Ḥikāyat Abī al-Qāsim

A Literary Banquet

Emily Selove (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

216 Seiten

2017
Edinburgh University Press (Verlag)
978-1-4744-2638-1 (ISBN)

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This study compares Ḥikāyah, a mysterious text surviving in a single manuscript, to other comical banquet texts and party-crashing characters, especially from Ancient Greece and Rome.

Ḥikāyat Abu al-Qāsim, probably written in the 11th century by the otherwise unknown al-Azdī, tells the story of a gate-crasher from Baghdad named Abū al-Qāsim, who shows up uninvited at a party in Isfahan. Dressed as a holy man and reciting religious poetry, he soon relaxes his demeanour, and, growing intoxicated on wine, insults the other dinner guests and their Iranian hometown.
Widely hailed as a narrative unique in the history of Arabic literature, Ḥikāyah also reflects a much larger tradition of banquet texts. Painting a picture of a party-crasher who is at once a holy man and a rogue, he is a figure familiar to those who have studied the ancient cynic tradition or other portrayals of wise fools, tricksters and saints in literatures from the Mediterranean and beyond. This study therefore compares Ḥikāyah, a mysterious text surviving in a single manuscript, to other comical banquet texts and party-crashing characters, both from contemporary Arabic literature and from Ancient Greece and Rome.

Emily Selove is a lecturer in Medieval Arabic Literature at the University of Exeter. She is the translator of al-Khatib al-Baghdadi’s 11th-century work on party-crashing, The Art of Party-Crashing in Medieval Iraq.

Acknowledgements

Part 1Introductiona. Manuscriptb. Authorship and Datingc. Editionsd. Translationse. Summary of Eventsf. Scholarshipg. A Mediterranean Table

Part IIChapter 1: A Sampling of the Ḥikāyah

Part IIIChapter 2: A Microcosm Introduceda. Mimesis or Mannerism?b. Baghdad the Party-Crasherc. Those Camels have Passed

Part IVChapter 3: Crashing the Text

Part VChapter 4: Mujun is a Crazy Game

Part VIChapter 5: The Cosmic Crashera. Abū al-Qāsim as Microcosmb. Abī al-Qāsim as Iblīsc. The Microcosm is a Man

Part VIIConclusiona. Bojangles Won’t Danceb. Philemon and Baucis

BibliographyIndex

Erscheinungsdatum	01.08.2025
Reihe/Serie	Edinburgh Studies in Classical Arabic Literature
Verlagsort	Edinburgh
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 234 mm
Gewicht	333 g
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Klassiker / Moderne Klassiker
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie ► Islam
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10	1-4744-2638-7 / 1474426387
ISBN-13	978-1-4744-2638-1 / 9781474426381
Zustand	Neuware