Jokha Alharthi's first academic monograph is a stimulating and thought-provoking re-reading of the ʿudhrī poetic tradition, which argues that the body, far from being absented from ʿudhrī poetry and anecdotes, must instead be understood as central to that tradition, as the space on which ʿudhrī love is written.
The book consists of seven chapters, which follow a laudatory foreword by Sabry Hafez, Professor Emeritus of Modern Arabic Literature at SOAS. Alharthi's introduction begins with a brief analysis of contemporary attitudes towards the ʿudhrī tradition, noting in particular that modern approaches to ʿudhrī poetry tend to portray it as a desexualized genre that exclusively depicts chaste, disembodied love. Opposed to this consensus, Alharthi focuses her analysis of the poetic corpus, and the many varied anecdotes told about the poets who produced it, around the representation of the body, that of both the beloved and of the lover. Delineating the argument, scope and extent of her analysis, Alharthi's introduction briefly sketches the rise, development and sources of the ʿudhrī tradition before placing her work's significance within the academic landscape.
In the second chapter, she further historicizes the ʿudhrī tradition by describing the rise of the ʿudhrī ghazal out of the pre-Islamic qaṣīdah, before approaching the question of how the faithful emotional relationships and stark, desert landscapes depicted in ʿudhrī poetry compare with the more sensual style of urban contemporaries like ʿUmar ibn Abī Rabīʿah. Following the initial emergence of ʿudhrī poetry in the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century, Alharthi notes that it resurfaces as a genre in ninth-century ʿAbbāsid Baghdad, the period in which she notes ʿudhrī love became “the exalted ideal of courtly society” (p. 38). In her third chapter, she expands her analysis of the ʿudhrī tradition by discussing the key term “ʿiffah”, a term that has often been translated as chastity; her discussion provides a brief survey of sexuality in the Quran and the legal tradition, before asking whether the ʿudhrī tradition was opposed to or in favour of marriage. Building on previous scholarship by Renate Jacobi and others, Alharthi notes that the term clearly refers to a sexual and emotional framework that allows for both sensuality and chastity, two terms she suggests have been opposed with each other in modern scholarship, but which are much more complementary in the ʿudhrī tradition.
Following these first three introductory chapters, the next three sketch the representation of the beloved's body in this tradition from three separate angles. Beginning in the fourth chapter, she first focuses in on a typology of the different body parts that tend to be portrayed by ʿudhrī lover-poets and their more standardized representations. Alharthi then turns her attention to the presence and absence of the beloved's body (chapter 5). Whilst the beloved seems to be ubiquitous in the ʿudhrī love poem, evoked through her glances, her smells, her conversation, she is also always absent. Her absence may be heightened through a focus on the “phantom presence of the beloved” (ṭayf al-khayāl) or her symbolic omnipresence, her manifestation in the nature surrounding the lover-poet. In the sixth chapter, Alharthi takes this discussion further by addressing the deferral of union with the beloved in order to heighten the lover-poet's longing. Reality might get in the way of the textual longing for the beloved and, to deal with this, the textual tradition constructs obstacles that cannot be overcome, so that the lover-poet may continue to love and to long for his beloved continuously. In the final chapter, which is then followed by a summary conclusion, Alharthi briefly sketches a typology of the various permutations that affect the lover-poet's body in their experience of love, touching on the pre-modern Islamic conception of love as a malady that might lead to death.
As with all academic monographs, there are aspects of this book that could have benefitted from greater analytical depth. In particular, while Alharthi notes that the ʿudhrī corpus is the product of two major periods, its initial efflorescence in the Umayyad period and its resurfacing in the ʿAbbāsid era, she does not analyse the ways in which the tradition developed across these different contexts in any great depth; for example, she notes that there is a gap of 150 years in our sources but does not analyse how the poetry and the quasi-biographical anecdotes bridge this gap, or the connections between these two types of source material. Of course, any analysis of these aspects of the ʿudhrī tradition, its changing production and reception over time, and its interactions with different environmental, social, cultural, and intellectual contexts, will benefit from a more sustained engagement with the theoretical insights of historians of emotion and sexuality than that which was within the scope of this work.
More to the point, however, this work demonstrates a felicity of style and research that make for an engaging and accessible read. Indeed, one of this work's strongest and most useful contributions to the field is its parsing of previous scholarship, a feature which makes the book both a useful addition to undergraduate and introductory postgraduate reading lists and suitable for the lay reader with an interest in early Arabic literature. It has been rare for authors to integrate Arabic-language scholarship into English-language scholarship on Arabic literature, and Alharthi's contribution here puts the two into conversation and productively uses them as the launch pad for her own analyses. This approach must serve as a reminder, particularly moving forward towards a greater decolonial scholarly apparatus in a field so drenched in colonialism, of the fundamental importance of cross-linguistic scholarship, of working across different scholarly traditions rather than speaking within monolingual echo-chambers. Hopefully, this scholarly approach, and the insights provided by Alharthi into embodiment in the ʿudhrī poetic tradition, will serve as an important foundation and inspiration to future scholarship on the history of emotions and sexuality in the Arabic literary tradition.
