We have aimed in the preceding chapters to examine some of the literary production of Medinan intellectuals (both prose writers and poets) during the period of the twelfth/eighteenth century, a period which has previously been subject to the unfair and generalizing criticism that it was one of stagnation and barrenness in every branch of literature. This view led to many unquestioning ideas which needed correcting through solid and free studies, and this we have tried to achieve by focusing on the Medinan intelectuals of the eighteenth century.
Throughout all the Islamic ages, the city of Medina maintained its position as a centre of Islamic education and Arabic literary creation. So we have come to recognize the mutual and productive relationships existing between some of the intellectuals of Medina (such as CAbd al-Qādir, Khalīl kūduk, CAbd al-Rahmān al-Ansārī, and CUmar CAbd al-Salām al-Dāghistānī) and their contemporaries in Yemen and Bilād al-Shām, including Muhammad Murtadā al-Zabīdī, al-Qādī Ahmad ibn CAlī al-Nahmī, and CAlī al-Murādī. Medina played an important role in welcoming ambitious and sincere intellectuals and paving the way for their reformative movements, as happened in the cases of Safī al-Dīn Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Qushāshī (in the eleventh/seventeenth century), who attracted to himself during his last settlement in Medina various students who spread the thought of his school to various parts of the Muslim world; including such distant places as Sumatra and Java. Again, in the twelfth/eighteenth century, the city of Medina received al-Shaykh Muhammad ibn CAbd al-Wahhāb, who appreciated there the knowledge and encouragement which he gained from the intellectuals Muhammad Hayāt al-Sindī and CAbd Allāh ibn Sayf. These both contributed important elements in strengthening his vision for the revival of Islam and in solidifying the movement which spread throughout the Arabian Peninsula and into some other Arabic provinces.
While Medina received and influenced some of the well-known and leading figures in Islamic and Arabic intellectual movements, the city equally received some well-known poets, such as Fath Allāh ibn al-Nahhās who settled there in the eleventh/seventeenth century. The unrest of the political and social life in eighteenth-century Medina was a positive factor behind the remarkable poetic productions emanating from the city in that period. In examining some of these, we have come to appreciate its originality, while at the same time the poets were influenced in their productions by the early Arabic poetry, as for instance we noticed the clear influence of the poet Abū al-Tayyib al-Mutanabbī over the famous poet of eighteenth-century Medina al-Sayyid JaCfar al-Baytī.
However, the Medinan poets of this period were not content merely to admire and emulate their predecessors of bygone ages, but sought also to advance the themes and forms of Arabic poetry. As we have seen, the Medinan poets tried to record the events of their own age in long poems which took the form of epics and demonstrated the extent of the poet’s education and learning, which was essentially Islamic as appears from their frequent allusions to Qur'ānic verses and the traditions of the Prophet. While such learning may be commendable in itself, since it showed awareness and appreciation of the classical standards of Arabic thoetoric found in Qur'ān and Hadīth, the poets of twelfth/eighteenth-century Medina were not limited, as old and modern critics agree, to emulating the pure Arabic of the past. There is clear evidence in their works of the influence also of some non-Arabic words and expressions, although the proportion of these foreign influences is insignificant, especially in the language of the poetry.
While the poets of Medina made noticeable and progressive contributions to Arabic epic poetry, they also tackled different subjects which illustrate a society struggling through the social conflicts of its time. Thus, we have noticed both the descriptive and satirical poetry of al-Sayyid al-Baytī. The example given of the first type of verse reflected the poet's dissatisaction with the environment of his work away from his home-town. In the latter, satirical example, we see the poet's rejection of the behaviour of certain groups within the city who disguised their true characters in different ways.
We have further been led to the conclusion that the intellectuals of Medina in succeeding periods influenced one another in the content and tone of their poetry. As an example of this we have noticed the tendency of the eighteenth-century Medinan poet JaCfar al-Baytī to discuss and criticise the political situation of the city and the recurrence of this tendency among the Medina poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in particular Ibrāhīm al-Uskūbī and Muhammad al-CUmarī, although these latter writers wrote in a freer and franker manner, with open specification of the root cause of political unrest. We have noticed also the eleventh/seventeenth-century historian Muhammad ibn kibrīt, who travelled the same road as other Medinan historians, including al-Marāghī and al-Samhūdī, in writing the history of the city of Medina. In Ibn kibrīt's writings, however, we have seen the influence of poetry to a greater degree than in his predecessors and we have noticed also his fondness for agriculture which he homself practised as a profession. Similarly, the twelfth/eighteenth-century Medinan writer CUmar ibn CAbd al-Sallām al-Dāghistānī's endeavours to record the biographies of Medinan intellectuals and the record the productions of the poets among them in his unpublished and important work Tuhfat al-Dahr was a new attempt at what Ibn MaCsūm al-Madanī of the eleventh/seventeenth century had done in his book al-Sulfa. While the latter widened the scope of his book to include some other Arabic and Islamic provinces, al-Dāghistānī devoted his entire work to the well-known intellectuals of Medina in the eighteenth century.
This tendency among some Medinan poets and writers to follow the paths already set by their Medinan predecessors may be explained in the light of the fact that the education which was promulgated in the manu centuries of learning was not affected to any great extent by significant changes. This was due to the status of the city as a centre for traditional Islamic education, which set her apart from any other cultural influence which might tend to alter the direction of the education and the thought-patterns of those who studied in her institutions. Furthermore, the city itself followed an apparently unchanging style of life in administrative and economic matters until as late as the mid-twentieh century, a factor which tended naturally to produce more or less similar effects at different periods in the thought and writing of the city's intellectuals.
Nevertheless, the renascent Arabic literary movement which took place in nineteenth century had in fact (as our study has shown) its roots in the achievements of the eighteenth-century’s intellectuals. At that time the Arabic provinces witnessed literary productions in many different Islamic and Arabic fields and the nineteenth century experienced the positive fruition of these in the Islamic revival movements which had their impetus in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thus, we have noticed the particular examples of the nineteenth and twentieth-century Medinan poets Ibrāhīm al-Uskūbī and Muhammad al-CUmarī, who followed in their poetical themes the ways already. Pioneered in the eighteenth century by the Medinan poet al-Sayyid JaCfar al-Baytī.
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