The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters

The importance of Muhsin al-Musawi's The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters for the various disciplines tackling Islamic and Arabic knowledge-production is not the originality of its overarching thesis, but its sheer breadth. This work belongs to a decades-long venture of disrupting the early Orientalist stranglehold on the theoretical lenses by which we gauge the Islamic “Orient” and its cultural output. Thoroughly dumbfounded by the outpouring of texts during the mediaeval Islamicate, Orientalists found it promising to register such production, mostly consisting of compendia and commentaries, as signs of uninventive exhaustion. They credited the crushing weight of intellectual and political despotism and identified an endless regurgitation of the old.This dismissive understanding of a centuries-long process of intellectual life spanning multiple geographic, political, and ethnic domains, facilitated what is now viewed by many as “the myth of Islamic decline” and permitted an erasure which allowed Orientalists to focus on two originary points of Islamic relevance: early contact between “Jews on Horses” (to quote Crone's essentialization of early Muslims) and Hellenic culture; and the modernist Islamic/Arab revival sparked by “contact” with European Enlightenment. The Islamicate was attributed one positive value: being the haulers of Hellenic rationalist-humanism. The Islamic decline coincided with the “point” at which the knowledge was transferred from Muslims to Europeans, who then utilized it to flower a humanist Renaissance and a scientific Enlightenment.Al-Musawi's work emerges within a decades-long tradition of unearthing the relevance and originality of the medieval Islamicate (alongside the works of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, George Saliba, and Toshihiko Izutsu). Republic of Letters is a dizzying treasure trove encyclopedic in breadth, covering at least seven centuries. Unlike previous works that focused on individuals, times, and genres, Al-Musawi dumbfounds and takes the reader on an excursion of literary riches along the Islamic cultural landscape. These cultural productions represent not only a continuation of a long-standing tradition which emerges under the direction of the Abbasid courts in which textualization represents expansion and centralization of power, but also the emergence of a self-fueling and dynamic “literary-republic” independent of emerging, decaying, or shifting political centers.Al-Musawi describes this “republic” as the cacophonous rattle of an open market of ideas, tropes, and rhetorical devices, whose vibrancy lies in growing literary networks that in turn facilitate transmission, dialog, criticism, intellectual raids, and contrafaction. Underwriting this dynamism is a shared code that can be seen as a “pervasive Islamic consciousness that takes the Arabic language as its pivotal point” (1).Chapter 1 of this work attempts to overcome the primary evidence for an Islamic intellectual decline: the collapse of a political center (the Abbasid Caliphate) whose symbolic power, acted as centripetal force unifying cultural production with Arabic as language of both the Qur'an and Court, religion and state. This chapter begins with what should seemingly lead to a natural decline of cultural production: the reign of war and conquest of the Mongolian Tīmūr, as he trampled over an Islamic west. The picture that emerges, however, shows the manifold ways in which intellectuals (such as Ibn Khaldūn, Ibn ʿArabshāh, and al-Taftazānī, whose works spawned intellectual reactions for centuries to come) responded, interacted, critiqued, or used Tīmūr's conquests and devastation of the Islamic world as subject in their theories.Of interest is the fact that the collapse of an Arab political center, and the subsequent emergence of multiple non-Arab centers, only furthered the deterritorialization of intellectuals whose “republic” had no political center. The texts, assemblies, networks, and extensive travels of these scholars penned the boundaries of the Islamicate within which a dynamic “republic of letters,” Arabic and Islam thrived despite instability of political power.In Chapter 2, al-Musawi provides us with both an early micromodel of the republic of letters as well as the vehicle by which it would be grounded and developed. For al-Musawi, we have in The Epistles of the Brethren of Purity—an anonymous encyclopedic work that mines through manifold sources of transmitted and rational knowledge, covering topics as diverse as alchemy, music, logic, biology, and metaphysics—a model of collaborative work to make knowledge independent of the court's myopic endeavors. The chapter proceeds with explaining the reason for the “excessive explorations in Arabic lexiconography,” (68) during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The context of such a lexicographic turn, wherein the lexicographer emerges as guardian of a shared Islamic code, is the rise of Persian and Turkish as languages of the court. The competition that emerges as an effect of Arab political disintegration, interestingly, procures both the rise of the polyglot and of Arabic as independent of political center but connected with Islam. A golden-past became its domain.In Chapter 3, the reader is introduced to the textual production that emerges out of this lexicographic turn. Many Orientalists and Arab modernists alike view the vast amounts of lexicons, histories, compendiums, and commentaries as uninventive repositories of antiquarian clutter. Al-Musawi departs from this view in describing how torrentially lexical indexes of knowledge cut across disparate spheres, bringing them into conversation and offering a panoramic view of the Islamicate. Al-Musawi recounts a myriad of examples illustrating the process, where textual productions (i.e., criticism, contrafactions, abridgments, commentaries, etc.) claimed superiority, definitiveness, and specialization. The reader experiences an intensifying network of knowledge, transmission, rendition, and displacement.In Chapter 4, we are confronted with the consequences of the explosion of an “open market economy” of ideas, tropes, and rhetorical devices, by way of scholarly attempts to define plagiarism. Al-Musawi shows consorted efforts to classify multiple levels of absorption and plagiarism between authors and poets, pointing to a dynamic dialog, and attempt to regulate “an incontrollable free activity” (126). Relaxed notions of plagiarism that emerged from multiple authorities challenged authors not just to absorb, but to cunningly raid the work of others, appropriating by way of excelling the raided in style, density, brevity, and meaning.Chapter 5 brings into view the necessary public for whom this literary activity became shared intellectual property in the Islamic republic of letters. No longer produced solely through the support of a reigning political center, the tremendous expansion of the compendium with its panoramic vision of society signaled a readership able to sustain its demand. A case that points to the “public text” and active participation of mass assemblies and teaching sessions “as gateways to discussion and public production” is al-Būsīrī's Burda and its dozens of subsequent imitations. Its shift toward the Prophet as both sacred and human diverts loyalty from earthly rule of the court, democratizing rhetoric.In Chapters 6 and 7, al-Musawi demonstrates the centrality rhetoric held for many of these litterateurs. As master-key to all other intellectual endeavors, including philosophy, jurisprudence, and Qur'anic hermeneutics, the poet and litterateur self-appointed as warden of an Islamic “order of things.” With a basis in the theological dictum of Qur'anic inimitability, and the poet-rhetorician as most apt to understand this vehicle of the sacred, rhetoric and the sacred became coupled. According to al-Musawi, this allowed the litterateur to challenge entrenched yet superficial traditionalisms.Chapter 8 presents us with the multiple modes in which a previous textualization, grounded and scaffolded by the court, was overturned. The rising presence of artisan-poets, street-poets, vagrant-intellectuals, homoerotics, and the carnivalesque within the compendia points to a heteroglossia disrupting traditionalist and state sensibilities. Al-Musawi dedicates much of this chapter to traditionalists' discomfort with esoteric Sufi poetry. Sufi poetry, which raided the poetic tradition's homoerotic, inebriation, and maddening love themes, decoupled ordinary language from its original significations, allowing it to fly into a sphere of dense and elusive meaning.To reiterate, Al-Musawi's The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters participates in the tradition it addresses. Like the compendia, it is not a straightforward read but one that must be mined repeatedly. It is replete with a dizzying array of discussions of texts, assemblies, publics, and spaces in relation to an open-ended expanding tradition that esteems its past while it evades imitation. The one criticism I propose is that the author's inclination to represent this tradition as humanist forces him to delineate a “traditionalist” base which “naturally” allies itself to the state, selling its own textual production as constraint against all that is destabilizing or unorthodox. I was not able to discern who exactly the author is referring to. I am not sure whether the author is referring to the ahl-al hadith, the Hanbalis, or the jurisprudents as a whole—a significant omission of clarity. In this regard, it would be good to point out that the Sufi poetry which he labels as upsetting hegemony could itself be understood as participating in hegemony. For example, the death in prison of Ibn Taymiyya (the author Al-Musawi most identifies with traditionalism, and whose centrality to medieval jurisprudence or even to the Hanbali school is debatable) was the result of Sufi persecution. Nonetheless, the work is a bold and tremendous step in decolonizing our view of the medieval Islamicate

Ancient history · Arabic · Archaeology · Islam · Islamic republic · Linguistics · Classics · Historical and Linguistic Studies · History · Islamic Studies and History · Philosophy

• Interreligious Scholarly Collaboration in Ibn al-Nadīm’s Fihrist

  Open Access•Rémy Gareil•Medieval Worlds•2022

  Añadir item

• The Production and Transmission of Knowledge in Islamicate Courts of the Middle and Early Modern Periods

  Christian Mauder•Intellectual History of the…•2022

  Añadir item

• Inscribing Persian in the Arabic Cosmopolis

  Open Access•Majid Daneshgar, Sajjad Rizvi•Australian Journal of Islamic…•2022

  Añadir item

• Craftsmanship in Literature and Literary Craftsmanship in 9th Century Baghdad

  Chiara Fontana•Quaderni di Studi Arabi•2025

  Añadir item

• Doing Things with Lists—Enumeration in Arabic Prose

  Open Access•Christian Junge•Journal of Arabic Literature•2019

  Añadir item