Common indicators of a Political approach in the history of Arabic Literature: A study of the greatest books on the history of Arabic Literature

Abstract

The history of Arabic literature includes the history of what happened and experienced in the last Arab nation. Collecting these experiences and illuminating all its contributing elements, represents the main foundation for a sound and stable character, therefore, it seems necessary to classify the literature history and its time periods into different distinct divisions. For this reason, most writers of literature history have categorized the history of Arabic literature based on various approaches so that they would be able to simply reveal the movement of literature. These approaches consist of political, climatic, cultural, ethnic ones, as well as literary schools and genres. The political approach is the most common one noticed in the history of Arabic literature. By following this approach, many writers of Arabic literature have attempted to classify its history into various divisions in accordance with their respective political periods.

2- THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

The purpose of the present study is to explain the Common indicators of political approach found in history  of Arabic literature. In this line, the four following books written based on political approach and regarded as the most known works in the context of literature history writing were studied and examined: The History literature of Arabic language by Jurji Zaidan, The history of Arabic literature by omar faroukh, the history of Arabic literature by shoghi zeif, Inclusive in the history of Arabic literature by Hanna Al Fakhouri.

3- METHODOLOGY

By applying an integrated method, the descriptive method was used for presenting the theoretical principles and the complete inductive method and qualitative content analysis were conducted for analyzing the findings. The Common indicators of political approach were attained by means of qualitative content analysis.  

4- RESULTS & DISCUSSION& CONCLUSIONS

The findings Common indicators that these four books written based on political approach possesses some common Common indicators that can be summarized into following issues: main and sub classification, preliminary discussion, presentation of features of literature of each period and biographies of literary men. The four books have followed the same political approach that is applied in the first book. Therefore, the books written after Jurji Zaidan's book, have not excluded his particular concepts and methods and it can be said that these four books share much commonalities.

Without any criticism, analysis and interpretation, Jurji Zaidan and omar Faroukh have merely gathered and narrated the contents and have not thoroughly examined any writer or poet, therefore it can be said that their books are like an encyclopedia encompassing history of Arabic literature and biographies of literary men. On the other hand, shoghi zeif and Hanna Al Fakhouri  have applied critical, interpretive and analytic approach to investigate literary men's works. However, it can be concluded that history of literature writing have experienced ascending movement, since by coming closer to present time, these four books written based on political approach need to receive more analysis and interpretation.