Love and Reading Practices in Late Abbasid Baghdad
What was it like to read about passionate love, homoerotic desire, and intimacy with the divine in late Abbasid Baghdad? One Arabic manuscript now held in the British Library tells a remarkable story about gender, family, love, and reading practices. In the early 13th century CE, a man in Baghdad produced an elegant copy of this manuscript's treatise, which consists of anecdotes and poems about love that had been put together by a man who lived over a century earlier. This manuscript is notable both because the copyist was working from the author's original and because the copyist had received an oral transmission of the text from one of the era's most famous female scholars who had herself heard it from the author. It is also remarkable because it contains dozens of attendance records that document a circle of readers in Late Abbasid Baghdad who came together to read about love, including the author's son. This talk explores this manuscript's extensive documentary evidence for reading this text, the social logics of producing the certificates that make up this documentary archive, and the gender dynamics of the text's transmission. This manuscript's archive of reading practices has been entirely overlooked for centuries, but it provides a window into the culture of reading about love amongst the piety-minded scholarly class of Baghdad.
Bio:
Matthew L. Keegan is the Moinian Assistant Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College. He has published articles on Arabic poetry, Quranic exegesis, manuscript variation, and Islamic legal riddles. His first monograph, Before World Literature, is forthcoming with Penn Press. It is a study of al-Hariri's Maqamat and the extensive commentary tradition that mediated its reception.
