Abstract

In this project, I situate Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī’s (fl. 1686) Hazz al-quḥūf bi-sharḥ qaṣīd Abī Shādūf in its cultural context. Thus far, the very few studies that analyze this work either consider it a historical and linguistic source, or read it in a literary fashion by looking at its aesthetic, narrative, and poetic aspects. I posit that neither of these readings suffice, and argue that we must combine both approaches to bridge the gap between our modern epistemological frameworks and premodern Islamicate categories. By considering categories operative in the postclassical Arabic period (13th–18th centuries), I argue that it is to be read as an encyclopedic work that draws on ʿajāʾib (marvelous, awe-inspiring) and riḥla (travelogue) tropes to give an expansive account of its subject—rural Egyptian peasants.

Overview of Hazz al-quḥūf

The book takes as its premise a qaṣīda, or poem, written by a certain Abū Shādūf, a peasant. More specifically, it seeks to explicate (tashraḥ, from sharḥ) this poem to demonstrate to its audience the coarseness and primitivity of the peasant class, in an excessively sardonic, crude tone.^[1] The work is divided into two parts: the first is an overview of peasants’ lifestyle and behavior, and the second constitutes the commentary (sharḥ) on the poem—a line-by-line analysis that critiques everything from the general aesthetics of the poetry to the minutest of grammatical errors. While the second volume follows many of the conventions of the sharḥ, it pushes its limits in terms of, (1) subject matter—peasantry—and (2) the satirization of academic rhetorical devices by excessively employing them. In writing this text, al-Shirbīnī positions himself on the sidelines: he “sides” with neither the peasantry (fallāḥīn) nor the scholars (ʿulamāʾ). On the one hand, and rather obviously, he critiques the peasants’ coarseness (kathāfa), rude speech, and vulgarity; but on the other, his over-the-top, detailed, perhaps even tongue-in-cheek analysis of the peasantry’s cultural production also implies that he is mocking the scholarly class’s excessive scholasticism. As such, al-Shirbīnī and the text tread a line between “high” and “popular” culture.

However, as we will see later, these categories do not do justice to the socio-cultural reality of Mamluk and Ottoman Egypt;^[2] Hazz is a popular work insofar as it was not engaged in the sharḥ enterprise in a purely scholastic sense. As such, al-Shirbīnī seems to belong neither to the elite nor to the peasantry; he was most likely a merchant or tradesman, which makes him a member of the middle class in Egypt that formed between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries in response to increased trade across the Mediterranean—a segment of society described in great detail by Nelly Hanna.^[3] As Humphrey Davies notes, al-Shirbīnī “must have qualified, if not as a full-blown scholar (ʿālim, pl. ʿulamāʾ), then at least as one of the ‘men of culture’ (ahl al-adab) who, while not attached to any institution of learning, had a recognized place within such critical cultural institutions as the majlis (‘literary gathering or salon’).”^[4]

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[1] Humphrey T. Davies, “Introduction,” in Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abu Shaduf Expounded, by Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī, Library of Arabic Literature (New York: New York University Press, 2016).

[2] See Konrad Hirschler, The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands: A Social and Cultural History of Reading Practices (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013).

[3] Nelly Hanna, In Praise of Books: A Cultural History of Cairo’s Middle Class, Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003), especially chapter 3.

[4] Davies, “Introduction,” xiii. For more on al-Shirbīnī’s life and works, see Humphrey T. Davies, “Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī,” in Essays in Arabic Literary Biography II: 1350-1850, eds. Joseph E. Lowry and Devin J. Stewart (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2009).

Why “Encyclopedism”? And what is it?

I am proposing to read Hazz eclectically because it has not been the case in the past. Both twentieth– and twenty-first–century scholars have often approached Hazz from a certain point of view, with a certain objective in mind. If some critics saw an opportunity to rely on Hazz as a historical and linguistic repertoire from rural Egypt in the seventeenth century, then more recent critics—in the spirit of revisionism—have proposed to read Hazz as adab, as “literary.”

Although this scholarship on Hazz is already less polemical than other work on the postclassical period,^[1] there is, nonetheless, if not an implicit indignation of the non-literary approaches to the text, then a sense that history is useful insofar as it illuminates the literary. This attitude, I have come to believe, is equally unproductive, for it automatically alienates non-literary specialists from the scholarship, even if the fact that this text does tell us a lot about peasants in seventeenth-century Egypt is admitted. Furthermore, it privileges aspects of the text that appeal to our (post)modern aesthetic sensibilities, and this goes against the purported purpose of revisionism—namely to read these postclassical texts on their own terms.^[2] Here, I would like to suggest that we read Hazz within the framework of encyclopedism, a style of writing and knowledge compilation usually attributed to the Mamluk period.^[3] What does it mean for a work to be encyclopedic? Is it useful to use the term “encyclopedia” or “encyclopedic” if it is not an indigenous category in the Arabic tradition? What are the benefits of reading Hazz within this framework?

Indeed, the term encyclopedia does not have a native counterpart in Arabic, but it similarly did not exist in Europe until the eighteenth century. However, as Elias Muhanna has persuasively argued,

Construing encyclopaedism as an analytic category of compositional features – such as exhaustiveness, multidisciplinarity, systematic organisation, etc. – represents a way to address the question of what conditions promoted the prevalence of this mode of textual production across various intellectual projects.^[4]

As a sharḥ of a qaṣīda, or commentary on a poem, Hazz exhibits many, though not all, of the features Muhanna lists above. Muhanna’s object of study is mainly Shihāb al-Dīn al-Nuwayrī’s Nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab (The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition), a compendium that spans 33 volumes in a recent printed edition. Hazz, meanwhile, is a much more modest book in two volumes. Nonetheless, if it is not an encyclopedia, I argue that it exhibits encyclopedic qualities (“such as exhaustiveness, multidisciplinarity, systematic organisation, etc.”). In considering the work “encyclopedic,” I believe we are able to appreciate the work as a whole, without singling out certain aspects of it and ignoring others.

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[1] Representative of this revisionist mode is, for instance, Thomas Bauer, “In Search of ‘Post-Classical Literature’: A Review Article,” Mamlūk Studies Review 11, no. 2 (2007): 137–67.

[2] For an incisive reflection on this problem with historical revisionism in treating postclassical Arabic texts, see Adam Talib, “Al-Ṣafadī, His Critics, and the Drag of Philological Time,” Philological Encounters 4, no. 1–2 (2019): 129–32 and passim.

[3] See for example, Elias Muhanna, “Why Was the Fourteenth Century a Century of Arabic Encyclopaedism?,” in Encyclopaedism from Antiquity to the Renaissance, eds. Jason Konig and Greg Woolf (2013), 343–56.

[4] Muhanna, “Why Was the Fourteenth Century a Century of Arabic Encyclopaedism?,” 346–47.

Given that both Davies and El-Rouayheb agree that the Khawāmis is an order that doesn’t appear elsewhere in the literature, I would like to suggest that it is in fact a mishmash of various Sufi orders’ qualities and practices. Davies rightly identifies various parallels between the Khawāmis and the various historically attested Sufi orders. In Davies’ words,

The reprehensible behavior of al-Shirbīnī’s rural dervishes parallels many of the practices mentioned in descriptions of various contemporary antinomian Sufi groups. The Muṭāwiʿah and the Malāmatiyyah were accused of pederasty and fornication, and the former also carried pitchers.The solitary retreat (khalwah), exploited by al-Shirbīnī’s shaykhs for nefarious purposes, was characteristic of the Khalwatiyyah order. There was also said to be a group in Upper Egypt who held pantheistic beliefs and acknowledged no recognized religion.^[5]

In other words, the Khawāmis is a fictive group insofar as it is a caricature of rural Sufi orders. It seems to me that al-Shirbīnī was aware of the practices of the various Sufi orders during his time and brought together all these different orders’ characteristic traits into one fictional order, the Khawāmis. In doing so, al-Shirbīnī creates a caricature of rural Sufi dervishes. But to what effect?

In the context of Hazz in particular and “ethnographic” adab (including the riḥla) in general, a caricature plays two related roles: to instruct and to entertain.^[6] First, by distilling a series of variegated practices attributed to a range of Sufi orders into one character, the instructive, didactic—that is, encyclopedic—aspect of the book is satisfied, for a caricature that is a pastiche of what one ought to know about rural Sufi dervishes is much easier to recall than, for instance, a list of “real” Sufi orders and their specific attributes. Second, combining all that is absurd, wonderous, or odd—ʿajīb and gharīb—about rural Sufi dervishes into one caricature allows for the figure to become humorous, if skillfully employed anecdotally, which is the role of the adīb in this case. At the same time, the humorous nature of the anecdotes helps with the first, didactic purpose of the caricature; something that is funny is more likely to be recalled. What’s more, ʿajāʾib or ʿajāʾib-inspired works (such as Hazz) are occupied with documenting the absurd—which also reflects an encyclopedic (and hence didactic) impulse. Thus, the dual roles of adab often overlap.

Let us consider two passages in which rural dervishes are reprimanded by al-Shirbīnī for shaving their beards. In both cases, the shaved beard is mentioned in passing, yet is often a symptom, or externalization, of moral corruption.

In the first example, al-Shirbīnī describes a first-person eye-witness account of a heretical dervish not only contradicting the Quran, but also misquoting the preeminent poet Abū al-̵ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī (d. 449/1058), i.e., practicing bad adab in both senses of the word: manners and curation of prose and poetry. Al-Shirbīnī writes,

وسمعت بعض الملحدين من الدراويش المحلّقين الدقون يقول كلاما يخالف الكتاب والسنّة إنّ البعث والنُّشور والجنّة والنّار لا حقيقة لهم وإن الشخص جنّته وناره وحسابه في نفسه وإن الدنيا لا تنفى ولا تزول وإنّما هي شمس تطلع وقمر يغيب وينشد قول أبي العلاء المعرّي رحمه الله

أتى عيسى فبطِّل شرْعَ موسى

وجاء محمدٌ بصلاةِ خمْسِ

وقالوا لا نبيٌّ بعد هذا

فضَلَّ القومُ بين غدٍ وأمسِ

ومهْما عِشتَ في دُنياكَ هذي

فما تُخلِّيك من قمرِ وشمسِ

إذا قُلتُ المُحالَ رفعْتُ صوتي

وإن قلتُ الصحيحَ أطلتُ همْسي

ثمّ يقول الشخص إذا طلعت روحه ومات دخلت في جسد من أجساد من آدميّ أو حيوان حتّى يدور عليها الدور فترجع إلى صاحبها الأول فيظهر بصورته التي كان عليها أولا وهكذا سائر العوالم فانظروا إلى شدة جهلهم وسوء اعتقادهم قاتلهم الله تعالى

Once I heard a certain heretical dervish, one of those who shave their beards, making statements that contradicted the Book and the practice of the Prophet Muḥammad, namely, that resurrection and eternal life and Heaven and Hell had no reality and that a person’s Heaven, Hell, and Judgment were all within himself, and that this world would not perish and disappear but rather was simply a sun that rose and a moon that set. And he recited the words of Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī, God have mercy on him:

Jesus came and cancelled Moses’s law,

Then Muḥammad brought five prayers a day.

“No prophets after this!” they said,

And man was lost between tomorrow and yesterday.

However long you live in this world of yours,

From sun and moon you’ll never get away.

I’ll raise my voice when speaking lies,

But whisper long whene’er the truth I say.

Then he said, “If a person’s soul leaves his body and he dies, it enters into the body of a human or an animal, and so it continues until it comes full circle and returns to its first owner; then he appears in his previous form as he first was, and the same goes for the rest of the worlds.” Observe, my brethren, the depth of their ignorance and misbelief, may the Almighty destroy them!^[7]

One of the most important aspects of this anecdote is that al-Shirbīnī claims to have witnessed these events himself, since he begins with the verb “wa-samiʿtu” (‘and I heard’). Therefore, al-Shirbīnī is insisting on the story’s truth-value; its truthfulness is not dependent on the authority of others. Yet, of course, this anecdote appears toward the end of the first volume, and any reasonable reader would have doubts about al-Shirbīnī’s—or the narrator’s—trustworthiness. Regardless of whether this anecdote is true as such, its essence—namely that rural dervishes are heretical, believe in things such as reincarnation, and misquote important poets—would not have been denied by any learned person during al-Shirbīnī’s time, who most likely were his audience.

Besides “samiʿtu,” a keyword in this passage is “fa-unẓurū” (‘observe’). In his discussion of al-Qazwīnī, Zadeh points to the importance of the ʿajāʾibs’ and gharāʾibs’ truth-value.^[8] Thus, al-Shirbīnī’s use of the imperative verb “observe” suggests that he is insisting on the anecdote’s truth-value; for if you can see these dervishes’ oddities (even if al-Shirbīnī does not use the words gharīb and ʿajīb), then they are true. Furthermore, Zadeh points to the fact that observation and empiricism are not the only ways premodern authors demonstrated their anecdotes’ truth-value; drawing on and appealing to age-old traditions about certain characters or materials is an equally valid approach to asserting an anecdote’s truth-value. In our example, this method is reversed on its head. Rather, than drawing on the tradition himself, al-Shirbīnī shows how the dervishes erroneously draw on the tradition. Thus, he, if obtusely, further exposes these dervishes’ untrustworthiness. If the dervishes’ words lack truth-value, then, by implication, al-Shirbīnī’s anecdote is true. This, of course, is verifiable by people’s common knowledge about dervishes.

In the second anecdote about dervishes with shaved beards, al-Shirbīnī draws on the tradition to prove his point—and not on any traditional source, but the Quran itself. Discussing a dervish’s seduction of a young boy (ghulām), by lying to him (taḥayyal ila al-wuṣūl ilayh), al-Shirbīnī writes,

... فهم في (سَكْرَتِهِمْ يَعْمَهُونَ) * (قَاتَلَهُمُ اللهُ أَنَّى يُؤْفَكُونَ) * ولقد صدق من قال وصرح المقال [طويل مع كسر في الشطر الثاني]

يَضال الولدْ مُنصانَ في حضنِ والدهِ

ولمّا يدروش يدور نيّاك

أي لّما يحتوي عليه جماعة من الفقراء أو من طائفة الملحدين المحلّقين الذقون أو طائفة الخوامس قاتلهم الله فيفسدوا عقيدته ويشغلوه عن الدنيا والدين ويدور معهم في التعاسة والخزي والنجاسة حتّى تطلع لحيته فيتركوه خرابًا يُلْقَع * لا نيك يشبع * ولا مال يجمع *

… for «in their intoxication they lie . . . God destroy them! How perverse a lot! » How true the words of him who said, and how clear the saying:

A youth is safe in his father’s arms,

But once a dervish he goes around getting fucked!

—meaning that when a band of dervishes or of the heretical sect that shaves off their beards or of the Khawāmis sect, God destroy them, get a hold of him, they corrupt his belief and distract him from this world and the next, and he goes around with them in wretchedness, ignominy, and impurity until his beard grows, at which they leave him, an abandoned ruin, ever craving a screwing, incapable of earning a living.^[9]

In this case, al-Shirbīnī does not begin the anecdote by using the first-person, yet he draws on the Quran to assert the anecdote’s truth-value; for if God claims that intoxication leads to lying,” and the dervishes are intoxicated (an assumption that could nonetheless be validated by contemporary knowledge), then they must be liars. Another purpose that quoting the Quran plays here is demonstrating al-Shirbīnī’s adeptness as an adīb; he knows what to say and when.^[10]

Hence, al-Shirbīnī draws on argumentative techniques present in ʿajāʾib literature in his ethnographic accounts to affirm his anecdotes’ truth-value, which, in turn, reflects an ethnographic and hence encyclopedic ethos. But “truth-value” is not equivalent to “truth.” If we accept my suggestion that the Khawāmis are a fictional caricature, what is said about them is not false. In crude terms, al-Shirbīnī is interested in proving that a stereotype is true, rather than recounting a tale that actually happened. In a sense, what matters to al-Shirbīnī is not fact and fiction as we define them, but the truth-value, or plausibility, of his anecdotes. Unlike the other ʿajāʾib works such as al-Qazwīnī’s, Hazz’s goal is not to marvel at the beauty of God’s creations, but rather to be stupefied by the peasants’ coarseness (khathāfa), or lack of adab. In this sense, al-Shirbīnī, coming much after al-Qazwīnī, adapts, rather than adopts, features of the ʿajāʾib tradition for his own purposes—the criticism of peasants, of which the rural dervishes (fuqarāʾ) we discussed are a part. Nevertheless, by drawing on the encyclopedic ʿajāʾib tradition, Hazz can thus be considered encyclopedic, with its attention to details, obsession with observation and truth-value, and recounting of a variety of stories, some of which are original but many of which are a refashioning of existing popular lore.

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[1] For a brief discussion on the relationship between al-Qazwīnī’s ʿAjāʾib and Yāqūt al-Rūmī al-Ḥamawī’s Muʿjam al-buldān, see Travis Zadeh, “The Wiles of Creation: Philosophy, Fiction, and the ‘Ajā’ib Tradition,” Middle Eastern Literatures 13, no. 1 (2010): 34–35.

[2] Zadeh, “The Wiles of Creation,” 23–24.

[3] Humphrey T. Davies, “Introduction,” in Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abu Shaduf Expounded, by Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī, Library of Arabic Literature (New York: New York University Press, 2016), xxxi.

[4] Khaled El-Rouayheb, “Heresy and Sufism in the Arabic-Islamic World, 1550–1750: Some Preliminary Observations,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 73, no. 3 (2010): 375.

[5] Davies, “Introduction,” xxxi.

[6] On the relationship between fact and fiction, and on “traditional twin aims of edeb: to instruct and to entertain,” see, Robert Dankoff, An Ottoman Mentality: The World of Evliya Çelebi, Rev. 2nd ed. (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2006 [2004]), 153–54ff. I am using Dankoff’s ideas here, but in a somewhat different context. Similarly, Thomas Bauer identifies a dual purpose—and by extension two different audiences—in much of Mamluk literature: one practical, or communicatory, and another literary. See Thomas Bauer, “Mamluk Literature as a Means of Communication,” in Ubi sumus? Quo vademus? Mamluk Studies – State of the Art, ed. Stephan Conermann (Göttingen: V&R Unipress; Bonn University Press, 2013), 23–56. Bauer’s ideas are definitely applicable to the Ottoman period.

[7] Yūsuf ibn Muḥammad al-Shirbīnī, Hazz al-quḥūf bi-sharḥ qaṣīd Abī Shādūf [Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abu Shaduf Expounded], ed. and trans. Humphrey T. Davies, 2 vols., Library of Arabic Literature (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 1: 330–31, 7.34. I cite according to the following convention, [volume number]: [page number], [section number].

[8] Zadeh, “The Wiles of Creation,” 26–32, 35–37.

[9] al-Shirbīnī, Hazz, 1: 336–37, 7.38.

[10] In the words of Wolfhart Heinrichs, “… ‘having the apposite quotation at your fingertips’ is the Sitz im Leben of adab…” Review of ʿAbbasid Belles-Lettres (The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature) [vol. 2], Edited by Julia Ashtiany, T. M. Johnstone, J. D. Latham, R. B. Serjeant, G. Rex Smith, Al-‘Arabiyya 26 (1993): 130.

Acknowledgements

Intellectual debt is the only kind of debt anyone would want to accrue. During my time at NYU Abu Dhabi, I have grown indebted to many—and to that I am grateful.

First, I would like to thank my advisor, Maurice Pomerantz. I first met Professor Pomerantz in late 2019, when I came to him for advice on how to improve my classical Arabic, only to leave with Wadad al-Kadi’s Mukhtārāt min al-nathr al-ʿarabī, with instructions to read al-Tawḥīdī on burning his books. Needless to say, I was hooked, and knew from then on that “premodern” Arabic literature was my calling, despite the modern period first luring me into the study of (Arabic) literature. I thank Professor Pomerantz for guiding me through the prolegomenon to this journey—Skyping with me while I was in New York, offering guidance on the capstone proposal, and tolerating my (over)enthusiasm and long emails. And when it came to the project itself, his enthusiasm and commitment were contagious. Thanks to our meetings—teeming with tangents, personal anecdotes, and, above all, passion for and commitment to language—I always returned to the project with a new set of eyes and a renewed sense of interest. In Professor Pomerantz I found the ideal mentor: he gave me much direction, nicely but honestly pointing out my mishaps, gaps, and errors, while letting me do my own thing, not least my theoretical forays. Inasmuch as he was a mentor, however, he was also an interlocutor; his ways will stay with me forever. Last but not least, I would like to thank him for his meticulous, close reading of my work and his incisive comments, which have improved this thesis in a more ways than I realize.

I owe to Maya Kesrouany my decision to study Arabic literature. My ṭarīq to literature is rather convoluted. As a computer science major in late 2018, I took Introduction to Modern Arab Literature with Professor Kesrouany. As I wrote my final paper for this class, I had an existential crisis—à la Sartre and the Arab engagés authors—and I switched to literature. For Professor Kesrouany’s guidance and mentorship, I am eternally grateful. She never ceased to push me to my limits and beyond, while simultaneously being generously supportive and present. She always squeezed me into her schedule: whether it was the day she came back to campus after her leave, or during the Lebanese revolution in November 2019 over Skype, she was always there, not only reassuring me but also challenging my thoughts, questions, and literary methods. In one of our final classes in Foundations of Literature II, she said, reassuring us about our final papers: “Hold my hand, and guide me through your thoughts.” This piece of advice has been with me ever since, guiding any writing I do, including what I’ve written in the pages to come. As for her guidance through the graduate school application process, I cannot thank her enough.

Ever since I met Tarek El-Ariss at Dartmouth College in February 2020, he has been a supportive mentor and engaged interlocutor. He has read my work with utmost attention and guidance, and his advice was invaluable as I made decisions about this project, and life. His intellectual generosity is contagious, and I am forever indebted to him, both personally and intellectually.

In the beginning of 2020, during the early stages of this project, I benefitted from conversations with Tarek El-Ariss and Robyn Creswell. Tarek pointed me to nahḍa texts that stage concerns and anxieties similar to those in Hazz al-quḥūf, and engendered in me a desire and commitment to undo the premodern/modern schism. At the time, I was interested in writing a thesis about Hazz and/as world literature; Robyn rightly pointed out to me that Hazz’s worth, or any text’s worth for that matter, is not defined by its “worldliness” or its acceptance into the canon of world literature. In other words, he pointed out to me that critiquing inḥiṭāṭ and inclusion in the canon of world literature can be mutually exclusive. I believe that it is this conversation that veered me away from writing about Hazz in the context of world literature.

Nora Barakat helped me formulate the project in more ways than I often realize. I thank her for sending me a long list of readings on the Ottoman Empire of the seventeenth century. She told me to read about the history of the period because it will help me understand the text. Even though this seems like rudimentary advice, it set me—a confused undergrad trying to figure out his senior thesis—on the right path.

To Sheetal Majithia, my academic mentor, I owe a debt of gratitude for her guidance on everything—from selecting classes, to graduate school, to life. Our numerous conversations, and her advice, will stay with me forever.

Many people read early drafts of the coming pages, and their feedback has sharpened my thinking. In particular, I would like to thank Hoor AlNuaimi, Lina Elmusa, Katie Kadue, Jessica Molina Abdala, Nikolaj Ramsdal Nielsen, Rachel Schine, Grega Ulen, and Jamie Uy. Although I have only met Rachel online, her feedback was engaged and extensive, and it pushed me to refine my argument. Katie generously shared with me her dissertation, “Domestic Georgic from Rabelais to Milton” (2017), and gave me feedback on my comparative argument about Hazz and early modern European literature.

I owe a special debt of gratitude to Jamie, my intellectual comrade—for the lunch and dinner dates, engaged feedback, conversations on literature, theory, and life, I cannot thank you enough. In addition, I would like to thank the Capstone Seminar members—students and professors—who made this journey more enjoyable and kept me grounded: Professors Sheetal Majithia and Deepak Unnikrishnan; and my fellow classmates Einas Alhamali, Bhrigu Bhatra, Aathma Dious, Nada Hatem, Chaerin Lim, Andy Menon, Leanne Talavera, Jamie Uy, and Malak Yasser.

Throughout my time at NYU Abu Dhabi, and also at NYU New York, my scholarship has improved thanks to my professors’ guidance and feedback. In particular: Sinan Antoon, Rossen Djagalov, Toral Gajarawala, Dale Hudson, Philip Kennedy, Maya Kesrouany, Sheetal Majithia, Salwa Mikdadi, Cyrus R.K. Patell, Erin Pettigrew, Nathalie Peutz, Maurice Pomerantz, Justin Stearns, Cristina Vatulescu, Deborah Williams, and Bryan Waterman—thank you.

I thank my friends—some who have graduated and others who are yet to graduate—for they have, in different ways, sustained me through this project. I would like to especially thank Aya Afaneh, Amna AlAmeri, Alya Alawadhi, Hoor AlNuaimi, Maryam Alshehhi, Maitha AlSuwaidi, Nishant Aswani, Sara Ba’ara, Sohail Bagheri, Mariam Elgamal, Alia ElKattan, Lina Elmusa, Ghadeer Ghosheh, Deniz Gökten, Liyan Ibrahim, Lujain Ibrahim, Jessica Molina Abdala, Tala Nassar, Everett Pruett, and Farida Shaban. Amna, Alya, Hoor, and Maitha were always there for me when I needed it most, and I share some of my fondest memories with them. Jessica and Lujain sustained me through college with good (and sometimes bad) coffee, intellectual rigor, and good conversation. In the past year, Liyan and Maitha were my pillars of support as I completed this mammoth. Alia and Everett, in different ways, supported me through the graduate school admissions process. I am also thankful to Farida for having a conversation with me about Hazz, the sharḥ as a genre, and deconstruction—without even knowing it—though she studies engineering. This conversation was illuminating, and helped me through an intellectual knot while writing chapter 3.

Lastly, a special thanks to goes to my family for supporting me no matter what. My mother, to whom this thesis is dedicated, always believed in me. Her encouragement has sustained me through thick and thin. Thank you.