Comparing Byzantine and Arabic poetry: Introductory remarks

Abstract

Older generations of modern critics pronounced negative assessments of both Byzantine and Arabic poetry for lacking originality and creativity. Further, medieval readers of Greek and Arabic presumably could not properly understand the content of this poetry because they were too focused on its vocabulary, grammatical points, and rhetorical tropes. On occasion, modern critics have suggested that medieval Arabic culture possessed no literary criticism and that Byzantine culture in effect possessed no belles lettres. Recent positive re-evaluations in both disciplines either propose to take medieval Greek and Arabic poetic and literary texts in their own terms or analyse them in order to show that they possess characteristics valued by modernity. Arabic poetry has been much more widely studied than its Byzantine counterpart because both medieval and modern Arabic literary critics were interested in it as a repository of Arab cultural heritage. Modern judgements regarding the relation between the poetry of the pre-Christian and the pre-Islamic periods and the poetry produced within the time of monotheistic belief were frequently influenced by modern political realities, and especially calls for increased secularization pronounced both in Europe and the Ottoman empire. Detecting analogies in how medieval Greek and Arabic literary cultures have been assessed by modernity can help identify modern prejudices that obstruct more productive approaches to the medieval literary material. The paper also examines the process whereby older pagan classics were preserved and made to serve the needs in two medieval monotheistic societies, the Byzantine and the Arabic one.