In medieval Arabo-Islamic culture, as with pre-Enlightenment Europe, literary theory and religious discourse are never far apart. Take for instance the miraculous nature (iʿjāz) of the Qurʾān, a concept that galvanized discussion in fields like scriptural hermeneutics, grammar and poetics. In fact an entire branch of literary theory — ʿilm al-maʿānī, roughly “the semantics of syntax”— owes its existence to theorizing about Qurʾānic iʿjāz. Yet while scholars have long acknowledged how theological debates affect medieval Arabic literary theory, they sometimes overlook the other side: how rhetoric and poetics move debates forward in religious circles. As an example, we still have no study of the relationship between Qurʾānic exegesis (tafsīr) and literary commentary (sharḥ) seen in the 11th-century author al-Wāḥidī, who famously glossed both the Qurʾān and the collected verse of the praise poet al-Mutanabbī. By the Mamluk era (ca. 1250-1517 AD) of Arabic literature, the two discourses feed off each other interchangeably, making the lack of studies about literary influences on religious discourse a compelling need for academic study. My paper intervenes at this gap in scholarship. Specifically, I am curious about how a group of 10th- and 11th-century Sunni Muslim theologians rely on practical literary criticism (naqd al-shiʿr) to talk about emulation (muʿāraḍa) of the Qurʾān, within broader discussions of the Qurʾān's miraculous nature. To tackle this question, I start by surveying works of practical criticism - i.e. close analysis of literary texts, as opposed to abstract theory - from early literary scholars like Qudāma ibn Jaʿfar, Ibn Rashīq, al-Āmidī, and al-Marzubānī, to see how they talk about emulation (muʿāraḍa) in poetry. Then I turn to four 10th- and 11th-century Sunni theologians writing about Qurʾānic iʿjāz: al-Khaṭṭābī, al-Rummānī, al-Bāqillānī, and ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī. All of them use practical criticism to argue that it is impossible to emulate (yuʿāriḍu) the Qurʾān, citing examples of poetry and analyzing them to prove their point. What I find is that the literary theorists want to actually weigh the artistic merits of any given poet, even if only to support their own idiosyncratic tastes. This is different from the theologians, who use practical criticism to show the futility of weighing merits when it comes to the Qurʾān. In this sense, practical criticism itself becomes a useless enterprise, which ironically serves a quite useful purpose in helping advance religious discourse and its cultural authority.

Don’t Take It Seriously: Roasting the Patron in the Early Ninth Century This paper examines extended exchanges of jocular roasting (al-muhajat al-tayyiba) in the poetry and prosimetric epistles of two mid-ninth century literary circles: the circle of the vizier Ibn al-Zayyat (d. 847), and the unofficial salons of the shayatin al-ʿaskar whom Shawkat Toorawa calls the Bad Boys of Baghdad (2005). Insults in these roasts were not usually meant to offend, but rather act as a winking acceptance into the literary in-crowd. They therefore fall within Ibn Wahb’s definition of hazl as “speech from inclination not from opinion,” or in other words performative rather than denotative speech (Gelder, “Jest and Earnest,” 1992). Yet the roast nevertheless walks a fine line between offensive invective and joshing. My paper analyzes the techniques used to manage tone in these poems, including misuse of genre (parody), self-referentiality, references to other epistles and poems within the history of that literary exchange, and explicit discussions of hazl. I argue that these extended literary exchanges use many of the mu`arada techniques of the Umayyad mufakharat but insert the author in an unprecedented way, creating an influential literary device for the future of Arabic letters: an affective authorial persona, embodied and emotionally charged within the text. It is the careful management of tone in these risky roasts that demanded the development of this affective authorial persona. The paper draws on epistles and poems found in Ibn al-Zayyat’s Diwan, Zaki Safwat’s collection of epistles (1937), and Ibn Abi Tahir Tayfur’s Kitab al-Manthur wal-Manzum as well as assorted other diwans and collections. I also consider theoretical comments made about the practice of roasting in treatments of epistolography from the following century (the tenth century), in works such as Qudama b. Ja`far, Jawahir al-Alfaz; al-Nahhas, Kitab `Umdat al-Kuttab; Ibn Wahb, al-Burhan fi Wujuh al-Bayan; and Abu Hilal al-`Askari, Kitab al-Sina`atayn.

Imitation can be read on a spectrum from sycophantic flattery to cutting mockery depending on the context in which it appears. Inherent in imitation is therefore an evaluative element since the decision to imitate another’s work implies some kind of approbation or condemnation of the source-text. In this regard imitation resembles commentary and may be considered to serve a similar purpose. Khalīl b. Aybak al-Ṣafadī (d. 1363), a prolific writer and commentator on Mamlūk-era literature, was, himself, quite the imitator. His imitations fall along the spectrum of flattery to mockery, but each serves an overall purpose for al-Ṣafadī as he performs his chosen role as curator of cultural authority. This paper will consider three representative examples of al-Ṣafadī’s imitations and reactions to them to consider how we, as readers today, can understand the evaluative or commentarial aspect of his mimicry. The first is Ikhtirāʿ al-Khurāʿ, a short prose text that clearly mocks scholarly literary commentary without dismissing the genre as a whole. The second, a long commentary on a poem known as Lāmiyyat al-ʿAjam by Abū Ismāʿīl al-Ṭughrāʾī (d. c. 1121), is an imitation not only of the stylistics of al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 869), but also in some degree, those of al-Ṣafadī’s contemporary and sometime mentor Ibn Nubātah (d. 1366). Third, are his imitations of Ibn Nubātah’s poetry which drove a wedge between them and in which the line between mockery and flattery blurs. In service to the creation of an authoritative stance, I argue that al-Ṣafadī’s imitations serve three interrelated goals. First, they are showpieces illustrating that he, as author, masters forms he admires be they those of his contemporaries or his predecessors. Second, they are evaluation of or commentary on the source-text depending on whether the imitation reads as mockery, flattery, or something in between. Third, in making evaluations through imitation, al-Ṣafadī describes for himself an authoritative stance within the literary culture. Clever emulation (muʿāraḍah ) takes both literary skill and knowledge and al-Ṣafadī enjoyed showing off his abilities. His imitations often skirt between jest (hazl) and sincerity (jidd) allowing for a display of knowledge and ability within and deriving from the literary tradition. This tendency to play along the edge means, however, that it is not always clear whether the imitations he composed were done in admiration, mockery, or a combination.

It has been argued that the maqāma genre parodies ḥadīth transmission by using a fictional isnād. Scholars generally assume that this parodic feature and the generally playful tone of the maqāma underwrite a subversive project which is then justified or disguised through pedagogical apology. In making this claim, some have drawn on the work of the Russian formalist critic Mikhail Bakhtin and his notion of the carnivalesque. This essay challenges the reliance on formal criteria to determine the relationship between a text and its cultural context which allows critics to claim subversive intentions in parodic texts. Indeed, parody can also be used to reinforce normativity by parodying outsiders or the underclass. When the Ḥanbalī moralist Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597/1200) tells a parodic story about ḥadīth transmission with subversive potential, no modern scholar would suggest that the text is intended to be subversive. Instead, it is understood to ridicule those who transmit ḥadīth improperly. Thus, the indeterminacy of the parody's connotations is often solved by resorting to biography or by assuming that the audience must have specific attitudes about the acceptability of being playful with religion. However, parody's indeterminacy points to the limits of formalism for identifying the signification of a text within medieval Arabic discourse. To explore alternative approaches to parody and subversiveness, I examine three parodic treatments of ḥadīth from the 5th/11th to the 6th/12th centuries by Ibn Nāqiyā (d. 485/1092), al-Ḥarīrī (d. 516/1122), and Ibn al-Jawzī. In all three examples, a character in the story takes a tendentious approach to the isnād or to ḥadīth interpretation in order to justify illicit behavior from lying to grave robbing. In all three cases, the playfulness of the story is susceptible to a subversive interpretation on formal grounds. These subversive interpretations need not be dismissed, but they should not be assumed. I use the tools of social history and resources of medieval Arabic literary theory and commentary to offer a new reading of the attitudes toward the parodying of ḥadīth and its transmission in this period.

In an effort to provide a critical link between medieval works of adab and contemporary notions of parody, this paper will offer a preliminary literary historical account of the first print edition of the Maqāmāt of Badīʿ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī (d. 1008 AD), which was compiled, annotated, and published by Muhammad Abduh in 1889. Despite having rescued the text from relative obscurity and bowdlerizing it so as not to offend his contemporary readership, Abduh’s contribution to the formation of a modern corpus of Classical Arabic literature has received less scholarly attention than his writings on Islamic law and education reform. By offering a close reading of the passages that Abduh bowdlerized, I hope to bring together aspects of Abduh’s larger project of reform, his conceptualization of modernity, and his method of manuscript selection, annotation, and elision in order to elucidate some of the assumptions regarding parody that informed his reading of the Maqāmāt. To properly situate this argument, I will first discuss the 1889 edition of the Maqāmāt within its immediate historical context: Abduh’s biography, his other major writings, and the intellectual milieu in Egypt during the first decades of British colonial rule. I will then take a closer look at the numerous redacted passages, including the entire Maqāma Shāmiyya, that “the reader (adīb) may have been ashamed to read,” as Abduh wrote in the introduction to the 1889 edition. These censored selections are a rich source for understanding how Abduh read parodic, obscene, and subversive passages of a pre-modern text as a threat to the morality of the modern Egyptian reader. This is an influential moment in the reception history of the maqāmāt, one that can enrich our understanding of the distinctly modern concerns that influenced the curation of an ostensibly Classical canon in print. For medieval Arabists, understanding what was at stake for Abduh may help to identify and put aside some of the assumptions of the modern reader in order to better ground a hermeneutics of pre-modern parody.