The Qur'an and the Aesthetics of Premodern Arabic Prose

Sarah R. bin Tyeer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137598752
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

This book approaches the Qur'an as a primary source for delineating the definition of ugliness, and by extension beauty, and in turn establishing meaningful tools and terms for literary criticism within the discipline of classical Arabic literature ( adab ). Focusing on the aesthetic dimension of the Qur'an, this methodology opens up new horizons for reading adab by reading the tradition from within the tradition and thereby examining issues of "decontextualisation" and the "untranslatable." This approach, in turn, invites Comparatists, as well as Arabists, to consider other means and perspectives for approaching adab besides the Bakhtinian carnival. Applying this critical strategy to literary works as diverse as One Thousand and One Nights and The Epistle of Forgiveness, Sarah R. bin Tyeer aims to prove two major points: how Bakhtin's aesthetics is anachronistic and therefore theoretically inappropriate when applied to certain literary works and how ultimately this literary methodology is sometimes used as a proxy for ungrounded and, sometimes, unfair arguments by other scholars. Foreword by Angelika Neuwirth, Professor of Quranic studies, Freie University, Berlin, Germany.

© The Author(s) 2016

Sarah R. bin TyeerThe Qur’an and the Aesthetics of Premodern Arabic ProseLiteratures and Cultures of the Islamic World10.1057/978-1-137-59875-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Sarah R. bin Tyeer¹

(1)

School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, London, UK

End Abstract

What role does the Qur’an’s aesthetics play in adab? And accordingly, how does one read pre-modern Arabic adab? What methodologies do we use? Could one read The Thousand and One Nights as a reflection of real societal customs and practices and use it credulously as a ‘literary ethnography’ of the Arab-Islamic world? Or should one use Western literary paradigms and theories, such as Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnivalesque, for instance, to read sukhf, mujūn, and roguery in light of the carnivalesque? How does one read the technique of the maqāma genre sparked by al-Hamadhānı̄ in the eleventh century and later emulated by al-Ḥarı̄rı̄ in the twelfth century and many others? In what respect are they in dialogue with their milieu and adab as both an institution and a literary system? Is the evocation of the sacred in pre-modern adab always ‘blasphemous’ and an attempt to ‘mock’ the establishment to vent and release or ‘assault Islam’ as some have maintained with respect to the maqāmāt and al-Maʿarrı̄’s Risālat al-Ghufrān [The Epistle of Forgiveness]?¹ Or is the juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane, even the vulgar, in a work such as Ḥikāyat Abı̄’l Qāsim al-Baghdādı̄ points to a more nuanced creative process?² What are the ramifications of this one-way traffic in reading adab? The aforementioned questions are the focus of this book. This introduction will address the building blocks of this book referred to in the title as the Qur’an, adab, aesthetics, as well as the meaning of ugliness between the lexicons and the Qur’an.

The problem of reading pre-modern Arab-Islamic adab in light of the binaries of the sacred and the profane, godly and godless and how the two rarely meet, or are in conflict, results in an either/or situation where the literary work is often interpreted as either a positive or a negative response to religion proper. But this conflict has its origins in European history and not in Arab-Islamic history. Since the Enlightenment in Europe, when the arts stopped regarding the sacred as part of the sublime and the beautiful, the definition of the Arts ceased to point to anything outside itself. This explains l’art pour l’art, formalism, and the ‘aesthetic form’ as part of the developments that took place at the beginning of the twentieth century.³ This has eventually led to the Arts’ independence from the sacred in what Van der Leeuw calls ‘the secularization of art.’⁴ This interpretive framework operates within a dichotomy of conflict between the creative expression seen as profane or secular and the sacred, not harmony. The same could not be held true to Arab-Islamic literary and artistic endeavours where pre-modern, and to some degree modern and contemporary literary expressions, show a continuum of influence with the sacred, in this case the Qur’an, and its influence on the creative process. This should not be understood as ‘religious art’ or ‘sacred art’ or that Arab-Islamic literary expression could only be read as a function of or in religion. Rather, it is an attempt to situate the Qur’an in the history of adab and investigate its influence on the system of adab, its artistic language, vocabulary, and the intricacies of its mechanics. An influence so powerful, that to ignore it and relegate its stature in literary and scholarly discussions to how the author is a ‘good Muslim/bad Muslim’, ‘Shi’ite or Sunni’, ‘Ismaili or Druze’ or fish for clues to determine the ‘faith-o-meter’ and ‘real’ sect of the author because his word and history are not good enough is tantamount to a deliberate and prejudiced obfuscating of its role in the thriving of adab and the institution of adab at large. This aforementioned approach is also a dehumanising act that reduces all human activity in the Arab-Islamic heritage into religious labels with no history, literary legacy, or human agency. It is a reading that erases all history in favour of a label. Ultimately, this approach clears itself of the obligation to understand or properly read this literature or its people. Carl W. Ernst argues against these dominant attitudes and views with respect to regarding Muslims and their activities as driven solely by religion:

To assume that Muslims, and Muslims alone, are driven to act exclusively by religion, apart from any other factors that shape our lives, is more than absurd. It dehumanizes Muslims […] It means that Muslims have no history, and therefore others have no obligation to understand them.⁵

With respect to adab, this dehumanising attitude situates the Qur’an in a stark dichotomy to creative expressions in Arab-Islamic culture whereby alternative views and approaches are eclipsed. This fabricated conflict therefore reads all cultural products as an expression against religion and/or an expression measured against an imagined and essentialised religious model. This could be seen as either a misunderstanding born out of the projection of an Anglo-European dichotomy between the arts and the sacred traced to the Enlightenment—which reads other people and their creative expressions through its own image—or a misunderstanding that treats Arab-Islamic literature and its people as objects with no history or human agency. In both cases, the denying and obliteration of ‘history’ from literary history is practiced.

As the title of this book proposes: the Qur’an and pre-modern Arabic prose, as part of adab, is an argument for the consideration of the role of the former in the interpretation of the latter away from clichés and Pavlovian reactions to the presence of the sacred in adab. A look at the components of the title to map out the book’s terminology is due before proceeding further.

The Qur’an: Paradigm Shift

In 1962, Thomas Kuhn coined the popular term ‘paradigm shift’ in reference to scientific progress. The concept became appropriated in all aspects of life and disciplines as a way of explaining the transformation from one way or model of thinking to another through an agent of change. Besides the Qur’an’s introduction of new moral and metaphysical concepts in seventh century Arabia, it also introduced a new way of thinking and expressing life as it ‘…imaginatively and linguistically… broke away from [Arab] traditions.’⁶ It possesses an evident demarcating shift between pre-Islamic and Islamic conceptual thought in the Arab-Islamic civilisation; this is eventually translated in language, as the conventional carrier of concepts,⁷ and as a result cultural creative expressions (belles-lettres, art, and so on) in the creative process itself and ultimately the artistic language. While there ‘[…] is clearly recognizable a certain continuity between the Qur’anic outlook and the old Arab world view, […] there is a wide cleavage between them.’⁸ The Qur’an itself, since the earliest process of its revelation at the beginning, created a literary paradigm shift, a rupture. It is neither the prose Arabs were used to, nor is it poetry either. It broke traditional and conventional genres known to people.⁹ The Qur’an calls itself The Book, and it became The Book, or what Ebrahim Moosa calls the ‘master-Text’, ‘…the yardstick of literary and rhetorical excellence[.]’¹⁰ As Nasr Hamid Abu-Zayd summarises Amin al-Khūlı̄’s views (1895–1966) on the inimitability of the Qur’an (i ʿjāz), pointing out that that was chiefly responsible for its positive reception amongst Arabs, al-Khūlı̄ thinks, ‘… the acceptance of Islam by the Arabs, was based on recognizing its absolute supremacy compared to human texts.’¹¹ In a similar vein, Navid Kermani also examined this ‘absolute supremacy’ in his study on the aesthetics of the aural reception of the Qur’an and its role in what Kermani refers to in the parameters of Kunstreligion (a religion of art or Art as Religion).¹² The Qur’an’s reception was marked by what Syrian poet ʿAlı̄ Aḥmad Saʿı̄d (Adūnis) calls ‘the linguistic awe’ (dahsha lughawiyya).¹³ Kamal Abu-Deeb explains this further and argues that ‘[…] some of the Qur’ānic metaphors are truly astonishing: they border on the surreal.’¹⁴ An example would be Q. 2:93 ‘wa ushribū fı̄ qulūbihumu l-ʿijla’ (they were made to drink [the love of] the calf deep into their hearts). The metaphor depicts the intensification of love for the calf, in reference to the story of the golden calf and Moses, that it has been drunk deep into the peoples’ hearts, as anything pleasurable and enjoyable sinks into one’s heart, fuses with it, and overwhelms it.¹⁵ ‘It is in the face of such wonderful metaphors’, Abu-Deeb maintains, ‘whereby a boundless imagination breaks away from all conventions and restrictions, cultural or linguistic, and roams freely in the world, connecting what cannot be connected and inventing linguistic and imaginative structures never before contemplated[.]’¹⁶ The Qur’an is its own genre, or a unique genre as pre-modern scholar al-Bāqillānı̄ (d. 404/1013) maintains.¹⁷ In like manner, Arab modern writers agree with their predecessors. Taha Hussein (1889–1973) stresses the aesthetic aspect of the Qur’an and its literary supremacy, known as i ʿjāz (inimitability); he maintains that it is neither poetry nor prose: it is Qur’an.¹⁸ Hussein stresses that the Qur’an...