Craftsmanship in Literature and Literary Craftsmanship in 9th-Century Baghdad: Ibn Abī Awn’s (d. 934) Kitāb al-Tashbīhāt [The Book of Similes]

Literary anthologies are traditionally conceived both as compelling testing grounds for newly emerging aesthetical conceptualizations tied to a specific socio-cultural context and era as well as tastemakers of readers/critics' literary tendencies. Ibn Abī ʿAwn’s (fl. 9th century) understudied literary explorations in similes, comparisons, and analogies (tashbīhāt) gathered in his Kitāb al-tashbīhāt confirm both statements. Still, this work should also invoke a broader reflection on how balāghah’s processes evolved during this formative period of the Arabic-Islamic classical culture and how creative thought might respond to increasing urbanization. Drawing upon Prof. Geert Jan van Gelder’s seminal insights into al-takhyīl (Takhyil: The Imaginary in Classical Arabic Poetics, with M. Hammond [Eds.], 2008) and his more recent argument on al-Jāḥiẓ’s “Exercises de style (Ingenuity & Artifice: Arabic Invention, Oulipian Strategies” conference paper, (2021), the present study argues that the relationship between material culture, crafts, and literary investigations within the pre-modern Arabic urbanized context can be observed according to two axes of research. First, exploring how the significant development of material culture and crafts in Medieval Baghdad arguably influenced, terminologically and thematically, Abbasid scholars’ literary imaginer(ies). Second, how historical moments of urban development linked to cultural enlightenment could have inspired some authors to develop also a craftsmanship-inspired approach to literary writing, a point that the rhetorical study of Ibn Abī ʿAwn’s anthology on tashibīhāt shows.