The Mantle Odes Arabic Praise Poems to the Prophet Muhammad [Paperback]

Three of the most renowned praise poems to the Prophet, the mantle odes span the arc of Islamic history from Muhammad's lifetime, to the medieval Mamluk period, to the modern colonial era. Over the centuries, they have informed the poetic and religious life of the Arab and Islamic worlds. Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych places her original translations of the poems within the odes' broader cultural context. By highlighting their transformative power as speech acts and their ritual function as gift exchanges, this book not only demonstrates the relevance of these poems to contemporary scholarship but also reveals their power and beauty to the modern reader.

Stetkevych provides an original translation and careful analysis of three landmark poems in Arabic Islamic literature . . . Recommended.[T]he reader can learn much from Stetkevych's study . . . .April 2013A work of scholarship at the highest level, critically groundbreaking, textually grounded, elegantly argued, and of a depth and breadth that is rare in any field.

Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych is Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is author of The Poetics of Islamic Legitimacy: Myth, Gender, and Ceremony in the Classical Arabic Ode (IUP, 2002).

A great achievement in literary theory and Islamic thought and a significant contribution to Arabic literature.

Preface
Acknowledgments
Note on Translation and Transliteration
List of Abbreviations

1. Ka'b ibn Zuhayr and the Mantle of the Prophet
Introduction
The Pre-Islamic Prototype
1. 'Alqamah's A Heart Turbulent with Passion: The Poem as Ransom Payment
2. Al-Nabighah's O Abode of Mayyah: Transgression and Redemption
3. Zuhayr ibn Abi Sulm?'s The Tribe Set Out: The Tacit Panegyric Pact
The Pre-Islamic as Proto-Islamic
Ka'b ibn Zuhayr's Su'ad Has Departed
The Conversion Narrative
The Conversion Ode
Part 1: Lyric-Elegiacl#Î