Hands at Work: Conditions for the representation of banausic art in early Arabic poetry.

Arabic poetry of the sixth–eighth centuries CE is a rich fund of information about material culture from the “user end.” The exclusion of manufacturers and other artisans from the poetry’s heroic milieu is all but total, and this tracks with the contempt for banausic labor alleged of Bedouin nomads by every scholar to write about them since al-Jāḥiẓ and Ibn Khaldūn. Typically, it is as metonymic accessories of crafted goods (e.g., the “sword scraped clean by an armorer”) that artisans are mentioned. There is however another trope in which the bodies of weavers, metalworkers, carpenters and other artisans are depicted in early Arabic poetry, as similes for dynamic movement on the poem’s primary, heroic plane, and this is the motif I call “Hands at Work.” By attending to this imagery, it is possible to attend to banausic labor of the pre- and early Islamic periods, including the work of matweavers and other trades that early Arabic poetry does not otherwise represent.

This is event is co-sponosored by CCSRE (the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity), the Middle East Studies Forum by Stanford Global Studies, and the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages.

PATH+ is a research group that considers new directions for the studies of Persian, Arabic, Turkish, and Hebrew languages, literatures, and cultures. 

Image Credit: Fresco from the Vault of Crafts at Qusayr ‘Amra. Detail from a photo by Jordan Pickett (2012).