The ancient Arabs used poetry not only to entertain themselves in the midst of their harsh life in the Arabian desert, but also to proclaim their cultural values, which were the moral-spiritual and material basis of their nomad society. Composing poetry therefore was almost a sacred rite for them. Its recitation in particular, was a main feature of certain ritual customs held annually during the aswaq (sg. suq , festival) season. The most common themes touched upon were the attributes of which a tribe may have been particularly proud, such as its victories and generosity to the vanquished, the bravery of its heroes in battle and on hard journeys, the beauty of its women and of nature, the genealogy of the tribe, and prayers to the Almighty. / Through verse the ancient Arabs expressed how they conceived of their deities, whether, idols representing various gods and goddesses, or Allah. These verses make it clear that Allah alone was not represented by any idol, allowing us to infer that He was regarded as superior to other deities. This thesis, therefore, attempts to show how the ancient Arabs expressed through poetry their belief in Allah as the Lord of Gods, which was the true nature of their ancestral belief, the h&dotbelow;anifiyya, the religion of their forefathers Abraham and Ishmael.

This poetry collection explores the concept of memory as a function of identity and is based on the ten years or so that I spent living and working in Islamic countries during the 1970s and 1980s. It is an attempt to create a record of a life lived in unfamiliar territories where cultural and social norms are very different from those with which I was brought up. The collection comprises four sections, each having a distinct character, attributable in part to the use of poetic forms chosen to complement specific periods and places. I experimented with haibun, haiku and prose poetry as well as free verse to achieve the desired effect. Themes of memory, place, people and social comment are woven throughout this collection to create a sense of unity within the whole. The accompanying critical essay, 'Writing Mindful of Ghosts', considers the processes involved in such a venture and refers to some of the poets whose work interests and inspires me, as well as offering information on the places and times that informed the poems.

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The dissertation investigates the medieval poetics of the amatory prelude beginning with the thirteenth century Qaṣīdat al-Burdah – or The Mantle Ode – by the poet Muhammad ibn Sa'īd al-Būṣīrī (d. 1294). Poets expanded the trope of the abandoned ruins to include urban space; incorporated sacred beloveds as poetic beloveds; and foregrounded the self-conscious authorial voice within the prelude. The first chapter locates the thirteenth century Qaṣīdat al-Burdah within the larger Arabic poetic legacy that extends to the ancient pre-Islamic period. The second chapter considers the discursive formation of sacred poetic beloveds, such as the Prophet Muhammad, incorporated among the repertoire of the amatory prelude’s classical and ancient poetic beloveds. The third chapter analyzes the authorial voice and role of the lyric “I” in the preludes of Shaʻbān al-Āthārī (d. 1425) and ʻĀʼishah al-Bāʻūniyyah (d. 1517) who pay homage to their literary predecessors including Ibn al-Fāriḍ (d. 1235), al-Būṣīrī, and Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī (d. 1349) by mirroring their metrical composition. The fourth chapter interrogates the intersection of poetics and literary criticism in the medieval Arabic-Islamic devotional invocation that is the hallmark of medieval prolegomena. The preludes within the genre of instructive poems on rhetoric known as the badīʿiyyāt encapsulated literary criticism’s definition of “ingenious beginnings.” Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ṣafadī (d. 1362) demonstrates this intersection in his prose introduction to al-Ghayth al-Musajjam fī Sharḥ Lāmiyat al-ʿAjam. I conclude by returning to modern iterations of al-Būṣīrī’s Qaṣīdat al-Burdah in literary texts in order to further challenge and raise questions about the discontinuity of medieval Arabic poetics in modern culture.

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This dissertation engages a cultural discussion on time concepts that took place between Arab thinkers and creative writers in the aftermath of the June War of 1967 against Israel and the onset of a period of Arab cultural self-critique. It focuses on a set of intellectual projects and examines their propositions on Islamic notions of time and their place in the modernity of Arab thought. Intellectuals such as the Syrian poet Adonis (b. 1930), the Moroccan philosopher Mohammed ʿAbed al-Jabri (1935-2000), and the Lebanese psychologist Mustapha Hijazi (b. 1937) critiqued the alleged Arab “event-based” and “discontinuous” perception of time which lacks the notion of the temporal as a homogenous impersonal medium. Focusing on the example of Sufism, they argued that time in the Islamic worldview is a heterogenous mix of sacred and profane events in an ontology deprived of change. My dissertation debates these findings in two ways. I first draw on the French philosopher Henri Bergson’s concept of “duration” to problematize these thinkers’ discursive ideal of homogenous time which imposes on the heterogeneity of lived temporality the attributes of space and, as such, produces a mechanistic vision of the world. I then focus on the discourse of Ibn ʿArabi (d. 637/1240) and Mulla Sudra (d. 1049/1640) to demonstrate that Sufism advances a view of time as a flux of change internal to the life of the soul and leading to moral self-perfection. Finally, my dissertation focuses on alternative Arabic engagements with Sufi writings on time through the works of the Moroccan ethicist ʿAbdurrahman Taha (b.1944), the Iraqi Marxist Hadi al-ʿAlawi (1933-1998), and the Egyptian novelist Gamal al-Ghitani (1945-2015). I argue that these thinkers and writers draw on the heterogeneity of time in Sufism to critique the semantic neutrality and abstraction of modern time which depends on capitalism as a life form.