Foreword

Extract It is a privilege to contribute a brief foreword to this timely collection, brilliantly conceived, edited and introduced by Sarah R. Bin Tyeer and Claire Gallien, and brought to fruition despite the acute challenges presented by 2020 and 2021. Bridging polarities – aesthetic and political, historical and theoretic – this volume interrogates Weltliteratur via Islamicate imaginaries, confronting abstract complexities while revealing rich compositional specifics. Central to the collection is a vision of Islamicate letters as ‘always and already’ global in scope; as Bin Tyeer and Gallien explore in their elegant introduction, the primary sources illumined anew in this edition represent World Literatures before and beyond standard scholarly frames that have been belatedly applied from the ‘Global North’. This final phrase, implying a specifically hemispheric consciousness and critique, is aptly foregrounded in Islam and New Directions in World Literature. Invoking influential voices such as Aamir Mufti, the volume opens by articulating its aim to ‘move beyond monocentric tendencies of World Literature’ in recognition especially of the ‘field’ as it is ‘now defined in the Global North’. It is this regional classification, charting broad zones of contact and inquiry, that I find especially intriguing. A Canadian, with rural Ontario roots, I have dedicated my own career to considering together Islamicate and North American letters, spanning lost Arabic manuscripts authored by enslaved West African Muslims, to the deep debts owed by classic New England authors to Persian Sufi poetry. The ‘Global North’ lineages of World Literature, as rightly recognised by Bin Tyeer and Gallien, implicate J. W. Goethe especially, whose receptions of Ḥāfiẓ were foundational to the field’s formalising – receptions which later catalysed much Comparative Literature scholarship, including, admittedly, my own.1 As a literary critic concerned with Qurʾānic legacies, but who is biographically ‘northern’, I find compelling the hemispheric shifts theorised by Bin Tyeer and Gallien, and performed practically within the chapters of Islam and New Directions in World Literature. However, the present collection’s ‘monocentric’ critique invites us not only to broaden out beyond the ‘Global North’, I think, but to reimagine what this region might yet signify, attending to traditions of the North too often neglected within both Comparative Literature and Islamic Studies. In my mind, it is not only inter-hemispheric, but intra-hemispheric vistas, that are potentially opened by Islam and New Directions in World Literature. As the collection articulates in its introduction, Goethean legacies have long contoured the field’s conceptualisation, linking Weltliteratur to the ‘Global North’ as well as ‘western Europe’. But, thousands of miles northwest of Weimar, during the very decades that Goethe was reading Ḥāfiẓ, Muslim sources were inspiring other rich afterlives. As anticipated by the title to my foreword, it was at the utmost inhabited boundaries of the northern hemisphere that Islamicate imaginaries would also receive fresh expression, rendered for readers of Inuit languages.

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