عنوان

Commentarial Acts and Hermeneutical Dramas: The Ethics of Reading al-Harīrī's 'Maqāmāt'

TL49619

انگلیسی

Commentarial Acts and Hermeneutical Dramas: The Ethics of Reading al-Harīrī's 'Maqāmāt'

[Thesis]

Matthew L. Keegan

Rowson, Everett K.

New York University

2017

490

Committee members: Cooperson, Michael; Katz, Marion; Kennedy, Philip; Pomerantz, Maurice

Place of publication: United States, Ann Arbor; ISBN=978-0-355-40710-5

Ph.D.

Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies

New York University

2017

The Maqāmāt of al-Hariri (d. 516/1122) is a text with fifty stories, each of which depicts the eloquent and erudite performances of a roguish figure who performs parodies of Islamic discourses from sermons to fatwās. How, then, did the Maqāmāt become such a success among Muslim scholars over the first 800 years of its reception and a central text in Islamic education? This dissertation explores the dozens of commentaries that emerged in the first centuries of the Maqāmāt's reception to argue that this apparent paradox is the product of modern preoccupations and assumptions about the relationship between Islam and literature. Based on the first detailed analysis of the Maqāmāt's reception and its commentaries, this project examines the diverse interpretive traditions surrounding the text. The dissertation shows that many of the text's early readers understood its fictive and erudite parodies to be constitutive of the same kind of hermeneutical ethics that was found in the Islamic scholarly tradition. By situates the Maqāmāt in its social, intellectual, and material contexts over the course of the first century of its reception, this study demonstrates that the Maqāmāt and its commentary tradition imbued the interpretation of the text's recondite language with ethical significance. That is, the Maqāmāt and its commentaries both depicted and produced hermeneutical dramas in which the interpreter's ability to respond appropriately to ambiguous discourse marked them out as a worthy adept.

Medieval literature; Middle Eastern literature; Islamic Studies; Ethics

Language, literature and linguistics;Social sciences;Arabic literature;Classical arabic;Commentary;Manuscripts;World literature

Smith, Shahriyar

Rowson, Everett K.

Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies

New York University

1966544147; 10600870

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[Thesis]

276903

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