Rachel N Schine

This article offers a set of race-conscious approaches to teaching premodern Arabic texts in translation, tailored to courses in Islamic studies and related subject areas. Throughout, I address the productive tension generated by the fact that many contemporary translations do not consistently signpost moments of racial thinking as such despite the increase in scholarship on medieval race and racism as well as in the call, on the part of students, to grapple with racialization in our course materials. On the one hand, I argue that such translations can perpetuate what Kimberlé Crenshaw dubs "perspectivelessness" by discursively disengaging from race in various ways, but on the other, I contend that this opens opportunities for critical reading of translation practices as well as of the historical source texts themselves. I offer guided readings of nine Arabic texts in translation from two major press series-Penguin Classics and the Library of Arabic Literature-that lend themselves to classroom use, in which I demonstrate how to foster reading with race in mind. In doing so, I offer an extended meditation on racialization as a comparative and historicizable hermeneutic for understanding premodern Islamic histories and literatures.

The signal works of poetry that prominently feature racialized Blackness in early Arabic literature (c. AD 500-1250) include works composed by authors of Afro-Arab heritage as well as by Arab authors who satirized and panegyrized Black subjects. These poets include the pre-Islamic author ʿAntarah ibn Shaddād and the ʿAbbasid-era figures al-Mutanabbī and Ibn al-Rūmī, and thus reflect the shift, across an extensive timeline, from a local, Bedouin poetics to a self-styled cosmopolitan, courtly aesthetic characterized as muḥdath, or modernist. The works are situated not only within the changing conventions of genre, but also within an arc that traces the emergence of new race concepts and racialized social institutions in the transition from the pre-Islamic era to Islam and from the early conquests to ʿAbbasid imperialization. Critical instances of these works' intertextual movements demonstrate how racial logic accretes in various Arab-Muslim textual traditions, showing how poetry intersects with popular epic as well as high literary geographical, ethnological, and commentarial corpuses. As verse moves across a myriad of later literary forms, its context-specific representations of racial difference are recontextualized and received in ways that contribute to a broader transregional and transtemporal discourse of racialized Blackness.

This essay examines the role of nursing experiences in the formation of popular heroes in Arabic literature of the medieval period, with a primary focus on the genres of siyar shaʿbiyya and qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ. I show that the miraculous nursing of heroes—many of whom are foundlings—in popular texts tends to follow a providential meeting either with an animal or with a woman who is capable of nursing. Though such tale patterns are attested across many cultures, they are also elaborated in specific, linked ways in traditional Muslim sources, as in narratives of Moses’s miraculous nursing and stories of Muḥammad’s wet nurse, Ḥalīma. Whereas prophetic literature often depicts nursing solely as a human-human relationship, the heroic literature incorporates significant human-animal encounters. Using an exemplary anecdote about a hero’s suckling found in manuscripts and early print editions of Sīrat Dhāt al-Himma, I sketch how one such instance can travel and shift across an epic tradition. I interpret the experience of the hero’s foster mother through the lens both of traditional Islamic institutions of milk kinship and of a reading practice that attends closely to women’s presences and agencies in the early lives of (mostly) male literary figures.

(Essay for the Library of Arabic Literature) In this article, Rachel Schine, author of the blog “Lyric Poets” (lyricpoets.tumblr.com) writes about ‘Antarah ibn Shaddād and what his poetry has in common with the lyrics of Cardi B. She notes: “The artist and essayist Max King Cap has said that one’s identity is ‘neither prescriptive nor proscriptive; it doesn’t dictate or disallow.’ Thoughtful art, according to him, embodies this principle, yet, when I was invited to write a comparison between the half-black (hajīn) ‘Antarah ibn Shaddād and a contemporary rapper (more likely than not to be a person of color), I was initially apprehensive that I would be making it look like ‘Antarah’s identity was indeed prescriptive, and that it dictated his comparability with other literary figures. I hope to convince you otherwise and show some of the uses of comparing Classical Arabic poetry with contemporary rap.”

URL above. Part of the Forum for Religion & Culture's roundtable on #MeToo and #TimesUp in religious studies.

In her essay, “Textual Harassment: Reading Medieval Arabic Love Verse in the Context of Consent,” Rachel Schine (University of Chicago) looks at the differences between the speakers and objects of adoration in the poetic genre of mannered love verse (ghazal). Addressing the inequalities of participation in the medieval Arabic literary playing field, Rachel discusses the works of the Umayyad-era poet ‘Umar b. Abī Rabī‘a in light of an anecdote regarding his behavior in the fictional Arabic popular epic, Sīrat Dhāt al-Himma, where the caliph’s daughter intentionally secludes herself to avoid becoming an unwilling subject of his poetry. Through analyzing this anecdote, Rachel problematizes a paradigm that any evidence of women in pre-modern sources should be valued, and instead prompts us to think about the role of consent in such works and our reception of them as contemporary readers in the aftermath of #MeToo and #TimesUp. She argues that women’s absences from certain literary and social domains can be read not only as a form of patriarchal exclusion but as an agentive gesture of denying consent.

ʿAbd al-Wahhāb's character in Sīrat al-amīrah dhāt al-himmah is but one example of a black hero who figures prominently in a sīrah shaʿbiyyah, or popular heroic cycle, the earliest references to which appear in the twelfth century and several of which remain in circulation today. Like several of his counterparts, not only is he black, but he is also alone among his relatives in being so. The explanation supplied in the text of his mother Fāṭimah's eponymous sīrah for his " spontaneous " phenotypic deviation makes use of rhetoric also found in various antecedent and near-contemporary belles-lettres sources. Placing ʿAbd al-Wahhāb's case within the context of this literary network illuminates a series of questions concerning the semiotics of race in pre-twelfth-century Arabo-Muslim literature, racially inflected anxieties about control of feminine sexual-ity, and pre-genetic syntheses of racial and reproductive " sciences. " This paper concludes that ʿAbd al-Wahhāb's blackness is produced through a set of scientific and speculative discourses that go beyond the prominent theories of climate influences and Hamitic genealogy, and that posit instead a racial determinacy that occurs spontaneously , regardless of geography or lineage, through a variety of interventions from and against the maternal body. These include the contamination of seminal fluid, " image-imprinting, " and divine fiat. The concentration of these theories within a single text makes ʿAbd al-Wahhāb's conception narrative a uniquely apt ground for discussing the broader complex of issues of gender and race in pre-modern Arabic literature.

Signs from Above: Towards a Comparative Symbology of Bird Imagery in Medieval Near Eastern Popular Prose This article presents excerpts from two near-contemporary works of popular prose from the medieval Near East: the Persian Dārāb-nāmeh and the Arabic Sīrat Banī Hilāl. In each, birds or birdlike characters (the sīmorgh and the crow, respectively) that share in having had theriomorphic, mythic significance in regional pre-Islamic traditions dispense premonitory wisdom to Muslim characters. Comparing these passages, the article contends that the characterization of these birds brokers a pietistic shift in symbolism between the pre-Islamic and Islamic context, while still maintaining the birds' mystical significance and sustaining the trope of birds as winged, heaven-sent messengers. This modified association between birds and divine ministry is not only prominent in these two texts, but also in the Qurʾān and varied bestiaries, poetry, and belletristic works that comprise these texts' cultural network.

Join me as I discuss race and Islamic history with Dr. Rachel Schine, a graduate of the University of Chicago and current Postdoctoral Associate in Arabic Literature and Culture at the University of Colorado Boulder. Can we speak about race when we talk about the past? How are different peoples depicted in the Qurʼān, Ḥadīth, and other literature? How were differences between human explained? Were these differences ever used in polemically? How did ideals of beauty intersect with conceptions of race? And more! Link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e9-race-and-islamic-history-dr-rachel-schine/id1463223629?i=1000476580494