The Rude, the Bad and the Bawdy (Gibb Memorial Trust)

Throughout his distinguished career devoted to the study of Arabic language and literature, Geert Jan van Gelder sustained a particular interest in humour and irreverence: in mujūn, broadly understood as literary expressions of indecency, encompassing the obscene, the profane, the impudent, and the taboo. Contributors to this honorific compilation tackle this subject from a wide variety of perspectives beyond the merely prurient in studies detailing the ways in which indecency has been signified, signalled, evaluated, and preserved , and including translations and commentaries of exemplarily audacious texts. Together these chapters cover a range of interrelated and complex issues on sexuality, gender, language, and poetics from an array of perspectives and with a variety of approaches, reflecting the interests and methodologies of several generations of scholars across numerous specialisations within the field of Middle Eastern and Islamic literary studies. One intriguing area of investigation that has emerged is the question of what becomes of mujūn in the modern era and how it transforms and mutates across space, time, and genre. Many other questions arise to from the ways in which the chapters complement each other in their interrogation of boundaries, broadly construed—be they historic turning points or gradual evolutions, cultural dichotomies and fusions, the so-called gender gap, or the dividing line between the erotic and the pornographic.Table of ContentsTabula GratulatoriaGeert Jan van Gelder: a biographical sketchIntroduction1. Wen-chin Ouyang, ‘Mujūn, Junūn, Funūn’ 2. Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila, ‘What is Obscene? Obscenity in Classical Arabic Literature’3. Pieter Smoor, ‘A Suspicion of Excessive Frankness’4. Gregor Schoeler, Abū Nuwās’ poem to the Zoroastrian boy Bihrūz: An Arabic ‘sawgand-nāma’ with a Persian ‘kharja’5.. Arie Schippers, ‘The Mujūn Genre by Abū Nuwās and by Ibn Quzmān: a Comparison’6. Nefeli Papoutsakis, ‘The ayrīyāt of Abū Ḥukayma (d. 240/854): A preliminary study’7. Monica Balda-Tillier, ‘ʻUdhrī Love and Mujūn: Opposites and Parallels’8. Emily Selove, ‘Mujūn is a Crazy Game’9. Thomas Bauer, ‘Dignity at Stake: Mujūn epigrams by Ibn Nubāta (686-768/1287-1366) and his contemporaries’10. Ewald Wagner, ‘Lyrics on a Fart’11. Denis McAuley, ‘Two fart jokes in Ibn ʿArabī’s Muḥāḍarat al-abrār’12. Richard van Leeuwen, ‘Love or Lust: Sexual Relationships between Humans and Jinns in the Thousand and One Nights and The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye13. Roger Allen, ‘The Obscenity of Sexual Torture’14. Frédéric Lagrange, ‘Modern Arabic Literature and the Disappearance of Mujūn: Same-Sex Rape as a Case Study’15. Marlé Hammond, ‘The Foul-Mouthed Faḥla: Obscenity and Amplification in Early Women’s Invective’16. Clive Holes, ‘A Saudi “housewife” goes to war: الفتاوي الشريرة or “the evil fatwas”’17. Adam Talib, ‘Caricature and Obscenity in Mujūn Poetry and African-American Women’s Hip Hop’18. Jan Schmidt, ‘Love and Sex among the Ottomans (1500-1800)’19. Geert Jan van Gelder: List of PublicationsNotes on the ContributorsIndex