Classical Arabic Begging Poetry and Sakwa.

• Author: Larsen, David

Classical Arabic Begging Poetry and Sakwa, 8th-12th Centuries. By NEFELI PAPOUTSAKIS. Arabische Studien, vol. 14. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ, 2017. Pp. viii + 254. [euro]58.

Early Arabic poetry was no static field of traditional practice. In its first few centuries it underwent enormous changes, from the emergence of ghazal poetry to badf and other innovations of poetic craft. Alongside these transformations, Arabic poetry was subject to a different kind of "modernization" as it was adapted for production and performance in metropolitan Iraq, where new motifs were drawn from urban life, and poets took on new subject positions. In Nefeli Papoutsakis's landmark study, the focus is on modes of self-representation in relation to wealth, and how new modes were naturalized and became generic, indeed "classical" features of Arabic poetry. The genealogy it offers will be eye-opening to specialists, comparatists, and generalists alike, and of great interest to economic historians, whose work will be needed to build on the findings of Classical Arabic Begging Poetry.

The book's major contribution to literary history is in the first chapter. Its material will be familiar only to readers of Brahim Najar's seven-volume anthology of "forgotten Abbasid poets," Shu'ara' 'abbasiyyun mansiyyun (Beirut: Dar al-Gharb al-Islami, 1997), in particular the sections on beggary and scurrility (vol. two, pt. three; acknowledged by Papoutsakis, p. 15). The poets in this volume are avatars of what Najar calls "antagonistic wit" (zarf mudadd), a novel ethos of early Abbasid poetry that played gleefully against the heroic codes of early verse culture (al-Najjar, 1: 27-28). Now, antagonism was nothing new in Arabic poetry, and neither was complaint. What was new in second/eighth-century Kufa and Basra was the poet's mocking self-representation as a person without resources. This was antithetical to Bedouin poetic tradition, in which generosity, the crowning virtue, was predicated on capital. The poverty of the Jahili poet is represented as a consequence of excessive generosity, or else seldom represented. (The exceptions are su'luk poets, in whose verse no beggary is implied; and Papoutsakis discusses the mukhadram-era case of al-Hutay'a on p. 19.) By contrast, the "beggar poets" of Iraq did not boast of generosity, wealth, fighting strength, or ascetic virtue. Theirs was a poetry of self-deprecation--the inverse, in other words, of traditional fakhr.

Questions of aims and efficacy arise at once. To what positive end...