Many protagonists of early popular siras (those first attested in the 12th century) are black, but it is less often the case that they are ethnically African: of the three major black champions in this corpus of chivalric texts, two (Abu Zayd al-Hilali of Sirat Bani Hilal and ‘Abd al-Wahhab of Sirat Dhat al-Himma) are born non-hereditarily black to Arab families under variant circumstances—Abu Zayd’s mother petitions God for a child with the ferocity of a crow, even if he should share its blackness, which he in turn does; ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s conception during his mother’s menses results in his fetal tissue being tinctured dark brown. Nonetheless, ‘Abd al-Wahhab marshals a large army of Africans and helms the battalions at the Byzantine frontier with such authority that one soldier takes him for the “caliph of the blacks.” We may thus query what it means that the anchoring figure of the black community as presented within the sira is stripped biologically and culturally of any form of Africanness. The text of Sirat Dhat al-Himma is particularly instructive in addressing the question of why, in Arabic popular works such as the 1001 Nights and folkloric hikayat, we so often encounter “blacks,” but so rarely encounter them as ethnically, tribally, geographically variegated Africans. I posit that in the case of the siras, there is an assimilationist import to the “thinning” of descriptions of diasporic African figures in the Muslim world. The proposed paper presents a vignette in Sirat Dhat al-Himma in which a coveted black warrior—Abu al-Hazahiz—is “flipped” from the Muslim to the Byzantine side, leaving ‘Abd al-Wahhab tasked with crossing the frontier and returning him to the fold of Islam. This peripatetic scene facilitates a discussion of several themes undergirding the representation of black identity and its tensions in the s?ra, including the text’s didactic prioritization of religious rather than ethno-racial distinctions (indicated by the genealogical notion of hasab wa-nasab) as the seat of prestige, its correspondent fraught expurgation of African characters’ indigenous identities through onomastics and other techniques of characterization, and the countervailing discursive natures of the racially organized Muslim military and the transcendental Muslim umma. I relate these themes both intra-textually and outward, considering both the treatment of converted Byzantines vis-à-vis their African peers in the s?ra itself as well as broader discourses in medieval Arabic popular, theological, and historical literature on race and integration into an expanding Islamic polity.

Nizami’s (d. 1209) Layli o Majnun is a Persian re-telling of the most famous romance from the ‘uhdri corpus of ill-fated, early Islamic lovers. Ostensibly set in the Najd, Nizami’s version maintains many thematic elements of ‘uhdri chastity and unrelenting desire, while structurally the text resembles Nizami’s other Persian romances in its masnavi form with a lengthy introduction. Though it is unknown exactly how the details of the story reached Nizami, the wealth of narrative differences present within Isfahani’s tenth century compilation of the Kitab al-Aghani (Book of Songs) allow for exploration into the multiplicity of ways in which the story was popularly known prior to Nizami’s versification. While scholars such as Hilel and Seyed-Gohrab maintain that Nizami’s main transformation of the story was the addition of Persianate Sufi discourses, in this paper I argue that although Nizami’s rendition does “Persianize” the story, this transformation reflects a Persian courtly aesthetic that casts Majnun as a king of love and of the desert. The paper focuses around a key action in Majnun’s development: his wandering in the desert amongst wild animals. Following Kilpatrick and Khan, I locate Majnun’s wandering within three narrative cycles of the Kitab al-Aghani. Differences within these cycles illustrate differing thematic undertones to the story whereby a courtly-tragic rendering valorizes such wandering as an extension of poetic desire whereas a didactic-ethical rendering begins by condemning Majnun’s desire and thus casts a shadow on wandering as a physical description of such desire. With such strains in mind, I then analyze an episode in Nizami’s Layli o Majnun where the height of Majnun’s wandering is depicted as his establishment of a kingdom of animals in the desert. By putting these texts in conversation, I re-situate the tragic and courtly elements of the story as co-existent within its development and enhanced by Nizami’s Persian retelling. I also question to what extent Sufi discourse dominates Nizami’s text and thus think towards the multiple levels of reception of the story after Nizami in the Persianate world.

Rumi, Lord Kitchener, Buddha, al-Hallaj, and Christ all walk into a celestial sphere—it’s the setup not for a bad joke, but for modernist Islamic poet and philosopher Mu?ammad Iqb?l’s (d.1938) late Persian masnav?, the Jav?dn?ma. In the Persianate traditions, the masnavi has represented one of the primary poetic forms in which Sufistic allegory structures a quest or romance narrative, presenting to the reader-as-disciple a progressive (if usually sprawling, digressive, and recursive) map or process towards perfecting the self in the service of contemplation of the divine. While locating itself in this literary tradition, the Jav?dn?ma undertakes an intertextual journey with two other sorts of travel narratives, journeying together in a unique encounter with the piece’s speaker-protagonist: the mi’rajnarrative, in which the speaker travels through a series of celestial spheres mirroring the Prophet Muhammad’s ascent into heaven, and Dante’s Divine Comedy. In the Jav?dn?ma, the character “Zinda-R?d” (“Living Stream”), guided by Rumi in place of Virgil, ascends through heaven’s seven spheres, each one populated with historical and literary figures from Europe and the Islamic world who converse with him as he seeks the divine presence. The final, most elusive traveling genre performed by the Jav?dn?ma is that of the ghazal embedded within the masnavi framework. The rhyming verse is interrupted by lyric interludes as the reader travels between poetic forms throughout the framing narrative. In identifying these moments of peripatetic poetic encounter, this paper puts forth an interpretation of Iqbal’s use of lyric to trouble the destination-oriented movement of narrative: why do the ghazal sections always occur as an individualized, first-person voice (or, more accurately, song)? What is accomplished in terms of narrative and thematic motion, descriptive characterization, and rhetorical voicing in these sections that the surrounding masnavi form cannot encapsulate? How do the ghazals function cross-textually, in harmony and counterpoint with one another and with the broader categories of traveling Sufi poetry? The ways genre travels within the Jav?dn?ma and its relation to the traveling speakers, map out the possibilities of various poetic forms in this text as they relate to the framework of the spiritual journey: the lyric ghazal seems always to be one step ahead of the masnavi, exemplifying the instability of linguistic striving toward the divine, generating their creative power from their insistence on the inability to reach a final narrative destination.