Gesellschaftlicher Umbruch und Histoire im zeitgenossischen Drama der islamischen Welt.

AuthorLandau, Jacob M.

Edited by JOHANN CHRISTOPH BURGEL and STEPHAN GUTH. Beiruter Texte und Studien, vol. 60. Beirut and Stuttgart: FRANZ STEINER VERLAG, 1995. Pp. 295.

This collection of papers, based on a symposium held in Bern in 1989, deals with social problems as reflected in contemporary Islamic drama. However, a paper on dramatic structures in al-Hamadhani's and al-Hariri's maqamas (by Marianne Chenou) can hardly be considered as a contemporary topic, while another, treating the dramatic element in some novels by Nagib Mahfuz and his use of dialogue (by Hartmut Fahndrich) cannot strictly be perceived as a discourse on drama as such. Of the other papers, five focus on drama in Arabic (M. M. Badawi, As ad E. Khairallah, Ewa Machut-Mendecka, Angelika Neuwirth, Wiebke Walther), another five on Turkish (Petra de Bruijn, J. C. Burgel, Priska Furrer, Erika Glassen, Zehra Ipsiroglu), four on Persian (Peter Chelkowski, Gisele Kapuscinski, M. C. Riggio, Isabel Stumpel-Hatami) and one on Urdu (Jan Marek).

The following lines will attempt to discuss and comment on some of the main characteristics of several papers. Both Khairallah and Neuwirth examine Salah Abd al-Sabur's Layla wa-'l-Majnun. The former focuses on the background and sources of the play, while the latter analyzes sensitively its contents and form as well as its dramatic impact. Machut-Mendecka takes a much broader look, examining the concepts of history and society in Arabic drama since the mid-nineteenth century. To do this, she first distinguishes between rico-classicism, realism, and creationism which, since the 1960s, "denies the logic of everyday experience" (but is this term, "creationism," truly apt?).

Of the papers dealing with Turkish drama, Glassen considers the shadow theater a mirror of late-Ottoman society, in its division into social classes and nationalities, each with its own language or dialect. She attributes the quasi-total disappearance of the shadow theater in the Republic of Turkey to the Republic's single-minded nationalism (but, perhaps, one might add, to a change in popular tastes as well?). Burgel discusses the relevance of power struggles in Turkish dramas, selecting several plays which present conflictual aspects of Ottoman history (he might, however, have also analyzed this in the perspective of the ongoing debate in the historiography and literature of the Republic of Turkey as to how the Ottoman Empire ought...

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