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“The Book of Tribulations by Nu`aym b. Hammad al-Marwazi (d. 844) is the earliest Muslim apocalyptic work to come down to us. Its contents focus upon the cataclysmic events to happen before the end of the world, the wars against the Byzantines, and the Turks, and the Muslim civil wars. There is extensive material about the Mahdi (messianic figure), the Muslim Antichrist and the return of Jesus, as well as descriptions of Gog and Magog. Much of the material in Nu`aym today is utilized by Salafi-jihadi groups fighting in Syria and Iraq.

ḤikāyatAbī al-Qāsim, probably written in the 11th century by the otherwise unknown al-Azdi, tells the story of a gate-crasher from Baghdad named Abu l-Qasim, who shows up uninvited at a party in Isfahan. Dressed as a holy man and reciting religious poetry, he soon relaxes his demeanour, and, growing intoxicated on wine, insults the other dinner guests and their Iranian hometown. Widely hailed as a narrative unique in the history of Arabic literature, the Ḥikāya also reflects a much larger tradition of banquet texts. Painting a picture of a party-crasher who is at once a holy man and a rogue, he is a figure familiar to those who have studied the ancient Cynic tradition or other portrayals of wise fools, tricksters and saints in literatures from the Mediterranean and beyond. This study therefore compares the Ḥikāya, a mysterious text surviving in a single manuscript, to other comical banquet texts and party-crashing characters, both from contemporary Arabic literature and from Ancient Greece and Rome.

This book explores both the value and the potential pitfalls of reading the literature and drama of the period from the 1380s to the Reformation ‘historically’, that is, in dialogue with historical events and the political cultures of the communities which produced and received it. It examines a wide range of dramatic and literary texts, some of which, like Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or Sir David Lyndsay’s monumental drama, Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis are relatively well known. Others, like the early Tudor Interlude of Godly Queen Hester, are perhaps less so. What drives the book is a belief that studying the literature of a period provides a far richer experience of its culture and politics than consideration of ‘historical’ documents alone. To read literature historically allows us to see how contemporary men and women deployed the ideas, concepts and symbols that mattered to them and how they represented their own relationships to such ideas and symbols. It allows us to hear them discussing questions of morality, identity, belief, private and public probity and responsibility openly and at length, and suggests how those men and women might respond, emotionally and aesthetically (as well as intellectually or pragmatically) to moral, social, and political issues. To read literature historically is, then, to attend to history imaginatively and aesthetically, with a fuller regard to the concerns, at once both intimately personal and broadly cultural, that underpinned political action, and the beliefs that gave meaning to individual behaviour.