Ghazal as World Literature. 2 volumes. Vol. 1: Transformations of a Literary Genre. Vol. 2: From a Literary Genre to a Great Tradition The Ottoman Gazel in Context. With B�rte Sagaster.

Ein gutes und sauberes Exemplar. - The ghazal originated as a literary genre in the Arabian Peninsula at the end of the 7th century. It soon spread over vast regions of the Islamic world to re-emerge in diverse new languages successively such as Persian, Hebrew, Ottoman, Caghatay Turkic and Urdu. In Iran, India, and in the Ottoman imperial culture in particular, it developed into the chief medium of personal emotional experience and mystic human-divine love alike. Serving to celebrate not only the most intimate inter-human relation, but equally the adoration of a patron, a mystic mentor, or even the transcendental Other, the ghazal succeeded to create a subversive counter-world of effervescence, an esoteric social cosmos governed by aesthetic rites that allowed its practitioners to temporarily overcome the constraints of norm-abiding Islam. Ghazal, or Ottoman gazel, crystallized to form the literary backbone of an imperial culture, whose aesthetic paradigm was to prove powerful until the beginning of modern times. Not uncomparable to the Western Great Tradition embodied in the tragedy, the ghazal/gazel survived into modernity, though less so in the function of a productive literary genre than as an intellectual challenge, whose critical reflection forms a major part in the project of cultural critique that intellectuals in the Near and Middle East are presently pursuing.