Seminars

Lasting from 1980 to 1988, the Iran-Iraq War is considered the longest two-state war of the 20th century. Its complex legacy includes death, destruction, and thousands of literary, cinematic, and artistic works in Arabic, Persian, and other regional languages. Titled after the speaker’s recently published book, the talk explains why this war remains a major topic for writers of Persian and Arabic fiction three and half decades after its conclusion. It will also show how contemporary Iranian and Iraqi writers have transformed the literatures of this war from authoritarian propaganda into literatures of mourning and resistance, with connections to some of the biggest social and political challenges the two countries face today.

Why was print not widely adopted in the Ottoman Empire until the late 1800s? It’s a question that has puzzled scholars for almost 400 years. Ottoman subjects had known about European printing for centuries and even had short-lived experiments with printing, but the vast majority of books continued to be copied by hand. Previous explanations have emphasized cultural roadblocks like religious opposition or scribal resistance, but there is little evidence for these theories. In this talk, I posit an economic explanation instead: Manuscript technology continued to flourish because it was more economically rational and printing was too burdensome. The project will analyze 1) the production costs of books, both printed and handwritten, 2) their prices on the secondary market, and 3) the commercialization of the book trades. This will be done across Arabic, Turkish, Armenian, Greek, and Hebrew books. The project promises a new approach to the history of books in the Islamic world and a clearer understanding of commercialization and capitalist development of the early modern Middle East.

This lecture introduces Ali bin Tamim’s Eyes of Wonders: On the Inventions and Oddities in al-Mutanabbi’s Poetry, which reexamines the legacy of the 10th-century poet Abu al-Tayyib al- Mutanabbi as more than a brilliant stylist. The book’s core argument is that al-Mutanabbi was not merely a stylist or imitator, but an inventor of meaning and poetic thought. Central to this claim is the classical Arabic critical concept of ikhtirāʿ (“invention”). In the Abbasid-era critical tradition, ikhtirāʿ denotes the creation of a meaning never before conceived—an original idea unclaimed by prior poets. Drawing on this concept, Bin Tamim offers an accessible yet rigorous framework for interpreting al-Mutanabbi’s work. He closely examines forty selected verses as case studies of poetic invention, treating each not as a mere stylistic feat but as an act of creative thought engaging questions of identity, language, and existence. This approach illustrates the book’s broader stakes. It redefines how we understand originality in Arabic poetry and also demonstrates a method of reading that highlights al-Mutanabbi’s role as a poet-thinker who expanded the horizons of poetic meaning. Ultimately, Eyes of Wonders repositions al-Mutanabbi not as a follower of tradition, but as a creative force who reshaped the tradition itself.

Among the strangest, most difficult writings of blind vegan poet, satirist, and witty man of letters Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī (d. 449/1057) isal-Fuṣūl wa-l-ghāyāt, “Sections and endings,” a hymnic meditation on God that some have decried as a mockery of the Qurʾān. Almost entirely lacking in narrative, upon further inspection, Fuṣūl yields up two micro-tales featuring animals. In the first, al-Maʿarrī watches in horror as an innocent bird becomes trapped in an ink jar, while in the second, a talking fox vows to pay tribute to a serpent in exchange for protection, only to accidentally harm the serpent in a manner that conveys the notion of fate and memento mori so common to al-Maʿarrī’s works. The unlikely source of these vignettes makes us sit up and pay attention, thus allowing the stories to teach something about precious gemstones, the lives of animals, Aesopian mistakes, and cosmic drama.

In this talk, I examine the first maqāmah by the Nahḍawī (Syro-)Lebanese author Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq (1804/05–1887), from his 1855 work al Sāq ʿalā al Sāq fīmā huwa al Fāriyāq (Leg over Leg). I begin by considering how key tropes of the Arab Nahḍah, such as tanwīr (enlightenment) and yaqaẓa (awakening), may have impacted al-Shidyāq’s position within foundational historiographies of Arab modernity. Then, centering al-Shidyāq’s insomnia (a biographical fact with epistemological and aesthetic implications for his philosophy and creativity), I suggest that his work be read through the prism of radical wakefulness. This wakefulness marks an entrance into saturated darkness, enabling a critique of ordinary, vision-oriented ratiocination that is typically associated with daylight activity. I follow closely the late-night-through-midday philosophical quest of the maqāmah’s frame narrator, al-Hāris Ibn Hithām, and argue that al-Shidyāq’s most compelling critique of daylight epistemologies emerges through his interrogation of formal analogies, scientific measurements, and comparative practice. These cognitive devices were central to how many 19th-century observers and theorists, including scientists, anthropologists, translators, and philologists, sought to organize an increasingly interconnected and competitive world. I draw on Devin Griffiths’s work on 19th-century analogical thinking to suggest that al-Shidyāq’s theory of comparison encompasses a dynamic interplay between formal and harmonic analogies. The talk concludes with reflections on how al-Shidyāq’s theory might inform a reimagining of the world literary sphere of the 19th century.

In my talk, I interactively explore the overlooked role of the medieval Maghrib (North Africa)—and especially the late tenth- and eleventh-century exilic poet-scholars of Qayrawan—in shaping Arabic and Mediterranean elegiac and exilic traditions. Beginning with a tellingly entertaining audio-visual sampling of the increasingly popular elegiac and nostalgic poetry of Arabo-Sicilian poet Ibn Ḥamdīs al-Siqillī (d.1133 CE), alongside references to the widely studied Andalusi (Arabic and Hebrew) city elegies, the talk traces the Maghrib’s crucial—yet often erased— contribution to the (sub)genres or themes of city lament and nostalgia form the homeland. At its center of the talk is the exilic poetry of Ibn ʿAbdūn al-Sūsī (d. 1010 CE), who composed nostalgic poetry about his native Sousse in Ifriqiyya from Palermo—in a fascinating earlier reversal of the exilic and poetic trajectory of Ibn Ḥamdīs. Within this framework, I briefly examine the poetry of exiled Maghribi poets such as Ibn Rashīq (d.1064 CE?), Ibn Sharaf (d.1067 CE), al-Ḥuṣrī al-Ḍarīr (d.1095 CE), and Ibn Faḍḍāl (d.1086 CE), who were forced into exile in Sicily and/or al-Andalus in the wake of the Hilali invasion of Qayrawan and Ifrīqiya in 1057 CE. By repositioning the Maghrib at the heart of medieval Arabic and Mediterranean literary history, this talk not only recovers a forgotten poetic heritage but also redefines how we understand the circulation of texts, ideas, and affective geographies across the premodern Islamicate world and the Mediterranean—a (sea)space that would become one of the central elegiac and nostalgic(Un)heimlich topoi of premodern, and indeed modern, Maghribi and North African poetry and literature.