Article of the Month - June 2023
 “Rethinking Poetry as (Anti-Crusader) Propaganda: Licentiousness and Cross- Confessional Patronage in the Ḫarīdat al-qaṣr”
(Matthew L. Keegan:
Asian & Middle Eastern Cultures, Barnard College)

Matthew L. Keegan. "Rethinking Poetry as (Anti-Crusader) Propaganda: Licentiousness and Cross- Confessional Patronage in the Ḫarīdat al-qaṣr" Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 11 (2023) 24–58.

Read the article here.

Keywords: Adab • Crusades • Jihad • Islam • Arabic poetry • propaganda • Saladin • Nūr al-Dīn

Abstract:
It is sometimes assumed that the poetry of the Crusader period was part of a con- certed propaganda effort to rouse Muslims to fight and to legitimate Muslim rulers in the eyes of other Muslims by portraying them as ascetic, Sunni revivalists focused on Jihad. Based on samples from the Ḫarīdat al-qaṣr wa-ǧarīdat ahl alʿaṣr, a massive 6th/12th-century adab anthology by ʿImād al-Dīn al-Iṣfahānī, this article argues for a different understanding of both the content and the circulation of this period’s poetry. I show that poetry was not addressed to a “public,” but rather was a form of elite com- munication in which social identity was performed, negotiated, and consolidated. Furthermore, ʿImād al-Dīn’s anthology does not marginalize Shiʿite voices or insist on portraying rulers as ascetics. I trace the origins of these assumptions and show that levity, licentiousness, and Shiʿites were all celebrated in the poetic discourses of the 6th/12th century.

Nomination Statement:
In this article (which should be read alongside his “Adab without the Crusades” (see below) Matthew Keegan provokes a reconsideration of twelfth-century Arabic poetry of the Near East, which has been largely viewed through a Eurocentric, Crusade lens. Rather than constituting a medium for pious, populist anti-Frank propaganda, this poetry is shown to have a life of its own, serving as a mode of social positioning within the elite of the Seljuq-dominated East, and a form of cultural capital which poets used to accrue favor with powerful patrons. Figures like Nur al-Din and Salah al-Din who are regularly portrayed in a hagiographical light, are shown to have patronized authors of licentious verse and poets who also loinized their Shi’a rivals. Keegan’s work complicates our understanding of adab in this period and invites us to understand this poetry on its own terms.

Authors’ Comment:
This article is one half of a pair that seeks to reassess Arabic poetry and prose in the era of the Crusades. The second article, “Adab without the Crusades” was originally the final section of the present article and is available in an open-access journal through this link. The project as a whole grew out of my interest in the Arabic poetry and prose of the 12th-century CE and a long-standing discomfort with the way Arabic poetry and prose in the age of the Crusades has been described in scholarship. The research for this project began after the completion of my dissertation on a 12th-century collection of trickster stories that had played a major role in the decline-and-fall narrative of Arabic literature and Islamic thought that has been the subject of much revisionism in recent years. Although the Mamluk period (1250-1517) had received most of the revisionist attention, I noticed that the Zengid and Ayyubid periods had received very little reassessment with the exception of Crusades-related material. I was furthermore frustrated by the deployment of the language of "propaganda" to describe poetry and prose in this period, and I suspected that the Euro-American obsession with the Crusades had led to the shoe-horning of a heterogeneous textual culture into a Crusades-related framework. After coming across ʿImād al-Dīn's massive anthology of Arabic poetry and prose in my dissertation research, I decided that working through the material in this anthology might lead to a different assessment. The result is this article, which explores the poetry and patronage of the period through the eyes of Saladin's biographer. The second article, “Adab without the Crusades,” examines one of the prose texts in the anthology, an epistle by a young warrior in which solidarity is not imagined through shared piety, as is often imagined, but through drinking, feasting, and hunting.

Would you like to discuss this article?
Start a thread on the Mediterranean Seminar list-server

See the other Articles of the Month here.