Overview

Winner of the 2021 Sheikh Zayed Book Award (category: Arab Culture in Other Languages) Browse a preview of Arabic Oration: Art and Fuction. In Arabic Oration: Art and Function, a narrative richly infused with illustrative texts and original translations, Tahera Qutbuddin presents a comprehensive theory of this preeminent genre in its foundational oral period, 7th-8th centuries AD. With speeches and sermons attributed to the Prophet Muḥammad, ʿAlī, other political and military leaders, and a number of prominent women, she assesses types of orations and themes, preservation and provenance, structure and style, orator-audience authority dynamics, and, with the shift from an oral to a highly literate culture, oration’s influence on the medieval chancery epistle. Probing the genre’s echoes in the contemporary Muslim world, she offers sensitive tools with which to decode speeches by mosque-imams and political leaders today.

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Reviews

This erudite study is a major breakthrough in our understanding of Arabic oratory. Qutbuddin has painstakingly reconstructed this vast tradition in all its diverse guises and contexts, from the battlefield to the pulpit, from political to legislative speeches. She presents its complexities with lucid precision and scrupulous attention to detail-and it is a truly pioneering work for Qutbuddin's discussion of women's orations and her survey of contemporary sermons. James Montgomery, University of Cambridge For a scholar of Western traditions of political thought, this book is a revelation. The Western canon also begins with oratory and with the ideas of the relation between public speech and politics that lay at the heart of Greek practice. To come to understand how the Arabic tradition thinks of language's role in shaping communal and political life will significantly advance the capacity of scholars to engage with the political discourse of the Arabic speaking world. This project is of fundamental importance and should transform the capacity of the non-Islamic and Islamic worlds to communicate with each other about political subjects. Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor, Harvard, and Director, Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics

Author Information

Tahera Qutbuddin, Ph.D. (1999), Harvard, is Professor of Arabic Literature at The University of Chicago. She has published widely on Islamic preaching, Ali’s sermons, Fatimid poetry, Tayyibi Bohra literature, and Arabic in India, including Light in the Heavens: Sayings of the Prophet Muḥammad (NYU, 2016)

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