Poetic Desire and Literary Thievery

How do we define plagiarism in literature? In this wide-ranging and innovative study, Muhsin J. al-Musawi examines debates surrounding literary authenticity across Arabic and Islamic culture over seven centuries. Al-Musawi argues that intertextual borrowing was driven by personal desire alongside the competitive economy of the Abbasid Islamic Empire. Here, accusations of plagiarism had wide-ranging consequences, as competition among poets and writers grew fierce, while philologists and critics served as public arbiters over controversies of alleged poetic thefts. Taking in an extensive remit of Arabic sources, from Persian writers to the poets of Andalusia and Morocco, al-Musawi extends his argument all the way to Ibr-h-m -Abd al-Q-dir al-M-zin-'s writing in Egypt and the Iraqi poet N-zik al-Mal--ikah's work in the twentieth century to present 'theft' as a necessary condition of creative production in Arabic literature. As a result, this study sheds light on a vast yet understudied aspect of the Arabic literary tradition, while raising important questions surrounding the rising challenge of artificial intelligence in matters of academic integrity.

Muhsin J. al-Musawi is Professor of Arabic and Comparative Studies at Columbia University. He is the editor of the Journal of Arabic Literature and the recipient of numerous awards including the 2002 Owais Award in Literary Criticism, the 2018 Kuwait Prize in Arabic Language and Literature, and the 2022 King Faisal International Prize for Arabic Literature in English. Recent publications include The Arabian Nights in Contemporary World Cultures (Cambridge, 2021), which won the Sheikh Zayed Book Award.