Disputed Poetic Territories

This chapter foregrounds the case of disputation and debates about borrowing, theft, and intertextuality. Al-Jāḥiẓ succinctly argues that a certain appealing saying would suffer use and modification over time until no one could claim it, although everyone regards it as its new host’s property. Thus, when al-Āmidī, and later al-Qāḍī al-Jurjānī, argue that theft applies only to unique inventions, the property of a specific person, disputation was to calm down, but not to disappear. The shift in discussion centered on invention and, by implication, away from ʿamūd al-shiʿr (the standardized poetry canon). While previous debates relate to Abū Tammām and his detractors’ critique of the presumed excessive stylistic contrivance found in badīʿ (inventiveness in meaning, figuration, and expression), the discursive tenth-century debates shift more toward al-Mutanabbī, as the strongest poet who was bound to gather his defenders and detractors, a two-camp situation, carefully studied by al-Qāḍī al-Jurjānī in his al- Wasāṭah , where he provides a concise terminology that is to feed generations of critics like Ibn Rashīq (d. 456/1064), whose short chapter on thievery undermines al-Ḥātimī’s significant, albeit convoluted, lexicon.