"Passed around by a crescent" : wine poetry in the literary traditions of the Islamic world

Abstract

This publication explores the presence of the shared heritage and interdependence of poetry composed around the theme of wine in diverse literary traditions of the Islamic world. The specialist contributions discuss multiple aspects of the literary polyphony of wine in the pre-modern Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Ottoman Turkish, and Urdu literatures during the first millennium of the Islamic era. Presenting these together and in dialogue with one another, the volume offers a comparative perspective on a long, varied, but singularly mutual tradition. It traces how this poetry develops, flourishes and matures across linguistic and geographic, confessional and social, aesthetic and artistic boundaries within the regions of the religiously and culturally diverse Islamic world, from al-Andalūs to India.