Mark Wagner

The Yemeni humoristic tradition emerged in earnest in the eighteenth century in a literary salon in the capital city of Sanaa run by an aristocratic poet named ‘Ali ibn al-Hasan al-Khafanji (d. 1766). Khafanji and his friends wrote vulgar parodies of the sentimental love songs of the day, lobbed scathing (and scatological) invective against one another, penned elegies for dead pets, and offered rules for beauty, comportment, and the seduction of young men, and rhymed prose narratives. All the while they demonstrated a deep erudition in Islamic thought and literary history, as well as the varieties of common Arabic speech in Yemen at the time. A series of poets in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries continued to write in this style right up until the Revolution of 1962. I argue that this humoristic mode, while shocking and occasionally blasphemous in content, offered a form of entertainment for those immersed in the Zaydi scholastic tradition that prevailed in Yemen. My project is to produce a critical edition and commentary of Khafanji’s poetic collection Lentil Wine and Choice Buckwheat with marginal glosses in Modern Standard Arabic. I aim as well to place this work in the wider context on the place of obscenity in the Arabic literary tradition and in Islamic thought.