..". transcends the realm of literature and poetic criticism to include virtually every field of Arabic and Islamic studies." Roger Allen

Throughout the classical Arabic literary tradition, from its roots in pre-Islamic Arabia until the end of the Golden Age in the 10th century, the courtly ode, or qasida, dominated other poetic forms. In The Poetics of Islamic Legitimacy, Suzanne Stetkevych explores how this poetry relates to ceremony and political authority and how the classical Arabic ode encoded and promoted a myth and ideology of legitimate Arabo-Islamic rule. Beginning with...

"Quite simply: these are seminal essays.... Distinguished scholarship, erudite, and full of innovative ways of interpreting Arabic and Persian poetry." --Omar Pound

" This book] reads Arabic and Persian poetry in a refreshingly new and significant way.... raises our understanding... to a new level." --James T. Monroe

Innovative methodologies reorient critical readings of classical Middle Eastern literature.

A body of Bedouin oral poetry which was collected in the second or third Islamic century, the pre-Islamic qasidah, or ode, stands with the Qur'an as a twin foundation of Arabo-Islamic literary culture. Throughout the rich fifteen-hundred-year history of classical Arabic literature, the qasidah served as profane anti-text to the sacred text of the Qur'an.

While recognizing the esteem in which Arabs have traditionally held this poetry of the pagan past, modern critics in both East and West have yet to formulate a poetics that would provide the means to analyze and evaluate the qasidah....

Three of the most renowned praise poems to the Prophet, the mantle odes span the arc of Islamic history from Muhammad's lifetime, to the medieval Mamluk period, to the modern colonial era. Over the centuries, they have informed the poetic and religious life of the Arab and Islamic worlds. Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych places her original translations of the poems within the odes' broader cultural context. By highlighting their transformative power as speech acts and their ritual function as gift exchanges, this book not only demonstrates the relevance of these poems to contemporary...

A body of Bedouin oral poetry which was collected in the second or third Islamic century, the pre-Islamic qasidah, or ode, stands with the Qur'an as a twin foundation of Arabo-Islamic literary culture. Throughout the rich fifteen-hundred-year history of classical Arabic literature, the qasidah served as profane anti-text to the sacred text of the Qur'an.

While recognizing the esteem in which Arabs have traditionally held this poetry of the pagan past, modern critics in both East and West have yet to formulate a poetics that would provide the means to analyze and...