This paper examines official court prose and its parodies in late-medieval Egypt. Its focus is the taqlid, the official document of investiture presented by court writers to an ascendant leader or administrator. I argue that the taqlid, with its literary techniques for uniting the court, both voiced and sublimated Egypt’s political anxieties during the volatile period of the Crusades. Its dual character--ranging from triumphalist to deeply equivocal--made it a prime target for parody among authors on the fringes of the elite political class. Modern scholarship has labeled taqlid parodies as Post-Classical literature, marking a fractured court system and a cultural hierarchy that no longer held. This paper insists that the goals of taqlid and its humorous adaptations are in fact largely the same: they valorize Islamic history and "high" Arabic against a backdrop of political uncertainty. As the Fatimid caliphate dissolved and successive military regimes from Asia Minor seized control of the empire, the taqlid ceremony assumed new ideological functions in administration and poetics. From Salah al-Din’s investiture to the rise of the Mamluks, governments placed enormous pressure upon writers and the taqlid form itself to promote certain leaders among diverse regional audiences and to win support for the expensive, controversial efforts of anti-Crusade. The rigors of administration found an aesthetic language of apologia that resonated throughout the eastern Mediterranean, but at the same time the taqlid became seen as foundering in cliche. Irreverent authors such as the puppeteer-dramatist Ibn Daniyal emphasized the pomp of investiture as a cynical exploitation of poetic language but, crucially, their works reaffirmed the privilege of poetry. Rather than spurning established authority altogether, the humorous text divided the question of ideology, between language and ritual. The very category of Post-Classical Arabic requires critical adjustment, so that we might identify its techniques for reifying elements of tradition even as it ridicules the courtly performances in which that tradition took shape.

In the ninth and tenth century, Arabo-Islamic society circum-Mediterranean evinced the rise of a new kind of adab humanism that served a new kind of human. This group, called merit folks (dhul-ahsab, ie Ahsabis) or new money (dhul-tarif), were "neither royalty nor rabble" according to Ibn Qutayba (d. 889). They were self-made men and women who rose to become judges, chancery staff, soldiers and merchants. According to one source (al-Nawaji, d. 1455), their literary salons (mujalasat) were more egalitarian, sociable and literary than those of kings. In Habermas’s terms, Ahsabis were a stratum of society that came together to claim for themselves a sphere of public concerns distinct from government, where they formed alliances to exert influence on kingship. Ahsabis appropriated adab humanism from the elite as a basis for their alliances and a vehicle for their influence, precisely because adab humanism could reflect and shape collective memory of the past, and thus influence expectations of the future. As part of their strategy to project an alluring subjective interiority, the Ahsabi public promotes and patronizes literature that embraces the satirical: farcical, unsettling, and “carnivalesque” (Bakhtin). This paper focuses on a corpus of bizarre and carnivalesque lore compiled by al-Nawaji in his Halbat al-Kumayt (Gathering for Wine) on the origins of wine culture, and the sociability and adab that surrounded it: Iblis midwifes four animals (peacock, monkey, lion, then pig) as they give their blood to quench the thirsty vine as it grows. The animals empower humans with metonymic traits (pride, playfulness, anger, and drowsiness) that allude to primal human needs. I argue these needs constitute private interests in the face of the state and naturalize yearnings for fulfillment and status: Animals teach the son of the Prophet Seth how to ferment wine for the first time, yielding – to his dismay – a drink that “makes the King seem like a servant,” thus eroding political hierarchies, and prompting him to ban all from consuming the wine, except him. This paper argues that the satirical lore surrounding the origins of wine constitutes a complex discourse that emboldens the Ahsabis with unhinged models of liminality, desire, and creativity, as plants drink blood and humans discover the animal within. Rather than being a mere pastime, wine and wine poetry served as a figura for the ideals of egalitarianism and political participation that the Ahsabis craved.

This paper will examine the densely intertwined relationship between superstition, patriarchy, and parody in the Yemeni author Wajdi al-Ahdal’s 2008 comedic mystery novel A Land Without Jasmine, focusing in particular on the raw superstitions that characters invested in the patriarchal system rely on to maintain and perpetuate that system, and the various literary strategies al-Ahdal marshals to parody these superstitions. Using multiple narrative points of view, the novel addresses the disappearance and presumed abduction of and search for the titular woman (Jasmine), a college student. In every case, male characters react to Jasmine’s disappearance by condemning her presumed lack of rectitude, but the text shows these judgments to be invariably based on prejudice and superstition rather than observation or evidence. Meanwhile, in excerpts from her diary, Jasmine herself mounts a critique of Yemeni society’s dependence on a patriarchy backed by superstition. Still, this same diary is both explicitly a false front for her family’s consumption—Jasmine is well aware that her brother reads her diary as a matter of “honor”, and so takes care to consistently present herself as the victim of a hostile male gaze—and suffused with superstition in its own right. Through its use of satire, multiple perspectives, and a saintly apparition, A Land Without Jasmine comes to the bleak conclusion that Yemeni society is so steeped in premodern superstition that no meaningful move toward modernity is possible: even reform itself can only be conceptualized within a framework of mysticism. While superstition and patriarchy may be too entrenched in Yemen to allow for serious reform efforts, A Land Without Jasmine provides us with another avenue for change. The consistently bad logic used by the male characters to justify their prejudices is particularly vulnerable to the sort of mockery in which Jasmine and al-Ahdal’s narrative engage. Bleakness is the wrong response, the novel argues: satire is both more appropriate and more effective.

Writer and originator of the controversial Israeli sitcom Arab Labor, Sayed Kashua is an Israeli Palestinian whose novels and media publications relentlessly explore the schizophrenic realities of Palestinian citizens of Israel. This series is the first bi-lingual Hebrew and Arabic show to air on primetime TV and the first to direct the viewing public’s attention to the Israeli Arab experience. This sitcom sits haphazardly on the edge of categorization—neither completely Arab, nor Jewish, Israeli nor Palestinian; hilarious but not completely comedic, and something more than a family sitcom with political content. As in his other novels and short stories, Kashua deliberately plays with the inadequacy of all of these classifications, laying bare the insufficiency that these notions of stable identification breed. Created and produced by an Arab writer, featuring Arab actors and actresses who speak Arabic in the show, this is indeed an Arab Work, but it is one that toys with the instability of that designation. Modelled on American sitcoms, Avoda Aravit has been both praised and savaged in the press and compared to The Cosby Show’s family fun, the wit of Seinfeld and the humorous social commentary of All in the Family. This paper looks closely at the mechanism of satire in the sitcom, investigating the different tactics used to portray a saturated and nuanced view of the Arab Israeli experience; the negotiation of political agency this portrayal entails; and, perhaps most crucially, how the constant shifting between languages, registers and codes both presents and produces a schizophrenic syntax for its viewers to encounter, at once humorous, impossible and hopeful. Like its linguistic collage, Avoda Aravit similarly intermingles different cultural strands of humor into its comedic narratives, importing Jewish and American comicality into its mix of Palestinian-Israeli irony and then subverting the identification of humor with a specific cultural, ethnic or national body. Tracking the various (mis)identities of humor and language at play in the show, this paper investigates the limits and scope of translation between (mis)identifications, inquiring into the potentially generative relations between the performative practices of identity and comedy. At stake is the efficacy of humor in allowing for both the wide circulation of social criticism and the attenuation of its import.