Abstract The enduring legacy of Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal (d. 241 AH /855 AD ) is often attributed to the events of the inquisition and his intransigence in the face of persecution. This perspective often obscures the complexity of Ibn Ḥanbal’s sanctification in narrative hagiography. Through an analysis of Ibn al-Jawzī’s (d. 597/1201) Manāqib al-imām Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal , this article argues that dialogue and character narration provide remarkable insights into the construction of Ibn Ḥanbal’s saintly reluctance. First-person accounts from Ibn Ḥanbal are one method that Ibn al-Jawzī uses to communicate the figure’s aversion to fame, but the appearance of interlocutors alongside Ibn Ḥanbal allows for more nuanced dimensions of obscurity to come into focus and communicate his sainthood. As character-dialogue remains a greatly understudied phenomenon in premodern Arabic literature, narratology, and hagiology, this study offers important engagements on its communicative weight for audiences as well as its consequential function for sanctification procedures.
Abstract This article traces the evolution of Tunisian literature across history. It contends that the transition of Tunisian literature from a component of Arabic literary history to an autonomous historical entity is much more than transference from whole to part. Rather, it demonstrates a radical transformation that opens the way to a new research paradigm based on a shift in viewpoints, which methodologically constructs the subject of this study. Regardless of the repercussions of this transition, the possibilities it encompasses, and the conditions for its success, the empirical study of what has been written over a century on the history of Tunisian literature reveals a correlation between the historico-political elements and the cultural and literary aspects, as expected in the theories and methods of literary history. This essay examines the major stages in writing on the topic of “Tunisian literature” over a century, beginning with the first book that can be included in this field, written by the historian Hassan Hosni Abdel Wahab in 1918, and ending with the most recent one published in 2019, going through what was published on the subject during two political periods, namely the state of Independence (1956) and the state of Transition (1987). It demonstrates that these four basic stages are governed by a logic pertaining to the formation of the notion of “Tunisian entity” and the evolution of Tunisian national identity. The interest in the history of Tunisian literature, both in its connection with and separation from the history of Arabic literature, displays an explicit national ideology that has developed historically through accumulation and is closely related to severed ties with old empires (the Ottomans, for example) and colonialism (French in particular). The questions raised in the essay about the history of Tunisian literature are only a practical example that may be extended to the literature of other Arab countries.
