Al-Āmidī’s al-Muwāzana and the Size of Knowledge

Julia Bray

doi:10.1163/22142371-12340057

Abstract

Abstract This paper first surveys the structure, content and purpose of al-Āmidī’s al-Muwāzana, the largest work of poetic criticism of the fourth/tenth century, then its medieval reception, which grants it quasi-encyclopaedic authority. Modern reception has often dehistoricized it by viewing it only as criticism, but book studies suggest broader contexts of interpretation. Looser than “encyclopaedia,” the notion of the “big book,” like those by al-Āmidī’s contemporaries and neighbours Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī and al-Tanūkhī, fits well with al-Muwāzana. The chronology of al-Āmidī’s life, and the idea of his “big book” as a highly personal work of lifelong scholarship, endorse M.Z. Sallām’s reading of al-Muwāzana as an intellectual ego-document. Finally, the citation practices of fourth/tenth-century “big books” anticipate aspects of the “archival” outlook of Mamluk scholarship and suggest how the “big books” discussed here sought to validate their own versions of cultural memory.

Highlights

Al-Muwāzana, in which he aimed to compare the output of the two most famous and prolific Arabic poets of the “modern” movement of the previous century, Abū Tammām (d. 232/845) and his pupil al-Buḥturī (d. 284/897), was by far the largest work of poetic criticism of its time, and if only on account of its size, it looks like a good candidate for inclusion in a discussion of what was “encyclopaedic” in fourth/tenth-century Arabic writing
Always controversial to medieval scholars, al-Muwāzana attracted a significant body of modern scholarship and comment in Arabic from the 1940s to the 1970s, because it was felt to raise vital and relevant issues about literary conservatism versus originality, conformity versus freedom, Arabic versus western intellectual traditions, and the role of the critic as a public intellectual,[3] but it has been less studied outside the Arab world.[4]. The focus, in this special issue of the Journal of Abbasid Studies, on how encyclopaedic writings of the fourth/tenth century were organized, offers a potentially good fit with al-Muwāzana, which was acclaimed by the pioneering modern Egyptian critic Muḥammad Mandūr as the first and best work of “systematic” criticism in Arabic.[5]
Via free access have already seen that one of al-Āmidī’s sources for al-Muwāzana had been a friend of al-Buḥturī, while another had known Ibn Qutayba.[75]. He tells us that in 317/929, he began working on an anthology of the best lines by Abū Tammām and al-Buḥturī, a project to which he kept returning.[76]

Summary

Introduction

(Yes, often.)[60] More important to an overall understanding of his composition practice, in our present very imperfect state of knowledge of the manuscript sources of the standard edition, are the internal references by al-Āmidī to other works that he had written on the topics treated in al-Muwāzana, the titles of such works cited by later biobibliographers,[61] and the external evidence of the existence of a body of material that Ibn al-Mustawfī used interchangeably with al-Muwāzana.[62] Al-Muwāzana as we have it was never revised; it seems likely that it was never completed, and that later authors, and perhaps al-Āmidī himself, viewed it as part of a larger corpus that could be treated as a single text, rather than as an autonomous book.[63]

Results

Conclusion