This book exposes the mimetic assumption involved in early Islamic historiography, its literary practice and whatever subverts it as reflected in Ṭabarī's History. Four major events in the history of early Islam are then subject to analysis based on literary criticism and are shown to produce a new meaning.

This book exposes the mimetic assumption involved in early Islamic historiography, its literary practice and whatever subverts it as reflected in ?abar?'s "History," Four major events in the history of early Islam are then subject to analysis based on literary criticism and are shown to produce a new meaning.

This book exposes the mimetic assumption involved in early Islamic historiography, its literary practice and whatever subverts it as reflected in ?abari's History. Four major events in the history of early Islam are then subject to analysis based on literary criticism and are shown to produce a new meaning.

"... transcends the realm of literature and poetic criticism to include virtually every field of Arabic and Islamic studies." -- Roger Allen Throughout the classical Arabic literary tradition, from its roots in pre-Islamic Arabia until the end of the Golden Age in the 10th century, the courtly ode, or qasida, dominated other poetic forms. In The Poetics of Islamic Legitimacy, Suzanne Stetkevych explores how this poetry relates to ceremony and political authority and how the classical Arabic ode encoded and promoted a myth and ideology of legitimate Arabo-Islamic rule. Beginning with praise poems to pre-Islamic Arab kings, Stetkevych takes up poetry in praise of the Prophet Mohammed and odes addressed to Arabo-Islamic rulers. She explores the rich tradition of Arabic praise poems in light of ancient Near Eastern rites and ceremonies, gender, and political culture. Stetkevych's superb English translations capture the immediacy and vitality of classical Arabic poetry while opening up a multifaceted literary tradition for readers everywhere.

This volume brings together a set of key studies on classical Arabic poetry (ca. 500-1000 C.E.), published over the last thirty-five years; the individual articles each deal with a different approach, period, genre, or theme. The major focus is on new interpretations of the form and function of the pre-eminent classical poetic genre, the polythematic qasida, or Arabic ode, particularly explorations of its ritual, ceremonial and performance dimensions. Other articles present the typology and genre characteristics of the short monothematic forms, especially the lyrical ghazal and the wine-poem. After thus setting out the full poetic genres and their structures, the volume turns in the remaining studies to the philological, rhetorical, stylistic and motival elements of classical Arabic poetry, in their etymological, symbolic, historical and comparatist dimensions. Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych's Introduction places the articles within the context of the major critical and methodological trajectories of the field and in doing so demonstrates the increasing integration of Arabic literary studies into contemporary humanistic scholarship. The Selected Bibliography complements the Introduction and the Articles to offer the reader a full overview of the past generation of Western literary and critical scholarship on classical Arabic poetry.

In Early Islamic Poetry and Poetics, Suzanne Stetkevych presents a selection of the formative studies of classical Arabic poetry of the past thirty-five years, a period that has witnessed the increasing integration of classical Arabic poetry into the contemporary humanistic disciplines. For the qasida, the Arabic heroic and then courtly ode, the selected studies engage orality theory, Structuralism, ritual theory, myth, gender, ekphrastic and interarts theory, speech act and performance theory, to produce an aesthetics and sociology of poetic form. Works on the ghazal, the wine-poem, and other lyric forms reveal their sociological, psychological, structural, and thematic distinction from, and relation to, the dominant qasida-form. Stetkevych's Introduction contextualizes the selected articles in a concise critical and bibliographical essay on the major achievements and trajectories of the field.

Abu Hamid al-Ghaz&257;l&299;, a Muslim jurist-theologian and polymath who lived from the mid-eleventh to the early twelfth century in present-day Iran, is a figure equivalent in stature to Maimonides in Judaism and Thomas Aquinas in Christianity. He is best known for his work in philosophy, ethics, law, and mysticism. In an engaged re-reading of the ideas of this preeminent Muslim thinker, Ebrahim Moosa argues that Ghaz&257;l&299;'s work has lasting relevance today as a model for a critical encounter with the Muslim intellectual tradition in a modern and postmodern context. Moosa employs the theme of the threshold, or dihliz, the space from which Ghaz&257;l&299; himself engaged the different currents of thought in his day, and proposes that contemporary Muslims who wish to place their own traditions in conversation with modern traditions consider the same vantage point. Moosa argues that by incorporating elements of Islamic theology, neoplatonic mysticism, and Aristotelian philosophy, Ghaz&257;l&299;'s work epitomizes the idea that the answers to life's complex realities do not reside in a single culture or intellectual tradition. Ghaz&257;l&299;'s emphasis on poiesis--creativity, imagination, and freedom of thought--provides a sorely needed model for a cosmopolitan intellectual renewal among Muslims, Moosa argues. Such a creative and critical inheritance, he concludes, ought to be heeded by those who seek to cultivate Muslim intellectual traditions in today's tumultuous world.