Arabic Poetry Conference

Panelists at the poetry conference

A number of substantial research papers were presented during a three-day conference held at AUB from January 24 to 26 on the role of poetry in reconstructing Arab history. The event, which was organized by Tarif Khalidi, the Sheikh Zayid Bin Sultan Al-Nhayan Chair of Islamic and Arab Studies, and by Ramzi Baalbaki of the Margaret Weyerhaeuser Jewett Chair of Arabic, was composed of five consecutive sessions on various topics selected from a span of Islamic literature.

The participants included scholars from prominent universities in Germany, England and the United States. According to Saleh Said Agha of AUB's Arabic Department, "The conference achieved its objective in good measure; the subject was attacked from different angles, with the scholars sharing their individual work in a specific and unique field of specialization."

The first day's proceedings began with a talk by Geert Jan Van Gelder of Oxford University, who used the case of al-Fakhri by Ibn al-Tiqtaqa to illustrate the role of poetry in historiography. Provost Peter Heath concluded the first session with his presentation of poetry in pre-modern historical and pseudo-historical texts. The second day's sessions included papers on pre-Islamic and early Futuh literary works, the historical relevance of poetry in the Arabic grammatical tradition, and the role of poetry in Arabic funerary inscriptions.

"Poetry has been marginalized for too long; and in fact contrary to historians' outlook on poets as romantics who are far removed from actual events, Arabic poetry is charged with political references and historical accounts," elaborated Tahera Qutbuddin of the University of Chicago. Using the case of the Fatimid dynasty, Qutbuddin analyzed the Fatimid verse to uncover the motivation driving their aspirations for world hegemony, reading the poetry to explain the interaction between history and ideology.

According to Professor William Granara of Harvard University, the conference brought together a diversity of scholars who study Arabic poetry in its different eras, thus creating a historical framework for approaching Arabic poetry and fusing history and philology. The last day of the conference featured talks on post-Sayyab Iraqi war poetry of the 1980s, Egyptian Shi'r al-Ammiya and Arab nationalism, Lebanon's Umar al-Zi'inni, and the work of Mahmoud Darwish.

"I especially enjoyed the papers on Mahmoud Darwish. The three in sequence provided an in-depth look at the ways in which contemporary poetry seeks to raise historical consciousness, especially in a period of political chaos and decline," remarked Granara, who said the papers succeeded in demonstrating the nexus of poetic expression and historical processes.

The conference included a total of 18 presentations, each of approximately 45 minutes long and followed by a brief discussion. It shed brilliant light on the importance of poetry as a valuable resource in historiography and gathered together scholars working on diverse aspects of Arabic poetry from different parts of the world.