Summary
Arab poet, the pen name of Ali Ahmed Said, described by Edward Said as today’s leading Arab poet, whose interpretations of the Arabic literary and cultural tradition are a superbly audacious instance of the contestatory force that dissolves official, identitarian versions of history (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.339-340 / printed p.312-313).
Details
- Since the three volumes of Al-Thabit wa al-Mutahawwil were published between 1974 and 1978, he has almost single-handedly been challenging the persistence of what he regards as the ossified, tradition-bound Arab-Islamic heritage, stuck not only in the past but in rigid and authoritarian rereadings of that past, whose purpose, he has said, is to keep the Arabs from truly encountering modernity (PDF p.340 / printed p.313).
- In his book on Arab poetics he associates literal, hard-bound readings of great Arab poetry with the ruler, whereas an imaginative reading reveals that at the heart of the classical tradition — even including the Koran — a subversive and dissenting strain counters the apparent orthodoxy proclaimed by the temporal authorities; he shows how the rule of law in Arab society separates power from critique and tradition from innovation (PDF p.340 / printed p.313).
- Adonis, quoted by Said, calls those who did not think according to the culture of the caliphate “the people of innovation” (ahl al-ihdath) (PDF p.340 / printed p.313; wording and transliteration checked against the original, the copy garbling both).
- His work and that of his associates in the journal Mawaqif are scarcely known outside the Arab world, but belong to a much larger international configuration that includes the Field Day writers in Ireland, the Subaltern Studies group in India, dissenting writers in Eastern Europe, and many Caribbean intellectuals and artists whose heritage is traced to C. L. R. James (PDF p.340 / printed p.313).
- In Chapter Four, III he is named again, with Elias Khoury, Kamal Abu Deeb, Muhammad Arkoun and Jamal Ben Sheikh, among Arab and Islamic artists and intellectuals still concerned with modernity itself in a culture dominated by turath (heritage) and orthodoxy (PDF p.356 / printed p.329).