Modernism/modernity

In December of 1976, a heated debate about Arabic poetry raged on the pages of the Times Literary Supplement. It began as a book review. The work in question was British-Egyptian scholar M. M. Badawi’s A Critical Introduction to Modern Arabic Poetry. The review, “Under Western Eyes,” was written by an up-and-coming Palestinian scholar named Edward Said. Said calls Badawi’s method “remorselessly serial,” his optic “not critical . . . but archival,” his voice “more like a harassed cataloguer than a literary critic,” and ultimately suggests, by not-so-subtle implication, that the product of Badawi’s labor is “uninteresting” and “unsophisticated.”² He claims that Badawi views “Arabic literature as something to be judged principally by Western literature, or by ideas about Western literature that were current a century ago” (Said, “Under Western Eyes,” 1560). In a response published the next month, Badawi pointed out what he calls “errors of fact” in Said’s analysis. He calls Said’s reading of his book “hasty and careless” and chalks these [End Page 421] problems up to Said’s “obvious ignorance of the subject” of modern Arabic poetry. Charging that Said’s “complaint” about the book’s chronological framework is one “no Arab schoolboy would make,” Badawi claims Said’s review “casts doubt on his credentials, on his competence to judge such a book.”³

The exchange unfolded in a now-familiar cant: the younger scholar challenged the elder on questions of method and approach, while the older scholar marshaled “credentials” and “qualifications” to discredit his rival and shore up his own empire of expertise. What is most relevant for the purposes of this essay, however, is how Said and Badawi argue across disciplinary lines. Said, the comparatist, longs for close readings of Arabic poetry that might challenge the “categories, conceptual schemes, and metaphors which most critics of Western literature assume have a universal validity” and allow for “new critical formulations” (“Under Western Eyes,” 1599). Badawi, meanwhile, is determined to die on the hill of area studies. His responses epitomize the old-school Arabist’s allergy to what is now known as “theory.” “Unlike Mr. Said,” he writes, “I am not infatuated by the latest fashion, nor am I anxious to use the most up-to-date term, as if literary criticism was a branch of technology” (“Modern Arabic Poetry,” 12).

Although this debate seems to have passed largely unnoticed by scholars of modernism (perhaps because it was concerned with the oft-sidelined field of Arabic poetry), it is nevertheless remarkable how little things have changed in the fifty years since Said and Badawi came to rhetorical blows. Scholars of Arabic poetry still find themselves caught between the “plodding empiricism” of area studies and the clubby Eurocentrism of comparative literature, and the academic publishing market also reflects this dilemma.⁴ Presses claiming to specialize in “literary studies” usually publish only on English, Anglophone, and European literatures, while those with specialties in “Middle Eastern studies” prefer historical and anthropological approaches to “the region,” as it is called. When it comes to the Middle East, in other words, Anglo-American readers are usually presumed to be seeking information, not imagination.⁵

Despite these constraints, three recent books offer new, very different, all refreshing takes on modern Arabic poetry. Robyn Creswell’s City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut, Kevin Jones’s The Dangers of Poetry: Culture, Politics, and Revolution in Iraq, and Huda Fakhreddine’s The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice study very different archives yet continue to ask where exactly Arabic poetry belongs as a field of study (indeed, if it is a discrete field of study at all). Published in the Translation/Transnation series at Princeton University Press, edited by...