It is tempting to contrive a conclusion for a book on anagnorisis with a recognition scene: to declare, somehow, ‘this is what anagnorisis tells us, against expectation, or this is what it all turns out to be about.’ Such a conclusion would be possible if this study were exhaustive, but it is not. That is to say, both the generic and temporal range of this first book on anagnorisis in Arabic literature is delimited in its perspective. There are other chapters of medieval literature that could be added; and of course modern and contemporary materials provide a study by themselves, relating anagnorisis in the burgeoning present-day Arabic corpus to world literature, as well as film, the most common medium in which we experience it.

Similarly, this study could have confined itself to showing, or confirming expressly, that in Arabic literature anagnorisis comes about in the six ways outlined by Aristotle in chapter 16 of the Poetics. By means of tokens or signs, as in the Prophet's khātam al-nubuwwah, the seal of prophecy; or the details of a long lost purse in a story by al-Tanūkhī. By means of contrivance, as in Surah 12 which is crafted by the hand of God; or the conversion of Salmān al-Fārisī, a tale teleologically – and folklorically – structured towards the recognition of Muḥammad; or the picaresque tales told by al-Ḥarīrī with masterful tacit allusion to narrative poetics, often giving the brush of narrative creation to Abū Zayd, the teller of fictions within fictions. By means of memory and the telling of stories, as in the case of Joseph's brothers, who are prompted by him to remember their evil past and thus know who he is; or the account of the Damascene prisoner of al-Maʾmūn who tells his story, summoning the past into the present so that he can be recognised by his jailer and saviour; or the sons of the Pious Israelite who tell their discrete stories years after their separation thus recognising each other and being recognised by their mother who chances to be within earshot (there is measured contrivance here too, in the construction of this short tale).