Ali Ahmad Hussein Knihy

Ali Ahmad Hussein’s book studies the rhetorical texture in two traditional tripartite poems: one from the pre-Islamic period, composed by ʿAlqama l-Faḥl, and one from the early ʿAbbāsid era, composed by Bashshār b. Burd. The poems have the same structure and deal with the same themes (love, camel-section, and praise or self praise). They also contain almost the same number of verses. A fundamental question is raised: What are the rhetorical figures on which each of the two poets depended in order to compose his poem? This, in turn, leads to a broader question: How different was the badīʿ style (“the rhetorical style”) in the poetry of the two aforementioned eras, assuming the two poems are representative of their times? The book starts with a survey of the development of the classical rhetorical studies from the 2nd and the 8th century until modern times. The way classical and modern scholars used to analyze a literary text with reference to its rhetoric is also discussed. A clarification of some problematic issues related to the rhetorical terms used in this book follows, before the rhetoric of the two poems is analyzed in detail. The study ends with a discussion of the main thesis: What are the differences in the use of rhetoric between the two poems?

Branches of the Goodly Tree contains fifteen articles in honor of Professor George Kanazi, from the Department of Arabic language and literature at the University of Haifa. The essays cover four branches of Arabic literature and language: classical poetry and prose; Arabic criticism; modern literature (theater, poetry and prose); and Arabic grammar and language including modern dialectology. In the book, a wide range of issues is discussed: – bacchic poetry in the Umayyad era; – love narratives mainly from The Arabian Nights; – Shi՟a literature; – Ibn Tabataba's philosophical approach to criticism; Saul Joseph's criticism and understanding of medieval Hebrew poetry in the light of medieval Arabic poetry; – the influences of Ottoman and European music on the Arabic theater in the nineteenth century; – the uses of language in the writings of Mayy Ziyada; – Sufism in modern poetry mainly in the works of al-Bayyati, ՟Abd as-Sabbur, and Adunis; – the image of the merchant in modern Arabic literature; – grammatical and linguistic issues in the Arabic translation of the Pentateuch from Coptic; – the influence of classical Arabic grammar on medieval Hebrew grammar; the rural dialects of Palestine; – and the Palestinian dialect of Ashdod, and the dialect of the fishermen of Acre.

In Old Arabic poetry from the pre-Islamic and early Islamic periods to the end of the orthodox Caliphate, one theme is the lightning-scene. In this the protagonist asserts that he could not sleep because he saw lightning flashing far away in the sky. The book explores the various functions of this scene, and its relationship with other parts of the poem. This study achieves two main goals. The first sheds light on two important terms connected with Old Arabic poetry: the function and the narration. We see how a certain element can function differently from text to text, and how these different functions influence the narration of a poem and consequently make it - to some degree - idiosyncratic; i. e., a text that differs from other poems that include the same element. The second purpose is to make a comprehensive study of the components, namely the motifs included in the lightning-scenes. Here, the author reaches conclusions regarding whether these components differ significantly from text to text, or whether they are merely repetitions. In other words, this study examines whether the lightning-scenes in themselves are idiosyncratic or - on the contrary - are fossilized and conventional follow long-established poetic traditions.