Vol. VII, no. 1 (2003) - Mamluk Studies Review - University of Chicago

MAMLU±K STUDIES REVIEW VOL. 7, 2003 29
must be evident and it is certain that many important and exciting discoveries
remain to be made in the terra incognita of Mamluk literature. Although the
backward-looking nature of so much Mamluk poetry and prose has been stressed
here, this feature should not necessarily be identified with decadence. 82 For if
Mamluk authors imitated and sought to surpass their Abbasid predecessors, it was
also true that Abbasid authors had looked back on and imitated their pre-Islamic
and Umayyad precursors. In both periods originality was only valued within quite
close constraints. In his Literary History of the Arabs, R. A. Nicholson, while
confessing to "a desultory and imperfect acquaintance with their work," ventured
that even the best of the poets of the Mamluk period were "merely elegant and
brilliantly accomplished artists, playing brilliantly with words and phrases, but
doing little else." 83 In Arabic Literature, Sir Hamilton Gibb characterised the
literary production of the Mamluk age as follows: "the output was enormous
throughout, but the qualities of originality, virility, and imagination, weak from
the first, die away completely by the sixteenth century." 84 While it is hard to
dissent from these timeworn verdicts, it is nevertheless the case that modern
western literary theory accords originality and "virility" a status that writers and
critics of the Mamluk period would have found excessive. On the other hand the
versatility, erudition, and literary stamina of most of the writers mentioned above
is quite astonishing.
82 See in this issue Bauer, "Communication and Emotion."
83 Nicholson, A Literary History, 448.
84 Hamilton Gibb, Arabic Literature: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1962), 142.
© 2003, 2012 Middle East Documentation Center, The University of Chicago.
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