22 Alina Kokoschka and Birgit Krawietz
ment of taste and its related predilections and displeasures in Europe.^88
He stresses the specific importance of colonial trajectories and their
impact on the perception of Oriental poetry and concludes “that
Mamluk Arabic literature is not characterized by stagnation and a lack
of innovation but rather by a steady and gradual development”. The
latter, “however, did not evolve towards the same endpoint as Western
literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” Dismissing cer-
tain segments of this literature as stagnant primarily has to do with “the
lack of developments that mimicked and confirmed Western models.”^89
Both features – i. e. steady development and nonconformity with long-
prevailing Western models of innovation – very much apply to the case
of Ibn al-Qayyim. We suggest, therefore, that the thorough disregard
for Ibn al-Qayyim and his persistent portrayal in the Western second-
ary literature as an epigone is not a coincidence having to do solely
with his specific case,^90 but rather may be strongly influenced by the
tenacious Romantic notion of the genius and the exaggerated hailing of
invention, especially since the era of colonial expansion and industrial
capitalism. In the course of the 18th century, originality and “its moral
antonym plagiarism”^91 became the cornerstone of debates about artis-
tic genius. Only the invention of the concept of the “original genius”
transformed the appropriation of texts – for example in the form of
repetition – into a “problem”; in the Baroque period, for instance,
exact repetition was taken for granted as an element of the fine arts.^92
The idea of the “original genius” is often dated back to Robert Wood’s
“Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer”,^93 which also
strongly influenced conceptions of creativity across Europe.^94 Here,
88 Bauer, Thomas: Mamluk Literature. Misunderstandings and New Approaches,
in: Mamlūk Studies Review 9 (2005), pp. 105–132, here pp. 105, 108.
89 Bauer, Mamluk Literature, p. 116.
90 Another candidate would be Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī (d. 1505).
91 Buelow, George J.: Originality, Genius, Plagiarism in English Criticism of the
Eighteenth Century, in: International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of
Music 21 (1990), pp. 117–128, here p. 117.
92 Glasmeier, Michael: “Loop. Zur Geschichte und Theorie der Endlosschleife am
Beispiel Rodney Grahams”, key note speech, May 5, 2011 in the course of the
conference “Wiederaufgelegt. Zur Appropriation von Texten und Büchern in
Büchern” (May 5–7, 2011), organized by Annette Gilbert, Peter Szondi-Insti-
tute, FU Berlin.
93 Wood, Robert: An Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer. With a
Comparative View of the Ancient and Present State of the Troade, London 1769.
94 Compare Fredriksson, Martin: The Avant-Gardist, the Male Genius and the
Proprietor, in: Nordlit 21 (2007), pp. 275–284, here p. 278.
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