The Ascendant Field: Critical Engagements with Ottoman Arabic Literature

In his 2005 study of homoerotic poetry in Arabic literature in the early Ottoman period, Khaled El-Rouayheb drew attention to "a remarkable dearth of secondary studies" in literary production of the period between 1500 and 1800 (Ottoman era), and argued that this is not because of a lack of "sourcematerial" but rather due to lack of "modern scholarly interest."1Fortunately, since then, there has been a growing interest in Ottoman-era Arabic literature, and while negative value judgments of the period cease to play a serious role (at least explicitly) in modern scholarship, a major issue facing this overlooked subject remains the lack of focused studies of particular litterateurs and their works.Broad overviews of post-classical Arabic literature tend to provide useful guides to particular genres or modes of writing, serving as fruitful starting points for further research and reading.These resources, however, often conflate several political, geographical, and temporal signifiers, inadvertently producing research asymmetries in the field.Moreover, despite their privileging of breadth over concentration, these essential preliminary scholarly efforts generally taper off when their chronologies reach the Ottoman period.What we are left with is a confused pause, pregnant with an excitement for the unexplored.