Medieval Arabic female poets
In the surviving historical record, medieval Arabic female poets are few compared with the number of known male Arabic-language poets. Within Arabic literature, there has been "an almost total eclipse of women's poetic expression in the literary record as maintained in Arabic culture from the pre-Islamic era through the nineteenth century"[1]. However, there is evidence that, compared with the medieval poetry of Europe, women's poetry in the medieval Islamic world was "unparalleled" in "visibility and impact".[2.1] Accordingly, since the beginning of the twenty-first century, scholars have emphasised that women's contribution to Arabic literature requires greater scholarly attention.[3][4.1][2.2]
Attestation
editThe work of medieval Arabic-language women poets has not been preserved as extensively as that of men, but a substantial corpus nonetheless survives; the earliest extensive anthology is the late ninth-century CE Balāghāt al-nisāʾ by Ibn Abī Ṭāhir Ṭayfūr (d. 280/893).[5] Abd al-Amīr Muhannā named over four hundred female poets in his anthology.[2.1] That much literature by women was once collected in writing but has since been lost is suggested particularly by the fact that al-Suyuti's 15th-century Nuzhat al-julasāʼ fī ashʻār al-nisāʼ mentions a large (six-volume or longer) anthology called Akhbar al-Nisa' al-Shau‘a'ir containing "ancient" women’s poetry, assembled by one Ibn al-Tarrah (d. 720/1320). However, a range of medieval anthologies do contain women's poetry, including collections by Al-Jahiz, Abu Tammam, Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani, and Ibn Bassam, alongside historians quoting women's poetry such as Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari, Yaqut al-Hamawi, and Ibn 'Asakir.[4.1]
Medieval women's poetry in Arabic tends to be in two genres: the rithā’ (elegy) and ghazal (love-song), alongside a smaller body of Sufi poems and short pieces in the low-status rajaz metre.[4.2] One significant corpus comprises poems by qiyan, women who were slaves highly trained in the arts of entertainment, often educated in the cities of Basra, Ta’if, and Medina.[6] Women's poetry is particularly well attested from Al-Andalus.[7]
References
edit- ^ al-Udhari, Amal (1999). Classical Poems by Arab Women: A Bilingual Anthology (2nd edition and trans ed.). London: Saqi Books. p. 500.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link) - ^ Samer M. Ali, 'Medieval Court Poetry', in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Women, ed. by Natana J. Delong-Bas, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), I 651-54. https://www.academia.edu/5023780.
- ^ Classical Poems by Arab Women: A Bilingual Anthology, ed. and trans. by Abdullah al-Udhari (London: Saqi Books, 1999), p. 13.
- ^ Tahera Qutbuddin, 'Women Poets', in Medieval Islamic Civilisation: An Encyclopedia, ed. by Josef W. Meri, 2 vols (New York: Routledge, 2006), Archived 2014-02-07 at the Wayback Machine.
- ^ Rkia Elaroui Cornell, 'Rabiʾa from Narrative to Myth: The Tropics of Identity of a Muslim Woman Saint' (Ph.D. thesis, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 2013), pp. 7, 32.
- ^ Gordon, Matthew S., 'Introduction: Producing Songs and Sons', in Concubines and Courtesans: Women and Slavery in Islamic History, ed. by Matthew S. Gordon and Kathryn A. Hain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 1-8 (pp. 5-6); doi:10.1093/oso/9780190622183.003.0001.
- ^ O. Ishaq Tijani and Imed Nsiri, 'Gender and Poetry in Muslim Spain: Mapping the Sexual-Textual Politics of Al-Andalus', Arab World English Journal for Translation & Literary Studies, 1.4 (October 2017), 52-67 (p. 55). doi:10.24093/awejtls/vol1no4.4.