History of Arabic Literature

Traffic in light benefits donor and recipient, without the ambiguities that always cling to the traffic in goods. It can link all mankind into a family and can enable the people of any country today to become the inheritors of the legacy left by the peoples of any epoch of any land. There is a great tradition of Arabic learning in this country. But not all Indians have equally benefited from that heritage. The language barrier is, admittedly, formidable. But it is equally formidable in the case of Greek. Nevertheless there is a not inadequate awareness of ancient Greek literature in India and the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides have been presented on the Indian stage. Our links with the Arabic heritage are closer and yet the general awareness remains sadly inadequate. This book may help towards remedying this unhappy situation. For the layman, original material will continue to remain inaccessible. But the corpus of translated material is large enough. However, some stimulus to explore it is necessary and this book seeks in all humility to provide it. Though it does not want to claim to be anything more than an outline, it seeks to provide a fairly complete frame. It covers poetry, religious thought, philosophical currents and mystical tradition, the great contribution made by Arab historiography, and the various categories of prose literature.