Auswahl der wissenschaftlichen Literatur zum Thema „American Sufi poetry“

Best book of poems I’ve read in years by a contemporary and have had thepleasure of being lifted by, shot into the orbit of harmonious rapture grins andthe joyousness of countless YES, O, YES. The collection resonates and purifiesthe deep sweet water in the cells where the real self drinks. The resonatingbuilds stanza by stanza, poem after poem, informed by an American spiritualand mystical lineage from Transcendentalism to the Beats of the BeatitudeVision into as-yet-to-be identified and named Third Wave, holding in itsunnumbered beckoning hands the world‘s mystical poetry body. Moore’s spectacularcontribution to this present building surge arrives before his audiencewith a thorough immersion in Islam’s Sufi way. This is experience inspired intosong, not a complex geometry of imaginary gymnastics afloat in an alienatedmental life ...

This article presents translations and analyses of some of the earliest known examples of Pashto literature: the poems of a figure known as Mullā Arzānī. The Pashto ghazals of Arzānī reflect a Sufi and messianic religio-cultural milieu in which Pashto is understood to be a divine language. An exploration of Arzānī’s poetry and Arzānī’s understanding of his own language use presents a strong challenge to the overly deterministic role that notions of “Pashtun identity” have played in Euro-American understandings of Pashto literature. Arzānī’s use of Pashto aimed not to express Pashtun ethnic identity. Rather, Arzānī’s ghazals position Pashto as an elite language that accords with the messianic and mystical logics of early modern Persianate cultures. Arzānī paired the cosmopolitanism of Persian and Islamic discourses with the particularity of Pashto language as a means to present Pashto as a divine and revelatory language within the messianic milieu of the Roshaniyya movement.

Ruby in the Dust: Poetry and History in Padmāvat by the South Asian Sufi Poet Muḥammad Jāyasī. By Thomas de Bruijn. Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2012. Pp. 371. [American ed., 2013. Dist. by University of Chicago Press.]

I present the poetry and life of the influential Sufi scholar Rumi in order to counter the prevalent Islamophobic images of Muslims in the media. Rumi’s philosophy epitomizes a cosmopolitan sensibility that embraced cultural diversity. One of Rumi’s most important legacies for our contemporary world is how his work creates bridges between Western and Islamic cultures. I suggest that the true cosmopolitan value of Rumi’s poetry can be realized if Rumi’s poems and philosophy are situated within their specific cultural and historical context, and are appreciated alongside the works of contemporary artists from the Islamic world who carry on Rumi’s legacy. As such, the artwork of Iranian-America artist Shirin Neshat is also discussed in relation to Rumi. I argue that art educators can play an important role in combatting bigoted perceptions of Muslims by incorporating the art of significant artists from the Islamic world, both past and present – such as Rumi and Neshat –in their curriculum.

This chapter directly picks up where Stétié ends, with a textual analysis of a poetic cycle of chapbooks by Meddeb. I argue that a renouveau in the Francophone lyric is made possible through his translations of classical Arabic and Sufi poetry. In his chapbooks, Meddeb attempts to refashion himself, after his two successful and widely acclaimed first novels Talismano (1979) and Phantasia (1986), as a mystical, wandering Sufi poet. With Tombeau d’Ibn Arabi (1987), Les 99 stations de Yale (1995), and Aya dans les villes (1999) in particular, Meddeb manically focuses on an adaptational, modern rewriting in French verse of the history of Sufi saints, poets and poetry. Meddeb simultaneously draws on the formal and structural poetics of the pre-Islamic odes (as we will have seen with Tengour and Jabès), but he recasts them in light of the life of the Sufi saints and mystics rather than the pagan poets. Meddeb’s major innovation lies not only in the poetic combination of sacred and profane poetic registers, but also in an original combination of French and Arabic poetic registers with the world of modern American poetics. A central literary case whom I revisit in the conclusion to Pacifist Invasions, a critical re-evaluation of Meddeb reveals him to be indispensable for the successful poetic reconstruction of Francophone studies. I demonstrate how, much like the Sufi poet, and in keeping with ‘Ā’ishah al-Bā‘ūniyyah’s Principles of Sufism, Meddeb’s new Francophone lyric self-inflects as consciousness in search of what lies beyond its knowledge of its current state: situated in relation to itself, its paradoxical internal genealogy, its contemplative meditational mode. The poetic import of Meddeb’s lyric consists of the masterful blending of the figure of the Sufi poet and the Arabic tongue with contemporaneous intonations in French poetry. Meddeb’s writing transverses concurrent and widely divergent poetic trends, and connects them to one another in an original French-language arabesque. Beneath the surface of his first poetic experiments, Meddeb had couched a hidden, propagative poetics of the trace, barely perceptible, held together by thematic and generic modulations, a double lyric voice, and the infralinguistic.

This chapter showcases Betty Davis’s transposition of women’s blues into rock-inflected version of funk. Bolden advances two key arguments. First, Davis reprised the sexual politics and rebellious spirit exemplified by singers Bessie Smith and Ida Cox, for instance, and reinterpreted those principles in modern America. Second, Davis’s eroticism and sui generis style of funk, which she expressed in her recordings and onstage, reflected a sexual politics that served as a counterpart to those of black feminists writers such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and many others who were publishing coextensively. But whereas black feminist writers often wrote about black women in previous generations, Davis not only addressed contradictions that black women encountered in contemporary street culture; she also represented such X-rated sexual desires as sadomasochism in her songwriting. In addition, the chapter provides biographical information that contextualizes Davis’s route to the music industry, and Bolden uses critical methods from scholarship on African American poetry to illuminate Davis’s vocal technique.