The role of naqa’id poetry (flytings) in pre-Islamic Arabia was to attack and dishonor the competing poet’s tribe and clan. These poetic contests consisted of one poet praising his tribe’s good qualities and lampooning those of his opponent’s, followed in turn by the latter, who praised his own tribe and lampooned his opponent’s. These poetic battles remained popular in the Islamic era, a time period marked by shifting customs, rituals, and aesthetic systems, including poetry. Given this new context, what were the new functions of naqa’id poetry? Did the focus remain on praising and blaming the contestants’ tribes, or did performance functions shift over time? This paper will investigate a sampling of naqa’id poetry from the corpus of Umayyad-era poets Jarir (d. 728) and al-Farazdaq (d. 730), each from the same tribe but separate clans. It will highlight the poets’ tendency to reference themselves, and to display their poetic talent. The result was that in addition to the traditional naq??i? discourse of defending one’s tribe and lampooning one’s opponent’s tribe, Jar?r and al-Farazdaq engaged in a metadiscourse that focused on their poetic and performative talent. I argue that Jarir and al-Farazdaq’s naqa’id performance centered on their individual reputation as performers, and that this was at least as important as a defense of their respective tribes. I will demonstrate how Jarir and al-Farazdaq deployed the genre of naqa’id as a defense of their own reputations, lampooning their opponent and his tribe, and showcasing their performance skills within the framework of tribal conflict. This new interpretation will shed light on Jarir and al-Farazdaq’s naqa’id as an idiom rooted in the values of the pre-Islamic era, with a new orientation in the Islamic. Whereas pre-Islamic naqa’id poets focused on the message of the poems as it related to the defense of the tribe, Jar?r and al-Farazdaq drew attention to themselves and to their performance, emphasizing artistry over message. We may think of the former, the message-centric performance, as having an outward focus, and the latter as having an inward focus. This inward focus signaled a new orientation in naq??i? performance and paved the way for a self-oriented, metadiscoursal poetry.

Medieval Arabic literary theory (poetics and rhetoric) is often predicated on the ‘philological’ approach of its writers, in contrast to the ‘philosophical’ approach championed by classical Greek and Hellenistic scholars. One would thus expect to find a clear influence of the Arabic grammatical tradition, starting from Sibawayh, on the subsequent writings of literary theory. As of yet, however, such an influence has not been clearly identified (cf. Baalbaki 1983). One possible exception is the convergence of the notion of figurative language (majaz) with the term ittisa' ‘latitude’, first appearing in Sibawayh’s Kitab and referring to specific syntactic phenomena (Versteegh 1990, Levin 1997, Carter 2004, Dayyeh 2015). In the works of subsequent grammarians, ittisa' came to be used interchangeably with majaz, a term extrinsic to grammatical thinking. In this paper I explore to what extent the uses of ittisa' among the grammarians conformed to the way majaz would later be used in non-grammatical writings, primarily literary theory (naqd, balagha). I argue that while the grammarians had no direct interest in tackling metaphorical language, they nevertheless posited a competing approach to the one that would emerge in the field of poetics and rhetoric. This is especially borne out by comparing how the same poetic shawahid (illustrative examples) were treated by the grammarians vis-à-vis the critics. Even within the grammatical tradition tensions emerge between a ‘cognitive’ approach to metaphorical extension and a more syntactic one. Unraveling these differences in approach will prove instrumental to our understanding of the theory of majaz laid out by 'Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani (d. 1078 or 1081), a scholar we identify today as a literary theorist but who, in his own lifetime, was a grammarian first and foremost. Early theories of figurative language have received much attention in the works of Wolfhart Heinrichs and others. However, its grammatical dimension has yet to be explored.

Sufi lore abounds with accounts of meetings between prophets, saints, and spiritual masters. Sometimes, a mysterious stranger appears to offer advice or guidance while, at other times, one mystic may chastise another for spiritual pride, or demonstrate her/his superiority. The wondrous nature of many such tales undermine their historicity, though perhaps not their pedagogical or hagiographical intent. Nevertheless, other stories of meetings and conversations between accomplished Sufi masters may be quite detailed and historically plausible. A case in point is the well-known account of the meeting in Mecca between the Baghdad based Sufi scholar and diplomat 'Umar al-Suhraward? (d. 632/1234) and the Egyptian Arab mystical poet 'Umar Ibn al-F?ri? (d. 632/1235), two of the most important Sufis of the 7th/13th century. According to several medieval sources, Ibn al-F?ri? miraculously appears to a despondent al-Suhraward? in Mecca during the Hajj with good news from the Unseen World. The two Sufi masters later meet again during the pilgrimage, when al-Suhraward? invests Ibn al-F?ri?’s sons and others with the khirqah, or Sufi robe. Despite the wondrous elements in this account, new evidence suggests that much of this story is, in fact, true. The proof texts are two poems that I have recently discovered in manuscript by Mu?ammad Ibn al-Khiyam? (602-85/1205-86), a student of Ibn al-F?ri?. In this presentation, I will recount the story of the meeting of the two Sufi masters during the Hajj, discuss its hagiographical elements, and then probe its historical elements and possibilities in light of two poems by Ibn al-Khiyam?’s: his elegy on the death of Ibn al-F?ri? and his panegyric to al-Suhraward?. In addition to their literary merit, both poems underscore the value of poetry, particularly the ikhw?niyy?t, or verse exchanged between friends and colleagues, as an important register for the social history of Islamic mysticism during the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods.

Although Ibn Hajar al-'Asqalani is primarily known for his seminal scholarship in the field of prophetic traditions or hadith studies, he was also an accomplished poet. In fact, as this paper reveals, one of the poems that Ibn Hajar included in his carefully crafted collection from the ninth/fifteenth century struck a deep chord of Muslim memories surrounding a restored Islamic caliphate. Far from the image of complete apathy to the Cairene Abbasids that has long been conventional wisdom, Ibn Hajar’s panegyric for al-Musta'in (r. 808–16/1406–14) lauded the caliph’s assumption of the sultanate as a restoration of legitimate rule to the blessed family of the Prophet. In crafting his poem, Ibn Hajar draws upon a deep reservoir of devotional love for the Prophet’s family in the late Mamluk era, embodied by al-Musta'in as the descendent of the Prophet’s uncle al-'Abbas, as well as a dynamic and evolving Islamic legal tradition on matters of governance. Even though al-Musta'in’s combined reign as sultan and caliph lasted only a matter of months, Ibn Hajar’s commemoration of it became a famous piece of cultural lore down through the last years of the Mamluk Sultanate and past the Ottoman conquest of Egypt. In addition to exploring the intertwined histories of Ibn Hajar, al-Musta'in, and their contemporaries, this interdisciplinary paper analyzes published and manuscript recensions of Ibn Hajar’s poetry, topographies of Cairo, Mamluk chancery documents, and treatises on Islamic law and hadith literature to elucidate the religious and socio-political complexity of veneration for the Abbasid caliphate in the late Mamluk era.

Scholars have recently noted the power of Arabic discourse (khitab) to serve as a commodity in a gift exchange, and with that power comes the capacity of the poet to serve as intermediary in releasing self or others from captivity, harm, or even death (Stetkevych, Buergel, and Ajami). One might think of the cases of Ka’b Ibn Zuhayr, Sha’s (Brother of Alqama and subject of Mufaddaliyya 119), and most famously, Shahrazad in the _1001 Nights_, all of whom gain their freedom by virtue of someone’s khitab, be it poetry or narrative or a hybrid. Intercession also seems to be the leitmotif of works like K. al-‘Umda (The Pillar), al-Aghani (Songs), and Yatimat al-Dahr (Orphan Pearl of Time). In fact, Arabists understandably take this pattern for granted. However, a comparison with medieval Icelandic sagas, like that of Egill Skallagrimsson, shows how delicate these intercessions can be in the face of power. Consider the moment when Arinbjorn intercedes on behalf of Egill in the face of King Eirik’s anger and Egill is shamed publically and denied reconciliation. So, we come back to Arabic sources a bit wiser and ask: why does intercession seem to succeed so broadly? This paper examines cases of intercession on behalf of scapegoats before and after the tenth century to show that structural changes in performance and patronage then cause intercession to become much more popular and in a sense democratic. Before the tenth century, we find most cases involved elite poets and patrons, however, after the tenth century (and al-Mutanabbi) the subjects redeemed by intercession seem more humble, often chancery workers, Qur’an teachers, Qadis, as well as merchants. This paper engages specific theories of psychology and economics (Heilbroner, Marx, and Freud) to show that khitab had such cachet in performance culture, it functioned much like monetary currency. By delicate convention, khitab enjoyed three states of fungiblity: as (social) capital in the moment, as a costly commodity, or as promissory note for future benefits. Moreover, the bare utility of currency, whether monetary or verbal, cannot account for the indefinite amassing of resources. The amassing of wealth invites us to face the human drive for dominance-submission games within the primate hierarchy. The paper will develop a model of literary intercession, and it will draw on intertextual readings from the poetry of al-Mutanabbi, proverbs from al-Tha’alibi in al-Tamthil wal-Muhadara (Sayings and Salon Performances), and K. al-Tatfil (Party-Crashers).