Ancients and Moderns - Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE
General Material Designation
[Article]
First Statement of Responsibility
van Gelder, Geert Jan
.PUBLICATION, DISTRIBUTION, ETC
Place of Publication, Distribution, etc.
Leiden
Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.
Brill
GENERAL NOTES
Text of Note
(617 words)
SUMMARY OR ABSTRACT
Text of Note
Ancients and Moderns is a topic in Arabic literary history dealing with the merits of, on the one hand, the early poets (al-qudamāʾ, al-mutaqaddimūn) , including the pre-Islamic (jāhilī) and early Islamic poets until around the middle of the second/eighth century, and, on the other hand, the "moderns" (muḥdathūn) , Bashshār b. Burd (d. 167/783) being their earliest important representative. Since the "modern" period continued for many centuries, it was sometimes subdivided, without any chronological precision or uniformity, using terms such as muwalladūn (literally, "of mixed descent,"