A PhD dissertation at the College of Arts, University of Basrah, entitled “Authorship and Power in Medieval Literature: Al-Suyuti as a Model,” was defended by student Sabrin Hashim Thabit.
The dissertation aimed to explore the relationship between authorship and power in Arabic literature during the medieval period through an examination of the works of Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti. It also sought to demonstrate how authorship became a tool for producing scholarly, literary, and cultural authority, as well as to identify the mechanisms that contributed to shaping the image of the author and his intellectual authority within the cultural sphere of his time.
The dissertation consisted of three chapters. The first examined authorship and power in the medieval period, while the second addressed the forms of literary authorship in the works of Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti. The third chapter focused on the authority of the author in relation to identity, the self, and the other.
The dissertation concluded that the process of authorship during the medieval period was influenced by political, cultural, and religious contexts. It also found that Al-Suyuti succeeded in transforming authorship into a means of building cultural and intellectual authority, drawing on the diversity and abundance of his works and the wide range of fields he addressed, in addition to his broad presence in Arab culture.
The study emphasized that this scholarly and literary presence contributed to consolidating Al-Suyuti’s position as a polymathic author and made his body of written work an important source in shaping his cultural authority.
