Kaʿb ibn Zuhayr weeps for Sultan Murad IV: Baghdad, heritage, and the Ottoman Empire in Maʿrūf al-Ruṣāfī's poetry

Abstract

This chapter situates Maʿrūf al-Ruṣāfī’s (1875–1945) poetry within the transcultural context of the Ottoman Empire. The work first provides a brief biography of al-Ruṣāfī, with particular focus on his time in Istanbul. I also pay attention to shifting socioeconomic conditions in the Ottoman Iraq that facilitated al-Ruṣāfī’s engagement with Ottoman Turkish writings. The chapter then gives a close reading of Süleyman Nazif’s (1870–1927) Firak-ı Irak (The Separation from Iraq, 1918) and al-Ruṣāfī’s “Nuwāḥ Dijla” (The Lamentation of the Tigris). Both works express a strong grief about the Ottoman defeat in Baghdad during World War I; however, they capture different receptions of the Arabic poetic heritage. In Firak-ı Irak, Kaʿb ibn Zuhayr (d. ca. 646/7), Ḥassān ibn Thābit (d. 674), and al-Mutanabbī (d. 965) turn into “Ottoman poets” as they weep for Sultan Murad IV (r. 1623–1640) and ultimately serve an Ottoman imperialistic discourse. Kaʿb ibn Zuhayr and Ḥassān ibn Thābit even live in the same world with the Ottoman poet Nefʿi (d. 1635) and speak to him in Turkish. While “Nuwāḥ Dijla” also expresses a deep sorrow for the Ottoman defeat, al-Ruṣāfī did not posit the Ottoman defeat in Baghdad as a tragic defeat for Kaʿb ibn Zuhayr or al-Mutanabbī. As the chapter’s final section pays attention to representations of heritage and homeland in al-Ruṣāfī’s works, it examines how different receptions of the Arabic poetic heritage could have contributed to the construction of diverse communal identities. Al-Ruṣāfī situated poets such as al-Mutanabbī within the Arabic heritage (al-turāth); in contrast, Süleyman Nazif saw the same poets as part of an Ottoman canon that members of the Ottoman literati upheld. Finally, I emphasize the need to flesh out the Ottoman literary heritage’s multilingual character to reassesses some key categories that critics take for granted, such as “classical Arabic literature” and “Ottoman literature.”