[Book Review] Lara Harb, “Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature” (Cambridge, 2020) Reviewed by Hamzah Hashmi

Within the gamut of human experience lies a plethora of emotion. Peering over an insurmountable mountain may evoke feelings of grandeur and awe; the occurrence of an unexpected and favorable coincidence may result in the feeling of utter joy; or the loss of a loved one in unbearable grief. In all cases, many human experiences induce emotion, and the most human of activities, those cognitive in nature, are not exempt. That is to say that cognitive experience for man can also be accompanied by great emotion. How many times have we experienced immense joy after solving a mentally rigorous problem, or felt displeasure with the incorrect reasoning of others? Just as our cognitive experiences are imbued with emotion, the cognitive experience of language can also stir emotions in the human soul. Regarding this, the following questions arise: How does language stir emotion in the soul? What type of experience is it? What specific emotion is associated with beautiful language?

These questions are the themes that Lara Harb explores in her groundbreaking work, Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature. Harb, currently a professor of Arabic Literature at Princeton University, received her doctorate from New York University in 2013. As the title suggests, Harb’s main concern is with the poeticity of language: what makes something poetic? Harb’s main argument is that medieval Arabic literary theorists and critics theorize poetics through an underlying aesthetic experience of wonder. This experience is the emotional pleasure that results from the cognitive process of the discovery of meanings that are strange, unexpected, and require mental effort to apprehend. Poeticity, then, refers to the production of this experience of wonder through language; the more wonder-provoking the poetry, the more beautiful it is (2, 6-12). This argument is a major contribution to the field of Arabic literature, one that she convincingly makes with several interventions throughout the book’s five main chapters.

…How does language stir emotion in the soul? What type of experience is it? What specific emotion is associated with beautiful language? These questions are the themes that Lara Harb explores in her groundbreaking work, Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature.

Harb dedicates admirable space in her preface to both justifying and problematizing her terms, ‘classical,’ ‘Arabic,’ ‘literary,’ and ‘theory.’ She then introduces the book with a set of questions guiding her inquiry and reiterates that an aesthetic of wonder underlies classical Arabic literary theory. She explores the idea of aesthetics and how wonder as an aesthetic consideration differs from common aesthetic notions of beauty and sublimity, while also surveying Muslim scholars’ explicit association of wonder in the natural world, and how it implicitly applies to literature as well. Then, over the course of five chapters, Harb details the disparate conversations of medieval thinkers on 1) poetic criticism and rhetorical devices (badīʿ); 2) poetics in the Arab peripatetic tradition; 3) theories of elucidation (bayān); and 4) theological discussions of the composition (naẓm) of the Quran, each of which characterizes literary beauty through a cognitively related experience of wonder. All these strands would eventually constitute the ‘Science of Eloquence’ (ʿilm al-balāghah)—roughly translated as Arabic rhetoric and poetics—that became central to traditional Islamic education.

Chapter 1 aims to historically situate approaches to literary criticism, which Harb divides into “the old school of literary criticism” and “the new school.” The old school crystalized in the tenth century, following the emergence of a new type of poetry (muḥdath) in the mid-eight century. Muḥdath poets typically used innovative rhetorical figures (badīʾ) and far-fetched imagery, as opposed to the more natural and realistic poetry of the ‘ancients’ (al-qudamāʾ). The rise of the old school of criticism, mainly through badīʿ criticism, invoked comparisons between the two types of poetry, theorizing the beauty of poetry in terms of truthfulness and naturalness or falsehood and artifice (30-42). Proponents of ancient poetry preferred an aesthetic of familiarity and natural accuracy, whereas proponents of the muḥdath poetry preferred far-fetchedness and ornamentation (42-45). However, both use the same subjective standard of aesthetics that evaluates poetry through extrinsic concerns. Harb’s intervention, then, follows from bringing to light an implicit paradigm shift that occurred at the pen of ʿAbdul Qāhir al-Jurjānī (d. 1078) and his successors, inaugurating a new aesthetic standard for poeticity that objectively measures the intrinsic ability of the language to provoke wonder through a cognitive process of discovery, as they move away from the truth-false dichotomy to a rational-imaginative (ʿaqlī–takhyīlī) paradigm (47). And while the rational meanings of poetry can produce wonder, Jurjānī’s watershed notion of takhyīl, which Harb translates as ‘make-believe,’ truly shows why poetry is tied to wonder. Make-believe meanings “[trick] the listener into accepting false premises as true” in the imagery they produce, relating unexpected meanings between two or more things in strange and unfamiliar ways (53). Thus, the cognitive effort in uncovering the unexpected meaning results in feelings of pleasure, leaving one with a sense of wonder for the poetry.

In Chapter 2, she deals with the relationship between logic and poetry in the Arabic Aristotelean tradition. Harb focuses on the philosophers Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī (d. 950), Ibn Sīnā (d. 1037), and Ibn Rushd (d. 1198), while additionally referencing Ḥāzim al-Qarṭājannī (d. 1287) and Abū Muḥammad Sijilmāsī (d. after 1304) as literary critics influenced by Aristotelian poetics. This chapter supports Harb’s claim of an underlying aesthetic of wonder by showing that Arabic Aristotelean philosophers held the same conception in their reception of Aristotle’s Poetics, suggesting common cultural attitudes of poetic beauty. Harb shows how the philosophers went through a trajectory similar to that of poetic criticism in that they began with defining poetry through a true-false scale, as evident in Fārābī’s writings, who, in turn, laid the foundations for Ibn Sīnā to define poetry through takhyīl, and consequently, its ability to incite the soul with wonder (76). The philosophers view takhyīl as the psychological effect of a poetic syllogism achieved through mimesis (muḥākāt), which estimates metaphor and simile in Arabic poetics. Mimesis also involves a cognitive process of discovery, but in a poetic syllogism, unlike a demonstrative one, the premises are ‘make-believe,’ meaning they are assumed to be true to evoke wonder by making an unexpected discovery through poetic language (81). Harb then shows the development of takhyīl, mimesis, and the experience of wonder in the poetics of Ibn Sīnā, Ibn Rushd, Qarṭājannī, and Sijilmāsī, while also exploring Ibn Rushd’s notion of alteration (taghyīr) as the defining trait of poetry, which similarly refers to the using of language in an unfamiliar way to produce wonder (108).

Harb’s focus on Jurjānī and his successors allows her to show the convergence of wonder as an aesthetic theory from multiple vantages, since compositional eloquence also arises from deducing unapparent, and at times unexpected, meanings about the context of speech additional to its original meaning based on the syntactical structure, the discovery of which instills wonder (217-33).

The remaining three chapters turn back to Jurjānī and his primary successors, Sirhāj al-Dīn al-Sakkākī (d. 1229) and Khaṭīb al-Qazwīnīnī (d. 1338). While Chapter 1 covered Jurjānī’s notion of takhyīl and its subsequent role in badīʿ, Chapters 3 and 4 cover the figures of ‘elucidation’ (bayān). Harb dedicates Chapter 3 to simile (tashbīh), which conveys the relation of two or more things in an indirect way. Here, Harb pays considerable attention to the mechanics of comparison and what makes its discovery pleasurable and wondrous. Chapter 4 deals with the remaining figures of bayan: figurative language (majāz), metaphor (istiʿārah), and metonymy (kināyah). Unlike simile, which evokes wonder through the discovery of relations, these figures evoke wonder through the way they signify meanings in an indirect manner, leading to the same process of discovery and pleasure (172). Lastly, in Chapter 5 Harb offers yet another contribution to the study of Arabic literary criticism, incorporating the poeticity of naẓm (lit. composition) and its ability to evoke wonder. While the theological discussions of the inimitably of the Quran which argue that the Quran’s miraculous nature is tied to the eloquence of its composition precede Jurjānī, Harb’s focus on Jurjānī and his successors allows her to show the convergence of wonder as an aesthetic theory from multiple vantages, since compositional eloquence also arises from deducing unapparent, and at times unexpected, meanings about the context of speech additional to its original meaning based on the syntactical structure, the discovery of which instills wonder (217-33). Harb lucidly explicates the pre-formalized expression of badīʿ, bayān, and naẓm in the works of Jurjānī as well as their formal articulations as disciplines by Sakkākī and Qazwīnī. All three disciplines, ʿilm al-maʿānī, ʿilm al-bayān, and ʿilm al-badīʿ, become the main divisions of ʿilm al-balāghah, or Arabic Poetics, which by now, Harb has demonstrated all point to an underlying aesthetic of wonder.

Arabic Poetics should be read by upper-level undergraduate and master’s students who study Arabic literature or medieval Islamic scholarship as Harb speaks clearly about her ideas and presents a clear argument (mostly) unencumbered by heavy technical language or burdening conceptual density.

There are some instances where Harb seems to sacrifice technical precision for the sake of her argument, such as not paying attention to the psychology of the internal senses and its relation to the process of takhyīl, like the imaginative faculty (mutakhayyil), which she at times conflates with the imagination (khayāl), a different faculty according to the theorists she is citing (168). Harb also downplays balāghah’s rhetorical concerns, limiting it only to the function of poetics despite balāghah being defined in terms of persuasion, as knowing the corresponding states of speech to their appropriate contexts (xiii, 255). This limits Harb’s ability to appreciate the role that the acute persuasiveness of language has in “moving the soul” and evoking wonder. Nonetheless, these minor drawbacks do not jeopardize her work.

Providing ample examples with clear and thorough analysis, Harb offers a coherent and convincing theory of Arabic poetics as reasoned by numerous medieval Arabic literary theorists, critics, and philosophers spanning varied intellectual traditions. Arabic Poetics should be read by upper-level undergraduate and master’s students who study Arabic literature or medieval Islamic scholarship as Harb speaks clearly about her ideas and presents a clear argument (mostly) unencumbered by heavy technical language or burdening conceptual density. This work opens many areas of research regarding the relationship between Arabic poetics, aesthetics, and logic, as well as contributes to the burgeoning field of aesthetic study in contemporary philosophy.

Hamzah Hashmi recently obtained an M.A. in Islamic Texts with a concentration in theology and philosophy at Zaytuna College in Berkeley, CA. Hamzah’s academic interests include Islamic theology, philosophy, logic, and rhetoric, with an eye towards conceiving how traditional Islamic discourses can contribute to contemporary inquiries, especially in psychology and epistemology.