Kevin Blankinship
Welcome! I am Associate Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at Brigham Young University. My mission is to bring classical Islamic civilization to a wider public through scholarship, teaching, editing, translation, podcasts, and public lectures.
My research is about classical Arabic poetry and belles lettres. Currently I am writing a book about the blind poet and freethinker al-Ma`arri (d. 1057) and Islamic animal ethics. My work has been supported by the Fulbright-Hays Program, the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, the Danish Independent Research Fund (DFF), University of Southern Denmark, and the University of Utah.
I also write for the popular press. I am a contributing editor at New Lines Magazine, and my work has appeared in The Atlantic, Foreign Policy Magazine, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Spectator, and more. I am on X as @AmericanMaghreb.
My research is about classical Arabic poetry and belles lettres. Currently I am writing a book about the blind poet and freethinker al-Ma`arri (d. 1057) and Islamic animal ethics. My work has been supported by the Fulbright-Hays Program, the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, the Danish Independent Research Fund (DFF), University of Southern Denmark, and the University of Utah.
I also write for the popular press. I am a contributing editor at New Lines Magazine, and my work has appeared in The Atlantic, Foreign Policy Magazine, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Spectator, and more. I am on X as @AmericanMaghreb.
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Research Articles by Kevin Blankinship
In the year 1021 CE, blind author and skeptic Abū l-(Alā) al-Ma`arrī (d. 1057 CE) wrote Risālat al-sāhil wa-l-shāhij (The Epistle of the Horse and the Mule), a winding prose work populated by animal characters who talk about poetry, grammar, riddles, and Syrian society on the eve of the crusades. Traditionally forgotten as a source for al-Ma`arrī's pacifism, and his vegan worldview, the Sāhil lets readers see his thinking on animals more than most other works. After a brief survey of animals in Islam, which shows a mainstream desire for balance between human and non-human needs, as well as exceptional cases that strongly uphold animals as subjects per se and which stand as key inter-texts for al-Ma`arrī, this paper considers how the Sāhil champions non-human creatures through images of animal cruelty deployed to shock readers into compassion, and through poetry and popular sayings (amthāl) recast in a zoocentric mold. It therefore advocates with more fervor than anthropocentric Islamic writings on animals, such as Kalīlah wa-Dimnah or the letters of the Ikhwān al-Safā. However, this happens in a way that makes it hard to pin down the sources of al-Ma`arrī's thought. Furthermore, al-Ma`arrī seems to contradict himself when, for example, he employs literal meaning when it comes to animal justice, even as he avoids literalism in other contexts. This calls his concern for animals into question in one sense, but in another, it affirms such concern insofar as his self-contradictions show an active mind working through animal ethics in real time.
Academic Book Reviews by Kevin Blankinship
A brushed-up version of the author’s 1984 Harvard PhD thesis, All the World is Awry deals with a giant of classical Arabic literature: Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī (d. 449/1057), the Arabic poet famous in the West for Risālat al-ghufrān (The Epistle of Forgiveness), a voyage through the afterlife that people once thought a precursor to Dante’s Commedia. But in the Arabic-speaking world, al-Maʿarrī’s claim to fame is Luzūm mā lā yalzam (Self-imposed necessity), a poetry collection that brims with renunciation (zuhd) and memento mori (waʿẓ), and which through the centuries has outraged readers for its criticism of religious authority. Lacey has four chapters: (1) “The Man,” about al-Maʿarrī’s life and legacy, (2) “The Milieu,” about his times and relevant intellectual discourses (e.g., falsafah, kalām, adab), (3) “The Medium,” about formal aspects of the Luzūm, and (4) “The Message,” which takes up half the book and surveys key themes. Since one rarely sees new titles about al-Maʿarrī and especially Luzūm, those that do appear are welcome, including Lacey’s, although he omits much of new scholarship, and thus frames al-Maʿarrī’s thoughts too broadly, seeing heterodoxy even when it may not be there.
My review of "The Portrait of Abū l-Qāsim al-Baghdādī al-Tamīmī" written by Abū al-Muṭahhar al-Azdī (fl. 5th/11th cen.) and edited and translated by Emily Selove and Geert Jan van Gelder (Gibb Memorial Trust, 2021).
In Progress by Kevin Blankinship
Steal No More from Nature confronts a giant of classical Arabic literature: the blind ascetic, freethinker, and alleged Muslim heretic Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī (d. 1057 CE). I examine one of his best-known but least studied themes, namely animal ethics. By modern standards, al-Maʿarrī was not just vegetarian but in fact fully vegan—vanishingly rare in a medieval Islamic world where most people believed that God grants animals for human use. What is more, animals appear everywhere in his works. They serve as symbols, moral allegories, and reminders of death. In this, he joins Pythagoras, Voltaire, the Buddha, and others in expressing the virtues of vegetarianism and animals overall.
While people often see al-Maʿarrī’s veganism as proof that he is a freethinking hero of atheists and skeptics, Steal No More from Nature argues differently: that his view of animals shows he is in fact profoundly religious. We can see this even in his Near Eastern context. His animal ethics are part of zuhd, the word for Islamic asceticism but which generally means “renunciation” or “disinterest.” I connect this to Andrea Haslanger’s account of Greek Cynic philosophers as “cosmopolitan,” since they detach from anything local. They scorn human society, received wisdom, and earthly pleasures, thus freeing themselves to think critically. Likewise, al-Maʿarrī’s pious disinterest in this world lets him flout social norms like meat-eating. He believes in the sanctity of life, but more than that, he sees meat-eating as part of overall flesh-obsession. He refuses animal products so that he can reject the body and embrace death, the ascetic’s highest goal. With ongoing debates about animal rights and the environment, al-Maʿarrī’s case raises questions that are captivating and urgent, but not new.
As for the maxims themselves, they appear as early as pre-Islamic times, e.g. vagabond poet Shanfarā’s “three companions — a brave heart, a bright blade, and a yellow longnecked bow,” and continue up to modern times, e.g. Iraqi-Ottoman physician Suleiman Ghazala’s maxim that “the sources of animal passion [ʿishq] are four: body, sensation, longing, and the joy of the gaze.” Given the constraints of rhyme and meter, the range of numbers in poetry is stricter than prose, normally spanning from two to eight. This makes the poetic sayings pithier and the items listed more tightly related. Often the lists have an air of finality or completeness, seeming to cover all there is to say about a topic. They span across poetic aghrāḍ (thematic intentions), from Ibn Sukkara al-Hāshimī’s witty mujūn (bawdy talk), to Andalusī poet Ibn al-Abbār’s (d. 658/1260) madḥ (praise poem) to a Ḥafṣid prince that “three things will energize you after age forty: triumph in battle, consolidation of power, and ‘manifest victory’ [fatḥ mubīn],” to the gloomy declaration of al-Maʿarrī (d. 449/1057) that, “I see myself bound in three prisons, so don’t ask for ill-boding news: they are my loss of sight, my seclusion at home, and being trapped in this cursed body.” In this way, number maxims in premodern Arabic poetry are not so much a genre as a theme or posture, one that gives counsel, amuses the reader, exposes matters of the heart, and plays many other roles that show, in Christian Junge’s words, “the volatility of enumeration.”
Specifically, I explore the section on ḥusn al-khitām, “appropriate endings,” from Khizānat al-adab wa-ghāyat al-arab, a poetic commentary-plus-literary anthology by Mamluk poet, essayist, and state secretary Ibn Ḥijja al-Ḥamawī (d. 837/1434). Therein, one finds what Ibn Ḥijja calls a risāla mujassada, a “personified letter,” which is full of puns on human body parts and which emulates a brief section from “al-Maqāma al-Baghdādiyya” by Abū al-Qāsim al-Ḥarīrī (d. 1122). Ibn Ḥijja describes his letter using the word mujassada, “personified” or “incorporated,” in a strikingly modern way that is rare for classical Arabic. Moreover, the letter is supposed to show, by invoking the biological integrity of the human body and structuring the letter explicitly around such a body, how the best kind of ending in a text connects naturally to its beginning. Therefore this letter, which to my knowledge is unstudied and untranslated, is one of the clearest examples that premodern Arabic critics had some concept, albeit unstated, of organic literary unity.
In the year 1021 CE, blind author and skeptic Abū l-(Alā) al-Ma`arrī (d. 1057 CE) wrote Risālat al-sāhil wa-l-shāhij (The Epistle of the Horse and the Mule), a winding prose work populated by animal characters who talk about poetry, grammar, riddles, and Syrian society on the eve of the crusades. Traditionally forgotten as a source for al-Ma`arrī's pacifism, and his vegan worldview, the Sāhil lets readers see his thinking on animals more than most other works. After a brief survey of animals in Islam, which shows a mainstream desire for balance between human and non-human needs, as well as exceptional cases that strongly uphold animals as subjects per se and which stand as key inter-texts for al-Ma`arrī, this paper considers how the Sāhil champions non-human creatures through images of animal cruelty deployed to shock readers into compassion, and through poetry and popular sayings (amthāl) recast in a zoocentric mold. It therefore advocates with more fervor than anthropocentric Islamic writings on animals, such as Kalīlah wa-Dimnah or the letters of the Ikhwān al-Safā. However, this happens in a way that makes it hard to pin down the sources of al-Ma`arrī's thought. Furthermore, al-Ma`arrī seems to contradict himself when, for example, he employs literal meaning when it comes to animal justice, even as he avoids literalism in other contexts. This calls his concern for animals into question in one sense, but in another, it affirms such concern insofar as his self-contradictions show an active mind working through animal ethics in real time.
A brushed-up version of the author’s 1984 Harvard PhD thesis, All the World is Awry deals with a giant of classical Arabic literature: Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī (d. 449/1057), the Arabic poet famous in the West for Risālat al-ghufrān (The Epistle of Forgiveness), a voyage through the afterlife that people once thought a precursor to Dante’s Commedia. But in the Arabic-speaking world, al-Maʿarrī’s claim to fame is Luzūm mā lā yalzam (Self-imposed necessity), a poetry collection that brims with renunciation (zuhd) and memento mori (waʿẓ), and which through the centuries has outraged readers for its criticism of religious authority. Lacey has four chapters: (1) “The Man,” about al-Maʿarrī’s life and legacy, (2) “The Milieu,” about his times and relevant intellectual discourses (e.g., falsafah, kalām, adab), (3) “The Medium,” about formal aspects of the Luzūm, and (4) “The Message,” which takes up half the book and surveys key themes. Since one rarely sees new titles about al-Maʿarrī and especially Luzūm, those that do appear are welcome, including Lacey’s, although he omits much of new scholarship, and thus frames al-Maʿarrī’s thoughts too broadly, seeing heterodoxy even when it may not be there.
My review of "The Portrait of Abū l-Qāsim al-Baghdādī al-Tamīmī" written by Abū al-Muṭahhar al-Azdī (fl. 5th/11th cen.) and edited and translated by Emily Selove and Geert Jan van Gelder (Gibb Memorial Trust, 2021).
Steal No More from Nature confronts a giant of classical Arabic literature: the blind ascetic, freethinker, and alleged Muslim heretic Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī (d. 1057 CE). I examine one of his best-known but least studied themes, namely animal ethics. By modern standards, al-Maʿarrī was not just vegetarian but in fact fully vegan—vanishingly rare in a medieval Islamic world where most people believed that God grants animals for human use. What is more, animals appear everywhere in his works. They serve as symbols, moral allegories, and reminders of death. In this, he joins Pythagoras, Voltaire, the Buddha, and others in expressing the virtues of vegetarianism and animals overall.
While people often see al-Maʿarrī’s veganism as proof that he is a freethinking hero of atheists and skeptics, Steal No More from Nature argues differently: that his view of animals shows he is in fact profoundly religious. We can see this even in his Near Eastern context. His animal ethics are part of zuhd, the word for Islamic asceticism but which generally means “renunciation” or “disinterest.” I connect this to Andrea Haslanger’s account of Greek Cynic philosophers as “cosmopolitan,” since they detach from anything local. They scorn human society, received wisdom, and earthly pleasures, thus freeing themselves to think critically. Likewise, al-Maʿarrī’s pious disinterest in this world lets him flout social norms like meat-eating. He believes in the sanctity of life, but more than that, he sees meat-eating as part of overall flesh-obsession. He refuses animal products so that he can reject the body and embrace death, the ascetic’s highest goal. With ongoing debates about animal rights and the environment, al-Maʿarrī’s case raises questions that are captivating and urgent, but not new.
As for the maxims themselves, they appear as early as pre-Islamic times, e.g. vagabond poet Shanfarā’s “three companions — a brave heart, a bright blade, and a yellow longnecked bow,” and continue up to modern times, e.g. Iraqi-Ottoman physician Suleiman Ghazala’s maxim that “the sources of animal passion [ʿishq] are four: body, sensation, longing, and the joy of the gaze.” Given the constraints of rhyme and meter, the range of numbers in poetry is stricter than prose, normally spanning from two to eight. This makes the poetic sayings pithier and the items listed more tightly related. Often the lists have an air of finality or completeness, seeming to cover all there is to say about a topic. They span across poetic aghrāḍ (thematic intentions), from Ibn Sukkara al-Hāshimī’s witty mujūn (bawdy talk), to Andalusī poet Ibn al-Abbār’s (d. 658/1260) madḥ (praise poem) to a Ḥafṣid prince that “three things will energize you after age forty: triumph in battle, consolidation of power, and ‘manifest victory’ [fatḥ mubīn],” to the gloomy declaration of al-Maʿarrī (d. 449/1057) that, “I see myself bound in three prisons, so don’t ask for ill-boding news: they are my loss of sight, my seclusion at home, and being trapped in this cursed body.” In this way, number maxims in premodern Arabic poetry are not so much a genre as a theme or posture, one that gives counsel, amuses the reader, exposes matters of the heart, and plays many other roles that show, in Christian Junge’s words, “the volatility of enumeration.”
Specifically, I explore the section on ḥusn al-khitām, “appropriate endings,” from Khizānat al-adab wa-ghāyat al-arab, a poetic commentary-plus-literary anthology by Mamluk poet, essayist, and state secretary Ibn Ḥijja al-Ḥamawī (d. 837/1434). Therein, one finds what Ibn Ḥijja calls a risāla mujassada, a “personified letter,” which is full of puns on human body parts and which emulates a brief section from “al-Maqāma al-Baghdādiyya” by Abū al-Qāsim al-Ḥarīrī (d. 1122). Ibn Ḥijja describes his letter using the word mujassada, “personified” or “incorporated,” in a strikingly modern way that is rare for classical Arabic. Moreover, the letter is supposed to show, by invoking the biological integrity of the human body and structuring the letter explicitly around such a body, how the best kind of ending in a text connects naturally to its beginning. Therefore this letter, which to my knowledge is unstudied and untranslated, is one of the clearest examples that premodern Arabic critics had some concept, albeit unstated, of organic literary unity.
“The Islamic World Today: Issues and Perspectives,” a two-day conference held at Brigham Young University (18-19 October 2021), will address these questions and more. Aimed at a general audience, the conference will include presentations on a number of subjects, followed by discussion and questions from the audience. For those unable to attend, livestreaming will be provided and the recorded sessions will be available after the event. Please see the conference website for details (https://islamconf.byu.edu/)
Featured speakers:
• Asma Afsaruddin (IU Bloomington)
• Jonathan Brown (Georgetown University)
• Natana DeLong-Bas (Boston College)
• John Esposito (Georgetown University)
• Dalia Fahmy (Long Island University)
• Sherine Hafez (UC Riverside)
• Shadi Hamid (Brookings Institution)
• Sherman Jackson (University of Southern California)
• Tarek Masoud (Harvard Kennedy School)
• Hadia Mubarak (Queens University of Charlotte)
• Asifa Quraishi-Landes (UW Madison)
• Tahera Qutbuddin (University of Chicago)
• Abdulaziz Sachedina (George Mason University)
classical Arabic literature, especially poetry.
My essay about al-Mutanabbi, "the Would-Be Prophet," often hailed as the greatest classical Arabic poet. When modern readers question whether the self-aggrandizing medieval rhapsode deserves the title, they ignore the many who made their points before them.
While the "1,001 Nights" tales can rightly be called world literature, the fact that people obsess over the work’s standing in the West ignores its legacy in its home and distracts from the joy of the stories themselves.
Essay about Majnun and Layla, the so-called Romeo and Juliet of the East, for the 17 April 2023 print issue of New Lines Magazine.
In the days before print or copyright, information was fluid and hard to control. This gave rise to countermeasures like self-commentary — an author’s explanation of his or her own works — and self-editing as ways to defend intellectual property, often revealing an author’s self-doubt and insecurity.
“The authority of verse has no rival in Arabic culture,” write Robyn Creswell and Bernard Haykel. This fact alone makes Arabic poetry, and classical Arabic literature generally, worthy of note.
I wrote about Mansur al-Hallaj, the Sufi mystic and poet whose trial and spectacular execution continues to stoke debate. This may have been exactly what he wanted.
For Halloween, I wrote about Middle Eastern ghoulies, ghosties, and long-leggedy beasties. Though such creatures from Middle East folklore seem inhuman, they serve to help us see ourselves more clearly.
My review of "Three Thousand Years of Longing" (2022), directed by Mad Max filmmaker George Miller and starring Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba. During a conference in Istanbul, professor Alithea Binnie meets a trapped djinn who offers three wishes in exchange for his freedom. Thus begins a series of adventures that don’t go farther than Alithea’s hotel room and yet will change her life forever.
Sidney Lumet’s award-winning satire exposed the media’s attitude of ‘anything for ratings’
Essay on the animal tales of Kalila and Dimna, including the new translation by Michael Fishbein and James Montgomery, plus a cameo by the ERC-funded AnonymClassic project at FU Berlin.
I review SAMAK THE AYYAR: A TALE OF ANCIENT PERSIA (trans. Freydoon Rassouli, adapted by Jordan Mechner, Columbia U Press), the story of a Persian Robin Hood who hoodwinks his enemies yet keeps a stern moral code.
In honor of the NBCC's new Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize, VP Tara Wanda Merrigan spoke with Kevin Blankinship, Jeremy Tiang, Emma Ramadan, Samuel Martin, and Shelley Frisch about reviewing literature in translation on 21 November 2021.
My obituary for longtime British translator of Arabic Humphrey Davies, who leaves a body of work and a mentor’s legacy
A new adaptation of the Dune trilogy seeks to avoid the quagmire of cultural appropriation while remaining faithful to the original’s wide-ranging spirit
I wrote about how a few women warriors made a huge impact in the early years of Islam, including THE TALE OF PRINCESS FATIMA, out from Penguin Classics in English translation by Melanie Magidow.
In her Arabic fiction, Omani novelist and International Booker Prize-winner Jokha Alharthi charts the rapid political and social changes that have occurred in her home country during the last fifty years. But just as important, she uses the form of the novel itself to explore human responses to those changes, giving readers access to inner lives as only imaginative literature can.
Review of "The Republic of False Truths," a retrospective on the Arab Spring ten years later.
تأمّلات متواضعة في سؤال لِمَ العقل البشري مفتون بالأوائل إلى هذه الدرجة؟
Still largely unknown in the West, the pre-Islamic Arabic "hanging odes" (mu’allaqat) tell of harsh desert life before Islam — endless warfare, secret lovers’ trysts, stout riding camels, and the sureness of fate. That untouchable quality is what has usually drawn translators from among maverick aristocrats and cultural elites, people who spent years globetrotting or squinting at old manuscripts before air travel or digital technology.
This blog post presents a new translation of an old poem, a qaṣῑda of praise to a patron by famed wine poet Abu Nuwas (who lived c. 757-814).
A poverty-stricken scholar's primal scream
My love letter to the Bonneville Salt Flats
The Mu`allaqat for Millennials, Pre-Islamic Arabic Golden Odes, published by the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (Ithra) in cooperation with the AlQafilah Magazine, both initiatives of Saudi Aramco.
Aiming to make the mu`allaqat known to new readers, the project gathers a team of eight commentators and translators. They include Abdallah S. Alroshaid, Professor of Arabic Literature at Al-Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud University; Saudi writer and physician Adi Alherbish; New York University Clinical Associate Professor David Larsen; Huda J. Fakhreddine, Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Pennsylvania; Kevin Blankinship, Assistant Professor of Arabic Literature at Brigham Young University; Saleh Said Alzahrani, Professor of Rhetoric and Criticism at Umm al-Qura University; Sami Abdulaziz AlAjlan, Assistant Professor of Literary Criticism at Al-Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud University; and Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, Sultan Qaboos bin Said Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University.
At the helm are Hatem Alzahrani, Assistant Professor of Arabic Literature at Umm al-Qura University, and Bander Alharbi, editor-in-chief of AlQafilah Magazine. You can read Professor Alzahrani’s published introduction here (https://arablit.org/2020/12/19/introducing-the-muallaqat-for-millennials/), and a report by the King Abdulaziz Center here (https://www.ithra.com/en/muallaqat/).
An original villanelle poem on sickness, inspired by one of the most notorious metaphors in classical Arabic poetry: the fever as a lover who comes in the night.
Original English language poem
Tuesdays I post an Arabic text to translate, then invite translations in English, or any other language. Saturdays I do a highlights roundup (not a contest; this tries to be inclusive). Semiannual writeup of the results in Arablit Quarterly.
"Pruning the Apricot Tree"
"Majnuun, or To Have"
"Ouroboros, or Writer’s Block—a lover’s spat with his poem"
An original villanelle on the death of Hosni Mubarak, authoritarian president of Egypt for 30 years, and the nostalgia some felt for his rule compared to what came after.
Original poem on the horrors of a comfortable suburban life.
Response poem to a painting of the same title by Władysław Podkowiński, 1893.