Arabic 'anti-Frankish' poetry of the crusading era: an introduction and some practical approaches

Although medieval Arabic chronicles, biographical dictionaries, travel narratives, anecdote collections and other sources are full of poetry quotations, it is only recently that historians of the Crusades have begun to realise the value of poetry for a deeper, more nuanced understanding of Muslim responses to the arrival of the Franks in the Eastern Mediterranean. Apart from Osman Latiff's The Cutting Edge of the Poet's Sword (2018), there has been no major work on Crusades-related poetry, and existing scholarship focuses on the poems' thematic content rather than on their musicality and sonic features. Yet exploring these aspects brings important insights into the broader cultural context which would not be available through more conventional historical methods.

This presentation will offer, first, an introduction to Arabic musico-poetic practices in the Middle East around the time of the Crusades, and consider how these gave rise to the corpus of poetry sometimes termed 'anti-Frankish' by modern scholars; second, a brief survey of the main Crusades-related poetry sources; and finally, some ideas on how we might analyse these sources musically/sonically, using practical methods informed by ethnomusicology.

Speaker

Kate Arnold (Nottingham Trent) 

Organiser

School of History, Religion and Philosophies, SOAS History Seminar Series.

Image: Taken from Maqāmāt of al-Harīrī, British Library manuscript (probably 13th century CE) Add. MS. 22114. f.94.