The concerns of this seminar are interdisciplinary and humanistic. In addition to Arabic language and literature, the range of interests includes topics of significance for Islamic studies: religion, philosophy, science, law and history of the Muslim world, and modern social and cultural history. The seminar affords an opportunity to members and guest speakers to discuss research in progress. Because the members come from several disciplines, the substantive discussions draw upon various fields to expand the sources, help reformulate questions, and anticipate future publications.
Ibn Baṭṭa al-ʿUkbarī’s (d. 387/997) anthology al-Ibāna is an amalgam of early Sunni texts, including some that are otherwise entirely unknown and others that are known by name but do not survive independently. Reconstructing these texts and their passage across the centuries to end up in Ibn Baṭṭa’s compilation has much to teach us both about early Sunnism and about the development of the Arabic written tradition.
10/27/2022
Faculty House 7:00 PM
Lā tuṣāliḥ: Do Not Reconcile with History but Try to Reconcile with Adab Arabic Literature Faces the Future: When “Science fiction” Tries to Re-narrate History
In an article significantly entitled “The emergence of science fiction in Arabic literature” (2002), scholar Reuven Snir establishes that Arabic science fiction can be divided in two trends: the first offering mere entertainment value, and the second representing a form of literature that attempts to acquire canonization in the literary system. While focusing on the emergence of a new genre, Snir poses the question of Adab, whose relationship with modernity has been object of extensive academic research. As we cannot recant the importance of literary canon, we can still consider it to have permeable borders, which can embrace literary works linked to new genres – such as SF – or fluctuating among genres. On the basis of this idea, we can re-evaluate literary phenomena often neglected by a certain cultural elite: there are, in fact, some literary works, which deserve attention regardless of the genre they belong to.
Over the years, Arab science fiction has been building a dimension of its own, enabling it to compete with the more consolidated schemes, expressed in French and English, that have taken on a core role in this literary genre: once entered into the canonized literature, it offers unpredictable possibilities of exploring the present and re-narrate history. SF writers “play” with time and, by setting their stories in the future, they create an unusual narrative pattern useful to codify reality.
Starting with these premises, we will try to explore, among the others, a sub-genre of SF, namely all of history. By posing the question “What would have happened if?” all of historical fiction creates a hybrid reality, or hybrid parallel, between the official past and the “other” possible past projected in the future. Even if historical fiction in Arabic is still in its initial stages, it tries to create room for the reader to analyze the potentially verifiable “if”, thus offering a counter-narration of History.
In this talk, which is based on a chapter from his latest book, Revolutions Aesthetic: A Cultural History of Baʿthist Syria (Stanford University Press, 2022), Max Weiss explores the irruption of morbid experience and representation in Syrian War culture. This dimension of contemporary Syrian cultural reproduction addresses questions of aesthetics, politics, and mortality in wartime. Recent Syrian novels and films constitute a veritable artistic morgue, a textual, visual, and cinematic apparatus that has both produced dead bodies and (re)imagined experiences of death and dying, all of which are tragic hallmarks of the Syria Warscape. Using the concept of necroaesthetics, he explores how central the depiction of death, dying, and dead bodies have become in literature and cinema in the time of the Syrian War.
This presentation addresses the weaponization of the “anti-Semitism” accusation to silence, intimidate, harass, or otherwise destroy advocates of Palestinian human rights. It focuses on the 2016 International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of “anti-Semitism” and its use in the US context by organizations ranging from the US State Department to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to Canary Mission for these purposes. Understood in relation to recent national political broadsides against free speech, academic freedom, and critical thinking (as per the State of Florida’s ban on critical race theory), it demonstrates that the intention as well as effect of the IHRA working definition is to deflect attention away from the policies and practices of the State of Israel regarding the Palestinian people and towards the purportedly “anti-Semitic” critics—including US-based students and scholars—of these policies and practices. The result: the continuation of the cycle of violence that has characterized the Israel/Palestine conflict through its now 74-year history and that continues to destroy Israeli and Palestinian lives on a daily basis in “Israel,” the West Bank, and Gaza. The presentation concludes with an appeal to the values of universal human rights and their equal and equitable application to all individuals regardless of their background, ethnicity, or religion within “Israel,” the West Bank, and Gaza. It is only on the basis of the recognition of our shared suffering and shared humanity that the violence might end and a future other than that of complete moral as well as human collapse might be envisioned.
02/27/2023
Faculty House, Columbia University / Zoom 7:00 PM
Vernacular Arabic Literatures in Tunisia: Intersections between the Nahda and Haskalah
In contrast to the vernacular Arabic literatures of Egypt and the Levant, those of Tunisia have been scantly regarded by scholars. Writings in al-dārija (colloquial, vernacular) seem to have interested only linguists, who have focused on the proliferation of novelistic and internet writing over the last two decades. The present talk delves into the deeper history of Tunisian vernacular literatures, the emergence of which can be located in the late nineteenth century at the crossroads of the Arab Nahda, the Jewish Haskalah, French colonialism, and print capitalism. We speak here not of a single vernacular literature, but of two: the first, historically, in Hebrew letters, and the second in Arabic letters. While these two literatures maintained their distinctiveness, we also examine several points of contact, overlap, and mutual influence. In both literatures, the "vernacular turn" represents not, pace previous scholars, the radical liberatory project of "ordinary" Tunisians, nor is it reducible to a foreign conspiracy against pan-Arab nationalism. What the twin vernacular projects articulated instead was a conservative, petit-bourgeois reaction against local elites, on the one hand, and French Enlightenment values, on the other. At the same time, the break with traditional literary models opened up a margin for the articulation of ambivalent, hybrid ideologies that combined parochial values with European-inspired social justice philosophies.
03/30/2023
Faculty House, Columbia University 7:15 PM
ʾIntiqād, Inḥiṭāṭ and the Rise of Early Modern Arabic Literary Criticism
Haifa Saud Alfaisal, King Saud University Abstract
Abstract
In this paper I would like to present a general overview of the argument I wish to make for a monograph proposal on the emergence of early modern Arabic literary criticism. There are three fields where the discourse on literary criticism develops. These are: the burgeoning cultural journal market, where critique or ʾintiqād is presented as a necessary concept; journal articles by lay literati who compared European and Arab literary works and ideas; and in the field of academic literary comparison, where scholars established the foundations of literary criticism in the modern sense. These developments will be surveyed paying close attention to the internalisation of the decline thesis or inḥiṭāṭ. As the paper will demonstrate the indigenisation and assimilation of ʾintiqād involved an epistemic shift from traditional to modern ways of knowing literature. The thinkers discussed developed their ideas about literary criticism through a manipulation of the lafth/ma’na pair from traditional Arabic literary criticism. The motivation for doing so was a desire to cast literature as socially and politically useful, and to move away from what they believed was a stagnant and excessively formalistic literary heritage. The paper will conclude with the inauguration of literary criticism as an academic discipline in 1910 at the Egyptian University. The central role played by ʾintiqād in this epistemic shift will be highlighted throughout, as will be the coloniality embedded in the European models and ideas these thinkers sought to emulate.
War Remains traces the poetics of ruination and resistance in select contemporary Lebanese wartime literature, cultural production, and sites of memory. Drawing upon work from southern Lebanon and Beirut, Khayyat examines how war remains are employed as a resistant trope in the intellectual spaces of war’s aftermath. She focuses on “Southern Counterpublics,” a collective of poets, novelists, activists, artists, and ordinary citizens and their war-inspired creative productions that speak to the ruins’ capacity to be reframed, recycled, and recontested. Khayyat argues that the ruins of war can be thought of as a generative milieu for resistant thought and action. An ambitious and provocative work, War Remains ventures to the so-called margins to archive the texture and substance rendered invisible when studies of memory rely solely on data furnished by official narratives and military accounts of war.
