From the issue dated June 21, 1996
2 Scholars Bring New Energy to Study of Ancient Arabic Poetry
By Peter Monaghan
Bloomington, Ind. -- For 30 years, Jaroslav Stetkevych has urged his colleagues in Near East studies to do a better job of conveying just how vibrant a literary tradition has underpinned Arab-Islamic cultures since the time of Mohammed.
Only then, says the professor of Arabic literature at the University of Chicago, along with a growing number of scholars influenced by him, can readers get a more nuanced understanding of those cultures -- at a time when the West could well use one.
To hear many observers tell it, Mr. Stetkevych's efforts have provided a much-needed stimulus to a field long focused on the philological aspects of literary texts at the expense of their meaning and poetics. The forms of poetry that originated in the pre-Islamic period, although they have remained crucial to Arabic verse ever since, have generally been dismissed as tediously repetitive and flat.
Mr. Stetkevych heads a gathering revisionist movement that is credited with showing why the ancient poetry is, in fact, rich and subtle. The revisionists' work draws on comparative literary studies, poststructuralism, and cultural anthropology.
Even before he fully formulated his position, Mr. Stetkevych was insisting that something had to be done to revive his field. As a young man in the Ukraine, he had been inspired by translations of Arabic poetry. But when he came to the United States, in the 1960s, he found that many scholars of the Near East did not share his passion. Near East studies, he believed, was bogged down in the painstaking analysis of texts -- their details, authorship, and origins.
In 1967, with the gumption of the young and impetuous, he asked a gathering of colleagues at Oxford University whether they were even interested in literature. Were they perhaps hiding their near-universal failure to learn to read and write Arabic fluently "under the smoke screen of sophistication?" he asked.
"It was a big surprise to people there," he recalls.
Mr. Stetkevych recounts the experience from the campus of Indiana University, where Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, his wife and fellow agent provocateur, is a professor of Near Eastern languages and cultures.
What drives the couple's efforts becomes clear as they discuss why their work can help explain Islam and overcome what he calls a "dangerous cultural illiteracy." Historically, doctoral students in Arabic studies have not been schooled in Arabic literature, even though "the cultures of the Arab world are literally oozing with poetic texts," he says. Religious and historical texts allude to poetry far more often than in English-speaking cultures.
Yes, interjects Ms. Stetkevych. Such is the enthusiasm of both scholars that they often cannot wait for the other to finish a thought. "Koranic commentary is full of poetry. And it doesn't necessarily give you the whole poem. It'll give you a snatch. You're meant to know the rest."
Mr. Stetkevych provides another measure of Arab poetry's centrality: the pan-Arab festival of poetry in Baghdad, which he attended annually during the '70s and '80s, until its disruption by the Gulf War. Some 2,000 poets, of all ideological stripes, would come from all over the Arab world. For 10 days, he could listen to poetry readings. "Only in the Arab world can anything like that happen," he says. "It was something phenomenal."
Generally, the poetry he and his fellow innovators study originated as remnants of the oral traditions of the Bedouin tribes of the Arabian Peninsula, before the birth of Mohammed, the prophet, in about A.D. 570. Following the establishment of Islam, in the seventh century, the texts -- which had been committed to manuscripts by this time -- did not lessen in importance, however. Rather, they became, with the Koran, Islam's pillars.
The key poetic form was a type of ode, the qasidah. In a way that has no equivalent in English-speaking cultures, it dominated the literature of Arab-Islamic societies and their Bedouin antecedents for more than 1,500 years. Its influence was profound until well into this century and lingers powerfully today. Mr. Stetkevych calls the qasidah "a cultural constant in Arabic."
"Every culture has a sense of form," he says. "We know ourselves through it." Yet scholars of the Near East did not bother until recently to ask how the qasidah form works, he argues. In fact, it and its related classical forms were given short shrift.
Some typical comments are quoted in a recent article in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion by Michael A. Sells, a former pupil of Mr. Stetkevych who is among the fellow innovators sometimes called the "Chicago school." Mr. Sells, a professor of comparative religions at Haverford College, cites the Encyclopedia of Islam (published by E.J. Brill), which, he notes with some distress, has served as a bridge between professional scholarship and a wider audience. One entry says of the qasidah, "the monotony becomes nauseous." Another calls Arabic poetry "untranslatable and dull" and "often grotesque and even repulsive."
What, then, explains the poetry's persistent centrality over hundreds of years, and its appeal to the likes of the Stetkevyches and Mr. Sells?
Certainly some features of the qasidah can daunt the newcomer. It was a panegyric, seemingly freighted with canonical requirements, including monorhyme, set themes, and images in particular sections of a rigid structure.
It would open with the nasib, an elegiac description of sorrow over one of a limited number of themes, such as an abandoned campsite, a lost loved one, or the passing of youth. A second section described a journey on camel through the desert. The last section could consist of praise for a patron, boasts about oneself and one's tribe, or one of a few other elements.
Aspects of Bedouin life were suggested by the required key terms of each section; for example, the second section, on journeys, commonly featured the camel, the ostrich, the oryx, and the onager, a wild ass. The descriptions of these animals, however, seemed to be more than merely naturalistic evocations of desert life.
To figure out what else they were, the Stetkevyches and other researchers have borrowed from such fields as literary theory, art history, and comparative literary studies. Ms. Stetkevych, who has looked to theories on ritual that have been developed in anthropology and the history of religions, believes that the imagery and structures of the earliest recorded Arabic poems, which served a ritual function as presentations in court ceremonies, themselves included evocations of rites of passage.
Typically, she suggests, the first section of a qasidah represents a separation from community; the second, a transitional state, in which an expelled person endures hardships; and the third, a ceremony reuniting the person, his status changed, with his community.
As Mr. Sells puts it, Ms. Stetkevych shows how the poetry conveys "partially concealed -- yet perhaps because of that, all the more profound -- ritual archetypes of Arabian tribal life."
As with musical or fictional forms in the West, she says, "once you have a sense of form, you become sensitive to the language of form, variations on the form, distortions and deformations of parts of the form." The variations and omissions convey meaning, too.
Critical though he is of colleagues who cling to the philological approach, Mr. Stetkevych is far from a slouch himself in this regard. But he employs it only in the service of a broader argument. In his book The Zephyrs of Najd, he "engages in a semiotic archaeology, tracing back the key symbolic elements of the nasib to 'the myth behind the word,'" as Mr. Sells puts it his recent journal article.
Some scholars predict that Mr. Stetkevych's next book, Muhammad and the Golden Bough, due this fall from Indiana University Press, will resonate well beyond Arabic literary studies. Its title alludes to James G. Frazer's 1890 study of the myths and rites that endured in art and literature after the rise of Christianity. Mr. Stetkevych calls his new book a "reclaiming of Arabian myth."
"It's really a reconstruction of probably the central Islamic-Arabic myth that is autochthonous -- that does not derive, for example, from the Bible," he says. To his great surprise, he had found, an Arabian equivalent of the mythical Greek golden bough "was there all the time, and nobody had ever seen it." This version involves Mohammed's own unearthing of a golden bough, an artifact of an ancient Arab people destroyed by divine scourge for their iniquity. It counters the common belief that classical Arabian culture had no myths or legends.
Scholars who have read the book are mightily impressed. Richard Bulliet, a professor of medieval history at Columbia University who reviewed the book for the Indiana press, says: "It opens up new dimensions of how to think about, how to study, how to see interrelationships in the ancient Arabian world and see their connections with the Mediterranean world in general. I thought it was a stunning piece of work."
He also speaks highly of Ms. Stetkevych's work. "Her way of reading pre-Islamic odes as almost ritual narratives is so different from anyone else's that even if one doesn't agree with her entirely, simply the suggestion of that as an alternative way of seeing things means you're not going to read the poetry of that era the same way again."
And Mr. Bulliet is most grateful for that: "The Middle East field has tended to be pretty retrograde in theoretical areas." The contributions of the Stetkevyches and their colleagues, he says, have come just in time for him. "I had more or less written off Arabic literary studies as being terminally boring."
How had the scholarship reached such a state? It was not just the field's philological bent, Mr. Stetkevych says. Scholars in Arabic-speaking countries have been slowed by what some scholars refer to as a "Koranic ambivalence" toward poetry. Like Plato's dismissal of poetry in The Republic, the attitude is a reaction against poetry's not aspiring to be conclusive.
The Stetkevyches by no means claim that changes in the field stem entirely from their efforts. Changes in students' expectations have helped, too. "We were not in positions where we could have classes of three to five students and just sit down and translate texts," says Ms. Stetkevych. "The students wouldn't come."
Students still do have to gain a solid foundation in textual analysis, she adds, but to keep them, "we've been forced to bring this into a broader, literary-critical conversation," She and some colleagues, particularly Mr. Sells, have produced well-received translations that are far more expressive than the old, literal renderings.
Ross Brann, a professor of Near Eastern studies at Cornell University who has written on medieval Hebrew and Spanish Arabic, says scholars in related fields haven't realized that there now is something in Arabic literary studies to pay attention to. The new work "really has changed the requirements, the vocabulary we have to use, even if we work in slightly different areas," he says.
Ms. Stetkevych insists that the quality of the literature alone justifies the efforts of her and her colleagues. "This is an absolutely stunning body of literature," she says. "It's one of those world treasures that should be open to view."
Banat Su'ad (known as the Mantle Ode)
By Ka'b ibn Zuhayr, presented to the Prophet Mohammed in A.D. 630
Translated by Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych
Su'ad has departed and today
my heart is sick
A slave to her traces,
unransomed and enchained.
On the morning of departure
when her tribe set out
Su'ad was but a bleating antelope
with languid gaze and kohl-lined eye.
When she smiles she flashes
side teeth wet
As if with a first draught of wine
or with a second,
Mixed with cool water from a wadi's bend,
in a pebbled streambed limpid
And sparkling in the noontime sun,
chilled by the northwind.
Scholarship on Classical Arabic Literature
Abu Tammam and the Poetics of the 'Abbasid Age, by Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych (E.J. Brill, 1991)
Desert Tracings: Six Classical Arabian Odes, translated by Michael A. Sells (Wesleyan University Press, 1989)
From Arab Poet to Muslim Saint: Ibn al-Farid, His Verse, and His Shrine, by T. Emil Homerin (University of South Carolina Press, 1994)
Muhammad and the Golden Bough: Reconstructing Arabian Myth, by Jaroslav Stetkevych (Indiana University Press, October 1996)
The Mute Immortals Speak: Pre-Islamic Poetry and the Poetics of Ritual, by Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych (Cornell University Press, 1993)
Reorientations: Arabic and Persian Poetry, edited by Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych (Indiana University Press, 1994)
The Literary Heritage of Classical Islam: Arabic and Islamic Studies in Honor of James A. Bellamy, edited by Mustansir Mir and Jarl Fossum (Darwin Press, 1993)
The Zephyrs of Najd: The Poetics of Nostalgia in the Classical Arabic Nasib, by Jaroslav Stetkevych (University of Chicago Press, 1993)
Copyright © 1996 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
