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  • Chapter 19 - Tree-Rings of Middle Eastern Poetry

  • from Part III - Global Regions
  • Edited by Bonnie Lander Johnson, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Literature and Plants
    Published online:
    06 February 2025
    Print publication:
    13 February 2025, pp 362-380

  • Summary

    This chapter takes its lead from Islamic poetry, which was practiced for centuries in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman-Turkish, and Urdu, in a geography extending from the Middle East to South Asia. Within that cultural universe, it focuses on the relation of the Ottoman lyric tradition to the environment. I address this tradition as the ‘last ring’ encircling a common Islamicate civilisation, after the Turkish critic Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s arboreal tropology, which represents the stages of ‘Muslim Orient’s’ literary-cultural history as encircling each other like tree-rings. While surveying the greenery of the Middle Eastern literatures with an eye on the relationship to the environment they articulate or enable, this article also tests the suggestion that ‘[t]he “Middle East” is euphemism for what was the Ottoman Empire’.