The Symbolism of Nature in the Mamluk Munāẓara: A Study of Some Floral Literary Debates

The literary debate is a distinctive genre of the Arabic literary tradition. Emerging in the Abbasid era, it flourished in Mamluk Egypt, when many compositions in prose and in verses have been produced, exhibiting a wide variety of animate or inanimate actants and themes. These texts have been composed for entertainment, with a didactic function, to comment on or symbolically represent aspects of the social reality. In this article, we will focus on the floral literary debate, a specific subtype of the genre that was practised from the third/ninth century. We will analyse a corpus of texts which portray speaking flowers produced from the sixth/twelfth to the ninth/fifteenth century to assess how one of the most classical and practised strands of the genre has been reconfigured between 1100 and 1400 to carry out specific performative and agentive scopes.