Conference Report

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 29 (2021): 323-329

This three-day virtual conference, organized by Huda Fakhreddine (University of Pennsylvania), David 
Larsen (New York University), and Hany 
Rashwan (University of Birmingham) 
and hosted by the University of Oxford’s 
C o m p a r a t i v e  C r i t i c i s m  a n d  T r a n s l a -
tion research centre (OCCT), delivered 
a splendid set of twenty-two papers 
by scholars from all over the world, 
examining a broad variety of multilingual 
texts from Islamic history. In October 2020, 
the organizers called for papers examining 
the web of literary practices and critical 
theories of multilingual writers working 
in Urdu, Persian, Turkish, Arabic, Kurdish, 
and other languages of Asia and Africa, 
which fall outside the Eurocentric purview 
of modern Comparative Literature. The 
respondents, including individuals from 
fourteen countries, fulfilled the ambitious 
scope of the call for papers.

Thanks to the efforts of Rawad Wehbe 
(University of Pennsylvania), the logistics 
of the conference proceeded smoothly. 
The conference started on Thursday, July 
22 at 10 a.m. ET (3 p.m. British Summer 
Time) with Matthew Reynolds, chair of 
the OCCT, who welcomed attendees with 
some opening remarks in support of 
the conference’s mission of challenging 
Eurocentric approaches to the discipline.

Hany Rashwan then introduced the 
first keynote speaker, Fatemeh Keshavarz 
(director of the School of Languages, 
Literatures, and Cultures at the University 
of Maryland), whose address, “Multilingual 
Poetry, the Information Highway of the 
Medieval Muslim World,” focused on 
poetry’s transmission along the “Silk Road 
of literary distribution and understanding,” 
with the Persian Sufi Fakhr al-Dīn ʿIrāqī 
( 1 2 1 3 – 1 2 8 9  C E )  a s  a  p r i m e  e x a m p l e . 
With a review of ʿIrāqī’s life, travels, and 

Pre-Modern Comparative Literary Practice in the Multilingual Islamic World(s) 
(Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation Research Centre/OCCT,  

University of Oxford, 22–24 July 2021)

Conference Organizers:
Huda Fakhreddine, David Larsen, and Hany Rashwan

Report by: 
Clarissa Burt 

United States Naval Academy

(burt@usna.edu)

© 2021 Clarissa Burt. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License, 
which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long 
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mailto:burt%40usna.edu?subject=


Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 29 (2021)

324  •  Clarissa Burt

texts, supplemented with references 
to Rūmī, Saʿdī of Shiraz, and several 
others, Keshavarz argued convincingly 
for cosmopolitan multilinguality in elite 
Sufi circles, where linguistic and cultural 
diversity was embraced and celebrated.

T h u r s d a y ’ s  f i r s t  s e s s i o n ,  e n t i t l e d 
“Multilingual Scholars and Scholarly 
Practice” and chaired by David Larsen, 
followed Kesharvarz’s keynote. Larsen 
introduced Claire Gallien (Université 
Montpellier 3), whose presentation was 
e n t i t l e d  “ M u l t i l i n g u a l  C o m m e n t a r y 
Literatures of the Islamicate and Their 
R o l e  i n  E a r l y  M o d e r n  O r i e n t a l i s m . ”  
I n  t h i s  s o p h i s t i c a t e d  p i e c e ,  G a l l i e n 
examined the disposition of manuscripts 
(including Quranic commentaries and other 
works of Islamic science) in Arabic, Persian, 
and Turkish that were gathered as artifacts 
by Great Britain in the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries and remain unedited. 
She argues that the selection of materials 
for translation and publication in English 
fed Orientalist conceptions and prejudices 
and ignored the intellectual engagement 
that multilingual commentaries represent. 
Gallien gave the example of Richardson’s 
1774 translation of Ḥāfiẓ, and its reliance 
on the commentary by Ahmed Sudi Bosnevi 
(an Ottoman scholar of the sixteenth 
century CE), which eclipsed more mystical 
commentaries by Sururi and Shemʿi in the 
Orientalist reception.

A l i  K a r j o o - R a v a r y  ( B u c k n e l l )  g a v e 
a paper entitled “A Brocade of Many 
Textures: Literary Trilingualism in 14th 
Century Anatolia, Iran and Beyond,” in 
which he displayed stunning examples 
of trilingual literary production from 
the court of Kadi Burhâneddin of Sivas  
(d. 1398). Pointing to mulammaʿ and talmīʿ 
as critical terms for multilingual stylistics 

in Islamic poetry, Karjoo-Ravary argued 
for a hierarchical theory of language use 
in constructing texts for the community 
of scholars and saints and traced its 
continued use in trilingual texts with 
reference to nineteenth-century works 
from Iran, eastern Anatolia, and central 
Asia.

Z e y n e p  O k t a y - U s l u  ( B o ğ a z i ç i 
University) presented “Sufi Metaphysics 
as Literary Theory: Şeyh Gālib’s Beauty 
and Love.” Sketching the life and works 
of the multilingual Ottoman Sufi Şeyh 
Gālib (d. 1798 CE), Oktay-Uslu focused 
on Gālib’s Turkish mathnavῑ poem Ḥüsn 
ü ʿAşḳ (Beauty and love), in which she 
found three layers of allegory: a mystical 
cosmology, a Sufi pathway to the divine, 
a n d  t h e  w r i t i n g  p r o c e s s .  O k t a y - U s l u 
considered this layered analogical tale 
using its relationship with Ibn ʿArabī’s 
doctrine of the oneness of being and its 
interaction with Rūmī’s work, arguing that 
only such multidimensional analysis opens 
complex layers of meaning in Gālib’s text.

C h r i s t o p h e r  L i v a n o s  ( U n i v e r s i t y 
of Wisconsin at Madison) chaired the 
second Friday session, “Translinguistic 
Adaptations of Genre and Form.” Maryam 
Fatima (University of Massachusetts at 
Amherst) presented “ʿIbrat for an Islami 
Pablik: Nineteenth-Century Historical 
Novel in Urdu,” in which she examined 
the historical novels through which Abdul 
Halim Sharar (1860–1926) navigated his 
own form of colonial modernity. These 
contain a unique mix of Islamic scholarship 
and Western-style rich paratextual notes, 
revealing Sharar’s control of Islamic 
historiography. 

Next, Alaaeldin Mahmoud (American 
University of the Middle East in Kuwait) 
p r e s e n t e d  “ R e t h i n k i n g  t h e  A r t  o f 



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Composition (Inshāʾ) in Arabic and Persian 
Maqāmāt: Badīʿ al Zamān al-Hamadhānī 
and al-Ḥarīrī in Dialogue with Ḥamīd 
al-Dīn Balkhī.” Using theoretical terms 
from al-Shaybānī (d. 298/910–11) and 
Qalqashandī (d. 821/1418), Mahmoud 
engaged with the Arabic maqāmāt of 
a l - H a m a d h ā n ī  a n d  a l - Ḥ a r ī r ī  a n d  t h e 
Persian maqāmāt of Ḥamīd al-Dīn Balkhī 
(d. 599/1202–3) as multimodal productions. 
Mahmoud looked specifically at the use of 
the Persian term sabk for the “stylistics” 
expounded by Muḥammad Taqī Bahār 
in his Sabkshināsī, yā tārīḵh-i taṭavvur-i 
nasr-i Fārsī (Stylistics, or the history of 
change in Persian prose), questioning 
the crosslingual relationship of sabk with 
taṣannuʿ (artfulness). 

S i m o n  L e e s e  ( U t r e c h t  U n i v e r s i t y ) 
presented the panel’s third paper, entitled 
“Refrains of Comparison: Bringing the 
P e r s i a n  R a d ī f  i n t o  A r a b i c  P o e t r y  i n 
E i g h t e e n t h  C e n t u r y  I n d i a . ”  F o c u s i n g 
on the multilingual poetry of Ghulām 
ʿAlī “Āzād” al-Bilgrāmī (d. 1786) and 
M u ḥ a m m a d  B ā q i r  “ Ā g ā h ”  a l - M a d r ā s ī 
(d. 1806), Leese demonstrated how these 
poets incorporated the Persian stylistic 
radīf (refrain) into their Arabic poetic 
compositions and engaged in theoretical 
disputes using the terms ʿArab, ʿAjam, and 
Hindī to signify relationships between 
languages and literary practices in Arabic, 
Persian, and the languages of India as a 
critical apparatus for their multilingual 
poetics.

In the last presentation of the day, 
Orhan Elmaz (University of Saint Andrews) 
g a v e  a  p a p e r  e n t i t l e d  “ C o n t r a s t i n g 
Masculine and Feminine Poetic Voices 
in Wine Poetry: Cases from Arabic and 
O t t o m a n  P o e t r y . ”  U s i n g  s e l e c t i o n s 
from pre-Islamic Arabic poetry through 

sixteenth-century Ottoman poetry, Elmaz 
s k e t c h e d  t h e  w i n e - s o n g  t r a d i t i o n  i n 
Arabic and Turkish with its contrasts in 
poetic conventions, attitudes, and social 
functions and its occasional overlaps with 
love poetry. Elmaz highlighted selections 
from the Ottoman poets Fużûlî (1483–1556) 
and Bâḳî (1526–1600), in which abstemious 
attitudes toward wine contrast with the 
fakhr of wine songs in pre-Islamic poetry. 
Elsewhere, the female Ottoman poet Mihrî 
Hatun (1460–1506/1512) composed wine 
poetry that Elmaz compared, in imagery 
and sentiment, to the poetry of al-Aʿshā  
(d. 627 CE).

W h e n  t h e  c o n f e r e n c e  r e s u m e d  o n 
Friday July 23, Hany Rashwan chaired 
the day’s first panel, “Translation and 
Non-translation in the Islamic World,” 
and introduced the first speaker, Peter 
Webb (Leiden University), who presented 
a paper entitled “Arabic Texts as Ottoman 
Literary Phenomena: The Multilingual 
L i v e s  o f  S a r ḥ  a l - ʿ U y ū n ( P a s t u r i n g  a t 
the Wellsprings of Knowledge).” Webb 
traced the dissemination of al-Risāla 
al-hazaliyya (The witty letter) by the 
Andalusian poet Ibn Zaydūn (1003–1071) 
and the fourteenth-century commentary 
on it composed by the Egyptian poet Ibn 
Nubāta (1287–1366), Sarḥ al-ʿuyūn, which 
exploded in popularity in the subsequent 
c e n t u r i e s  a s  a t t e s t e d  b y  t h e  s h e e r 
number and geographical range of extant 
manuscripts of the work. Webb followed 
Ibn Nubāta’s use of a Persian phrase 
across manuscripts to see how scribes 
understood it (or not) across time, space, 
and linguistic difference. On the basis of 
the content of Sarḥ al-ʿuyūn, Webb posits 
that the Ottoman popularity of the work 
derived from its presentation of succinct 
narratives of classical pre-Islamic Arabic 



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326  •  Clarissa Burt

figures, which summarized the cultural 
traditions of Arab lands under Ottoman 
control.

In “Islam in the Vernacular: The World(s) 
of Arabi Malayalam, and Multilingual 
I m a g i n a r i e s  i n  K e r a l a ,  S o u t h  I n d i a , ” 
Muneer Aram Kuzhiyan (Aligarh Muslim 
University) examined literary production 
in Arabi Malayalam, a form of Malayalam 
in Arabic script with lexical borrowings 
from Arabic, Tamil, Persian, Urdu, and 
Sanskrit. Kuzhiyan focused on Muhyiddin 
Mala by Qāḍī Muḥammad (d. 1616), a praise 
poem for the twelfth-century Sufi master 
Shaykh ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī (d. 1166), 
which contributed to “translating Islam” 
for the Muslims of Kerala. Kuzhiyan spoke 
of anthologies of other “sabina songs,” as 
devotional texts in Arabi Malayalam were 
called. He offered several etymologies for 
the term but focused more on translations 
into Arabi Malayalam in the second half 
of the eighteenth century, situating Arabi 
Malayalam as a locus for multilingual 
comparative studies in relation to its many 
languages and cultures of contact. 

Ayelet Kotler (University of Chicago) 
presented “Translation as a Poetic Point 
of Departure: Persianizing the Rāmāyaṇa 
in Early 17th-Century India.” In this well-
argued paper on Mas̠navī-i Rām u Sītā, a 
Persian verse translation of the Sanskrit 
e p i c  R ā m ā y a ṇ a  b y  t h e  s e v e n t e e n t h -
century north Indian poet Masīḥ Saʿd-
Allāh Pānipatī, Kotler analyzed Masīḥ’s 
faithfulness to the Sanskrit original and 
his creative process in building the Persian 
poetic text to argue for analytical criticism 
of premodern Persian translations through 
the values inherent in such compositions 
as Moghul mediations of Indian culture  
in Persian.

Simon Leese chaired the second Friday 
session, “Minorities, Shibboleths and 
Polyglossia.” Nasim Basiri (Oregon State 
University) offered the first paper, entitled 
“Rethinking Queering in the Pre-modern 
P e r s i a n  P o e t r y :  A  D i a l o g u e  b e t w e e n 
Rūmī and Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī.” In her paper, 
Basiri addressed modern scholarship 
of premodern Persian poetry and its 
neglect of LGBTQ+ identities. Through her 
readings of Rūmī and Ḥāfiẓ, Basiri aimed 
to “save pre-modern queer poetry from 
marginalization” and “read queerness” 
into the study of Persian poetry, in the 
process breaking open Eurocentric, white, 
cisgender, male-centered comparative 
literary analysis.

T a l y a  F i s h m a n  ( U n i v e r s i t y  o f 
Pennsylvania) turned her attention to 
multilingual medieval Jewish scholarly 
culture in her paper, “Echoes of Arabic 
Linguistic Theory, Practice and Muslim 
Doctrine in Jewish Writings of the Medieval 
Islamicate World.” Focusing on Rabbanite 
and Qaraite authors of the ninth through 
eleventh centuries, Fishman related the 
Hebrew dictionaries of Saadia al-Fayyumi 
(882–942 CE), the gaon (leader) of the 
Babylonian Talmudic academy of Sura in 
Iraq, to Arabic lexicographical scholarship 
on rare lexemes in the Quran. Similarly, 
her analysis of the tenth-century Aramaic 
epistle of Sherira (a subsequent gaon of the 
Suran yeshiva) pointed to the application 
of the Islamic doctrine of inimitability 
(iʿjāz) to rabbinic tradition. 

Seerwan Ali Hariry (Soran University 
i n  I r a q i  K u r d i s t a n )  e n d e d  t h e  p a n e l 
w i t h  h i s  f a s c i n a t i n g  p a p e r ,  “ P o e t i c s 
o f  M u l t i l i n g u a l i s m  i n  M e d i e v a l  a n d 
Pre-modern Kurdish Poetry: Rethinking 
Macaronic Verses in Classical Kurdish 
 



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Poetry.” In one of the most delightful 
e x a m p l e s  o f  m u l t i l i n g u a l i s m  i n  t h e 
conference, Hariry presented selections of 
mixed-language macaronic verses by the 
Kurdish poets Aḥmad-ī Khānī (1651–1707), 
Nālī (1797–1877), and Mahwī (1830–1909) in 
which each group of verses were composed 
in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Kurdish in 
turn, signaling the poet’s virtuosity and 
requiring a similar multilingualism on the 
part of the audience. Although Kurds at 
the geographic crossroads between Arabo-
Islamic, Safavid, and Ottoman empires 
u s e d  h e g e m o n i c  l a n g u a g e s  i n  t h e i r 
writings to the detriment of their own, 
these poets added Kurdish to crown their 
literary canon with compositions that 
broaden the definition of macaronic verse 
for comparative purposes.

Nasim Basiri convened the third Friday 
session, titled “Catachresis and Creative 
Misreadings.” Christopher Livanos opened 
the session with his paper, “Reading 
Christian Heresy into the Qur’an in the 
Latin Fathers, the Medieval Translators 
and the Modern Academy.” Citing Bloom’s 
“anxiety of influence,” Livanos argued 
that Western criticism of the Quran has 
centered on a heresiological approach 
seeking to uncover distorted Christian and 
biblical sources for the Quranic text, an 
approach he finds in the “Syriac turn” in 
Quranic scholarship. In contrast, Livanos 
hopes for new academic approaches to 
the Quran to account for its literary and 
religious significance.

Colinda Lindermann (Freie Universität 
Berlin) came next with her “Loanwords 
f r o m  W i t h i n :  D e b a t i n g  T a ʿ r ī b  i n  t h e 
Multilingual Ottoman Environment,” in 
which she traced the history of Arabic 
theory concerning taʿrīb (Arabicizing) 
loanwords from other languages, from 

a l - K h a l ī l  b .  A ḥ m a d  ( d .  c a .  1 7 0 / 7 8 6 ) 
to al-Jawālīqī’s (d. 540/1144) treatise 
al-Muʿarrab min al-kalām al-aʿjamī ʿalā 
ḥurūf al-muʿjam. Lindermann traced 
t h e  d e b a t e  f r o m  e a r l y  s c h o l a r s  t o 
al-Suyūṭī (d. 1505), through the treatise 
of Kemalpaşazāde (d. 1534), al-Risāla fī 
taḥqīq taʿrīb al-kalima al-ʿajamiyya, and 
al-Munshī (d. 1592) to al-Khafājī (d. 1659), 
w h o  m e n t i o n s  t h e  s l a n g  o f  O t t o m a n 
gender-benders under the rubric of lughat 
al-mukhannathīn. Lindermann argued 
that this scholarly discourse was clearly 
engaged with the living linguistic and 
sociocultural Ottoman milieu.

M e h t a p  O z d e m i r  ( U n i v e r s i t y  o f 
Massachusetts at Amherst) presented 
Friday’s last paper, “Debating Belagat: The 
Poetics of (Af)filiative Translation in late 
Ottoman Literary Modernity.” Ozdemir 
pointed to the wave of nineteenth-century 
translations from Arabic and French that 
imported literary values into Turkish and 
its impact on late Ottoman literature. 
Ozdemir analyzed Recaizade Ekrem’s 1882 
Talim-i Edebiyat (Teaching of literature) 
and the controversy that followed its 
publication, with Hacı İbrahim Efendi 
arguing over the legacy of belagat (poetics) 
from Arabic in balance with or in contrast 
to French-oriented literary theory. This 
literary-theoretical debate reflects the 
tension between a necessary rupture with 
the past to build Ottoman modernity and 
the preservation of traditional devices as 
encased in belagat so as to create a unique, 
self-possessed Ottoman literature.

H u d a  F a k h r e d d i n e  c h a i r e d  t h e 
f i r s t  S a t u r d a y  s e s s i o n ,  “ M u l t i l i n g u a l 
L e x i c o l o g y  a n d  E x e g e s i s . ”  L e i l a 
Chamankhah (University of California 
at San Diego) presented a paper entitled 
“Mapping Ibn ʿArabī’s Teachings in the 



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328  •  Clarissa Burt

Premodern Persian Sufi World: ʿAbdul 
Razzāq Kāshānī’s Lexicons and Their 
Literary Importance in Formalizing Sufi 
Terminology.” She detailed ʿAbdul Razzāq 
Kāshānī’s (d. 1335) prolific dissemination 
of Ibn ʿArabī’s teachings in Ilkhanid Iran 
(1256–1353) and his own contributions to 
Sufi literature. The paper focused on three 
lexicons by Kāshānī: Iṣṭilāḥāt al-ṣūfiyya 
(Technical terms of Sufism), Rashḥ al-zulāl 
(Distilling pure water), and Laṭāʾif al-iʿlām 
(The niceties of imparting knowledge).

Next, Salour Evaz Malayeri (University 
of Saint Andrews) presented “Religion and 
Literature in Dialogue: Nāṣir-i Khusraw’s 
Reception of the Quran and Hadith.”  
A well-traveled Persian bilingual (Persian 
and Arabic) poet, Nāṣir-i Khusraw (1004–
1076 CE) contributed widely to Persian 
literature. The paper focused on the 
poet’s religious and exegetical thought 
as revealed in his Jamʿ al-ḥikmatayn 
(Reconciling the two wisdoms). The two 
sources of wisdom were falsafa/philosophy 
and Ismaʿili doctrine/taʾwīl. By comparing 
the Quran and Hadith with Nāṣir’s use 
of rhetorical devices and philosophical 
propositions, Malayeri showed that the 
poet used the Quran and hadith to support 
his own argument.

T h i s  p a p e r  w a s  f o l l o w e d  b y  t h a t 
o f  A b d u l  M a n a n  B h a t  ( U n i v e r s i t y  o f 
Pennsylvania), “Prophethood in Poetic 
Wisdom: Beginnings, Adab and Muhammad 
Iqbal.” The paper examined Persian-
Urdu diglossia in Muhammad Iqbal’s  
(d. 1938) concept of payām as inspirational 
i m p e t u s  f o r  p o e t i c  a n d  p r o p h e t i c 
discourse. Tentatively translating payām 
as “message,” Bhat showed that payām 
for Iqbal is both what prophets deliver to 
humanity and the poetic yearning that 
poets channel to construct poetic texts. 

After discussion, Ali Karjoo-Ravary 
convened the final panel of the conference, 
“Textual Practice, Media, and Reception.” 
S u h e i l  L a h e r  ( H a r t f o r d  S e m i n a r y ) 
presented an intriguing paper, “Arabic 
Prayer or Persian or Both? Abū Ḥanīfa’s 
View and Its Legal Reception.” Laher traced 
the history of translation of the Quran into 
Persian (starting with Salman the Persian, 
d. 33/654), and its recitation in prayer. 
Abū Ḥanīfa (d. 150/767), unlike other legal 
scholars, allowed the use of Persian in 
ritual prayer, perhaps as accommodation 
for non-Arab converts. The question points 
to the historical dispute over whether 
the Quran consists in its meanings qua 
meaning, or in the meanings of the Arabic; 
the majority of scholars of Islamic law 
ultimately settled on the latter position. 
Citing a range of legal opinions from 
Abū-l-Layth al-Samarqandī (d. 376/983) to 
Burhān al-Dīn al-Marghīnānī (d. 593/1197), 
Laher showed that Ḥanafī jurists tolerated 
the use of Persian in ritual prayer and 
supplication and faced a consequent anti-
Shuʿūbī backlash, which enforced the use 
of Arabic alone in devotional practice 
across the Muslim world.

F a y a z  A .  D a r  a n d  Z u b a i r  K h a l i d 
(Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 
India) offered a joint paper, “Sheikh 
Nuruddin’s Koshur Quran: Translinguistic 
Poetry of a Fourteenth century Kashmiri 
Saint.” The authors detailed the legacy 
and Kashmiri mystical poetry of Sheikh 
Nuruddin (1378–1440 CE). Venerated as 
the saint and founder of a mystical order, 
Nuruddin incorporated Quranic references, 
figures, and verses in Arabic into his 
shrukh poetry, to the point that his poetry 
has been described as Koshur Quran, or 
“the Quran in Kashmiri.” His verse also 
refers to such Sufi figures as al-Ḥallāj and 



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Rūmī, making his poetry an addition to 
Sufi mystical Kashmiri literature, which 
combines Arabic, Kashmiri, and Sanskrit 
values. 

Aqsa Ijaz (McGill University) gave the 
conference’s last paper, “Shaping the 
Language of Love: The Afterlife of Nizami’s 
Khusrau u Shīrīn in Persianate India,”  
in which Ijaz considered three north Indian 
versions (Persian, Urdu, and Punjabi)  
of Nizami Ganjavi’s (1141–1209) celebrated 
poem. Ijaz explored intertextuality among 
the different versions, which articulated 
the poetics of love and desire in Khusrau  
u  S h ī r ī n  a c r o s s  c u l t u r e s ,  l a n g u a g e s ,  
and time.

H u d a  F a k h r e d d i n e  i n t r o d u c e d  t h e 
c l o s i n g  k e y n o t e  s p e a k e r ,  M i c h a e l 
Cooperson (UCLA), whose delightful talk, 
“Learning Arabic in Pre-modern Times,” 
was a consolation for anyone who struggles 
with a second, third, or fourth language. 
As Muslims conquered non-Arab lands, 
Cooperson asked, how did the ʿAjam, those 
who were linguistically “othered,” submit 
to and function in Arabic as a hegemonic 
language? In answer, he offered several 
t e x t s  t h a t  w e r e  u s e d  a s  p r i m e r s  f o r 
non-Arabs to learn Arabic, including Tafsīr 
Muqātil b. Sulaymān (d. 150/767) and 
Maqāmāt al-Ḥarīrī (mentioning a Gilaki 
interlinear commentary) for acquiring 
 

vocabulary and mastering grammatical 
intricacies. He shared anecdotes of Bishr 
al-Ḥāfī (d. 227/841) and ʿAlī b. ʿAbd Allāh 
al-Ghuzūlī (d. 815/1412) and the linguistic 
challenges they encountered, suggesting 
that the formal and rule-bound nature 
of Arabic and its literary devices was a 
source of empowerment for non-Arabs 
that allowed them to excel and contribute 
broadly to the Arabo-Islamic cultural 
heritage. 

C o n c l u d i n g  t h i s  a m a z i n g  r a n g e  o f 
papers, David Larsen offered closing 
remarks, reviewing the salient points of 
many papers and encouraging scholars to 
follow up on avenues for further research. 
The conference closed with mutual thanks 
and greetings from all.

O v e r a l l ,  t h e  e v e n t  w a s  a  s t e r l i n g 
example of an intimate seminar in which 
participants benefit hugely from the 
papers and feedback of their peers. The 
online format did not detract at all; instead, 
it made possible the geographic range of 
the participating scholars. Rawad Wehbe 
curated an extraordinary video record 
of the conference, which can now be 
seen on YouTube (https://www.youtube.
c o m / p l a y l i s t ? l i s t = P L v 1 d O - u b w b q h W -
zO6fRTdQ5M28L-lYxZY). An edited volume 
of the conference proceedings is much to 
be hoped for.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv1dO-ubwbqhW-zO6fRTdQ5M28L-lYxZY
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv1dO-ubwbqhW-zO6fRTdQ5M28L-lYxZY
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv1dO-ubwbqhW-zO6fRTdQ5M28L-lYxZY