Bedouin and 'Abbasid Cultural Identities

This literary-historical book draws out and sheds light upon the mechanisms of "the ideological work" that the Arabic Majnun Layla story performed for 'Abbasid urbanite, imperial audiences in the wake of the disappearance of the "Bedouin cosmos." The study focuses upon the processes of primitivizing Majnun in the romance of Majnun Layla as part of the paradigm shift that occurred in the 'Abbasid empire after the Greco-Arabian intellectual revolution. Moreover, this book demonstrates how gender and sexuality are employed in the processes of primitivizing Majnun. As markers of "strangeness" and "foreignness" in the 'Abbasid interrogations of the multiple categories of ethnicity, culture, identity, religion and language present in their cosmopolitan milieus. Such "cultural work" is performed through the ideological uses of alterity given its mechanisms of distancing (e.g., temporal and spatial) and nearness (e.g., affective). Lastly, the Majnun Layla love story demonstrates, in its text and reception, that a Greco-Arabian and Greco-Persian subculture thrived in the centers of 'Abbasid Baghdad that molded and shaped the ways in which this love story was compiled, received and performed. Offering a corrective to the prevailing views expressed in Western scholarly writings on the Greco-Arabian encounter, this book is a major contribution to scholars and students interested in Islamic studies, Arabic and comparative literature, Middle East and gender studies.

Ruqayya Yasmine Khan is an associate professor and the M. Malas Chair of Islamic Studies in Claremont Graduate University's Religion Department. Khan's research interests include Arabic literature (early and modern), Qur'anic studies, gender/women's studies and Islam and the digital age. Her more recent scholarly interests include late antiquity and Islam, origins of Islam and cultures of Umayyad Damascus and Abbasid Baghdad. Khan is the author of the book Self and Secrecy in Early Islam (2008), which maps the relationships between the concepts of secrecy and identity in early Islamic cultures. She is also the editor of Muhammad in the Digital Age (2015).

Introduction 1. Song Culture, Kitab al-Aghani (Book of Songs) and the Love Story of Majnun Layla 2. On the term 'U-hri and its Symbolic Universe for Understanding Majnun Layla 3. The Night in the Ghayl-Love, Meaning, and Language 4. Umayyad and 'Abbasid Constructs of Masculinities in the Love Story of Majnun Layla 5. A Lost 'Bedouin Arcadia'-The Tree Man and the Umayyad Tax Man 6. Majnun as the Knight-Errant: Language and the Significance of Errancy (Huyam) 7. 'Abbasid Culturally Primitivist Readings of Layla as Object and Subject 8. 'Abbasid Readings of the 'U-hri Romances: Female Unchastity & the Love Triangle Conclusion Glossary Bibliography