Image supplied by permission of St John the Baptist College in the University of Oxford

My interest in comparative literature and world literature as discipline and practices was honed at Washington University in St Louis in the course of my doctoral studies. Working on the intersection of the local and the global in the work of the Tunisian writer Mahmud al-Masa’di alerted me to the limitations as well potential of comparative methods on the one hand, and Area Studies on the other. There is something attractive about working in an area where both nationalist parochialism and hegemonic transnationalism could be held in mutual check. I have had critical engagements with concepts like influence, intertextuality, dialogism and translation. Tarafud emerged from this engagement. In Oxford, I was a founding member of OCCT (Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation) and co-convene the MSt in Comparative literature and Critical Translation.

Dual training in Comparative Literature and Area studies at Washington University coalesced in my PhD dissertation [link here to PhD diss?] on Mahmud al-Mas’adi, which then became my first book, Nationalism, Islam and World Literature: Sites of Confluence in the Writings of Mahmud al-Mas’adi (London: Routledge, 2006). The Introduction to this book, which can be read here, makes a broader point about the dominant methods through which “Third World” literatures stripped down for information, rather than engaged with as literature, unlike the standard for the study of European literature. I argue that “in the case of Arabic literature, the main paradigms remain the politics and history of the region or its societies, mirroring interest in the area either as a political hotspot or an unknown other”. The effects of Such perspectives inform our academic study of Arabic literature, classical or modern, and called for deep critique (see the Roundtable paper for Middle Eastern Literatures). We must interrogate text, not merely describe or analyse context out of which Arabic literature emerges, while remaining alert to the transnational dimension of both, history and literature.

Arabic literature has the radical potential to challenge literary theory to be truly global, self-critical and flexible. Arabic literary criticism circles have long thought about comparative literature, both as a discipline and as a practice. In a sense, the many centuries of scholarship in and on Arabic, Syriac and Greek philosophical literature, not to mention massive transnational movements form Baghdad to al-Andalus are a prime examples of comparative scholarship. The 1995 Conference on Comparative Literature in the Arab World, held in Cairo, which I discussed the conference for Edebiyat (here) was an eye-opener for me. The conference highlighted that comparative literature has long been focused on the Western canon; it showed that scholars from the Global South are hardly acknowledged as valid producers of knowledge about their cultures. Indeed, this unidirectional traffic has somewhat come under critique subsequently but has not changed substantially.

To foster space for exploring the mutliplicity of ways in which we can change this unidirectional traffic and create a more equitable and even academy marked a number of subsequent interventions. Most recently, I co-edited Minding Borders: Resilient Divisions in Literature, the Body and the Academy with colleagues, Matthew Reynolds, Adriana X. Jacobs and Nicola Gardini; you can read the introduction to this volume here. In this introduction, we explore the concept of the border as something which divides and joins differences. Literature is a space in which borders are everywhere, between languages, between traditions, between texts. In examining the border, we examine the movement across that border, the ways in which the porous border allows for the exchange of information and ideas, but can all too easily erect a closure.

With this aim in mind, I have twice edited an issue of Comparative Critical Studies. In the first (Comparative Critical Studies, 4:3, 2007), dedicated to the Novelisation of Islamic Literatures, bringing Arabic together with Persian, Turkish, Urdu etc.. I sought to re-orient comparative literature in spacial terms. Too often stuck exclusively on the Euro-centric, comparing Global South literatures with Europe, I instead opted to work comparatively with form across Islamic literatures, bringing different modern literary traditions into conversation with each other; you can read the introduction to this volume here. More recently, in collaboration with colleagues Ben Morgan and Matthew Reynolds, we dedicated a special issue to Comparative Criticism and Methods, rather than performing a specific type of comparison. In our introduction, which you can read here, we sketched a history of comparative literature as a discipline, re-centring the site of comparison onto the academic practice of criticism and translation theory, rather than the literature itself. As we note in our introduction, “Comparative criticism compares the texts that it discusses; but it also constitutes itself through comparison (implicit or explicit) with other critical practices in other geographic and cultural locations. To write comparative criticism is therefore to be aware of yourself as participating in the construction of one among many possible literary and cultural worlds.” In our selection of what literature to compare, how to compare it, with what tools, we are constantly constituting new ways of thinking about literature, adding new meaning to the world around us, making visible that which before had been unseen.

My work on comparative literature has led directly to the development of tarafud as central to my critical practice and my approach to literature. Tarafud, a critical practice that focuses on the ways in which literatures meet and converge. It is an acknowledgment in principle of the plurality and diversity that govern the creative process itself. It also recognizes the principle of addition and accumulation regardless of the linguistic, generic or stylistic source of a text. In Arabic, I have written an essay on tarafud as a method of criticism, calling for scholars to work with solidarity across linguistic and traditional borders, which you can read here. The English translation of this essay is in preparation, and will be published on this website as soon as possible.

Goethe’s idea of Weltliteratur (world literature) has been, for me, an anchor and a point of departure form Goethe at the same time. His conception of world literature was based around the central tenets of the free exchange of ideas and dialogue. For Goethe, reading literatures from other cultures was a key method of fostering intercultural understanding and exchange, and highlighted the similarities between people across cultures. Often, the importance of Arabic literature and Islam to the development of Goethe’s world literature has been overlooked; as I argue in my essay on tarafud, linked above and in my book on al-Mas’adi, Goethe’s relationship with Islam and Arabic literature was one of profound respect, deep admiration and self-immersion. But this is only part of the story since he operated within a context where non-European cultures were available for appropriation, plunder and embellishment of European imperial culture.

In Paris in 2017, I presented a paper at the First International Congress of Translation Studies, entitled “Translating radical difference and the ambitions of World Literature”. In this paper, which you can download here, I argued that world literature suffers from the paradoxical situation in which it aims for the Big Ideas by transcending individual differences and speaking about the global, or speaking on the global level. At the same time, world and comparative literatures are two disciplines which are both, in their own ways, reflections on borders. Methodologically speaking, we must insist on translation as the crucial site of border crossing, of bringing different specificities into contact and transcending the individual towards the global.