Literary Criticism in Medieval Arabic-Islamic Culture Literary Criticism in Medieval Arabic-Islamic Culture The Making of a Tradition WEN-CHIN OUYANG EDINBURGH U NIVERSITY PRESS In memory of my father, Chi-chang Ouyang (1929-95) © Wen-chin Ouyang, 1997 Transferred to digital print 2009 Edinburgh University Press 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in Baskerville by Koinonia, Bury, and Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7486 0897 4 ISBN 978 1 4744 7149 7 (EPDF) The right of Wen-chin Ouyang to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act (1988). Contents Acknowledgements vii Note on Transliterations, Translations and Dates viii Introduction 1 1 Knowledge and Cultural Dialectics 22 The Aristotelian Framework (al-F(cid:0)r(cid:0)b(cid:0), al-'(cid:0) mir(cid:0) and Avicenna) 25 The Religious Framework (Ibn (cid:0) azm and al-Ghazz(cid:0)l(cid:0)) 31 An Eclectic Framework (Ikhw(cid:0)n al-Saf(cid:0)) 35 The Encyclopaedic and adab Frameworks (Ibn al-Nad(cid:0)m, Ibn Far(cid:0)gh(cid:0)n, al-Khw(cid:0)razm(cid:0) and al-Taw(cid:0) ïd(cid:0)) 38 2 Functions of Poetry in Medieval Arabic-Islamic Society 55 Ancient Poetry as Source of Knowledge 61 The New Role of Poets and Poetry 66 3 Beginnings The Early Meanings and Practices of Literary Criticism ( 'ilm al-shi'r, naqd al-shi'r and inā'at al-shi'r) 90 Dialectics of Culture and Politics Authentication of a Poetic Heritage (Ibn Sall(cid:0)m) 94 The Question of Literary Value (al-J(cid:0)(cid:0) i(cid:0)) 102 The Authority of Tradition (Ibn Qutayba) 105 The Role of Literary Tradition (Ibn al-Mu'tazz) 110 Laying the Theoretical Foundation (Ibn (cid:0) ab(cid:0)(cid:0)ab(cid:0), Qud(cid:0)ma and al-(cid:0) (cid:0)tim(cid:0)) 112 4 Fanfare of Controversy: Ab(cid:0) Tamm(cid:0)m and al-Mutanabb(cid:0) 130 The Controversy over Ab(cid:0) Tamm(cid:0)m (al-(cid:0) (cid:0)l(cid:0) and al-(cid:0)mid(cid:0)) 131 The Controversy over al-Mutanabb(cid:0) (al-(cid:0) (cid:0)hib b. 'Abb(cid:0)d, al-(cid:0) (cid:0)tim(cid:0), Ibn Wak(cid:0)' and al-Q(cid:0)(cid:0) (cid:0) al-Jurj(cid:0)n(cid:0)) 146 The Calm after the Storm (Ibn Rash(cid:0)q, al-Marz(cid:0)q(cid:0) and Ibn Sharaf) 154 vi LITERARY CRITICISM IN MEDIEVAL ARABIC-ISLAMIC CULTURE 5 Against All Odds: The Making of a Tradition 166 Definition of the Field and Its Specialist 170 The Literary Critic 171 Exclusion of Non-specialists 171 The Problem of the Poet 172 Definition of the Critic 175 The Problem of Talent and Training 178 Emergence of a Critical Tradition 179 al-Marzub(cid:0)n(cid:0) 185 Ibn Rash(cid:0)q al-Qayraw(cid:0)n(cid:0) 188 Conclusion 200 Appendix I Accounts of Critics in Biographical Dictionaries 213 Appendix II Attributes of Critics in Biographical Dictionaries 220 Appendix III al-'(cid:0) mir(cid:0)'s Classification of the Sciences 232 Appendix IV al-Ghazz(cid:0)l(cid:0)’s Classification of the Sciences 233 Appendix V Ikhw(cid:0)n al-(cid:0) af(cid:0)’s Classification of the Sciences 234 Appendix VI Recognition of Literary Criticism in Non-critical Writings 237 Bibliography 249 Index 252 Acknowledgements This book is an attempt at expressing in a language that is not my own the always exhilarating but often chaotic strands of my intellectual explorations into culture and literature. As in any intellectual journey, those who have touched my life and influenced my thinking are too numerous for me to acknowledge here. Family, friends and colleagues have all wittingly or unwittingly participated in this journey. I cannot thank my family and friends enough for encouraging and supporting me unfailingly and unconditionally throughout my academic career. I would like to thank George Saliba, Jeanette Wakin and Ehsan Yarshater for reading and commenting on my work when it was still a dissertation. I would also like to thank Jane Feore and Ivor Normand at Edinburgh University Press for being patient, supportive and helpful, and Kenny Morrata for going through the manuscript with a fine-tooth comb and smoothing out my writing. I am grateful to Wolfhart Heinrichs for recommending this book for publication and for making invaluable suggestions for the improvement of this work. I owe a special debt to Wadad al-Qadi, who is the elder sister I never had, a role model and mentor. She came into my life when I most needed someone like her, and has since been one of my guiding lights. Above all, I am grateful to Pierre Cachia, who has been a father, mentor, teacher and friend to me ever since I arrived at Columbia University as a first-year graduate student in 1982. I would not have been able to write this book without his guidance and support. He patiently and meticulously read and edited my various manuscripts, and, more importantly, he urged and encouraged me to submit it for publication. Without his ‘whipping’, to borrow his own word, my work would perhaps still be hibernating in the cosy inner belly of my computer. Note on Transliterations, Translations and Dates The system adopted for rendering Arabic names and terms in Latin characters is the same as that now used in many English-language publications, such as the International Journal of Middle East Studies or the second edition of Encyclopaedia of Islam. I have followed this system consistently in the case of titles of works cited, technical terms, personal names and passages quoted. Arabic declension is not observed except on the rare occasions when it is crucial to the understanding of the passage. In the case of place-names, however, I have followed a double system. Little- known localities have been given in strict transliterations, but well- established ones have been designated by their common names, for example, Damascus rather than Dimashq. In addition to passages quoted, titles of works and technical terms have been provided with English translations. These translations, however, appear only once in the body of the text. In the case of titles and technical terms, they appear when these titles and terms are mentioned for the first time. Arabic titles and terms are extremely difficult to render into English, as their implications and nuances are often lost in translation. In most cases, I have given literal translations, and in some cases I have added explan(cid:0) ations. When they are not central to the arguments presented, some technical terms, especially those dealing with narrow technicalities peculiar to the Arabic language, are quoted without translation simply because they are untranslatable. For those who are interested in these terms, they many consult Pierre Cachia’s The Arch Rhetorician or The Schemer's Schema (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1997). Dates are provided in parentheses for literary and political figures mentioned at least once where they appear for the first time in the text. Some of these dates are repeated in each chapter when the time-frame of the figures discussed is significant to the clarity of the arguments presented. Introduction When I was being interviewed for the position I currently occupy at the University of Virginia, one of the members of the search committee asked me what the main area of my research was. When he heard that it was ‘medieval (third/ninth to fifth/eleventh centuries) Arabic literary criticism’, he cocked one eyebrow and retorted: ‘There was no medieval Arabic literary criticism, was there?’ This was not the first time I received such a response. My interviewer’s response is not atypical among scholars of the classical period, whether or not their field is the Middle East. In fact, very few people in the West outside the very small circle of scholars who specialise in classical Arabic literature have heard of, or are willing to acknowledge, something called medieval Arabic literary criticism. Their scepticism is explicable and understandable in light of the emergence of literary criticism in what is commonly perceived as the West (mainly Europe and the United States) in the modern period, which culminated in the twentieth century in its establishment as an independent discipline of intellectual inquiry dealing with knowledge and requiring specialised skills. More problematic, however, is documentation, or the lack thereof, of such a discipline in classical Arabic writings. Literary criticism, which I take to mean ‘not only judgments of individual books and authors, "judicial” criticism, judgment, practical criticism, evidences of literary taste, but mainly what has been thought about the principles and theory of literature, its nature, its creation, its function, its effects, its relations to the other activities of man, its kinds, devices and techniques, its origins and history’,1 is designated in the Arabic language today by the term al-naqd al-adab(cid:0). However, al-naqd al-adab(cid:0) as a term delineating the general area of literary study is a very recent phenomenon in the history of Arabic literature; it is a twentieth-century concoction that has gained wide currency in the last few decades, but was not known as such in classical Arabic writings. Without a name to define it, any assertion of its existence in the classical period is understandably suspect. Yet it would be an error to dismiss the possibility of such a discipline in medieval Arabic writing, nameless though it may have been, especially 2 LITERARY CRITICISM IN MEDIEVAL ARABIC-ISLAMIC CULTURE considering the complicated history of the emergence of literary criticism, its theoretical frameworks and methodology in the West. Widely practised at present in four major forms – book review and literary journalism, academic history of literature, literary appreciation and interpretation as found principally but not solely in academic writings, and literary theory2 – literary criticism has until very recently had to struggle to establish itself as an independent, cohesive and legitimate discipline of intellectual inquiry. In fact, as late as the 1980s, literary criticism was still deemed by some to be in crisis because of ‘theory’s inability to justify itself as a knowledge of texts and their meanings’.3 The causes of such a crisis are many, as Edward Said efficiently sums it up: criticism is considered essentially as defined once and for all by its secondariness, by its temporal misfortune in having come after the texts and occasions it is supposed to be treating. Just as it is all too often true that texts are thought of as monolithic objects of the past to which criticism despondently appends itself in the present, then the very conception of criticism symbolizes being outdated, being dated from the past rather than by the present.4 Criticism, literary or otherwise, therefore, is often viewed as a kind of second creation which must necessarily be supported by literature, the first creation, for its raison d’être, its purpose being to explain literature and expose the intricate workings of art. Appreciation for art, however, has always been precariously subjective, making any regulated, objective and systematic approach to it virtually impossible. ‘The problem is one of how, intellectually, to deal with art and with literary art specifically. Can it be done? And how can it be done?’5 In an age where the methodology of exact sciences reigns supreme in any kind of intellectual inquiry, literary criticism must necessarily argue for its integrity by grounding itself in the methodology of exact sciences, as Warren and Austin propose when faced with the question: One answer has been: it can be done with the methods developed by the natural sciences, which need only be transferred to the study of literature’.6 This line of argument, needless to say, has its own share of problems. While critics argue that literary criticism is a kind of science, they are also aware that it is not. Wellek and Warren, acknowledging that literary study is ‘not precisely a science’, settle for the notion that it ‘is a species of knowledge or learning’7 and that its practitioner, the critic, ‘translates his experience of literature into intellectual terms, assimilates it to a coherent scheme which must be rational if it is to be knowledge’.8 Further, borrow(cid:0) ing methodology from disciplines such as linguistics, psychoanalysis,