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Aging as a physical, aesthetic and intellectual process gained, after muhdath poetry, a position of prominence in Classical Arabic poetry and poetics. Despite its relevance to the development of subgenres such as that of shayb (white hair) and zuhd (ascetic poetry), Arabic verse on aging received little attention by major contemporary critics. This study focuses on the verses on aging penned by the Andalusian poet Abu Ishaq al-Ilbiri and the Sicilian 'Abd al-Jabbar Ibn Hamdis in the XI and XII centuries, arguing for the creative processes through which these two poets reworked the motif of old age, together with other poetic subgenres, fashioning a 'poetics of aging.' By means of such a poetics, al-Ilbiri and Ibn Hamdis voiced their apprehension for the end of their lives, and at once, for the end of Islam's political supremacy in their homelands. Both al-Ilbiri and Ibn Hamdis, as they aged, became more and more preoccupied with the political decline of Islam in Muslim Spain and Sicily. They addressed the prominent political figures of their times, inciting them to a restore Maghribi Islam to its former glory. At the same time, they devoted a significant part of their overall production to subgenres such as the elegiac and the ascetic, in which they reflected upon their physical decay and advocated a withdrawal from worldly pursuits. My study questions this apparent contrast. It is my contention that al-Ilbiri's and Ibn Hamdis's poetics of aging does not imply of personal withdrawal from public life. Such a poetics should instead be read as part and parcel with their public verses of tahrid (public instigation). In what follows I illustrate how al-Ilbiri and Ibn Hamdis combined verses on physical decline, elegies and ascetic verses, in order to convey their late-life reflections as two first-hand witnesses to the end of Islam's social and political cohesion in the Muslim West. Emerging from these verses is a fascinating combination of a political documentation for later Maghribi Muslim history and a quasi-autobiographical voicing of the anxieties these poets experienced living at both the temporal and spatial margins. / Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

La ligne directrice de notre recherche est de questionner l'évidence d'une distinction disciplinaire entre la sociologie et l'histoire. Vue l'étendue du sujet, nous avons adopté une posture exploratoire en suivant deux pistes. La première consiste à interroger un critère de distinction courant et selon lequel la sociologie serait davantage explicative alors que l'histoire serait essentiellement descriptive. À la lumière d'une mise en débat des positions de Durkheim et Weber pour la sociologie et de celles de l'histoire traditionnelle et des Annales pour l'histoire, nous avons noté une tendance à la diversité des conceptions disciplinaires qui semblent confirmée par certains travaux de recherche des auteurs discutés. Constatant un décalage entre les discours de définition disciplinaire et les recherches à proprement parler, la seconde piste d'exploration s'attarde à l'analyse des disciplines à l'oeuvre. À travers une sélection de trois études d'histoire et trois études de sociologie, nous avons cherché à identifier ce qui pourrait être considéré comme des fondements d'une distinction disciplinaire. Loin de fournir une ligne de démarcation claire, les oeuvres analysées semblent plutôt indiquer que l'histoire et la sociologie participent à une pratique analytique commune guidée par un processus d'interrogation complexe. Nous avançons que l'analyse des distinctions disciplinaires devrait se poursuivre par la recherche de postures interrogatives propres à chacune de l'histoire et de la sociologie. / The guideline of our research is to question the obviousness of a disciplinary dictinction between sociology and history. The subject being too broad, we have adopted an explorative approach wich follows two main tracks. The first one questions a common way of distinguishing sociology from history according to the idea that the first would be mainly explanatory while the latter would be essentially descriptive. We have confronted Durkheim's and Weber's main ideas about sociology, and brought together the debate around history which took place in France between the "histoire traditionnelle" and the "Annales" school. In doing so, we have noted a variety of ways of conceiving each discipline and that seems to be corroborated by some of these author's research work. We have also noticed a gap between disciplinary definitions and the academic research as such. Therefore, the second track of our exploration was the analysis of the "disciplines at work". By selecting three studies in history and three others in sociology, we have tried to identify some elements on wich a disciplinary distinction can be based. Far from revealing a clear boundary, the studies seemed rather to show that history and sociology take part in a common analytical practice guided by a complex process of inquiry. In that sense, we argue that the analysis of the disciplinary distinctions should carry on by a search for inquiry stances that may be specific to each of history and sociology.

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