Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature.

• Author: Noy, Avigail

Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature. By LARA HARB. Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilizations. Cambridge: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2020. Pp. xviii + 298. $99.99 (cloth); $29.99 (paper); $18.49 (ebook).

Lara Harb's Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature is a sweeping argument for a hitherto unnoticed aesthetic underlying the mature tradition of classical Arabic literary criticism. Calling it "wonder" and using the term "summarily," Harb is referring to an aesthetic that values indirectness in poetic speech over directness, discovery of meaning over plain-sightedness, strangemaking over familiarity, and obscuration over obviousness. It is, in short, the aesthetic that underpinned the "modern style" (muhdath) of Arabic poetry starting in the late second/eighth century, which became a mainstay of Arabic-Islamic culture for over a millennium. But Harb's book is more than a story of literary critics catching up to the poetic sensibilities of their time: it is an inquiry into the minute linguistic phenomena that generate this poetic effect, as evinced by the literary critics themselves, starting in the fifth/eleventh century. The book covers a range of literary devices that are well familiar to the Arabic specialist, now presented in a new light, and it brings into conversation traditions that have typically been kept separate, namely, early writings on naqd (poetic criticism), the Aristotelian legacy of the Poetics and Rhetoric in Arabic, and the standard rhetorical tradition associated with al-Sakkaki (d. 626/1229) and al-Qazwini (d. 739/1338). The book is an ambitious rewriting of the history of Arabic poetics and an indispensable addition to the field of classical Arabic literature and criticism.

The strength of Harb's approach is that her starting point is not an Arabic technical term (the common method taken by scholars); this is not a study about ta'ajjub (wonder) or any derivative of the root '-j-b (although the root is not infrequent in Arabic Aristotelian poetics). Rather, the comments that literary critics make on poetic utterances, and the poetic utterances themselves (lines of poetry, verses from the Quran), form the basis for her analysis. Collectively, these comments, along with the theoretical passages surrounding them, reveal something that is present in the sources and definable, even if it does not have a name in classical Arabic. No less transformational than Harb's argument that an aesthetic of wonder and discovery emerged in literary criticism in the fifth/eleventh century is that an entirely different aesthetic, one of truthfulness and naturalness in language, governed the pre-fifth/eleventh century works. How could this have gone unnoticed? Of course, much has been written on the truth/lie and natural/artificial controversies in Arabic criticism (e.g., Mansour Ajami, J. Christoph Biirgel, Renate Jacobi), and Wolfhart Heinrichs even cites Ibn Tabataba's (d. 322/934) recognition that "modern" poets "meet approval only when they have to offer something subtle, novel, eloquent, witty, or elegant, without paying attention to the realities/truths (haka'ik) that might correspond to their words" ("Nakd," EI2, Suppl., and see Julia Bray's discussion of two types of truth in Arabic Poetics, pp. 41-42 n. 73). However, what Harb is uncovering is that even when the early critics lauded the modern...