literature – Hybrid Learning

PERSIAN LITERATURE

Batoota — Mon, 26 Jun 2017 07:19:24 +0000

PERSIAN LITERATURE is a body of poetic and other literary works created principally, but not exclusively, in Iran. Beyond the present political boundaries of Iran proper, Afghanistan, the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, and Turkey have been home to a rich body of literary work written in Persian.
In the context of Iran’s full and multifaceted participation in and contributions to what has been called “the Islamic civilization,” Persian literature constitutes a rich, diversified, and autonomous aesthetic event to which the Iranian, or more accurately Persian-speaking, literati and their historical audiences have actively contributed. In its language and rhetoric, aesthetic and disposition, sensibilities and imagination, this literature is not, to any significant degree, reducible to fundamental tenets and doctrines of Islam. Although the majority of Persian poets and literati have been born to families and raised in environments in one way or another identifiable as “Islamic,” their universe of imagination and literary production constitutes a reality sui generis, a space of aesthetic experience irreducible to any particular religious worldview. Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Manichaeism, Mazdakism, and all the major and minor sectarian divisions within Islam have invariably contributed to the Persian literary imagination. And yet the totality of that imagination is principally an aesthetic phenomenon irreducible to any one of its religious or nonreligious informants.
Perhaps the single most significant aspect of the Persian literary imagination, as it was delivered in a colorful panorama of formal styles and aesthetic sensibilities, is the noncanonical nature of its language. As it gradually developed after the Arab invasion of the early seventh century, modern Persian (as distinct from Pahlavi, or middle Persian, and Avestan, or old Persian) was a language in which no sacred text was believed to have been revealed. As opposed to Hebrew and Arabic, in which the Bible and the Qur’an were revealed, Persian remained a constitutionally vernacular or, more accurately, secular language. The memories of the sacred language of the Avesta and the exegetical language of Pahlavi having been surpassed and superseded by the absolutist hegemony of the Arabic Qur’an, Persian language occupied a noncanonical space in which secular events could occur beyond the doctrinal inhibitions of the sacred Arabic of the Qur’an. It is crucial to remember that there were syncretic religious movements immediately after the Arab invasion, such as Khurramiyah and Bih-Afridiyah, that had occasional rhetorical claims to the revelation of a “Persian Qur’an” (see Sadighi, 1938, et passim; Amoretti, 1975, pp. 489-490; Shahrastani, 1979, vol. 1, p. 397). But with the political demise of such movements, the idea of a “Persian Qur’an” never materialized. The Arabic Qur’an remained the canonical text of all sacred imagination for Muslim Iranians who fully and productively participated in that imagination. The phrase “Persian Qur’an” is later used by `Abd al-Rahmam Jam! (d. 1492), who called Jalal alDin Rumi’s Masnavi “the Qur’an in Persian,” meaning that Rumi’s text has the sacred sanctity of the Qur’an expressed in Persian. Such hyperbolic expressions notwithstanding, the historical fact has always been that Persian remained a noncanonical language in which the literary imagination could be let loose.
The Persian literary imagination has been acted out in a conjunction of multiple sacred imaginings both domestic and foreign to Iranian communities. Zoroastrian, Manichaean, Mithraic, Mazdakian, Hindu, Buddhist, Judaic, Christian, Islamic, and a host of other less politically successful religions have emerged or arrived in historical succession and left indelible marks on Persian literary culture. But the very fact of their multiplicity, that they have come in succession and, in hostility or mutual tolerance, have coexisted together, has prevented any one of them from exercising absolutist, hegemonic power over the Persian literary imagination. Extensive scholarship (Mu`in, 1959; Melikian-Chirvani, 1974, 1984 in particular) has established that Zoroastrian, Manichaean, and Buddhist imageries entered the aesthetic parlance of the Persian literary imagination and endured, even flourished, well into the Islamic period. Even within the Islamic context, sectarianized doctrinal differences continued to divide the active and passive loyalties of Persian literati throughout the ages. Whereas up until the fifteenth century the majority of Persian poets and literati could be identified as Sunnis, after the establishment of the Safavids (1501-1732), Shiism became at least the nominal faith of many poets and writers. Having theological/antitheological, philosophical/antiphilosophical, or so-called Sfifi/anti-Sufi predilections further added to the divisive orientations that loosened the active absolutism of any one particular ideological force over the Persian literary imagination. As for the oral and literary sources of this imagination, Iranian, Indian, Chinese, Arabic, and Turkish material converged to create a multicultural literary universe that went beyond the confines of any particular politics. The world was home to the Persian poet as he or she sat to wonder on the nature and purpose of being.
The first textual evidence of a literary tradition in Iran is the royal inscriptions of the Achaemenid kings, Darius I (522-486 BCE) and Xerxes, his son, in particular. Inscribed in old Persian, these royal texts indicate a proud, self-confident, assertive, and theocentric imagination: “A Great God is Ahura Mazda,” reads one, “who created the earth, who created the sky, who created man, who created happiness for man, who made Darius the King” (quoted in Yarshater, 1988, pp. 5-6). Although theocentric, this royal self-conception is clearly conscious of an individual existence: “Says Darius the King, by the favor of Ahura Mazda I am such a man who is friend to right. I am not a friend to wrong. It is not my wish that the weak man should have wrong done to him by the mighty; nor is it my wish that the mighty man should have wrong done to him by the weak” (Ibid., p. 6). In these inscriptions, the king as narrator extends his authority from the supreme deity, Ahura Mazda, and then acts as an individual full of moral and ethical convictions. With an authority extended from God, Darius the king is the man, the lawgiver, the monarch, the chronicler, and the historian of the Achaemenid’s glorious deeds. In an inscription, Darius gives a rather full, boastful account of how he overthrew Gaumata, a magian who had pretended to be the slain brother of Cambyses, Smardis. Darius’s account is swift, concise, not devoid of narrative elegance.
From the royal inscriptions of the Achaemenids to Zoroaster’s own hymns, the Gathas, there lies a vast arena of imaginative oral traditions that are distilled and barely visible through the Avestan prism. This oral tradition was perpetuated by Iranian minstrels, or gosans who carried forward a fantastic tradition of narrative songs. As storyteller/magicians, gosans had a central social function in ancient, particularly Parthian and Arsacid, communities (see Boyce, 1957). They sang songs, told stories, recited poems, delivered satires, mourned and celebrated on occasions, and carried forward a rich and rewarding tradition of songs and tales, legends and myths, stories and anecdotes (for a discussion of the Avestan literature, see Dale Bishop’s article in Yarshater, 1988, chap. 2).
In the Avesta, the Gathas and the pre-Zoroastrian hymns Zoroaster remembered later, the Yashts, are the first, most comprehensive poetic narrative we have which remain principally subservient to the Zoroastrian sacred imagination. Gods, deities, and heroes, as well as their metahistorical relations to worldly being are the subjects of these sacred narratives in which the poetic plays a vital role. But the same poetic urge that partially subserved the sacred imagination of the Avesta was forcefully at work in the muscular epic narrative of ancient Iranians. As evident through the prism of the Avestan Yashts, a flourishing oral tradition had given epic proportions to legendary rivalries between the Iranian house of Kayaniyan and its perpetual enemies, the
Turanians. Not until the time of Firdawsi (d. about 1025) do we have textual evidence of this effervescent oral tradition, which must have been active and widespread during the composition of the Yashts. Iranian minstrels must have transmitted various versions of these epics from generation to generation. Under the patronage of Parthians and the Arsacids (247 BCE-226 CE), this minstrel tradition was given enough political momentum to permit the extension of a folkloric narrative into a royal lexicon of cultural legitimacy. It has been suggested (Yarshater, 1988, pp. 10-11) that the overwhelming, and politically successful, Eastern (Zoroastrian) tradition overshadowed the receding memory of the legends and histories of the Persians and the Medes, and that by the time of the Sassanians (224-651 CE) only the Kayaniyan legends had been constituted as the legitimizing force at the disposal of courtly scribes.
The Sassanian emperors were the direct beneficiaries of both the sacred and the secular imagination that had informed much of the earlier Iranian communities. Certainly by the time of the composition of Khwaday-namag (The Book of Lords) during the reign of Khusraw II (590-628 CE), the renarration of already ancient legends and stories had assumed legitimizing status. Khwaddynamag represents the earliest extant fictive renarration of a legendary history that puts the poetic occasion at the service of ideological legitimation of the state apparatus. As the first man/king, Gayomarth, in this narrative, presides over the creation and succession of the rendition of much older stories. As “the most important literary heritage of ancient Iran” (Yarshater, 1988, p. 1o), Khwaddy-namag is a compendium of moral and philosophical injunctions as delivered through the Persian poetic imagination. As such, however, it is as much a distant memory of pre-Sassanian legends and stories as it is an immediate mirror of the moral and political imperatives of the Sassanian monarchy. As a supreme example of storytelling, Khwaday-namag preserves some of the rhetorical features that have endured through subsequent variations in the epic genre.
The absence of textual evidence has permitted suggestions that pre-Islamic Persian literature lacked any significant secular literature. “This judgment,” Ehsan Yarshater has suggested, “ignores two basic facts: that the secular literature of Iran prior to Islam was essentially oral, and that much of the early New Persian literature was in fact only a new recension or direct rendering of Middle Persian and Parthian creations” (1988, p. io). As an example, Fakhr al-Din As’ad al-Gurgani’s (d. about 1063) eleventh-century modern Persian renditions of the love story Vis and Rdmin is our textual link to the Parthian version of the story available to al-Gurgani in middle Persian and Georgian. As an adventurous love story, Vis and Rdmin reads in marked contrast to Darakht-i asurig, which, extant in middle Persian, provides one of the earliest examples of didactic dialogics in Persian poetry, in this case between a tree and a goat. Among an overwhelming body of religious verses that Manichaean and Zoroastrian priests produced in Parthian and Pahlavi, Aydagar-i zariran and Drakht-i asurig are among the few textual examples of a secular literary imagination. Indirectly, however, we know of a more elaborate secular literature. What in later sources is identified as Fahlav iyat refers to an elaborate body of beautiful poetic traditions–Surud, Chakdmah, and Tardnah among them-with which even the later Persian poets, whose prosody was considerably arabicized, were familiar.
The Persian literature produced after the Arab invasion of the seventh century was thus both textually and orally heir to a substantial body of literature that, whether in direct (written or oral) tradition or in continuation of literary imagination, persisted well into the later periods. As it gradually emerged as a noncanonical language, Persian evolved into a literary language of monumental imagination. Always under the shadow of Arabic, modern Persian carried within its slanted relation of power to Arabic the debilitating memory of the decisive Battle of Qadisiyah (June 637) in which the Persians were defeated by the newly Muslim Arabs. In a remarkable division of creative imagination, the Persian scientific and philosophical writings were produced primarily, but not exclusively, in Arabic, while their literary output continued to flourish in Persian. Arabic then became the paternal language of the hegemonic theology, jurisprudence, philosophy, and science, while the maternal Persian, the language of mothers’ lullabies and wandering singers, songwriters, and storytellers, constituted the subversive literary imagination of a secular and poetic conception of being.
As Iraq (Baghdad in particular) emerged as the cultural capital of the Arabic west, Khurasan (Nishapur in particular) emerged as the cultural capital of the Persian east. From the central heartland of Khurasan, Persian literature spread as far east as the Indian subcontinent, as far west as the Balkans, as far north as China, and as far south as the Persian Gulf. Contemporary Iranians, Afghans, Tajiks, Indians, Pakistanis, Turks, and Arabs have almost as equal a claim on the literary history of Persian as they have on Arabic and Turkish. Relations of power, the changing features of royal patronage, revolutions, wars, invasions, and conquests have had much more to do with literary productions than anything ethnic, racial, or linguistic. For Turkish warlords, in particular, Persian literature became the chief ideological legitimizer of their rule. As an apparatus of political legitimation, production of Persian literature functioned as one of the principal ideological forces at the disposal of the Ghaznavids (977-1186), the Seljuks (1038-1194), and even the Ottomans (1281-1924). As a courtly artifact, Persian poetry was equally present and instrumental in India, particularly during the reign of the Mughals (1526-1858). Exacerbated by the coming to power of the Shi’i Safavids (1501-1722), who, having substituted Shiism as the state ideology, had no particular need, penchant, time, or taste for Persian poetry, Persian and Indian poets found India a more congenial place than Iran. The result of this historical displacement is that any history of Persian literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ought to be traced to India rather than Iran. Whether self-consciously or not, dynasties that considered themselves Turkish, Persian, or Indian throughout the medieval period adopted the political apparatus of Persian poetry to fulfill the major ideological task of state legitimation in a space adjacent to other, principally Islamic modes and modalities of legitimacy.
The roots of Persian poetic imagination in the ideological apparatus of the Persian court is evident in the first, most successful form of its historical record, that is, the panegyrics (see Meisami, 1987). As it emerged in Khurasan between the tenth and twelfth centuries, Persian court poetry put itself at the disposal of the Samanids (819-1005) and the Ghaznavids, who consciously fashioned themselves after the enduring memories of the Sassanians. As Rudaki (d. 940), Farrukhi (d. 1037), and Manuchihri (d. 1040), among scores of others, marked the particular characteristics of Persian panegyric poetry, marks of chivalry and warfare, as symbolics of banquets and feasts, found their way into the operative repertoire of Persian aesthetics (for a full discussion of the prominent features of court poetry, see Jerome E. Clinton’s article in Yarshater, 1988, chap. 4). But perhaps the most striking aspect of this poetry, best exemplified by Rudaki’s pictorial representations of nature, Farrukhi’s penchant for exquisite physical details, and Manuchihri’s festive celebration of nature and particularly his joyous description of wine and wine drinking, is its worldly imagination, which has an unmitigated, direct, and spontaneous contact with the physicality of being. Thus, although Persian panegyrics developed into a highly stylized courtly form, its imageries and historical consciousness represent a wide spectrum of aesthetic and material sensibilities.
Rooted in the same political necessity, as well as in Persian folkloric traditions, is the epic poetry that comes to its fullest and aesthetically most sustained manifestation in Firdawsi’s Shahndmah. Composed in some fifty thousand couplets over a period of thirty years, Shahnamah is a singular heroic narrative of a people’s mythical, legendary, and historical memories. In Shahnamah, Firdawsi brings the diverse and scattered memories of a people he deliberately identifies as “Iranians” into the sustained imaginative force of a single poetic event. Shahnamah is self-consciously heroic, from its metrics to its diction. Firdawsi’s epic narrative describes the heroic deeds of Rustam, the treacheries of Zahhak, the innocence of Siyavush, the bedeviling attraction of Sudabah, the tragedies of Suhrab and Isfandyar, the love stories of Bizhan and Manizhah, Zal and Rfidabah. What holds these stories together is Firdawsi’s self-conscious presence, his periodic interruptions of the epic narrative to dwell on the nature of human beings and their destiny, his unfailing moral gaze at the glories and atrocities of human existence. Firdawsi tells old stories with an unmistakably moral verve that operates in the towering imagination of a self-confident poet, fully conscious of his epic narrative (for two excellent essays on Shahnamah, see the articles by William L. Hanaway and Amin Banani in Yarshater, 1988, chaps. 5 and 6, respectively; for a good translation of a story from Shahndmah, see Firdawsi, 1933)
If epic poetry appealed to the heroic aspirations of both the changing monarchies and of folkloric traditions at large, a particular aspect of it, the romantic, catered to finer sensibilities of love and adventure. By the time Nizam! (d. 1209) composed his famous Khamsah, the Persian romantic tradition was already rich and diversified. Written about 105o, Gurgani’s Vis and Ramin borrowed from pre-Islamic Iranian themes and constructed the first and most successful example of this genre. Vis and Rdmin of Gurgani is one of the most brilliant examples of Persian narrative poetry, one in which preIslamic stories are resuscitated with powerful poetic imagination. The origin of Vis and Ramin has been traced back to the Sassanian (226-652) or even Arsacid (250 BCE-224 CE) period. Gurgani reports that he found
the Pahlavi version of this story in Isfahan and, following the orders of Abu al-Fath Muz, affar al-Nishapuri, rewrote it in poetic Persian with particular attention to the dramatic rhetoric of storytelling (for a comprehensive essay on Vis and Ramin, see M. J. Mahjoub’s introduction to his critical edition of the text, Gurgani, 1959; for an excellent prose translation, see Gurgani, 1972). In producing his version, Gurgani took advantage of both written and oral accounts of the story, but he embellished and delivered it with particular attention to the details of dramatic delivery, a trademark of Persian narrative poetry. Adopting a number of Pahlavi words in his poetic rendition, Gurgani produces a clear narrative with a stunning simplicity as its moving energy. Despite the brilliance of its poetic composition, Vis and Ramin experienced a period of eclipse when its uncompromising celebration of physical love offended Islamic sensibilities. Nevertheless, Vis and Ramin had a profound impact on subsequent Persian romances, not least on the master of Persian romantic narrative, Nizarrn.
Nizami’s brilliant achievement in Khamsah (Quintet), however, brought the Persian romantic tradition to a height comparable to Firdawsi’s achievement in epic poetry. In a masterful construction of a dramatic narrative, Nizaml, always personally present in his tales, constructs a literary humanism resting on nothing but the dramatic movement of his own power of storytelling. Khamsah consists of five narratives, each evolving around a thematic treatment of love and adventure. As evident in such stories as “Khusraw and Shirin” and “Layl! and Majnfin,” Nizami took full advantage of dramatic techniques to develop a particularly haunting narrative of love and adventure (for an excellent introduction to Nizami’s poetry, see Peter Chelkowski’s article in Yarshater, 1988, chap. 1o; J. C. Biirgel’s article in the same volume, chap. 9, is a comprehensive introduction to the genre).
The romantic genre thus brought to full fruition by Nizam! soon unfolded into a rich tradition to which such gifted poets as Amir Khusraw Dihlav! (d. 1325), Khwaju Kirmani (d. 1352), and `Abd al-Rahman Jam! (d. 1492) added dimension and brilliance, qualities never to reach the height of the master of the genre, Niz am! himself.
Whereas both the epic and the romantic genres demanded longer attention spans, the brevity of lyrical poetry tested the power of the Persian poets for the economy of their wording. From its origins in amorous occasions in the panegyric, epic, and romantic poetries, lyrical poetry emerged and found its most successful and enduring form in Persian ghazal. Ghazal became the functional equivalent of musical sonatas in Persian poetry. With sustained and implacable economy of wording, masters of Persian lyrics, principally Sa’di (d. 1292) and Hafiz (d. 1390), shed all extrapoetic functions of poetry and created perhaps the most artistically successful experience in the whole spectrum of Persian literature. Ghazal is the aesthetic challenge of brevity, the formal occasion of poetic mastery, a short space where the mosaics of words, sensibilities, and imageries demand the best in aesthetic creativity that a poet can command.
Although the origins of ghazal go back to such masterful practitioners as Sand’! (d. 1130) and Nizami (d. 1209), it is with Sa`di (d. 1292) that the miniaturesque composition of lyrics comes to its most brilliant fruition. Sa’dis ghazals are the very picture of beauty and subtlety. Rarely has a Persian poet had such a perfect, almost magical, command over words, with flawless harmony in their sound effects. The sheer musicality of Sa’di’s ghazals defies all description. His ghazals read and sound like a Chopinesque nocturne: crisp, clear, concise, brevity the very soul of their amorous movements. Sa’dis works portray a human, physical, perfectly tangible love that registers with unfailing impact. The whole spectrum of Persian poetic repertoire, having come to perfection by the thirteenth century, is at the disposal of Sa’di. Never after Sa’di did classical Persian ghazal benefit from the ingenious powers of such a word magician. Sa’di’s lyrical humanism is arguably the zenith of Persian poetry and all its worldly possibilities (for a discussion of Persian lyric poetry, see Heshmat Moayyad’s article in Yarshater, 1988, chap. 7).
Neither the romantic nor the lyrical possibilities of Persian poetry escaped the attention of Persian mystics. Devoted to a particular doctrinal reading of the Qur’an and of the Muhammadan message, the Persian Sufis joined their Arab, Turkish, and Indian brethren in a massive mystification of the physical world. Finalized in the doctrine of wahdat al-wujud (the Unity of Being), the Sufis collectively engaged in a radical mystification of both literature and love. Persian lyrical poetry in particular proved most appropriate for such a grand act of mystification. Three successive poets, Sand’! (d. 1130), `Attar (d. about 1220), and Rum! (d. 1273), are chiefly recognized as the master-builders of Persian mystical poetry.
With Saud’i we witness the decline of the court as the great patron of Persian poetry and the rise of religious sentiments to substitute the physical beauties that principally informed Persian poetry’s imaginative repertoire. The substantial mystification of Sand’! by later Sufis is not borne out by the actual presence of religious sensibilities in his poetry. Sana’i professed that his worldly poetics did not in any significant way promote his station in life, and that consequently he decided to devote his talent to religious poetry. He blamed his contemporaries, a vague reference to his liaisons with the Ghaznavid court, for not having appreciated his poetry. He seems to have felt particularly humiliated by submitting his poetic gift to the brute taste of his patrons. He was the master of the world of words, he thought, and yet a servile slave to his brute masters. As a result, he informs us, he abandons worldly poetry and turns his attention to religious matters. But the conversion is not so dramatic as to abandon poetry altogether. He simply decides to attend to religious matters poetically. “My poetry shall be a commentary on Religion and Law / The only reasonable path for a poet is this.” Despite his Shi’i sentiment, Sand’! equally praised the first three caliphs, indicating a less than zealous religiosity (see Safa, vol. 2, p. 560 for a discussion). Nevertheless, later Sufis took full advantage of this “conversion” and fabricated fantastic stories about it, turning Sana’i into a fullfledged Sufi. As a poet, however, Sana’i remained singularly attached to religious matters, a fact best represented not only in his poetry but also in his pilgrimage to Mecca, which he undertook from Khurasan (for further details, see De Bruijn, 1983).
After his Mecca pilgrimage, a friend of Sanai, a man named Khvdjah `Amid Ahmad ibn Mas’ud, provided him with a home and daily sustenance and asked Sana’i to collect his own poems and prepare a divan (collection of poetry). Sana’i spent the rest of his life in this house in Ghaznin and compiled his collected works, including his masterpiece Hadiqat al-hagiqah. Sana’i’s divan, masterfully edited in more than thirteen thousand verses by Mudarris Radavi, is a compendium of his secular and religious sensibilities. His mada’ih, (panegyric praises) demonstrate Sand’i’s mastery of the genre and are clear indications of a boastful awareness of his poetic gifts. Hadiqat al-hagiqah va shari’at al-tariqah (also known as Ilahi-namah) is by far the most significant work of Sana’i which he composed between 1129 and 1130 in ten thousand verses. Sand’! dedicated this masnavi couplet to the Ghaznavid warlord Bahramshah (r. 1118-1152). Hadiqat begins with conventional salutations to God, the Prophet, and his companions, and then proceeds to poetic discourses on reason, knowledge, wisdom, and love. In his original version, something must have been in Sana’i’s Hadiqat that caused the anger of contemporary religious authorities. He sent a copy of it to a prominent religious authority, Burhan al-Din Abu al-Hasan ‘Ali ibn Ndsir al-Ghaznavi, in Baghdad and asked him to issue an edict in its support. In his letter, composed in the form of a poem, Sand’! went so far as to identify Hadiqat as “the Qur’an in Persian,” a phrase that has been used for other texts as well, particularly by Jam! in reference to Rumi’s Masnavi. Immediately after the death of Sand’!, there was no complete version of Hadiqah extant. Muhammad ibn `All al-Raffa’, a Sufi as judged by his introduction, prepared an edition of the text.
Karnamah -yi Balkh, another masnavi of Sana’i thought to be the earliest poetic composition, is in an entirely worldly and humorous mode. Composed for the Ghaznavid ruler Mas`ud ibn Ibrahim, Karnamah -yi Balkh is full of praises for the nobility and poetic dialogues with his contemporary poets. Sayr al-`ibad ild alMa`ad, Tariq al-tahqiq, and `Ishq-namah are three other of Sand’I’s masnavis.
`Attar’s Mantiq al-Tayr, among his numerous other masnavis, has been persistently read as a mystical allegory, foretelling Rumi’s masnavi to be composed later in the same century. `Attar’s story of a group of birds persuaded by the hoopoe (Hudhud) to look for a King is a simple didactic narrative. Thirty of the many birds thus persuaded to look for their King finally make it to their destination, where they meet Simurgh (the “thirtybird,” or simply a reflection of the thirty birds). (For a brilliant translation of this poem, see `Attar, 1984.)
Sand’i and `Attar’s experimentation with didactic masnavi narrative for suggestion of mystical allegories ultimately reached Rum-1, in whose hands Persian mystical poetry achieves its height and most prolific potentials. Rumi’s Masnavi, dubbed “the Qur’an in Persian” by Jam!, is the highest achievement and the metalogical conclusion of Persian mystical poetry. Rum! took equal advantage of Persian ghazal lyricism and supplanted his mystical love where the physical love of Sa’di was. With slight poetic modifications in conceptual and aesthetic sensibilities, Rumi gave full expression to a mystical narrative that postulated an all-loving God presiding over the worldly manifestation of his omnipresence. Man in Rumi’s narrative became a Man-God potentially endowed with the realization of all divine attributes. Rumi’s became a passionate quest inward, toward the realization of God within (for the English translation of Rfimi’s Masnavi, see Rumi, 1925-1940).
After Rum-1 the colossal mystification of Persian lyrical and romantic poetry was so pervasive and powerful that not until the advent of modernity in the wake of the Constitutional Revolution of 1906-1911 did an alternative universe of poetic imagination have a literary space to emerge. The only exception to that massive mystification in premodern Persian poetry is in the lyrical poetry of Hafiz and a whole new universe of aesthetic sensibilities that he created.
With Hafiz (d. 1390), Persian lyrical poetry reached a new height, the refreshing space of a whole new poetic thinking. Hafiz’s poetic narrative, the physical beauty of his verses, is above and beyond anything achieved before or after in Persian lyrics (for a sample of his poems, see Hafiz, 1897). In Hafiz’s poetry dwells an unrelenting engagement with the physical presence of life, with the stunning irreducibility of being. He comes after both Sa’di and Rumi, and in a remarkable way weds the worldliness of one to the passionate intensity of the other. Hafiz’s ghazals defy the temptations of Rumi’s mysticism, confront the world directly, and shift Sa’dis worldliness to a new, aesthetically more compelling, engagement with being. The overriding sentiments of Hafiz’s lyricism is the pivotal primacy of physical love necessitated by an existentially ironic and paradoxical conception of being. The two crosscutting senses of paradox and irony give Hafiz’s conception of love a critical sense of urgency:
Seize the moment, you and I here together, Once The short trip over, and we shall never meet again.
And as for the promises of knowledge and wisdom to mediate any conception of being:
Thank God, just like us, no faith no fidelity
Was in he who was called the wise, the trustworthy!
Testing the power of brevity in Persian poets even more vigorously than ghazal was ruba’i or du-bayti (quatrains). Baba Tahir-i `Uryan (d. about 1o63) was the indubitable master of a stunningly beautiful, yet irreducibly simple, genre of quatrains most probably first comprised in Lori dialect and then modified by later scribes to literary Persian (Safa, vol. 2, p. 386).
A farmer was once waiting in a pasture, Crying sadly while to his tulips he attended. “Alas,” he said, as he planted his flowers, “That we should plant and leave them unattended.”
Baba Tahir’s imageries are drawn from daily observations, to which a twist of unexpected poetic significance is given. Reading and understanding Baba Tahir requires no grand leap of faith. He addresses simple but compelling realities that can immediately register with his readers. A feeling of the simultaneous beauty and brutality of life abounds in his poetry (for a translation of Baba Tahir’s poetry, see Baba Tahir, 1902).
In `Umar Khayyam’s (d. about 1129) quatrains, however, Persian literature finally recognized one of its greatest potentials: an autonomous poetic voice radically subversive of all metaphysics, of all unexamined sacred assumptions (the most deservedly famous translation of Khayyam is that of Edward FitzGerald; see Khayyam, 1859). The prevalence of historical references to Khayyam in Persian primary sources make the Orientalist assumption that prior to FitzGerald’s translation, Khayyam was not significantly recognized or appreciated highly dubitable. Equally challenging that assumption is the still widespread presence of oral traditions of Khayyamesque quatrains. In the Persian and Arabic primary sources (e.g., Nizami `Arudi’s Chahar maqalah or alQifti’s Akhbdr al-hukamd’) Khayyam is widely reported in association with quite a number of his prominent potential contemporaries. Ibn Sina (Avicenna, d. 1036), Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 11 I I ), Hasan alSabbah (d. 1124), and Nizami al-hulk (d. 1092) are among historical characters associated, in fiction or in fact, with `Umar Khayyam. Whether identified as a philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, or poet, Khayyam was widely known, loved, and respected by his contemporaries. This wide contemporary recognition is crucial to an understanding of the centrality of `Umar Khayyam in the Persian literary imagination.
`Umar Khayyam’s poems, marked principally by a frightful recognition of the fragile beauty of life, reject all intermediaries of human existential understanding. In these quatrains Khayyam confronts and celebrates reality-always with a fearful embracement that trembles with life and anxiety-without a moment of neglectful blinking. Khayyam’s quatrains are as compelling, simple, and unadumbrated:
Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough, A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse-and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.
as they are matter-of-factly subversive of all the metaphysics of the sacred:
You are a compound of the elements four, The seven planets rule your fevered life. Drink wine, for I have said a thousand times That you will not return: once gone, you’re gone.
In marked contrast to Khayyam’s constitutional doubt is Nasir-i Khusraw’s (AH 394-481/1003-1088 CE) propagational poetry, which he put fully at the disposal of his Isma`ili faith. Nasir-i Khusraw, as one of the most significant figures in Iranian intellectual history, had a profound effect on Persian poetic imagination. As an Isma’ili da’i (propagandist) he put his immense poetic power at the full service of his faith. In such philosophical treatises as Jami` al-hikmatayn, Zdd al-musafirin, and Khvdn va ikhvdn, Nasir-i Khusraw expounded protoNeoplatonic ideas in the Persian philosophical tradition. In his Safar-namah he demonstrated an uncanny capability for critical social observations. But it was chiefly in his poetry that he is observed as a staunch ethicist fully aware, proud even, of his poetic powers. Much of Nasir-i Khusraw’s poetry is also autobiographical, in the sense that he gives a full and detailed account of his moral and intellectual dilemmas at various stages of his life. Although he ultimately put his poetic gift fully in the service of the Isma’ili cause, Nasir-i Khusraw leaves a detailed trace of his doubts and uncertainties prior to his conversion to Isma’ilism. His poetry in fact gives a rather full account of all sectarian, juridical, theological, philosophical, and even interreligious divisions that divided his contemporaries (for a sample of his poetry, see Schimmel, 1993)
By the end of the thirteenth century, classical Persian poetry reached its zenith. `Abd al-Rahman Jam! is universally recognized as the last master practitioner of the classical style of practically all genres, with the exception of the epic (for a sample of his poetry, see Jami, 1956). During the Safavid period, Shiism functioned as the operative state ideology, and as a result the royal patronage of poetry considerably declined. Persian poetic imagination flourished in India and at the Mughal (1568-1858) court. Not until the middle of the eighteenth century did the Persian literary imagination take partial advantage of the Safavid demise and begin to reassert itself. With the decline of the Safavid in the mideighteenth century and the rise of the intervening dynasties of the Afshars (1736-1795) and the Zands (1750-1794), the Shi`i ideological grip began to loosen. Nadir Shah Afshar (r. 1736-1747), in particular, weakened Shiism considerably when he contemplated its effective doctrinal elimination by reducing it to the fifth school of Islamic law (see Arjomand, 1984). The socalled Literary Revival (Bazgasht-i Adabi) in the eighteenth century, and the relative prominence that such poets as Hatif-i Isfahani (d. 1783) found in that move-ment, was a substantial response to the decline of Persian literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This revival, however, could not and did not do much to put the Persian literary imagination on a new plane. Age-old imageries and sensibilities began to be resuscitated in the service of new dynasties. The Qajars (1796-1925) succeeded the Zands as the penultimate variation on the theme of Persian monarchy. With very few exceptions, Qajar monarchs were deeply corrupt despots, overpowering against their own defenseless subjects, weaklings and servile in front of their powerful external adversaries. The so-called literary revival could only serve outdated and repleted imageries full of empty praises for deeply corrupt kings. Even the spontaneous zeal of the Babi movement, led by Sayyid `Ali Muhammad Shirazi (d. 1849), which produced a brilliant poet in one of its radical exponents, Tahirah Qurrat al-`Ayn (d. 1851), could not for long save Persian poetic imagination from futile redundancy. What Persian literature needed, and received, were two major political and poetic revolutions.
The Constitutional Revolution of 1906-1911 was the festive birth of Iran as a nation of self-conscious citizens mobilized to define their inalienable rights. The Constitutional poetry in particular became the tumultuous birth channel of the dominant ideas of nation and nationalization (see Aryanpur, 1978). The occasion of the Constitutional Revolution, in which the absolutist monarchy of the Qajars was forced to accept the central political authority of a national assembly (majlis), gave full, colorful, and enduring expressions to hopes, fears, and aspirations of a nation in the making. In the hands of these revolutionary poets, Persian poetic narratives were recast into the formative mold of a whole new aesthetic self-conception. Persian language in effect was liberated from old and tired repetition of outdated sensibilities. Iraj Mirza’s (d. 1925) brutal satire, `Arif’s (d. 1933) stunningly beautiful lyricism, Parvin I’tisami’s (19071941) quiet anger, and Farrukhi Yazdi’s (d. 1939) radical socialism gave fresh and invigorating blood to Persian poetry.
The revolutionary effervescent created by the poetry of the Constitutional period continued well into the 1920s and 1930s. But the political momentum that the revolution had given to the Persian poetic imagination was not internal and strong enough to shed the shackles of tired, old formalities forever. Toward that end a revolution was needed from within the poetic imagination itself, a radical rethinking of the poetic act that would match the revolution without.
If the poetry of the Constitutional Revolution of 1906-1911 gave birth to the Iranian “nation,” the Nimaic revolution in Persian poetics was commensurate with the birth of the Persian “individual.” Nima Yushij (1897-196o), the indisputable founding father of “New” Persian poetic imagination (shi’r-i naw), gave full theoretical and poetic expression to a whole new universe of creative imagination in Persian poetry. There is no historical comparison to what Nima did in Persian poetics in the millennium-old history of Persian poetry. Through a sustained theoretical and practical rethinking of the very act of poetic imagination, Nima revolutionized Persian poetry to the marrow of its bones and opened a vast spectrum of creative reconception of poetic being. Against tremendous odds, antagonized by generations of hostile and mediocre contemporaries, Nima singlehandedly made a monumental case for a radical rethinking in the very constitutional configuration of sensibilities that make a particular narrative “poetic.”
Nima radically questioned the very validity of all hegemonic prosodies and persuasively argued for what he considered the innate, “natural” musicality of the poetic narrative itself as it emerges from the creative imagination of the poet. Nima argued that the hegemonic dictation of no extrapoetic prosody should hamper that innate force and presence of the poetic narrative. Futile attempts have been made to trace the aesthetic origins of the Nimaic revolution to vague and conventional references to “The West.” The fact, however, is that in his major theoretical manifesto, Arzish-i ihsasat dar zindagiyi hunarmand (The Significances of Sensibilities in the Life of [an] Artist), Nima makes as many references to Russian, French, and German poets and theorists as he does to classical Persian and Arab prosodists. His argument, theoretical as indeed the very reading of his poetic narrative, is sui generis. Undoubtedly Nima’s knowledge of his contemporary Russian and French poetics was as much a part of his radical rethinking of the Persian poetics as his knowledge of his own classical heritage. But no amount of historical or geographical genealogy or archeology can account for the unprecedented individuality of his poetic revolution. Nima changed the landscape and the topology of Persian poetic imagination, the very terms and thrusts of its worldly engagements.
Nima had to suffer the consequences of his poetic genius. With few but crucial exceptions, his contemporaries had no taste or patience for his radical reconfiguration of Persian poetics. Powerful and influential neoclassicists vehemently opposed him. But a group of young but extremely talented poets picked up where he had left off. Chief among these young followers is Ahmad Shamlu (b. 1925), who pushed the Nimaic poetics to even fresher, physically more tangible, edges. The radical physicality of Shamlu’s poetry, and ultimately his unbelievably daring experimentations with the full potentialities of Persian language, his poetico-politics, gave a supremely elegant twist to every possibility of poetic materialism available in Persian. In his hand, and through the effervescent force of his creative imagination, Persian poetic drive was pushed to exhilarating edges of radical narrativity. In his poetry, all extrapoetic realities dissolve and rise obediently to meet the poetic.
Another major voice in the Nimaic movement was the most eloquent feminine voice in the entire history of Persian poetry: Furfigh Farrukhzad (1935-1967). No woman had hitherto dared to subvert so much so publicly in such a short span of time. Furfigh’s decidedly feminine voice settled a millennium-old account of suffocating silence imposed on the Iranian woman in her relentlessly patriarchal society. Furugh’s naked, exquisite, beautiful, and daring subversion of Persian cultural taboos was so radical that it would take generations of her readers to map out the range of physical sensibilities with which she dared to experiment (see Hillmann, 1987).
Mahdi Akhavan-i Salis (1928-1990) was yet another forceful poetic voice that successfully and convincingly combined the best and the most eloquent potentialities of the Khurasani poetic tradition with an unflinching political commitment to radical reutilization of the Persian poetic. The result was a nuanced and barely noticeable balance between a poetic narrative that had nothing but its own story to tell and a relentless engagement with the political. Akhavan’s poetry is a nostalgic reading of a glorious past that may or may not have been there and yet was narratively put there to make the present read a particularly powerful song. His poetry then became the conscience of a whole generation of poetic politics: a poetry that took zest and momentum from life, a politics that was embedded in the humanizing force of poetry.
In the same category of the master lyricists of the “New” Persian poetic imagination is Suhrab Sipihri (1928-1980), who gave momentous, elegant, and stunningly beautiful expression to a radical physicality in his poetry. A painter-poet, Sipihri utilized almost identical strokes of simple, articulate, and deceptively naive staccatos to create sheer astonishment at the awesome physicality of the mere act of living, of the forceful, absolutist, conception of existence.
In many respects a follower of Akhavan in poetic diction and sentiment is Isma’il Khu’i (b. 1938) who, from an early romantic beginning, grew to fruition in the post-Islamic Revolution period as a poet of massive rhetorical skills put squarely in the service of a severe, almost debilitating, anticlerical sentiment. KhfiTs poetry in the 1980s emerged as the most articulate voice of Iranian diaspora in total disillusion with the consequences of the Islamic Revolution in Iran (1978-198o).
Two unusually gifted poets-Ahmad Riga Ahmadi (b. 1940) and Manuchihr Yakta’i (b. 1921)-took the Nimaic revolution in poetic narrative to yet another direction. Fuller experimentations with the aesthetic possibilities of the poetic narrative became paramount in Ahmadi’s poetry. Having lived most of his adult life in New York, Manuchihr Yakta`i, yet another painter-poet in the Nimaic tradition, has been in a state of almost obsession with narrative experimentation. Coming to him from a distance, as it were, has made the poetic narrative of Nima something of a linguistic fable for Yakta’i, folding and unfolding itself in self-descriptive directions.
Closer to popular taste but with no particularly significant connection to these phenomenal revolutions in Persian poetics were a number of poets, such as Faridun Mushiti (b. 1926), Faridun Tavallull (b. 1919), Hushang Ibtihaj (H. I. Sayah, b. 1927), Simin Bihbahani (b. 1927), Nadir Nadirpur (b. 1929), and Manuchihr Shaybani (b. 1923). At times virtuoso performers of pictoral and mental imageries, these poets had no particularly powerful connection to their time and space and spoke mostly of outdated and even irrelevant sentimentalities. The effective shock of the Islamic Revolution had a considerable impact on some of these poets-for example, Hushang Ibtihaj and Simin Bihbahani-but not to such a degree as to cause a drastic, qualitative change in their poetic diction or the narrative force of their creative imagination.
The Islamic Revolution in Iran subjected Persian poetry to a major political shock. The leading poets of the early 1970s, whose level and mode of discourse was established by the political-poetic power of Ahmad Shamlu, fully participated in the course of the revolution so far as they thought it a monumental, secular event. In the wake of the revolution, Shamlu, moved to London and published Iranshahr, a journal that took full political and intellectual account of the event. After the success of the revolution and the commencement of its islamization, Shamlu, moved back to Iran and started a new journal, Jum`ah, to which the leading secular intellectuals contributed.
With the successful islamization of the revolution, Persian poetic imagination went into a major period of hiatus characterized by effective neoclassical islamization (characterized by Tahirah Saffarzadah), silent secular commitment (represented by Ahmad Shamlu), and radical exilic defiance (best voiced in the most recent poems of Isma’il Khu’i).
In the meantime, a new generation of Iranian poets are coming of age and fruition-some inside Iran, others in exile. This generation is too young to remember with any degree of intensity the particular package of sensibility carried for long by the no longer so “New” poetry. The rising spirit that informs and animates this generation is bilingual to the soul of its apparition.
Modern Persian fiction received its greatest narrative and aesthetic impetus from Muhammad `All Jamalzadah (b. 1892) and Sadiq Hidayat (1903-1951). With such works as Yaki bud, Yaki nabud, and Sar-va tah yik karbas, Jamalzadah successfully brought earlier attempts at a simplified prose to an effective and promising conclusion. He built on decades of revolutionary, simplified prose from the Constitutional period and rescued the suffocating Persian prose from the shallow formalism of the Qajar period. While Jamalzadah’s simple, effective, colorful colloquialism provided ample opportunity for Persian prose to cultivate expressions of diverse social types and groupings, Hedayat took that prose and drove it into the darkest and most unexplored corners of Iranian communal and individual sensibilities. Hidayat’s The Blind Owl is the first and the most successful attempt to reach for and achieve a literary narrative in frightful tune with irreducible (at times even ahistorical) anxieties of being. Publication of The Blind Owl in the early 1940s was followed by other novellas and short stories, chief among them Hajji aqa (1945). Although many prominent writers-for example, Buzurg `Alavi (b. 1904), Sadiq Chfibak (b. 1916), Mahmfid I’timadzadah (b. 1915), and Jalal Al-i Ahmad (1923-1969)~-followed Hidayat’s socially conscious fiction, no other author matched, let alone surpassed, him in his existential insights in The Blind Owl. The only exception to this assertion is perhaps the brilliant achievements of Ibrahim Gulistan (b. 1922), who took up and developed a particularly compelling aspect of Hidayat’s legacy, namely, an unswerving penchant for the primacy of the aesthetic narrative. In such brilliant staccatos as “Az rfizgar-i raftah hikayat” and “Jui va divar-i tishnah,” Gulistan created and sustained flawless sketches of a descriptive self-signification that always surpassed the traces of its own acts of significations. What exactly these highly stylized, flawlessly crafted, descriptions “meant” or “signified” almost fades under the dazzling brilliance of the aesthetic act of narrativity itself.
Standing exactly at the opposite side of Gulistan is Ali Ahmad, who took Hidayat’s social realism and carried it to thinly fictionalized political mainfestos. Infinitely more effective as an essayist and an engage intellectual, Al-i Ahmad’s perhaps most successful fiction was Nun va al-qalam (translated as By the Pen), in which he borrowed from traditional narratives to depict a revolutionary society in the wake of a popular uprising.
In the same generation, and somewhere between Gulistan’s aesthetic narrativity and Al-i Ahmad’s excessive realism, is Sadiq Chfibak, one of the most prolific writers. In such works as Tanqsir and Antari kih lutiash murdah bud, Chfibak paid critical attention to the narrative realism of his art. Having been born and bred in southern Iran, Chfibak was chiefly responsible for introducing a whole new repertoire of southern sensibilities to modernist Persian fiction, a trend that was then successfully pursued by Ahmad Mahmfid in such works as Hamsayah ha and Zd’in dar zir-i baran.
The more aesthetically serious work that commenced with Hidayat and continued with Gulistan was subsequently picked up by perhaps the most brilliant contemporary writer, Hushang Gulshiri (b. 1938). Gulshiri’s Prince Ihtijab reads in the same vein as Hidayat’s The Blind Owl and Gulistan’s “Az rfizgar-i raftah hikayat.” Manipulating the tormented consciousness of a Qajar prince, Gulshiri masterfully re-creates in Prince Ihtijab the social and psychological malaise of a whole cycle of corruption and decay. Love and loyalty, power and seduction, corruption and decay, are the undercurrents of a narrative labyrinth that weaves its own story around itself.
Simin Danishvar (b. 1921), Shahrnfish Parsipfir (b. 1946), Munirfi Ravanipur, and Mahshid Amirshahi (b.1940) are the four leading women writers who have contributed massively to a strong, pronounced, and articulate feminine consciousness in modern Persian fiction (for a detailed study, see Milani, 1992). Danishvar’s Savashun became the most widely read fiction in the entire history of the genre. Shahrnush Parsipur’s Tuba’ va ma’na -yi shab and Zanan bi-dun-i Mardan explored deeply into the labyrinth of a feminine consciousness in history and politics. Ravanipur’s Ahl-i Gharg opened a whole new vista of southern mythical sensibilities in Persian fiction. In this respect, Ravanipur’s fiction sided itself with a tradition that claimed Sadiq Chfibak and Ahmad Mahmud among its founding members. Amirshahi’s Dar Hagar became a sensitive chronicle of a deep frustration with the religious and antisecular turns that the Iranian Revolution of 1979 took.
Publication of Mahmud Dawlatabadi’s ten-volume epic Klidar in the late 1970s must be considered a major event in the history of Persian fiction. Centered around a fictionalized version of a local hero in Khurasan, Klidar is a majestic narrative of legendary proportions. Dawlatabadi constructs a full-bodied epic in which love and adventure, atrocity and nobility are woven together and led toward a uniquely enobling tragedy.
From such local traditions as romance literature, shahnamah-khvdni, ta`ziyah, ru-hawzi, siyah-bazi, khayalbazi, `arusak bad, and khaymah shah bazf, in conjunction with widespread exposure to other theatrical traditions in the Arab world, India, Central Asia, China, Turkey, and eastern and western Europe, a thriving Persian drama emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century. In the wake of the Constitutional Revolution of 1906-1911, drama took center stage in the Persian creative imagination. Mirza Fath `Ali Akhundzadah (18121878) and Mirza Malkom Khan (d. 1908) were the forerunners of social realism and political satire in Persian drama. Translations from Russian, French, and English plays increased dramatically after World War II; and such talented actors as `Abd al-Husayn Nushin gave institutional recognition to the genre. But a major culmination of Persian drama is to be seen in the 1960s and 1970s, when leading playwrights such as Ghulam Husayn Sa’idi (1935-1985) (“Gawhar-i Murad” was his nom de plume), Akbar Radi, Bahram Bayza’i (b. 1938), and ‘Abbas Na’lbandiyan, among many others, took full advantage of drama to address prevailing social and political issues. Sa’idi in particular, explored the deepest corners of anxiety (he was a trained psychologist) in local characters and cultures beyond the reach of
Tehran-based cafe intellectuals. Bahram Bayza’i very soon linked his interest in theater to a brilliant directorial career in cinema and created a whole spectrum of dramatic and visual sensibilities entirely his own. Another playwright/director of considerable talent is Parviz Sayyad (b. 1937), who successfully bridged a widening gap between premodern and modern, as well as between popular and avant-garde art (see Dabashi, 1992).
The Iranian Revolution of 1979 and its immediate islamization by the victorious faction introduced the combined forces of a triple imperative in the Persian literary imagination: the first formed by those who opted for an exilic life over the militant censorship of a theocracy; and the second shaped by those who ideologically, or as a matter of principle, chose not to oppose the political formation of a theocracy; and the third grouped by those secular intellectuals who preferred to stay inside Iran. Isma`ili Khu’i and Ghulam Husayn Sa’idi are prime examples of Iranian literati who left their country and chose the bitter tongue of expatriate intellectuals. Tahirah Saffarzadah and Shams Al-i Ahmad (the brother of Jalal Al-i Ahmad) are among those members of the literati who wholeheartedly celebrated the Islamic Revolution, remained in Iran, and continued to be productive in the new political environment. But not all who have remained inside Iran advocate or even accept the radical islamization of the literary imagination. Ahmad Shamlu, Ahmad Riza Ahmad-1, Hushang Gulshiri, Mahmud Dawlatabadi, Simin Danishvar, Shahrnush Parsipur, and Bahram Bayza’i, among scores of other poets, novelists, playwrights, and filmmakers, continue to produce in active or tacit celebration of an autonomous creative imagination. In the meantime, the younger generation of poets, novelists, dramatists, and critics are charting their own separate ways into the future. Inside Iran the radical implications of an Islamic revolution have stirred up the deepest emotions and anxieties. A flood of literary and visual outputs marks the younger generation’s creative response to a groundbreaking revolution, to unfathomable sacrifices during the eight-year war with Iraq (1980-1988), and to the continued anxieties of a collective imagination still not at peace with itself. Iranians live in exile in all parts of the world, and whatever the language of their hostculture, they try to teach their children Persian, and these children are growing up to express the particular configuration of their history and identity in Persian and in the language of their adopted culture. Young poets, such as Ru’ya Hakkakiyan, `All Zarrin, and Ramin Ahmadi (all outside their homeland) and Qasim AhaninJan, Ahmad `Ali-put, Mihri Muradi, Bizhan Jalali, Zuhrah Khaligi, and `Ali Mu’mini, among scores of others (all inside Iran), are the emerging signs, the dancing rays of a rising sun, whose full, shimmering proportion and colorful disposition, its nature and orientation, are not yet in full view.
[See also Devotional Poetry; Iran.]
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HAMID DABASHI

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

Batoota — Sun, 25 Jun 2017 17:44:07 +0000

PERIODICAL LITERATURE. It is a prodigious, if not impossible, exercise to circumscribe “Islamic periodical literature.” The tradition of Orientalist scholarship long employed the term “Arabic literature” as a synonym for “Islamic literature,” extending this to a degree to literature in Turkish and Farsi. Urdu and Malay, however, did not receive the attention owed to the two major languages of nearly half the world’s Muslims. For present purposes, we will define Islamic literature as the body of literature by Muslims, in any language, and not confined to theological subject matter.
Beyond Muslim literary production, Islam remains the religion most intensely studied by those outside its fold. Despite its innate ideological prejudices, it would be imprudent to ignore the corpus of Orientalism. Nonetheless simply being about Islam or Muslims does not intuitively make a work part of Islamic literature. In reckoning its ancillary status within that domain, it must be recognized that it lacks the inspiration of faith that characterizes the core works of Islamic letters. The following survey bears in mind the importance of that essential spirit in the vast body of Islamic periodical publication.
Islamic periodical literature made its debut with the publication of Al-`urwah al-wuthqa. Founded by one of the great Muslim reformers, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838-1897), its first issue appeared in Paris on 13 March 1884. As a symbol of Muslim resistance against colonialism, it infuriated the British, who convinced the Ottomans to prohibit its circulation; in India the ruling British imposed a hefty £loo fine and two years’ impris- onment for possession of the newspaper, and Egypt ordered similar punishment. In the face of mounting pressure, the newspaper ceased publication on 17 October 1884, after seven months and eighteen issues. In recent times, a follower of Afghani, Dr. `Abd al-Hakim Tabibi, has kept Afghani’s memory alive by publishing from Geneva a bimonthly magazine of the same name. Afghani’s Pan-Islamic sentiment has further modern reflections in Muslim World (Karachi), published by Mu`tamar al-`Alam al-Islami, and Muslin World League Jour-nal (Makkah al-Mukarramah), published by Rabitat al`Alam al-Islami.
As a prologue to scholarly publishing by Muslims, Islamic Culture is an outstanding example. Appearing in 1927 under the patronage of the nizam of Hyderabad in Deccan, India, its first editor was Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, the famed English Muslim whose translation of the Qur’an would later become a classic in its own right. After Pickthall’s death the journal fell into the able hands of a Polish Muslim of Jewish ancestry, Muhammad Asad, whose translation of the Qur’an and commentary on Sahih al-Bukhari would later earn him a respected position in the Muslim community. For nearly half a century Islamic Culture remained without peer; its publication has recently been suspended.
After the independence of Pakistan a number of journals rose to prominence, including Islamic Literature, Islamic Studies, Igbal Review, and Hamdard Islamicus. Islamic Literature was unique in that it flourished through the enterprising spirit of its founder, Shaykh Muhammad Ashraf, and died with him; he made a pioneering contribution to the diffusion of Muslim scholarly works. Islamic Studies and its sister journal in Urdu. Fikr va nazar continue to fill the gap left by the loss of Islamic Culture and Islamic Literature. Igbal Review has distinguished itself as the single most important source of research on the philosophy of `Allamah Muhammad Iqbal. Hamdard Islamicus and its sister journal Hamdard Medicus reflect the unwavering dedication of Hakim Muhammad Said. Like Turkiye Diyanet Vakfi (Istanbul), they demonstrate that dissemination of knowledge through the time-honored Muslim tradition of publications funded by waqf is not outmoded. Some other prominent Pakistani titles include Universal Message, Qur’anulhuda, Islamic Order, and Mujahidin (Peshawar).
Scholarly publishing in India is highlighted by such titles as Islam and the Modern Age, Journal of Objective Studies, Aligarh Journal of Islamic Philosophy, Islamic
Times, Radiance, `Ulum al-Qur’an, and Al-risalah, Muslim India is a remarkable publication that documents in detail problems of Muslims living in India as a minority. Another publication is Kashmir Diary.
For the past fifty years or so, Glasnik has been the sole voice of Bosnian Muslims and an indispensable source of reference for the history of Islam in the Balkans. The ongoing genocide of the Bosnian Muslims has made the continuation of this journal impossible. The same fate has befallen Islamska Misao (Sarajevo).
Turkey, officially a secular state, has seen an unprecedented growth of Islamic literature in the twentieth century. Bediuzzaman Said Nursi’s Nur continues its long history of publication in the company of such titles as Islami arastirmalar-i, Diyanet, Islam (Istanbul), Gene Akademi and Bilgi ve hikmet. In Indoneisa, too, Islamic titles are flourishing, notably Al-hikmah, `Ulumul Qur’an, Kiblat, Bestari, and Adzan.
A large number of periodicals arose out of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. They are distinguished by the consistency of their appearance in multilingual editions, such as Al-tawhid, Mahjubah, Echo of Islam, and Message of Thaqalayn.
Muslim Central Asia is coming to prominence with an expanding body of literature. Journal of Central Asia is perhaps the oldest in the trade. Other titles include AACAR Bulletin (a very useful biannual reference publication), Central Asia, Central Asia Brief, Central Asia Monitor, and Central Asian Survey.
Journal of Palestine Studies is the single most important source of scholarly articles on Palestine. Washington Report on Middle East Affairs is characterized by an even-handed approach. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency’s Palestine Refugees Today is the official publication on refugees from Palestine. Other related publications are Al -fajr, Human Rights Update, Israel and Palestine Political Report, New American View, April 17, and Breaking the Siege. The Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine in Washington, D.C., issues occasional papers and reports.
In recent decades, Muslim minority communities have produced a substantial amount of periodical literature. The most prominent addition to this literature is a journal on Muslim minorities themselves, Journal Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs (Jeddah). Founded by the late Dr. Syed Zainul Abedin, it quickly rose to become one of the few Muslim journals of international repute.
In England and America, The Muslim and Islamic Horizons, respectively, were the forerunners of a number of currently appearing periodicals. From Canada, Crescent International is perhaps the oldest publication of its kind. Australian Muslims took the lead by bringing out Insight and later Australasian Muslim Times. Impact International (London) is among the oldest Muslim semiacademic publications that continues to have worldwide impact; Islamic Quarterly (London) has declined to irregular appearance. Muslim Wise, a new vibrant voice of Muslim youth, will be remembered in the history of Muslim journalism as a bold initiative. It was succeeded by another innovative but short-lived publication, Muslim Update: Weekly Facsimile Edition. Fortunately, Q News, a weekly by the same group of dedicated young writers, has shown greater resilience. Muslim News is another impressive new publication. Two now-defunct publications out of London must be mentioned-Inquiry (Afkar) and Arabia; both enjoyed a wide readership in many Muslim countries.
International Journal of Islamic and Arabic Studies (Bloomington, Indiana) is the first Muslim journal from America to achieve contemporary standards of scholarly publishing. Later the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences appeared, with a slant toward the “islamization of knowledge.” Minaret, Inquiry, and Message are now well-established community magazines, while New Trend maintains a loyal readership. American Muslim is a relatively new publication with wide appeal. Muslim Media Watch Newsletter is the first systematic attempt at media monitoring by Muslims. The African-American Muslim community has two important publications, Muslim Journal and Final Call. For the Arab-American community, ADC Times is essential reading.
For years, Muslim communities in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, Mauritius, and Reunion have faithfully published the Hong Kong Muslim Herald, Muslim Reader, Islam in China, As-salam, La Croissant, and Al-Islam, respectively. Al-nahdah (Kuala Lumpur) is famous for its in-depth coverage of the region.
Spanish Muslims are beginning to emerge on the publishing scene with titles such as LamAlif, Bismillah boletin, and Ihsan. South African Muslims have a strong publishing base. Al-qalam, Majlis, Muslim Views, Al`ilm (Dorban), and Al-Islam (Cape Town) are some widely circulated titles.
On Arabic language and literature, standard journals include Al-Lisan al-`Arabi, Journal of Arabic Studies (Brunei Darussalam), Journal of Arabic Literature, Revue de la lexicologie, and Islami Edebivat (Istanbul). Other titles include Al-`Arabiyah, Edebiyat, and Journal of Afro-Asiatic Languages. Muslim Musings is a provocative new title on the literary scene.
There is a definite dearth of titles in the field of Islamic law. Islamic and Comparative Law Quarterly is the only journal of any distinction. Two journals started by the International Islamic University, Kuala Lumpur, II U Law Journal and Syariah Law Journal, are now defunct. Jurnal perundungan (Kuala Lumpur) suffers from irregular appearance. Jurnal syariah has begun publication under the auspices of Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur. Other titles are Arab Law Quarterly and Arab Law and Society.
Among specialized titles, foremost is the Journal of Islamic Science. It is the only publication of its kind that looks at modern science and technology from an Islamic perspective. Related titles are Islam Today, Science and Technology in the Islamic World, Kesturi, Ilim ve sanat, Journal of the Islamic Academy of Science, and Islamic Thought and Scientific Creativity.
Only a few periodicals address the problems of Islamic education. Muslim Education Quarterly grew out of the first International Islamic Education Conference in Makkah al-Mukarramah (Mecca) in 1977 and has continued since then. The other is published in Kuala Lumpur under the title ,furnal pendidikan Islam. A new Muslim Teachers College Journal is published in the United States.
Recent interest in Islamic economies has resulted in a proliferation of literature on the subject. Prominent journals are Journal of Islamic Economics, Pakistan Development Review, Humanomics, New Horizon, American Journal of Islamic Finance, Journal of Economic Cooperation among Islamic Countries, Middle East Business and Economic Review, Islamic Economic Studies and Journal of Islamic Banking and Finance.
Islamic medicine is the subject of three leading journals-Hamdard Medicus, the oldest of the three, Journal of the Islamic Medical Association of North America, and Journal of the Islamic Medical Association of South Africa. Islamic World Medical Journal became defunct soon after it started publishing in London. Medical Journal of the Islamic Republic of Iran is a commendable addition. Jihad wa Tauheed: A Publication About HIV/AIDS is the only Islamic periodical on the subject.
Women’s studies are not prominent in research and academic publishing in the Muslim world. However, titles such as Mahjubah, Ummi, Al-wardah, Muslimah, Mother’s Sense, Muslim Family, Soembike (Kazan, Russia), Islamic Sisters International, and Kadin ve aile feature an Islamic approach to women and family problems. At least four titles are important for their coverage of Muslim women’s affairs from a feminist perspective-Shirkat Gah Newsletter, Ahfad Journal, Nimeye digar, and Women Living under Muslim Laws.
Regrettably, Islamic arts, crafts, and architecture have remained among the most neglected areas in periodical publishing. The undisputed leader in Islamic art was Arts and the Islamic World, but after some twenty issues it has folded for lack of funds. Eastern Art Report has suffered the same fate. A useful source of reference, IRCICA Newsletter, is perhaps the last hope for scholars of the Islamic arts. Mimar, an acclaimed architecture journal, is now defunct. Another title is Muqarnas. In archaeology, a single title reigns supreme, Archeologie islamique (Paris).
There is discernible growth in the periodical literature on Interfaith studies. Focus on Christian-Muslim Relations, Islamochristiana, Henry Martin Institute of Islamic Studies Bulletin, and Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations are some of the pertinent titles.
In the area of reference periodical publishing, Muslim World Book Review remains one of a kind, rivaled only in part by the Digest of Middle East Studies. The Index of Islamic Literature that accompanies every issue of the Muslim World Book Review is a useful addition to Islamic bibliographic sources in English. For Arabic material, `Alam al-kutub (Riyadh) is an excellent source. Fasl-i kitab is convenient for Farsi publications. Periodica Islamica, founded by Munawar Ahmad Anees, serves as the foremost source of current knowledge on Islamic periodical literature from a multidisciplinary perspective.
Finally, interdisciplinary studies are generating new journals. A few of the newest primary titles are Al-qalam, (Lahore), Al-adwd’ (Lahore), Journal of Islamic Studies (Oxford), _7urnal IKIM (Kuala Lumpur), Muslim and Arab Perspectives (New Delhi), Izlenim (Istanbul), Fountain (London), and Intellectual Discourse (Kuala Lumpur).
From the time of Afghani to `Alam al-kutub, Islamic periodical literature has matured into a tangible harvest. There are gaps in quality of production and editorial rigor; there are areas of outright neglect, and those where Muslim scholarship is heading for greater maturity. It is time for concerned scholars to examine critically the status of periodical publishing in the Muslim world.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aman, Muhammad M., ed. Arab Periodicals and Serials: A Subject Bibliography. New York, 1979. Lacks a tide index.
Atram, M. A. al-. “Al-Fihrist: New Critical Study.” `Alam al-Kutub (Riyadh) 10.1 (AH 1409/1988 CE): 2-12 (in Arabic).
Auchterlonie, Paul, and Y. H. Safadi, eds. Union Catalogue of Arabic Serials and Newspapers in British Libraries. London, 1977. 1,011 titles from twenty-nine libraries.
Bachir. `Imad, and Andrew Buxton. “The Information Content of Titles of Arabic Periodical Articles.” Journal of Information Science 17 (1991) 57-63.
Behn, Wolfgang, ed. Index Islamicus, 1665-1905. Millersville, Pa., 1989. Covers Islamic periodical literature in Western languages since the appearance of the first article in 1665.
Bloss, Ingeborg, and Marianne Schmidt-Dumont, eds. Zeitschriftenverzeichnis Moderner Orient (Stand 1979). Hamburg, 1980. Lists holdings of the six largest periodical collections (Arabic, Persian, Turkish) in Germany.
Duman, Hasan, ed. Istanbul Kutuphaneleri Arap Harfli Sureli Yayinlar Toplu Katalogu, 1828-1928. Istanbul, 1986. Union catalog of periodicals in Arabic script in the libraries of Istanbul.
Al-fihrist: Kashshdf ad-dawriyat al-`Arabiyah. Annual. Beirut, 1981-Index of articles in selected Arabic periodicals, edited by `Ubaydli `Ubaydli.
Fihrist-i Maqalat-i Farsi dar Matbu’at-i Jumhuri-i Islami-i Iran. Quarterly. Tehran, 1982-. List of Persian periodical articles, edited by Iraj Afshar.
Index of Islamic Literature. Quarterly. Leicester, 1987-. Listings of articles in English only, issued as a supplement to Muslim World Book Review.
Islamic Book Review Index. Annual. Berlin, 1982-. Lists book reviews from nearly two hundred Western-language periodicals. Edited by Wolfgang Behn.
Pearson, J. D., et al., eds. Index Islamicus, 1906-1955. Cambridge, 1958. A classified list of articles in peridocials, collective volumes, and conference proceedings. Excludes Arabic and other Muslim languages. Sixth supplement, 1981-1985, London, 1990.
Periodica Islamica: An International Contents Journal Quarterly. Kuala Lumpur, 1991-. Reproduces table of contents from more than eight hundred periodicals worldwide; multilingual. Edited by Munawar Ahmad Anees.
Sims-Williams, U., ed. Union Catalogue of Persian Serials and Newspapers in British Libraries. London, 1985. 640 tides from sixteen libraries.
Turkologischer Anzeiger. Annual. Vienna, 1975- Listings of articles in all languages on Turkish and Ottoman studies.
MUNAWAR AHMAD ANEES

MALAY AND INDONESIAN LITERATURE

Batoota — Fri, 01 Aug 2014 04:09:37 +0000

MALAY AND INDONESIAN LITERATURE. Ever since the emergence of the Srivijaya empire on the east coast of Sumatra around 700 CE, the Malay language has played a dual role in Southeast Asia. It has first been the language of alam Melayu, the Malay world-the coastal areas around the Strait of Malacca, the South China Sea, and the Java Sea whose common narrative traditions, religious practices, and rituals make them the heartland of a distinctly Malay culture. Malay has also been the language of communication in Southeast Asia among people of different cultures, not only for natives of the archipelago but also for travelers from
India, China, and the Middle East. Traders and travelers, preachers and monks, administrators and soldiers have used Malay (or Malay pidgins and Creoles) as their second language; they also wrote in it, often to escape from local tradition and create something novel.
Malay has thus been both a vehicle of ideas and concepts that originated in the Malay heartland and a language associated with novel ideas introduced by travelers and migrants. This duality, or even ambivalence, has made Malay a dynamic language with an undefined and open identity. Actively supported by Dutch and British administrators in colonial times, it has become the national language of the Republic of Indonesia where it is called (Bahasa Indonesia) and the kingdom of Malaysia (under the name Bahasa Malaysia) as well as of the Republic of Singapore and the Sultanate of Brunei.
Literacy and Orality. The first evidence of Malay writing is in inscriptions found on the Malay Peninsula and on the islands of Kalimantan and Sumatra. Written in a script that originated in southern India, these short texts are an amalgam of older form of Malay and Sanskrit, suggesting a predominant presence of Hinduism and Buddhism in Southeast Asia. With the arrival of Islam in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when it was introduced by merchants and priests from India and China, the Arab/Persian script called Jawi was adapted for writing Malay. Jawi is still widely used in some parts of the Malay heartland.
Islam was readily accepted by the local population, who were attracted by its notions of equality and democracy. Neither did local rulers hesitate to adopt the new religion; they saw in its rituals and philosophy a novel way to support their authority and easily assimilated the idea that the ruler is God’s shadow on earth and a “perfect man”-a concept developed in the Muslim kingdoms of southern Asia (see Milner, 1983).
With its strong focus on the scriptures, Islam must have stimulated the respect for writing and thus the production of manuscripts (naskah) and letters (surat). Owing to the scarcity of surviving materials, however, it is impossible to determine how widespread literacy really was in the Malay heartland and neighboring regions before the advent of printing and nationalism. It was a highly valued commodity in court circles, often supplied by relative outsiders including Arabs, Indians, and Chinese. Within Islamic educational institutions (the madrasah, pondok, and pesantren) literacy may have been more common, which at times made the scholars an aggressive alternative to the political and cultural authority of the courts over the local population. In general, literacy remained a relative rarity until the end of the nineteenth century (see Amin Sweeney, A Full Hearing, Berkeley, 1987).
In a context that was so strongly organized by orally transmitted knowledge, the term “literature” is an unfortunate one; not until 193o had Malay itself assimilated the words sastra, sastera, and kesusastraan to refer to intentionally fictional texts. Before that, words like karangan, tulisan, gambar, and surat were used to refer to various genres of writing; ceritera, kisah, pantun, and riwayat were common terms for orally transmitted stories.
Since its introduction into Southeast Asia, Islaminspired writing has always remained closely associated with Malay; it was considered the best language in which to read and write about the Qur’an, tradition, law, and knowledge. In the twentieth century a corollary argument has often been proposed in the Malay heartland: Malay is associated with Islam, and therefore every Malay-speaking person should be a good Muslim. In Indonesia, where Malay is the second language for much of the population, this statement has never been accepted as self-evident; not all people who use Malay (or “Indonesian”) feel obliged to be staunch defenders of Islam. In modern literary life, discussions are conducted along similar lines of differentiation: the assumption that a Malay author has to work from an explicit Islamic stance is generally accepted in Malaysia, but this has rarely been the case in Indonesia.
Prelude to Modernity. The fifteenth-century Sultanate of Malacca is usually seen as the Islamic heir of the empire of Srivijaya. Malacca’s authority was brought to an end by European colonialists in 1511; in the memory of people in the Malay heartland it remained the period of greatest Malay glory, sanctified and described in many narratives. Materials from the days of Malacca are rare and none of its writings have been preserved. Contemporary reports of European visitors picture Malacca as an international city with a great sphere of influence; no doubt the activities developed under the aegis of its Muslim rulers had great impact on cultural life in Southeast Asia as a whole and on the Malay heartland in particular. At the fall of Malacca in 1511, Islam was strongly established on the coasts around the Java Sea and the Straits of Malacca. Religious and juridical treatises (kitab) and tales of the prophets (hikayat), partly translations from Arabic and Persian originals and partly adaptations to local ideas, left a strongly Islamic stamp on Malay culture. Islamic ideas have since taken a central position in Malay intellectual life and writing.
The oldest known Malay texts of some length originate from the Sultanate of Aceh on the north coast of Sumatra, where Malay played an important role in administration, trade, and culture alongside the local Acehnese language. A vivid intellectual life existed there in the first half of the seventeenth century; this is particularly manifest in its the religious writings, which find their climax in the works of Nuruddin ar-Raniri (Nfir al-Din al-Raniri), Samsuddin al-Sumatrani (Shams alDin al-Sumatrani), and Hamzah Pansuri (Hamzah Fansuri). The most authoritative Islamic scribe was arRaniri, born and raised in Rander in Gujarat, India; he came to the archipelago with a great knowledge of Persian and Arabic texts and propagated this knowledge in the numerous texts he wrote in his somewhat idiosyncratic Malay. Ar-Raniri stayed at the court of Aceh between 1637 and 1644, long enough to ensure that his writings would have a lasting influence on Malay Islamic thinking. Some of his texts are still consulted today in Malaysian and Indonesian religious schools. The best known of his works is Sirat al-mustakim (Al-sirat almustaqim). Mention should also be made of the Bustan as-Salatin (Bustan al-Salatin), an encyclopedic compendium of seven volumes in which the history of the world is presented following Persian models, with numerous references to works from the Islamic heartland.
Ar-Raniri is usually viewed as an orthodox mystic who apparently met with great resistance and even hostility among local intellectuals. In religious treatises like Hujjat as-siddik li-daf as-zindik (Hujjat al-siddiq li-daf al-zindiq) and Tibyan fi ma’rifat al-adyan (Al-tibyan fi ma’rifat al-adyan) written in a mixture of Malay and Arabic, he tried in particular to refute the writings of the Wujudiyah movement. The leaders of this movement had developed an erudite philosophy the essence of which was the claim that man’s being and God’s being, the world and God, are identical. The most respected author of theological texts in defense of the Wujudiyah was Samsuddin al-Sumatrani (d. 1630), who tried to bring Islamic teachings about the seven grades of being (as developed by authors like Ibn al-‘Arabi and `Abd alQadir al-Jilani) into accordance with local religious notions (see C. A. O. van Nieuwenhuijze, Samsu ‘l-din van pasai, Leiden, 1945)
In literary terms, ar-Raniri’s greatest opponent was Hamzah Pansuri, whom he accused of having heretical ideas close to those of Samsuddin. Hamzah Pansuri expressed his ideas about God and the world in a mathematically constructed form of written poetry called syair; he appears to have had a rather random knowledge of Persian and Arabic writings, which he very ably incorporated into his own work. It has not been determined whether Hamzah invented this genre of poetry or merely perfected a form already known in Malay. Using images, metaphors, and similes that were novel at the time, his syair had a far-reaching effect on Malay literature. Syair became a generally accepted form that-at least after Hamzah Pansuri’s experiments-could be used for every possible topic; it was to remain very popular among all Malay speakers until the late twentieth century. Poems like Syair dagang and Syair burung pingai, which are attributed to him, have remained a source of inspiration; even after syair as a form lost its authority, the echoes of Hamzah can be found in the modern Malay poetry of both Indonesia and Malaysia. The question whether Hamzah was a heretic and his work deserved to be burnt (as it was as a result of Raniri’s endeavors) need not concern us here (see Naguib alAttas, 1970; and G. W. J. Drewes and L. Brakel, The Poems of Hamzah Fansuri, Leiden, 1987). Discussions between scholars like ar-Raniri, who defended so-called orthodox mysticism on the basis of al-Ghazall’s work, and those who tried to combine mystical notions from the Islamic heartland with local ideas and rituals, remained a source of tension in Islamic circles. To what degree and at what pace should foreign elements be accepted and assimilated into Malay writing?
Malay authors in the tradition of ar-Raniri and Hamzah often appear to have a more or less solid knowledge of Persian and Arabic texts; they translated and adapted many narratives (hikayat) and treatises (kitab) that in turn had a far-reaching impact on Malay culture. Many prose works elaborate and explain stories from the Qur’an, are for instance the Hikayat anbiya and Hikayat jumjumah; others are tales about the Prophet (Hikayat nur Muhammad and Hikayat Nabi bercukur) or about his contemporaries (Hikayat Raja Khandak, Hikayat Amir Hamzah, and Hikayat Muhammad Hanafiyyah). Most of these hikayat are anonymous, and in this they joined the existing Malay tradition transmitted in an uneasy mixture of oral and written forms. Hikayat became as familiar in the archipelago as its more serious counterpart, called kitab and including theological works in the strict sense of the word, dealing with the law and other religious topics. Unlike hikayat, kitab were usually attributed to specific authors. At courts and schools, these Islamic writings must have been appreciated as exemplary texts for behavior and thinking. A prime example is the seventeenth-century text Taj us-Salatin (Taj alSalatin), a 1603 adaptation of a Persian text in which the prerogatives of rulers and the correct behavior of human beings are described (see P. P. Roorda van Eysinga, De Kroon aller koningen van Bocharie van Djohore naar een oud Maleisch handschrift vertaald, Batavia, 1827).
Texts of both genres were copied again and again, the kitdb more meticulously than the hikayat owing to their differences in content and function. To the enjoyment and edification of all they were distributed over the archipelago, giving a new impetus to the knowledge of Malay. Toward the end of the nineteenth century many of them were lithographed and printed in the Malay heartland. In this process of writing and copying, reading and reciting, the narratives that had been inspired by Indian and Javanese examples and local traditions were gradually pushed to the margin; the same was happening to the orally transmitted tales, which in the days of Malacca must still have played a prominent role in shaping the central values of the Malay-speaking world.
After Aceh, other authoritative centers of Muslim writing in Malay emerged and disappeared in the archipelago-Palembang, Banjarmasin, Patani, Trengganu, and Riau. A few of the authors and texts that traveled through the archipelago in the company of hikayat, constantly restating the configuration of Malay cultural life were Abdul Samad al-Palembani, who wrote, most notably, Hidayat as-Salikin (Hidayat al-Salikin), Sair asSalikin (Sayr al-Salikin), and Bidayat al-hikayat (Bidayat al-hidayah, strongly based on work by al-Ghazali); Kemas Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Palembani, author of Hikayat Syaik Muhammad Samman; and Daud ibn Abdullah al-Patani, who wrote Ghayar al-Tallab al-murid marifat (see Drewes, 1977). In new editions, many of these older kitab are still being consulted in religious schools.
Arguably the center of religious writing in Malay with the most lasting radiance was Penyengat, a small island in the Riau Archipelago where the prestigious family of the vice-rulers of Riau-Lingga had its residence in the nineteenth century. In particular, Raja Ali Haji (181o1874) should be mentioned. Inspired by Dutch and British examples, he wrote a Malay grammar (Bustan alKatibin) and a dictionary of Malay (Pengetahuan Bahasa) based on Arabic models; at the same time he inspired members of his family, female as well as male, to write. His contacts with Dutch scholars enabled him to have some of his texts printed. Print being the key to modernity, Raja Ali Haji can be seen as one of the first modern Muslim authors in Malay; his example was taken up by his descendants, who set up a publishing house on the island.
Modernity. In the course of the nineteenth century contacts between Southeast Asia and the Middle East, most importantly Mecca and Cairo, were intensified owing to the introduction of steamboats, the telegraph, and printing techniques. In the shadow of developments in the Middle East where intellectuals like Muhammad `Abduh and Muhammad Rashid Rida propagated a moral and religious reformation of Islam, tensions and discussions in the British-controlled peninsula and the Dutch Indies took a new shape (Roff, 1967). Until now the relationship between individual and God and between man’s being and God’s being had been the predominant subject of discussion and writing, but subsequent discussion focused on the question of to what extent Islamic law and the Qur’an and hadith could and should be directly applied in everyday life, and to what extent local customs should be permitted.
In the Malay heartland, this conflict between modern Islamic responses to the intrusions of the British and more traditional Islamic practice syncretized with local customs and beliefs is usually presented in terms of the conflict between the kaum muda (the reformists, literally “the group of the young”) and the kaum tua (the traditionalists, literally “the group of the old”). Printed materials were to play an important role in this conflict. As in so many other parts of the Muslim world, the kaum muda were far better equipped than their opponents to take control over modernity; in the first half of the twentieth century they made very effective use of printing to persuade their fellow-believers to hold more strictly to the rules and regulations of Islam and at the same time to be more open to Western innovations, if only to withstand the West’s power-and even better, to keep it at bay.
The first modern author, Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir Munsyi (1796-1854), had died before the conflict between the kaum muda and the kaum tua took serious form in Southeast Asia. Born in Malacca of mixed Arabic and Indian descent, Abdullah was a pious Muslim and a great admirer of British achievements. His autobiography, Hikayat Abdullah (Singapore, 1849) shows him to be fully aware of the possibilities western culture had to offer to the Muslim people of the Malay-speaking and -writing world, and nowhere did he hide his contempt for what he considered the unwillingness of Malays to be more open to the outer world. Abdullah had made himself familiar with printing techniques by working for Christian missionaries, but he did not succeed in convincing Malays of its usefulness. It was another fifty years before Malay literates more carefully read Abdullah’s book and took his plea for printing seriously. In the meantime, people of Chinese, Indian, European, and Arab descent who felt only thinly connected with the Malay heritage had become the main initiators of innovation and modernization in the urban areas of Singapore, Penang, Batavia, and Surabaya. These were places on the margin of the Malay heartland, to be followed only much later by those who saw themselves as the “real” Malays.
Another pioneer in publishing was Syed Syeikh Ahmad al-Hadi, an intellectual of Arab descent who had been given a religious education in Penyengat and Mecca before settling in the peninsula. With some religious friends he published the journal Al-imam (1906-1 909), mouthpiece of the kaum muda, in Singapore; later he established his own printing press, Jelutung Press, in Penang, where he published his first novel. Setia Asyik kepada Maksyuknya atau Shafik Afandi dengan Faridah Hanom (1926/27) is a Malay adaptation of an Egyptian novel in which Muslim ideas about modernity are carefully explored and propagated. Faridah Hanom was not the first novel to appear in the Malay heartland, yet it was of exemplary importance in the fictional literature (sastra) that emerged; subsequent novelists like Ahmad Rashid Talu (Iakah Salmah?, 1928) took inspiration from both its content and its form in realistic novels and novelettes in which the Malays were pictured as lacking moral strength and were urged to develop more religious fervor.
Malay prose authors in the peninsula experimented on the model of English and Dutch Indies examples and presented the teachings of Islam as the appropriate moral and ethical frame of reference for their protagonists and readers alike. From that perspective, it is justifiable to call all modern Malay literature produced in the peninsula “Islamic literature”——a point that was explored in great depth in the Islamic reorientation (dakwa) of the 1970s and 1980s (see Judith Nagata, The Reflowering of Malaysian Islam: Modern Religious Radicals and their Roots, Vancouver, 1984). Many of the modern authors in the Malay heartland had a Muslim upbringing; at least they appreciated the fact that being a Malay meant being a Muslim, and sooner or later every Malay had to come to terms with Islam. Islam thus became a strong catalyst to nationalism once the writings of the kaum muda and their descendants made the growing number of literate Malays aware of the fact that non-Islamic Chinese and Indian immigrants on the peninsula were gaining control over economic life and pushing the children of the soil (bumiputra) into the countryside. The statement that Malayness should be identical with Islam was an almost inevitable consequence of this growing self-awareness; only a few intellectuals had the courage to question and challenge this.
Different Concepts of Islamic Literature. Literacy in the Malay-speaking world as a whole increased owing to colonial programs of education, and so did the demand for reading materials. In the British-controlled areas the kaum muda competed with the kaum tua as well as with secularists to gain the upper hand in cultural and literary life. In the Dutch Indies, Islam was hardly a theme at all in the literature that came into being in the twentieth century.
Politically speaking, the Straits of Malacca and the South China Sea were the main boundaries between the Dutch Indies and the British Malay States (and Straits Settlements). Culturally speaking, however, they were inland seas within the Malay world, over which continuous migrations back and forth were taking place. This explains, for instance, why many of the leading authors and journalists in present-day Malaysia are of Sumatran descent. Parallel to the ambivalent position of Malay, at once the language of the heartland and the language of novelties, two traditions were taking shape in the centers of political and economic authority-in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and Medan on one hand, and in Jakarta and Surabaya on the other. Authors who saw themselves as part of the Malay heartland with its distinct heritage tried to explore their “Malay-ness” by way of Islam; others, more secularly oriented and as much tied to their local heritage and Western culture, preferred following Western examples to combining their writings with Muslim teachings.
In the Malay States and Straits Settlements and later in Malaysia, a well-defined cultural policy was a very important tool for the Malays in constructing a national and unifying culture on Malay terms. In the 1950s and 1960s “Malay power” was the predominant slogan in enforcing Malay ideas and values on the new state and its national ideology. In the 1970s and 1980s Malay authors reformulated their stance; more than ever, they emphasized the importance of Islam as the essential element of Malay culture and to this end the Islamic part of the Malay heritage was retrieved and strengthened. A wide variety of Islam-inspired organizations succeeded in uniting Malays under an Islamic banner. The Malay intelligentsia discussed how to reach their readers with sastra Islam (Islamic literature), a kind of writing that was to contain Islamic values, project Islamic concepts, and be created by pious Muslims with pure hearts.
The discussions between Shahnon Ahmad, undisputedly the most respected prose author of the second half of the century, and the literary critic and scholar Kassim Ahmad are generally considered exemplary for the problems and questions involved in defining sastra Islam. The task of a Muslim author, according to Shahnon, is to discover the order that God has created in this world, to acquire insight in his truth, his beauty, and his will, and then to use it as the main force in creating literature. This is only possible and conceivable if one carefully follows the Qur’an, the hadiths, and the law. Writing literature, claim Shahnon and his followers, is a form of `ibadah, a religious duty; neither “art for art’s sake” nor “art for society” (two slogans with which everybody literate in the Malay world had become familiar in the 1950s) should be the maxim, but rather “art because of God” (seni karena Allah); such art could only be made when the heart was pure and all rituals were appropriately performed. The objections of Kassim Ahmad to Shahnon’s views can be summarized in two main points. First, living as a good Muslim and trying to fathom God’s design does not suffice; those who try to shape and defend sastra Islam should be more explicit about the rules, concepts, sources, principles, devices, and prescriptions that are to regulate the writing of works of art-and that may be impossible without smothering the vitality of the act of creation. Second, Muslim authors too readily disregard literature written by non-Muslims: there are many literary works not written by Muslims that still contain values useful for the Muslim community and for humanity in general. Such considerations led Shafie Abu Bakar, another prominent discussant, to suggest that it may be best not to attempt an exact definition of what sastra Islam is and is not; perhaps writing with a pure heart and pious intentions could suffice after all. It is obvious that such discussions are not merely about literature and its required qualities; they also have to do with politics in that they are yet another effort to strengthen the position of the Malays and their culture within the multiracial society of Malaysia. This explains the heat and intensity of the debates.
The concept of Islamic literature is not only disputed, of course, but also explicitly tested in works of prose and poetry scattered through all sorts of periodicals and journals with a wide and varied readership. The most highly regarded works of prose and poetry have occasionally been collected; notable anthologies of short stories include Tuhan, bagaimana akan Kucari-Mu (1979) and Sebuah lampu antik (1983). Among novels, Muhamad Ahkhir by Anas K. Hadimaja (1984), and Al-Syiqaq I (1985) and Tok Guru (1988) by Shahnon Ahmad are often named as interesting examples of sastra Islam. At least as influential as this prose is the poetry that emerged in the late 1970s; popular poems can be found in the anthology Tuhan, kita begitu dekat by Hamzah Hamdani (1984) and in collections of individual poets, for example Manifesto by Suhor Antarsaudara (1976), Cahaya by Ashaari Muhammad (1977), and `Ayn by Kemala (1983). The prose works of sastra Islam usually focus on a protagonist who after a deep crisis repents and becomes a devout and good Muslim; the poetry is usually more concerned with the question of the relationship between God and the individual-in the tradition of Hamzah Pansuri and Amir Hamzah, it is often couched in monologues addressed by the author to God in deep and painful striving toward self-definition.
In Indonesia, authors who explicitly claim to find inspiration in Islamic teachings and experiences have played a less prominent role in shaping the canon of the national literature. Before World War II, Islam was not supposed to play any role in the government-censored cultural life in which sastra came into being; activities in Islamic circles were mainly restricted to editing and printing older texts and to writing new kitdb-like treatises. Islam was only a marginal theme (if it was a theme at all) in the literary work published in Batavia. The secularists in control were of the opinion that religious experiences were a personal, not a societal matter. Two exceptions should be made, Amir Hamzah and Hamka, and it is no coincidence that both are from Sumatra. The poet Amir Hamzah (1911-1946), a Malay prince from the east coast of Sumatra, found his inspiration in his Malay heritage, using metaphors and similes that circle around his personal search for God and strongly echo Hamzah Pansuri’s poems. Caught between tradition and modernity, his poems (collected in Njanji soenji, 1937, and Boeah Rindoe, 1941 are still discussed and recited in Malaysia as well as in Indonesia. An even more intermediate figure is Hamka (1908-1981), who grew up in reformist circles in Sumatra and became a leading religious teacher. His numerous books on religious affairs seem in form and content like continuations of the kitdb of Malay heritage, but he also took part in the emerging literary life with novels like Di bawah lingkungan Ka’bah (1938) and Merantau ke Deli (1939) These novels focus on Islamic questions; they are still widely read in the Malay world, and in Malaysia they are now seen as early manifestations of the sastra Islam. [See the biography of Hamka.]
In the first period of Indonesian independence between 1945 and 1965, Muslim intellectuals were given ample opportunity to formulate their ideas about literature. They formed a number of organizations that were more or less directly affiliated with political parties, but the various Muslim organizations never succeeded in taking a central place in the literary scene of Jakarta and beyond. In the last years of the so-called Old Order, they were increasingly criticized by communists and nationalists for not being wholehearted supporters of President Sukarno’s efforts to construct a national culture. This criticism came to a climax in 1962 when Hamka, already a revered and respected religious leader, was accused of plagiarism. Opponents claimed that his novel Tenggelamnya Kapal van der Wijck (originally published in 1938) was a shameless translation of an Egyptian novel by Manfaluthi (who had himself taken a novel by the French author A. Carre for his model). Hamka had acted within a tradition of adaptation and translation going back to Raniri and beyond, but this was not much appreciated by his enemies, who found his defense as lukewarm as his support for the national non-Islamic culture Sukarno envisaged.
In the early years of the New Order adherence to religion was strongly advocated by the new government as an effective antidote to the banned communist movement. Once more, Islam was given ample opportunity to develop a higher profile in the literary scene. Islamic thinking in Indonesia never took on the intense forms that are so characteristic of the Malaysian situation; in general intellectuals, critics, and authors remained aloof from the dogmatic teachings that began to be propagated in the Malay heartland. This moderation was most dramatically shown in the famous case of Langit makin mendung, a short story written by Ki Panji Kusmin and published in the literary journal Sastra in 1968. Muslims considered the story blasphemous because it depicts Muhammad and God as human beings. Eventually H. B. Jassin, the editor of the journal and himself a good Muslim, was brought to court, and after a muchpublicized trial the case eventually ended undecided. The Muslims who were invited to support the accusations of blasphemy, Hamka among them, were unable to present their accusations in a unified and convincing manner. As it turned out, many leading Muslim intellectuals were of the opinion that artistic freedom should be respected and that religious life was a personal affair that should not pervade public life.
In spite of this defeat, Islam has gradually taken a more prominent place in Indonesian literary life, concurrent with the expanding role Islam is playing in political and cultural life as a whole. As in Malaysia, the traditional dichotomy between poetry and prose seems relevant. In the shadow of Amir Hamzah, poets like D. Zawawi Imron (Nenekmoyangku airmata, Jakarta, 1985), Emha Ainun Nadjib (99 untuk Tuhanku, Bandung, 1983), and Sutarji Calzoum Bachri (O amuk kapak, Jakarta, 1981) continue to explore the relationship between the individual and God in terms of personal emotions and experiences in a lyrical tone and language that easily lends itself to public recitation. As in Malaysia, Islam-inspired poetry by both famous and unknown poets can be found in many newspapers and journals. The oral element in modern poetry is further explored in public poetry readings where poems are sung and recited in dramalike fashion (the so-called bazanji are a good example of these performances). As for prose, short stories and novels explicitly inspired by Islam and the Qur’an play only a very limited role in modern Indonesian literature. In this connection the work of short story writers like Muhammad Diponegoro, Jamil Suherman, and in particular Danarto (Adam ma’rifat, 1982) should be mentioned; it is to be expected that with the resurgence of Islamic values, the number of authors who try their hand at this particular kind of literature will grow.
Indonesian literature as a whole is generally appreciated as being more challenging, sophisticated, and playful than the rather predictable and rigid prose and poetry of Malaysia, an evaluation usually extended to work considered a manifestation of sastra Islam. The intensity is of a different kind, so to speak, the irony and ambiguities of the margin being substituted for the grimness of the heartland. The relevant essays of A. A. Navis, another Indonesian author who was once accused of blasphemy, are a fine illustration of the gap that grew between the margin and the heartland in the conceptualization of sastra Islam. An author should never follow rules and regulations, Navis claims; on the contrary, set rules and regulations should be seen as problems, and it is the task of an author to challenge and question readers’ opinions rather than to confirm them.
Present Situation. In this Indonesian plea for sastra Islam as a subversive element lies its main difference from Malaysian literature as a whole, and this difference can be explained largely from the position literature plays in these two states. In Malaysia literature is primarily regarded as a tool in the creation of a national culture and, in a wider sense, in the political struggle; it is supposed to strengthen the position of the Malays vis-a-vis the other groups in a multiracial society, and authors feel intensely involved in societal developments. In Indonesia literature is given only a very marginal social role, and this very marginality offers authors the freedom to experiment. The language is the same; function and intent, however, are different, as they circle around different points of reference. There is irony in the fact that the work of Indonesian authors on the margin is often taken by Malaysian authors in the heartland as exemplary, rather than the other way around. Tensions between the Malay heartland and the margins of “Malay-ness” remain, as does the ambivalent role of the Malay language. Islam has filled the gap of these tensions again and again.
[See also Islam, article on Islam in Southeast Asia and the Pacific.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abdullah, Munshi. The Hikayat Abdullah (1849). Translated by A. H. Hill. Kuala Lumpur, 1970.
Drewes, G. W. J. Directions for Travellers on the Mystic Path. The Hague, 1977.
Hamka. Tenggelamnya kapal van der Wijck dalam polemik. Jakarta, 1963.
Ismail Hamid. The Malay Islamic Hikayat. Bangi, Selangor, Malaysia, 1983.
Jassin, Hans B. Polemik: Suatu pembahasan sastera dan kebebasan mencipta berhadepan dengan undang z dan agama. Kuala Lumpur, 1972. Kratz, Ernst U. “Islamic Attitudes toward Modern Malay Literature.” In Cultural Contact and Textual Interpretation, edited by C. D. Grijns and S. O. Robson. Dordrecht, 1986.
Maimunah Mohd and Ungku Tahir. Modern Malay Literary Culture: A Historical Perspective. Singapore, 1987.
Milner, A. C. “Islam and the Muslim State.” In Islam in South-East Asia, edited by M. B. Hooker, pp. 23-49. Leiden, 1983.
Naguib al-Attas, Syed. The Mysticism of Hamzah Fansuri. Kuala Lumpur, 1970.
Roff, William R. The Origins of Malay Nationalism. New Haven, 1967.
Shahnon Ahmad. Kesusasteraan dan Etika Islam. Malakka, 1981.
HENDRIK M. J. MAIER
MALAYSIA. The Malay Peninsula before the imposition of British rule in the late nineteenth century was made up of traditional Malay states under the control of hereditary Malay sultans. In these states Islam, which spread to this part of the world during the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, was already strongly established at all levels of society. Aspects of Islamic law were observed to varying degrees, although elements of preIslamic culture were still prevalent among the people as a whole. Among the sacral powers of the Malay rulers was responsibility for the defense and good governance of Islam as the state religion. In some states, such as Johore-Riau, Malacca, Kelantan, and Trengganu, certain rulers were well known for their patronage of Islamic religious learning and scholarship.
The role of the religious scholar was essentially that of faithfully preserving, transmitting, translating, and commenting on the classical Arabic texts from Mecca that he had learned, mastered, and to a large extent memorized. The intellectual tradition and paradigm of religious taqlid (faithful preservation and imitation of traditional opinions regarded as authoritative and orthodox) that was nurtured in the Malay kingdoms prior to the twentieth century had roots in the intellectual environment of Mecca in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The inclination toward tasawwuf (Islamic mysticism) and popularity of Sufi tariqahs (brotherhoods) among the Malays was due to the widespread influence of Sufi-oriented Muslim preachers and scholars-hence the preeminent position of al-Ghazali’s thought in the Malay-Indonesian archipelago. Owing to the unifying and integrating thrust of al-Ghazali’s intellectual contributions, many great figures of Islamic learning in the Malay states from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth pursued a tradition of Islamic learning in which fiqh (jurisprudence), tasawwuf, and kalam (theology) were integrated.
What formal education existed during the early part of the nineteenth century for the Malay community was purely Islamic religious education revolving around the reading and memorization of the Qur’an and the learning of basic religious rituals such as prayer, fasting, zakat, and the hajj. The mosque was the only site of such education until the emergence of the pondok (private residential religious seminary) in the late nineteenth century and the madrasah (school) in the beginning of the twentieth century.
The Muslim states of the Malay Peninsula outside the three Straits Settlements (the island of Penang acquired in 1786, the island of Singapore in 1819, and Melaka [Melacca] in 1824) remained free from British interference until the latter part of the nineteenth century. The Pangkor Treaty of 1874 signaled the imposition of British rule on the Malay states of the peninsula. It provided for the appointment of a British resident to the Malay state; it was incumbent upon the Malay ruler or sultan to ask for his advice and act upon it in all matters “other than those touching Malay Religion and Custom.” This led to the creation of a new religio-legal bureaucracy subservient to the royal palace and subordinate to the traditional Malay elites close to the palace. This bureaucratization of Islam served to strengthen the control of the Malay sultan and the secular traditional elite over the religious life of the people.
Perceiving British rule as essentially one of kafir dominance supported by Christian evangelism, the Malay religious leaders and scholars generally adopted a hostile attitude toward western culture. Consequently they mobilized their resources to strengthen and defend the Islamic identity of the masses by building their own pondoks and madrasahs with independent curricula and financial resources. Except in areas where the spirit of jihad against British colonialism or Siamese expansionism in the north was generated by a few prominent religious scholars around the turn of the century, an attitude of resignation and submission to British rule prevailed among both the Malay rulers and the masses.
The beginning of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of an Islamic reformist (islah) movement that began to criticize the socioeconomic backwardness and religious conservatism of traditional Malay society of the time. This new socioreligious activism began when several religious scholars studying in the Middle East came under the powerful influence of the revivalist and reformist ideas of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad `Abduh at the close of the nineteenth century; others were earlier exposed to the puritanical teachings of the Wahhabi movement. The leader of the Malay reformist movement, Shaykh Tahir Jalal al-Din (18691957), a student of `Abduh, founded Al-imam in 1906, the first periodical to spread the message of Islamic reformism in the Malay-Indonesian archipelago. From their base in Singapore and later in Penang, the reformers pioneered the establishment of modern Islamic schools (madrasahs) whose curriculum differed radically from the pondok system with the introduction of several modern subjects and a new method of learning and teaching religion. This modernization of religious education and the spread of reformist writings and thought through the new media of magazines and newspapers had far-reaching social and political consequences.
The religious bureaucracy and the traditional `ulama’ were used to some religious practices regarded by the reformists as bid’ah (unlawful innovation), and they tolerated some degree of accommodation with local traditions that were perceived by the reformists as khurdfdt (superstitions and accretions). They opposed the views and activities of the reformists, popularly called Kaum Muda (the Young Group). The call for greater exercise of independent religious reasoning (ijtihad) with direct reference to the Qur’an and the sunnah and less reliance on a single madhhab (legal sect) was strongly resisted by the traditionalists, who came to be known as Kaum Tua (the Old Group). In their efforts to rouse the Malay community from its intellectual slumber and socioeconomic inferiority to the immigrant non-Muslim communities in the urban centers, the reformists also came to criticize and challenge the political order of the British colonialists. Indeed, the seeds of Malay nationalist consciousness were sown by the reformists. However, the fruits of their labor were to be reaped by the next elite who emerged from the new schools, as well as by the scions of aristocratic families who led the anticolonial struggle in the 1940s and 1950s. Seriously inhibited by British colonial policy coupled with opposition from both the traditionalists and Malay secular elites, Islamic reformism in British Malaya was unable to become an effective social force.
The Japanese interregnum during World War II, though traumatic for the masses, did not seriously alter the position of Islam among the Malays. The Islamic reformist spirit was suppressed while Malay nationalist sentiments were gathering momentum. Postwar Malay nationalism of a conservative orientation saw the foundation of the United Malay Nationalist Organization (UMNO) in 1946. The British formed the Federation of Malaya in 1948 after its Malayan Union proposal was rejected by the Malays. They arrested both the radical Malay nationalist leaders and the proponents of an Islamic political party, Hizbul Muslimin, which was banned a few months after its formation in 1948. The
Pan-Malayan Islamic Party (Partai Islam Se-Malaysia, better known as PAS) originally developed from the defection of the `ulama’ faction in UMNO in 1951 and became a registered political party in 1955. Its emergence marked another turning point in the development of Islamic thought in the Malay states. The idea of establishing an Islamic state in British Malaya was propagated and articulated for the first time as mainstream Malay nationalists in UMNO pressed for the independence of the country from British rule. The British granted independence to the Federation of Malaya in 1957, with Singapore becoming a separate colony, and thus began the era of parliamentary democracy and constitutional monarchy. In 1963 Malaysia came into being, with the inclusion of Singapore (until mid-1965) and the two Bornean states of Sabah and Sarawak.
The total population of Malaysia in mid-1990 was estimated to be 17,755,900, compared with 13,764,352 in mid-1980. According to 1990 estimates, the Muslim Malays in peninsular Malaysia constituted 58 percent of the total population, the Chinese 31 percent, and the Indians io percent. The 198o census put Muslims at 53 percent, Buddhists at 17.3 percent, Confucians, Taoists, and traditional Chinese believers at 11.6 percent, Christians at 8.6 percent, and Hindus at 7 percent.
Although the position of Islam as the official religion of post-independence Malaysia-with the Malay rulers of each state serving as the guardians of Islamic religion and Malay custom-was guaranteed in the constitution, only some aspects of the life of the Muslim community and the nation were influenced by Islamic values and norms. The government under the leadership of Tunku Abdul Rahman with the support of the British was committed to a secularistic vision of the new nation and vigorously opposed the Islamic political struggle and ideals. As such, it came under strong attack from the PAS and Islamically oriented Malay organizations. Five years after the 1969 racial riots, the PAS joined the coalition government of the National Front. As a result, the government under the second prime minister of Malaysia, Tun Abdul Razak, established the Islamic Centre, which formed an important part of the Islamic Religious Affairs section of the Prime Minister’s department. Tun Abdul Razak’s government gave increased attention to the educational, social, and economic development of the Malay Muslims to accommodate the demands coming from PAS within the government and from the da`wah movement outside it.
The assertive and generally anti-establishment da’wah (Islamic proselytization) movement emerged in the 1970s through the activities of youth organizations in secular educational institutions, including PKPIM and ABIM (the Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia, established in 19’71). It represented a new phase in Islamic thought and action, but its vision of Islam as a complete and holistic way of life was in fact a continuation and elaboration of earlier reformist and revivalist movements in the Middle East and Pakistan. Complementing the Islamic political movement in the country, the youthled da’wah organizations pressed for the greater application of Islamic laws and values in national life and articulated the holistic Islamic perspective of social, economic, and spiritual development. While the scope of Islamic religiosity was widened to embrace all aspects of human life, the intensity of religious life was simultaneously emphasized by da’wah proponents. Thus the form and content of Islamic life were noticeably affected. The government under Tun Hussein Onn at first viewed the new phenomenon negatively and was extremely wary of the political effect of assertive, Malay-dominated da’wah on the multiracial nation and its own political strength. One of the central government’s responses was to initiate its own da’wah-oriented institutions and activities under the aegis of the Islamic Centre and in cooperation with government-linked Muslim missionary organizations such as PERKIM, USIA in Sabah, and BINA in Sarawak. The Ministry of Education was also progressively improving and upgrading the teaching of Islam in the schools; it established the Faculty of Islamic Studies in the National University of Malaysia in 1970, opening up new opportunities for Islamically committed graduates to work in the civil service.
The resurgence of the holistic Islamic consciousness spearheaded by the da’wah movement, with its call for Islamic alternatives, continued to influence the Malay community as well as the state authorities. It reached a high point around 1979-1982 with the victory of the Islamic revolution in Iran. The demand for the establishment of more Islamic institutions in the country was raised by several organizations in national seminars and international conferences held in Malaysia. The government under Tun Hussein Onn’s premiership made some concessions and decided to conduct a feasibility study for the establishment of an Islamic bank in Malaysia; when Dr. Mahathir Mohamed became prime minister in 1981, this was one of the projects that received his immediate attention.
Under Mahathir’s leadership the government took a more conciliatory and positive approach toward the demands of the da’wah movement. PAS had been forced to leave the National Front coalition government in 1977 and had continued its struggle for complete implementation of the shari`ah and the establishment of an Islamic state in Malaysia as an opposition party. It regarded Mahathir’s Islamic initiatives and efforts as “cosmetic islamization” aimed at undermining the influence of the Islamic party. Anwar Ibrahim, the charismatic leader of ABIM and an articulate spokesman of nonpartisan da’wah in the 1970s, decided to support Mahathir by joining his government in 1982 in order to achieve his Islamic objectives from within the administration. Anwar Ibrahim’s support gave a new lease on life to Mahathir’s Islamic initiatives. The creation of the Islamic Bank and the establishment of the International Islamic University in 1983, followed by the that of the International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization in 1987, were the immediate results of Anwar’s direct involvement in Mahathir’s administration.
Under Mahathir the islamization process in Malaysia entered yet another important new phase. This included the institutionalization of concrete Islamic programs within the government; the inculcation of Islamic values in the administration; the encouragement of Islamic intellectual discourse in government departments and institutions of higher learning; the reform of national education by incorporating Islamic perspectives and values; the initiation of changes in the legal system to facilitate the growth and expansion of Islamic shari ah court administration; the removal of glaringly un-Islamic practices from the official ceremonies of government departments; finding ways and means to cease the practice of charging interest on government loans to Muslims; and the establishment of an Islamic insurance company, an Institute of Islamic Understanding (1992), and interestfree banking facilities in conventional commercial banks (1993). In foreign relations the Mahathir administration strengthened its pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel policy. It became more vocal and consistently critical of the superpowers.
The widening scope of Islamic consciousness outside the government framework also affected the world of Malay literature and journalism, which had formerly been under the influence of socialist as well as secular humanist trends. The urgency for an Islamic paradigm in economics and other social sciences in the universities was articulated in the late 1970s and 1980s as part of a new realization among Muslim intellectual circles world wide. Thus the mission for the “islamization of human knowledge” came into being, and the International Islamic University, Malaysia, was entrusted with pursuing it without any government obstruction. [See International Islamic University at Kuala Lumpur.] Meanwhile, the ABIM leadership decided to change its approach of sloganeering and Islamic rhetoric to one of “problem-solving” and “corrective participation” in cooperation with the government. The emphasis on solving immediate social problems and direct involvement in community development seemed to be the order of the day in the early 1990s. All the major Islamic da`wah organizations, such as ABIM, Darul Arqam, and JIM (Jamaah Islah Malaysia, established in 1991), have embarked on active educational programs for preschool, primary, and secondary school children nationwide.
PAS, as an opposition party, and some Islamic factions continued to dwell on the ideal of an Islamic state, the abolition of secularism, and the complete implementation of the shari`ah, including that of capital punishment (hudud) in the state of Kelantan. The Muslim community in the 1990s, however, is confronted with many new issues, such as efficient management of big businesses, increasing whitecollar crime, environmental degradation, serious drug abuse, AIDS, the plight of Muslim female workers in factories, widespread corruption and fraud, negative influences of the electronic media, and increased interreligious dialogue. As Malaysia moves toward the goal of becoming an industrialized nation by the year 2020, the place of ethics and spiritual values in an industrial society will certainly become more crucial. Several Muslim leaders and Islamic groups are beginning to realize that the challenges of industrializing Malaysia are far too numerous and complex to be handled by any one group or party. The future demands greater unity, cooperation, and interdependence among all groups within the Muslim community.
[See also ABIM; Dar ul Arqam; Da’wah, article on Modern Usage; Madrasah; Malay and Indonesian Literature; Partai Islam Se-Malaysia; PERKIM; United Malays National Organization; and the biography of Ibrahim.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ahmad Ibrahim, ed. Readings on Islam in Southeast Asia. Singapore, 1985.
Bastin, John, and Robin W. Winks. Malaysia: Selected Historical Readings. Kuala Lumpur, 1966.
Deliar Noer. The Modernist Muslim Movement in Indonesia 1900-1942. Singapore, 1973.
Funston, John. Malay Politics in Malaysia: A Study of United Malays National Organization and Party Islam. Kuala Lumpur, 1980. Holt, P. M., ed. The Cambridge History of Islam. Vol. 2. Cambridge, 1970. Chapters 2 and 3 are extremely useful.
Hooker, M. B., ed. Islam in South-East Asia. Leiden, 1983.
Lyon, M. L. “The Dakwah Movment in Malaysia,” Review of Indonesian and Malayan Affairs 13.2 (1979).
Mauzy, D. K., and R. S. Milne. “The Mahathir Administration in Malaysia: Discipline Through Islam.” Pacific Affairs 56.4 (Winter 1983-1984): 617-648.
Means, G. P. “The Role of Islam in the Political Development of Malaysia.” Comparative Politics 1 (1969): 264-284.
Mohd, Nor bin Ngah. Kitab Jawi: Islamic Thought of the Malay Muslim Scholars. Singapore, 1982.
Morais, J. V. Anwar Ibrahim: Resolute in Leadership. Kuala Lumpur, 1983.
Muhammad Kamal Hassan. “The Response of Muslim Youth Organizations to Political Change: HMI in Indonesia and ABIM in Malaysia.” In Islam and the Political Economy of Meaning, edited by W. R. Roff, pp. 18o-196. New York, 1987.
Muhammad Kamal Hassan. Moral and Ethical Issues in Human Resource Development: Old Problems and New Challenges. Kuala Lumpur, 1993
Naguib al-Attas, Syed Muhammad. Some Aspects of Sufism as Understood and Practised among the Malays. Singapore, 1963.
Naguib al-Attas, Syed Muhammad. Preliminary Statement of a General Theory of the Islamization of the Malay-Indonesian Archipelago. Kuala Lumpur, 1969.
Revival of Islam in Malaysia: The Role of ABIM. Kuala Lumpur, n.d. Roff, W. R. The Origins of Malay Nationalism. Kuala Lumpur, 1967. Snouck Hurgronje, Christiaan. Mekka in the Latter Part of the Nineteenth Century. Leiden and London, 1931.
M. KAMAL HASSAN
MALAY AND INDONESIAN LITERATURE. Ever since the emergence of the Srivijaya empire on the east coast of Sumatra around 700 CE, the Malay language has played a dual role in Southeast Asia. It has first been the language of alam Melayu, the Malay world-the coastal areas around the Strait of Malacca, the South China Sea, and the Java Sea whose common narrative traditions, religious practices, and rituals make them the heartland of a distinctly Malay culture. Malay has also been the language of communication in Southeast Asia among people of different cultures, not only for natives of the archipelago but also for travelers from
India, China, and the Middle East. Traders and travelers, preachers and monks, administrators and soldiers have used Malay (or Malay pidgins and Creoles) as their second language; they also wrote in it, often to escape from local tradition and create something novel.
Malay has thus been both a vehicle of ideas and concepts that originated in the Malay heartland and a language associated with novel ideas introduced by travelers and migrants. This duality, or even ambivalence, has made Malay a dynamic language with an undefined and open identity. Actively supported by Dutch and British administrators in colonial times, it has become the national language of the Republic of Indonesia where it is called (Bahasa Indonesia) and the kingdom of Malaysia (under the name Bahasa Malaysia) as well as of the Republic of Singapore and the Sultanate of Brunei.
Literacy and Orality. The first evidence of Malay writing is in inscriptions found on the Malay Peninsula and on the islands of Kalimantan and Sumatra. Written in a script that originated in southern India, these short texts are an amalgam of older form of Malay and Sanskrit, suggesting a predominant presence of Hinduism and Buddhism in Southeast Asia. With the arrival of Islam in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when it was introduced by merchants and priests from India and China, the Arab/Persian script called Jawi was adapted for writing Malay. Jawi is still widely used in some parts of the Malay heartland.
Islam was readily accepted by the local population, who were attracted by its notions of equality and democracy. Neither did local rulers hesitate to adopt the new religion; they saw in its rituals and philosophy a novel way to support their authority and easily assimilated the idea that the ruler is God’s shadow on earth and a “perfect man”-a concept developed in the Muslim kingdoms of southern Asia (see Milner, 1983).
With its strong focus on the scriptures, Islam must have stimulated the respect for writing and thus the production of manuscripts (naskah) and letters (surat). Owing to the scarcity of surviving materials, however, it is impossible to determine how widespread literacy really was in the Malay heartland and neighboring regions before the advent of printing and nationalism. It was a highly valued commodity in court circles, often supplied by relative outsiders including Arabs, Indians, and Chinese. Within Islamic educational institutions (the madrasah, pondok, and pesantren) literacy may have been more common, which at times made the scholars an aggressive alternative to the political and cultural authority of the courts over the local population. In general, literacy remained a relative rarity until the end of the nineteenth century (see Amin Sweeney, A Full Hearing, Berkeley, 1987).
In a context that was so strongly organized by orally transmitted knowledge, the term “literature” is an unfortunate one; not until 193o had Malay itself assimilated the words sastra, sastera, and kesusastraan to refer to intentionally fictional texts. Before that, words like karangan, tulisan, gambar, and surat were used to refer to various genres of writing; ceritera, kisah, pantun, and riwayat were common terms for orally transmitted stories.
Since its introduction into Southeast Asia, Islaminspired writing has always remained closely associated with Malay; it was considered the best language in which to read and write about the Qur’an, tradition, law, and knowledge. In the twentieth century a corollary argument has often been proposed in the Malay heartland: Malay is associated with Islam, and therefore every Malay-speaking person should be a good Muslim. In Indonesia, where Malay is the second language for much of the population, this statement has never been accepted as self-evident; not all people who use Malay (or “Indonesian”) feel obliged to be staunch defenders of Islam. In modern literary life, discussions are conducted along similar lines of differentiation: the assumption that a Malay author has to work from an explicit Islamic stance is generally accepted in Malaysia, but this has rarely been the case in Indonesia.
Prelude to Modernity. The fifteenth-century Sultanate of Malacca is usually seen as the Islamic heir of the empire of Srivijaya. Malacca’s authority was brought to an end by European colonialists in 1511; in the memory of people in the Malay heartland it remained the period of greatest Malay glory, sanctified and described in many narratives. Materials from the days of Malacca are rare and none of its writings have been preserved. Contemporary reports of European visitors picture Malacca as an international city with a great sphere of influence; no doubt the activities developed under the aegis of its Muslim rulers had great impact on cultural life in Southeast Asia as a whole and on the Malay heartland in particular. At the fall of Malacca in 1511, Islam was strongly established on the coasts around the Java Sea and the Straits of Malacca. Religious and juridical treatises (kitab) and tales of the prophets (hikayat), partly translations from Arabic and Persian originals and partly adaptations to local ideas, left a strongly Islamic stamp on Malay culture. Islamic ideas have since taken a central position in Malay intellectual life and writing.
The oldest known Malay texts of some length originate from the Sultanate of Aceh on the north coast of Sumatra, where Malay played an important role in administration, trade, and culture alongside the local Acehnese language. A vivid intellectual life existed there in the first half of the seventeenth century; this is particularly manifest in its the religious writings, which find their climax in the works of Nuruddin ar-Raniri (Nfir al-Din al-Raniri), Samsuddin al-Sumatrani (Shams alDin al-Sumatrani), and Hamzah Pansuri (Hamzah Fansuri). The most authoritative Islamic scribe was arRaniri, born and raised in Rander in Gujarat, India; he came to the archipelago with a great knowledge of Persian and Arabic texts and propagated this knowledge in the numerous texts he wrote in his somewhat idiosyncratic Malay. Ar-Raniri stayed at the court of Aceh between 1637 and 1644, long enough to ensure that his writings would have a lasting influence on Malay Islamic thinking. Some of his texts are still consulted today in Malaysian and Indonesian religious schools. The best known of his works is Sirat al-mustakim (Al-sirat almustaqim). Mention should also be made of the Bustan as-Salatin (Bustan al-Salatin), an encyclopedic compendium of seven volumes in which the history of the world is presented following Persian models, with numerous references to works from the Islamic heartland.
Ar-Raniri is usually viewed as an orthodox mystic who apparently met with great resistance and even hostility among local intellectuals. In religious treatises like Hujjat as-siddik li-daf as-zindik (Hujjat al-siddiq li-daf al-zindiq) and Tibyan fi ma’rifat al-adyan (Al-tibyan fi ma’rifat al-adyan) written in a mixture of Malay and Arabic, he tried in particular to refute the writings of the Wujudiyah movement. The leaders of this movement had developed an erudite philosophy the essence of which was the claim that man’s being and God’s being, the world and God, are identical. The most respected author of theological texts in defense of the Wujudiyah was Samsuddin al-Sumatrani (d. 1630), who tried to bring Islamic teachings about the seven grades of being (as developed by authors like Ibn al-‘Arabi and `Abd alQadir al-Jilani) into accordance with local religious notions (see C. A. O. van Nieuwenhuijze, Samsu ‘l-din van pasai, Leiden, 1945)
In literary terms, ar-Raniri’s greatest opponent was Hamzah Pansuri, whom he accused of having heretical ideas close to those of Samsuddin. Hamzah Pansuri expressed his ideas about God and the world in a mathematically constructed form of written poetry called syair; he appears to have had a rather random knowledge of Persian and Arabic writings, which he very ably incorporated into his own work. It has not been determined whether Hamzah invented this genre of poetry or merely perfected a form already known in Malay. Using images, metaphors, and similes that were novel at the time, his syair had a far-reaching effect on Malay literature. Syair became a generally accepted form that-at least after Hamzah Pansuri’s experiments-could be used for every possible topic; it was to remain very popular among all Malay speakers until the late twentieth century. Poems like Syair dagang and Syair burung pingai, which are attributed to him, have remained a source of inspiration; even after syair as a form lost its authority, the echoes of Hamzah can be found in the modern Malay poetry of both Indonesia and Malaysia. The question whether Hamzah was a heretic and his work deserved to be burnt (as it was as a result of Raniri’s endeavors) need not concern us here (see Naguib alAttas, 1970; and G. W. J. Drewes and L. Brakel, The Poems of Hamzah Fansuri, Leiden, 1987). Discussions between scholars like ar-Raniri, who defended so-called orthodox mysticism on the basis of al-Ghazall’s work, and those who tried to combine mystical notions from the Islamic heartland with local ideas and rituals, remained a source of tension in Islamic circles. To what degree and at what pace should foreign elements be accepted and assimilated into Malay writing?
Malay authors in the tradition of ar-Raniri and Hamzah often appear to have a more or less solid knowledge of Persian and Arabic texts; they translated and adapted many narratives (hikayat) and treatises (kitab) that in turn had a far-reaching impact on Malay culture. Many prose works elaborate and explain stories from the Qur’an, are for instance the Hikayat anbiya and Hikayat jumjumah; others are tales about the Prophet (Hikayat nur Muhammad and Hikayat Nabi bercukur) or about his contemporaries (Hikayat Raja Khandak, Hikayat Amir Hamzah, and Hikayat Muhammad Hanafiyyah). Most of these hikayat are anonymous, and in this they joined the existing Malay tradition transmitted in an uneasy mixture of oral and written forms. Hikayat became as familiar in the archipelago as its more serious counterpart, called kitab and including theological works in the strict sense of the word, dealing with the law and other religious topics. Unlike hikayat, kitab were usually attributed to specific authors. At courts and schools, these Islamic writings must have been appreciated as exemplary texts for behavior and thinking. A prime example is the seventeenth-century text Taj us-Salatin (Taj alSalatin), a 1603 adaptation of a Persian text in which the prerogatives of rulers and the correct behavior of human beings are described (see P. P. Roorda van Eysinga, De Kroon aller koningen van Bocharie van Djohore naar een oud Maleisch handschrift vertaald, Batavia, 1827).
Texts of both genres were copied again and again, the kitdb more meticulously than the hikayat owing to their differences in content and function. To the enjoyment and edification of all they were distributed over the archipelago, giving a new impetus to the knowledge of Malay. Toward the end of the nineteenth century many of them were lithographed and printed in the Malay heartland. In this process of writing and copying, reading and reciting, the narratives that had been inspired by Indian and Javanese examples and local traditions were gradually pushed to the margin; the same was happening to the orally transmitted tales, which in the days of Malacca must still have played a prominent role in shaping the central values of the Malay-speaking world.
After Aceh, other authoritative centers of Muslim writing in Malay emerged and disappeared in the archipelago-Palembang, Banjarmasin, Patani, Trengganu, and Riau. A few of the authors and texts that traveled through the archipelago in the company of hikayat, constantly restating the configuration of Malay cultural life were Abdul Samad al-Palembani, who wrote, most notably, Hidayat as-Salikin (Hidayat al-Salikin), Sair asSalikin (Sayr al-Salikin), and Bidayat al-hikayat (Bidayat al-hidayah, strongly based on work by al-Ghazali); Kemas Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Palembani, author of Hikayat Syaik Muhammad Samman; and Daud ibn Abdullah al-Patani, who wrote Ghayar al-Tallab al-murid marifat (see Drewes, 1977). In new editions, many of these older kitab are still being consulted in religious schools.
Arguably the center of religious writing in Malay with the most lasting radiance was Penyengat, a small island in the Riau Archipelago where the prestigious family of the vice-rulers of Riau-Lingga had its residence in the nineteenth century. In particular, Raja Ali Haji (181o1874) should be mentioned. Inspired by Dutch and British examples, he wrote a Malay grammar (Bustan alKatibin) and a dictionary of Malay (Pengetahuan Bahasa) based on Arabic models; at the same time he inspired members of his family, female as well as male, to write. His contacts with Dutch scholars enabled him to have some of his texts printed. Print being the key to modernity, Raja Ali Haji can be seen as one of the first modern Muslim authors in Malay; his example was taken up by his descendants, who set up a publishing house on the island.
Modernity. In the course of the nineteenth century contacts between Southeast Asia and the Middle East, most importantly Mecca and Cairo, were intensified owing to the introduction of steamboats, the telegraph, and printing techniques. In the shadow of developments in the Middle East where intellectuals like Muhammad `Abduh and Muhammad Rashid Rida propagated a moral and religious reformation of Islam, tensions and discussions in the British-controlled peninsula and the Dutch Indies took a new shape (Roff, 1967). Until now the relationship between individual and God and between man’s being and God’s being had been the predominant subject of discussion and writing, but subsequent discussion focused on the question of to what extent Islamic law and the Qur’an and hadith could and should be directly applied in everyday life, and to what extent local customs should be permitted.
In the Malay heartland, this conflict between modern Islamic responses to the intrusions of the British and more traditional Islamic practice syncretized with local customs and beliefs is usually presented in terms of the conflict between the kaum muda (the reformists, literally “the group of the young”) and the kaum tua (the traditionalists, literally “the group of the old”). Printed materials were to play an important role in this conflict. As in so many other parts of the Muslim world, the kaum muda were far better equipped than their opponents to take control over modernity; in the first half of the twentieth century they made very effective use of printing to persuade their fellow-believers to hold more strictly to the rules and regulations of Islam and at the same time to be more open to Western innovations, if only to withstand the West’s power-and even better, to keep it at bay.
The first modern author, Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir Munsyi (1796-1854), had died before the conflict between the kaum muda and the kaum tua took serious form in Southeast Asia. Born in Malacca of mixed Arabic and Indian descent, Abdullah was a pious Muslim and a great admirer of British achievements. His autobiography, Hikayat Abdullah (Singapore, 1849) shows him to be fully aware of the possibilities western culture had to offer to the Muslim people of the Malay-speaking and -writing world, and nowhere did he hide his contempt for what he considered the unwillingness of Malays to be more open to the outer world. Abdullah had made himself familiar with printing techniques by working for Christian missionaries, but he did not succeed in convincing Malays of its usefulness. It was another fifty years before Malay literates more carefully read Abdullah’s book and took his plea for printing seriously. In the meantime, people of Chinese, Indian, European, and Arab descent who felt only thinly connected with the Malay heritage had become the main initiators of innovation and modernization in the urban areas of Singapore, Penang, Batavia, and Surabaya. These were places on the margin of the Malay heartland, to be followed only much later by those who saw themselves as the “real” Malays.
Another pioneer in publishing was Syed Syeikh Ahmad al-Hadi, an intellectual of Arab descent who had been given a religious education in Penyengat and Mecca before settling in the peninsula. With some religious friends he published the journal Al-imam (1906-1 909), mouthpiece of the kaum muda, in Singapore; later he established his own printing press, Jelutung Press, in Penang, where he published his first novel. Setia Asyik kepada Maksyuknya atau Shafik Afandi dengan Faridah Hanom (1926/27) is a Malay adaptation of an Egyptian novel in which Muslim ideas about modernity are carefully explored and propagated. Faridah Hanom was not the first novel to appear in the Malay heartland, yet it was of exemplary importance in the fictional literature (sastra) that emerged; subsequent novelists like Ahmad Rashid Talu (Iakah Salmah?, 1928) took inspiration from both its content and its form in realistic novels and novelettes in which the Malays were pictured as lacking moral strength and were urged to develop more religious fervor.
Malay prose authors in the peninsula experimented on the model of English and Dutch Indies examples and presented the teachings of Islam as the appropriate moral and ethical frame of reference for their protagonists and readers alike. From that perspective, it is justifiable to call all modern Malay literature produced in the peninsula “Islamic literature”——a point that was explored in great depth in the Islamic reorientation (dakwa) of the 1970s and 1980s (see Judith Nagata, The Reflowering of Malaysian Islam: Modern Religious Radicals and their Roots, Vancouver, 1984). Many of the modern authors in the Malay heartland had a Muslim upbringing; at least they appreciated the fact that being a Malay meant being a Muslim, and sooner or later every Malay had to come to terms with Islam. Islam thus became a strong catalyst to nationalism once the writings of the kaum muda and their descendants made the growing number of literate Malays aware of the fact that non-Islamic Chinese and Indian immigrants on the peninsula were gaining control over economic life and pushing the children of the soil (bumiputra) into the countryside. The statement that Malayness should be identical with Islam was an almost inevitable consequence of this growing self-awareness; only a few intellectuals had the courage to question and challenge this.
Different Concepts of Islamic Literature. Literacy in the Malay-speaking world as a whole increased owing to colonial programs of education, and so did the demand for reading materials. In the British-controlled areas the kaum muda competed with the kaum tua as well as with secularists to gain the upper hand in cultural and literary life. In the Dutch Indies, Islam was hardly a theme at all in the literature that came into being in the twentieth century.
Politically speaking, the Straits of Malacca and the South China Sea were the main boundaries between the Dutch Indies and the British Malay States (and Straits Settlements). Culturally speaking, however, they were inland seas within the Malay world, over which continuous migrations back and forth were taking place. This explains, for instance, why many of the leading authors and journalists in present-day Malaysia are of Sumatran descent. Parallel to the ambivalent position of Malay, at once the language of the heartland and the language of novelties, two traditions were taking shape in the centers of political and economic authority-in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and Medan on one hand, and in Jakarta and Surabaya on the other. Authors who saw themselves as part of the Malay heartland with its distinct heritage tried to explore their “Malay-ness” by way of Islam; others, more secularly oriented and as much tied to their local heritage and Western culture, preferred following Western examples to combining their writings with Muslim teachings.
In the Malay States and Straits Settlements and later in Malaysia, a well-defined cultural policy was a very important tool for the Malays in constructing a national and unifying culture on Malay terms. In the 1950s and 1960s “Malay power” was the predominant slogan in enforcing Malay ideas and values on the new state and its national ideology. In the 1970s and 1980s Malay authors reformulated their stance; more than ever, they emphasized the importance of Islam as the essential element of Malay culture and to this end the Islamic part of the Malay heritage was retrieved and strengthened. A wide variety of Islam-inspired organizations succeeded in uniting Malays under an Islamic banner. The Malay intelligentsia discussed how to reach their readers with sastra Islam (Islamic literature), a kind of writing that was to contain Islamic values, project Islamic concepts, and be created by pious Muslims with pure hearts.
The discussions between Shahnon Ahmad, undisputedly the most respected prose author of the second half of the century, and the literary critic and scholar Kassim Ahmad are generally considered exemplary for the problems and questions involved in defining sastra Islam. The task of a Muslim author, according to Shahnon, is to discover the order that God has created in this world, to acquire insight in his truth, his beauty, and his will, and then to use it as the main force in creating literature. This is only possible and conceivable if one carefully follows the Qur’an, the hadiths, and the law. Writing literature, claim Shahnon and his followers, is a form of `ibadah, a religious duty; neither “art for art’s sake” nor “art for society” (two slogans with which everybody literate in the Malay world had become familiar in the 1950s) should be the maxim, but rather “art because of God” (seni karena Allah); such art could only be made when the heart was pure and all rituals were appropriately performed. The objections of Kassim Ahmad to Shahnon’s views can be summarized in two main points. First, living as a good Muslim and trying to fathom God’s design does not suffice; those who try to shape and defend sastra Islam should be more explicit about the rules, concepts, sources, principles, devices, and prescriptions that are to regulate the writing of works of art-and that may be impossible without smothering the vitality of the act of creation. Second, Muslim authors too readily disregard literature written by non-Muslims: there are many literary works not written by Muslims that still contain values useful for the Muslim community and for humanity in general. Such considerations led Shafie Abu Bakar, another prominent discussant, to suggest that it may be best not to attempt an exact definition of what sastra Islam is and is not; perhaps writing with a pure heart and pious intentions could suffice after all. It is obvious that such discussions are not merely about literature and its required qualities; they also have to do with politics in that they are yet another effort to strengthen the position of the Malays and their culture within the multiracial society of Malaysia. This explains the heat and intensity of the debates.
The concept of Islamic literature is not only disputed, of course, but also explicitly tested in works of prose and poetry scattered through all sorts of periodicals and journals with a wide and varied readership. The most highly regarded works of prose and poetry have occasionally been collected; notable anthologies of short stories include Tuhan, bagaimana akan Kucari-Mu (1979) and Sebuah lampu antik (1983). Among novels, Muhamad Ahkhir by Anas K. Hadimaja (1984), and Al-Syiqaq I (1985) and Tok Guru (1988) by Shahnon Ahmad are often named as interesting examples of sastra Islam. At least as influential as this prose is the poetry that emerged in the late 1970s; popular poems can be found in the anthology Tuhan, kita begitu dekat by Hamzah Hamdani (1984) and in collections of individual poets, for example Manifesto by Suhor Antarsaudara (1976), Cahaya by Ashaari Muhammad (1977), and `Ayn by Kemala (1983). The prose works of sastra Islam usually focus on a protagonist who after a deep crisis repents and becomes a devout and good Muslim; the poetry is usually more concerned with the question of the relationship between God and the individual-in the tradition of Hamzah Pansuri and Amir Hamzah, it is often couched in monologues addressed by the author to God in deep and painful striving toward self-definition.
In Indonesia, authors who explicitly claim to find inspiration in Islamic teachings and experiences have played a less prominent role in shaping the canon of the national literature. Before World War II, Islam was not supposed to play any role in the government-censored cultural life in which sastra came into being; activities in Islamic circles were mainly restricted to editing and printing older texts and to writing new kitdb-like treatises. Islam was only a marginal theme (if it was a theme at all) in the literary work published in Batavia. The secularists in control were of the opinion that religious experiences were a personal, not a societal matter. Two exceptions should be made, Amir Hamzah and Hamka, and it is no coincidence that both are from Sumatra. The poet Amir Hamzah (1911-1946), a Malay prince from the east coast of Sumatra, found his inspiration in his Malay heritage, using metaphors and similes that circle around his personal search for God and strongly echo Hamzah Pansuri’s poems. Caught between tradition and modernity, his poems (collected in Njanji soenji, 1937, and Boeah Rindoe, 1941 are still discussed and recited in Malaysia as well as in Indonesia. An even more intermediate figure is Hamka (1908-1981), who grew up in reformist circles in Sumatra and became a leading religious teacher. His numerous books on religious affairs seem in form and content like continuations of the kitdb of Malay heritage, but he also took part in the emerging literary life with novels like Di bawah lingkungan Ka’bah (1938) and Merantau ke Deli (1939) These novels focus on Islamic questions; they are still widely read in the Malay world, and in Malaysia they are now seen as early manifestations of the sastra Islam. [See the biography of Hamka.]
In the first period of Indonesian independence between 1945 and 1965, Muslim intellectuals were given ample opportunity to formulate their ideas about literature. They formed a number of organizations that were more or less directly affiliated with political parties, but the various Muslim organizations never succeeded in taking a central place in the literary scene of Jakarta and beyond. In the last years of the so-called Old Order, they were increasingly criticized by communists and nationalists for not being wholehearted supporters of President Sukarno’s efforts to construct a national culture. This criticism came to a climax in 1962 when Hamka, already a revered and respected religious leader, was accused of plagiarism. Opponents claimed that his novel Tenggelamnya Kapal van der Wijck (originally published in 1938) was a shameless translation of an Egyptian novel by Manfaluthi (who had himself taken a novel by the French author A. Carre for his model). Hamka had acted within a tradition of adaptation and translation going back to Raniri and beyond, but this was not much appreciated by his enemies, who found his defense as lukewarm as his support for the national non-Islamic culture Sukarno envisaged.
In the early years of the New Order adherence to religion was strongly advocated by the new government as an effective antidote to the banned communist movement. Once more, Islam was given ample opportunity to develop a higher profile in the literary scene. Islamic thinking in Indonesia never took on the intense forms that are so characteristic of the Malaysian situation; in general intellectuals, critics, and authors remained aloof from the dogmatic teachings that began to be propagated in the Malay heartland. This moderation was most dramatically shown in the famous case of Langit makin mendung, a short story written by Ki Panji Kusmin and published in the literary journal Sastra in 1968. Muslims considered the story blasphemous because it depicts Muhammad and God as human beings. Eventually H. B. Jassin, the editor of the journal and himself a good Muslim, was brought to court, and after a muchpublicized trial the case eventually ended undecided. The Muslims who were invited to support the accusations of blasphemy, Hamka among them, were unable to present their accusations in a unified and convincing manner. As it turned out, many leading Muslim intellectuals were of the opinion that artistic freedom should be respected and that religious life was a personal affair that should not pervade public life.
In spite of this defeat, Islam has gradually taken a more prominent place in Indonesian literary life, concurrent with the expanding role Islam is playing in political and cultural life as a whole. As in Malaysia, the traditional dichotomy between poetry and prose seems relevant. In the shadow of Amir Hamzah, poets like D. Zawawi Imron (Nenekmoyangku airmata, Jakarta, 1985), Emha Ainun Nadjib (99 untuk Tuhanku, Bandung, 1983), and Sutarji Calzoum Bachri (O amuk kapak, Jakarta, 1981) continue to explore the relationship between the individual and God in terms of personal emotions and experiences in a lyrical tone and language that easily lends itself to public recitation. As in Malaysia, Islam-inspired poetry by both famous and unknown poets can be found in many newspapers and journals. The oral element in modern poetry is further explored in public poetry readings where poems are sung and recited in dramalike fashion (the so-called bazanji are a good example of these performances). As for prose, short stories and novels explicitly inspired by Islam and the Qur’an play only a very limited role in modern Indonesian literature. In this connection the work of short story writers like Muhammad Diponegoro, Jamil Suherman, and in particular Danarto (Adam ma’rifat, 1982) should be mentioned; it is to be expected that with the resurgence of Islamic values, the number of authors who try their hand at this particular kind of literature will grow.
Indonesian literature as a whole is generally appreciated as being more challenging, sophisticated, and playful than the rather predictable and rigid prose and poetry of Malaysia, an evaluation usually extended to work considered a manifestation of sastra Islam. The intensity is of a different kind, so to speak, the irony and ambiguities of the margin being substituted for the grimness of the heartland. The relevant essays of A. A. Navis, another Indonesian author who was once accused of blasphemy, are a fine illustration of the gap that grew between the margin and the heartland in the conceptualization of sastra Islam. An author should never follow rules and regulations, Navis claims; on the contrary, set rules and regulations should be seen as problems, and it is the task of an author to challenge and question readers’ opinions rather than to confirm them.
Present Situation. In this Indonesian plea for sastra Islam as a subversive element lies its main difference from Malaysian literature as a whole, and this difference can be explained largely from the position literature plays in these two states. In Malaysia literature is primarily regarded as a tool in the creation of a national culture and, in a wider sense, in the political struggle; it is supposed to strengthen the position of the Malays vis-a-vis the other groups in a multiracial society, and authors feel intensely involved in societal developments. In Indonesia literature is given only a very marginal social role, and this very marginality offers authors the freedom to experiment. The language is the same; function and intent, however, are different, as they circle around different points of reference. There is irony in the fact that the work of Indonesian authors on the margin is often taken by Malaysian authors in the heartland as exemplary, rather than the other way around. Tensions between the Malay heartland and the margins of “Malay-ness” remain, as does the ambivalent role of the Malay language. Islam has filled the gap of these tensions again and again.
[See also Islam, article on Islam in Southeast Asia and the Pacific.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abdullah, Munshi. The Hikayat Abdullah (1849). Translated by A. H. Hill. Kuala Lumpur, 1970.
Drewes, G. W. J. Directions for Travellers on the Mystic Path. The Hague, 1977.
Hamka. Tenggelamnya kapal van der Wijck dalam polemik. Jakarta, 1963.
Ismail Hamid. The Malay Islamic Hikayat. Bangi, Selangor, Malaysia, 1983.
Jassin, Hans B. Polemik: Suatu pembahasan sastera dan kebebasan mencipta berhadepan dengan undang z dan agama. Kuala Lumpur, 1972. Kratz, Ernst U. “Islamic Attitudes toward Modern Malay Literature.” In Cultural Contact and Textual Interpretation, edited by C. D. Grijns and S. O. Robson. Dordrecht, 1986.
Maimunah Mohd and Ungku Tahir. Modern Malay Literary Culture: A Historical Perspective. Singapore, 1987.
Milner, A. C. “Islam and the Muslim State.” In Islam in South-East Asia, edited by M. B. Hooker, pp. 23-49. Leiden, 1983.
Naguib al-Attas, Syed. The Mysticism of Hamzah Fansuri. Kuala Lumpur, 1970.
Roff, William R. The Origins of Malay Nationalism. New Haven, 1967.
Shahnon Ahmad. Kesusasteraan dan Etika Islam. Malakka, 1981.
HENDRIK M. J. MAIER

INDONESIAN LITERATURE

Batoota — Sun, 11 May 2014 16:59:11 +0000

See Malay and Indonesian Literature.

CENTRAL ASIAN LITERATURE

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CENTRAL ASIAN LITERATURE. Central Asia is understood to include the territories of present Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan, the native population of which is Turkic in race and Muslim in religion. The Turkic peoples of Central Asia had a state structure and a rich literary tradition long before the Russian conquest of the region.
The development of a significant literary tradition in Turkic-speaking Central Asia dates back to the ninth and tenth centuries CE. Historically and sociopolitically, we may distinguish three significant periods in the development of literature in Central Asia-the Islamicimperial, the colonial, and the post-independence periods.
Islamic-Imperial Period. The longest era lasted until the second half of the nineteenth century. During this period numerous literary and poetic works were produced, often under the aegis of the great Turkic Muslim emperors, kings, sultans, and emirs and their courts. Some of the best-known patrons of and contributors to the literature of Central Asia include the Qarakhanids (tenth century); the Timurids (fourteenth through sixteenth centuries) such as Amir Timur (1336-1405), Ulughbek (1394-1449), and Husayn Bayqara (143815o6); the founder of the Mughal Empire in India, Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur (1483-1530); and the late nineteenth-century emir of Khoqand, Umarkhan.
Yusuf Khass Hajib was one of the best-known writers of eleventh-century Central Asia. Unfortunately, only one of his works survives, a long didactic poem entitled Kutadghu bilig (Wisdom of Royal Glory), which is considered one of the oldest monuments of Central Asian Turkic literature.
Ahmad Yasavi was a Central Asian Turkic Sufi and poet. He was born in the second half of eleventh century near the city of Sayram in Turkistan. Divan-i hikmat, a collection of his didactic character poems written in Central Asian Turki, is still very popular among the peoples of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. The oldest surviving manuscript of this work dates from the seventeenth century. Yasavi’s poems created a new genre in Central Asian Turkic literature, that of religious folk poetry. In the following centuries many religious poets such as Sfifi Allahyar and Sulayman Baqirghani were influenced by Ahmad Yasavi.
The best-known poets of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries whose works have been preserved to modern times are Qutb, Khvarizmi, and Durbek. Qutb’s Khusraw va Shirin, Khvarizmi’s Muhabbatndmah, and Durbek’s Yusuf va Zulaykhd are still popular among Central Asians, especially Uzbek people. The prose work Nahjul faradis, written in the second half of the fourteenth century in Central Asian Turki by an unknown author, consists of four parts. The first part is devoted to the life of Muhammad, and the second part describes the activities of Caliph Rashid id-Din, `All, and four imams.
Under the Timurids (fourteenth to sixteenth centuries) Central Asian literature flourished, and a new generation of poets appeared. The poems of Lutfi, Atayi, Sakkaki, Gada’i, Nava% and Babur are still read and appreciated by the peoples of Central Asia.
Lutfi was the great early master of the ghazdl genre later perfected by Nava’i and Babur. Lutfi’s poetry is more accessible to modern readers because it contains more Turkic words than Arabic and Persian. His works influenced the poetry of his contemporaries Atayi, Sakkaki, and Gada’i, whose poetry was esteemed even during their own lifetimes.
Gada’i is one of the most remarkable Central Asian Turkic poets of the fifteenth century. The language of his divans (collections of poems) is Turki, the literary language of the Turkic people of Central Asia. Turki was highly developed under the Timurids. Central Asian literary Turki took its classical shape especially in the works of Mir `Alishir Nava’i (1441-1501) and Muhammad Zahiruddin Babur (1483-1530).
Nava’i was an outstanding thinker and poet as well as the great literary patron of his day. He was a statesman and a prominent member of the court of Sultan Husayn Bayqara, the Timurid prince who ruled Herat from 1473 to 1506. Nava’i wrote all his works in Central Asian Turki. His Hamsa (Quintet) is comprised of five dastdns (long poems): Hayrat al-abrdr (Amazement of the Pious), Farhad va Shirin (Farhad and Shirin), Layli va Majnun (Layli and Majnun), Sab`a yi sayydr (Seven Planets), and Saddi Iskandari (Alexander’s Wall). His four divans were entitled Ghard’ib al-sighar (Curiosities of Childhood), Nawadir al-shabdb (Marvels of Youth), BaddTal-wasat (Wonders of Middle Age), and Fawa’id al-kibar (Advantages of Old Age); they contained more than sixty thousand lines of lyrical verse. He was also the author of a number of scientific treatises and the linguistic work Judgment on Two Languages. He exercised great influence on the literatures of Central Asia, Azerbaijan, and Turkey, and his works (numbering more than thirty) also influenced the development of Uzbek literature and language.
Muhammad Zahiruddin Babur also made a great contribution to the development of Central Asian literature. Babur’s lyrical poems are colorful. His biographical work Baburnamah is valuable as the first monument of realistic prose written in Central Asian Turki.
In the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries Central Asian literature developed in the domains of three independent khanates (kingdoms) in their capital cities in Bukhara, Khiva, and Khoqand. The Bukhara khanate existed until 1920. In 1753 it was renamed the Bukhara emirate. In the territory of the khanate where the population spoke mostly in Central Asian Turki and Persian, the literary works were also created mainly in these languages. The most famous poets of the Bukhara khanate were Mujrim Obid, Turdi Faraghi, Sayido Nasafi. Mujrim Obid (late eighteenth-early nineteenth century) was one of the best lyric poets, who wrote ghazals. Turdi Faraghi lived during the reign of the king Nadir Muhammadshah (governing from 1640) and his sons Abdulaziz (1645) and Subkhanqulikhan (1680). In this period it was difficult for poets to survive in the territory of the khanate; for this reason they left their homeland for the court of the Mughals of India. In the first stage of his creative activity Turdi wrote Sufi poems, and he considered himself as follower of `Alishir Nava’!. His poem Muhammas-i Turki Turdi is one example. The character and motif of his poems later changed; he began writing poems that expressed social ideas.
In the Khiva khanate the best-known writers were Nishati (sixteenth century), Munis (1778-1844), Agahi (1809-i874), Muhammadniyaz Komil (1825-1899), Avaz Otaroghli (1884-1919). Munis and Agahi were poets as well as historians. Munis began writing a history of Khwarazm titled Ferdaus ul-lqbal (The Paradise of Happiness), but he could finish only the introduction and first chapters. Munis’s follower, the poet Agahi, finished this excellent work.
The Khoqand khanate for many centuries was the center of poets. Such outstanding poets as Mashrab (seventeenth century), Mahmur (eighteenth century), Gulkhani (1770-1820), Muqimi (1850-1903), Furqat (1859-1909), Zavqi (1853-1921), as well as the many poetesses such as Uwaysi (1780-1846), Nodira (1791-1842), and Anbaratin (1870-1915) were the best in Turkistan of this period.
Colonial and Post-Independence Periods. Little scholarly attention has yet been addressed to literary developments in Central Asia during the period since the imposition of Russian colonial rule in the second half of the nineteenth century and the most recent period leading to the regaining of national sovereignty and independence in 1991. What work was done by former Soviet scholars needs to be critically reviewed from a nonideological perspective.
The colonial period in Turkistan, beginning with the Russian military invasion and occupation in 1861, marked a dark and tragic era for indigenous literature. From the beginning of their colonial incursion in the region the Russians attempted to make use of literature to further their interests by creating and promoting works that praised Russian culture, political system, and identity. Local poets and writers like Abay, Zhambyl Zhabaev (Kazakh), Ahmad Danish (Tajik), Furqat (Uzbek), and others began praising Russians in their works.
Some of Furqat’s poems-Suvorov haqida, Gimnaziia (Gymnasium), Vystavka (Exhibition), and Rus askarlary ta’rifida (About Russian Soldiers), praised everything Russian. Archival materials now indicate that whenever Furqat published a poem praising Russians he was rewarded by the Governor-general of Turkistan. This type of antiliterature was produced under the initiative of the editor in chief of the Turkistan Vilayatynyng Gazeti and the chief inspector of Turkistan public schools, a Russian named Ostroumov. During the first years after the Russian invasion of Turkistan, Ostroumov and his teacher II’minsky, a Russian missionary from Kazan, attempted to replace the Arabic script that had been used for more than a thousand years with Cyrillic and to ban Islam; for this purpose the Bible was translated into Uzbek. Although the tsarist rulers of Turkistan did not succeed in implementing these ideas, what they did not do was done by the Bolsheviks.
Eventually Furqat understood the mistake he had made and began to write poetry criticizing the oppressive nature of Russian rule in the Ferghana valley. As a result he was exiled by the Russians and died in Chinese Turkistan.
During the early decades of the twentieth century a new generation of writers, the so-called Ziyahlar (Enlighteners), who were followers of Ismail Bey Gasprin skii and supporters of Jadidism, emerged, making major contributions to the modern literature of Turkistan. Among them were Mahmudkhodzha Behbudy, Abdurauf Fitrat, Abdulhamid Cholpon, Maghjan Jumabayuuli, and Manan Ramiz. [See Jadidism and the biography of Gasprinskii. ]
In addition to poetry, this period also saw the writing and performance of plays as a new literary and artistic genre in Turkistan. In clear contrast to the nineteenthcentury writers and poets who demonstrated their literary skills by praising the beauty of spring or magical moonlight, the Jadlid writers turned their attention to the critique of ideas and social practices. For example, Behbudy’s play Padarkush (Patricide) written in 1911, and a play by Abdulla Qodiry entitled Bakhtsyz kuyov (Unlucky Bridegroom), together with Cholpon’s short stories, concentrated on the serious problems families faced in Turkistan following Russian colonial occupation.
Abdurauf Fitrat (1886-1938), one of the early dramatists and an outstanding scholar of the Jadidi era, both inspired and provided the ideological framework for the indigenous reform movement in Turkistan. Many of Fitrat’s plays took the form of historical dramas that depicted actual figures from the early and medieval Islamic periods. His works helped raise national consciousness and feelings of patriotism among the peoples of Turkistan. Some of his best-known plays in this genre include Abu Muslim (1918), Temiirning saghanasy (Timur’s Mausoleum, 1919), Oghizkhan (1919), Abul Fayz Khan (1924), Isyon’i Vose (Vose’s Uprising, 1927), and others written in either Uzbek or Farsi.
Like Fitrat, many Central Asian writers of this early colonial period were bilingual. Through their efforts to unify the various spoken forms of Turkic they developed the Literary Turki language. Historically and politically, they considered Turkistan to be a single, indivisible state with a common historical and cultural identity. Fitrat played a leading role in this movement and supported the introduction of an array of progressive changes in Turkistan. However, he opposed the imposition of the “proletarian” revolution exported from Russia. Fitrat sought to improve socioeconomic conditions in Turkistan by strengthening its ties with other Turkic and Muslim peoples in the region.
Another new genre, the realistic novel was introduced in Turkistan in the twentieth century by Abdulla Qodiry (1894-1938). Some of his better-known novels in this genre include Otgan kunlar (The Bygone Days, 1922), and Mehrobdan chayon (Scorpion from the Altar, 1929). He crafted a new method of writing historical novels that differed significantly from the well-known style of Arab writer Jurji Zaydan, whose aim was to describe the history of Islam through his novels. Abdulla Qodiry’s method of writing historical novels more closely resembled that of Walter Scott. The central importance of Abdulla Qodiry’s novels lay in their sympathetic rendition of the lives and times of the people of Turkistan before they were robbed of their freedom and independence by Russian colonists. When the Turkistani people read these novels, especially before 1991, they always recalled the long history of their independence and yearned for the return of their freedom. Many other Turkistani novelists like Mukhtar Avezov (Kazakh), and Khydyr Deryaev (Turkmen) followed Abdulla Qodiry’s example.
Not surprisingly these writers were much criticized by pro-Soviet authors who accused them of harboring sympathy for the old order. In his satirical writings Abdulla Qodiry criticized everything he considered bad in society, and the Soviets reacted with hostility. His first arrest by the Soviet regime followed the publication of one of his pieces in the satirical magazine Mushtum (Fist) in 1926.
By far the most significant contributions to Turkistan’s modern literature were made by an author whose entire life and works were dedicated to the realization of the ideals of a democratic and independent Turkistan. This extraordinary writer was Abdulhamid Sulaymon ughli Cholpon (1897-1938). The first collection of his poems, Uyghonish (Awakening) was published in 1923. In these poems Cholpon advocated the awakening and resistance of his people against the invaders:
Oh my heart! why for so long
Have you become friendly with chains? What complaints, what demands have you? Why have you become weakened?
You’re alive, not dead
You are a man, you are a human Don’t be in chains
Don’t beg
Because you also are born free!
The last three lines of the above poem by Cholpon have become the motto of the Democratic Party of Uzbekistan (ERK) today.
For Cholpon, as the following verses indicate, the struggle for freedom and independence was the sole reason for living a noble life or dying a glorious death:
O you widows and helpless ones O you bound in chains
O you beggars for freedom Do not beg from them!
Cholpon’s patriotism, love of Turkistan, and hatred of the invaders always echoed in the hearts of his readers. His poetry remained a strong source of inspiration and a major symbol of constant struggle for Turkistanis who held the independence and freedom of their homeland as their cherished goal. Only four collections of his poems were published during Cholpon’s own lifetimeUyghonish (Awakening), Buloqlar (Springs), Tong sirlary (Secrets of Dawn), and Soz (Musical Instrument). In addition, Cholpon also published part one of his novel Kecha va kunduz (Day and Night, 1935) and a number of plays and short stories.
The Communist rulers of Turkistan feared Cholpon, Fitrat, Maghjan, and Abdulla Qodiry because of the appeal their views had among the population at large. The regime attempted to exploit their popularity by encouraging them to write in support of the Soviet colonial system, but these efforts failed.
The classical literary language of Turki was the dominant medium of written expression throughout Central Asia during the fifteenth to late nineteenth centuries. In 1924 the Communist regime split the region into five Soviet republics and instituted a campaign (carried out all over the Soviet Union) of secular education in local indigenous languages. The government supported the writing and publication of works for schools and general readers in these vernaculars, resulting in bodies of Soviet Kazakh, Kirghiz, Tajik, Turkmen, and Uzbek literature.
During the 1930s the literary community in the Soviet Central Asian republics suffered an unprecedented loss in human lives and incurred serious social, cultural, and psychological damage to the community. In 1937-1938 almost all well-known writers and many of their followers and family members were arrested by the Soviets. Special archival materials made available in the period of glasnost indicate that many national literary figures of Central Asia (Fitrat, Abdulla Qodiry, Cholpon, and others) were sentenced to death by the Military Group of the Supreme Court of the Ministry of Inner Affairs of the USSR but in fact were shot before sentencing (Sharq Yulduzi, Tashkent, No. 6, 1991, p. 9o). Numerous honest and talented writers were annihilated and their works removed from public circulation and banned. Despite the concerted efforts of the Soviet rulers to mute the calls for freedom unleashed by these courageous writers, they have continued to inspire a new generation of writers in Turkistan. Today, many carry forward the tradition of pride in the heritage of contemporary Turkistan. They include major literary figures of the present era such as Chingiz Aitmatov (Kirghiz), Olzhas Suleymenov (Kazakh), Erkin Vahidov, Abdullo Oripov (Uzbek), Gulurukhsor Safieva (Tajik), and many others who have resumed the interrupted creative work of their teachers.
The execution of many of the heroes of Turkistani literature during the first decades of Bolshevik rule nonetheless had a chilling effect on literary circles. The decades from 1940 to the 1970s saw the rise of mediocrity as dutiful but unimaginative servants of the invading poweramong them Hamza, Ghafur Ghulam, Hamid Alimjan, Yashin, Uyghun (Uzbek), Ayni, Mirzo Tursunzoda, Lahuti (Tajik), Berdi Kerbabaev (Turkmen), and T. Satilghanov (Kirghiz)-eulogized the regime under the banner of “socialist realism” in verses like these:
Joseph Stalin, the whole people say We saw Lenin in you.
And it is true.
(Ghafur Ghulam)
My elder brother is Russian
If I’ll praise [him] in this poem It will be in good conscience. (Ghafur Ghulam)
Russia, Russia, the gigantic land. I am not a guest, I am your son. (Hamid Alimjan)
These were considered good examples of socialist realism among the ruling circles, and their authors won much praise. The sons and daughters of this land who had suffered so much under the yoke of colonialist oppression found it shameful to label such works literature.
A recurrent theme in Soviet literature was an attack on Islam and its supporters, and this theme became a standard subject for Central Asian pro-Soviet writers. In the 19206 they even founded a literary magazine called Khudosizlar (Atheist). Hamza Hakimzada Niyazi (18891929) expressed his opposition to Islam not only in his literary works Maysaraning ishi (The Tricks of Maysara), Burungi saylowlar (Former Elections), and Boy ila khizmatchi (Rich and Servant), but also in his political activities; he was stoned to death by a mob.
Even under these difficult circumstances, many talented writers like Mukhtar Avezov (Kazakh) and Aybek (Uzbek) wrote historical novels chronicling their nations’ heroic part. Other writers, such as Chingiz Aitmatov (Kirghiz), employed legends and allegories in their novels in order to avoid praising the Soviet reality of this period.
More recently, authors of great skill and genuine talent have offered more truthful approaches to the facts, events, and conditions in contemporary Turkistan. However, the history of Turkistan has continued to inspire new works. The 1970s was a particularly productive period when a number of historical novels were written including A. Yakubov’s Ulughbek hazinasi (The Treasure of Ulughbek), PirimquI Qadirov’s Yulduzli tunlar (Starry Nights) and Avlodlar davont (The Barrier of the Generation), Mirmuhsin’s Me’mor (The Architect) and Kh. Deryaev’s Qismat (Destiny). Banned historical novels by Abdulla Qodiry and Mehrobdan Chayon and Cholpon’s novel Kecha va kunduz (Night and Day) were republished.
During the Soviet period the Central Asian classics were published, but always in shortened form. Until today no full editions have appeared. Even NavdTs linguistic work has never been printed in full form in Central Asia, because the writer praised the Prophet and saints. When the Central Asian republics gained independence, authors were allowed to write about their historical past and began more freely to describe the themes of Islam, Sufism, and the Islamic heritage of the country. Abdullo Oripov’s Hadzh daftary (The Hajj Diary) was the first popular work in this genre.
A country without democracy, and a nation that for years was turned into a labor camp, was referred to only a few years ago by puppets of the ruling circles as the Bakhtlar Vodysy (Valley of Joy). The realities of life during the final years of occupation, however, were described in the works of more objective writers-including Erkin Vahidov, Chingiz Aitmatov, Olzhas Suleymenov, Abdullo Oripov, Muhammad Salih, and A. Sher,-as exemplified in the following poem entitled Vatan umidi (National Hope):
Though my name means Free (Erkin)
I have no freedom, I am a chained prisoner. I am blindfolded, my heart is full of pain
I have no tongue, I am speechless.
(Erkin Vahidov)
True to the prophetic voices of the national writers, after 130 years real independence came, and it did so with considerable sacrifices and serious economic hardships to the peoples of Central Asia. The end of the twentieth century promises great activity in literature and criticism, with resurgent Islamic influences likely to play a part.
[See also Islam, article on Islam in Central Asia and the Caucasus.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Agaeva, Marina. Turkmenskaia literatura (Turkmen Literature). Moscow, 1980.
Allakov, Jora. Hazirki dovur ve Turkmen edabiyati (Modern Time and Turkmen Literature). Ashgabat, 1982.
Allworth, Edward. Uzbek Literary Politics. The Hague, 1964. Allworth, Edward, ed. Central Asia: A Century of Russian Rule. New York, 1967.
Allworth, Edward, ed. The Nationality Question in Soviet Central Asia. New York, 1967.
Bacon, Elizabeth E. Central Asians under Russian Rule: A Study in Culture Change. Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1966.
Bombaci, Alessio. “The Turkic Literatures: Introductory Notes on the History and Style.” In Philologiae Turcicae Fundamenta, vol. 2, pp. 11-71. Wiesbaden, 1965.
Cagatay, Tahir. Turkistanda Turkculuk ve Halkcilik. 2 vols. Istanbul, 1951-1954
Hayit, Baymirza. Turkestan im XX. Jahrhundert. Darmstadt, 1956. Hodizoda, Rasul, Usmon Karimov, and Sadri Sa’diev. Adabiyoti Tojik (Tojik Literature). Dushanbe, 1988.
Istoriia Kirghizskor Sovetskoi literatury (The History of Kirghiz Soviet Literature). Moscow, 1970.
Istoriia Uzbekskoi literatury (The History of Uzbek Literature). 2 vols. Tashkent, 1987.
Istoriia Uzbekskoi Sovetskoi literatury (The History of Uzbek Soviet Literature). Vol. i. Tashkent, 1917.
Koprulu, Mehmet Fuat. “Cagatay Edebiyati.” In Islam Ansiklopedisi, vol. 3. Istanbul, 1963.
Kyrgyz Sovet adabiiatynyn tarykhy (The History of Kirghiz Soviet Literature). 2 vols. Frunze, 1987.
Ocherki istorif Kazakhskoi literatury (Outline of the History of Kazakh Literature). Moscow, 1960.
Ozbek adabiyoti tarikhi (The History of Uzbek Literature). Vol. 1. Tashkent, 1990.
Qazaq adabietining tarikh (The History of Kazakh Literature). Vol. 1. Alma-Ata, 1960.
Rustamov, Ergash Rustamovich. Uzbekskaia poeziia v pervoi polovine XV veka (Uzbek Poetry in the First Half of the Fifteenth Century). Moscow, 1963.
Togan, A. Zeki Velidi. Bugunku Turkili (Turkistan) ve Yakin tarihi. Istanbul, 1942-1947
Turkmen poeziyasining antologiasi (The Anthology of Turkmen Poetry). Ashgabat, 1958.
KHAYRULLA ISMATULLA

ARABIC LITERATURE

Batoota — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 13:19:24 +0000

ARABIC LITERATURE. [This entry comprises two articles on Islamic themes and values in modern Arabic literature. The first presents a general overview; the second focuses specifically on issues of gender in fiction and poetry.]
An Overview
From the beloved pre-Islamic odes, the mu’allaqat, to the contemporary novel, literature written in Arabic spans centuries, continents, and historical periods. Although Arabic literature began during the Jahiliyah (pre-Islamic period), Islam has had a profound influence on its development. The Qur’an itself is a literary tour de force, and down to the present day Islamic texts forming part of the centuries-long turath (the textual tradition of the Arabo-Islamic world) continue to play an important role in the development of contemporary literature. With the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988 to the Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz (Najib Mahfuz), Arabic literature became poised to play a larger role on the world literary scene.
The literature of the Jahiliyah was that of a partly Bedouin society and was dominated by poetry; the poet often acted as the oracle of his tribe. The premier art form was the qasidah or ode. The poet was conventionally inspired to compose an ode by the sight of animal droppings that signaled an abandoned encampment. The critic and anthologist Ibn Qutaybah (d. 889) links the creation of the ode to the remnants of this encampment and elucidates the ode’s structure. Although twentieth-century critics have questioned Ibn Qutaybah’s classification of the qasidah, this has by no means
detracted from the significant role that poetry played in the codification of the Arabic language and Arabic grammar by medieval grammarians and lexicographers. Both the male and the female poetic voices existed in the pre-Islamic period; the female poet al-Khansa’ has entered the annals of Arabic literature with the elegies she composed for her brother.
With its powerful imagery and its often incantatory style, the Qur’an joined the pre-Islamic poetic corpus as a literary and aesthetic model as well as a religious one. For Muslims the Qur’an is the direct, unmediated word of God; therefore it is as perfect from a literary standpoint as it is from a religious one. The speech of God is not normal speech, and its inimitability (i’jaz) becomes a topic of central concern for later theorists, both grammatical and literary.
The Arab-Islamic conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries created a multinational empire from Spain to Afghanistan. This cosmopolitan society drew virtually without prejudice from the previous cultures of local regions, spawning a sophisticated literature far exceeding in richness and quantity the literatures of either the classical Mediterranean world or of medieval Europe. Paper had recently been invented in China, and its dissemination through the lands of Islam had much to do with this literary florescence; so too did the opening of cultural channels and the circulation of ideas across an unprecedented geographical expanse. Scholars and writers might begin their careers in what is today Portugal and end them on the banks of the Red Sea or the borders of the Hindu Kush.
Most critics associate classical Arabic literature with poetry. A formalized and detailed metrical system was codified by al-Khalil (d. 791). The panegyric became a highly refined art form, as did the lighter ghazal, a shorter ode. The qasidah survived the passage of time, although its erotic prologue was transformed and adapted to new needs, such as the pastoral and the ascetic. The neoclassical duo of Abu Tammam (d. 845) and al-Buhturi (d. 897) became familiar literary names, as did that of the heroically inclined al-Mutanabbi- (d. 965). Not all poets, however, felt constrained to obey the sacred rules of the poetic genre; thus Abu Nuwas (d. 815) mocked the erotic prologue by addressing the opening of one of his poems to a tavern.
Numerous works have come down to us from the classical period of this highly sophisticated culture. One of the literary genres dominating the Arabic prose corpus is an anecdotal form designed to be at once edifying and entertaining, known as adab. To characterize it as prose can be, however, misleading. In its discourse adab can include Qur’anic verses, poetry, and traditions of the Prophet. These traditions, called hadith, are collections of the sayings and actions of the Prophet intended to serve as guides for the daily life of the Muslim. Generally recognized as the greatest master of Arabic adab is the ninth-century writer al-Jahiz. His Book of Misers (Kitab al-bukhala’) has survived the centuries, and its anecdotes circulate in children’s literature in the contemporary Arab world. The characters who populated medieval Arabic anecdotal works ranged from rulers and judges to misers and party-crashers.
Medieval anecdotal literature had close family relations to two other literary products, the maqdmah and The Thousand and One Nights. The maqamah is an indigenous Arabic form invented by Badi` al-Zaman alHamadhani (d. 1008). His Maqamat (loosely translated as “Seances”), executed in rhymed prose, featured a sort of picaresque hero whose narrative existence centered around his eloquence and his ability to outwit his listeners and gain from them. Al-Hariri (d. 1122) also made his name by writing in this genre, although his literary constructions are more rhetorically fanciful than those of his predecessors. It is his Maqdmdt that would serve as the model for nineteenth-century writers anxious to reenergize Arabic literature.
The Thousand and One Nights is a much more amorphous literary text whose stories were collected over centuries. The Nights is now as much a classic of Western literature as of Arabic. Magic, sexuality, flying carpets, questions of the body: all were part and parcel of the stories associated with the Nights. Shahrazad and her sister Dunyazad, Shahriyar and his brother Shahzaman, are the two couples whose lives set the narrative in motion. Shahrazad weaves the tales that will immortalize her in the annals of world literature, at the same time as she will help resolve the dilemma of the heterosexual couple whose instability opens the narrative. Many of the story cycles from the Nights, like that of Sindbad, reappear in modern guises in twentiethcentury Arabic writings. In these rewritings, the personality of Shahrazad holds pride of place as the female hero who can play in two arenas-classical and modern Arabic literature.
Literature flourished in the Islamic West as it did in the Islamic East. Although the maqamah was invented in the Eastern part of the Arabo-Islamic world, examples of it appeared in Islamic Spain. The hybrid literary population of that region gave birth to a new poetic form, muwashshahat, a complex poem combining Arabic and local linguistic elements. These muwashshahat can be set to music, and one can still hear them sung in the Arab world today. The Andalusian author ‘Ali Ibn Hazm (d. 1064), displays another dimension of anecdotal prose literature in his treatise on the psychology of love, Tawq al-hamamah (The Dove’s Neckring). The special development given to courtly love themes in Hispano-Arabic literature has often been linked to the rise of the troubadours in neighboring Provence.
From quite early in the development of Islamic orthodoxy, echoes of asceticism and mysticism could be heard. Generally these came from individuals dissatisfied with what they perceived to be the loss of the personal dimension in the religious experience, buried under legalistic discussions and ritualized practice. A different sort of mystical and philosophical narrative was woven in Andalusia by the physician-philosopher Ibn Tufayl (d. 1185-1186). His great allegory Hayy ibn Yaqzdn (Alive Son of Awake) had medieval relatives in the Arabo-Islamic philosophical tradition; it is a masterpiece whose literary echoes, from gender to philosophy, can be heard across the centuries down to the contemporary Middle East, where it resurfaces in children’s literature from Egypt to Tunisia. Its appeal lies partly in its plot: an abandoned infant grows up alone on an island and discovers science and mysticism on his own. He then meets another young man who also seeks shelter from his own society, and the two, after an aborted attempt at setting this society on the right path, live happily on their own island.
The competing trends of the mystical and the legal were harmonized by the great thinker Abu Hamid alGhazali (d. 1111), whose autobiography, Al-munqidh min al-dalal (The Rescuer from Error), talks about this dilemma. Al-Ghazali’s autobiography, like that of St. Augustine, recounts a religious quest. But the premodern period also boasted other autobiographical sagas, among them that of the great twelfth-century Syrian warrior-writer Usamah ibn Munqidh. His story takes place during the Crusades, and some of his observations of Western combatants in his Kitab al-i’tibar are by now classic. As an Arabic writer living through the occupation by Western invaders, Usamah has great appeal to modern-day Palestinian writers such as Emile Habiby, who do not hesitate to draw parallels spanning the centuries.
The medieval autobiographical form coexisted with a well-developed indigenous Arabo-Islamic literary form, the biography. The genesis of the biographical dictionary has been linked by some to the science of hadith criticism and by others to Arab genealogical storytelling and poetic traditions. The arrangement of biographical compendia is linked to the concept of tabagdt or classes. In tabaqat collections the biographies were divided into groups that could be arranged according to generations (as with hadith transmitters) or on levels of merit or skill (as with poets). In a possibly later development, this term was also applied to compendia limited to a given type. Biography developed into a diverse and sophisticated historical and literary genre that saw its golden age under the Mamlfiks (c. 1250-I500) and included works devoted to persons with particular physical characteristics, such as the blind. [See Biography and Hagiography.]
To read Usamah’s autobiographical text in which he discusses the Crusaders or the biographical compendia is to realize that Arabic literature is an inherent part of the political and cultural processes in the region. This becomes clearer in the modern period. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the West had a more profound influence on the Middle East than that of mere politics. With Western imperialism came new literary genres, the novel and the short story. Poetry, which has always been one of the mainstays of Middle Eastern culture, continues to be promoted and promulgated in a spirit different from that of prose.
It is generally considered that the first Arabic novel is Zaynab by the Egyptian Muhammad Husayn Haykal, published in 1913. But this point is the culmination of a process that started in the nineteenth century and involved the revitalization of the Arabic literary scene. Here the name of the Syrian Nasif al-Yaziji (d. 18’70 looms large; he penned maqamat in imitation of those of his medieval predecessor al-Harirl. Modern-day travelers who walk the Cairo streets and pick up a copy of the Egyptian monthly magazine Al-hildl may not know that this long-lived periodical owes its existence to this early revitalization movement, in which its founder, Jirji Zaydan (d. 1914), was quite prominent. Other nineteenthcentury intellectuals, such as Rifa’ah Rafi’ al-Tahtawi (d. 1873), traveled in Europe (al-Tahtawi was imam of the Egyptian educational mission in France) and wrote about it in their native Arabic. This early phase of modern Arabic literature also saw other literary experiments, including the early twentieth-century neoclassical prose works of Muhammad al-Muwaylihi (d. 1930), Ahmad Shawgi (d. 1932), and Hafiz Ibrahim (d. 1932). Drawing on the traditional form of the maqdmah, these authors composed texts that were literary masterpieces functioning as well as social criticism. Shawgi and Ibrahim were also famed for their neoclassical odes.
This early twentieth-century neoclassical experiment in poetry was not to last, however. The classical qasidah was doomed to fade away, except among old-fashioned poets. Free verse invaded the Arabic poem, from Iraq and North Africa, and dominated it. Prose poems did not lag behind, and today the field of Arabic poetry is as complicated as the political face of the region. Writers such as Salah `Abd al-Sabfir (d. 1981), Adonis, Mahmud Darwish, and Ahmad `Abd al-Mu’ti Hijazi are those who give Arabic poetry a prominent place on the regional (and world) scene.
The distance that twentieth-century Arabic literature has traveled from the days of neoclassicism to the present postmodern narratives is enormous. The names and works that loom large fill library catalogs. Drama as an independent literary genre (and not as a modern rewriting of the maqamah, as some critics would have it) appears. Because Arabic literature has traditionally been considered to be written in the literary language (fushd), vigorous debates arise over the possibilities of using the vernaculars in this high-cultural product; both authors and audiences must appreciate the artificiality of having a peasant appear on the stage speaking in literary Arabic.
One of the foremost proponents of the pure Arabic language was himself a man of letters. Taha Husayn (d. 1973), an Egyptian scholar and writer, was one of the Arab world’s leading modernizers. He penned an autobiography, Al-ayyam (The Days), that remains one of the most beloved works of twentieth-century literature as well as being a landmark in Arabic letters. The saga it recounts forms part of its appeal: a blind Egyptian boy conquers social and educational barriers to become a professor at the modern university in Cairo. Along the way, he becomes part of the student delegation to France and returns to his native Egypt with a French doctorate and a French wife. His visual handicap only accentuates the drama of this text and the cultural differences it raises between tradition and modernity, East and West. It is no accident that schoolchildren from Syria to the Sudan and from Saudi Arabia to North Africa still read this work. This most dramatic of Arabic stories, the tale of “the Conqueror of Darkness,” has also been made into a film and broadcast for millions of Arab viewers. [See the biography of Husayn.] Taha Husayn lived through the traumatic days of Egypt’s battle for independence, that precious contemporary commodity that was to spread throughout the Arab region. With newfound independence, critics of Arabic literature could now begin to speak of Egyptian literary production in comparison with Syrian or Sudanese; but in fact, tempting as these national categories might be, the major driving force behind literary categories is linguistic. Does a writer write in Arabic, or does he or she write in the colonizer’s language? Literature written in Arabic now stands alongside Franco-Arab literature or Anglo-Arab literature (to take but two examples) that comprise texts written by Arab authors, not in Arabic. The fact that many contemporary Arab writers, whether writing in Arabic or in a Western language, live in exile-combined with the transnational nature of cultural production in the world-generally means that writers from one Arab country are read in many. For example, the prominent Lebanese woman writer Hanan al-Shaykh lives in London, but her novels are available to Arabophone readers the world over. The same is true for the verse of the important Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish.
Naguib Mahfouz is undoubtedly the name that most Westerners today associate with Arabic literature. The Nobel Prize is crucial here, as are Mahfouz’s novels and short stories portraying Egyptian life, sometimes at its seediest. At the time Mahfouz won the coveted prize, however, there were many other writers whose fame might have suggested that they too should have been laureates. Yusuf Idris (d. 1991 considered by many younger writers to be the shaykh of the short story, is one such writer. Some of Idris’s narratives are among the most powerful in world literature, rife with sexuality and exploitative male-female relationships.
In the modern period more than genres have changed. The female voice is much more important in the contemporary literary production of the Middle East than it was in the premodern period. The male dominance of most classical Islamic literary genres has been replaced by a far greater balance between male and female voices. This is true not only in poetry (where women contributed even in classical times) but also in the novel and short story.
With women’s writings have come women’s concerns, and often feminism. Both male and female literature, of course, also often reflects the political and social issues in contemporary Middle Eastern societies. Many women writers have distinguished themselves, from Morocco to Saudi Arabia, but undoubtedly the most visible Arab woman writer is the Egyptian feminist physician Nawal al-Sa’dawi. Among women writers al-Sa`dawi stands out by virtue of her uncompromising texts, from fiction to autobiography and didactic essays and studies (e.g., The Hidden Face of Eve). She comes closest to her male colleagues in her outspoken fiction, dealing as it does with sexuality and woman’s exploitation. Hers is a searing gender critique added to the class critique, familiar to Arabic readers from the work of Yusuf al-Qa’id. AlQa’Id exposes the less savory aspects of government bureaucracies, imbuing his narratives with a bleak vision that allows his characters no escape (e.g., War in the Land of Egypt). In this al-Qa`id is not too dissimilar from the Palestinian Ibrahim Nasr Allah, whose postmodern fiction (for instance, Prairies of Fever) is a desperate commentary on Arab political and social dilemmas. [See the biography of Sa’dawi.]
Arabic literature today is undergoing profound changes. Metafictional narratives and narratives rich in intertextuality are invading contemporary prose, as they have that of the West. But the new Middle Eastern literary experiment is different. Contemporary writers, whatever their religious or political allegiance, are turning toward the classical tradition, redigesting it, redefining it, and recasting it. The name most often associated with this development is that of the Egyptian Jamal al-Ghitani. He draws on the rich Arabo-Islamic textual heritage, including historical, biographical, and mystical texts, to create modern narratives, demanding that his reader intertextually link his literary universe with that of his medieval antecedents. The intertextual use and reuse of classical Arabo-Islamic materials is not restricted to al-Ghitani; practitioners of the contemporary Arabic metafictional narrative cover the entire geographical range of Arabic letters and include the brilliant Palestinian writer Emile Habiby and the innovative Tunisian author al-Mis’adi, to cite but two.
This attempt to return to the classical heritage and to exploit it in new narrative ways was predominantly, and until recently, the domain of Arabic male writers. Once again it is Nawal al-Sa’dawi who has made the breakthrough: Her two recent novels, The Fall of the Imam and The Innocence of the Devil, are attempts at a redefinition of the rich Arabo-Islamic tradition in both its more secular and its more religious manifestations.
It is one of the ironies of literature that it can be manipulated to various ends. One of the most important international developments to date, the religious revival, has played a significant role in literary developments, changing the face of Arabic literature. Despite its image in the West, the Islamist movement is not just a matter of street demonstrations or sermons in the local mosque. At stake is the control of various forms of cultural production, some of which-such as literature and the arts-have long been in the hands of more secularized and leftist intellectuals. The transnational nature of Islamism means that its ideas and advocates know no borders. Books may be printed in Cairo and Beirut, but one is as likely to find them in bookstores in other Middle Eastern cities as well as in European capitals with large Muslim populations.
This literary movement has been dubbed “Adab Islami,” or “Islamic literature.” Islamic literature is a parallel Islamic literary production that encompasses all the genres hitherto promulgated by more secularly minded intellectuals-plays, novels, short stories, and poetry. Even the terms of the debate are clearly laid out. “Committed” literature is no longer the prerogative of one group. One must extend it, we are told, to the religiously engaged text.
The nexus of literature and the religious revival has still to be fully explored. Oddly enough, this critical occultation comes about because of the unwitting collusion of different academic specialists. On the one hand, most studies of religious movements concern themselves with political and theological questions. On the other hand, Western specialists in Arabic and other literatures of the Middle East confine themselves to the enormous secularized literary production of the region, perceived as it is to be artistically serious and hence more worthy of study.
The Islamist movement is teaching us that literature is as political today as it was in the medieval period. The deep influence of the dual and complementary processes of islamization and arabization is perhaps most visible in North Africa, where many writers once consciously employed the language of the colonizer; now, in an equally conscious move, many of them are switching to Arabic.
Islamic literature is, of course, not neutral. It advocates a way of life-the religious way. (Statistically, in Arab countries, sales of Islamic books far outnumber those of secular ones.) One of the favored modern Islamic literary genres is the autobiography. The major figures of the Islamist movement have indulged themselves here, from the popular television preacher Muhammad Mutawalli al-Sha’rawi to the equally colorful blind Shaykh `Abd al-Hamid Kishk. Kishk’s Story of My Days chronicles not only his religious development but also his saga as a visually handicapped young man. In an ironic twist of literary fate, it calls to mind Taha Husayn’s The Days. [See the biography of Kishk. ]
The Islamist movement has also given rise to many female literary voices. The classic example here remains that of Zaynab al-Ghazali, whose Days from My Life recounts her religious activism and her dramatic imprisonment. In recent years, as veiling has become more popular among the educated elite of the Arab world and North Africa, many women writers are taking the occasion to exhibit not their bodies but their narratives of salvation. These spiritual autobiographies, not too distant in their aim from that of al-Ghazali, now abound on the shelves of Islamic bookstores all over the world. [See the biography of Ghazah.]
Nonetheless, the contemporary autobiography, like its other contemporary generic prose relatives, differs in spirit from its classic antecedent. Whereas it can be argued that classic literary text (be it anecdote or biography, to take but two examples) is more an expression of collective norms, the modern literary text expresses and centers more deeply on the individual. Genres may be superficially similar, but their cultural bases alter their articulation.
Examining this recent literary production that is Islamic literature alongside the intertextual postmodernism of someone like al-Ghitani will show that contemporary Arabic literary discourse is being transformed. The new Arabic discourse is one that synchronically telescopes centuries of previous Arabic literary production. When verses from the Qur’an, sayings from the hadith, or historical incidents from Usama’s chronicle are transposed and embedded into a twentieth-century Arabic creation, a new literary product emerges. Present-day Arabic literature is to be characterized as a complex discourse that partakes of cultural elements from both the rich Arabo-Islamic past and the equally rich Western tradition.
Arabic literature, whether in its more secular or in its more religious guises, is today a major cultural force in the Middle East. Through its relations with other contemporary literature s, especially Western, it participates in an emerging world literary culture. At the same time, through its frequently self-conscious relation to its own immense Arabo-Islamic textual inheritance, it adds its own distinctive flavor.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allen, Roger. The Arabic Novel: An Historical and Critical Introduction. Syracuse, N.Y., 1982.
Beard, Michael, and Adnan Haydar, eds. Naguib Mahfouz: From Regional Fame to Global Recognition. Syracuse, N.Y., 1993.
Hamori, Andras. On the Art of Medieval Arabic Literature. Princeton, 1974
Malti-Douglas, Fedwa. Structures of Avarice: The Bukhald’ in Medieval Arabic Literature. Leiden, 1985.
Malti-Douglas, Fedwa. Blindness and Autobiography: Al-Ayydm of Tahd Husayn. Princeton, 1988.
Malti-Douglas, Fedwa. Woman’s Body, Woman’s Word: Gender and Discourse in Arabo-Islamic Writing. Princeton, 1991. Malti-Douglas, Fedwa. Men, Women, and God(s): Nawal El Saadawi Writes Arab Feminism. Berkeley, 1995.
Monroe, James T. The Art of Badi az-Zaman al-Hamadhani as Picaresque Narrative. Beirut, 1983.
Stetkevych, Jaroslav. The Zephyrs of Najd: The Poetics of Nostalgia in the Classical Arabic Nasib. Chicago, 1993
Stetkevych, Suzanne Pinckney. Abu Tammdm and the Poetics of the ‛Abbāsid Age. Leiden, 1991.
Stetkevych, Suzanne Pinckney. The Mute Immortals Speak: PreIslamic Poetry and the Poetics of Ritual. Ithaca, N.Y., 1993
FEDWA MALTI-DOUGLAS
Gender in Arabic Literature
Most twentieth-century Arabic fiction is informed by an Islamicate consciousness, yet relatively few authors have chosen specifically Islamic themes. Many writers question the place of tradition in a rapidly modernizing world, but few examine the religion as a social, symbolic system. Those novels and poems that have dealt with Islam specifically have three foci: criticism of the institutions of orthodox Islam; the spiritual role of Islam and of the prophet Muhammad as a counterproject to westernization; and Islamicist activism. Such texts tend to exaggerate traditional conceptions of gender roles and behaviors. Gender is here used to refer to the images, values, interests, and activities held to be important to the realization of men’s and women’s anatomical destiny. As women have added their voices to the corpus of literature on Islam, so have the understandings of gender changed.
It was in the first quarter of the twentieth century that Muslim intellectuals began to write fiction that reflected political and socioreligious concerns. Members of the Egyptian Madrasah Hadithah exposed the oppressive treatment of women and the unchallenged power of religious authorities. Mahmud Tahir Lashin’s 1929 short story “Bayt al-ta’ah” (“House of Obedience”) criticizes men who use what they consider to be an Islamic institution to crush women’s will; the “house of obedience” authorizes the husband of a woman who wants a divorce to become his wife’s jailer. One of the earliest Arabic novels is Taha Husayn’s autobiographical Al-ayydm (published serially in 1926-1927 and as a book in 1929). In this Bildungsroman that traces the triumphs of Egypt’s blind doyen of letters, the pro-Western Taha Husayn criticizes the all-male, tradition-bound al-Azhar system and its hypocritical `ulama’. He constructs himself as a strong man in defiance of social expectations that blind men should be as marginal to society as are women.
While some intellectuals were attacking the corrupt institutions and agents of modern Islam, others were invoking the power at the core of a well understood, timeless faith. The neoclassical court poet Ahmad Shawqi was one of the first to write long poems on Muhammad; his Alhamziyah al-nabawiyah and Nahj al-burdah inspired others to write about Islamic history and the life of the Prophet. The 1930s in Egypt saw the publication of fiction and drama by leading modernist writers lauding the Islamic exemplar and showing that Islam is no obstacle to progress, for example Tawfiq al-Hakim’s unwieldy play Muhammad (1936), Muhammad Husayn Haykal’s Hayat Muhammad, and Taha Husayn’s ‘Ala hamish al-sirah (1937-1943) During the postRevolution period two more important works focusing primarily on Muhammad were published. In 1959 the Egyptian Nobel laureate Najib Mahfuz (Naguib Mahfouz) published Awlad haratina, an allegory based on the lives of several Islamic prophets that was considered blasphemous and was censored. Qasim-Muhammad is the revolutionary with the widest vision, the toughest foe whom the unruly gangs of the alley had yet confronted, yet he like his predecessors was doomed to find his revolution coopted. `Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi’s Marxist study Muh, ammad rasul al-hurriyah (1962) presents the prophetic mission as an exploitative obsession. Each Muhammad is at once an ordinary man and a driven reformer. The women characters in the Prophet’s life are presented as at best foils to his greatness.
One of the first attempts to consider Islam in tandem rather than in mutually exclusive competition with modernity was Qindil Umm Hashim (1945) by the Egyptian adib Yahya Haqqi. It tells the by now paradigmatic tale of the rejection of Islam in favor of Western science, the failure of this science, and the recognition of the need to meld the spiritual and the material. Women act as vehicles of each culture’s values and shape Ismail’s decisions.
During the globally troubled decade of the 1960s Arab men and women began to question the role of religion in the rapidly changing life of the modern individual. While Saudi poets like `Abd al-Rahman Salih al`Ashmawi and Tahir Zamakhshari were writing pious poetry, Egyptian secularists were targeting religion. Najib Mahfuz laments the transformation of Islam into an ideology and the concomitant loss of soul in society. Several characters search in vain for an absent fatherfigure, a transparent symbol for God. These desperate quests involve Sufi masters and chaste prostitutes, the latter often providing greater solace than the former. The Sudanese al-Tayyib Salih seems less pessimistic: in Urs al-Zayn (1966), Zayn, the saintly fool, wins the love of the village beauty and assumes his real persona when he becomes united with her. Both writers create women who merely facilitate a man’s access to the spiritual realm.
While some women were writing overtly feminist texts, others turned to Islam to find a legitimate space for women as active agents. In 1966 the leader of the Egyptian Association of Muslim Ladies, Zaynab alGhazali, published Ayydm min hayati, her memoir of six years in prison under Nasser. She describes torture so great that only she, and not the men, could bear it. In a kind of gender reversal, she cites men only to demonstrate her spiritual superiority. At about the same time in Iraq, another pious woman was producing religiously didactic yet also arguably feminist literature. In the 1960s and 1970s Bint al-Huda, also known as Aminah Saar, participated in the Islamicist revivalism in Najaf; in 198o, the Bath regime executed her. She wrote several novels (notably Liqa; fi al-mustashfd, c. 1970), short stories, and poems in which she created models of ideal behavior for Muslim women. These women are anti Western; they embrace domesticity and advocate the veil, yet they are not subservient to men; and they may work in the public sphere as long as they follow correctly understood Islamic prescriptions. They may even bear arms should the Islamic mission require it.
With the rise of Islamicist movements during the 1970s and 1980s, a few women have chosen to devote their literary talents to Islam. These women do not try to support or oppose gender bias in Islam or its texts. They see rather the hand of patriarchy at work in the misappropriation of scripture to oppress women. The Egyptian feminist physician and novelist Nawal alSa’dawi has written more than twenty novels, of which two concentrate on Islam. The heroine of Suqut al-Imam (1987) is called Bint Allah, or Daughter of God; not only is her name a blasphemy, but she also has dreams of being raped by God. Jannat wa-Iblis (1992) delves into the psyche of the Islamicist movement to expose men’s expedient uses of religion. When God declares Satan to be innocent, the transcendent binary of good and evil is undermined. Sa’dawi’s fearless condemnations of those who abuse religious privilege have earned her a place on the death list of a powerful fundamentalist group. Another Egyptian, but of the next generation, is Salwa Bakr. Her 1986 novella Maqam `Atiyah explores the relationship between Islamic sensibilities and the pharaonic heritage. Should the shrine of Lady `Atiyah be removed to give access to archaeological remains that hold a secret that will transform modern Egypt? Her next novel, Al-`arabah al-dhahabiyah Id tas’adu ila al-samd’ (1931), takes place in the women’s prison, by now a familiar place for readers of Egyptian women’s writings, where a “madwoman” assesses her companions’ eligibility to join her in the golden chariot that will whisk them all off to heaven.
Men and women have both extolled and criticized Islamic texts and institutions throughout the twentieth century. Men have depicted the Prophet as the perfect man who might serve as a model for all, and women have looked into the scriptures for right guidance in their search for power and position in society. However, many have recognized that unscrupulous individuals have used Islam to further their own ambitions. Those who have dared to speak out against such distortions have often had to pay a dear price.
[See also the biographies of Husayn, Ghazali, and Sa’dawi]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bakr, Salwa. Al-`arabah al-dhahabiyah Id tas`adu ila al-samd’. 1991.
Bakr, Salwa. Maqdm `Atiyah. Cairo, 1986.
Bint al-Huda. Liqa’ fi al-mustashfd. Beirut, ca. 1970. Ghazali, Zaynab al-. Ayydm min hayda. Cairo, 1966. Hakim, Tawfiq al-. Muhammad. Cairo, 1936. Haqqi, Yahya. Qindil Umm Hashim. Cairo, 1945. Haykal, Muhammad Husayn. Hayat Muhammad. Cairo, 1938.
Husayn, Taha. `Ala hdmish al-sirah. Cairo, 1937-1943. Husayn, Taha. Al-ayydm. Cairo, 1926-1927.
Lashin, Mahmud Tahir. “Bayt al-ta’ah.” Cairo, 1929.
Mahfuz, Najib (Mahfouz, Naguib). Awlad haatina Beirut, 1967. Religion and Literature 20.1 (Spring 1988). Special issue devoted to Middle Eastern literature, with an Islamic focus.
Sa’dawi, Nawal al-. Suqut al-Imam. Cairo, 1987. Sa’dawi, Nawal al-. Jannat wa-Iblis. Beirut, 1992. Salih, Al-Tayyib. `Urs al-Zayn. Beirut, 1967. Sharqawi, `Abd al-Rahman al-. Muhammad rasul al-hurriyah. Cairo, 1962.
MIRIAM COOKE