Arabic Literature in the Post-Classical Period

Studies in Arabic devoted to poetic output during the period between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries are characterized by a kind of anxiety caused by a painful awareness that Arabic poetry at the time had entered its era of decline and was facing a serious crisis. There is also some sort of consensus that the creative impulse motivating Arabic culture had begun to flag, to break down and indeed to disappear. Thence the concept of ‘period of decadence’ derived its influence and overriding ability both to colour the vision of all those who deal with the topic and to define the approach of scholars who make use of the term.

If one looks at works on the poetry of this period, one soon notices that, because the entire era is shrouded in obscurity, the methods and conclusions of those who have studied it consist of judgements regarding contents and their documentary dimension. However, the application of this simplifying instinct to research on this period does not result from a lack of familiarity with the poetry produced. The real reason is the serious conflict between desire and history that arises at the moment of reading: between what actually happened on the one hand – in other words, the dilemmas and ruptures that Arabic poetry found itself facing – and, on the other, what the researcher would like to have happened. For this very reason the opinions and attitudes adopted are founded on a system that of necessity leads either to an exaltation of the poetry of the period – extolling it to the very skies and considering it as a further developmental link in the course of Arabic poetic creativity through the ages¹ – or else to a process of contempt – whereby it is trivialized and discarded, being viewed as mere artifice that has managed to sweep aside the artistic achievements of Arabic poetry.²

Research on the history of Arabic culture and the period of ‘decadence’ is full of a curious kind of keening ritual; the portrait is dark and distressing, at the cusp of a decline.³ Many scholars use political realities to explain the paralysis that afflicted poetic creativity, insisting that the turkicization policy during the Ottoman period was what swept everything away, poetry, belles-lettres and art. The operation becomes a mission to rescue the Arabic element and condemn the Turkish. With certain researchers in the Maghrib this racist approach to self-acquittal becomes more a question of regionality; they insist that it was only the Mashriq that went through a period of decadence beginning at the end of the Abbasid period, while the Maghrib saw a period of political and cultural efflorescence that came to an end only with the advent of imperialism.⁴ However, whether this instinct is racist or regional, it is still of significance. It suggests a kind of dismayed awareness of what actually happened, without the concomitant realization that this way of dodging history cannot alter what actually happened. Was Ottoman occupation really responsible for the decline in Arabic poetry during this period, or was it instead the methodology used by earlier generations of Arabs – in areas such as the manipulation and usage of poetic discourse, attitudes to language, meaning and modes of production – things that, in all their variegation, can furnish plenty of reasons for the crisis in which poetry found itself? What is the connection between the theorization of earlier Arab generations about poetry and poetics and their attitude to meaning on the one hand and on the other the state of regression and despondency in which poetry found itself during this period? Was not theory responsible for taking away the poet’s freedom, by creating poetic categories, and fixing generic boundaries, possibilities, roles and means of production?

The majority of attempts at addressing the reasons for the poetic tradition’s regression and weakness are based on a kind of explanation that requires the creative poetic element to be linked to the political and social. This type of research fails to take account of the fact that the connection between the creative act and its environment, be it political or social, is highly problematic: at the very moment that the creative act takes shape, it engages with not merely its present and its surroundings but also its particular history.

In the light of these premises I have read the poetry of this period and considered the problematics that it raises. I have come to realize that the period includes an enormous number of poetic collections and poets in both east and west of the region. In addition to poets such as Ibn al-Naḥḥās al-Ḥalabī (Aleppo, d. 1642), al-Amīr Manjak Pāshā al-Yūsufī (Damascus, d. 1669), ‘Alī al-Ghurāb (Tunis, d. 1811), al-Kaywānī al-Dimashqī (Damascus, d. 1759) and ‘Abd al-Raḥmān al-Fāsī (Morocco, d. 1712), al-Muḥibbī mentions in his Nafḥat al-rayḥāna wa-rashḥat ṭalā’ al-ḥāna the names of hundreds of poets (he cites the names of forty-seven from Damascus alone). In addition we also come across a number of other well-known poets, of whom I will mention some in the following list:⁵

If one considers these collections of poetry from the point of view of their generic purposes, one notices that they are motivated from within by a kind of grudging awareness, based on the one hand on a desire to confirm their adherence to Arabic poetic norms and provide a continuity with the poetic output of the past, and on the other hand on a fervent wish to be open to fresh vistas and horizons with which the poetic tradition has had no previous acquaintance. The notion of authenticity to the tradition took the form of adherence to the genres of panegyric and lampoon, a sanctification of the values prized by earlier poets, and a resort to their techniques as inspiration for the engendering of metaphor, simile and figurative language. A fervent quest for innovation consumes the bulk of the collections, taking the form of new types of writing: puzzles, cryptograms and history in poetic form; and panegyrics, secular and prophetic, leading in turn to a kind of linkage between religious and poetic discourse. They are all indeed kinds of poetic practice that earlier Arabic poetry had not witnessed, and so some researchers⁶ regard them as a sign of innovation. However, a more careful examination of these contrived generic purposes, in the broader context of a desire to open new avenues that would free Arabic poetry from the artifice, frippery and mannerism that continued to plague it, soon reveals a quite different picture. On the surface they may give the impression of an internal dynamic at work within the poet and poetry and even suggest a search for new and unfamiliar topics in Arabic poetic history, but a reading of that same dynamic soon confronts us with an implicit acknowledgement that poetry finds itself in a crisis too severe to be confronted.

These disjunctures involve not only the level of the poetic text and the means of its production, but also the status of poet and poetry within society, the relationship of the poet to his text, and the ways he chooses to express the definition of poetry and of innovation. I have therefore decided to deal with the most important and far-reaching of these disjunctures, under the following set of headings.

FIRST DISJUNCTURE: THE LOW STATUS OF THE POET AND HIS DISCONTENT WITH POETRY ITSELF

This type of break impacts upon the relationship of the poet to his poetry. It reveals itself in expressions of doubt regarding the validity of the poetic event itself. Texts are replete with accounts of the way poetry and poets are despised. We read Ibn al-Naḥḥās al-Ḥalabī, for example:⁷

This tragic awareness of the crisis of poetry and the low status of its practitioners represents a new reality.

Poets give the overriding impression that the gap between poetry and its recipients is widening, leaving the poet himself in a state of isolation unprecedented within the Arabic poetic tradition. Manjak Pāshā al-Yūsufī addresses himself to this comprehensive sense of closed horizons and blocked paths, imprinting his feeling of isolation on the text’s surface:⁸

This serious historical decline in the relationship of the poet to his product and society was not the product of this particular historical period; rather it stems from a historically distant era. If we take a look at the writings of earlier critics and penseurs, we notice that, whether they are writing about poetic criticism and theory or composing histories of literature in general, they were completely aware of the fact that the trials of the poet and the crisis of poetry itself could be traced back to the moment when poetry was dislodged from its lofty position at the advent of Islam. Ibn Khaldūn (fifteenth century) talks about the period of silence that followed the advent of the Koranic text: ‘Tongues were stilled and fell silent.’¹⁰ This silence was not something chosen by the poet, but rather an event over which he had no choice. For the first time in the history of Arabic poetry the process of poetic communication is interrupted and the relationship between poet and listener is severed. People turned away from poetry and occupied themselves with ‘matters of religion, prophecy, and revelation’.¹¹

The decline that afflicted the process of poetic communication was not simply a gap in the process of Arabic poetry, but rather a total rupture that had a significant impact on its direction and brought about a major change in the poet’s status within society. Within the tribal structure that Islam set out to abolish the poet had held an unparalleled position, perpetuating the tribe’s glorious feats and exploits in his poems. Poetry had always been a vital presence, the tribe’s means of rescuing memories from the tyranny of forgetfulness and thus of guaranteeing their glorious feats and battles a continuing presence as time went by. It was poets who took on this great task, and society offered them a particular place in its collective imaginaire and enveloped him in a mythic halo; as Ibn Sīnā puts it, ‘he held the status of prophet’.¹² As far as poets were concerned, the new faith of Islam not only shunned the religious beliefs and values of their forebears (in itself a very bitter spiritual and psychological experience), but also constituted a significant clash of destinies. The struggle between the Prophet and poets was thus no less significant than the one between him and his enemies; indeed it was even more bitter and incisive.

This disjuncture reveals itself through a tension in the relationship that is supposed to exist between poetry and audience. As a phenomenon it gives the impression of starting during this period, but in actual fact its roots go far back in the history and direction of Arabic poetry. Recipients of the poem are, of course, one side of the process of poetic communication; without them poetry’s efficacy is destroyed, its social role nullified and its aesthetic function crippled. As a consequence the break in the relationship between poetry and its recipients leads to a breakdown in the process of poetic communication itself.

The causes of this disjuncture are numerous and varied: some involve the poet, his ability to anchor his poetry in the tradition, and his knowledge of the secrets and wonders of discourse; others are related to the decline that affected the language itself. The basic reason for this major break is that poets failed to ground their poetry in the tradition. That requires of them that they make their discourse conform with the needs and norms of poetry so as to produce something that is new and unprecedented while still remaining firmly grounded in the realms of poetry.

Historical circumstance also played a role in the lowered status of poetry. The early Islamic conquests and the mingling of languages and races that they brought about served as an incentive to a number of innovations in the realm of Arabic culture and as one of the most important factors in the process of impelling that culture to ask new questions and to introduce variety into its knowledge and experience. But at the same time this movement represented a danger to the Arabic language itself and to people’s ability to master its particular genius and comprehend its rules. Al-Qarṭājannī (thirteenth century) addresses himself to this issue in blunt terms: ‘People thought so little of poetry because they spoke foreign languages and were ill-disposed temperamentally. They had no idea whatsoever about the secrets of eloquence and its dynamic potential. They turned this deficiency into artifice. They are really to blame for it, and the situation still exists.’¹³

This foreignness did not come to light only during al-Qarṭājannī’s own period; it was a historical reality that had begun much earlier and continued after his death. All we need do is refer to the introduction to Ibn Manẓūr’s fourteenth-century dictionary, Lisān al-‘Arab, where we find him bemoaning the orphaned state and decline of Arabic:

Thus the practice of poetry ceased to be a mode for the invention of new types of expression that could expand man’s appreciation of his world. Instead it became mere versification, with gain and earning a living as the only goals. Poetry also ceased to be a form of writing that would reveal the poet’s vision of the world and his attitude to mankind’s problems; instead it became a piece of artifice to be bartered. This change impacted poetry, poet and recipient; and thus did the history of decline begin. What kept recurring was the chronic sense of imminent decline and disastrous closure, colouring the views of Arab intellectuals and theorists from the tenth century onwards. Ibn Ṭabāṭabā, for example, discusses it, detailing the trials and tribulations of poets during his own lifetime.¹⁵ Some modern studies emphasize this point too. Iḥsān ‘Abbās, for example, discusses the state of poetry in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, suggesting that literary Arabic was dislodged from its pedestal and replaced by the colloquial dialects.¹⁶ As a result of this process of removal, colloquial poetry expanded its purview considerably in both production and reception. Ḥasan Ḥusnī ‘Abd al-Wahhāb says much the same in his book, Mujmal tarīkh al-adab al-tūnisī, where he notes that the decline of poetry in Tunis during the era known as the ‘period of decadence’ did not happen all at once, but was rather the result ‘of the corruption of literary Arabic through prolonged periods of ignorance’.¹⁷

The heading of this section refers to the disappearance of the distinction between poetry and other genres; indeed poetry starts to conform to the expectations of other genres. This development does not happen purely by chance; it is more a matter of compulsion. The poet writes within a fixed linguistic system in a particular culture and a defined generic framework. The poet’s creativity acquires its newness and individuality only from an awareness of those moments when it is supposed to break rules and restrictions and of those other moments when it is an adherence to those same restrictions and boundaries that becomes one of the requirements of change, invention and renewal.

The student of poetic practice during this period rapidly realizes that this third rupture led poets to dislike poetry, to become all too aware of the paralysis that had so gripped poetic communication, and to despair of the possibility of finding an audience that could rescue poetry from the contempt into which it had fallen. In such a period of confrontation poetry was subsumed into other types of literature. We can summarize some of these modes and forms under the headings below.

Under this category fall such things as puzzles, cryptograms, histories and embellished poetry. They all have in common the manipulation of words so as to make the intended meaning of the poet only decodable after a good deal of effort and tedium. The relationship betwen poet and recipient is now governed by the skill of the former in obscuring meaning – concealing his intended message by twisting language and using it in unintended ways – and by the ability of the latter to crack the codes and interpret the cryptograms. Here for example is ‘Abd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī:¹⁸

inna li’l-thā’i fī’l-ḥurūfi thabātun

wa-li-bādī thabātihi wathabātun

ḥarfu sirrin sāra bi-lā sarayān

fī’l-mu‘tanā jam‘un la-hu wa-shatātun

huwa hādhā hādhāwa-hādhā-wa-hādhā

tatasāmā li-āyatihi l-bayyinātu

wa-huwa amrun muḥaqqaqun fī umūr

ka-shukhūṣ turī-ka-hā al-mir’ātu

akhadhat ẓāhiran wa-a‘ṭat khafiyyan

fa-sakārā shuhūdu-hā wa-ṣuhātu

It does not take long to realize that these verses which shroud their meanings in deliberate obscurity participate in the construction of poetic discourse only through metre (basīṭ), paronomasia (thabāt in line 1; sirr, sāra, sarayān in line 2; and amr, umūr in 4) and antithesis (jam‘, shatāt; ẓāhiran, khafiyyan; sakārā, ṣuhāt), all of them poetic devices that rely on, indeed sanctify, sonic imitation. However, the efficacy of such devices can be derived only from the core of poetic discourse when the imitation is multicoloured and multifaceted, constantly varying so that the sonic imitation does not become total, thus plunging the utterance into a monotony of mere repetition. However, al-Nābulusī’s text is content merely to condone total sonic congruence, repeating the same consonants and thus the same phonetic resonances. The poet thus impoverishes language and overwhelms words. They in turn forsake him and turn the tables, plunging him into an abyss of artifice and mannerism.

These puzzles, cryptograms, histories and embellishment poems clearly emerge from a conception of poetry that is totally at variance with the early Arabic poetic corpus. While they might perhaps be considered merely as an extension and even an intensification of the very obscurity that is a regular feature of poetic discourse, in fact they differ from this type of obscurity in that language is converted into impenetrable puzzles. There is no cognizance of the obvious fact that, even if this type of writing manages to dazzle its recipient, it leads to a serious clash between the formal structural level and the semantic, since the former becomes the focus of a variety of attempts at creativity and is seen as the only basis for the construction of the aesthetic dimensions of speech. That said, it is nevertheless extremely simplistic to suggest that the ‘erasure’ of the space between poetry and obscurantist discourse is a distinct feature of the period usually termed ‘the period of decadence’. The decline in poetic practice that saw texts become a kind of clash between the twin aspects of formal structure and semantic level emphatically did not have its beginnings in this period. It had been operating for some time within the very heart of Arabic culture, but manifests itself in this particular period with a particularly overwhelming force.

The use of poetry in the cause of historical dating also belongs in this same category; it was an especially popular mode among poets of this period. It involved composing a verse or half verse that conforms with the sense, metre and rhyme of the other verses. However, when the equivalent numerical value of each letter is added up, the sum total is the date of the year to which the poet wishes to refer. Here, for example, is a line from a poem written by Manjak Pāshā al-Yūsufī in which he records the date of the opening of a hostel built by the governor of Syria, Ṣāliḥ Pāshā, in AH 1075:¹⁹

The date the poet-prince wishes to record in order to celebrate the occasion is found in the second half of the line, according to the common numerical value given to each consonant: fī = 80 + 10 (90); sabīl = 60 + 2 + 10 + 30 (102); Allāh = 1 + 30 + 30 + 5 (66); khān = 600 + 1 + 50 (651); qad = 100 + 4 (104); buniya = 2 + 50 + 10 (62), giving a grand total of 1075.

This process whereby the poetic text was turned into a document of historical record was considered a hallmark of poetic quality and high esteem, and so most important poets of the period sanctioned its use, including al-Khāl al-Talwī (d. 1705), al-Kaywānī al-Dimashqī,²⁰ Ibn al-Naḥḥās and ‘Abd al-Raḥmān ibn al-Shākir (d. 1749) nicknamed al-Bahlūl (the clown). This last poet made this type of writing his preferred medium; so anxious was he to demonstrate his skill in it that he composed a panegyric in praise of his master, ‘Abd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī (d. 1731), comprising 108 lines in which every single line computes to the same date, AH 1136.²¹ Shaykh ‘Abd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī – highly regarded in his lifetime as poet, littérateur, religious scholar and author of poetry, travel works, studies on mysticism, jurisprudence and the epistolary art, some ninety works – is recorded as delivering a glowing opinion of al-Bahlūl’s poem, something that is clearly not an ephemeral comment from someone with no knowledge of the principles of poetry, but rather a genuine evaluative judgement from a scholar well versed in Arabic poetics and the rules governing the creative process.

In Naqd al-shi‘r Qudāma ibn Ja‘far states explicitly that the realm of poetry does not recognize prohibitions and interdictions. ‘It has to be firmly stated . . . that all concepts are at the poet’s disposal, and he can use whichever ones he wishes without being denied the use of one about which he wishes to speak.’²²

Research on the poetry of this period soon reveals that poetic practice often led to an erasure of the gap between poetry and religion. Poets of this period believed that mere versification of religious and moralistic topics was sufficient to have their compositions subsumed under poetry; metre thus played its thoroughly misleading role of eliminating the gap between manneristic verse and real poetry. In the Maghrib we can mention Muḥammad ibn al-Qāsim ibn Da’ūd al-Salwī who lived in the fifteenth century and wrote a complete collection of poems in praise of the Prophet called Nawādir al-niẓām fī sharaf sayyid al-anām which consists of more than three thousand lines.²³ Then there is the Dīwān of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān al-Fāsī in the seventeenth century,²⁴ and the work of al-Wazīr al-Sarrāj (d. 1736), al-Ḥulal al-sandasiyya fī’l-akhbār al-tūnisiyya, contains numerous extracts from panegyrics composed during this period. He suggests that the poets’ overriding interest in religion and the spread of panegyrics and mystical poems is due to the tyrannical power exerted by the rulers at the time and the famine and plague that were the consequences of that rule.²⁵ Shaykh Muḥammad al-Nayfar also mentions this type of poetry in his work, ‘Unwān al-arīb, and cites many poetic texts from the Husaynid period that clearly show poetry’s conformity with the demands of religious discourse and at the same time its overwhelming mood of self-pity, affliction and misery. In the eastern part of the Arab world (the Mashriq) we note that ‘Abd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī uses the introduction to his Dīwān to detail the topics that preoccupied poets in this period, the vision they had of poetry and its function, and what exactly they expected of it. We thus discover that religious panegyrics penned in response to the perceived demands of religious discourse are to be found in the poetry of Amīn al-Jundī, al-Kaywānī al-Dimashqī, al-Khāl al-Talwī, Ibn al-Naqīb al-Ḥusaynī, Ibn al-Naḥḥās al-Ḥalabī, Abū Ma‘tūq Shihāb al-Mūsawī and others.

A perusal of the poetry composed during this period soon reveals that, along with all the puzzles and cryptograms, the poetic collections include other poems that adhere rigidly to the goals and methods of older Arabic poetry. Such texts aspire to imitate the techniques used by the ancient poets, but without managing to reach the same level of aesthetic achievement as their forebears.

In Nafḥat al-rayḥāna wa-rashḥat ṭalā’ al-ḥāna al-Muḥibbī discusses Ibn al-Naḥḥās al-Ḥalabī and Manjak Pāshā al-Yūsufī, both of them poets whose careers during this very period demonstrate that creativity and foundation-building in Arabic poetry was still flourishing.²⁶ He even goes so far as to claim that Ibn al-Naḥḥās was renowned for his ability to craft idioms, while Prince Manjak’s forte was in the invention of figures. However, when we read the collected poems of these two poets, we soon realize that al-Muḥibbī’s fulsome praise can be viewed only as a desperate exercise in clutching at straws, a forlorn hope that poetry might regain its former status and position in society. It is indeed difficult to find any texts to justify al-Muḥibbī’s encomium; the majority sink into a shallow imitation of the modes and categories utilized by their poetic forebears.

Metaphors and images also participate in this act of borrowing from the heritage of the past. Thus we see the panegyric’s subject being likened to towering mountains, lions, clouds and rain; all of which are blatantly copied in the collections of al-Amīr al-Ṣan‘ānī,²⁷ Muḥammad al-Ṣafāqisī²⁸ and ‘Abd al-‘Azīz al-Fishālī.²⁹ We even see this classicizing tendency in the texts of al-Amīr Manjak al-Yūsufī who in many of his poems does at least display an individual approach to writing. He makes use of the older text as a motivating force that permits the poet simultaneously to achieve a linkage with the past and a separation from it; he imitates earlier kinds of writing, copying for example the Rūmiyyāt of Ibn Firās (d. 968) and many of the more familiar metaphors – sea and clouds in panegyric or boast poetry – to portray generosity.

The label ‘age of decadence’ then has displayed a remarkable ability to colour the dissertations of those who adopt its principles, concealing as much about the period in question as it reveals. In the current context what it replaces is something like ‘the course of decline in poetry’. Not unnaturally the label casts a shadow over the topic under study here; the weakness that deepened the crisis of Arabic poetry and confronted it with a set of impossibilities is attributed to the political issues that mark the period in question.

For these reasons we have preferred to investigate this period as a gap or a break in the course of Arabic poetry. If we change our approach, not labelling the era as simply a ‘period of decadence’ but rather regarding it as a time when a steady decline in the Arabic poetic tradition reached its nadir, we soon discover that the crisis began much earlier; indeed its roots are to be found in the history of Arabic culture, concealed though they may be within the long history of Arabic poetry and the changes that it witnessed. Whether we examine the status of the Arab poet, his relationship with society, and the role he played socially and aesthetically; or the relationship of poetry to the older tradition of poetics and the extent to which it adhered to or broke away from those norms; or the relationship of poetry to other literary genres and its ability to fulfil its role in responding to the social and aesthetic needs of Arabic culture, in all these cases we find that the issue of decline and weakness remains a central feature of the problems that fomented within the core of poetic practice and intensified even during poetry’s most radical and innovative moments.

From the very outset Arabic poetry has included among its generic characteristics the potential to become a means of earning a living. This implies that the crisis of poetry and the lowly position the poet occupied are a direct product of the contradictions firmly embedded in the ancient Arabs’ very concept of the word, in their definition of poetry and their expectations of it. When the poet converted poetry into a means of gain and earning a living, it was no mere passing event, but a crisis whose full impact was postponed until all the required elements could be in place, at which point it would become a means whereby poetry would be led inexorably towards artifice and the poet himself to inevitable contempt. This process of decline has its own history; there are periods of quiescence, others of activity and tension. It is not a linear movement through time but rather one that, in the process of application and accumulation, sometimes leaps forwards and at others goes into reverse. Whence comes the illusion that it did not exist before the period we are considering here, whereas it had actually been in relentless operation for ages before that time. Thus the substitution of a phrase like decline in poetry for ‘age of decadence’ becomes not simply a change of label or a widening of the temporal scope of the title, but rather a different way of examining the reasons that brought poetry to such a sorry pass and opened the history of its decline.

It is entirely reasonable that creativity in Arabic culture should have chosen to display itself through poetry, which stands at the forefront of the cultural scene throughout the classical period of Arabic literature and surpasses other literary genres in both status and function. However, at some point this same creative instinct chooses to alter its self-projection. The creative impulse shifts from poetry, the ‘official’ literature that Arabic culture had previously chosen to celebrate, to prose, and from official literature to other genres and categories that theoreticians of old had striven mightily to marginalize and ignore. Research on the narrative genres in Arabic culture, for example, shows that this very period witnessed the appearance of a whole collection of compositions concerned with the popular sagas (those of the heroes of popular imagination, like al-Ẓāhir Baybars, Princess Dhāt al-Himma, Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan, the Righteous Saints and their miraculous deeds, Sufis, and so on), not to mention the great story collection, A Thousand and One Nights (The Arabian Nights). (See Part IV on popular prose in this volume.)

An unnuanced application of the principles of historical development to an assessment of the changes that affected Arabic poetry in this period emerges as utterly simplistic, since it totally ignores what I would term the principle of alternatives and substitution. We only need to look at the corpus of modern Arabic poetry to confirm that poetic practice – with all its differences and its variety of aesthetic propositions – continues to maintain covert linkages with those many innovations and forms in poetic praxis that have previously been marginalized and ignored. The very fact that so many modern creative texts resort to these abandoned and largely overlooked writings is just one token of the fact that they are what truly embodies the principle of substitution. They have now taken over from official literature, impelling the creative power of Arabic writing towards new goals and peaks which guarantee that the fires of Arabic culture will continue to be rekindled.

¹ Adunis, al-Thābit wa’l-mutaḥawwil, vol. Ⅲ, pp. 53–5; see also Bāshā, Tārīkh, pp. 5, 77–8.

² See e.g. Lu’lu’a, Manāzil al-qamar, pp. 45–6; see also Maḥmūd Sālim Rizq, Tarīkh al-adab al-‘arabī, pp. 418–19; al-Ghazzī, al-Adab al-tūnisī, pp. 11–37.

³ See e.g. the views of Maḥmūd Sālim Rizq, Tarīkh al-adab al-‘arabī, pp. 418–19; the same posture can be seen in al-Ghazzī, al-Adab al-tūnisī, pp. 11, 37, 418–20.

⁴ ‘Abbās al-Jarārī, al-Adab al-maghribī, p. 174.

⁵ al-Mawsū‘a al-shi‘riyya, website of al-Majma ‘al-thaqāfī (Abu Dhabi).

⁶ See e.g. Bāshā, Tārīkh, pp. 5, 77–8.

⁷ His full name is al-Manalla Fatḥ Allāh ibn ‘Abd Allāh, known as Ibn al-Naḥḥās al-Ḥalabī al-Madanī. He is considered one of the period’s most important poets, so the majority of literary historians provide his biography: see al-Muḥibbī, Khulāsat al-athar, vol. Ⅱ, p. 257; and his Nafḥat al-rayḥāna, vol. Ⅱ, pp. 507–8; al-Ziriklī, al-A‘lām, vol. Ⅴ, p. 333. For the quotation, see Ibn al-Naḥḥās, Dīwān, p. 70.

⁸ Manjak Pāshā al-Yūsufī, Dīwān, p. 121.

⁹ al-Kaywānī, Dīwān, pp. 67–9.

¹⁰ Ibn Khaldūn, al-Muqaddima, p. 581.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² al-Qarṭājannī, Minhāj al-bulaghā’, pp. 122–4.

¹³ Ibid., pp. 124–5.

¹⁴ Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-‘Arab, vol. Ⅰ, p. ⅹ.

¹⁵ Ibn Ṭabāṭabā, ‘Iyār al-shi‘r, p. 15.

¹⁶ ‘Abbās, Tarīkh al-naqd al-adabī, p. 496.

¹⁷ ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, Mujmal tarīkh al-adab al-tūnisī, p. 235.

¹⁸ al-Mawsū‘a al-shi‘riyya, website of al-Majma ‘al-thaqāfī (Abu Dhabi): Dīwān ‘Abd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī. For obvious reasons, these lines are not susceptible to translation – or, at least, not one that will serve any ‘meaningful’ purpose. The original is transliterated so that the comments which follow can be contextualized.

¹⁹ Prince Manjak ibn Muḥammad ibn Manjak ibn Abī Bakr ibn ‘Abd al-Qādir ibn Ibrāhīm ibn Muḥammad ibn Ibrāhīm ibn Manjak al-Kabīr al-Yūsufī al-Sharkasī al-Dimashqī, mentioned by al-Muḥibbī in Khulāsat al-athar, vol. Ⅳ, pp. 409–23; and in his Nafḥat al-rayḥāna, vol. Ⅰ, pp. 136–60. See also al-Khafājī, Rayḥānat al-alibbā, vol. Ⅰ, pp. 232–56; al-Ziriklī, al-A‘lām, vol. Ⅷ, p. 224. The poem can be found in Manjak Pāshā al-Yūsufī, Dīwān, p. 71. Once again this line is not translated, but given in transliteration.

²⁰ See e.g. al-Kaywānī, Dīwān, pp. 172–3, 190–2.

²¹ al-Budayrī, Ḥawādith Dimashq al-yawmiyya, pp. 9, 139.

²² Qudāma ibn Ja‘far, Naqd al-shi‘r, p. 17. See also al-Jurjānī, al-Wasāṭa, p. 64.

²³ MS in the Public Library in Rabat, Morocco, no. 360K. See ‘Abbās al-Jarārī, al-Adab al-maghribī, p. 156.

²⁴ ‘Abbās al-Jarārī, al-Adab al-maghribī, pp. 139ff.

²⁵ al-Wazīr al-Sarrāj, al-Ḥulal al-sandasiyya, p. 195.

²⁶ For al-Muḥibbī’s comments, see Nafḥat al-rayḥāna, pp. 507–8.

²⁷ al-Mawsū‘a al-shi‘riyya, website of al-Majma ‘al-thaqāfī (Abu Dhabi): Dīwān al-Amīr al-Ṣan‘ānī.

²⁸ Ibid., Dīwān Muḥammad al-Ṣafāqisī.

²⁹ Ibid., Dīwān ‘Abd al-‘Azīz al-Fishālī.