Abstract
This chapter examines the migrations of a single loanword and loan-concept—the gharı̄b, or stranger—across Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Armenian speaking communities. In particular, by analyzing the sermons and literary production of seminal figures such as Judah Halevi, al-Ghazzālı̄, Jalāl al-Dı̄n Rūmı̄, Yūnus Emre, and Mkrtich‘ Naghash, it argues that the gharı̄b had utility as a referent across a dizzying array of religious and linguistic contexts. Therefore, because of the gharı̄b’s unique ability to be simultaneously “native” and “foreign” at the same time, it serves as a valuable heuristic for considering the highly migratory nature of cultural production within the medieval Mediterranean world.
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Notes
- 1.
Raymond P. Scheindlin, The Song of the Distant Dove: Judah Halevi’s Pilgrimage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 4.
- 2.
Jonathan P. Decter, Iberian Jewish Literature between al-Andalus and Christian Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 1.
- 3.
Quoted from Decter, Iberian Jewish Literature, 1. See also Makkot 2b; Sanhedrin 37.
- 4.
Judah Halevi, al-kitāb al-khazarī: kitāb al-radd wa-al-dalīl fī al-dīn al-dhalīl, ed. Nabih Bashir (Beirut: Manshūrāt al-Jamal, 2012), 565.
- 5.
Or, in Decter’s words, for Halevi “the actualization of atonement requires emigration from one’s homeland to the Land of Israel with its concomitant hardship of alienation.” Decter, Iberian Jewish Literature, 1.
- 6.
Halevi, al-kitāb al-khazarī, 269.
- 7.
Halevi, al-kitāb al-khazarī, 345. For studies on Halevi’s relationship with Islamic concepts and Arabic terms, see also Ehud Krinis, God’s Chosen People: Judah Halevi’s Kuzari and the Shīʻī Imām Doctrine, trans. Ann Brener and Tamar Liza Cohen (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2014); and Raymond P. Scheindlin, “Islamic Motifs in a Poem by Judah Halevi,” Maghreb Review 29 (2004): 40–52. For a study on the theme of exile and nostalgia in Andalusian poetry, see Fāṭima Ṭaḥṭaḥ, al-ghurba wa-al-ḥanīn fī al-shiʿr al-andalusī (Rabat: Jāmiʻat Muḥammad al-Khāmis, 1993).
- 8.
For Bakhtin, speech acts are dialogic in that they anticipate a response from others. By a similar token, he contends that “word in language is half someone else’s.” Or, as he puts it, the word “becomes ‘one’s own’ only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own.” Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987), 293–294. Rather than conceptualize the gharīb’s peregrinations across languages with relatively empty descriptions like “cross-cultural fertilization” or “cross-pollination,” my focus here will concern how and why different authors made the term their “own”—a process that was in part predicated on the widespread use of the term by “others.”
- 9.
On other mobile motifs that have come to shape Armenian, Turkish, Arabic, and Punjabi cultural production, see my article, “The Diasporic Crane: Discursive Migration across the Armenian-Turkish Divide,” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 18, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 229–252.
- 10.
Franz Rosenthal, “The Stranger in Medieval Islam,” Arabica 44, no. 1 (1997): 38.
- 11.
Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 27.
- 12.
Michiel Arnoud Cor de Vaan, Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the Other Italic Languages (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 196.
- 13.
Edward W. Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press, 2000), 173.
- 14.
Said, “Reflections on Exile,” 173.
- 15.
Said, “Reflections on Exile,” 174.
- 16.
Aamir R. Mufti, “Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and the Question of Minority Culture,” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 1 (1998): 103.
- 17.
See, for instance, Kader Konuk, East-West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010), as well as Angelika Bammer, ed., Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
- 18.
Rosenthal, “The Stranger in Medieval Islam,” 35.
- 19.
For relevant studies on the “Arabic” gharīb, see Thomas Bauer, Die Kultur der Ambiguität: Eine andere Geschichte des Islams (Berlin: Verlag der Weltreligionen, 2011); Patricia Crone and Shmuel Moreh, trans. with comment., The Book of Strangers: Mediaeval Arabic Graffiti on the Theme of Nostalgia / Attributed to Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2000); Mark R. Cohen, Poverty and Charity in the Jewish Community of Medieval Egypt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Wadad al-Qadi, “Dislocation and Nostalgia: Al-ḥanīn ilā l-awṭān, Expressions of Alienation in Early Arabic Literature,” in Myths, Historical Archetypes and Symbolic Figures in Arabic Literature: Towards a New Hermeneutic Approach: Proceedings of the International Symposium in Beirut, June 25 th –June 30th, 1996, ed. Angelika Neuwirth et al. (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1999), 3–31.
- 20.
Bauer, Die Kultur der Ambiguität, 347. Bauer is far more cautious about explicating the possible etymology of “gharīb” than Rosenthal, but does suggest a meaning closer to the etymological connotation of “exile” in English: “Die Etymologie von gharīb ist nicht ganz sicher; als Grundbedeutung könnte eventuell ‘der, der weggegangen ist’ anzusetzen sein, was zum mentalitätsgeschichtlichen Befund passen würde.” (Ibid., 349.) However, it is important to note that unlike Said’s condition of “terminal loss,” Bauer argues the gharīb’s state is contingent and potentially surmountable.
- 21.
See M. M. Bakhtin, “The Problem of Speech Genres,” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, ed. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 60–102.
- 22.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), xx.
- 23.
Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” in Collected Papers, vol. 4, trans. Alix Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1959), 368.
- 24.
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 5.
- 25.
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 6.
- 26.
Olivia Remie Constable, Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World: Lodging, Trade, and Travel in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 5.
- 27.
Constable, Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World, 8.
- 28.
Crone and Moreh, trans., The Book of Strangers, 8.
- 29.
Cohen, Poverty and Charity in the Jewish Community of Medieval Egypt, 76–77.
- 30.
Rosenthal, “The Stranger in Medieval Islam,” 35–36.
- 31.
Quoted from Rosenthal, “The Stranger in Medieval Islam,” 59. For the hadith in Arabic, see also Muslim, ṣaḥīḥ http://sunnah.com/muslim/1/279, accessed February 5, 2018.
- 32.
So much ink was spilled in an attempt to provide a satisfactory answer to this problem that the tenth century al-Ājurrī even wrote the Book of the Strangers (kitāb al-ghurabāʾ), an entire work loosely devoted to the interpretation of this hadith. See Rosenthal, “The Stranger in Medieval Islam,” 60.
- 33.
Muḥammad al-Ghazzālī, iḥyāʾ ʿ ulūm al-dīn, ed. ʻAbd al-Raḥīm ibn al-Ḥūsayn ʻIrāqī, vol. 1 (Cairo: Lajnat Nashr al-Thaqāfa al-Islāmiyya, 1937–38), 64–65.
- 34.
Rosenthal, “The Stranger in Medieval Islam,” 61.
- 35.
Al-Ghazzālī wrote these lines when he lived in exile and poverty, having vowed no longer to serve any government or take money from any ruler. His own status as a “gharīb” not only reflected a particular social condition, but it also mirrored his exegesis of the religious function of gharībs as well, since he ultimately sought to restore the “religious sciences” from the false innovations of heretics and philosophers.
- 36.
In fact, despite the fact that Rūmī found patronage and prestige in Konya, he was often identified by his companions as a gharīb. For example, the poet Fakhr al-Dīn Ibrāhīm ʿIrāqī (d. 1289) reportedly used to praise Rūmī’s greatness, often sighing and declaring, “No one understood Mawlānā [Rūmī] as he ought to be [understood]. He came into this world a gharīb and departed from it a gharīb.” (Shams al-Dīn Aḥmad Aflākī, manāqib al-ʿārifīn, ed. T. Yazıcı, vol. 1 (Ankara, Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1959), 400). Although ʿIrāqī did not explain himself further, he was not alone in making such declarations. For instance, Rūmī’s own spiritual guide, Shams al-Dīn Tabrīzī, told Rūmī’s son: “The secret of [Rūmī] is veiled as is the secret of Islam. Like Islam, he has come as a gharīb. See how his secret shall be as ‘Islam began as a gharīb and will return as a gharīb. Blessed be the strangers!’” (Ibid., 308–309). Again, in this context, being a gharīb does not reflect an ethnic or geographic origin as much as it suggests a manner of engaging with the greater Islamic community as a “stranger” who paradoxically embodied the truest essence of Islam, just as we have seen in the case of al-Ghazzālī.
- 37.
For instance, the first tale in the Mathnawī concerns an otherworldly, divine stranger (gharīb) who guides a king and his beloved to estrange themselves from worldly attachments.
- 38.
Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, kitāb-i fīhi mā fīhi, ed. Badīʻ al-Zamān Furūzānfar (Tehran: Amīr Kabīr, 1983), 52.
- 39.
In this case, Rūmī plays with the expectation that true gharībs are those who have quit their native lands and gone to live among foreign “westerners.” He utilizes the Arabic root gh-r-b to illustrate how the gharīb is a westerner (ma ghr i b ī) who truly lives in the West (ma ghr i b), as opposed to the easterner (mashriqī) who merely arrives to dislodge gharībs from their temporary place of dwelling. In this literal sense (i.e., in this case of letters), Rūmī juxtaposes the inner root of “gharīb,” located, again literally, inside the West, against the established assumption that the easterner would seem to be the stranger. Rūmī, kitāb-i fīhi mā fīhi, 52.
- 40.
Kafadar, Between Two Worlds, 5.
- 41.
The poems in Yūnus Emre’s Divan are known as ilahis, or devotional hymns, which would have been chanted aloud in small gatherings.
- 42.
Yūnus Emre, Yunus Emre Divâni, ed. Mustafa Tatçı, vol. 2 (Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı, 1990), 234–236.
- 43.
As Annemarie Schimmel has commented on Yūnus Emre, “there is scarcely a popular poet in the Muslim world, from Turkey to Indonesia, who has not elaborated this topic, attacking the bookish scholars who forget the true meaning of the most important letter and instead blacken the pages of their learned books.” (Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 418). To put this in somewhat different terms, Yūnus Emre arguably made such comparisons between himself and formal religious jurists precisely because many other authors were making similar claims in a wide variety of languages. Such a juxtaposition was widely recognizable, in other words, in the same manner the figure of the gharīb was widely recognizable.
- 44.
However, I do not wish to give the impression that this was the only manner in which the multivalent term “gharīb” was deployed. For example, beginning in the thirteenth century, interest in strange wonders and marvels, rooted in the terms ʿajīb and gharīb, reached a watershed moment with the composition of Zakarīyyaʾ al-Qazwīnī’s (d. 1283) ajā’ib al-makhlūqāt wa-gharā’ib al-mawjūdāt (Wondrous Creatures and Strange Beings) in Arabic. Al-Qazwīnī defined ʿajīb generally as a phenomenon whose cause is beyond the comprehension of humans, whereas the gharīb represents a rare phenomenon that runs contrary to normative observation. This adjectival understanding of the “gharīb,” that is, as descriptive of phenomena capable of producing strange cognitive states, also overlapped with the gharīb as stranger to a limited extent. In fact, when ʿĀşıḳ Paşa, a fourteenth-century Turkish Sufi, composed the first major didactic mathnawī in Anatolian Turkish, he named it the Garīb-nâme (Book of the Garīb) for similar reasons, as higher spiritual meanings—the Islamic episteme revealed in the Arabic and Persian languages—were “garīb in the Turkish language.” (ʿĀşıḳ Paşa, Garīb-Nâme: Tıpkıbasım, Karşılaştırmalı Metin ve Aktarma, ed. Kemal Yavuz, vol. 4 (Ankara: Türk Dil Kurumu, 2000), 924). In other words, even though Turkish was not yet widely accepted as a literary language in the world of Islam, ʿĀşıḳ Paşa thought it was necessary to introduce Sufi teachings—a strange episteme, and the episteme of strangers—to a Turkish-speaking audience, as this knowledge (i.e., Islam itself) was “gharīb” to Turks.
- 45.
As Thomas S. Burns notes, “A peregrinus was originally any person not from Rome or a Roman colony, but by the end of the republic almost everybody in Italy had become a citizen. […] In the period after the initial conquests a native to the province, if living in a Roman colony, might be a peregrinus, even though living on his ancestral lands.” Thomas S. Burns, Rome and the Barbarians: 100 B.C.-A.D. 400 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 32–33. For more general studies on “strangers” and “exile” in pre-modern society, see also The Stranger in Medieval Society, ed. F. R. P. Akehurst and Stephanie Cain Van D’Elden (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); The Stranger in Ancient and Mediaeval Jewish Tradition: Papers Read at the First Meeting of the JBSCE, Piliscsaba, 2009, ed. Géza G. Xeravits and Jan Dušek (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010); L’étranger Au Moyen Âge, ed. Société des historiens médiévistes de l’enseignement supérieur public (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2000); Exile in the Middle Ages: Selected Proceedings from the International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, 8–11 July 2002, ed. Laura Napran and Elisabeth M. C. Van Houts (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004). For a study on Muslim “strangers” within Latin Christendom, see also Brian A. Catlos, Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, C. 1050–1614 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 228–280.
- 46.
Although there is a sizable corpus of songs and literature on the gharīb in the Middle Armenian, Eastern Armenian, and Western Armenian language, the field of Armenian Studies has paid little attention to this figure. Instead, scholars have generally focused their attention on the figure of the pandukht (emigrant) and the antuni (homeless person), both of which are not considered loanwords in the modern Armenian lexicon—unlike the gharīb. There are a few exceptions, however. Varak Nersissian offers a brief discussion of the gharīb in a survey of medieval Armenian poetry, arguing “there can be no doubt that the theme of the migrant and of emigration was first cultivated and perfected in the Near East, by Armenian poets.” Yet, as this chapter has labored to demonstrate, discourse on the gharīb cannot so easily be circumscribed to a single people or language. (See Varak Nersissian, “Medieval Armenian Poetry and Its Relation to Other Literatures,” in Review of National Literatures: Armenia 13 (1984): 93–120.) Petra Košt’álová offers a more creative approach to the Armenian gharīb, noting its importance as a “cultural keyword,” equivalent to the Jewish concept of galut, that helps to illuminate an Armenian position of “standing on the border or ‘threshold’ between two cultures, languages and worlds.” Petra Košt’álová, “Exile and Lamentation in the Armenian Historiographical Tradition of the 16th and 17th Centuries,” ARCHIV ORIENTALNI 82, no. 3 (2014): 460. See also Petra Košt’álová, “Vyhnanství a Exil Jako Jeden Z Ústředních Motivů Arménské Etnicity: Koncept Ghaributhjun,” Cesky Lid 4 (2014): 403–419. Conversely, my own aim has been to show how the loanword and loan-concept of the gharīb itself borders many languages and religious cultures, and consequently offers us a valuable heuristic for considering the interconnectedness of the diverse societies and cultures in which the gharīb circulated—a migratory discourse about who and what strangers are. This was also one of the aims of my dissertation, “The Stranger’s Voice: Integrated Literary Cultures in Anatolia and the Premodern World” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2014).
- 47.
There is a growing body of scholarship that examines the complicated dynamics of medieval Armenian-Muslim interaction and intellectual history, and is too extensive to list here. But, for a general starting point, see Seta B. Dadoyan, The Armenians in the Medieval Islamic World: Paradigms of Interaction: Seventh to Fourteenth Centuries, 3 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2011–2014); James R. Russell, Armenian and Iranian Studies, (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2004); Rachel Goshgarian, “Futuwwa in Thirteenth Century Rum and Armenia: Reform Movements and the Managing of Multiple Allegiances on the Seljuk Periphery,” in The Seljuks of Anatolia: Court and Society in the Medieval Middle East, ed. A. C. S. Peacock and Sara Nur Yildiz (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013), 227–263; Sergio La Porta, “Re-constructing Armenia: Strategies of Co-existence amongst Christians and Muslims in the Thirteenth Century,” in Negotiating Co-existence: Communities, Cultures and ‘Convivencia’ in Byzantine Society, ed. B. Crostini and S. La Porta (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2013), 251–272; Alison Vacca, Non-Muslim Provinces under Early Islam: Islamic Rule and Iranian Legitimacy in Armenia and Caucasian Albania (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). For studies on the interface between medieval Armenian and Islamicate literature, see also S. Peter Cowe, “The Politics of Poetics: Islamic Influence on Armenian Verse,” in Redefining Christian Identity: Cultural Interaction in the Middle East since the Rise of Islam, ed. J. J. van Ginkel, H. L. Murre-van den Berg, and Theo Maarten van Lint (Leuven: Peeters Publishers & Department of Oriental Studies, 2005), 379–403; A. K. Kozmoyan, Hayotsʻ ev parsitsʻ mijnadaryan kʻnarergutʻyan hamematakan poetikan (Yerevan: HH GAA “Gitutʻyun” Hratarakchʻutʻyun, 1997).
- 48.
“Gharīb” was never formally adopted as part of the Classical Armenian lexicon, but rather appeared with the rise of Middle Armenian as a literary language. Generally, the earliest known appearances of the gharīb in Armenian manuscripts occur as proper names, such as in the case of a twelfth century Armenian prince, Aplgharib, or “father of the gharīb.” (See Matthew of Edessa, Armenia and the Crusades: Tenth to Twelfth Centuries, trans. Ara Edmond Dostourian (Belmont, MA: National Association for Armenian Studies and Research, 1993), 220.) The Armenian colophon tradition, which provides a treasure-trove of historical information at the end of many manuscripts, similarly attests to a wide variety of men and women who were identified as “gharībs.” There was a certain Kharipʻ Magistros, for example, who helped to rebuild Marmashēn in 1225; a female Gharib, the mother of a Fr. Vardan Baghishetsʻi, whose name was recorded in a colophon in 1384; and an old widow Gharip who helped purchase a New Testament in 1490. The frequency of these monikers only increases over time. See H. Achaṛyan, Hayotsʻ andznanunneri baṛaran, vol. 3 (Beirut: Hratarakutʻiwn Sewan Hratarakchʻakan Tan, 1972), 136–138.
- 49.
E. Khondkaryan, ed., Mkrtichʻ Naghash (Yerevan: Haykakan SSṚ GA Hratarakchʻutʻyun, 1965), 203.
- 50.
E. Khondkaryan, the editor of the critical edition of Naghash’s poetry, has suggested that Osman Beg and his son Hamza gave Naghash nearly autonomous control over the Christian population in order to stabilize a region that was under repeated attack from the Qara Qoyunlu, another Turkic tribal federation, to the East.
- 51.
Khondkaryan, ed., Mkrtichʻ Naghash, 33–34.
- 52.
Although Khlatʻetsʻi makes sure to describe the ubiquitous suffering of different genders, age groups, and social classes, he stresses this tribulation was common to the entire region, and not only to Armenians or Christians: “And this did not only happen to Christians, / but to the entire Tajik people, / For tribulation was common / to the Persian people, the Armenians, and Turks,” he wrote. See L. S. Khachʻikyan, ed., ZhE dari hayeren dzeṛagreri hishatakaranner (1401–1450 tʻ tʻ.), vol. 1 (Yerevan: Haykakan SSṚ Gitutʻyunneri Akademiayi Hratarakchʻutʻyun, 1955), 277.
- 53.
Khachʻikyan, ed., ZhE dari hayeren dzeṛagreri hishatakaranner, 274.
- 54.
Khachʻikyan, ed., ZhE dari hayeren dzeṛagreri hishatakaranner, 276.
- 55.
Khachʻikyan, ed., ZhE dari hayeren dzeṛagreri hishatakaranner, 274.
- 56.
For anthologies of Armenian poetry and songs that discuss a range of issues related to estrangement and emigration, see Manik Mkrtchʻyan, Hay mijnadaryan pandkhtutʻyan tagher (XV-XVIII dd.) (Yerevan: Haykakan SSH GA Hratarakchʻutʻyun, 1979); Manik Mkrtchʻyan, Hay zhoghovrdakan pandkhtutʻyan erger (Yerevan: Haykakan SSṚ GA Hratarakchʻutʻyun, 1961).
- 57.
Khondkaryan, ed., Mkrtichʻ Naghash, 168–169.
- 58.
Both Rosenthal and al-Qadi define the gharīb in Arabic sources in terms of an entwined sense of alienation and total feeling of humiliation. Usage of the word in Middle Armenian is completely harmonious with this assessment. See Rosenthal, “The Stranger in Medieval Islam,” 42; al-Qadi, “Dislocation and Nostalgia,” 9.
- 59.
In this sense, Jesus was the ultimate “stranger,” since “foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (Matt. 8:20, NRSV). Elsewhere, Jesus makes it abundantly clear that his followers were to consider their treatment of the stranger (ξένος) as equivalent to their treatment of him: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me” (Matt. 25:35, NRSV). Christians in pre-modern Anatolia and its neighboring regions explored the meaning of these verses in diverse ways. Most notably, a hymn sung from the perspective of Joseph of Arimathea during the Matins of Good Friday in the Greek Orthodox church urgently repeats the phrase “dos moi touton ton xenon,” or “give me this stranger,” referring to the crucified body of Jesus Christ. When this hymn was later translated into Arabic, xenos was rendered as gharīb. See Gregorios Th. Stathis, “An Analysis of the Sticheron Τὸν ἥλιον κρύψαντα by Germanos, Bishop of New Patras (The Old ‘Synoptic’ and the New ‘Analytical’ Method of Byzantine Notation),” in Studies in Eastern Chant IV, (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladamir’s Press, 1979), 177–227.
- 60.
Khondkaryan, ed., Mkrtichʻ Naghash, 174.
- 61.
Khondkaryan, ed., Mkrtichʻ Naghash, 175.
- 62.
Khondkaryan, ed., Mkrtichʻ Naghash, 167. For a short article on allegory in the works of Naghash, see S. Peter Cowe, “An Allegorical Poem by Mkrtichʻ Naghash and Its Models,” Journal for the Society of Armenian Studies 4 (1988–1989): 143–156.
- 63.
Armenian communities also consumed Naghash’s poetry on gharībs far beyond the city of Amida. We know that Naghash’s poems were copied in Venice, Kafa, Constantinople, Sepastia, Tokat, Vostan, Julfa, Ardabil, and many other places by the seventeenth century. In fact, Hakop Meghapart, the first Armenian printer, published one of Naghash’s poems on gharībs in Venice, 1525 miles from Amida, only some four decades after Naghash’s death.
- 64.
For instance, Aṛakʻel Baghishetsʻi (d. 1454), a prolific poet, musician, and prelate of Erkayn-Unkuzyatsʻ monastery, likewise composed a poem (tagh) on the gharīb that shares many thematic and narrative similarities with Naghash’s poetry. Although both men were born in the same village, Aṛakʻel’s poem on exile generally does not rely on Arabic and Persian loanwords—save for the “gharīb” itself. Why then use the term “gharīb” at all? As I have suggested here, the term had utility as a referent for Armenian speakers; it therefore carried a particular meaning that intersected with, and departed from, the semantic fields of other more “native” words for strangers in the Classical Armenian lexicon. Aṛakʻel Baghishetsʻi, Aṛakʻel Baghishetsʻi: XV dar, ed. Arshaluys Ghazinyan (Yerevan: Haykakan SSH Gitutʻyunneri Akademiayi Hratarakchʻutʻyun, 1971), 184–187.
- 65.
As Decter notes, “The Hebrew poetics of estrangement was shown to draw upon the repertoire of themes and motifs conveyed in the Arabic corpus; it might even be the case that authors’ very experiences of displacement was shaped by the discourse on estrangement and longing in Arabic literature.” Decter, Iberian Jewish Literature, 208.
- 66.
Jeremy A. Black, A. R. George, and J. N. Postgate, A Concise Dictionary of Akkadian (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2000), 79.
- 67.
Sheldon Pollock, “India in the Vernacular Millennium: Literary Culture and Polity, 1000–1500,” Daedalus 127, no. 3 (1998): 41–74. See also Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
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Pifer, M. (2018). The Age of the Gharīb: Strangers in the Medieval Mediterranean. In: Babayan, K., Pifer, M. (eds) An Armenian Mediterranean. Mediterranean Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72865-0_2
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