Anthropology of the Middle East

While love passes for being a feeling born in the West in the twelfth century, love poetry, in its declamatory or sung form, appeared in the sixth century among the Bedouin of the Arabian desert before flourishing in the Arabic cities, then Persian and finally in Europe. Love passion, excessive in essence, can be said only in excess with its joys and its distress. The man who experiences this state of passion is feminized, finding in the medium of poetry a socially legitimate space to express his emotions, including jealousy, nostalgia or blasphemy. Singing the beauty of the beloved and the disorder she or he inspires is a way of acknowledging his emotional vulnerability and also a mode of love conquest. But if the language of predation can be found in heterosexual and homosexual Arabic or Persian masculine poetry, such language is absent from feminine poetry, this difference revealing the asymmetrical polarity of desire according to gender.

Unlike numerous traditions, poetic inspiration of Moorish poets is not spiritual but carnal because it takes root in the desire for a woman, who taste like Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal. Love poems find their reason in the context of their production. In this case, the decisive moment of the meeting and the long-lasting impression it leaves on the poet. Love poems are not the privilege of a handful, they are primarly composed in the specific Arabic dialect (ḥassāniyya), with the aim of reaching the woman's heart, like Bedouin Arabic pre-islamic poetry. So her first name, her body, her qualities and defects, from erotised become poetised.

By examining mahragānāt, a genre of music common among the low-income working class in Cairo, and upper-class pop music, this article studies the expression of love and grief across socio-economic classes in Egypt. It challenges the mainstream argument that men, especially those belonging to lower socio-economic classes, are expected to perform ‘like men’ and suppress their emotions and affection. These mahragānāt exhibit extreme affection and grief as men threat of inflicting self-harm or committing suicide if they lose their female lovers. This genre's popularity on social media resonates with increasing suicide rates among lower socio-economic classes due to failed love affairs. By focusing on expressions of love in Egyptian music, this article suggests a dialectic relation between love, class and the understanding of masculinity.

In this article, I attend to poetic expressions of passionate longing for a beloved among displaced single Syrian men in the Jordanian capital of Amman. With a point of departure in the story and poetry of Qays, a 28-year-old Syrian man from Damascus, the article engages in an exploration of the poetic space engendered in the process of writing and reading poetry in exile. It demonstrates how longing found expression and relief in love poetry, as it enabled the young Syrian men to, momentarily, displace themselves to a different time and place, closer to the women they longed for. The poetry I thus argue, engenders and constitutes a creative space of possibility in which the impossible becomes possible in exile.

This article examines the contemporary qaṣīda poetry of South Sinai Muzīna Bedouin women from an anthropological perspective, drawing primarily upon a history of emotions framework, as well as Bedouin ethnographic studies and Arabic literary criticism. The article argues that the composition and vocalisation of qaṣīda poetry in South Sinai is more than a performative art; it is a means of ‘navigating’ one's emotions as a woman in a patriarchal society where emotional expression for both men and women is deemed inappropriate. In the poetry of Nādiyyah and Umm ‘Īd, we gain insight into the subjective lived experience of Bedouin women in South Sinai, as they attempt to poetically express their desire, elation, grief and passion, while simultaneously demonstrating their ability to ‘control’ their emotional states.

Much has been said about the influential role of Forough Farrokhzad (1934–1967) in developing a feminine language in modern Iranian love poetry. Despite this, scholars have not systematically or theoretically examined what I call ‘the poetics of individuation’ in Forough's lyrics. The present article analyses Forough's poetic and individual paths of development as two inevitably parallel and intertwined routes. The article theorises that by removing a pre-imposed patriarchal sense of sin with regard to feminine love, Forough deconstructed the masculine narrative of good poetry in five highly significant ways via the feminine and self gaze. The article concludes that the poet's commitment to poetry as a platform of expression was a means of her liberation and individuation as an independent feminine poet with voice and agency.

The presence of male homoeroticism in Persian poetry has long been noted. This sexual configuration is largely based on the conventional manner in which the beloved is described with male attributes, including a hairline above the lips or sideburns. Such readings assume a direct relationship between poetic topoi and external reality, and project, ahistorically, a modern aesthetic assumption onto premodern gender norms. This article argues that a male-associated rendition of the beloved, specifically in the case of the rhetorics of the facial hair that permeates the description of patrons, the divine and women alike, reveals not necessarily the sweetheart's gender, but dominant perceptions of praiseworthy characteristics and the power dynamics that rule the rhetorics of premodern gender norms.

On behalf of the Scientific Committee of Anthropology of the Middle East, we would like to express our deepest regrets for the loss of pioneer film maker Khaled Al Siddiq on October 14th, 2021. Khaled Al Siddiq's 1972 film, Cruel Sea won the Fipresi Prize at the Venice Film Festival and was also a prize winner at the Syrian Film Festival that year. This landmark film bought the Gulf Cinema Company, where Khaled was the director, widespread international acclaim. Al Siddiq's other important films include The Wedding of Zein (1976) and Shaheen (1984). Our deepest condolences go to Dr. Zubeydenh Ashkanani, his wife, whose generous gift of the yearly eponymous prize awarded for best article of the year in the Anthropology of the Middle East is always well-received and much appreciated.