Essays in Arabic Literary Biography 1350-1850.

• Author: Beard, Michael
• Position: Book review

Essays in Arabic Literary Biography 1350-1850. Edited by JOSEPH E. LOWRY and DEVIN J. STEWART. Mizan. Studien zur Literatur in der islamischen Welt, vol. 17,2. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ, 2009. Pp. vii + 431. [euro]68.

There is an awkward stage in the life of Arab culture when a brilliant early career gives way to a decline in energy and imagination. It becomes sullen and uncommunicative, exhausted, interested only in fashion, and assumes a style characterized by cliches, restatement, and excessive ornament. That is the traditional narrative. The introduction to this anthology lists some of the terms that the critical tradition has used to characterize that period: "steady decline," "absence of creativity," conventionality, loss of vigor, a period whose poetry is characterized by "empty panegyrics," "celebrations of trivial occasions," a period whose literature is lifeless, passionless, conventional, and hackneyed. The editors add that H. A. R. Gibb's Arabic Literature: An Introduction (1963) makes the point in the table of contents, organizing his chronology in a comical sequence: The Golden Age (A.D. 750-1055), The Silver Age (A.D. 1055-1258), and The Age of the Mamluks (A.D. 1258-1800), "Mamluk" being evidently a synonym for "Brass Age."

This work, the second volume in the series "Essays in Arabic Literary Biography," deals with exactly that period. It cannot help but address the issue. The decadence paradigm is, as the editors acknowledge, an unexamined opinion, imposed on us without proof. We may accept it out of inertia, or we may sense that its purpose is to flatter the European observer, a self-serving ideology: "The trajectory of decline exhibits a clear inverse correlation with a traditional periodization of pre-modern and modern European history that suggests ascendancy: dark ages, middle ages, renaissance enlightenment, industrial revolution, modernity, and so on. The narrative of decline is thus more the triumphalist self-narrative of the conquerors and colonizers. ..." With balance unusual on such occasions, the editors add, "On the other hand, the decline paradigm was also employed by indigenous writers to describe the trajectory of their own cultural history" (p. 8).

The decline thesis is questioned widely. (It was the subject of a conference at Washington University in St. Louis in October 2010.) The issue is unavoidably on the reader's mind, but what attracts notice is something else: the volume's consistent intelligence and...