NIZAR F. HERMES | “This Tunis, Sir, Was Carthage:" Abū al-Fatḥ al-Tūnisī’s Nostalgia for the Besieged "Bride of the Maghrib"

2020 NOV 13
Friday, Nov 13, 2020, 12:00pm - Friday, Nov 13, 2020, 01:30pm
Location
Zoom

 

Please join us

at the Early Modern Workshop 

on

Friday, November 13 | 12-1:30pm

for a presentation by

Nizar F. Hermes

Associate Professor

Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures

 

“‘This Tunis, Sir, Was Carthage:’

Abū al-Fatḥ al-Tūnisī’s Nostalgia for the Besieged ‘Bride of the Maghrib’”

 

Dr. Hermes will present materials from his forthcoming book on premodern and precolonial Maghribi city poetry, Of Lost Cities and the Poetic Imagination in the Premodern and Precolonial Maghrib: 9th-19th Centuries AD.

 

Our events are free and open to the public.

 

Please register on the link below:

 

Zoom: https://virginia.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYrduqgrzIpEtR2wl9TE9kNOP4R-WR_c92o

 

The Spanish Siege of Tunis: Bab El Bhar et l'arsenal en 1535 lors du sac de Tunis par l'armée de Charles Quint

 

Abstract

 

The 15th/16th century exilic Tunisian scholar/poet’s 51-line Nūniyya (Ode Rhyming in the Letter Nūn [N]) which he penned in Damascus at the onset of the 1535 Spanish conquest of Ḥafṣid Tunis (13th-16th centuries) stands as one of the finest masterpieces of the neglected premodern and precolonial Maghribi city poetry, which I explore in my forthcoming Of Lost Cities and the Poetic Imagination in the Premodern and Precolonial Maghrib: 9th-19th Centuries AD. In his magnum opus Nafḥ al-ṭīb (The Breath of Perfume), famed Algerian historian and anthologist al-Maqqarī al-Tilmisānī (d.1632) extolled the Nūniyya as one of the greatest nostalgic and elegiac poems ever composed—of course, up until his own time. Al-Maqqarī’s eloquent praise of the Nūniyya is worth quoting in toto and should serve as a North African appetizer for the talk:

 

“The poem of the renowned judge, the great litterateur whose poetic masterpieces captivated the minds as he extracted them from the hidden quarters of his thoughts. The sheikh, the imām, my lord [Sidi] Abū al-Fatḥ Muhammad ʿAbd al-Sālām al-Maghribī al-Tūnisī, resident of Damascus—may God sprinkle his grave with the rain of mercy and delight. This poem is the release of an ailing foreigner and the legitimate grief of a clever person. Like myself, he left his home country and never forgot it, and continued to [devotionally] read the verses of sorrow and recited them, and kept hoping that that Time would gift him the seeing of its gilded beauty.”