CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2018
| Author | Grigoryan, Sona |
|---|---|
| Title | Poetics of Ambivalence of al-Ma'arri's "Luzumiyat" and the Question of Freethinking |
| Summary | My dissertation is a study of the eleventh-century Syrian writer Abū'l 'Alā' al-Ma‘arrī(d.1058) and his diwan entitled "Luzūm mā lā yalzam" (The Necessity of what is not Necessary). By historical contextualization and with the revision of analytical terms of reference such as freethinking, atheism, deism, sincere belief and taqīya (dissimulation) previously applied to the study of al-Ma‘arrī and his Luzūm, the research aimed to enhance our understating of both al-Ma’arrī and the general dynamics of the period in which the poet lived and worked. Previous studies of Luzūm had shared the general assumption that a uniform, pietistic religious culture was the central driving force of society, even prior to the formal institutionalization of ‘ulamā’ under the Seljuqs, Ayyubids, and Mamluks. Most of these studies also assumed that, at the time of al-Ma‘arrī, the dynamics of the cultural and intellectual life were entirely driven by the rigid dichotomy between orthodoxy and unorthodoxy. Finally, previous studies, inattentive to and perhaps intolerant towards to any sort of incoherence, dissonance, paradox, and confusion, ended up presenting reductive — and, as a result, often superficial— studies of Luzūm. As a result, al-Ma‘arrī has been presented as an eccentric alien and a complete outsider to his age. Likewise, Luzūm has been presented as a completely unconventional work. The aim of the thesis was to argue against the dichotomizing paradigm of the extant scholarship on al-Ma'arrī. |
| Supervisor | Aziz Al-Azmeh |
| Department | Medieval Studies PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2018/grigoryan_sona.pdf |
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