Open AccessIbn Shuhayd and his "Risālat al-twābiʿ wa 'l-zawābiʿ"
Author(s) -
Jaakko HämeenAnttila
Publication year - 1970
Publication title -
journal of arabic and islamic studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 0806-198X
DOI - 10.5617/jais.4546
Subject(s) - eleventh , arabic literature , narrative , context (archaeology) , arabic , philosophy , islam , literature , classics , history , art , theology , archaeology , physics , linguistics , acoustics
Ibn Shuhayd's (d. 1035) Risālat al-tawābiʿ has been preserved in fragments in Ibn Bassām's al-Dhakhīra. The early eleventh century was a period of great experimentation in narrative prose. Just a few decades before Ibn Shuhayd wrote his work, al-Hamadhānī had written his maqāmas on the other side of the Islamic world. The Risālat al-tawābiʿ comes into the margin of maqāma literature. The original structure of the treatise is reconstructable to a certain extent, especially with the help of al-Thaʿālibī's Yatīmat al-dahr, which has been neglected in earlier studies. In his work, Ibn Shuhayd quotes not only from his own poetry but also from his rasā'il. One of these quotations shows how Ibn Shuhayd himself has revised his original Risālat al-ḥalwā' and modified it to fit it into the new context of the Tawābiʿ.