The Well-Tempered Reader: The Legitimization of Adab in the Arabic Literary Tradition
Dec 2025 · Berkeley Series in Postclassical Islamic Scholarship Book 7 · Univ of California Press
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The Well-Tempered Reader provides a new understanding of the term adab, a ubiquitous concept in Arabic literature with many meanings. In Sarah R. Bin Tyeer's analysis, adab is more than just a way of writing or the cultivation of moral excellence, as it is often understood. It is rather an ethical way of perceiving, understanding, and living which results from ceaseless critical interaction between the individual and all aspects of his or her social, cultural, natural, and metaphysical environment. Through a close reading of texts from eighth-century Baghdad to nineteenth-century Lebanon, in which adab emerges as a force across historical periods and geographies, Bin Tyeer posits the term as a generative literary and cultural framework and a discursive force for analyzing literary acts. This is the first book-length study of adab as an intellectual institution that legitimized its own existence through the formation of adabized subjects, revealing its import not only for Arabic literary studies but for comparative literature as a whole.
The Well-Tempered Reader provides a new understanding of the term adab, a ubiquitous concept in Arabic literature with many meanings. In Sarah R. Bin Tyeer's analysis, adab is more than just a way of writing or the cultivation of moral excellence, as it is often understood. It is rather an ethical way of perceiving, understanding, and living which results from ceaseless critical interaction between the individual and all aspects of his or her social, cultural, natural, and metaphysical environment. Through a close reading of texts from eighth-century Baghdad to nineteenth-century Lebanon, in which adab emerges as a force across historical periods and geographies, Bin Tyeer posits the term as a generative literary and cultural framework and a discursive force for analyzing literary acts. This is the first book-length study of adab as an intellectual institution that legitimized its own existence through the formation of adabized subjects, revealing its import not only for Arabic literary studies but for comparative literature as a whole.
About the author
Sarah R. Bin Tyeer is Assistant Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is author of The Qur’an and the Aesthetics of Premodern Arabic Prose and coeditor of Islam and New Directions of World Literature.
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