The Politics of Literary Value in Early Modernist Arabic Comparative Literary Criticism

Abstract

Abstract The modernist epistemic disconnect from the “medieval Islamic republic of letters,” Muhsin al-Musawi argues, is attributable both to the incursion of Enlightenment-infused European discourse and a failure to read the import of the republic’s significant cultural capital. This article explores the effects of Eurocentric incursions on transformations in literary value in two of the earliest known works of comparative Arabic literary criticism: Rūḥī al-Khālidī’s Tārīkh ʿilm al-adab ʿind al-ifranj wa-l-ʿarab wa-fiktūr hūkū (The History of the Science of Literature of the Franks, the Arabs, and Victor Hugo, 1902) and Aḥmad Ḍayf’s Muqaddimah li-dirāsat balāghat al-ʿarab (Introduction to the Study of Arab balāghah, 1921). I employ the various theoretical formulations of the decolonial school of thought, primarily Walter Mignolo’s coloniality/modernity complex, in tracing these epistemological shifts in literary value and focus on the internalization of Eurocentric critiques of Arabic literary capital. I also discuss the politics involved in such processes, presenting a decolonial perspective on these modernists’ engagement with their Arabic critical heritage.