This project is guided by the idea that cultures, even when colonised or dominated, do not really start anew or surrender their history easily. Arabic literature, being a continuous tradition and open to a variety of linguistic and cultural currents, is in fact a good place to look at issues such as the resilience of local forms, as well as transformation and translation of foreign forms through time and space. Starting with adab and the maqamah in particular, the project explores the long view of Arabic literature from adab all the way to the modern novel.

Arabic literature, both classical and modern, has been at the core of my research and teaching. In fact, my first academic publications were inspired by my deep engagement with the pre-modern past. “There is a Jahiz for Every Age: Narrative Construction and Intertextuality in al-Hamadhani’s Maqamat”, which you can download here, approaches al-Hamadhani’s Maqamat through an engagement with the methods and tools of modern Western criticism while bearing in mind contemporaneous Arabic literary criticism. Comparing one of al-Hamadhani’s Maqamat with the work of al-Jahiz, and within the mindset of their time, it emerges that as al-Hamadhani’s characters appear to repudiate al-Jahiz, they recognize and affirm him as master of adab, style and humour.

One argument I make is that the link between adab and modern Arabic prose fiction has been continuous, and quite influential. I wrote an article for the journal Novel, which you can download here, that takes the maqama as a “local” narrative form and explores how the Arabic novel does not quiet fit in the thesis which defines the modern Arabic (and non-European) novel a site of compromise between local content and foreign form. Local form must be brought into the equation. The modern Arabic novel, which has retained a vital features such as orality and poetry, developed out of this triad of local narrative form, foreign form and local content.

One example of such an engagement is Muhammad al-Muwaylihi’s Hadith ʿIsa ibn Hisham, which I compare productively with al-Masʿadi’s Hadatha Abu Hurayra Qal… in this article. Al-Muwaylihi’s novel draws on the features of al-Hamadhani’s Maqamat, displacing the character from his original context into modern Egypt; the collapse of time between al-Hamadhani and al-Muwaylihi allows the author to explore the rapid developments in Egyptian society that had, by that time, shifted the country’s landscape, portrayed in the novel. Al-Mas’adi, on the other hand chose the way of evocation of the tradition in style, language and form.

An important aspect of Arabic literature that has long been of interest to me is the evolution through time of key words, concepts and models of literary production. Perhaps the most well-known, and yet most complex, of such terms is “adab”, a word that nowadays means literature tout court, but which, over time, has meant literary style, manners, etiquette, literary culture and beyond. This concept that flourished in the Abbasid period and before, remained central to the concerns of authors and writers across time. In an article about Yusuf al-Shirbini’s seventeenth-century Hazz al-Quhuf, I demonstrate how the text interacts with the adab tradition in novel and fascinating ways, expanding the boundaries of adab through a parodic representation of popular, rural culture.

In terms of geographic focus, North Africa has been a central interest of mine, about which you can read more in the projects on Tunisian literatures and Mahmud al-Masʿadi. Most recently, I have written an introduction on the study of North African literature for Olakunle George’s Companion to Arabic Literatures, which you can read here, and a blog on the introduction here. In the volume I edited with Maria Fusaro and Colin Heywood, I also wrote the closing chapter, concerning the representation of the early-modern Mediterranean in modern Maghrebi historical fiction, which you can read the article here.

Across my work on modern Arabic literature, I have attempted to shift the academic focus away from the near-exclusive concentration on the influence of the European onto Arabic literature, and towards reading this literature on its own terms. This applies both at the level of academic discourse and the way we understand the literary cultures as they developed across time. Rather than applying theoretical tools to Arabic literature and using them to decipher texts and their meanings, I call for us to bring Arabic literature into conversation with literary theory, using Arabic literature to explore the limitations of literary theory, as much as we use literary theory to explore Arabic literature.