Nabati poetry, or the oral vernacular poetry of the Arabian Peninsula, is no longer an art form practiced solely by desert Bedouins. It has been taken up by rulers of the Arabian Gulf states who as poet-princes place themselves within a poetic tradition that is centuries old. As active composers and performers, they expand upon the historical role of Arab rulers as patrons of poetry. The present paper investigates how Shaykh Muhammad bin Rashid Al Maktoum, ruler of Dubai, employs nabati poetry for the purposes of strategic self-representation and legitimation. Specifically, it sheds light on Al Maktoum's literary riddles as a heavily patronized body of literature. A close reading of selected riddles devotes attention to those rhetorical strategies that function to negotiate the respective positions of this poet-prince and his subjects and poetic peers. The analytical focus is twofold. First, building on existing scholarship on the patronage of poetry in the Arabic literary tradition, I shed light on the complex power relations at play in the riddle competitions. Secondly, the work of Pierre Bourdieu and George Herbert Mead forms the theoretical backdrop for a discussion of Al Maktoum's socio-political persona as constructed through his poetry.

Abbasid Baghdad of the 3rd/9th century enjoyed a wealth of religious culture, intense intellectual as well as artistic curiosity and interest. Political and economic stability was seen as an impetus to the process of consolidating the boundaries of the communal identity. This paper seeks to challenge this assumption. Through the conception of death and afterlife, I seek to show that the boundaries of communal identity are porous. From Abbasid Baghdad, this paper chooses Abu Bakr ‘Abd Allah b. Muhammad b. ‘Ubayd b. Sufyan -Qurashi, well-known as Ibn Abi al-Dunya born in 208/823, in Baghdad and died there in 14th Jumada II, 281/21st August 894. This paper specifically focuses on Kitab al-Qubur (The Book of Graves), a collection of powerful short texts that presents itself as a non-prophetic hadith. The topic of the text corresponds to major questions in prophetic Hadith; the epistemological stance to existentialist questions poetry investigates. The first person narrative voice in these texts, the brevity of each, and the invocation through repetition all call for reading the text as poetry. While primary and secondary sources set up an understanding of the broad context in which Ibn Abi al- Dunya wrote his book, none directly discusses why this bizarre poetry poses itself as Hadith. Through studying the project of Ibn abi al-Dunya, this paper attempts to answer this question through understanding the consolidated communal identity of Abbasid Baghdad as a space of tension where processes of oscillation, backformation and post-production negotiate a configuration within which the community forms unique, identifiable features. The case of Ibn abi al-Dunya exposes the constructed-ness of communal identities and calls for an understanding of their boundaries as loose, porous and negotiable. Ibn abi al-Dunya’s approach, moreover, allows topics intensely covered and debated by scholars of Hadith to be addressed from an epistemologically different position. While the applicability and permissibility of these issues have been the goal of Hadith scholarship, Ibn abi al-dunya chooses to go beyond the immediate definition into an existentialist theorization about death, fear and loneliness.

This paper examines the development of the literary and historical persona of the poet Hassan ibn Thabit. By exploring how scholars of the ninth to twelfth centuries represented the life, poetry, and legacy of Hassan, I will explore the prevailing discourses of the ‘Abbasid era regarding the earlier pre-Islamic period (al-jahiliyya) and the rise of Islam. Specifically, I will argue that Hassan’s symbolic importance to these later Muslim scholars lies in his embodiment of the transition from the “ignorance” of the jahiliyya to the “wisdom” of the Islamic period. For example, ‘Abbasid authors often note that Hassan’s life was divided equally between the two historical periods in which he lived, sixty years in the jahiliyya and sixty in the Islamic period. These dates are best viewed as a symbolic demonstration of Hassan’s connection to each period. The most important fact to the narrators is Hassan’s identity as a transformational figure, one rooted in pre-Islamic Arabia but equally connected to the new world of Islam. When Hassan appears in ‘Abbasid texts it is often as an emblem of the transformational possibilities of Islam; thus, he is portrayed as a figure who demonstrates the legitimacy and superiority of Islam and Islamic civilization. To demonstrate this point, three diverse works from the ‘Abbasid period will be studied: Tabaqat fuhul al-shu‘ara’ by Ibn Sallam al-Jumahi (d. 846), al-Muwashshah by al-Marzubani (d. 994), and Tarikh madinat Dimashq by ‘Ali Ibn ‘Asakir (d. 1176). The texts represent a sampling of the breadth of the genres of scholarly writing produced in this period, from biographical dictionaries to works of literary criticism. Each text will be examined as a literary artifact imbued with unique ideological content. Additionally, the study will consider the various modes of discourse employed by the authors in each text.

Ab? Nuw?s (d.c.814) is invariably counted, by his contemporaries and modern scholars alike, as a genius of the medieval Arab poetic tradition. His mordant wit, effervescent bravado, and his unabashed love for wine, pederasty and all things forbidden have not only lent to his notoriety as a court poet but have made him a legendary figure in the Arab imagination. Although the vast range of his poetic repertoire reflects a verve and versatility virtually unmatched by his predecessors, Ab? Nuw?s is especially celebrated for his mastery of the wine poem or khamr?ya. Trained in the Iraqi cities of Basra and K?fa, where licentious poetry enjoyed the greatest popularity, Ab? Nuw?s saw the height of his career in the ‘Abb?sid capital of Baghdad where he composed some of his most exquisite masterpieces of wine praise. Considered by scholars to be an apogee of the ‘modern’ (muh?dath) or urbane aesthetic which privileged the highly sophisticated use of rhetorical figures known as bad?‘ (‘innovative’) and which dismissed the topoi of the classical ode as archaic, Ab? Nuw?s’s unique contribution to the wine poem consists primarily in his highly astute crafting of a rhetorical game whereby the values of religious and poetic systems of thought are antagonized, violated and subverted in such a way as to sublimate and sanctify forbidden desire, often using the very religious discourse which would prohibit it. Through a close reading of the descriptive and structural elements of one of his celebrated wine songs, I show how wine (khamr), the ‘drink’ and the ‘figure,’ constitutes the erotic impetus of this rhetorical game. I show first how the poet’s erotic relation to wine (khamr) is the primary topic of the poem and how this erotic desire for wine signifies the desire to be seduced by an erotically excessive ‘object’ that can neither be consumed as a ‘drink’ nor apprehended as an ‘image’ or ‘figure.’ My reading of the poems thus emphasizes first, that the poet is so intoxicated by the love of wine that he acts both as an erotic and rhetorical ‘ seducer’ and second, that this activity of ‘seduction,’ at once ‘erotic’ (homoerotic) and ‘rhetorical,’ is achieved through the magical ‘craft’ of wine the ‘drink’ and the ‘figure.’ Ultimately, I show how the wine song of Ab? N?w?s can be read both as a reflection on and performance of the seductive, intoxicating, and liberating experience of poetry itself.

Sufi hagiography is a subject only recently coming under critical, rhetorical study. As late as the 1990s, collections of saintly biographies were viewed as historical sources corrupted by pre-modern superstition. The scholar’s job was to read through the texts for the kernels of historical “truth” contained in the works. In the last decade, however, a number of scholars have sought to re-evaluate the status of Sufi hagiography. This re-evaluation has been part of a broader movement that seeks to understand how the character and trajectory of Sufism has been shaped by a constellation of factors, including theological debates, political alliances, and economic realities. This paper is situated within this scholarly trend and will apply intertextual analysis to several major works of Sufi hagiography, in both Persian and Arabic, ranging from Sulami’s Tabaqat al-Sufiya (Arabic) to Jami’s Nafahat al-Uns (Persian). These works each contain a biography of Ibn Khafif, a member of Abu al-Qasim al-Junayd’s circle who was renowned for both his asceticism and theological acumen. His biography is thus an especially rich site of contestation for those debating the place of bodily discipline in later Sufism, and Sufism’s relationship with fiqh. Following Kristeva, such intertextual analysis will seek to move beyond “mere source hunting,” revealing how pre-modern Islamic writers performed authorial transparency in order to, seemingly, let the evidence speak for itself. This study examines the ways in which these authors put forward arguments about what Sufism was and should be through selection and arrangement of the stories about the figures they chronicle. Such a study will reveal how these writers positioned themselves as transmitters of received sayings and reports, sometimes repeating verbatim entries in previous collections, while nevertheless presenting radically different pictures of Ibn Khafif, and thus articulating widely varied visions of Sufism. Furthermore, the paper will show how references to early Arabic texts are used to reinforce the authority of authors writing in Persian and how authorship of Arabic texts on subjects such as hadith and usul al-fiqh are used to bolster the credentials of Ibn Khafif. By demonstrating how these stories from the lives of Sufi saints pass back and forth between Arabic and Persian, this paper seeks to question the ways in which contemporary scholarship divides bodies of literature by language and place of origin, and the applicability of such a model to multi-lingual literary traditions that span large geographic areas over several centuries.