Abstract

Abstract In medieval and pre-modern Arabic and Islamic letters there was a distinct divide between the issue of plagiarism in poetry, which was widely and thoroughly discussed in literary criticism and became the topic of standard chapters and focused treatises, and general plagiarism, which involved the appropriation of entire books and treatises in various disciplines. The latter phenomenon, though well-known and mentioned sporadically in scholarly discourse, was not the focus of a tradition of theoretical discussion. This essay discusses unacknowledged citation in Arabic and Islamic letters generally and then examines one example in detail, the treatise Ḫaṣāʾiṣ yawm al-ǧumʿa “The Special Qualities of Friday”, which the Shiite scholar Zayn al-Dīn al-ʿĀmilī (d. 965/1558) based closely on Nūr al-lumʿa fī ḫaṣāʾiṣ yawm al-ǧumʿa “The Gleaming Light, on the Special Qualities of Friday”, by the famous Sunni polymath Ǧalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī (d. 911/1505). Comparison of the two treatises reveals some of the typical methods scholars adopted in producing such works through the appropriation of earlier texts and at the same time shows how a Sunni work was modified for presentation to a Shiite audience.

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