Poetic Desire and Literary Thievery: Economies of Intertextuality in Arabic Literature
by Muhsin J. al-Musawi

How do we define plagiarism in literature? In this wide-ranging and innovative study, Muhsin J. al-Musawi examines debates surrounding literary authenticity across Arabic and Islamic culture over seven centuries. Al-Musawi argues that intertextual borrowing was driven by personal desire alongside the competitive economy of the Abbasid Islamic Empire. Here, accusations of plagiarism had wide-ranging consequences, as competition among poets and writers grew fierce, while philologists and critics served as public arbiters over controversies of alleged poetic thefts. Taking in an extensive remit of Arabic sources, from Persian writers to the poets of Andalusia and Morocco, al-Musawi extends his argument all the way to Ibrāhīm ᶜAbd al-Qādir al-Māzinī's writing in Egypt and the Iraqi poet Nāzik al-Malā՚ikah's work in the twentieth century to present 'theft' as a necessary condition of creative production in Arabic literature. As a result, this study sheds light on a vast yet understudied aspect of the Arabic literary tradition, while raising important questions surrounding the rising challenge of artificial intelligence in matters of academic integrity.

About the Author

Muhsin al-Musawi is professor of classical and modern Arabic literature, comparative and cultural studies at Columbia University. A renowned scholar and literary critic, his teaching and research interests span several periods and genres. Professor al-Musawi is the author of thirty-nine books (including 6 novels) and over sixty scholarly articles. Professor al-Musawi is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the highly prestigious 2002 Owais Award in Literary Criticism, the 2018 Kuwait Prize in Arabic Language and Literature , King Faisal Prize in Arabic Literature in English, Jan.2022; and Sheikh Zayed Book Award, May 2022.

About the Speakers

Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He has written more than two dozen books, edited four, and contributed chapters to many more. He is also the author of over 100 essays, articles, and book reviews on subjects ranging from Iranian and Islamic Studies, comparative literature, world cinema, and the philosophy of art (trans-aesthetics). His books and articles have been translated into numerous languages, including Japanese, German, French, Spanish, Danish, Russian, Hebrew, Italian, Arabic, Korean, Persian, Portuguese, Polish, Turkish, Urdu, and Catalan.

Madeleine Dobie teaches French and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her research and teaching focus on francophone colonial and postcolonial culture. Her publications include: Foreign Bodies. Gender, Language & Culture in French Orientalism (Stanford, 2001, 2003), Trading Places. Colonization & Slavery in Eighteenth-Century French Culture (Cornell, 2010) and Mayotte Capécia ; une femme des Antilles dans l’espace colonial français (co-written with Myriam Cottias) (2012). She has also coedited A Comparative Literary History of Slavery, Vol. 1 (2024) and journal issues on Maryse Condé and Assia Djebar. She has recently co-edited with Olivia Harrison an issue of Esprit créateur devoted to Faits divers and the Fictions of Race.

Elaine van Dalen is an assistant professor of Classical Islamic Studies and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University. Her research focuses on the history of medicine in medieval Islamicate societies. Her first book project, The Arabic Hippocrates, focuses on postclassical Arabic commentaries on the Hippocratic Aphorisms. It explores the way physicians maintained the canonical status of medical texts and preserved the relevance of the foundational authority of their field across changing medical landscapes.

Tarek El-Ariss is the James Wright Professor and Chair of Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College. In 2021, he earned a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete his new book, Water on Fire: A Memoir of War. Trained in philosophy, comparative literature, and visual and cultural studies, he works across disciplines and languages to examine notions of the subject, community, and modernity. His research interests include Arabic literature, culture, and the arts; literary theory, new media, and digital humanities; Nahda and modernity studies; travel writing and the war novel; sci-fi and utopia studies; 18th- and 19th-century French philosophy and literature; and gender and sexuality studies.

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