What is Balagha?

Among our most important contributions is the excavation of the forgotten tradition of Islamic rhetoric (‘ilm al-balagha) for the contemporary study of literary form. We translate balagha variously as poetics, rhetoric, and stylistics. Key works were prepared by our team members from the literary traditions with which this project is concerned. Many of these are being translated for our anthology, Arabic, Persian, and Turkic Poetics: Towards a Post-Eurocentric Literary Theory (expected Nov 2024). These bibiliographies were compiled in two phases: once at the planning stage and second after we started working together as a team.

GlobalLIT’s anthology of primary sources will provide a critical vocabulary for the project, and enable the development of a future agenda for world literary theory that is synthetic in orientation, philologically rigorous, and comparative in the strongest sense of the term.

Key figures whose writings will be included:

• Arabic: al-Baqillani, al-Rummani, Qudama b. Jaʿfar, Ibn al-Mu’tazz, Ibn Sina, al-Jurjani, al-Sakkaki, and al-Qazwini
• Persian: ʿAwfi, Raduyani, Watwat, Shams-i Qays, al-Tusi, Jami, and Wa’iz-i Kashifi;
• Turkic: Tarazi, Nawa’i, Babur, and Sururi