In The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, edited by Roland Greene and Stephen Cushman, 62-64. This experience is the emotional pleasure that results from the cognitive process of the discovery of meanings that are strange, unexpected, and require mental effort to apprehend.

Using the principles of Arabic jinās, Rashwan reveals previously unsuspected subtleties in Egyptian literary composition.The magazine’s editors sought to generate a profound change in the role and form of Arabic poetry as a tool to support a significant leap forward in the Arab thinking and writing. Harb then shows the development of takhyīl, mimesis, and the experience of wonder in the poetics of Ibn Sīnā, Ibn Rushd, Qarṭājannī, and Sijilmāsī, while also exploring Ibn Rushd’s notion of alteration ( taghyīr) as the defining trait of poetry, which similarly refers to the using of language in an unfamiliar way to produce wonder (108).

The sophistication of Arabic theorizations of aesthetics, which this book exposes, and the universality of their principles makes it important for the study of literary theory in general and literatures beyond Arabic, including modern Western literatures. By creatively re-reading ancient Egyptian texts through the lens of the classical Arabic poetic tradition Dr.The author first presented this review at the Sixth Annual Graduate Students Book Review Colloquium on Islam and Middle Eastern Studies in 2022 organized by AbuSulayman Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University and the Maydan. The book amply deconstructs the long-established hypothesis that differentiates between literary and non-literary texts based on our modern comprehension of literary genres. The analysis revals the significant role that Sh‘ir played in enabling a new kind of secular and personal poetics, including that of prose-poetry and vision poems. Now the time is surely ripe for Hany Rashwan's bold postcolonial challenge--that applying the Arabic concept of wordplay (jinās) to ancient Egyptian texts can yield literary and linguistic insights which have thus far eluded his fellow Egyptologists. The chapter also deals with the general reasons behind the closure of both phases of the magazine and suggests the real causes that twice forced al-Khāl to give up his dream.

However, the Arab cultural project has constantly been led by the religious branch of its culture, and therefore, the creative and linguistic processes have always moved within this frame. In other words, it departed from the limitations of Arabic expression confined to the traditional religious frame, and moved into a broader horizon of expression that sought to replace this with internationalization and ←18 | 19→cultural pollination. A. in Islamic Texts with a concentration in theology and philosophy at Zaytuna College in Berkeley, CA.

In this novel argument, Lara Harb suggests that literary quality depended on the ability of linguistic expression to produce an experience of discovery and wonder in the listener. Finally, this chapter traces the French and English source texts and investigates their influence on the poetic and literary works in the magazine, which indicates, as we shall see, the dominance of the cultural atmosphere of these texts over the literary and cultural direction of the magazine. There are some instances where Harb seems to sacrifice technical precision for the sake of her argument, such as not paying attention to the psychology of the internal senses and its relation to the process of takhyīl, like the imaginative faculty ( mutakhayyil), which she at times conflates with the imagination ( khayāl), a different faculty according to the theorists she is citing (168). At last my haunting desire to see a good study on analogies between ancient Egyptian and Arabic literary sensibilities and taste has been fulfilled. Studies dealing with the social, political and philosophical backgrounds of Arabic literature are particularly welcome in the series.

Now the time is surely ripe for Hany Rashwan’s bold postcolonial challenge—that applying the Arabic concept of wordplay (jinās) to ancient Egyptian texts can yield literary and linguistic insights which have thus far eluded his fellow Egyptologists. Harb shows how the philosophers went through a trajectory similar to that of poetic criticism in that they began with defining poetry through a true-false scale, as evident in Fārābī’s writings, who, in turn, laid the foundations for Ibn Sīnā to define poetry through takhyīl, and consequently, its ability to incite the soul with wonder (76). I note that Majallat Shi‘r announces the birth of a new concept of poetry that indicates penetration of the common prevailing tribal concept and depends on continuous discovery through poetry about the truth of the human condition. In addition, the book analyzes the extent of the magazine’s effect on poetic Arab modernism and its significance in view of the development of Arabic literature, which is imbued with a ‘modernism’ that was either its contemporary or has been developing from its vision till the present day.I make the argument in my book that the main aesthetic underlying post-10 th-century classical Arabic literary theory was one of wonder; that is, poetic beauty was evaluated based on the ability of language to evoke an experience of discovery and wonder in the listener. Analysing the Qur’an, which is known for confronting the poetry of the time, this book reveals that "post Qur’anic" literature came to be defined against it. It certainly deserves to be on every Egyptologist’s bookshelf, and we will benefit from its insights. He impressively explores the intersection between the visual and verbal layers and sheds new light in re-evaluating the ‘visual literariness’ of ancient Egyptian writing.