Adab: Literary Form and Social Praxis

أول ما أمر الله به عبده الجمع وهو الأدب وهو مشتق من المأدبة وهو الاجتماع على الطعام كذلك الأدب عبارة عن جماع الخير كله قال صلى الله عليه وسلم إن الله أدبني أي جمع في جميع الخيرات لأنه قال فحسن أدبي أي جعلني محلا لكل حسن

—Ibn al-ʿArabī, محيي الدين بن العربي، الفتوحات المكية (The Meccan Illuminations)

The first thing that God has commanded to his servant is to gather [jamʿ], and this is adab. Adab derives from “banquet” [maʾdubah], which is gathering to eat. Similarly, adab is to put together all that is good. The Prophet said: “God has taught me adab,” in other words, he put together in me all the good things, and then he said: “And then he perfected in me the adab.” In other words, he made me a receptacle for every good thing.¹

وإنّما الأدب عقل غيرك تزيده  في  عقلك —al-Jāḥiẓ, الجاحظ، المعاش والمعاد (This World and the Next)

Indeed, adab is the augmenting of one's mind [ʿaql] with the mind [ʿaql] of the other.

Attending to the complex intellectual histories of the polysemic concept of أدب (adab) exposes how the codification of literary epistemes flattens certain cultural lifeworlds and practices in order to reify others. While in its contemporary usage adab has come to denote “literature,” historically the term has signified not only literary ideals, styles, and forms but also educational tenets, cultural erudition, and moral comportment, as well as social norms and etiquette (hospitality, fashion, food, speech, and manners). It can therefore be understood as “both a literary and an ethical ideal” that couples “polite behavior and proper education” (Hämeen-Anttila). From the vantage point of Euro-American understandings of belletristic literature (littérature), these connotations might appear incongruous. However, the interweaving of spiritual and intellectual edification has been central to the Arab-Islamic intellectual tradition of adab across its historical development.

Concerned with ethical, aesthetic, and bodily comportment, adab speaks to the mutual imbrication of literary form and social praxis. Before its codification as “literature” at the end of the nineteenth century, adab encompassed a broad range of genres and textual practices—from poetry and prose to anthologies and encyclopedias to critical studies about adab. Alongside its inherent interdisciplinarity, adab carries an intersubjective valence insofar as it frames cultural production as a dialogic process that moves across mediums, individuals, and historical times. Put otherwise, “Adab and the role of the adīb came to represent both process and product: the process of contributing to the corpus of materials that would maintain and enhance the status of adab and the aesthetic norms of its practitioner, and the products . . . that the corpus provided” (Allen, Arabic Literary Heritage 238).

The modern taming of adab's semantic capaciousness exposes a range of disciplinary measures that restructured knowledge practices around particular literary sensibilities, social values, and institutional formations. Attending to what is lost in this process renders legible a diverse set of literary modes with immense critical relevance. Combining the formal dimension of genre taxonomy with a stylized approach to writing, alongside a social, moral, and pedagogical orientation, adab cuts across many of the concerns that have animated the various method wars within contemporary literary criticism. It therefore models other forms of writing and reading that are only now gaining currency in Euro-American literary studies.² In bridging questions of literary form, disposition, and function, adab directs us to how the very category of literature itself discloses a series of assumptions about the kinds of work that literary texts can or should do. Modern Euro-American understandings of literariness are frequently rooted in taxonomic distinctions that uphold binaries of the secular/sacred and public/private. The exclusion of religious, historical, and political texts from the category of belles lettres, for example, runs against the practices and ethos of adab within Arab and Islamic intellectual histories (Rashwan; Simpson and Ritner). The secular turn therefore introduced a different conceptualization of historical time and the social body that continues to sway literary practices and critical persuasions.

This essay argues that the transhistorical lens of adab provides a valuable corrective to the influence of the secularization thesis on narrative studies. By this, I mean the ways in which the historicization of modernity in relation to the European Enlightenment project favors models of scientific techno-rationality that are seen as antithetical to religious epistemes. The secularization thesis has conditioned both the periodization of genres and the framing of critical reading practices within the dominant schools of Euro-American literary studies—from Roland Barthes's manifesto on literary criticism as an “anti-theological activity” that sacrifices the “Author-God” (147) to Georg Lukács's solemn conclusion that “[t]he novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God” (88). Foregrounding the communities of practice that shape social and intellectual lifeworlds, adab engages a diverse range of textual and extradiscursive traditions that introduce more expansive notions of literary writing, reading, and interpretation. This essay turns to the historical formation and transformation of adab across Arab-Islamic intellectual traditions as a starting point for thinking through the sedimentation of certain methods, practices, and theories within contemporary literary criticism. Rather than approach adab's inherent polysemy and etymological ambiguity as a problem to be (re)solved, I suggest that we embrace its internal heterogeneity as a site for reflecting on the dynamic relationship between literary forms and practices.

Adab as Literature

The secularization thesis has influenced not only modern Euro-American literary studies but also much of the canonical scholarship on Arab-Islamic intellectual traditions. The nineteenth century was a major inflection point in the conceptual history of adab, during which two interrelated phenomena emerged—adab's institutional codification as “literature” and its formation as a subject of Orientalist scholarship (Brockelmann; Nicholson; Vollers; Gibb; Nallino; and Pellat).³ In creating the Arab and Muslim worlds as epistemic objects, the project of European imperialism reshaped local knowledge practices to better align with secular post-Enlightenment principles. Epistemic shifts in the relationship between the social and the individual, as well as the mind and the body, inflected new institutional formations such as universities, libraries, school curricula, and print technologies (Allan, “How Adab” and In the Shadow). These developments were accompanied by contemporaneous transformations in the intellectual landscape of the Middle East and North Africa during the long-nineteenth-century Arab intellectual nahḍah or “revival,” a period generally bookended by Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798 and the start of World War II.

Interrogating the intersection of European colonialism with discourses of Arab modernity, nahḍah studies scholars have attended to the cultural institutions, infrastructures, and habitus animating the period's zeitgeist of intellectual inquiry and cross-cultural exchange. The practices indexed under adab were inevitably influenced by the shifting landscape of cultural institutions and forms, which included language reform and translation projects, literary salons and associations, journalism and publishing industries, periodicals and printing technologies, and university and educational initiatives, as well as the rise of new literary genres such as the novel and the short story.⁴ These developments collectively led to an increase in Arabic literary criticism and comparative literary studies that engaged a newly available archive of translated works of literature and theory (see Allen, Introduction; and Pepe). The first use of adab to signify a worldly sense of belletristic literature beyond the context of Arabic or Islamic cultural production is said to be in the work of the Lebanese nahḍawī linguist, lexicographer, and translator Buṭrus al-Bustānī in 1876 (Hallaq).

Echoing Ottoman-era knowledge classifications, many nahḍawī intellectuals adopted the singular adab—signifying literature or belles lettres as a genre or corpus—as well as the plural ādāb—indicating the practice of literary or linguistic arts—and used adab and ādāb more interchangeably with the terms علم (ʿilm; “science,” “knowledge,” “learning,” “scholarship”), and بلاغة (balāghah; “rhetoric,” “eloquence”).⁵ This trend is especially prevalent in the Lebanese intellectual Jurjī Zaydān's canonical four-volume Arabic literary history, تاريخ آداب اللغة العربية (Tārīkh ādāb al-lughah al-ʿarabiyyah; The History of Arabic Language Arts), serialized in the literary journal الهلال (al-Hilāl; The Crescent) in 1894–95 and published in book form as a multivolume set between 1910 and 1913 (see Al-Baghdadi; Elshakry). Michael Allan discusses how Zaydān's use of adab in the singular and ādāb in the plural, which he translates as “literature” and “language arts,” respectively, calls attention to “a distinction between literature understood as a corpus of knowledge and literature understood as a pedagogical practice” (“How Adab” 187).⁶ Zaydān's work also reveals a narrowing of the genres and practices that fall under the category of adab as the multivolume series approaches the modern period. By the fourth volume, the scope of adab contracts to more closely align with modern Euro-American literary sensibilities. Specifically, Zaydān begins to distinguish between the social sciences and the humanities, while removing the Islamic sciences from adab, which is now modeled on the category of belletristic literature, especially fiction.⁷ Zaydān's canonical typological classification speaks to the evolving role of the discourse of adab within the tradition itself while also revealing its relationship to broader structures of power-knowledge.

The long nineteenth century not only marked a pivotal shift in how Arab intellectuals and scholars of the Middle East and North Africa came to understand the practices and discourses of adab but crucially influenced generations of scholars in its wake. The imperial body politic relied on the enforcement of secular/sacred and public/private distinctions that reshaped synchronic accounts of adab in ways that continue to be reflected in twentieth-century scholarship. With the postsecular turn, however, scholars are revisiting the classical and medieval archives to foreground adab's interlinking of sociality, spirituality, and embodiment. This corpus of work illuminates the rich intellectual and social possibilities of approaching adab through a practice of historical recovery. In what follows, I turn to the recuperative gestures of these scholars, which demonstrate adab's dialogic development with Islamic ethical epistemes and textual traditions.

Adab as Ethics⁸

The word adab was coined to describe a new social and intellectual formation coalescing during the late Umayyad (661–750) to early Abbasid (750–1258) period. Literary historians and philologists are divided on the precise etymology of adab but generally consider it to be “a back-formation from the unattested plural ādāb (for the likewise unattested aʾdāb) of the singular daʾb,” meaning habit, custom, or سُنَّة (sunnah)—the latter term signifying “ancestral custom” (Hämeen-Anttila). While this account has dominated Orientalist and early European literature, scholars have since complicated this origin story by highlighting associations with entertainment, education, and hospitality within adab's etymological and conceptual history.⁹

Luca Patrizi and Nuha Alshaar have drawn a connection between adab and the metaphor of the Qurʾan as “a divine banquet sent by God” (Alshaar, “Relation” 11) or an archetype of “Divine Hospitality” (Patrizi 519) through the root ʾ-d-b, signifying a banquet or invitation to a meal.¹⁰ Exploring adab as a mode of hospitality that nourishes the mind, soul, and body, they assiduously trace this image across the Qurʾan, hadith (the sayings and practices ascribed to the Prophet Muhammad), and exegetical literature. The Qurʾanic sura المائدة (“al-Māʾidah”; “The Repast” or “The Banquet”) reads

قَالَ عِيسَى ٱبْنُ مَرْيَمَ ٱللَّهُمَّ رَبَّنَآ أَنزِلْ عَلَيْنَا مَآئِدَةًۭ مِّنَ ٱلسَّمَآءِ تَكُونُ لَنَا عِيدًۭا

لِّأَوَّلِنَا وَءَاخِرِنَا وَءَايَةًۭ مِّنكَ ۖ وَٱرْزُقْنَا وَأَنتَ خَيْرُ ٱلرَّٰزِقِينَ ١١٤

قَالَ ٱللَّهُ إِنِّى مُنَزِّلُهَا عَلَيْكُمْ ۖ فَمَن يَكْفُرْ بَعْدُ مِنكُمْ فَإِنِّىٓ أُعَذِّبُهُۥ عَذَابًۭا لَّآ أُعَذِّبُهُۥٓ أَحَدًۭا مِّنَ ٱلْعَـٰلَمِينَ ١١٥

Said Jesus, the son of Mary: “O God, our Sustainer! Send down upon us a repast from heaven: it shall be an ever-recurring feast for us—for the first and the last of us—and a sign from Thee. And provide us our sustenance, for Thou art the best of providers!”

God answered: “Verily, I [always] do send it down unto you and so, if any of you should henceforth deny [this] truth, on him, behold, will I inflict suffering the like of which I have never [yet] inflicted upon anyone in the world!” (M. Asad 5.114–15)

The Qurʾanic translator and commentator Muhammad Asad interprets the sura's imagery as a reference to “God's ever-recurrent provision of sustenance, both physical and spiritual” (194).¹¹ Situating the sura within the context of adab as a social formation, theological sources demonstrate how the pre-Islamic etymological valences of ʾ-d-b influenced both the “development of the notion of adab within Islam” and the Islamic tradition's self-conceptualization in the designation of the Qurʾan as a banquet (Patrizi 523).

Within Sufi mystical literature, the banquet is frequently interpreted allegorically, so that “al-māʾida indicates the realities of knowledge (haqāʾiq al-maʿārif)” (al-Raghīb al-Iṣfahānī qtd. in Patrizi 523–24). Patrizi also links adab to مأدبة (maʾdubah) through references to “God's Banquet (maʾdubat Allāh), from which the believers can draw knowledge” (530). Bridging hospitality and educational imagery, the expression maʾdubat Allāh “was probably used metaphorically to define the education of people and thereafter of their own souls, the adab al-nafs” (517). These alternative etymologies suggest that adab always already linked the social, the spiritual, and the bodily as shared worlds and that these connections were further developed as the discourse of adab integrated and expanded on Islamic narrative and moral norms. Sufi writings on adab, for example, teach corporeal, social, and spiritual forms of comportment directed toward humankind, God, and divine law (Ohlander).¹² Classical Sufi adab discourse encompasses both “an outer, praxic dimension (ādāb al-ẓāhir), as well as an inner, attitudinal dimension (ādāb al-bāṭin)” (Ohlander). Delineating social and spiritual norms for the Sufi aspirant, literature in this tradition relies on a dialogic relationship between the esoteric and exoteric that is foundational to both Qurʾanic and literary hermeneutics.¹³

Islamic narrative ethics shaped the practice and discourse of adab across multiple registers. Not only were the Qurʾan and hadith regularly cited in adab compilations and training manuals, but the holy text served as a new exemplar of literary eloquence that shifted aesthetic norms across the literary and linguistic arts.¹⁴ Comprehensive knowledge of the Qurʾan—largely through memorization and rote recitation—was integral to the cultivation of udabāʾ, who often demonstrated erudition through direct citation of or indirect allusion to the Qurʾan (iqtibās), Qurʾanic commentary, or hadith.¹⁵ Similarly, adab compilations were modeled on the narrative structure of hadith, which relies on a genealogical model of textual veracity that traces a chain of transmission directly to a first-person eyewitness.

Beyond their narratological influence, the Qurʾan and hadith have an explicit pedagogical function that has deeply marked the adab tradition. The texts explicate and model the tenets of Muslim spiritual comportment, with the Prophet Muhammad as an ethical exemplar. As the practice of adab continued to develop, it became associated “with knowledge and the manners that are dictated by a divine source” (Alshaar, “Relation” 7). Signaling both “a moral and intellectual curriculum,” adab built on the centrality of knowledge practices in Islam, since “the best form of adab is that which God used to educate His Prophet” (14–15). Ibn Manẓūr's thirteenth-century dictionary لسان العرب (Lisān al-ʿArab; The Tongue of the Arabs) similarly speaks of the divine education of the Prophet through an etymological connection between دعاء (duʿāʾ; “prayer,” “invocation to God,” or “supplication”) and adab (100).¹⁶ This suggests a relationship between the adīb and the consumer of adab akin to one of hospitality, while further associating the work of adab with pedagogical practices of piety. These connotations carry over in some of the semantic derivatives of adab, such as taʾaddub and taʾdīb, that appear across both hadith literature and classical adab compendia (Sperl; Alshaar, “Relation”).¹⁷

Alongside the prominence of the Qurʾan and hadith within adab literature, there was a reciprocal influence of adab on canonical religious training practices. Thomas Bauer notes that during the period known as the “Sunni revival” (1055–1258), the secretariat class (kuttāb) was absorbed into the religious class of ulama at a moment when language studies were developing into a disciplinary field that was “an indispensable part of the religious studies curriculum.” Literary criticism, linguistics, rhetoric, semantics, grammar, and lexicography were explicitly integrated into the religious training of ulama who now participated in the production of belles lettres. Adab emerged as an academic discipline integrated into the training and practices of scholars in Islamic law, speculative theology, hadith studies, and Qurʾanic exegesis. Bauer notes that literature of the time defined an adīb as “a bearer of knowledge indispensable for religious studies, as an interpreter of the secular tradition of Arabic lore and literature, as maître de plaisir, as author of refined poetry and prose, and as a kātib in service of the state.” These developments fortified the growing field of ʿilm al-adab—the science or study of adab—which further intertwined the methodologies of scriptural exegesis and literary hermeneutics (Bauer; Enderwitz).¹⁸

Across these recent critical interventions, adab emerges as a complex societal and intellectual formation that marries ethical edification and spiritual comportment with the social habitus of cultural practices. Framing adab as a shared pedagogical praxis that reaches across moral and epistemic registers, these accounts complicate a scholarly tradition that has privileged adab's association with the elite intellectual culture of literary salons and the courts.¹⁹ Understanding what is lost in the canonical histories of adab sheds light on the recuperative intellectual work that might lie ahead.

Adab as Subject Formation

The transhistorical prominence and circulatory range of the concept of adab might direct us to the perception that there has been a distinct community of adab practitioners and readers across Arab-Islamic intellectual histories. As this exploration of its shifting semantic landscape has illustrated, however, the social, spiritual, and intellectual formations that fall under its conceptual umbrella speak to a multitude of literary practices called adab. Moreover, within a scholarly tradition whose textual corpus demonstrates a deep concern with the lexical, philological, and intellectual genealogies of its own knowledge practices, the act of defining adab is itself a crucial facet of the self-reflective work of the adīb. Adab is thus at its core an evolving social praxis whose communities continually shape and redefine its terms.

The denotational delimiting of adab as “literature” has largely overshadowed its various connotations and their dialogic interrelationships.²⁰ Colonial practices and epistemes dramatically reorganized bodies in space and time while introducing new models of the human that were in contest with adab as social and intellectual formation.²¹ Critics of adab's reception in the Western academy rightfully problematize the tendency to project modern Euro-American literary schemas onto Arab-Islamic intellectual traditions (see, e.g., Allan, “How Adab” 182; Alshaar, “Relation”; Bin Tyeer; H. El Shakry; Guth; Sperl). There has been far less attention paid to understanding how adab's evolution and significatory accretions might have something to offer contemporary literary critics. To that end, Allan invites us to reflect on literature less as a coherent body of texts that conform to some internally consistent logic than as “a disciplined manner of reading” (“How Adab” 176). Bridging the ontological question of what literature is and an inquiry into what literature does renders legible how modern literary studies codify ways of reading tied to the universalization of secular modes of knowledge production and subject formation. The academic fetishization of critical reading as “an invisible norm,” as Michael Warner reminds us, has a complicated and underexplored history (20).²² It is not surprising that Warner finds in Saba Mahmood's work alternative pathways to knowledge that model “not just a different technique of text processing, or a different attitude about the text object, but a different kind of subject to which the technique is oriented” (19).

We might juxtapose “critical reading” to the verb قرأ (qaraʾa)—to recite, read, study, teach, investigate, examine, or explore—from which the maṣdar, or verbal noun, Qurʾān derives.²³ Like adab, qaraʾa suggests a model of reading and reciting that mobilizes “corporeal knowledge practices” to cultivate ethical edification as a social mode of subject formation (Ware 57). The inclination to separate internal states from outward habits relies not only on a false binary of the secular and the spiritual but also on assumptions about the private work of the self as distinct from the social work of the cultural or political sphere. As scholars in the anthropology of Islam have demonstrated, the privatization of a series of beliefs, practices, and discourses under the transcendental category of religion is a relatively new phenomenon.²⁴

Arguing for the centrality of adab to Islamic modes of being, Ira Lapidus highlights how the concept mediates “the inward flux of intellect, judgement, and emotion in relation to outward expression in speech, gesture, ritual, and action—as the key to the very nature of man's being and his relationship to God” (40). These interlocking spiritual, aesthetic, and existential registers all reside within adab as a practice that speaks at once to “the role of literature in moral, religious, and social life” as well as to “fundamental Muslim ideas about how life is to be lived to fulfill the religious goals of human existence” (40).²⁵ Dahlia Gubara and Alexis Wick similarly adopt a holistic approach that situates adab as a “way of life” (195) or “ethical habitus” (200), and they refer to the practice of adab as a kind of “ṣināʿah (a craft, technique, specialization, or profession)” that models intellectual production as an ethical “lived practice, more akin to a set of exercises” (203). Reflecting on the modern dismissal of adab's ethical and embodied dimensions brings to light the critical illegibility of certain reading and textual practices that have been foundational to Arab-Islamic subject formation.

Understanding the nonequivalence between adab and literature is the starting point for a broader inquiry into the relationship between literary forms and their social functions. From the perspective of adab's diachronic development, we can begin to question privatized models of literary writing and reading within the Euro-American tradition. We can thus engage the adab corpus on its own terms while also considering how it can expand our approach to literary lifeworlds and practices. Calling into question the ontological stability of literature allows us to move beyond the limits of narrative entextualization to explore what happens outside the textual frame. When we reimagine literary reading as a nexus of embodied practices, habits, and sensibilities, we can better attend to the extradiscursive dimensions—literary salons, printing presses, journals, classrooms, mosques—that shape literary communities. This breaks apart the rigidity of the literature-theory divide and its attendant canons, while calling attention to how certain conceptual or theoretical paradigms “travel” more easily than others (Said).

As the adab corpus is by nature heteroglossic and self-referential, it challenges modern notions of literary authorship while exposing how the very category of literature is inseparable from the critical apparatuses through which we interpret cultural objects.²⁶ These tensions emerge in some of the scholarship on adab in which its blurry distinctions between passive and active, as well as between form, content, style, and intention can sit uncomfortably with contemporary literary dispositions.²⁷ This ambiguity of creative acts, agents, and texts opens the door to new understandings of literary reading that can enrich our own practices as literary scholars and educators. Returning to Warner's provocation, we can ask: What kind of subjects does adab orient itself toward? And, more crucially, what kind of subjects can adab create?