The norm as set in the example above allows space for different personal
accentuations, but the poem has to share a common code with its audience to
receive recognition. Within the dynamics of subordination and change,
allegiance and deviation, both imitation and innovation work in concordance
and refraction. No matter how the pre-modern poet (before 1914 as a date of
convenience) argued imitation as both conscious plagiarism and as an insep-
arable part of one’s grounding and learning, there was a binding sense of
allegiance to the norm. Sarcasm and humor at the expense of these norms
made their inroads only when urban expansion, and its concomitant mixture
of races and cultures, especially with the ‘Abbmsid takeover, offered ground
and justification to deviation. The urban/Bedouin dichotomy was as serious
then as it is now. The anti-Bedouin sentiment, as in AbnNuwms’s poetry,
targeted associated ways of thinking, writing, and behaving. Arabism, for a
time, was confused with a desert way of life as antithetical to a broad Islamic
inter-culturality, along with its manifestations, real or imaginary, in literature.
To account for deviational poetics with its streak of the so-called shu‘nbiyyah,^4
as “an attempt to forge the bases for a multicultural intelligentsia,”^5 we need
an overview of normative and deviational poetics since pre-Islamic times,
as follows:
1 Poetics of Allegiance;
2 Mediational Poetics;
3 Reversal Poetics.
These work within conventions and norms in subordination or resistance.
They lay the ground for postclassical, neoclassical, and modern poetics, as
subsequent analysis of neo-Sufism and modern elegiac modes demonstrates.
To cope with the poetics of allegiance, however, and its classical underpin-
nings, Suzanne P. Stetkevych’s The Poetics of Islamic Legitimacymay serve the
purpose of this chapter as a critical reading of pre-Islamic and Islamic poetry
with emphasis on the dimension that keeps it in dialogue with history and
culture. The poems, as analyzed in her book, are no longer isolated literary
products, but ones that operate in cultural contexts of authority and
allegiance, with all their ceremonial rites and demands. Whether actors or
supplicants, poets had a role to play within time-honored traditions.
Stetkevych also relates change in rhetorical patterns to cultural shifts and
religious–political transitions and transformations that justify association
with the Umayyad or ‘Abbmsid periods.
In line with Jaroslav Stetkevych’s critical method and his masterly use of
cultural anthropology and thorough readings of the generic and the mythical
in poetry, Suzanne P. Stetkevych carries the study of poetry and poetics
beyond philology, while making good use of it whenever the need arises
to reflect on poets’ special use of words, terms, and occasions. Although
unconcerned with early surveys of myth that have their impact on modern
CONCLUSION: DEVIATIONAL AND REVERSAL POETICS