Registers of Arabic Literary History

Abstract

prises all that mankind imprinted in verbal form to be transmitted to memory, Carl Brockelmann's monumental History of Arabic Lit eraturesought to collect and catalog all of Arabic writing he considered to be of literary relevance.1 The German Orientalist, though, was conscious of the fact that a philosophical history of Arabic Schrifttum, the ultimate aim of his endeavor, was still out of reach and that his aspiration for a Literaturwissenschaft im h?heren Sinne' had to await further study at the beginning of the twentieth century (1:2). Exhaustive knowledge of the literary material and refined methodology were still in their infancy in comparison to the advance in the study of Islamic religion and tradi tion initiated by the Hungarian scholar Ignaz Goldziher. Brockelmann, who was aware of the difference between what constitutes for the Arabs and the modern meaning of literature, operated with two different concepts of literature. One stems from Arabic tradition and usage, one from a modern, universal one: Thus the historian of Arabic literature needs to consider all these emergences and may only in the Modern period, which gradually aligns the world of Islam as well to European culture, restrict himself to art of literature (Wortkunst) proper (l:lf).2 But as d?mod? as Brockelmann's definition of literature and his attempt to provide an all-embracing literary history may appear, they curiously come closer to our present understanding of literature. At the turn of the long nineteenth century, an epoch marked by the height of Euro pean colonialism in the Arab world and the triggering of an imperial global age with far-reaching consequences for Arab and other local cultures and traditions, the challenges Brockelmann faced one hundred years ago are not unfamiliar to those obstacles historians and critics of Arabic literature encounter today. In principle, these problems relate to defining the nature of the material called literature, the definition of parameters of periodization, and the specification of geographic and linguistic boundaries over time. The imperative for literary studies in the