Middle East Art

[Anonymous No.5046979]

Is there such a thing as muslim literature? Are they allowed to create literary art and explore existential themes?

I looked to Harold Bloom for recommendations but they don't seem to be in the Canon.

[Anonymous No.5047017]

I disagree with that image. The Muslim world has only recently turned into what we now have today, as the result of extremists coming into power. Even for the greater part of the 20th century, the Middle East has been on par with the rest of the world. It is neo-barbarism that we see today, not barbarism unchanged by time.

[Anonymous No.5047025]

Only author that comes to mind is Salman Rushdie and he got a fatwa for his writing. But I'm guessing this doesn't fit what you're looking for. Muslim Lit would be interesting to read though.

[Anonymous No.5047082]

>>5047017
>posting a haram image of heretical non-believers as if they represent islam


>>5047025
>Muslim Lit would be interesting to read though.

I wonder if it's possible...

[Anonymous No.5047399]

>>5046979
>Western Canon
>including the Middle East

[Anonymous No.5047941]

>>5047399

is there a canon or 'literature' outside the west??

[Anonymous No.5047969]

>>5047399
>Not knowing about anatolic greece, byzantine empire or the fact that the biblical story largely comes from the middle east

>>5047017
Once upon a time the middle east was on par with west but that period wasnt the 20th century

[Anonymous No.5047980]

>>5047017

Lol dude that pic is from rich ass westernized people who didn't even really follow islam. The majority of people did not look like that.

[Anonymous No.5047984]

>>5047980
To be honest those are most likely persian people before the revolution.

[Anonymous No.5047989]

>>5047941
Is this supposed to be trolling?

[Anonymous No.5048026]

arguments like these are so fucking stupid.

>is there such a thing as american noh theatre?
>who is the greatest german griot? i cant find any information.

there are many different narratives, and the variety of media that exist reflect such a fact. globalization has not yet become so rampant, or so historied, that every place in the world is enacting the same narrative, in the same way. in the last few decades there have been more novels coming from the middle east, but no, they do not have a tradition in this format. but to ask them to would be like to ask new hampshire to have a tradition of epic mythological poetry. expand your fucking horizons.

[Anonymous No.5048236]

Check
Sadiq Hedayet
Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar
Yusuf Atılgan
Yasar Kemal
Hasan Ali Toptas
Naguip Mahfouz(not Nobel class imho)
You would Never read it Because there is No translation of him in English afaik or understand The cultural references to both Turkish society and western literature but there is this guy Oguz Atay who practically has written down a book named Tutunamayanlar, which practically fuses Pale Fire, Ulysses, Master and Margharita with an awesome sense of humor. But it is practically untranslatable(is this even a word?)

[Anonymous No.5048248]

>>5047941

classical chinese has a canon I think

[Anonymous No.5048249]

>>5048026
Your post is a bunch of hot air with not a single book to back it up and muslims are forbidden from artistically depicting the world so OPs question is not even that ridiculous.

[Anonymous No.5048285]

The Middle East had a lot of cultural potential, and still does. Islam, on the other hand, is a cancer to all forms of civilization including culture and literature.

[Anonymous No.5048286]

>>5046979

[Anonymous No.5048297]

>>5048286

If this is a troll thread, then name some muslim literature. Authors who have been threatened by Islamists because of their writing, obviously don't count.

[Anonymous No.5048327]

>>5048297

> No canonical works

[Anonymous No.5048393]

The Turks, Indonesians and Persians have a pretty decent literature industry. But I remember that I read somewhere the whole Arab world releases less books in 10y than Portugal in 6 months.

[Anonymous No.5048399]

>>5048327
That's a collection of folktales, the arabic equivalent of Grimm's Fairy Tales, except far more variable in contents (I have three different copies on my shelf right now, all with different stories included). It's an interesting read, but it isn't a work of literature by a single author like the people in this thread seem to have in mind.

Examples of books like those include the work of Naguib Mahfouz and other authors listed here: >>5048236

[Anonymous No.5048411]

>>5046979
>Arabian Nights
>Layla and Majnun
>Philosophus Autodidactus (a response to the next listed)
>The Incoherence of the Philosophers
>Theologus Autodidactus (the earliest sci-fi novel ever)
>The Travels of Ibn Battuta

[Anonymous No.5048420]

op your post was amusing to me

idk much muslamic lit but there was a poet named Hafez, he seems to be very important in the persian tradition

[Anonymous No.5048438]

Here's a list of releases per year. Not the same because it includes translations but it says a lot about some countries. Turkey is #9, Iran #14, Indonesia #18. The first Arab is Egypt with #37, Libya is #119. Jesus Christ, even Andorra is better and that's just a bunch of villages and a small town.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_country_per_year

[Anonymous No.5048456]

>>5048438
Is that Bukowski? I thought Bukowski was a pretty cool guy...

[Anonymous No.5048457]

>>5048411
Incoherence of philosophers is one reason why Islam went from a 'golden age ' to backwards primitivism....its really terrible the precedent it set

[Anonymous No.5048467]

Khalil Gibran comes to mind, but dude was a Maronite Lebanese Christian who lived in the US.

[Anonymous No.5048481]

>>5048456
I wonder how many of his books were translated into the Muslim world.

[Anonymous No.5048543]

Mahmoud Darwich is an awesome contemporary Palestinian poet, translated to English, no fatwa...

[Anonymous No.5048579]

>>5047980
In Afghanistan for definite, and I assume other places, the burqa etc came back into fashion during the 20th century, among the rich as a way of differentiating themselves from the commoners. The picture in the OP ignores the tragedy that, as the guy you replied to said, they've headed into neo-barbarism as opposed to having always been barbaric

[Anonymous No.5048623]

>>5048297
you say "muslim literature" as if the muslim world was in any way culturally united.
you wouldn't classify anything as "christian literature" either, unless you were talking about authors whose most important feature is being christian and writing about christianity.

I also don't see why it should be obvious that authors threatened by islamists don't count. do we discount the works of a western author because he was threatened by christian conservatives who were offended by the contents of his writing?

Now to give an actual response to your post:
The most important work of arabic literature is of course the qur'an and that's not because there was no good literature after the advent of islam but because the qur'an played an enormous role in the development of the arabic language itself.

There is plenty of literature from all over the islamic world, from the classical Persian poets (like Hafez, Rumi, Ferdowsi, Sa'di, Nezami or Omar Khayyam) and the Perso-Arabic "Arabian Nights" to philosophical novels from the Abbasid period and Indo-Persian ghazals, traditional Turkish poetry and modern works by Nobel Literature laureates like Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt) or Orhan Pamuk (Turkey), works by Taha Hussein, Alaa al-Aswani, Mohammad Iqbal or Mohsin Hamid, and modern Arabic poetry by Nizar Qabbani or Mahmud Darwish. There are few regions in the world that have older and greater literary traditions than the islamic world.

These pages may be helpful in finding out about the many authors and works from all over the muslim world:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_literature
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_literature
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_literature
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistani_literature
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_literature
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_literature
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_literature

[Anonymous No.5048638]

>>5046979
Middle East =/= Islam

Also Gilgamesh is "Middle East"

Fucking OP

[Anonymous No.5050399]

>>5046979
>Is there such a thing as muslim literature? Are they allowed to create literary art and explore existential themes?
>>5047941
>is there a canon or 'literature' outside the west??

Of course. Has any lettered people not done this? Haven't y'all ever bothered to google this stuff?

>>5047984

It's from Ba'athist Iraq in the 70s. Not really representative.

>>5048249
>and muslims are forbidden from artistically depicting the world

A good number of Muslims don't believe in depicting animate life, but there have always been traditions of representative art in "Muslim" cultures.

>>5048285
>Islam, on the other hand, is a cancer to all forms of civilization including culture and literature.

lol.

>>5048457
>Islam went from a 'golden age ' to backwards primitivism

Did it?

I don't know where the "Al-Ghazali ruined science" thing comes from, but it's a bizarre and incorrect reading of history.

>>5048623

This is the first sensible post in this thread, TBH.

>People being seriously skeptical that 1/5 of the world's population has created literary traditions of its own

It'd be funny if it wasn't sad.

[Anonymous No.5050427]

>>5047399
>>5046979
>tfw Harold Bloom included the Qu'ran in his Western Canon
>tfw there are anons on /lit right now who think a Western Canon can only have books from what twenty-first century people call the West.

[Anonymous No.5050431]

>>5048286
Hah that is how most threads on /lit/ start. That doesn't mean it can't turn into a productive discussion.

[Anonymous No.5050636]

>>5050399
>but there have always been traditions of representative art in "Muslim" cultures.

other than architecture for mosques are they allowed to make art, like music and dance, sculpture, etc?? why or why not

[Anonymous No.5050646]

>>5050399
>I don't know where the "Al-Ghazali ruined science" thing comes from, but it's a bizarre and incorrect reading of history.

Unfortunately it is correct. He didn't do it single-handedly, he just set the stage for Islam to reject all western thought, Aristotelianism, "science/philosophy" and become extremely fanatical about faith---faith being the only path to any stable knowledge

[Anonymous No.5050668]

>>5050399

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incoherence_of_the_Philosophers#Legacy


Al-Ghazali's insistence on a radical divine immanence in the natural world has been posited [7] as one of the reasons that the spirit of scientific inquiry later withered in Islamic lands. If "Allah's hand is not chained", then there was no point in discovering the alleged laws of nature. For example:

> ...our opponent claims that the agent of the burning is the fire exclusively;’ this is a natural, not a voluntary agent, and cannot abstain from what is in its nature when it is brought into contact with a receptive substratum. This we deny, saying: The agent of the burning is God, through His creating the black in the cotton and the disconnexion of its parts, and it is God who made the cotton burn and made it ashes either through the intermediation of angels or without intermediation. For fire is a dead body which has no action, and what is the proof that it is the agent? Indeed, the philosophers have no other proof than the observation of the occurrence of the burning, when there is contact with fire, but observation proves only a simultaneity, not a causation, and, in reality, there is no other cause but God.

This type of thinking fucked them up^
What causes fire? lets ignore the natural reasons and just say "GOD DID IT". lol

[Anonymous No.5050715]

>>5050636
>are they allowed to make art, like music and dance, sculpture, etc??

Are they allowed? Depends on who you ask. The religious permissibility of certain types of art, music, and dance has been a controversial subject in Islamic law. But Muslim peoples do and always have done all of these things - they have even incorporated them into religious devotion. Not sculpture so much, but music and dance, absolutely.

>>5050646
>and become extremely fanatical about faith---faith being the only path to any stable knowledge

Have you read anything he wrote?

[Anonymous No.5050740]

>>5050399
I like you.

[Anonymous No.5050754]

>>5050740
Jesus fucking Christ go back to reddit with this cringeworthy bullshit.

[Anonymous No.5050766]

>>5050668

A. Al-Ghazali never attacked scientific inquiry or even philosophy per se; he attacked Avicennism. Here he offers his own position on the "exact sciences":

The second evil comes from the sincere but ignorant Muslims who thinks the best way to defend religion is by rejecting all the exact sciences. Accusing their professors of being astray, he rejects their theories of the eclipses of the sun and moon, and condemns them in the name of religion. These accusations are carried far and wide, they reach the ears of the philosopher who knows that these theories rest on infallible proofs; far from losing confidence in them, he believes, on the contrary, that Islam has ignorance and the denial of scientific proofs for its basis, and his devotion to philosophy increases with his hatred to religion.

>It is therefore a great injury to religion to suppose that the defense of Islam involves the condemnation of the exact sciences. The religious law contains nothing which approves them or condemns them, and in their turn they make no attack on religion.

B. It's fucking silly to believe that Al-Ghazali, prominent though he was, had the normative influence to convince everyone from Spain to India to stop doing "science" -- something he had no interest in doing anyway.

[Anonymous No.5050819]

>>5048623

This.


OP should be sent to a home for the retarded for making such a stupid thread. Can you /pol/-tier retards not use google? Is that too hard?

[Anonymous No.5052187]

Arabs are shit. Almost everything you think of as muslm lit came from Persia and greater Iran. Who ran the administrations? Persians. Lit? Persians. Persians had a culture before the arabs buttfucked them and took over.

Rip Ahura Mazda

[Anonymous No.5052211]

>>5046979
Those guys were the shit 1100 - 1500.

[Anonymous No.5052301]

>>5050646
>Al-Ghazâlî describes the Incoherence of the Philosophers as a “refutation” (radd) of the philosophical movement (Ghazâlî 1959a, 18 = 2000b, 61), and this has contributed to the erroneous assumption that he opposed Aristotelianism and rejected its teachings. His response to falsafa was far more complex and allowed him to adopt many of its teachings.

>In their religious propaganda the Ismâ’îlites openly challenged the authority of Sunni theology, claiming its religious speculation and its interpretation of scripture is arbitrary. The Sunni theologians submit God's word to judgments that appear to be reasonable, the Ismâ’îlites said, yet they are purely capricious, a fact evident from the many disputes among Sunni theologians. No rational argument is more convincing than any of its opposing rational arguments, the Ismâ’îlites claimed, since all rational proofs are mutually equivalent (takâfu’ al-adilla). Only the divinely guided word of the Shiite Imam conveys certainty (al-Ghazâlî 1964b, 76, 80 = 2000b, 189, 191). In response to this criticism al-Ghazâlî introduces the Aristotelian notion of demonstration (burhân). Sunni theologians argue among each other, he says, because they are largely unfamiliar with the technique of demonstration. For al-Ghazâlî, reason (‘aql) is executed most purely and precisely by formulating arguments that are demonstrative and reach a level where their conclusions are beyond doubt.

[Anonymous No.5052316]

>>5052187
Settle down Saeid

[Anonymous No.5052380]

>>5046979
That pic is blatantly false, Iran is one of the few countries in the world with satellites.

[Anonymous No.5052405]

>>5050819
>Can you /pol/-tier retards not use google? Is that too hard?
They can't. They can only use /pol/. Another form of neo-barbarism, really.

What was originally satire on racism and bad politics has attracted the real idiots. The whole /pol/ thing originated as a part of tongue-in-cheek /b/ "culture". Now what was once a joke seems a reality to many new posters, and people who actually share these beliefs have found their way onto the board.

[Anonymous No.5052465]

>>5050819

>Ignorant person makes thread
>people post interesting stuff and try to share information and knowledge

>you get mad and make a post that doesn't contribute to anything in any way

You are the cancer, not OP.

[Anonymous No.5052535]

>>5052405
>The whole /pol/ thing originated as a part of tongue-in-cheek /b/ "culture".
/b/ originated the same way. I wonder how many times we are doomed to repeat this shit.