La Prose Amoureuse Arabo-Islamique: De l'isnād Traditionnel aux Sources Livresques

This article focuses on the method of transmission in aḫbār belonging tothe Arabic literary genre of love prose. The survey of the system ofquotations in thirteen love treatises written between the 4th/10th and the11th/17th centuries indicates that the traditional isnād, in which the names of the transmitters are included, was progressively abandoned. Authors starting from Muġulṭāy (d. 762/1361) chose instead to favour quotations of books by their titles, even though the preferred method of transmitting knowledge was still oral during the Mamluk period. Use of written ‘references’ not only indicates a formal change of conventional practice, but also implies the willingness of later authors to claim a kind ofauthorship in reshaping stories taken from old material