Recognition in the Arabic Narrative Tradition: Discovery, Deliverance and Delusion.

• Author: Lawson, Todd
• Position: Book review

Recognition in the Arabic Narrative Tradition: Discovery, Deliverance and Delusion. By PHILIP F. KENNEDY. Edinburgh Studies in Classical Arabic Literature. Edinburgh: EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2016. Pp. xii + 356. $130, [pounds sterling]80.

Northrop Frye borrowed from William Blake his title The Great Code: The Bible and Literature to emphasize the point that one of the features of "Western Civilization" is that the Bible, its images and metaphors, its rhythms, its worldview, its spirit, circulates throughout and forms the very basis of the literary culture and Gedankenwelt of Christendom. While it has always been acknowledged that the Quran functions, perhaps even more intensely, in its milieu and for its audience in precisely the same way, scholars have been slow to apply the kinds of literary methodologies--or their cognates--that Frye used to make his point. This volume goes a good distance in demonstrating the truth of the Frygian insight as applied to the Quran and in a language understood by those most needful of the lesson. (A few previous attempts are mentioned in the bibliography.) It is thus a most welcome contribution to the study, analysis, and explication of Islamicate culture, Arabic literature, the Quran, and Islam.

The volume begins, naturally enough, with the Quran, prefaced by a few salient remarks vis-a-vis the appositeness of using Aristotle's category of [phrase omitted], or recognition, for the study of such an obviously different literary culture--or is it? The first three chapters (pp. 16-186) are deeply contemplated explorations of the incomparable surat Yusuf (12). Chapter one ("Cognitive Reading"--one takes this to mean "reading that focuses on occasions of recognition in the text"), based on the superb translation of Alan Jones, takes the reader through the various stages of this remarkable "tale" with an eye to locating the manner in which anagnorisis occurs and functions along its various stages. There are many instances of recognition beyond the emblematic recognition of Joseph by his dastardly brothers, "positive," "negative," and in between. The reader has no doubt at the end that anagnorisis, in its Quranic garb (!), was every bit as important for the author and audience of the Quran as it was for Aristotle, who in Poetics singled it out--most famously by reference to the tale of the sad but wiser Oedipus Rex--as one of the hallmarks of successful literature. It is allowed that this should come as no surprise inasmuch as the self-avowed vocation, the central preoccupation of the Quran, is, after all, revelation, one for which Islam as such sees itself the servant. The key Quranic terms--tanztt, ta'wil, haqq, bayan, kashf--m addition to all of the passages asking the "reader" to contemplate, to understand, to know, to perceive, help to underscore the importance of the Quran's central concern with the epic journey from ignorance to knowledge and awareness, or as frequently, appositely, and refreshingly put here: enlightenment. (Scholars of Islam have traditionally been hesitant to use the E word when discussing Islam.) The figure of anagnorisis in the Quran, so profusely celebrated and artistically construed in Q 12, provides simultaneously the invaluable solace that things are not always what they seem and (if less consoling) that just because things happen to be very unusual at the moment does not mean they are not real.

The second chapter explores the way in which the revelations of Joseph, both of his...