Book Reviews (MSR XII. 1, 2008)

Thomas Bauer seems very much intent on discrediting my chapter on Mamluk and Ottoman poetry (in the Post-Classical Period volume of the Cambridge History of Arabic Literature, edited by Roger Allen and D. S. Richards and published in 2006), which apparently contradicts the premises and ideas he himself had already put forward about this long period, one that happens to be his chosen area of specialization. To this end he has resorted in his review article to an unseemly, incoherent, and unscholarly all-out attack on my ideas, my stance, and my work, even my person. The attack is unseemly because the personal slurs, innuendos, and insinuations generously distributed throughout his paper are unbefitting the tasks and objectives of genuine scholarship, and simply compromise their own source; incoherent because Bauer seems unable to stay the course of a single principle or standard of judgment in his rush to condemn my work and my stance; unscholarly because he builds his case on heavily decontextualized references, betrays a thorough ignorance of my corpus of work (and so my actual stance on particular issues of literature and culture), and critiques my translation of Arabic poetry in a manner that sadly betrays the weakness of his own grasp of the Arabic literary language and its idioms. First of all, it needs to be acknowledged that there are obviously serious and deep-rooted differences in our assessment of the poetry of the period in question. Yet to slip from scholarly engagement with disagreement and alternative judgments to a vituperative lashing-out, filled with charges of all kinds, including insinuations which are meant to reflect on the person of the other, is beyond ordinary comprehension. Whereas a scholarly disagreement can be welcomed as a contribution to shaping or instigating a debate, this kind of inelegant and uncivil attack cannot be allowed to stand without challenge, although I admit to finding no pleasure whatsoever in having to respond to this level of writing. Bauer has the audacity to heap personal invective on me simply for thinking differently from him, for not seeing in the poetry of this period the greatness and superior quality he himself sees. And yes, it is indeed true that I do not have a