on 30-Jun-2017 (Fri)

Mujālasāt emerged in ninth-century Iraq and flourished in the tenth century, spreading from Iraq to the west, to Andalusian Spain and to North Africa. These literary salons endured as a cultural practice well into the modern era.

This forum for literature offered edification, entertainment, and escape for middle- and upper-ranking men and women; it also served as a means of building one’s public reputation, establishing one’s status, expanding one’s social network, and socializing the young.

Arabists should analyze the ways in which generations of amateur audiences reinterpreted old literature in order to breathe new life into traditional texts, which can turn cold and alien. Without an analysis of audience reception, we are left with a canon detached from the particular needs and choosy sensibilities of those who exercised the privilege of selecting texts for future transmission—or not.

By analogy, I draw parallels throughout this work with the institutions of the marzēaḥ (of western Asia in the Bronze Age) and the Greek symposion#(beginning in the Geometric period, 900–700 B.C.). I review the corpus of modern scholarship that gauges these social institutions’ character and impact.

and exploring some basic questions: How large were mujālasāt? What type of people attended—were there elders, women, children, or servants present? Who spoke what, and to what degree did attendees take turns or dominate? How long did sessions last, and were they held at night or during the day? Were they held indoors or outside, and which buildings were used? For a social institution that has occupied more of a place in the daily lives of medieval men and women than television or classroom education in our own time, this gap in knowledge is grave.

I attempt to address these basic questions and take that description to the level of cultural analysis. If mujālasāt were prevalent and enduring, why did individuals participate? If people performed poetry and competed for prestige in mujālasāt, what impact did their text selection and performance in assembly have on the formation of canon, identity, community, and ideology? How did the performance of poetry and narrative shape their vision of an Arabo- Islamic past?

The anti-imperial reading generates irreducible problems. However, for Al-Buhturi meticulously developed a career that would protect his chief per- sonal interests in life-his professional reputation as a poet in Iraq and his property in Syri

As for the second interest, the anti-imperial reading would stand as anath- ema to al-Buhturi's public persona as court poet, specializing in panegyric that aims to build the public image of men of state: He

hese stories-regardless of their facticity-indicate a public reputation for panegyric, i

The Abbasid caliphs were Arabs descended from Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib, one of the youngest uncles of Muhammad and of the same Banu Hashim clan. The Abbasids claimed to be the true successors of Prophet Muhammad in replacing the Umayyad descendants of Banu Umayya by virtue of their closer bloodline to Muhammad.

Also the argument about the importance of performance context shouldn’t elide the context in which this and all other studies of the naqāʾiḍ have been produced. Are there any contemporary accounts? How much later were these texts set down in writing? How did they circulate during the poets’ lifetimes?

Apart from its ob- vious freedom from the relative external structural rigour of the qafida, the occasional poem is generally marked by the simplicity of its language.