Fluche und unfromme Wunsche in der arabischen Sprache und Literatur.

• Author: Stewart, Devin J.

Fliiche und unfromme Wunsche in der arabischen Sprache und Literatur. By MANFRED ULLMANN. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ, 2020. Pp. 245. [euro]58 (paper).

This is a fascinating and useful book. A by-product of years of work on the Worterbuch der klassischen arabischen Sprache (WKAS), this volume presents a substantial collection of classical Arabic curses (and "impious wishes") culled from both poetry and prose works of the early Islamic centuries. In the prologue Manfred Ullmann points out that lexicography does not just entail an accounting for vocabulary but also deals with the real entities and concepts that lie behind the words. His research for the dictionary produced over 500.000 individual notecards, and these provided material for various studies on specific items, concepts, and literary motifs, such as the wolf, the werewolf, the mirror, the Pleiades, crucifixion, the postal system. Blacks, water lilies and lotus blossoms, the hyena, the catapult. the waterwheel. and theft (p. 7). This book on curses is an addition to that list, but it is somewhat different from the others in that it treats not an item, concept, or motif, but a particular speech genre, one that has been recognized as a rich facet of the Arabic linguistic patrimony both by medieval Arab philologians and by modern anthropologists such as Edward Westermarck and Bronislaw Malinowski. There is little significant prior scholarship on classical Arabic curses, and certainly not of this size. Most of the discussions of curses in secondary scholarship, including older studies by Westermarck on Moroccan curses and F. Dunkel on Palestinian curses, have focused on the modern dialects and have been conducted by folklorists, anthropologists, and linguists.

Fliiche und unfromme Wiinsche contains an introduction and thirty-three chapters, followed by four indices devoted to personal names, quranic citations, rhyme-words of the poetic verses cited, and vocabulary. The introduction includes a general discussion of Arabic curses, their forms, their syntax, and the contexts in which they were used (pp. 9-19). The first four chapters treat the portrayal of God and the divinity's role in curses (pp. 21-34). Chapters 5-32 (actually in Roman numbering) treat curses topically or thematically. according to the type of punishment invoked (pp. 34-186). The final chapter, 33, treats curses that come in the form of ironic blessings (pp. 186-91). The individual curses are numbered consecutively...