From Jahiliyyah to Badiciyyah : Orality, literacy, and the transformations of rhetoric in Arabic poetry

This essay1 offers a speculative exploration of the transformations in the form and function of rhetorical styles and devices at three distinctive points of Arabic literary history. It takes as its starting point the mnemonic imperative governing the use of rhetoric in pre- and early Islamic oral poetry and proposes that in the later literary periods rhetorical devices, now free of their mnemonic obligation, took on further communicative or expressive functions. It then turns to the effect of literacy on the "retooling" of the no longer mnemonically bound rhetorical devices to serve as what I term the "linguistic correlative" of Islamic hegemony as witnessed in the High cAbbasid caliphal panegyrics of the rhetorically complex badic style. Finally, it attempts to interpret what seems to modern sensibilities the rhetorical excess of the post-classical genre of badiciyyah (a poem to the Prophet Muhammad in which each line must exhibit a particular rhetorical device) as a memorial structure typical of the medieval manuscript (as opposed to modern print) tradition.Issue title: Oral Tradition in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam