The AnonymClassic Project workshop entitled “Animals, Adab, and Fictivity” took place on May 9thand 10th, 2019, convened by Matthew L. Keegan and Beatrice Gruendler. The workshop brought together ten leading scholars of Classical Arabic literature who considered the relationship between fictivity and animals in the Arabic literary tradition.
There are a number of famous examples of stories in Classical Arabic literature that feature talking animals, Kalīla wa-Dimna being the most prominent example. Kalīla wa-Dimna was translated and adapted into Arabic by Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ in the 8th century AD, but the first surviving manuscript witness is from the 13th century, almost half a millennium later. During that period, Arabic prose writing came into its own as a sophisticated tradition of writing. The copyists responsible for the surviving manuscripts ofKalīla wa-Dimnawere extremely creative in their adaptation and reproduction of the text, such that we refer to them as co-authors. These co-authors were familiar with a broad tradition of writing about talking animals that Kalīla wa-Dimna inspired.
Thus, if we want to understand the world in which the copyists of Kalīla wa-Dimna worked and the assumptions they had about how animal stories fit in the world of Arabic discourses, we need to understand this vibrant and diverse tradition of putting animals to imaginative work. The workshop made a significant contribution to this goal.
Each paper was given a full hour to allow for the ideas in each paper to be fully developed. Each participant gave an oral presentation, followed by a prepared response by a discussant who had read the paper beforehand and an open discussion. These discussions proved fruitful for making connections between different papers over the course of the workshop.
Many workshop participants also attended a series of pre-workshop seminars on specific Arabic texts dealing with animals. These workshops paved the way for meaningful discussions between students and workshop participants about animals in the Arabic literary tradition.
The workshop included excellent papers from local participants, as well as guests from abroad, including Geert Jan van Gelder, the Emeritus Laudian Professor of Arabic, who surveyed the genre of very short Arabic animal fables. Francesca Bellino, Assistant Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at the University of Naples, gave a paper on the animal stories of the Sicilian author Ibn Ẓafar. The participation of Jeannie Miller (University of Toronto) and Kevin Blankinship (Brigham Young University) was supported by the Dahlem Junior Host Program. They spoke, respectively, about al-Jahiz’s Book of Animals and al-Ma’arri’s various uses of talking animals across his oeuvre. Ignacio Sánchez (University of Warwick) presented a paper about the animal stories of the Brethren of Purity in which he showed that some animals were ventriloquizing earlier theological positions.
Graduate students and postdoctoral fellows at the Freie Universität also presented papers, including Khouloud Khalfallah, Ali Adnan Sakr, Guy Ron-Gilboa, and Johannes Stephan.
The workshop showed that the tradition of writing about animals in Arabic was vibrant and diverse. The participants discovered surprising connections between apparently quite different texts, and the format encouraged increasingly sophisticated questions about genre to be posed. The results of the workshop will be published as two special issues in the peer-reviewed Journal of Abbasid Studies.
