Serrano - Qurān and the lyric imperative

Qurn and the Lyric Imperative

Qurn and the Lyric Imperative

Richard Serrano

LEXINGTON BOOKS

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2016930842

ISBN: 978-1-4985-2070-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

eISBN: 978-1-4985-2071-3

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Contents

These acknowledgments are by no means exhaustive.

I am grateful to Lindsey Porambo, my editor at Lexington Books, for being always gracious and patient, and to the anonymous reader who so carefully read the manuscript and offered many suggestions that allowed me to make this a much better book. Julia Bray read an early version of this book and offered astute and stern advice on how to make it a better and different book; I cannot hope to repay her kindness except by absolving her of all responsibility for the flaws and faults that remain.

In order to conduct the research for Qurn and the Lyric Imperative I learned two new foreign languages, German and Spanish. I am grateful to my extraordinary Spanish teachers in Buenos Aires, especially Alejandra Pappalardo and Gonzalo Gallego. Then-deans Ziva Gallili and Ann Fabian facilitated some institutional horse-trading that permitted enough time off to learn German in Hamburg and Vienna. I am grateful to both of them for their support and encouragement.

The ceaseless exhortations of Bernadette Cailler, a dear friend and intellectual comrade of many years, were invaluable.

A timely Guggenheim Fellowship made it possible to complete the first draft of the book; my gratitude for that stamp of approval and that precious year knows no bounds.

My colleagues at Rutgers University in French, Comparative Literature, and the Humanities in general have been supportive for nearly 20 years; never more so than during the 10 years devoted to this project. I am fortunate to be part of such an extraordinary group of scholars and teachers.

This book could not have been written without the kind assistance of Mayra Melendez.

Finally, I am most grateful to James Monroe, who, when I told him in 1991 that I wanted to read Arabic poetry, not only took me seriously, but with a generosity seldom matched in our (or any) profession, designed a pair of graduate seminars which taught me to do just that. It still remains my goal, however unrealized and perhaps ever unattainable, to write a book that rivals the passion, wit and eloquence of his five decades of scholarship.

Portions of appeared in Visible Writings. Cultures, Forms, Readings (Rutgers University Press, 2011).

Why has a French professor with a PhD in Comparative Literature written a book about the Qurn and Arabic poetry? I am not an Orientalistneither the evil sort bent on abetting English, French and American world domination and therefore pilloried by Edward Said and his vast tribe of irascible minions, nor the more mundane kind gone giddy at counting long vowels and short in snippets of Semitic verse, although I am not wholly unfond of the latter. The purpose of this book is not to explain the Qurn. Devoted to such a task are vast resources accumulated over more than a millennium and ever more readily accessible thanks to digitization. The Qurn nonetheless continues to defy explanation, despite the legions engaged in the vast Islamic and Orientalist intellectual industry intent on doing just that. In this book I instead prefer to explore a series of anomalies and disjunctions that pull at the seams of the discourse woven around and through the Qurn and poetry. I am interested not in explicating, clarifying or amplifying the Qurn per se , all noble and hoary tasks, but instead in the exploration of the complexities of the work and the multiple discourses into which it is integrated in order for it to mean . The title, Qurn and the Lyric Imperative , is not the result of shoddy editing, with an initial definite article mysteriously gone AWOL, for my argument implies that there is no the Qurn, that it is a work constantly in the making and unmaking, and that this process of becoming and unbecoming depends to a great extent on Arabic poetry, without which there would not have been and there could not be a Qurn or the Qurn or even a qurn .

Well, then: what is the Qurn? It is many things, not the least of which is a fascinating medieval literary text rich with ambiguity, although thinking and writing about the Qurn as Literature is today bound to raise the hackles of those who see the secularity of literary analysis as practiced in in the early seventh century, as did the volume of learned commentary engaged in deciphering it. Scholars attempting to make sense of the Qurn as the era of Muammad and the first generation of Muslims receded beyond memory and became the stuff of anecdote turned to its genre-cousin poetry in order to set hermeneutical parameters. In some ways, poetry served later scholars as a sort of firebreak meant to stem the advance of the blaze of interpretation. Since poetry was the only genre of Arabic Literature coterminous with and even predating the Qurn, it alone could serve the function of checking the meaning of words otherwise no longer remembered. Unfortunately, the Qurn itself is decidedly unambiguous about its disdain for poetry and poets. The disjunction between poetrys utility in making sense of the Qurn and poetrys disrepute in the Qurn generates a series of anomalies and contradictions in Arabic Literature. It is these I explore here.

A title imagined for this book at its long-ago inception, The Qurn and the Lyric , evolved into Qurn and the Lyric Imperative as the project itself evolved from its relatively uncomplicated (but certainly complicated enough) original intention to read the Qurn through the prism of poetry citation in the great commentaries of the ninth through the twelfth centuries. The the has disappeared because I want to insist on the Qurn as a qurn , as the Qurn refers to itself, as a literary genre drawing its name from the acts of recitation and reading implied in the breadth of the word qaraa embracing both. As recitation and reading are not actions restricted to the Qurn, they in fact insist on the relationship between this genre and others, especially poetry. The lyric became the lyric imperative once it became clear that this book would not be so much a comparison of the Qurn and poetry, relying on the commentaries as a sort of hinge allowing me to go back and forth between the two genres, but instead that poetry and qurn were two manifestations of one Qurno-arabic discourse. Since one might (mistakenly) imagine the possibility of a Qurn that continued to exist once all poetry had been forgotten or lost or removed from the tradition, I want to insist that it was and is poetry that makes the Qurn possible and comprehensible. Perhaps more important than permitting possibility and comprehension, poetry also demonstrates the Qurns improbability and, by its constant reminder of the ultimate murkiness marking the limits of the lexicon, it does not allow one to imagine a Qurn ever fully comprehended, regardless of the intentions of the commentators who have labored in its margins for centuries.