Classical Arabic Humanities in Their Own Terms: Festschrift for Wolfhart Heinrichs on His 65th Birthday Presented by His Students and Colleagues.

• Author: Toorawa, Shawkat M.
• Position: Book review

Classical Arabic Humanities in Their Own Terms: Festschrift for Wolfhart Heinrichs on His 65th Birthday Presented by His Students and Colleagues. Edited by BEATRICE GRUENDLER with the assistance of MICHAEL COOPERSON. Leiden: BRILL, 2008. Pp. xxxvi + 611. $223.

One afternoon in early 2000 I sat opposite Wolfhart Heinrichs (WH) over lunch in a Thai restaurant. I was spending the year in Cambridge, Mass., pursuing Indian Ocean interests. Conversation turned to the Islands of Waq al-waq and he asked me whether I had "tracked down the reference"; the reference was one he had suggested in Miami in 1997 after I presented "Waqwaq Revisited and Resituated" at that year's annual meeting of the American Oriental Society. "I think," he said back then, "that Daunicht made a case for the Moluccas or New Guinea as a location, even Australia, at the meeting of the Union europeenne des arabisants et d'islamisants in 1978." I marveled that he remembered my Miami paper, and his suggestion, three years later, just as I had marveled in 1997 that he had remembered the Daunicht paper from two decades earlier. I recount this anecdote because it illustrates two fundamental aspects of this formidable scholar: his encyclopedic knowledge and his generosity, especially with would-be scholars.

WH's generosity is evoked several times in the acknowledgements (pp. ix--xi) and preface (pp. xiii--xix) of the volume under review (hereafter CAH) by the editor, Beatrice Gruendler, and her sous-chef, Michael Cooperson. it is captured as follows in the closing paragraph of the preface:

It is a commonplace of classical Arabic biography to remark of a great scholar that intaha ilayhi 1-'ilm, "all knowledge available ended up with him." From an American perspective, it certainly seems that much of twentieth-century Arabic philology (among other fields) ended up with Wolfhart Heinrichs, who, most fortunately for us, has always been willing to share, no questions asked. (p. xix) The appreciation of WH's students and colleagues for that generosity is captured also in the tabula gratulatoria of eighty-five names, but it is, of course, best reflected in the twenty-one contributions to CAH, nine of which are by former students. Every student of WH, indeed every acquaintance, will know also that he is seldom without his wife at his side, a superlative scholar of Arabic in her own right. As a testament to this, a bibliography of Alma Giese's scholarship (pp. xxxv--xxxvi) accompanies the bibliography of WH's scholarly output (pp. xxv--xxxiv). The latter enumerates almost forty years of books, articles, and encyclopedia entries, in German and English, on topics ranging from metaphor to authority, from obscurity to farflung Turoyo (a kind of Aramaic spoken in eastern Turkey).

As for WH's encyclopedic knowledge, it is honored in the very organization and contents of CAH. As Gruendler notes, the volume is a "mini-encyclopedia, or rather a kashkul of terms from -aat to zarafa, gleaned in what I hope is a pleasantly haphazard manner from many fields of pre-modern Near Eastern Studies" (p. ix). Those terms, the headings of each chapter, are -at (on this plural ending in Levantine Arabic), 'ayyar (on warrior-scoundrels in folk literature), balagha (on Aristotelian rhetoric), bi- (on this genitive particle), hazaj (on this Persian meter), Iblis (on Satan), iqa' (on musical meter in the classical Arab and medieval European traditions), iqtisad (on the economics of the medieval Mediterranean), khutab (on discourse in jurisprudential theory), khitab (on the early Arabic oration), libas (on garments in the poetry of Abu Nuwas), mulamma' (on this poetic form in Islamic literatures), qasida (on Arabic poetry in performance), qasida ghazaliyya-khamriyya (on two poems by Hazim al-Qartajanni), qitta (on cats), safar (on time-travel literature and al-Muwaylihi), ta'bir al-ru'ya and ahkam al-nujum (on women in Byzantine dreambooks), tadmin (on "implication" in al-Rummani), tahadi (on gifts and debts in Zoroastrian ritual), tamannt (on wishing in Islamic texts), and zarafa (on the giraffe).

Using alphabetized terms is an inspired organizational principle, even if it is in the English transliteration and does not include all 26 (English) or 29 (Arabic) letters. It allows subjects from different fields and subfields to sit "naturally" together, circumventing the problem one often faces with festschrifts of uneven "representation." It also unwittingly reflects the new publishing principle of the E13, the current edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam, a monument of scholarship on whose landmark second edition WH left an indelible and perdurable mark.

CAH opens with "Drink your Milks! -at as Individuation Marker in Levantine Arabic" (pp. 1-19), a compact description of a widespread but unstudied plural, featuring in expressions such as shrab halibatak, where the word "milks" would appear on the face of it to make little sense as a plural. While conceding that many features of the plural, in Classical Arabic as well as in colloquial registers, need further study, Kristen Brustad clearly explains the relationship between the instances she cites (my favorite is nazzil-li ghasilatak habibi "Bring me your laundry[s], dear"), the plurals of paucity (jam' al-qilla), individuation, and the...