Takhyil: the Imaginary in Classical Arabic Poetics: Texts/ Studies

Takhyil is a term from Arabic poetics denoting the evocation of images. It has a broad spectrum of connotations throughout classical philosophical poetics and rhetoric, and it is closely linked to the Greek concept of phantasia. This volume is comprised of annotated translations of key texts on this topic from major philosophers and literary theoreticians, including Alfarabi (al-Farabi), Avicenna (Ibn Sina), Averroes (Ibn Rushd), and ‘Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani. In her preface, the classicist Anne Sheppard relates takhyil to Greek poetics, and in his introduction, Wolfhart Heinrichs traces the development of the term in the Arabic tradition. The second part of the book contains eight studies on takhyil and various aspects of image-evocation and how it relates to musical theory, literary criticism and rhetoric. The opening essay is by Katrin Kohl, a specialist in European poetics, who places takhyil in the wider context of poetic universals.

Geert Jan van Gelder retired as Laudian Professor of Arabic, University of Oxford, in 2012 and returned to the Netherlands in 2015. He has published widely on Classical Arabic literature.

Marlé Hammond is Senior Lecturer in Arabic Popular Literature and Culture at SOAS University of London where she teaches classes on Arabic Literature and Middle Eastern and North African cinema. She is the author of The Tale of al-Barraq Son of Rahwan and Layla the Chaste: A Bilingual Edition and Study (Oxford University Press, 2020) and the award-winning monograph Beyond Elegy: Classical Arabic Women’s Poetry in Context (Oxford University Press, 2010). She also edited Arabic Poems (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets, 2014). Having studied film modules at Columbia University in New York and The American University in Cairo, she started teaching about Arabic-language cinema in 2006 and began integrating it into her research in 2007, when she was awarded a three-year British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at Oxford University to explore representations of ancient female poets in modern Arabic literature and film. This led to her publication of studies of two films: Togo Mizrahi’s Sallama (1945) and Bahiga Hafez’s Layla, Daughter of the Desert (1937). She has also authored a book chapter on the role of the kiss in Egyptian film language of the 1940s. Her work at the archival collection of (primarily Egyptian) film scripts at the New York State museum in her home town of Albany, has enabled her to ‘reconstruct’ bowdlerized films, such as Yusuf Wahbi’s Love and Revenge (1945), the subject of Chapter 1.3, and have informed the regional essays at certain junctures. Whilst this ‘expertise’ has been focused on Egypt, over a decade of teaching of teaching on the subject of Arabic-language cinema more generally has resulted in her researching the cinemas of North Africa and the Eastern Arab world rather extensively.