Reorientations: Arabic and Persian Poetry.

• Author: Toorawa, Shawkat M.

Members of the A.O.S. or M.E.S.A. who attend the annual meetings will be familiar with the panels of the self-styled "Chicago school," panels consisting of Suzanne and Jaroslav Stetkevych (hereafter SPS and JS) and usually their current and former students from the University of Chicago. It is not only their presence that has earned the name "Stetkevych panel," but also the sense that they dominate the enterprise. This domination is evident in Reorientations. Of the 262 pages of articles, 129 are by SPS and JS; of its 510 footnotes, 261 are by them. They account, therefore, for half the volume.

Quantity is admittedly not an arbiter of quality, but as the contributions are of a more or less even standard, the statistics are significant. But SPS's belief that the articles (called studies) represent a wide spectrum is curious. Of the eight articles, six treat Arabic poetry, two Persian poetry; of the former, five concentrate on the nasib section of the classical qasida. Indeed, Homerin's article on mystical verse, Lewis's on the radif, and Losensky's on a Baba Fighani lyric, seem to be here less for the "broad spectrum of literary critical issues addressed" (p. vii) than for the need to include other members of the "Chicago school." Substituting those with other articles on the nasib might have turned this book into a coherent volume.

Although the "school" does not have "a distinct theoretical or methodological approach" - surely nuancing the applicability of the term - SPS explains in the preface that its members do share certain literary critical assumptions, primarily that the classical literary traditions of the Islamic Middle East are

fully literatures in the same sense of the term as we apply it to Western literary traditions. In whatever ways they differ from Western literatures, they are nevertheless not to be relegated to mere fodder for philological, sociological, or anthropological pursuits. And however impenetrable they may seem from a Western stance, Arabic and Persian poems are works of art and are regarded as such by the cultures that produced them. (p. vii)

I am unclear who the implied "relegators" are - perhaps those who "perpetually follo[w] the latest critical trends of New York or Paris . . . fashionable but never original" (p. vii). Moreover, it seems to me that the last sentence of the "manifesto" quoted above replicates the position it indicts. Prefatory editorial remarks notwithstanding, the contributors are obviously comfortable with contemporary theory.

The articles also include "original translations . . . that strive to capture the power and poeticity" - do not all translations so strive? - of the originals. This inclusion is useful as it provides the reader with the texts in question. The Arabic is provided for the texts discussed by SPS but, inexplicably, not for those of other contributors, though transliterations are provided throughout.

The volume opens with "Pre-Islamic Panegyric and the Poetics of Redemption: Mufaddaliyyah 119 of Alqamah and Banat Suad of Kab ibn Zuhayr" (pp. 1-57). Drawing on Mauss' theory of girl exchange, SPS argues that the poems function as commodities in a ritual exchange, i.e., as ransom payments (p. 2); and, using Gaster's seasonal pattern paradigm, she further identifies the poems as pledges of fealty. She also suggests that it was the Mantle Ode (Banat Suad) that generated the story of the Prophet Muhammad's donation of the mantle to Kab and not vice-versa, thus revealing the poem's mythogenic and mythopoetic aspects. Indeed, her choice of poems rests on the fact that both "have been handed down in a context of anecdotal materials that testify to their redemptive transaction" (p. 2). The commentator al-Anbari explains in his gloss of the last line of M 119 that it was composed to have the poet's captive nephew released. SPS sees al-Harith's decision to do so (and to release others besides) as a way to avoid exhibiting a "failure to make return gifts, mean[ing] a loss of dignity" (p. 5).

These positions are used to challenge assertions that...