The genre of wonders (acaib) in Middle Eastern literatures has long been popular among both scholars and general readers: for the former, it is a fruitful venue for exploring literary production, concepts of natural and supernatural, and storytelling traditions; for the latter, it kindles images of the exotic and marvelous East, best exemplified in collections like the Arabian Nights. This paper aims to look at the acaib genre in a comparative perspective within the Islamicate and European literary traditions by close-reading of a set of acaib entries in a miscellanea. In addition to including a copy of the free translation Qazwini's Acibül-mahluqat by Ahmed Bican dating to the fifteenth century, the manuscript has ninety-one entries titled interchangeably garibe, acibe and nevadir (between folios 278b-294a), which deal with reports of natural events, fabulous animals, unexpected births, etc. Almost half of these entries are about water, its wonders, and benefits. Through the close-reading of the wondrous properties allocated to water, this paper aims to trace early modern mentalities towards natural and wondrous, by thinking about narrators and audiences reproducing and consuming the acaib genre. In addition to that, by placing these reports within the larger framework of mirabilia about water in Islamicate and European literary cultures, this paper questions the "locality" and "universality" of the genre and how it transgressed the boundaries of time, language, and literary traditions. It will question the historiography on wonders by discussing the impact of approaches that isolate the genre to the "Middle East" and thus contribute to the exoticization of not only the genre but of Middle Eastern literatures.

The romance is one of the most notoriously fuzzy genres in literary scholarship, a problem only exacerbated by the fact that there is no indigenous term for it in any of the premodern literatures to which it is applied. Nonetheless, scholars have identified and analyzed “romances” across the Eurasian continent, in Imperial and Byzantine Greek literature, in Medieval French and German, in classical Georgian, in “high” (or courtly) Persian and Ottoman, in “middle” (popular) Arabic and Urdu, and in Sanskrit and Chinese. Given such breadth and scope, the romances identified in these traditions are undoubtedly different in each context; yet clearly there are common elements running through this massive corpus, a sufficient number of distinctive features that allow us to read these diverse texts as part of the same generic family, akin to Potter Stewart’s famous definition of pornography, “I know it when I see it.” The existence of such “family resemblances” between the Middle Eastern iterations of this genre and those of its Greek and European counterparts suggest great possibilities for comparative study, studies of the sort that allow us to track how these world systems interact with each other; but to further this work, we would do well to think further about what the “romance” means (or what we mean by it) in the context of Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman literature, and how does this use of the term line up with what we find in other disciplines and area studies. That is the aim of this paper: through a long-view survey of the genre in its Middle Eastern context, we attempt to bring some more clarity to what the romance is in our field, and more importantly, consider what we might gain from a term that would allow us to read these texts as participants in a much larger global genre.

The ghazal form is arguably one of the oldest and most beloved genres of the greater Middle East and the Islamicate world. Scholars agree that the first iteration of the ghazal, or proto-ghazal, was adapted from the nasib section of the pre-Islamic, Arabic qasida. The ghazal has since circulated as an independent form in numerous languages including Arabic, Persian, Hindi-Urdu, Punjabi, Turkish, Uighur, Malay, German, and English. This long and multilingual history of the ghazal is, of course, far from uniform and literary practitioners and critics have routinely noted differences in style and practice across regions and ‘periods’. Yet, since the ghazal is also routinely fetishized as one of the most anti-mimetic forms of poetry that was concerned with conventionalized language and metaphor rather than the experiences of its writers -- this is especially true of the sabk-e Hindi model -- literary historiographers have intensely debated the advantages and pitfalls of reading this form historically, rather than transhistorically. The nineteenth-century Urdu reformist movement of naichral shai‘ri or natural poetry is an especially pivotal moment in ghazal criticism on account of its campaign against literary abstraction and the effect that this scholarship had on reorienting multilingual and multiregional models of ghazal history towards more national horizons. This paper will argue that while the natural poetry movement can be read as an attempt to resituate historical and geographical particularity into ghazal practice, the Romantic ideals of natural expression that these writers employed were themselves implicated in newer models of literary universalism that underpinned eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discussions on World Literature.

The tazkirah—a literary genre variously understood as anthologies, biographies, compendia, or literary histories—consists of short anecdotes about poets’ lives as well as selections of their work. Despite the difficulty of simply translating this genre into one consonant with Western forms, scholars have most often understood these texts as early forays into literary history, therefore mining them for historical information about prominent poets’ lives and works. Given this slippage between tazkirah and literary history, I will focus in this paper on the self-conscious translation of Urdu tazkirah into tarikh, or history proper. By examining the ways in which the tazkirah genre comes into Urdu from Persian just before the inception of the British Raj in 1857, I will show how the translation of tazkirah into tarikh by both native and Orientalist scholars relies on colonialist understandings of the importance of both history and vernacularization for the consolidation of proper “civilization”; indeed, my work shows that Urdu tazkirah’s resistance to translation into tarikh comes to justify Urdu’s status as a non-national and “backward” language vis-à-vis “proper” languages like Persian, Hindi, and, of course, English. Ultimately, my paper will demonstrate how the movement between tazkirah and tarikh has contributed to the canonization of Urdu as an imported creole in the Indian national imaginary.