The Dialectic of Emotion and Power and Its Role in Shaping Courtly Amatory Discourse in the Abbasid Era.

Abstract

This study investigates the dialectical tension between emotion, conceived as a fundamental human affective drive, and power, understood as a dominant political and socio-institutional structure. This tension exerted a decisive influence on the formation of the amatory discourse articulated by court poets—among caliphs, viziers, and court secretaries—during the Abbasid period. The study proceeds from the central premise that love poetry produced within a courtly context cannot be reduced to a spontaneous articulation of romantic anguish; rather, it functioned as a discursive practice circumscribed by power dynamics operative within the palace milieu.

The research engages a core problematic in Abbasid literary studies: the intersection between the poetic self, laden with emotional subjectivity, and the political institution, invested with symbolic and material authority. It argues that this intersection gave rise to an emotionally inflected diplomatic rhetoric that mediated between self-expression and political constraint. The analysis unfolds along two principal axes. The first examines the evocation of a chaste, affective ethos as a rhetorical strategy for disciplining desire under the pressure of spatial and institutional authority. The second explores the deployment of symbolic and allusive modes of expression as aesthetic mechanisms through which poets negotiated the latent conflict between emotional delicacy and sovereign majesty. The study concludes that courtly amatory poetry constituted a distinctive poetic formation, one that integrates the rhetoric of supplication with the poetics of veiled resistance to the center of power.