How to Cite

Stetkevych, Suzanne Pinckney: Rhetoric, Hybridity, and Performance in Medieval Arabic-Islamic Devotional Poetry: Al-Kāfiya al-Badīʿiyya of Ṣafī ad-Dīn al-Ḥillī, in Dorpmüller, Sabine et al. (Eds.): Religion and Aesthetic Experience: Drama—Sermons—Literature, Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing, 2018 (Heidelberg Studies on Transculturality, Volume 4), p. 207–231. https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.416.c5921

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ISBN 978-3-947732-02-9 (Softcover)
ISBN 978-3-947732-01-2 (Hardcover)
ISBN 978-3-947732-03-6 (PDF)

Published

12/13/2018

Authors

Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych

Rhetoric, Hybridity, and Performance in Medieval Arabic-Islamic Devotional Poetry: Al-Kāfiya al-Badīʿiyya of Ṣafī ad-Dīn al-Ḥillī

Abstract The premier work of Islamic devotional literature of the post-classical period is undoubtedly the Mantle Ode (Qaṣīdat al-Burda) of al-Būṣīrī (d. 694–696/1294–1297), which generated a vast body of derivative works composed in the hope of acquiring the blessing or baraka of the poem. Among these was the badīʿiyya, a praise poem to the Prophet Muḥammad (madīnabawī) that is a contrafaction (muʿāraḍa) of al-Būṣīrī’s Burda in which each line exhibits a particular rhetorical device. The present paper offers a re-evaluation of the badīʿiyya as a hybrid devotional performance that combines the science of rhetoric—the essential element of the tenet of the miraculousness of the Qurʾān (iʿjāz al-Qurʾān)—with the art of praise poetry to the Prophet (madīnabawī) as a reenactment of the miracle of the Qurʾān and of the baraka of al-Būṣīrī’s Burda. It takes as its main example Al-Kāfiya al-Badīʿiyya of Ṣafī ad-Dīn al-Ḥillī (d. 749 or 750/1348 or 1349) to examine the rhetoric and aesthetics of the badīʿiyya in light of contemporary ideas of performance and performativity.