Chapter 19 - Tree-Rings of Middle Eastern Poetry

Summary

This chapter takes its lead from Islamic poetry, which was practiced for centuries in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman-Turkish, and Urdu, in a geography extending from the Middle East to South Asia. Within that cultural universe, it focuses on the relation of the Ottoman lyric tradition to the environment. I address this tradition as the ‘last ring’ encircling a common Islamicate civilisation, after the Turkish critic Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s arboreal tropology, which represents the stages of ‘Muslim Orient’s’ literary-cultural history as encircling each other like tree-rings. While surveying the greenery of the Middle Eastern literatures with an eye on the relationship to the environment they articulate or enable, this article also tests the suggestion that ‘[t]he “Middle East” is euphemism for what was the Ottoman Empire’.