In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Iranian literary scholars sought to bridge the gap between traditional forms of knowledge and literary history-writing (viz. the tazkirah tradition) and ‘modern,’ European approaches to science and historiography. Across the border in British India, Indian scholars belonging to the same Persianate tradition, but now writing in Urdu, were engaged in the same. When interaction between Persian and Urdu is considered, it has most typically been seen as unidirectional, with the former influencing the latter by providing loanwords, literary models, and so on. However, reality has been somewhat more complicated. Indian scholars writing in Urdu such as Shibli Nu‘mani and Muhammad Husayn Azad are rarely acknowledged in narratives about Iranian literary modernity, yet they were cited prominently by such Iranian scholars as Muhammad-Taqi Bahar and Zayn al-‘Abidin Mu’taman. Iranian literary scholars saw some of their Indian counterparts as having successfully combined the best aspects of the traditional Islamic sciences with the best of what European methodologies had to offer; this was attractive to Iranian nationalists and modernizers in the Pahlavi era, who hoped to do the same. The aim of this paper is to examine the connections between the development of new, ‘modern’ literary scholarship in Iran and India, highlighting the little-known impact of Indian scholars on the Iranian literati, and arguing for a more complicated relationship between Persian and Urdu than what has most often been suggested.

Iraqi poet Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb’s (d. 1964) transnational experiences defined his poetics and his poetry resonated transnationally. The poet was in Iran during the 1953 coup d’état the American and British intelligence services engineered against Prime Minister Muḥammad Muṣaddiq. According to al-Sayyāb’s own account in his memoir Kuntu shuyūʿiyyan (I Was a Communist, 1959), the refusal of the Iranian Communist Party (the Tūdah) to intervene and protest against the coup led him to sever all ties with the Communists upon his return to Iraq. The coup in Iran caused what I refer to as a “turn” not only in al-Sayyāb’s politics but also in his poetics. The Iranian coup’s effect on al-Sayyāb’s poetic work has been neglected by critics, though his reaction to it is of primary importance for understanding his move from political commitment (iltizām) to a more ambivalent, nuanced, and complicated poetics that interrogates the death-and-rebirth mythic cycles he is known for. By the end of his life, al-Sayyāb stood firmly with the Baʿthist (i.e. Iraqi nationalist but also Arab chauvinist) camp in a stark about-face from his early period of Communist-inspired commitment that transcended national borders. In this paper, I trace the transnational links that shaped al-Sayyāb’s life while I also investigate how al-Sayyāb’s poetry implicitly responds to and resists his explicit political commitment during the first half of the 1950s in my analysis of one of his long poems, al-Asliḥah wa-l-aṭfāl (“Weapons and Children”), published in 1954. A reorientation of current understandings of transnationalism emerges out of my reading of this poem, which requires a redefinition of the processes of “transnationalism-from-above” and “transnationalism-from-below.” While “transnationalism-from-above” is usually understood in terms of capitalist globalization, al-Sayyāb’s experience of Communist transnationalism--which worked to restrict local nationalist movements and align them with the Soviet cause--complicates this view. I therefore offer a new take on the concept of “transnationalism-from-above” through my reading of al-Sayyāb’s life and art.

Most scholars of Maghrebian literature study postcolonial avant-garde francophone literature of the Maghreb and its relation to French literature as a dialectic of metropole and its periphery, for francophone literature of North Africa draws substantially on French modernism. Some writers, however, such as Mohammed Khair-Eddine, sought to “deterritorialize” French in their writings, and this deterritorialization sprouted south-to-south connections with some Négritude writers such as Aimé Césaire. Nonetheless, these connections would not have materialized without each party’s relationship to the metropole. Thus the former colonizer’s culture remains central to these connections. Mohamed Leftah, however, a Moroccan francophone writer who wrote most of his novels while an expatriate in Egypt, anchored his writings in the Islamic tradition. Leftah’s writing suspends the Mashreq/Maghreb divide and shifts the transnational connections characterizing francophone Maghrebian writings. This author's oeuvre is characterized by its transgressive character; it relies on decadant themes, and invests heavily in opposing normativity—it is a product of an epitomic exilic condition. Leftah’s novel, Le dernier combat du captain Ni'mat, narrating a love relationship between the married Ni'mat, an Egyptian retired army official, and his young Nubian gardener, Islam, earned the author “La Mamounia” literary prize, yet remains unavailable in Morocco. I examine how Leftah's linguistic, geographic, and ontological exile conditions his writing and articulates in an unprecedented way postcolonial modernity across the Arab world, by problematizing the established metropole/periphery relation, and drawing on aesthetics and politics in the postcolonial Arab world. Leftah’s writing articulates modernity and "dissensus" and search for new ideals in two manners: by anchoring the narrative in Sufism, the precursor of early Islamic had?tha, thus operating from within the locus of Islamic tradition; and through the figure of the decadent, deployed in connection with excessive sexual practices. Leftah's mobilization of sexuality in his writings contests simultaneously the heteronormalizing and homogenizing discourses of modernity, the nation-state, Islamic fundamentalism, and Western Orientalism, thus imagining the postcolonial modern Arab subject as one of differentiation and desire. I draw on Michel Foucault's conceptualization of the connection between the deployment of sexuality and biopolitics; on Afsaneh Najmabadi's study of Iranian modernity through a historicization of sexual practices and norms; on Adonis’s discussion of the role of the Sufis in instigating modernity; and on Jacques Rancière’s theorization of dissensus as essential to modernity.

Once a province of Islamic rule, Malta has since and long before been a central locus of imperial administration and trade across the Mediterranean. A site of conquest both symbolic as well as material, absorbed under the suzerainty of the British empire from 1800 through the Second World War, the Mediterranean islands simultaneously housed one of the first major Arabic printing presses, put to use predominantly by Arab Christians who traveled with Protestant missionaries to work on biblical translations. Upon conversion to Protestantism––and following his brother’s martyrdom at the hands of Maronite church authorities––Aḥmad Fāris Shidyāq was exiled by local patriarchs and sailed with American missionaries to Alexandria before arriving in Malta where he spent 14 years as professor, Arabic translator of the Bible, and printer. Traveling thereafter to England, Paris, Tunisia and Istanbul, he worked as professor, publisher, translator and editor. A prolific writer of lexicography, grammatology, fiction, journalism and travelogues, among Shidyāq's writings is a work on Malta, al-Wāsiṭah fī aḥwāl Māliṭah, which provides an ethnography of the two islands, with particular attention to the Maltese language as a “corrupted” dialect of Arabic. Considering his study of Maltese alongside his more general philological writings, this paper outlines a methodology of Shidyāq's linguistic and analytical practices that historically situates his work between pre-modern Arabic philological traditions about which he was demonstrably erudite, and the bustling contemporary fields of European comparative linguistics, with which he was similarly familiar. While much of these writings contain elitist invective––attacking the Maltese people with crude generalizations about "moral character" and social "peculiarities"––Shidyāq provides a cursory dialectology of Maltese, speculating diachronically for its "corrupted" phonological transmogrifications from a heuristic conception of a pure Arabic language (al-fuṣḥā). Anticipating many arguments to come, I argue that Shidyāq situates the space and language practices of Malta, both literally and figuratively, to reflect on the threats presented by the projects of European empire to the history and future of Arabic language and civilization.