It is a pleasure to have a chance to review this book. I have relied on it often over the last eight years or so—not only drawing on it in teaching Arab-world folklore in particular, but also as a source for thinking about, writing on, and teaching comparative lore. The book could also comprise one of a set of texts for a general course on Arab-world culture or for a course on global folklore. The work is prepared for English-speaking students and scholars, and as such is notably effective—among the best in the pantheon of introductory texts for humanities and social science aficionados.
Part I, Who are the Arabs?, neatly lays out in twenty pages a history of the Arabs from pre-Islamic ancient Arabia to what is today the Arab world. Dwight Reynolds includes a useful current map, and concludes the section with helpful overviews of Arabic language(s) and of Islam. The section concludes with a short but evocative and efficient bibliography; the titles he has chosen not only provide useful readings that enlarge on topics he has just introduced, but also point readers toward additional subjects on which folklore study can shed light.
In the first four pages of Part II, Reynolds introduces folkloristic definitions and classifications—in particular as they relate to Arab folklore. In the first three-sentence paragraph, he succinctly introduces concepts foundational to contemporary folkloristics, such as lore as communal, as performance, as both conventional and highly changeable (familiar and “strange” or innovative), and as necessarily studied in context. After this feat of clarity and conciseness, Reynolds, in Part III, the heart of the book, demonstrates how these concepts have enriched our understanding and appreciation of Arab-world folklore. He offers over 150 pages of judiciously chosen examples and texts: various types of verbal art (oral poetry, folk narrative, and then proverbs, riddles, jokes, and curses), musical arts (folk instruments) along with particular musical traditions sacred and secular, material arts (homes and domestic space), pilgrimage paintings, women’s arts, and finally customs and traditions, some very local and others shared more widely in and beyond the Arab world per se. These selections offer the reader introductions to over thirty other researchers studying folklore in sixteen countries within the Arab world.
As Reynolds engages with the works of these researchers, he masterfully demonstrates how folklore studied by drawing on an array of historical and social contexts as well as methodological and theoretical approaches brings us closer to understanding the cultures of others affectively. In addition to geographical and generic exempla, Reynolds includes women’s and men’s folklore as well as urban and rural folklore among various classes of folk—including Jewish and Christian Arabs as well as Muslim Sunnis and Shi’is. He easily in this section introduces emic and etic perspectives and the importance of each. The in-depth examples (his presentation of the zar or spirit possession ritual is particularly fine) ensure complexities are not neglected while the seven pages of suggested readings organized by genres—Arabic oral poetry, folk narratives, proverbs, conversational genres, Arab folk music, material folk arts, and folk customs and traditions--illustrate the many fine works available for further learning. Importantly in the context of the Arab world in particular, the author notes the fluidity of genre labels for folk forms even within one region of the Arab world and foregrounds throughout the participatory possibilities offered by folk performance. Further, he touches on the intermixture or fluidity of genres as they are accessed within particular folk performances.
Throughout, there is a nice balance of theoretical commentary with abundant solid examples and further helpful insights for each. Since Reynolds is also an ethnomusicologist, the sections on Arab folk music are very fine—useful in particular to students whose interests turn in that direction—and he also is able to elaborate on important musical dimensions of poetry, for example, often neglected by scholars. Decades after I published my first book, a collection of Tunisian lullabies and nursery rhymes, this handbook led me to discover why my Tunisian illustrator, in a set of humorous rhymes young girls chanted or sang about their imaginary future husbands, represented a girl as singing while sitting on a swing. Reynolds provides an unexpected parallel to a phenomenon I thought unique to a particular Tunisian locality, Kairouan—allowing me to re-appreciate a piece of lore in another context. Evidently in faraway Blida, Algeria, young girls were also swinging and singing about “the men they will or will not marry” (51).
Part IV provides a succinct summary of recent historical and contemporary approaches to folklore scholarship in the context of the Middle East and North Africa: historic-geographic, structural, functional, contextual, performance, as well as oral. This section, coming after Parts II and III, efficiently and accessibly builds on previous examples of the intersection of theory and practice past and present, while further demonstrating an array of means by which scholars have struggled to understand and complexly explicate the power and expressivity of lore.
Part V focuses on communicative media and is especially helpful in introducing ways to think about relationships between orality and literacy in the Arab world past and present as well as between the literary and filmic. There is a glossary, especially helpful to those who know some Arabic, a bibliography, a list of web resources, and an index.
Having drawn on this book or portions thereof for multiple courses on Arab folk narrative or Arab-world folklore over the last few years, I find that Arab Folklore is accessible to students on multiple levels depending on their backgrounds in folklore or the Arab world that they bring to the course. Reynolds’s clear explications open up for students the opportunity to move forward both in their knowledge of folklore theory and methodology and of the Arab world. Even for advanced undergraduate Arabic majors, the book is an excellent source to work from as they develop a paper focusing on a particular folklore performance or a comparative topic. I just wish for students’ sake that it was not quite so costly, but it is a book that remains on one’s bookshelf as a resource long after the course is completed. In a sense it is also timeless, canonical—as important now, if not more so, than when it first appeared in 2007.
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[Review length: 1038 words • Review posted on November 3, 2015]