Few objects elicit more laughter and resentment than luxury ships. In context of Arab politics during the two World Wars, the spectacle of the yacht at sea invited nationalist poetry, although the vessel itself was monarchical by design. My paper considers the poetic moments heralding royal ships, from the Shatt al-Arab waterway to Suez. I analyze the legacy of Ottoman- and Mandate-era performances, many of whose poems were not published until post-monarchy decades, in constitutional republics. As governments were nationalizing or selling off their fallen kings’ luxury items, they were also canonizing poetry praising those rulers as naval geniuses. I find that the obsequious tendencies of neoclassical Arabic madih (panegyric) help us to understand the enduring attraction of yacht aesthetics in popular culture. Taking a wide view of global shifts toward populism, I ask what insights nautical poems can give us on the icon of the yacht itself. The 21st century fetishizes royal pageantry and peak-capitalist “Yacht Rock,” even while economic populists currently target yacht owners as a class to be toppled. I argue that waves of nostalgia inform each other, even across regions and epochs. The paper concludes by considering the publication history of its Arabic sources, disseminated by national ministries and Arabic semi-private digital enterprises. We see now editors’ rising interest in examining historical Arab seascapes from a distinctly royal, naval perspective—even in cases in which the royal governing system is a relic of the distant past. My paper ultimately seeks to understand how yachts become literary spaces in the process of sparking extraordinary, and productive, public outrage.

The Egyptian author Sonallah Ibrahim has variously been called a “rebel with a pen,” “a novelist of lost causes,” and “the Arab world’s preeminent bard of dashed hope and disillusionment.” But in addition to their biting political commentary, Ibrahim’s novels also revel in the scatological, the sexual, and the lewd, as farts, feces, urine, and masturbation all consistently make their way into his fiction. Ibrahim thus builds on the legacy of nineteenth-century printing maven, lexicographer, and author Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, whose famous al-Saq ‘Ala al-Saq begins with an exhaustive catalog of rare Arabic words for female and male genitalia, anuses, and copulation. In this sense, Ibrahim’s novels partake in what literary critic and author Radwa ‘Ashur has called a “possible modernity”—one in which heterogeneous languages of refinement, bawdiness, and everyday speech tumble over each other in a playful verbal romp. This paper reads Ibrahim’s Zaat (1992) together with the opening chapters of Shidyaq’s al-Saq ‘ala al-Saq to illustrate in greater detail the parameters of this alternative, impolite, “revolting” modernity. I focus in particular on Ibrahim’s revival and reconfiguration of three key Shidyaqian forms: sexual punning, rhymed prose (saj‘), and the seemingly endless list. Where Shidyaq uses explicit sexual language to mock the polite prudishness of his presumed Christian critics, Ibrahim relies on innuendo to simultaneously escape and get the better of his own era’s Egyptian censors. And where Shidyaq lists endless obscure Arabic synonyms to preserve an Arabic language he felt was deteriorating under the pressures of modernization, Ibrahim uses lists to bombard the reader with the refuse and debris of late capitalism, its boundless heaps of cheap, imported products. I argue that, by challenging the borders that supposedly divide the Arabic literary canon into discrete historical periods, we can trace an alternative modernism in which political power is challenged through small, linguistic jabs at polite taste. We can trace a history of “revolt,” in other words, through works which reigning literary establishments deemed “revolting.”

The celebrated Egyptian singer Umm Kulthūm (d. 1970) is one of the most successful re-animators of the qas̩īda in the twentieth century. Her work, especially in the 1940s and 1950s, reveals a profound understanding of the qas̩īda’s movement from the personal to the public, from reflection to engagement, and from self to other/others. In response to urgent political transformations in Egypt and the Arab world in that period, Umm Kulthūm found in Aḥmad Shawqī’s (d. 1933) poetry, his praises of the prophet in particular, a malleable, versatile, and deeply impactful form through which to connect to her wide audience and summon them into a shared state of mind. Her selection of poems, her editing of them, and her final performances all attest to her ability to “translate” and “rewrite” the archetypal form for her times, revealing in it a call for outward engagement (social, political, historical) that can only arise from a most personal and inward of postures. This paper traces the journey of one of Shawqī’s praises of the prophet, Salū qalbī (Ask My Heart) into an evolving and ever-relevant political statement. When Umm Kulthūm initially performed the poem in 1946, it signaled a spiritual turn towards the individual search for balance and peace while at the same time expressing a collective stance against British presence in Egypt. When the song was deliberately reintegrated into Umm Kulthūm’s revolutionary repertoire in 1967, the political message was underscored, keyed, and unmistakably attached to the Nasser revolutionary effort. In the wake of the 2011 events in Egypt, echoes of this same song resurfaced. By re-framing this poem in song and in performance, Umm Kulthūm transforms it or parts of it into one of the most recognizable revolutionary statements; a statement that rang as urgent and true to a protesting crowd in 2011 as it did in 1946 and in 1967.

This paper challenges the ways that scholars have interpreted the expression of erotic desire in canonical and prestigious Arabic poems from the 9th and 10th centuries. It does so by focusing on how these poems have been used by historians of gender and sexuality and other social historians in order to describe a normative system of socio-sexual relationships and desires. The worlds that these poems describe have often been taken as a proxy for the lived experience of a society in history. This form of analysis has been performed and utilized in debates about Islam and secularism and in projects to recover a queer Muslim past as well as in academic scholarship. This paper describes the contradictions at the heart of this interpretive practice and suggests that it is limited by an implicit basis in heteronormative expectations and strictly binary gender. Most revisionist scholarship in the history of pre-modern Islamicate sexualities has focused on dispelling older Orientalist myths about normative penetrative bisexuality or a heterosexuality irrespective of its object, by emphasizing the empirically sound insight that there was no homosexual identity in pre-modern Islamicate societies and centering the terms of Foucault’s analysis over the values, debates, and structures of feeling in pre-modern Islamicate texts. This paper breaks with this school of thought and turns our analytical attention to the predominant dimension of sexual violence and coercion in Classical Arabic erotic poetry. Sexual violence becomes a new perspective by which to make sense of the social world that these texts create, contest, and represent and through this analysis the supposedly stable gender categories that underpin these models of heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual masculine desire begin to fray. In this paper, the author will focus specifically on the poets Bashshār b. Burd (d. 167/783) and Abū Nuwas (d. 200/814) to draw attention to the centrality of sexual violence to the Classical Arabic literary canon and the modern reading practices that continue to distract from it.