Authorship in Sufi Poetry

Abstract

This article explores authorship in the Sufi poetry of Egypt. How do we explain apparent paradoxes: attribution of new poetry to an old saint, to more than one person, or to a performer? The Sufi’s world includes a close-knit spiritual-social network, spanning entities (both living and dead), across which text and inspiration flow. Poetic production (primarily the recombination of pre-fabricated units), occurs as much in social performance as in “private” composition. Since the Sufi author is always network-connected, every poetic practice is always collaborative. Conversely, every Sufi (“poet,” performer, or listener) acquires authorial attributes. The article terms the social network of authors the “interauthor,” and claims that it is precisely the social analog to the symbolic “intertext” emphasized through textual repetition. Paradoxes result from coercing the Sufi interauthor into an alien modernist frame of autonomous authorship. Ironically, in practice this sacred “tradition” exhibits more postmodern features of authorship than contemporary secular Arab poetry.

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