It then ex- plores the conditions under which Wannūs’ library came into existence and flourished in a Syria marked by the Baʿth party and the al-Asad regime’s authoritarian control of the political and cultural fields, under which it migrated from Damascus to Beirut in the wake of the 2011 Syrian revolution-turned-war. After presenting a brief overview of the books in Wannūs’ library, their subject matter, and their provenance, it examines personal book inscriptions, which unravel a rich intellectual network and provide insight into Wannūs’ trajectory and recognition as a playwright and public intellectual. This article sets out to read Wannūs through his library. The private library of the Syrian playwright and public intellectual Saʿdallāh Wannūs (1941-1997) arrived at the American University of Beirut in 2015. Finally, this study examines the fraught relationship of the post-Naksa (1967) Arab poet, as exemplified in the modern Yemeni poet ʿAbd Allāh al-Baradūnī, with the poets and poetry of the Golden Age.
In the 19th-20th century Nahḍa, Neo-Classical, poets such as Aḥmad Shawqī, recouped the Abbasid master poets to both retroject and project a vision of an Arab-Islamic ‘Enlightenment’. The panegyric odes of poets such as Abū Tammām and al-Buḥturī were canonized so as to promote a vision of an Arab-Islamic Golden Age and, further, to serve as models for the expression of Arab-Islamic hegemony and the conferral and contestation of legitimate authority. Challenged to create a poetry that would serve as the linguistic correlative of the astounding and unprecedented might and dominion of the rulers of the Arab-Islamic state, the Abbasid Modernist Poets (al-shuʿarāʾ al-muḥdathūn) invented a powerfully and radically innovative poetic style, termed badīʿ.
This study argues that the 3rd AH/ 9th CE century panegyrists (praise poets) of the Abbasid caliphal court at Baghdad (and briefly at Samarra) were responsible for constructing the image of a Golden Age of Arab-Islamic dominion that was subsequently adopted by the poets and thinkers of the 19th-20th century Nahḍa or ‘Arab Awakening’.
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