Poetry in Islamic Historical Writing: The Dialectic of Creativity and the Politics of Truth

Abstract

Benefiting from various post-positivist historical theories and approaches, this paper aims to seek some new entry points to Islamic historical traditions from the perspective of the presence and function of poetry within it. It is known that looking at history as a “representation” of the past where the real, the imaginative, the artistic, and the narrative intersect, is now considered as one of the pivotal points emphasized by new theories of historical knowledge. However, although this understanding applies to Islamic culture as it applies to others, it cannot be denied that it has been established in Western contexts that may not be suitable for analyzing the circumstances in which Islamic historical writing arose. Accordingly, it is not possible to study the presence of poetry in Islamic historical writings in terms of quantity, quality, and employment, without reconsidering the various theories of literary genres and its oversimplifications that may not apply to ancient Arabic writing systems, and thus to the Arabs’ perception of historical writing. In this perspective, we suggest that studying this presence and its functions may open the way for new hypotheses about Arab and Islamic sources, and the way the Arabs understood poetic writing while formulating their ways of belonging to history.