On Fiction and Adab in Medieval Arabic Literature

The authors of this volume are some of the principal scholars of the field of Medieval Arabic literature and include Stefan Leder, Julia Bray, James Montgomery, Michael Cooperson, Daniel Beaumont and Dwight Reynolds. The book is a natural complement to Stefan Leder’s Story-Telling in the Framework of Non-Fictional Arabic Literature*, and furthers our understanding of some of the issues dealt with in the earlier tome. It deals chiefly, and variously, with the rhetoric, semantics, epistemology and humanistic mythology of narrative in the canon of Adab (medieval Arabic Belles Lettres) and related narrative literatures. “What is fiction (or fictional)?” and “What is Adab?” are essentially hanging questions that shape or affect the essays in various ways; literatures dealt with include: the Iqd al-Farid of the Andalusian humanistic writer Ibn Abd Rabbih; the Arabian Nights; the pre-Islamic Battles Days of the Arabs (Ayyam al-Arab); manuals of dream interpretation; historiography; stories of the signs of Muhammad’s prophetic vocation; early Islamic travel accounts; and hagiographical writing.