Violence as event is chaotic and arbitrary, destructive and intrusive.

Violence as concept is evasive and elusive. It can be one thing and its opposite: therefore violence can be meticulously planned but it can also be random and irrational. Violence is often simultaneously legitimate and illegitimate, determined by the perspective of its representation.

The following survey eschews any attempt to define what might have constituted violence in Arabic literature. Instead I present a number of pressure points, of contact zones in what I understand to be the spectrum of violence, nodes around which the fears, anxieties, concerns and aspirations provoked by instances of violence and their representation were concentrated.^{[1118] [1119]}1 discuss the following ‘pressure points': the war against time; apocalypse; the anxiety of remembrance (specifically vituperative poetry, love poetry, and the martyr poetry of a group of early Islamic insurrectionists); abomination (especially encounters with non-Muslim peoples the Rus and the Franks); the non-human world; spectacle (in particular corporal punishment and the inviolability of the human body). These zones are not discrete: they do not constitute categories of violence, but, like violence itself, are porous and mimetic.

The temporal focus of the survey covers some six centuries, from the pre- Islamic sixth century to the twelfth century and the crusades. The survey does not, however, proceed chronologically: the temporal focus of each section is determined by the historical context of the textual sources discussed.