Rupture & Continuity: Tracing Identity Across Arabic Literature
Introduction
Literature remains one of the most charged and compelling discursive spaces where the politics of identity play out. Identity is conventionally thought of as a process by which the Self is determined in relation to the Other. Often, identities are founded on exclusionary practices and principles that foreground questions of power and its imbalanced distribution. Across space and time, wars have been waged and revolutions led over the right to define and preserve cultural, social, and political identities. As Frederick Cooper explains in Colonialism in Question, identity poses a problem precisely because it is used to designate a sense of community or affiliation on the one hand, and exclusivity or difference on the other.1 One cannot understand the complexities of Arabic literary identities, which conflate linguistic, sociopolitical, ethnic, religious, and cultural valences, without first accounting for their histories.
Origins of the Arabic literary tradition
For centuries in the Arabic literary tradition, poetry was considered the most prominent art form. Its composition, known as the qasīda or ode, wove complex impressions of the tribal Arab society from which it emerged. The earliest known poetry in Arabic dates back to the pre-Islamic period, an ancient time that is only now coming into sharper focus thanks to the work of some epigraphers and historians. Rather than relying exclusively on literary and historical sources written retrospectively in the Islamic period, scholars are now looking at inscriptions on desert rocks made by nomads in order to gauge a more nuanced history of the Arabic language.2 Of the more extraordinary discoveries, for example, is one rock in particular that depicts a text believed to be the oldest known record of literary expression in Arabic.3
The Mu‘allaqāt, or the Suspended Odes, offer more complete depictions of Arab identity. These originally oral tales were consigned to memory, passed down by Bedouin poets over generations, then were collected and recorded in textual form in the second or third Islamic century.4 These long poems vividly describe timeless portrayals that remain relevant to Arabic literature today, like the prince hero, or in the case of Imru’ al-Qays in Qifā nabkī, the roguish antihero. There is, of course, also the mu‘allaqa of Antarah ibn Shaddad, who gives us his account as a black Arab who was born into slavery and rose to the noble rank of warrior poet, having earned his freedom by fiercely defending his tribe. Less noble archetypes also carry over in other pre-Islamic poetry. We find the su‘lūk or vagabond poet, who lived on the fringes of tribal society, most famously al-Shanfara in Lāmiyyat al-‘arab and the war poetry of Ta’abbata Sharran. Though lesser known, tribes women also played an important role through their poetry. Al-Khansa’s moving elegies for her two warrior brothers, for instance, earned her widespread respect in the major cities of the Arabian Peninsula. Her songs of loss fulfilled the communal ritual of mourning just as they committed wars and warriors to tribal memory. One can imagine how performing such songs would require great courage and charisma, for they also functioned as incendiary speeches that encouraged vengeance or boosted tribal morale after suffering a great loss.
Such forms of poetry were preserved in early anthologies that were compiled in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, like the Mufaddaliyyāt and Kitāb al aghānī. In a sense, pre-Islamic poetry gives us stories of characters who lived, fought, loved, and endured the harsh desert landscape. They also lived by tribal codes and appreciated the art of oral storytelling, not just for its aesthetic value but also for its testimonial powers. These poems offer unique insight into the rites and rituals of a time about which there is still much to learn.5
Literary afterlives & identity in the age of empire
The advent of Islam in the seventh century transformed life in the Arabian Peninsula and beyond. The Qur’an’s revelation forever intertwined the fates of Islam and the Arabic language. Scholars have argued that the Qur’an shares many rhetorical qualities with poetic expression.6 Its extraordinary degree of eloquence is part of what constitutes its inimitable and miraculous nature, thus making it unmatched by any human speech. The history of its oral transmission by reciters, and its eventual textualization under the Rashidun Caliphate, make the Qur’an stand alongside Arabic poetry as one-half of the dual foundation of Arabo-Islamic culture. Literary intertextuality with the Qur’an often reflects and challenges prescriptive or typecast identities, offering new life and meaning in contexts that critically examine contemporary sociopolitical concerns. Alongside other theological texts, the Qur’an is thus a living archive with which literature is constantly engaged.
Under the at-times successive, at times coinciding, rule of Muslim empires, people of different cultures and races were governed in cosmopolitan cities like Damascus, Baghdad, Cordova, and Granada. As such, political life was not always stable, but the literary and cultural spheres thrived. This, in many ways, was the product of a large-scale translation movement: “The massive expansion of Islam in its first few centuries encompassed large, hitherto non-Arab populations, which thereby entered this new Arabic-Islamic book culture, but at the same time, introduced their own literary and intellectual heritage into it. Not only older literary traditions, but also philosophy, science, mathematics, geography, historiography, and other disciplines flourished in the Muslim environment.”7 The subjects of empire self-fashioned urban identities that were interpolated by poetic and scholastic texts. One cannot underestimate the role textuality played in the process of forming and negotiating imperial identities. It began with the invention of paper in China and its diffusion westward over the Silk Road.8 Soon afterward, paper-manufacturing techniques developed throughout the Muslim world. By the late eighth century, under the rule of the Abbasid Caliph Harun al-Rashid, the use and local production of paper became widespread, especially with the establishment of complex bureaucratic and administrative systems, which demanded more efficient modes of recordkeeping.9 These developments anchored emerging identities in a revolutionized system of writing, which itself was informed by political power and privilege, as history lay in the hands of scribes and scholars. The indisputability of textual evidence and elimination of possible variation granted an unassailable authority to the written word, which was a key reason for having the Qur’an, for instance, written into a codex. Orality, which for centuries had been the method of conserving and transmitting intergenerational identities, receded in importance.
No text in the body of Arabic literature captures the diversity of the Islamic world more than Alf layla wa-layla, also known as the One Thousand and One Nights. Over centuries, stories and folktales originally from Persia and India came together and were translated into Arabic. In the tenth century, some Arab stories were added to the original core.10 Then, in the thirteenth century, more stories from Syria and Egypt made their way into the growing corpus.11 The stories covered the entire social spectrum at the time, all while reflecting the cosmopolitan cultures of cities like Baghdad and Basra. The Nights are an absolute compendium. They also spawned stories more famously known in popular culture, namely Sinbad, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and Aladdin, which were not part of the original cycle and were inserted by the French translator Antoine Galland in the early eighteenth century.12 This is to say, the history of the Nights’ origins, translation, and introduction to Europe is as diverse and borderless as the very characters that illuminate its pages. In a way, the work’s circulation makes it a text with multiple identities, a work of world literature in its own right, not an unproblematic term but an accurate one nonetheless.
We also see the variety that characterized the medieval Muslim world reflected in the colorful anecdotes of miserly people in al-Bukhalā’, written by the father of Arabic prose and famed polymath, al-Jahiz.13 His proto-anthropological descriptions are tinged with irony and reflect the cultural politics of a sensitive time in the early Abbasid period, known as the Shu‘ūbiyya tensions between Arab and Persian cultures. The Afro-Iraqi writer also put together an Arabic encyclopedia in seven volumes, Kitāb al-ḥayawān, in addition to a treatise on the superiority of the black race in Kitāb fakhr al-sūdān ‘ala al-bīdān, in which we encounter a portrait of the black race’s preeminence in eloquence and oratory.
It would be an immense task to document the cultural reverberations made by the poetry and prose of the so-called Islamic Golden Age. Nonetheless, one cannot do without mentioning the groundbreaking works of Abu Nuwas in the eighth century, Abu Tammam in the ninth, and al-Mutanabbi in the tenth. Their substantial poetic output cannot be reduced to a few words, but insofar as their poetry is concerned with notions of identity, it serves well to remember that these key figures came from mixed backgrounds. The half-Persian, Arab identifying Abu Nuwas, for instance, approached the qasīda’s unbending form with a more versatile, taboo-breaking style that many of his poet contemporaries did not dare. Similarly, Abu Tammam’s travels between Damascus and Egypt, before he was employed by the Abbasid court in Iraq, made him worldly and sharpened his poetic skill to a degree that ensured his philosophical poetry is deliberated long after his death.14 Moreover, much of the poetry produced at the height of the Islamic civilization was patronized. As such, we find no dearth of poetry that venerates kings, glorifies battles and legitimizes rule.
Locating complexity in an overlooked period
Recent scholarship is making more nuanced interventions in the long period that followed the decline of Islamic empires, beginning with an examination of the misleading nomenclature used to identify it. Conventionally, this period is framed by two key historical events: The Siege of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258, which saw the rise of petty kingdoms and provinces like the Mamluks, and the arrival of Napoleon in Egypt in 1798, which purportedly brought “modernity” to an Arab world under Ottoman rule. This upsurge in scholarship challenges the Orientalist understanding of the association of this period with cultural decadence, known as inhitāt.15
Between the tenth and twelfth centuries, we see a rise in Maqāmāt, a genre of rhymed prose, translated as Assemblies, in which rhetorical deception is abundant and the multiplicity of identity becomes a popular idea. Accordingly, the eloquent rogue or the beggar poet becomes a prominent figure in Arabic literature.16 Al-Hamadhani and al-Hariri’s Maqāmāt are the classical Arabic examples. We also find a tremendous effort during this period to document and periodize all sorts of intellectual and cultural knowledge from the Islamic world and beyond in the form of multi-volume anthologies and encyclopedias.17 The Mamluk era saw the heyday of popular Arabic literature thanks to a blossoming middle class made up of craftsmen, shopkeepers, and merchants who were fairly literate and who composed poetry. Literary society at the time was thus constituted by members from intersecting social layers that shared different cultural paradigms, life experiences, and colloquialisms. Many ‘ulamā’ read and wrote vernacular poetry like zajal alongside the classical qasīd.18 There was never a dichotomy between the worlds of elite and popular composition; both coexisted and thrived. This was a world of chancellors and secretaries whose administrative posts focused heavily on the act of writing. Patronage for poetry was no longer in vogue, especially due to the existence of a flourishing book market that provided a steadier income for the adīb.19
The Mamluk period was also a time when Sufism and Islam were not anti-thetical theological pursuits when men and women would study to become erudite scholars and teachers. Nonetheless, it was rarely the case that a woman scholar would compose her own works. ‘A’isha al-Ba‘uniyya was exceptional in this regard. She was prolific in her composition of religious and mystical poetry and prose, of which al-Fath al-mubīn fī madh al-amīn is a distinguished example.20 What is interesting about this piece is the strong Sufi rhetoric and impulse that propels her description, known as wasf. Scholars have also characterized its devotional aspect as a form of ghazal or love poetry, whose subject is the Prophet. Some of her work was meant to be recited publicly at mawlids, its performative quality underscored by rhymed prose.21
Identity in modern Arabic literature
The formation of modern Arab identity is often regarded in terms of the colonial encounter between the Ottoman Arab and Western European cultures in the late nineteenth century, a time when the authority and influence of the Ottoman Empire had begun to wane. This period is marked by an intellectual and cultural movement that reexamined the Arabic heritage. Known as al-Nahda, or Arab Renaissance, it began in Egypt and spread to Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Tunisia, and Iraq. Its project, conceptualized by Christian and Muslim intellectuals, was to modernize the Arabic language and rethink religion through the prism of hadātha, that is, modernity.22
Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq’s al-Sāq ‘ala al-sāq fī mā huwa al-Fāryāq, one of the foundational texts of Arab modernity published in 1855, dramatizes these complexities in content as well as form.23 More than a simple reflection of the social, cultural, and intellectual concerns of the time, the tension spills over into its very form. Difficult to classify and experimental in every sense, it is a dynamic text that negotiates between literary forms considered “native” to the Arabic literary tradition, such as epistolary (risāla) and rhyming prose (saja‘), and “foreign” forms such as the novel, which was also just beginning to emerge in the West. It has often been called the first Arabic novel, but that claim has at times been disputed.
The metrics and modes of the Arabic language constantly change with the movement of its speakers and keepers. In turn, the debates on what it means to be a modern Arab both within and beyond the Arabic-speaking region also shift accordingly. Most readers of world literature would know Gibran Khalil Gibran’s masterpiece, The Prophet (1923), but fewer would be familiar with his earlier revolutionary work, al-Mawākib, published in Arabic in New York in 1919, and later translated as The Processions. A beautifully rhymed and metered dialogue between an old man and a youth, it remains a key text of mahjari, or immigrant, poetry that revolutionized the ode’s compositional form and contemplated universal concerns including spirituality, corruption, and the purity of nature.
In Formations of the Secular, Talal Asad explains that people’s understanding of identity shifted yet again after World War II.24 While conceptualizations of identity, or subjectivity, are inextricably linked to the colonial encounter and the emergence of the nation-state, they are not static entities. In moving beyond epistemic binaries such as “Eastern” and “Western,” “reformer” and “reactionary,” or “liberal” and “conservative,” we may begin to see more historically situated nuance in literary discourse that resists neat categories. Of relevance here are Sa‘id ‘Aql and Louis ‘Awad, whose experiments in the first half of the twentieth century highlight the influence of other traditions on Arabic literature, ancient Phoenician and modern English, respectively. Theirs were attempts to locate alternative ways of reading and relating to history, nationalism, and subjecthood, which were not held favorably by the gatekeepers of tradition.
There is an argument upheld by a camp of Arabic literary scholars that says self-reflexive and introspective identities are amplified in the Arabic novel, especially in the aftermath of the Arab defeat in the 1967 war.25 This manifests in the intellectual figure who begins to question inherited narratives of nationalism and resorts to irony, self-doubt, and paranoia. We see a surge in autobiographical narratives in which the question of identity takes on renewed vigor. Characters struggle with ambivalent identities, showcasing their transformativeness, and embracing a process of becoming rather than already being. This is evident in the 1966 postcolonial novel, Mawsim al-hijra ila-l-shamāl by Tayeb Salih, translated as Season of Migration to the North, in which the traveled and worldly narrator from Sudan encounters his counterpart in the protagonist Mustafa Sa‘eed. The latter embodies everything the narrator is not and yet is gripped by. Both are products of Orientalism and have to face the cross-colonial experiences that made them.
Although 1967 tends to be seen by cultural historians as a turning point in the region’s history, it would be misguided to read it as an isolated instance, and more useful to view it as one event within a constellation. The war on Palestine in 1948, and the ensuing cycles of violence and displacement, were some of the more devastating events that shook the tenets of Arab nationalism to the core and called into question concepts of independence and pan-Arab identities.
Sahar Khalifeh’s novel as-Subbār, published in 1976, is an example of representational complexities that exist beyond the occupier-occupied binary, which itself is crosscut by complicating factors like class and economic concerns, suggesting the boundaries of representation and identification are not as rigid as they appear. Ghassan Kana fani’s novella ‘Ā’id ila Haifa, published in 1969, dramatizes ambivalence in the experience of a Palestinian family that is displaced after the 1948 war and loses their son in the mass exodus, only to discover twenty years later that he had been taken in by a Jewish family and now serves in the Israeli army. Kanafani complicates easy political assumptions by dramatizing situations that are not straightforward.
Some have called the twentieth century a period of war, migration, exile, and displacement.26 It has also reified the “refugee” as a political category. Indeed, the fifteen years that gripped Lebanon in different yet overlapping vises of war, were in many ways a testament to the violent outcomes suffered by transgressive identities. But these years are also evidence of the vulnerability, precarity, and volatility of identity in the first place. Here we see a rise in women writers who draw attention to themselves as participants in the literary sphere. They decentered the masculinist narrative of war by writing novels in which daily life is an act of resistance, and highlighting socially marginalized characters who traverse the boundaries of gender, class, politics, and religion.27 We see this unfold, for example, in Hikāyat Zahra by Hanan al-Shaykh, published in 1980, whose titular character is described in complex ways that move her beyond symbolizing the national, and patriarchal, imagination.
More recently, identities or voices forged in and through diaspora are becoming the subject of literary texts in a front-and-center way. In her collection of poems, Chaos, Crossing, published last year, Palestinian poet Olivia Elias, who writes in the French language, investigates some of the biggest and most pressing questions that have produced subjects like herself who draw strength from upheaval and the power of self-determination from hybridized language.
Conclusion
Questions of identity are as urgent and compelling today as they have been throughout Arabic literary history. While this essay offers a broad overview of major debates and portraits of identity across the body of Arabic literature, it does not labor under any illusions of its own comprehensiveness. One can only hope it generates deeper investigations into fields that are owed further consideration, such as the literatures of North Africa, medieval Muslim Spain, and the contemporary Gulf. A receptacle of worlds past and a catalyst of social change, literature is a site of tension as it is a refuge of dreams and potential futures. Although the identities it produces are usually thought of as abstractions, in reality they are products of historically and politically-bound processes of becoming. And the factors that influence these processes are never singular. That is why one must search for the historical continuities that cushion every rupture.
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The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author, and do not represent Fiker Institute.
