نقد الأدب العربى ومذاهبه الأدبية وتاثيرها في الأدب العربي

Criticism of Arabic literature and its literary Impact

Abstract

The impact of Islam on Arabic literature and literary criticism was vast. One issue that remains puzzling is how literature not only survived the attacks of the Koran and Prophet Muhammad but also flourished and attained a status as high as or even higher than it had prior to Islam. Poetry was also able to negotiate for itself a space within society that was for a long period relatively free of religious coercion or interference. Such outstanding critics as al-Asmai (d. c. 830), Ibn Jinnl (d. 1001), al-Sûlî (d. 946), and al-Qadi al-Jurjânl (d. 1001) could state that great poetry was associated with unbelief and that the religious attitude only weakened poetry (examples of this were some poets who converted to Islam during the times of the Prophet but whose poetry after conversion was considered inferior to their poetry before it). These critics were not marginal, and some were authorities on Islamic law and jurisprudence. For the most part, however, criticism remained a marginal activity of grammarians, philologists, or hermeneutist. Only in the ninth century did criticism start to attain an autonomous status as a legitimate intellectual and scholarly activity, and by the tenth century it developed into an institution that had a privileged status even vis-à-vis poetry itself. But literary theory and criticism bore the pangs and scars of its birth, and for this reason it is important to understand how literary criticism developed in its earlier stages.
The literary schools that emerged during the European Renaissance did not remain confined to the Old Continent, but rather spread from it and entered into a number of literatures belonging to different cultures. Arabic literature was no exception to this, as literary approaches influenced Arabic literature. In this article, we will discuss the influence of each of the literary schools on Arabic literature.