Classical Arab authors' use of anthologies for self-expression and their tendency to recycle familiar material from earlier authors make their works a gold mine for studying the relationships that link a person to a text. It is this tangle that Abdelfattah Kilito unravels and illuminates, deftly and unobtrusively, in The Author and His Doubles, a set of essays on plagiarism and forgery in classical Arabic literature. The fourth chapter, “The Paths of the Prophetic Hadith,” for example, points out both that few other texts have inspired as much discussion of the relationship of a man to a text as hadith collections and that scholars' emphasis on its isnād did not mean that they neglected “the contents of the Hadith” (p. 42).

In The Author and His Doubles, Kilito follows a different strategy from his later work L'Oeil et l'aiguille, which is an invitation to a timeless land where we debate the implications in daily life of episodes from the Thousand and One Nights, or his earlier work Les Séances, a more conventional scholarly commentary. All the same, Les Séances (Paris: Sindbad, 1983) prefigured the present book by stating a main theme, which, loosely translated, is that in classical Arabic literature, “[t]he canonization of genres and of previous themes makes such serious claims upon the future that a firm circle is inscribed, outside of which only non-texts are produced. (p. 73).”

Arabic literature has some idiosyncratic genres that deserve attention, and Kilito demonstrates the relevance of genre considerations to understanding classical Arabic literature. When reading a modern text, for example, one is directed by stylistic devices toward an author, whereas in classical Arabic literature it is far easier to trace a text's genre than its author (p. 2). The exception proving the rule may be, as Kilito observes, that “[t]here does exist an unmistakably Jahizian style” (p. 73). In classical Arabic literature, using a name prevalent in earlier poems ties one's work to those poems, which constitute a de facto genre (p. 55). Even the earliest known Arab poets were consciously working within a tradition and so within a set of genres. Thus

Antara's voice “liberates itself by the very gesture of signaling its dependence” (p. 12).

These essays might easily be reformatted as dialogues, since there is enough internal debate to satisfy Plato. Also in the Platonic tradition, Kilito provides, in his final essay (the “Conclusion”), a myth—that of a lost man who barks to wake sleeping dogs in hopes that their response (more barking) will guide him home. Instead of providing a history of the barking-man motif in medieval Arabic literature, Kilito provides a parable that explores uses of language as well as the nature of otherness.

This welcoming book invites us in for a chat but also challenges us to read or reread classical Arabic literature and then to think some more. The right answers are not listed for the indolent in an appendix. All the same, this is an appropriate book to place in a student's hands to introduce diverse forms of Arab literary creativity, because it bridges the classical–modern divide. The author, for example, uses an anecdote from classical Arabic literature—Khalaf's comparison of literary scholarship to professional money changing—to make the point that no matter how much one protests he knows what he likes, items rejected by literary critics and moneychangers, respectively, will eventually be “taken out of circulation” (p. 48). The nine essays and the concluding myth seem a more humane way of introducing students to the pleasures and concerns of pre-modern Arabic literature than an exclusively historical approach. They also serve to introduce students to a challenging contemporary Arab scholar of great erudition and subtlety.

A churlish critic might object that although Chapter 6, “The Poetics of the Anecdote,” provides some tips about better anecdotes (e.g., to make the level of language appropriate to the character), it does not deliver on its title's promise or analyze the digressive approach to literature of which the inclusion of anecdotes in literary essays is symptomatic. Michael Cooperson's translation from the French (and from the Arabic of the literary quotes) is so clear and elegant that it seems similarly churlish to suggest that the English title of the first chapter, “Verses and Reverses,” sacrifices clarity for elegance. All the same, the French title is “Métempsycose du poème,” or “Reincarnation of the Poem,” and the gist of the essay is that in writing a poem one must tie one's words to the traditions of Arabic poetry to such an extent that one's original poem is inevitably a reincarnation of previous poems.