UC Berkeley

Language Marvels: Al-Badī‘ In and Beyond Arabic-Islamic Poetics considers a ubiquitous but ultimately elusive term in Arabic turāth (tradition): al-badī‘. A singular nominalized adjective, Al-Badī‘, which we might gloss as “The (Incomparably) Creatively Marvelous,” is one of God’s names in Islam. In the 3rd/9th century, the word came to be associated with a “new” style of poetry dense with sonic parallelism and vivid and dynamic imagery. Later still, the term gave its name to a scholarly discipline (‘ilm al-badī‘) and a very popular genre of poetry (the badī‘iyya).

Scholars have tended to equate al-badī‘ with the set of Greco-European tropes and figures, as well as with a merely “ornamental” or “mannerist” use of language. This dissertation, however, resists one-to-one conceptual translation and instead takes this term and concept seriously on its own terms. Moreover, this project resists upholding an “Arabic-Islamic/Judaic-Hebraic” binary and instead reads the discourse on al-badī‘— which originates in an Arabic textual corpus— across confessional lines and sometimes even into adjacent linguistic territories (i.e. Hebrew). Throughout, I ask what was at stake when Muslim and Jewish writers during the vastly understudied Mamluk Period (1250-1517) oriented themselves vis-à-vis the term “badī‘” and the kind of embodied experience of “marvelous creativity” I suggest it had come to name.

I propose that, especially in the context of Mamluk Egypt, we ought to read the word al-badī‘ as referring to a singular quality to be accessed by individual language users, one that enables a particular mode of interacting with language and harnessing its “marvelous creativity.” This mode, I argue, is also related to particular forms of physical, emotional, ethical, and social comportment. Being a ṣāḥib al-badī‘ (master or wielder of al-badī‘), I suggest, is then quite the opposite of a dryly technical, mannerist exercise to be performed in private; it is an affectively-charged relation to and through language that is intimately bound up with relations toward and with others, especially in the politically and environmentally precarious world of medieval Cairo.