“There is no question which we might simply ask, without knowing of past things that are preserved in the question and spur it.”
Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: The Seabury Press, 1979), 54
“Say to whoever denies successors any advantage and assigns precedence to ancients/that the ancient was once modern: and this modern will remain ancient.”
Master Buṭrus al-Bustānī, the cover motto for the lexicon Kitāb muḥ īṭ al-muḥ īṭ
“I am restoring to our silent and apparently immobile soil its rifts, its instability, its flaws; and it is the same ground that is once more stirring under our feet.”
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1994), xxiv
One of the basic paradigms defining the Arab nahḍah or the less popular yaqẓah (viewing it here as an umbrella term for modernity, or “awakening,” since the early nineteenth century, broadly 1811–1950s) is its unease with the Arab/Islamic past. Apart from the structural negativism that recurs within an underlying justification for change, some prominent nahḍah intellectuals in Egypt and the rest of the Arab world emulate their European “Enlightenment” counterparts who turned their back on the premodern era [Middle Ages] in their headlong espousal of progress under the guise of rational philosophy and empirical reasoning.Footnote 1 Indeed, prominent and influential intellectuals such as the Egyptian Salāmah Mūsā (1887–1958) go so far as to suggest vaulting more than five hundred years of premodern and medieval Islamic history in exchange for an internalized post-Renaissance version of Europe.Footnote 2 He argues, “Arab readers need the Western Enlightenment for their Eastern minds.”Footnote 3 Early on in his polemical discourse, Māhiya al-nahḍah (What is the Awakening?), he expresses his fear that we may “fail to defeat medievalism in our life.”Footnote 4 The “doyen of Arabic literature”’ as Ṭāhā Ḥusayn (1889–1973) is called, made no secret of his rejection of the period in question, dismissing its literature as “decadent” and “dead.”Footnote 5 Commenting on the attitude of late nineteenth and early twentieth Arab liberals, the late Moroccan intellectual Muḥammad ‘Ābid al-Jābirī (1936–2010) concludes that this Arab liberal (Salāmah Mūsā) “remains completely silent about the Arab past, because it is never part of his preoccupation; hence he resolutely distances it.”Footnote 6 Before focusing on the complexity of Arab and Islamic modernities, however, we need perhaps to introduce the subject of their disparagement and unease. Here a preparatory exploration of the textual community of the middle and premodern periods in Arab/Islamic history (1250–1811)Footnote 7 is appropriate, especially in terms of the reconstruction of knowledge. In what follows (Parts I and II), I will examine this reconstruction as exemplified by specific cases that happen to distinguish the makeup of a literate culture, its sites of correspondence and discussion, and thereby establish “a republic of letters.”Footnote 8 This use of the term republic is intended as an appellation for a community of scholars and readers across the Islamic lands who happened to interact, correspond with one another, hold meetings and debates, and establish a repertoire of texts in encyclopedic or commentary form. Much larger and productive than the French encyclopedia project that invoked the term republic of letters,Footnote 9 configurations and constellations of post-classical (i.e., medieval and premodern) Islamic knowledge over a number of centuries and well into the eighteenth century complemented, built on, and far exceeded in their diversity, scope, geographical range, and target their basis established in the late Umayyad and Abbasid eras. At the same time, it must also be acknowledged that, along with this corpus and amid drastic disruptions of a political and cultural nature, there is an equally enormous production of less merit that was meant to nourish a broader populace in quest of knowledge. Muslim elite treatment of the recent past tends to discount the masses and hence also the denigration attending that medieval/premodern writing addressing these publics. Thus, the study of past culture is a study of societies and their political economies. This relationship with a cultural past assumes great importance in our search for a better understanding of movements, attitudes, and concepts because culture provided shared codes that were not lost on either the khawāṣṣ (elite) or the ‘āmmah (the common public),Footnote 10 especially in that volatile climate run not only by dynasties of differential interests in and engagements with culture but also by less conspicuous powers on material and intellectual levels. Let us remember that narrative literature leaves us a massive record of tyrants and rulers who turned into helpless beings in the presence of a revered shaykh or a prominent scholar.Footnote 11 The fact that we are left with an enormous corpus of these narratives, voluminous histories, compendiums, biographical dictionaries, treatises of every sort, and treasure troves of poetry and correspondence testifies to a republic of letters of an exceptional feat.
Current use of the term, usually associated with Pascale Casanova’s World Republic of Letters, merits some attention not only to decenter the latter’s conceptualization but also and primarily to direct attention to traditions that antedate and perhaps problematize the global application. Casanova’s World runs counter to national communities, for Paris as the locale and armature of this republic is the one to accrue, recapitulate on. and also deliver recognition, a case that is seemingly proved not only by cultural imports from the metropolitan center worldwide but also by its assimilation of other works from excolonies and cultural peripheries.Footnote 12 The idea of a culturally gravitating centripetal metropolis obviously partakes of both material and cultural circumstance as was the case earlier with Baghdad, where the symbolic power of the city as the central pivot of Islam was on hold even as its contribution went into decline before the eventual downfall as a result of the Mongol invasion in 1258. In this case the notion of a symbolic capital derives from the caliphal order that leads a reputable jurist and judge like the Egyptian ibn Duqmāq to bewail the city’s fall as something universal.Footnote 13 Before discussing the emerging role of Cairo, it is worth remembering that for modernists the fall signifies consequent “negligence” and stagnation. Indeed, no less of a modernist than the Iraqi leading poet Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb (d. 1964), addresses the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols ( 1258) as the dividing line between light and darkness, power and weakness, and fertility and sterility. While addressing the Algerian fighters as the ones bringing regeneration to a dying ummah (nation) he specifically dwells on the fall of Baghdad as follows:
From the darkness there descended on our dwellings
A swarm of locusts, scorching them. It was as if the waters of the Tigris, where [the swarm of locusts] turned black
Testified to it with blood and ink.
Was it not its judgment that had so stunned the pregnant women
That they gave birth to naught but ashes?Footnote 14
The fall of Baghdad as a massive turning point in Islamic geographies has its sociopolitical and cultural dimensions. The symbolic failure and fall turned the Islamic nation upside down, and many contending centers appeared that claimed legitimacy and leadership through culture or force. For an actual accommodation of writers and writings from all over the globe, Cairo came to occupy a place of honor throughout the thirteen and fourteen centuries, according to two prominent contemporaries of the Mamluk period, al-Qalqashandī (d.1418) and ibn Khaldūn (d.1406). Although the latter surmise is commensurate with Casanova’s assessment of the role of Paris, it obviously exposes at the same time the pitfalls involved in a generalized equation that would link the interdependency of the print industry and the rise of a “world republic of letters.” The middle and premodern periods in Islamic history may illustrate failures in economy and politics but not backwardness and stagnation, a point that Peter Gran strongly engages with.Footnote 15 The actual achievements in cultural production in terms of written culture are problematic enough to raise questions about Eurocentric totalizing constructs in the form of structuralist polarizations. During the period under consideration, monographs, massive lexicons, and encyclopedic dictionaries were composed across the Islamic lands, along with an active quest for knowledge and the rise of individual library collections and archival repositories. Although medieval and premodern Islamic culture attests to Casanova’s stipulation concerning the unsustainability of an equation between political/economic growth and cultural prominence, it also disputes her definition of the world republic of letters in terms of a post-Renaissance Europe. Even if we accept the term as involving a constellation of collaborative knowledge, the periods under consideration offer us the opportunity for further consideration of such umbrella terms.
Cairo of the middle and premodern period was more of an epicenter for a combination of material production and symbolic capital, however. The nature of growth and its shifting body politic place us squarely within a cosmopolitan nexus that witnesses a dialogue among schools of thought, scholastic controversies, scientific achievements, poetic innovations and shifts in expression, the massive use of prose for statecraft, and soaring heights of Sufi poetry that simultaneously invert worldliness in common tropes. Indeed, Cairo was the witness to a cosmopolitan culture that was partly its own, but also and to a large extent forced on the city by virtue of place. Situated at the crossroads to Mecca, Africa, the Mediterranean, Syria, and eastern Asia, all the way to the borders with China that ibn Baṭṭūṭah (d. 1369) would reach and describe, Cairo was a place, but not an identity. What was its own and what was brought to the place and its people involves and defines its makeup at that particular historical intersection, one in which another, non-Arab presence enforced its presence while acclimatizing itself to the accommodating Islamic space. Fighting its way between its own populations and its Arab and Afro-Asian communities, especially the Maghribi component, and the superimposed Mamluks and Ottomans, City-Victorious, as its name signifies, comes out cosmopolitan but also as an Arab/Islamic metropolitan epicenter.
The Arab/Islamic Modernity Complex: The Burden of the Past?
It stands to reason then to argue that a return to an early period, albeit with different understanding and methodology, cannot be warranted unless there is a pressing need, a need that pertains to structures of knowledge in relation to colonial and postcolonial imperatives, including identitarian politics.Footnote 16 The plan for my current project therefore questions first modernity sites that propagate a wholesale rejection of the cultural values of the premodern and Mamluk periods. It also seeks to reveal a transitional oscillation that exists among another segment of Arab and Muslim literati, one that operates between an edgy and shy approval and occasional expressions of denial of any worthwhile production of the periods under consideration. Secondly, it attempts to uncover omissions that reside in rhetorical disclaimers of modernity and instead to construct a counter-mapping of a textual terrain involving conflict, contestation, and struggle.Footnote 17 I leave out the issue of the nation-state, and the invented secular/religious paradigm, until some other occasion. The process will follow an interdisciplinary critique that conforms to a contemporaneous definition of the term adab in the middle period, one through which aesthetics, as well as sciences and crafts or professions, transform the cultural landscape at the same time as they undergo ruptures and shifts. As it stands, the second part of present intervention will engage with specific sites of scriptoria, and especially lexica, rhetoric, and epistles concerning disputation or argumentation, as being dynamic forces in the fabric of discussion and reading communities, of forums of governance and authority, and of common or street life.Footnote 18 Within such a framework specific subgenres are utilized as examples and cardinal points for the synthesis of basic premises.
Disputing the Antipodes of ModernityFootnote 19
As a majority of Arab modernists are habitually trapped in a feeling of subordination to an Enlightenment disengagement with a medieval European past,Footnote 20 the Mamluk and Ottoman periods are, more often than not, treated in corresponding medieval terms despite their different historicity and referent; they are consequently dismissed as the fall from grace, a dark descent into the abyss of backwardness and deterioration.Footnote 21 Modernity itself harbors within it a latent subordination to mimetic representation, which in turn suspects the underlying linguistic base of the rhetorical fecundity traceable to that earlier period. Taken together, and read against the writing of even such well-balanced intellectuals as Aḥmad Ḥasan al-Zayyāt (d. 1968), the translator of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Werther (1920) and editor of the most popular intellectual forum, the magazine al-Risālah (1933–1953), there is in literary historiography a range of possible responses to the past: an Oedipal repudiation of literary fathers; a self-conciliatory stance heralding a rebirth; and a more assiduous commitment to unearthing the legacy of the middle and premodern period.Footnote 22
The complexity of this uncertain recognition of what is clearly a massive cultural output and the denial of its significance is all the more apparent when read against a positive gamut of counter-engagements in the contexts of lexicography, national discourse, and nation building. In other words, under the impact of the encounter with Europe and the continuing effort to carve a way out, there is more than one inventory of evidential traces to be found on the colonial subject. Salāmah Mūsā’s categorical rejection of the past five centuries or so can be offset by Shaykh Muḥammad ‘Abduh (d. 1905) and many of his disciples, as well as by the members of the émigré Pen-League (Al-Rābiṭah al-qalamiyyah) in the early 1920s in the United States and Lebanon, with their willingness to discriminate between assimilation, imitation, and independence.Footnote 23 Against Salāmah Mūsā’s tide and his sweeping denial of medieval and premodern culture, there are some significant contributions to a revolutionary politics and poetics that lie at the very base of the modernity project. The Egyptian Shaykh Ḥusayn al-Marṣafī (1815–1890), a solid scholar who was to have a substantial impact on many trainees in Arabic sciences, constructs his al-Wasīlah al-adabiyyah (The Literary Method) on a selective reordering of Arabic and its sciences, but in his Risālat al-kalam al-thamān (The Epistle of the Eight Key Words) he also acknowledges the power and influence of the encounter with Europe insofar as new conceptualizations of polity and statehood are concerned. In 1881 he writes: “In this epistle I request readers’ acutest attention and care so as to understand everything mentioned and to reconsider it in order to be sure of its meanings. In this epistle I address the most intelligent youth of these times … in which I have explained words currently in use and circulation among people; words such as nation, homeland, government, justice, oppression, politics, freedom, and education.”Footnote 24 Indeed, in this short but significant text (along with other similar ones), a new textual territory is laid down and begins to take shape, a new register grows and inserts itself in a wider cultural script that had already witnessed the contributions of the Syrian (Lebanese) Buṭrus al-Bustanī (1819–1883), the Lebanese-Iraqi Anastas al-Karmalī (1866–1947), and many others. It involves an engagement that commonly betrays certain flaws in its uneven transactional encounter. National recognition of the need for Europe is often proclaimed along the image of a glorious golden age, usually Abbasid with Baghdad as the center that is rhetorically shored up. Even the urgent quest for a confrontational revivalist movement that set the tone for a national political discourse carries within it the scars of an encounter with the Ottomans and Europe. Conversely, it is within the context of quest that an underlying “political unconscious,” perhaps an undercurrent, reverts to the relatively recent past of the middle period rather than to the heyday of the Abbasids in (ninth and eleventh centuries). Standing opposition to a commonly held belief in an imaginary substratum of Abbasid ancestry, specific engagements strove instead to establish a text-based extraction from within the density of the middle period. Drawing on its rhetorical fecundity and specifically its exceptional statist and social/communal markers in statecraft, poetics, and rhetoric, less outspoken participants in the nahḍah project found themselves drawn to a number of leading conceptualizations and tropes that differ in a significant way from the dominant disparagement of the period under discussion. In their exceptional presence amid striding espousals of a European enlightenment politics, these conceptualizations markedly carve another differential space in state formation. I would like to draw attention to these because they also work against the common premise that the nahḍah movement is necessarily confined only to Cairo, which was admittedly an epicenter for cultural and urban advancement and growth throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Flag, Statecraft, and Language
From among these particular markers, I will now cite the following three instances of formative presence in the makeup of “modernity” and its concretization in the nation-state: firstly, the use of a poem from the medieval period to provide the structure and syntax of the Arab national flag in the fight for independence from the Ottomans, a flag that would continue to function ever after until perhaps the resurgence of globalization and its systematic recourse to power to dismantle such countries as Iraq (since 1991); secondly, the reclamation of the Mamluk terms of parity between state administration and the role of the intelligentsia; and thirdly, the generation of lexical conversation and lexicographic production with deep roots in both genealogical tradition and rhetorical ancestry. These three instances are strongly linked to identitarian politics and hence also raise questions regarding the complexity of the so-called Awakening (nahḍah) project, with its many preoccupations, concerns, methodologies, and conspicuous appropriations from colonial culture.
These identitarian markers were, however, deployed in the Arab world in particular at the end of the nineteenth century against a landscape of disparagement by literati. The posture encountered most often is grounded in negativity, shrouding the period in concepts of decadence and loss, blotting it out as unfortunate anticlimax to an otherwise golden age.Footnote 25 Even Sulaymān Khaṭṭār al-Bustānī, a discerning scholar, pioneering comparatist, and multilingual translator, littérateur, editor, and poetic translator in full of Homer’s Iliad in 1904, concurs with the dominating reading of the period as one “of decadence and imitation.” He qualifies his sweeping statement, however, with a mention of “the ember that every now and then emits a spark to generate a poetic talent,” mentioning in the process the names of ibn Nubātā al-Misrī (d. AH 768/AD 1366), ibn Ḥajar (d. 852/1448), the Ottoman Turk ʻAbd al-Bāqī al-Maʻrūf, ibn Maʻtūq al-Mūsawī (d. 1676), and ʻAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī (d. 1731), from within the premodern period.Footnote 26 Many late-twentieth-century scholars have been arguing exactly the opposite, and clear-sighted efforts have begun to expose the failures of this hurried but common judgment. My focus here on middle and premodern legacies in the combined “macrogenres” of a cultural archive and the practice of epistolary art, rhetoric, and literary criticism,Footnote 27—as being basic to the middle and premodern construction of knowledge—intends no apologetic reading, nor does it add more to what Thomas Bauer and others have been convincingly exposing as servile duplication of the response of European modernity to medieval times.Footnote 28
For the first exception to the sweeping disparagement of the middle/premodern period, I have in mind the fourteenth-century Iraqi poet, scholar, rhetorician, and merchant, Ṣafī al-Dīn al-H˛ῌillī (AH 677–750/AD 1278–1348/1349). This mention might not raise or generate curiosity on our part as readers were it not for the so-called Arab Revolt (1916–1918) in the Ḥijāz and other parts of the Arab region against the Ottomans, led by the Meccan Sharīf Ḥusayn (AH 1270–1350/AD 1854–1931). Its flag was no more than a reinstatement in design and color of al-H˛illī’s verse, which won instant success in synthesizing syntactical and emblematic features that have given form and shape to most Arab national flags.Footnote 29
A Text for a Nation-State
This example fits into a larger picture involving writings that claim nationalism or reflect on the past as a possible source for governance and statecraft. The poem in the flag converses with many preoccupations, such as the one that brings al-H˛illī’s contemporary and close associate, the Egyptian acute critic, scribe, and illustrious poet ibn Nubātah al-Miṣrī to the center of attention at the turn of the century, 1900. Indeed, his epistle “Risālat al-sayf wa al-qalam” (The Epistle of the Sword and the Pen) generated others, including a seeming recension by his disciple and fellow Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ṣafadī,Footnote 30 and led to contrafactions and duplications. I am specifically referring here to an otherwise inexplicable reproduction of ibn Nubātah’s epistle,Footnote 31 by no less than the prominent Syrian/Lebanese linguist, poet, critic, and nationalist Ibrāhīm al-Yāzijī (1847–1906), whose ode calling on Arabs to rise in revolt was already a household word.Footnote 32 It is this poem that Georges Antonius credited with invigorating an Arab national awakening.Footnote 33 Al-Yāzijī was prolific, meticulous, and sharp. His articles on the Arabic language and his scathing criticism of colonial efforts to uproot culture through the Latinization of the Arabic alphabet were influential in confronting both Turkification and colonial schemes. But the act of reproducing ibn Nubātah’s debate as an exemplary rhetorical “deviation” in his journal Al-Ḍiyā͗’ (The Light; 1900) is noteworthy.Footnote 34 A revivalist movement was already under way, one that involved the contributions of many great scholars and eminent intellectuals, including Shaykh Muḥammad ‘Abduh, the Grand Mufti of Egypt and an eminent scholar and reformist, who had edited many classics, including Badī‘ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī’s (d. AD 1007) Maqāmāt (Assemblies), and ʻAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib’s (d. AD 661) abridged Nahj al-balāghah (translated into English as The Peak of Eloquence). But al-Yāzijī’s reproduction of a short epistle as a debate between the pen and the sword seemed to have another dimension to it.
The debate ends up as a balanced discussion of each side’s merits and probable drawbacks. The sword and the pen, the military and the art of writing, the pairing is brought together in a process of reconciliation that does not negate difference. In ibn Nubātah’s time, both military and administrative skills had to coordinate with each other in the makeup of a state, despite the fact that chancellery protocols and rules usually granted the lords of the pen more recognition.Footnote 35 Does the same logic apply to the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Arab world? Are intellectuals called upon to coordinate their efforts with other organized or institutionalized powers, especially after some eminent poets like the Egyptian Maḥmūd Sāmī al-Bārūdī (d. 1904) and learned dignitaries participated in ‘Urābī Pasha’s revolt in Egypt (1881) and simmering popular uprisings in the Hijaz, Iraq, and other places?Footnote 36 Unless we are willing to conceive the consolidated and intense conversation at the turn of the nineteenth and early twentieth century between religious thinkers, secularists like Faraḥ Anṭūn and Yaʻqūb Ṣarrūf, and journalists and writers as being a site of vigorous national awareness, we are bound to overlook not only the permeation of the culture of the middle period into the “modernity” project, but also the relevance of the politics of the medieval Islamic republic of letters. Even when seemingly subdued, that earlier cultural tradition, with its many paradigmatic and axial categories, continued to inform the modernity project and at times unsettle its excessive internalization of Western orientations. Around that time (the second half of the nineteenth century), the keen interest in the formation of nation-states, the encounter between Islam and Europe, the enhanced presence of religion in society, and the investigation of principles of Islamic governance were already being diligently pursued in journals and open forums, including Shaykh Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā’s (d. 1935) al-Manār (The Minaret, 1898), Fāris Nimr’s (1857–1951) and Ya‘qūb Ṣarrūf’s (1852–1927) al-Muqtaṭaf (The Chosen, 1876–1952), Jurjī Zaydān’s al-Hilāl (The Crescent, 1892–), and Faraḥ Anṭūn’s (1874–1922) journal al-Jāmiʻāh (The Congregational Site; i.e., a word-play on the concept of the university and compendium).Footnote 37 The last of these publications had as one of its goals an aspiration to break down paradigmatic divides in the construction of modern knowledge. The reproduction of that Mamluk epistle cannot have been a passing whim, and especially not on the part of such a committed grammarian, philologist, and poet as Ibrāhīm al-Yāzijī. No matter how much cultural weight we accord this reproduction, it is at least worthy of note as evidence of a continuing cultural relevance and permeation of works of the Mamluk era. Above all, it is not as “decadent” and superfluous as some modernists have suggested, they being scholars who, in Thomas Bauer’s neat observation, are only duplicating the European enlightenment’s own revulsion at its own medieval times, leading to the subsequent colonial sense of superiority vis à vis other cultures.Footnote 38 Along with this sense of subservience, there is almost certainly a concomitant lack of familiarity with the corpus of knowledge involved. Confounding productivity with superfluity, these historians or critics have failed to notice the way in which Mamluk scholars from inside and outside the chancery had also renounced the excessive resort to specific rhetorical devices, embellishments, and figures of speech, a point that will be my focus in due course.Footnote 39
From Word Empire to World Empire
The third exception to the decadence paradigm is of a more lexical nature. One might pose the question as to how we are to explain the fervor that attended al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ (The Encompassing Lexicon) by Fīrūzabādī (d. AH 817/AD 1415) in the nineteenth century.Footnote 40 Why would such an eminent littérateur, the Syrian-Lebanese “master” Buṭrus al-Bustānī (1819–1883), choose to place his own dictionary, Muḥīṭ al-muḥīṭ (The Encompassing Ocean), in genealogical succession to the earlier lexicon, and why would the shrewd writer Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq (1804–1887) compose his own take on the same lexicon in his exhaustive al-Jāsūs ʻalā al-Qāmūs (Spying on the dictionary [The Encompassing lexicon]; i.e., detecting its faults). “Master” Buṭrus al-Bustānī and al-Shidyāq were both considered to be among the most important and dynamic contributors to the “awakening” in the Arab east; their impact went far beyond the region to extend to many Islamic lands and also the so-called Mahjar (diaspora, particularly in the Americas). Their cultural bridges extending back into the past traverse the fields of philosophy, theological discourse, and lexical explorations and compilations. The ways in which they made use of their journals and other publication and circulation venues were positioned at the dynamic intersection of transformation and change. Indeed, their sustained struggle to negotiate the balance between past and present—the legacies of the Arab past and Europe—should be able to dislodge once and for all the prevalent paradigm of disparagement for the premodern. Before and beyond the question of linguistic mediums that were suggested by renowned Orientalists and approved later by Salāmah Mūsā (1887–1958) and other modernists, the drive toward modernity in the earlier phases of the Arab and Islamic revival took the issue of lexical exploration extremely seriously and as a countermovement to the Ottomans and colonial education policies. The confrontation with French and British colonial policies in education and the press was for a long time focused primarily on the body of native and national languages. Despite the enhanced efforts at translation involving primary texts in Arabic, Persian, and other Eastern languages vigorously pursued by well-known Orientalists throughout the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth, the colonial administration specifically targeted native and national languages in order to dislodge their main domain in Qur’ānic and religious studies and communication, as seen particularly in French policies in Algeria. Whence comes the significance of the lexical bridge back to the middle and premodern periods.
All this may help to explain the diligence shown by scholars in their vigorous pursuit of lexicography during the nineteenth century in Lebanon/Syria, Egypt, and Iraq in particular. In those regions print made it possible to discuss, reissue, abridge, modify, and improve on the voluminous lexicons that had already been compiled by scholars and linguists of the middle period in particular.Footnote 41 It needs to be recalled that lexicographic production had traversed both times and borders, bringing together, for example, the Andalusian ‘Alī ibn Ismā‘īl ibn Sīdah (1007–1066) and the Tunisian ibn Manẓūr (d. AH 711/AD 1311), not to mention the illustrious lexicographers, grammarians, and linguists of Baghdad, Aleppo, Cairo, and Zabīd in Yemen.Footnote 42 Reaching its zenith in Mamluk times, the lexicographical endeavor manifests a commitment and philological skill and knowledge outside the court and chancery; it is an arduous individual pursuit pure and simple, one that conveys a sense of belonging to a rich culture and language, a verbal empire that concocts and inspires an intellectual and philological efflorescence. There is more to this effort than the traction that it obviously presents, however.
This same effort and production testify to the loss of the transparency of old times when word and signified are one and the same, when people used to speak the language with an understanding that rarely eludes others. Not until the early Umayyad period (AH 41–132/AD 661–750) did the Islamic world wake up to a loss of touch with language, the need to learn Qur’ānic recitation, enunciation, and even meaning. Only levels of eloquence can distinguish one from another. The advent of drastic changes in politics, economy, cultural production, urban expansion, and statehood brings about a growing disparity between signifier and signified, a process whereby representation takes over in order to account for a new materiality. Grammar steps in, as does al-Khalīl ibn Aḥmad al-Farāhīdī’s (AH 100–170/AD 718–786) pioneering lexicon and prosodic system, as a means of codifying writing and poetry that was once a popular mode of oral communication. What Michel Foucault traced in Europe as an epistemological shift from a sixteenth century to a seventeenth century order of things can be applied to a pre-Islamic and early Islamic advent, an era before the shift to another almost statist Islam in which epistolographers as kuttāb master language as discourse to be molded, gauged, and fitted according to prerogatives and also requirements. In Foucault’s words, “The peculiar existence and ancient solidity of language as a thing inscribed in the fabric of the world were dissolved in the functioning of representation; all language had value only as discourse.”Footnote 43 No wonder then (and in an era long before the topic of Foucault’s analysis) that the “secretary” at the Umayyad court, ‘Abd al-Ḥāmid al-Kātib (d. 749 CE), wrote to his coprofessionalist bureaucrats admonishing them to be like the sā’is (stableman, groom, driver of animals) in managing a wild animal until it is tame and controllable. He concludes thus: “In this description of siyāsah (noun from sāsa, nominative sā’is; the running of an order, its politics), there is instruction for those persons who are to oversee people, manage them, and share experience and life with them.”Footnote 44
Disciplined and codified, Arabic gradually functions as discourse that necessarily invites dictionaries, lexicons, and grammatical compendiums. The functional armature is no different from the ones that imperial regimes need to communicate with their subjects. The purpose and expediency behind Edward William Lane’s (1801–1876) efforts in producing his lexicon for the British Empire and the metropolitan center could not have been lost on Arab intellectuals and scholars.Footnote 45 Although Lane could have carried out the project on his own, it was nevertheless of great service to the empire. What could be more conducive to imperial expansion than the training of its personnel in Arabic and to have empire philologists on demand to explain and justify means and notions of command, control, and ultimate takeover? The East India Company (1600–1874) and its military and commercial apparatus, a company heavily involved in empire, had already made its plans to have trainees in Arabic through studying and reading the Arabian Nights as a model text conjoining instruction and entertainment, in a mixed language of standard writing and colloquial Arabic. Edward William Lane had these interests in mind, and his lexicon was not a mere antiquarian whim. He worked on the lexicon through a careful study of al-Zabīdī’s (d. AH 1205/AD 1790) Tāj al-‘arūs (The Bride’s Crown), as the container not only of al-Fīrūzabādī’s (1329–1414) Al-Muḥīt (The Ocean) and ibn Manẓūr’s (d. AH 1233/AD 1312) Lisān al-‘Arab (The Language of the Arabs) but also of his further improvement on both through extensive traveling, correspondence, and communication with visitors. With such an acquired mastery of Arabic words and expressions, the imperial staff could embark on a learning experience consolidated by academic institutions that were established for this specific purpose. Programs at major universities and institutions were in dire need of an Arabic/English lexicon. The empire generates its interests through a lexical mapping that preserves verbal utility in the colonized lands through a pragmatic use of native languages under the positivist drive. In the colonial production of lexicons and their implementation in teaching colonial personnel, the defining criteria involve utility and interest. In an ironic twist of fortune and in a seemingly fortuitous outcome whereby paronomasia and antithesis establish a presence in imperial rhetoric, the word empire (i.e., lexicons) of the Islamic middle period was put to the service of a world empire.
In their effort to bring Arabic into the domain of the struggle for independence, early advocates of Arab modernity found no greater challenge than to update and abridge the great achievements of their ancestors, especially as they were tightly organized in the middle period. In 1869, the Lebanese Master Buṭrus al-Bustānī, drawing on Fīrūzabādī’s Qāmūs that had become popular in abridged form as Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ, produced a two-volume lexicon, Muḥīṭ al-muḥīṭ (The Encompassing Ocean). He later produced an abridged version, Quṭr al-muḥīṭ (Diameter of the Ocean). Although amended with many additions and corrections, it remained popular for some time. It was followed by Saʻīd al-Khūrī al-Shartūnī’s (1849–1912) Aqrab al-mawārid fi fuṣaḥ al-‘Arabīyyah wa-al-shawārid (The Nearest Sources in Standard Classical Arabic and Loan Words) in 1890 (a third volume in 1894, with recapitulations and corrections). Along with that lexicon, he published another arranged thematically, Kitāb najdat al-yarā‘:wa-huwa mu‘jam qamūs murattab ‘alā abwāb al-ma‘ānī (The Book of Rescue: a lexicon arranged in terms of meanings; 1905). Along with other significant contributions to the art of writing, al-Shartūnī was also the compiler and editor of the collected poetry of a prominent seventeenth-century poet, Dīwān Shihāb al-Dīn al-Mūsawī al-ma‘rūf bi-ibn Ma‘tūq (1617–1676). His lexicon was followed by a more popular one aimed at learners of the language, in particular by Father Louis Malouf in 1908, which he named al-Munjid (The Rescuer).Footnote 46 The link between these initiatives and the earlier lexicographical movement that was so noticeably strong in the middle period is the new emphasis on social groups, their use of language, and their actual practices. Those had been shunned in earlier dictionaries that take the Bedouins and their “authentic” and “genuine” use and pronunciation as central to further variations or conjugations carried out by poets in particular. From Buṭrus al-Bustānī and al-Shartūnī to Fāris al-Shidyāq and Father Anāstās Mārī al-Kirmilī and beyond, the lexicon now became more or less a verbal reconstruction of the nation. In a deft and highly conscious systematization, verbal roots with meanings relevant to nation building increase in number in keeping with needs and priorities. This is what Buṭrus al-Bustānī has to say, for example, in explaining awṭān or homelands: “the love for the homeland is faith,” a maxim that he used as the slogan for his journal al-Jinān (1870–1886). Indeed the members of the Egyptian Academy for Arabic (named for King Fu’ād al-Awwal) were to lay great emphasis on this foundational principle in order to cement the bond between language and nationhood. The justification had already struck root in translations from European scientific scholarship.Footnote 47 In his introduction to Qāmūs al-nahḍah, Ismā‘īl Maẓhar explains his undertaking as necessarily conditioned by a double bind: the need on the one hand to engage “modern Western civilization” and, on the other, the effort to “revive and resurrect transmitted sayings to reconcile borrowing … with the preservation of our Arabism which can be sustained only through language.”Footnote 48 The word qāmūs (dictionary) itself grows genealogically over time to connote enormous semantic, semiotic, and linguistic fields that encompass grammar, logic, and thought. It is no longer only a container of lexis, but rather a generator of identity and nationhood; hence the unabating circulation of the term through the unsevered link with the abundance of the ocean (as used in the title “Qāmūs” and “Muḥit”) and the functional genealogical growth. Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq’s enterprise is not merely to “spy” on the Qāmūs (i.e., Fīrūzabādī’s dictionary) and detect its omissions, but primarily to establish correct genealogies among the family or network of no less than thirty well-known lexicons. He questions the authority of some renowned jurists, historians, grammarians, and polymaths such as Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī (d. AH 911/AD 1505) who, for some reason, omits the mention of the African (i.e., Tunisian) ibn Manẓūr, whose voluminous lexicon Lisān al-‘Arab is cited as exemplary. Al-Shidyāq himself was no ordinary figure among nahḍah intellectuals, and his discerning critique of the Qāmūs has to be read against imprecise interpretations of the presence of language in the modernizing project.Footnote 49
