DEALit · Argumentation and Dialectics in Early Arabic Literary Disputes

The literary dispute is a genre that emerged in Arabic literature in the 9th century. As a genre, it has been overlooked for decades and has attracted little scholarly attention. While recent scholarship has begun to pay greater attention to it, the focus has largely been on texts from the Mamluk (1258–1505) and Ottoman (1505–1922) periods, as well as on thematic rather than formal aspects of the texts.DEALit addresses this gap by studying the earliest examples of Arabic literary disputes (from the Abbasid period, 750–1258) and by focusing on the dialectical strategies employed in these texts through a combination of close reading and digital approaches. First, I will compile a corpus of 50 to 60 texts. Second, I will conduct a close analysis of a small sample within the corpus, examining argumentative and refutational strategies and exploring whether they intersect with codified traditions of disputation. Third, I will digitize the entire corpus using Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR), classify key concepts with digital tools, and explore patterns of arguments and counterarguments across the corpus.In doing so, DEALit will offer three main contributions to scholarship: (1) a study of the Abbasid literary dispute, (2) a digitized corpus available for further research, and (3) a reusable workflow applicable beyond the specific field of premodern Arabic studies.This is the right moment to carry out this project, as I can build on recent developments in the field and collaborate with ongoing research projects at the institutions with which I plan to work. At the host institution, the University of Bern, sub-projects on Ottoman legal sources within The Flow project are developing HTR models for premodern Arabic texts. At the University of Münster, where I plan short visits, current research on later examples of this genre will provide opportunities for collaboration and diachronic comparison.