Arabic Literature - An Overview (Culture and Civilisation in the Middle East.)

ARABIC LITERATURE – AN OVERVIEW This book gives a rounded and balanced view of Arab literary creativity, past and pres...

Author: Pierre Cachia

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ARABIC LITERATURE – AN OVERVIEW

This book gives a rounded and balanced view of Arab literary creativity, past and present. Because it assumes no previous knowledge of Arabic or of its literary conventions, it is accessible to the first year student of the subject, and even to the inquisitive general reader who has no intention of becoming a specialist. Yet it has features that ought to stimulate interest among established scholars as well. ‘High’ literature is examined alongside popular folk literature (long ignored by Arab scholars and Arabists alike), and the classical and modern periods, usually treated separately, are presented together. Cachia’s observations are not subordinated to any pre-formed literary theory, but describe and illustrate the directions taken and results achieved, whether these conform to Western norms or strike out along distinctive lines. The book does not claim to have the last word on contentious issues, but it does indicate where the debate may be followed and where new research is being undertaken. It presents an overall picture of the field of relevance to the student of literature as well as to Arabists working in related fields. Pierre Cachia was born in Egypt in 1921, of a Maltese father and a Russian mother. After war service with the British 8th Army, he taught in the American University in Cairo (1946–48), in the University of Edinburgh (1950–75), and in Columbia University (1975–91). His publications are mostly on modern Arabic literature. He was a co-founder in 1970, and joint editor until 1996, of the Journal of Arabic Literature.

CULTURE AND CIVILIZATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST Series editor: Ian R. Netton University of Leeds

This series studies the Middle East through the twin foci of its diverse cultures and civilizations. Comprising original monographs as well as scholarly surveys, it covers topics in the fields of Middle Eastern literature, archaeology, law, history, philosophy, science, folklore, art, architecture and language. While there is a plurality of views, the series presents serious scholarship in a lucid and stimulating fashion.

ARABIC LITERATURE – AN OVERVIEW

Pierre Cachia

. . . like a goodly tree, firm its roots, and its branches up in the sky (Qur a¯n 14:24)

First published in 2002 by RoutledgeCurzon 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by RoutledgeCurzon 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

RoutledgeCurzon is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group # 2002 Pierre Cachia All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-22051-X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-27542-X (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–7007–1725–0 (Print Edition)

To my former students whose enthusiasm sustained me and whose insights enriched me

CONTENTS

Preface The transcription of Arabic

viii xi

1 The root

1

2 The stem

15

3 The bifurcation

31

4 The main growth

47

5 The Iberian branch

87

6 The stunting

103

7 The grafting

123

Bibliography Index

183 185

vii

PREFACE

During my long teaching career, I wished that my first year students had access to a short, readable, self-explanatory book that would give them not a deep but a rounded and balanced view of the entire field of Arab literary creativity. It would in itself be valid and worthwhile. It would guide their choice of the more advanced courses they might take. It would enable them to fit the detailed information they got in these courses into a sensible perspective. It might even open out for them an area in which to conduct research of their own. It is such a book that I have tried to produce in my retirement. It assumes no previous knowledge of Arabic, although it does not evade linguistic peculiarities essential to the understanding of the literature. It dips only minimally into the political and cultural background of this literature. It does not even yield to all the priorities of the literary historian in that it does not necessarily name and characterize all the major literary figures of each period. What above all it tries to do is to identify the trends and themes that developed over the centuries, and to illustrate these with samples that will yield something of their flavour. I like to think that such a book may be of service to the inquisitive general reader as well. An Egyptian folk proverb has it that “the flautist dies with his fingers still twitching”. I have tried to curb my academic habits and inclinations, subordinating them to the real needs of the readership I have in mind. For example, the field bristles with moot questions that can be resolved only by detailed examination of texts and discussion of arguments. I have been content to draw the broad

viii

P R E FA C E

parameters of the issue and list other sources to which the reader may turn if he is so minded. I am aware, however, that I betray my academic formation by my use of footnotes. I have never had the antipathy to footnotes that the general reader is reputed to harbour. They are a convenient way of conveying necessary information without interrupting the flow of an argument. Nevertheless, I have used them for only two purposes. One is to identify the source of a precise citation that is essential to an argument and not immediately traceable through the Internet. The other is to pass on to the reader additional information of the kind I have described in the preceding paragraph. A source of much confusion is Arabic names. Very few Arabs have surnames that are passed from father to son. These surnames usually end in a long ı¯ and are preceded by the article ‘al-’ of which the ‘l’ assimilates into a number of phonetically congruent consonants; but this is not always the case. A person is often identified by a string of names, and if they are all of the same order then it is by the first that he ought to be addressed, even formally; the second is his father’s personal name, not his, and the third is his grandfather’s. But a man may also have a patronymic or an honorific name, and he may be best known by one of them, or even by a sobriquet that is not used to his face. I have tried to take the burden off the reader’s shoulders by consistently using only one brief and widely used designation for each writer; but for the sake of the more punctilious reader I give additional or alternative forms only in the index. Similarly, except in a few awkward instances I give the titles of books in English translation within the text, and add the Arabic wording only in the index. As for the transcription of these names and titles, it is a problem on a par with death and taxes. It is unavoidable when dealing with a language with phonemes that have no equivalent in English. My advice to the budding Arabist is to grit his teeth and master one entirely reliable system good and early, otherwise he will be plagued with inconsistencies day after day. As for the general reader, he may ignore the technicalities and make what he can of the outlandish symbols. He will not be better served by any other scheme.

ix

P R E FA C E

Finally, a point of relevance to all present-day scholarly publications: Now that a few clicks on a computer’s keyboard can produce detailed lists of books on any subject, the kind of bibliography traditionally appended to books can be considerably curtailed. The one I offer is minimal. It is intended only for the reader who is not, or not yet, an expert Arabist and who wishes to take only a step or two beyond the information in this book. I wish such a reader all the enjoyment he can get.

x

THE TRANSCRIPTION of both classical and colloquial Arabic

The transliteration systems currently in use are mostly – but not consistently – tied to Arabic orthography. Never entirely satisfactory, they are proving entirely inadequate in dealing with colloquial forms of the language. Yet knowledge of some regional vernaculars has become an indispensable part of Arabic studies now that echoes of everyday speech have a place even in the literature of the e´lite and that some scholarly interest is being taken in Arab folk literature. A shift to the representation of Arabic as spoken rather than as written has become imperative both because there is no stable orthography for the vernaculars and because puns achieved by the distortion of normal pronunciation play a large part in folk compositions. The shift will be of some benefit even to the classicists since it will facilitate the transcription and discussion of connected passages, especially metrical ones. After much experimentation and the infliction of much pain on colleagues and students, I have devised a system of transcription that serves all purposes and yet does little violence to longestablished ways. To avoid digraphs, I have built on the foundation laid by Brockelmann, whose system is familiar to all serious Arabists even if they do not favour it in their own writings. In the service of classical Arabic, I retain all his symbols except three. These three exceptions are made to avoid a multiplicity of variations on ‘g’ and ‘h’. For Arabic ¸ , I adopt the widely used ‘j’ instead of his ‘gˇ’. More radically, I borrow from the International Phonetic Alphabet ‘x’ instead of his ‘h’ for Arabic ˝ , and for its voiced equivalent ˘ I use ‘x’ rather than his ‘g˙’. Additional phonemes peculiar to

xi

THE TRANSCRIPTION

various vernaculars, listed in the table below, harmonize with Brockelmann’s usage. These are the only innovations which I urge my fellow-Arabists to adopt. There are others in which my example may be ignored without invalidating the system. Their description follows. To the generally accepted ‘ ’’ for hamza and ‘‘ ’ for I personally prefer ‘ ’ and ‘ ’ because my aging eyes find these clearer and because their alignment with other symbols seems to me more consistent with their status as phonemes rather than mere diacritics. The so-called “emphatic” or pharyngalized consonants ‘d’, ‘s’, ˙ ˙ ‘t’, and ‘z’ are adequately marked with a dot beneath. What no ˙ ˙ existing system of transliteration has acknowledged is that pharyngalization can extend to a whole word that contains none of these consonants, as in Alla¯h. At least when the phenomenon affects the sense of a passage, I favour signaling it by placing a dot under the ‘a’ since the change from a front to a back vowel is the most clearly audible indication of the quality pervading the whole word; hence ja¯rı¯, ‘current’, but ja¯rı¯, ‘my neighbour’, and al-ba¯ba, ˙ ‘the door’ (in the accusative), but al-ba¯ba, ‘the Pope’. The ˙ ˙ otherwise unmarked ‘a¯’ may, however, continue to do duty for either the front or the back vowel when the distinction between them is determined by known phonetic rules. Finally, because dictionaries of the vernaculars are few and because folk poets exploit different regional usages in punning, I deem it a kindness to the reader to mark the letters which depart from classical pronunciation with an umlaut; thus wakkal, ‘he appointed as agent’, but w ¨ akkal, ‘he fed’, where the ‘w’ replaces an initial hamza. Here is a table of all the symbols peculiar to Arabic pronunciation:

Symbol

IPA

Arabic script

Description

¨ a

? ?

Hamza

Glottal stop Regional pronunciation of a ¨ u¯l, ‘I say’

¿ a A

a ˙

fatha ˙

Æ, as in Cairene

Back ‘a’, as in Egyptian mayya, ‘water’ ˙

xii

THE TRANSCRIPTION

Symbol

IPA

Arabic script

Description

a¯ a¯ ˙ d ˙ d d¨

a:-A: A: d D d

alif alif

e¯ g g¨ h ˙ ı¯ ı

E: g g i: @

v

Back or front vowel As in ja¯rı¯, ‘my neighbour’ ˙ Pharyngalized ‘d’ Like ‘th’ in this Regional ˇ, as in Egyptian däbah, ‘he ˙ slaughtered’ Colloquial rendering of ‘ay’ as in be¯t, ‘house’ Cairene ¸ as in gabal, ‘mountain’ Regional Æ as in Upper Egyptian agü¯l, ‘I say’

J o¯ q s s¨ sˇ s ˙ t t¨

¸ Æ

t t ˙ u¯ w w ¨

D o: q s s S ~s t t T $t u: w w

x x z z¨ z ˙ z¨ ˙

x z z z$ z$

˝

ˇ

Ł

Neutral vowel added to break a consonantal cluster, as in Egyptian il-bintı ga¯t, ‘the girl came’ Pronounced Z in the Levant Colloquial rendering of ‘aw’, as in yo¯m, ‘day’

Colloquial

˚ as in sä¯bit, ‘firm’

Pharyngalized s

˚

Colloquial ˚, as in tä¯r, ‘revenge’ (cf. ta r) Like ‘th’ in thirst Pharyngalized t preceded by ˙damma in diphthong Colloquial initial hamza, as in Egyptian w ¨ id¨n, ‘ear’

Colloquial ˇ, as in zänb, ‘fault, misdeed’

Colloquial

xiii

, as in Egyptian zä¯bit˙, ‘officer’ ˙

THE TRANSCRIPTION

If Arabic is to be transcribed as uttered rather than as written, it follows that the sun-letters should take the form of the consonants with which they assimilate, and that a hamzat wasl occurring after ˙ a vowel need not be represented by any symbol. A ta¯ marbu¯ta ˙ should become a ‘t’ when carrying a desinential vowel, but in pausal form it should be transcribed as an ‘h’ only if immediately preceded by a long vowel thus qitta, ‘a cat’, but al-fata¯h, ‘the young ˙˙ woman’, as against al-fata¯, ‘the young man’. Arabic proper nouns bristle with problems. In deference to representations made to me by conservative colleagues and in order to avoid confusion with the form in which such names appear in other publications, I concede that when these occur in a context that does not require them to be grammatically declined – as in an English sentence or an alphabetic list – they should be transcribed as if each separable element was in pausal form; thus Abd-Alla¯h rather than Abdu-lla¯hi. When, however, such a noun incorporates a desinential vowel that cannot be ignored as in the “ Abu¯” which forms part of patronymics, or the much rarer “Imru u” in which the desinence extends to two syllables, with one vowel preceding the third radical and another following it, then in the absence of any other factor it is the nominative case that should prevail; thus “ Abu¯-Ta¯lib”, but “ibn- Abı¯-Ta¯lib”. Finally, to circumvent some of ˙ ˙ the complications that occur in alphabetical listing, I favour hyphenating the inseparable parts of a name e.g.: Abu-l- Ata¯hiya, Abd-ar-Rahma¯n, Ibn-Xaldu¯n, Ta abbata-Sˇarran. ˙ ˙ Colleagues who choose to try out these innovations will find that they give access to new destinations without departing far from the beaten path.

xiv

1 THE ROOT

“Have poets left a song unsung?” Such is at least one reading of an opening line by Antara, one of the most celebrated of pre-Islamic poets. This is but one indication that the Arab poetic tradition – embodied in numerous orally transmitted compositions, some purportedly dating back to the middle of the fifth century, a good century and a half before the emergence of Islam – is the product of a long development, for it was already firmed up by conventions and even equipped with cliche´s, such as the striking comparison of the half-erased traces of a desert encampment to repeated tattoo-marks among the veins of the wrist (the wrist being, even nowadays, a favourite spot for tattooing), or the conceit that the swords of a warring clan are flawless except for the notches resulting from the blows dealt to an enemy. Indeed poetry has long been deemed the supreme art form among the Arabs, one that flourished even at times when other arts were virtually unknown. The literary prose of the same period, on the other hand, consists only of some proverbs and orations reported at a much later date. An often quoted dictum by the critic Ibn-Rasˇı¯q (1000–63 or 71) has it that the early Arabs congratulated one another for only three occurrences: the birth of a boy, the emergence of a poet, and the foaling of a noble mare. And to this day attending a poetry recitation in the Arab world is an eye-opener for the outsider: he will see and hear an audience of hundreds sitting for four hours or more, listening intently and responding instantly and forcefully as one poet after another declaims his compositions.

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1

THE ROOT

The words for poetry, sˇi r, and for poet, sˇa¯ ir, are from a root which has come to denote ‘feeling’, inviting an association with the Romantic notion that poetry is primarily concerned with emotion. Originally, however, the root denoted ‘knowledge, awareness’. The poet was a repository and recorder of tribal lore, hence the saying that “poetry is the register of the Arabs.” And indeed the Arabs have inherited from pre-Islamic times an imposing body of robust poetry that has set the standard for successive centuries. In this, rhythm was achieved by repetitive patterns of long and short syllables, later analyzed and somewhat artificially expanded into sixteen metres, in most of which each line runs to between twenty-two and thirty syllables, divided into hemistichs. And no matter how long a poem was, the same rhyme was maintained throughout.1 There are indications that at an early stage the poets had a supranormal function in the tribe. Each was believed to have a demon, and at least the satires he directed at an enemy had the character of a curse. When so engaged he might appear with half his hair anointed, one shoulder covered and the other bare, and only one foot shod, and he would point at the opposing tribe while delivering his verse. To this day the Arabic name for the index finger is as-sabba¯ba, ‘the curser’. But it is also recorded that the tribes observed months of truce every year, when war even between sworn enemies was suspended, and during these months fairs were held in some centres – in Mecca, in Du-l-Maja¯z, and principally in Uka¯z – at which the ˙ tribes shared commercial and religious activities, and at which (as happens even now at folk festivals) poets competed for attention. If the accounts written somewhat later are to be believed, rival poets sought the arbitration of some highly respected master of the craft, and the judgments given and often acrimoniously disputed were

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1 A convenient description of these metres is to be found in W. Wright’s A Grammar of the Arabic Language, 3rd ed., Cambridge University Press, 1896, etc., vol. 2, pp. 358–368. Until the twentieth century a poem was identified not by a title but by its metre and rhyme, and in this book this practice will be maintained as it is sufficient for tracing most entries in any collection. The mu allaqa¯t mentioned below, however, need no such treatment.

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2

THE ROOT

concerned not with their demonic alliances but with their human fallibility in the use of words. And from the start, the poetry on record had ample room for both tribal and personal motifs. The role of the individual in pre-Islamic society is well characterized in a poem by Durayd ibnas-Simma (d. 630) which recounts how he participated in a raid on ˙ ˙ an enemy tribe which started well, but after getting away with some booty the raiding party, disregarding his advice, stopped to divide the spoils and was overtaken by a detachment from the offended tribe, with the result that a number of men, including the poet’s brother, were killed. The first five lines of his poem emphatically assert Durayd’s own acumen before proclaiming his tribal solidarity in strikingly jingoistic terms (tawı¯l/dı¯): ˙ True was my counsel to A¯rid and his companions, ˙ The kinsmen of as-Sawda¯ – and the whole tribe are my witnesses: Said I, “Beware: two thousand well-armed men, Their leaders clad in armour of Persian make!” But when they disregarded me I stayed at one with them, seeing What they erroneously saw, that I was ill-advised. I uttered my behest at Mun araj al-Liwa¯, But they did not perceive its wisdom till next the sun was high. Am I anything but a man of Xaziyya? When it errs, I err, And when Xaziyya is wise, then am I wise.

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The opposite sentiment is voiced by asˇ-Sˇanfara¯ (d. c.550), one of several rogue poets who relied not on the backing of their tribe to survive, but on their own wits and hardihood (tawı¯l/lu¯): ˙ Up with the breasts of your riding-beasts, my mother’s sons, For to another kinship I incline. Urgent are my needs. Moonlit is the night, And for my purposes the mounts and saddlebags are strapped.

3

THE ROOT

To the noble-spirited, earth offers a refuge from harm, A lone retreat for him who shuns reproach. The land, I swear, does not shrink before one Set questing by fear or desire, if he but keep his wits. Other kinsmen have I: The nimble-footed wolf, The furtive spotted serpent, the shaggy-maned hyena. That is a company midst whom one’s secrets are kept And one is not shunned for a fault once committed. Between these poles was a wide range of human experience for the pre-Islamic poets to explore. They left to posterity a treasury of love-songs, wine-songs, and hunting-songs. Prominent of course were poems praising tribes and chieftains, celebrating warlike deeds with the consequent elegies on the death of heroes. But there was also praise for the peace-makers. The early Muslim scholars who collected this precious material called any of these poems on a single theme a qit a, ‘a piece’, as if it ˙ was a fragment detached from a larger unit. They reserved the term qası¯da, now used for any poem, for a kind of ode constructed on a ˙ particular tripartite pattern. This pattern is best exemplified in seven – or, in a different collection, ten – widely recognized masterpieces known as the mu allaqa¯t, i.e. ‘the suspended odes’, so called because they were purportedly written in gold and suspended inside the ka ba, the cubical shrine that was revered in Mecca even before it became the focus of the Muslim pilgrimage. The term may, however, with only a little straining, be taken to refer to the stringing together of several themes. The first part of a qası¯da, was known as the nası¯b or amatory ˙ prelude. This was the celebration of a lost love. Sometimes what stirred the poet’s emotion was an apparition which he took to be the spectre of the beloved. More commonly, however, the entire poem started with a situation so conventional and so well understood by the audience that it was not explicitly described: The poet, traveling through the desert with one or two companions, comes upon the traces of an encampment where once dwelt a woman he loved, and he gives expression to what was known as “weeping over the ruins.” Here and elsewhere specific locations are named, the significance of which is now lost but

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4

THE ROOT

which may be presumed to have been desirable sites to which only prestigious tribes had access. But the features that stir the poet’s emotional recollection are precise. Thus in Zuhayr’s (d.609) suspended ode: Is it Ummu Awfa¯’s, this unspeaking ruin In the rocky plain between Darra¯j and Mutatallam? And that abode of hers at Raqmatayn, resembling Retraced tattoo marks among the veins of the wrist? There do the wild cows and oryxes follow one another, And their young spring up from their resting places. I halted there after twenty years And, by toilsome imagining, made out the abode: The blackened hearth-stones, where the cauldron once rested, And a trench, like a cistern’s edge, uncrumbled. When I knew the abode, I called to the spring-site: “Good morning, spring-site! May you be safe!”

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Usually, the amatory prelude was more nostalgic than erotic. But in some instances – notably in the suspended ode of Imru u-l-Qays – it leads to a boastful recounting of the poet’s many seductions. Among the many days he remembered with relish were:

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. . . The day I entered the howdah – Unayza’s howdah – She saying, “Many be your woes! You force me down!” And again, as the saddle-frame swayed beneath us both, “You’ve hocked my camel, Imru u-l-Qays. Dismount!” I told her, “Travel on, with its nose-rein loosened, And do not banish me from your oft-tasted fruit. Many like you have I visited at night – a pregnant or nursing mother, Distracting her from a one year-old bedecked with amulets. If, behind her, he cried, she turned towards him With half her body, the other half unturned beneath me.” And a day when, on a sand dune, she denied herself To me with an oath from which was no evasion:

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5

THE ROOT

“O Fa¯tima, go softly with some of this cocquettishness. ˙ If adamant to cut me off, be seemly! Is your delusion that my love for you is fatal, And that whatever you command, my heart obeys? If any trait of mine displeases you, Then slip my garments from your own – they will slip off! Soon, however – either as a proud reaction to rejection, or with a convenient transitional phrase such as “Often do I set off when birds are in their nests” which Imru u-l-Qays uses in four of his poems, or even without any such preparation – the poet launches into the second part of the ode, the rahı¯l or journey in which he has ˙ opportunity to describe the desert setting and its fauna, his own mount, his hardihood and skill in hunting or in battle. A prime example is in Labı¯d’s (d. c.661) suspended ode, where having urged himself to turn away from a hopeless love he moves through a concatenation of images – functionally thorough and sharp in detail2 – of which the first few lines read:

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Cut short your longing for an uncertain union: The best preserver of a love is a decisive break. Richly repay the gracious one, but the sole course If she falters or is inconstant is severance By means of a she-camel travel-wearied, Emaciated, her marrow and hump reduced, Yet when exhausted, her flesh and fur thinned down, The thongs of her foot-guards in tatters, She still has zest within her bridle, like a cloud Tinged red, unburdened of its rain, in a southerly wind, Or like a full-uddered wild ass, pregnant to a white-bellied male, made lean By his chasing and kicking and biting of other stallions,

2 For an indication of how apposite the poet’s description was, see: Labı¯d ibn Rabı¯‘a, The Golden Ode, tr. Wm. R. Polk, with photographs by Wm. J. Mares. Chicago U.P., 1974.

6

THE ROOT

And who, though scarred, yet drives her up the rocky heights, Troubled by her refractoriness and rut. In the third part the poet, having reached his destination, develops his main theme. This may be an account of his own participation in a battle, as in Antara’s:

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When I saw the tribe advance in a mass, Each urging the other, faultlessly I charged. They call out “ Antara!” and the lances are like The ropes of a well in my black charger’s breast. Still I aimed at them the blaze on his neck And his breast until he was draped in blood, He swerved at the thrust of the shafts in his breast Appealing to me with a tear and a whinny. He would – had he knowledge of discourse – have pleaded; He would – had he power of speech – have addressed me. It restored my spirit and cleared its unease That the horsemen called out “Woe, Antara! Advance!” While grimly the horses pitched into soft ground, Be they long-bodied mares or short-haired males. Tractable are my mounts, wherever I wish. My counselor Is my heart, and I spur it with well-twined resolution.

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The poet’s chosen theme may equally be praise of the peace-makers, or boasting of his carousing and his lavish hospitality. He may also sum up his personal priorities, as does Tarafa: ˙ You who reprove me for sharing in the fray And for cultivating pleasures – can you ensure my immortality? If you cannot ward off my end, Then let me hasten to it with what I have at hand. But for three that are part of a real man’s life – I swear: I would care nothing when my sick-bed comforters rose!

7

THE ROOT

Of these is outpacing reproachers with a draught Of red wine that foams when topped with water; Then, at the call of a guest, wheeling a wide-legged steed, Keen as the thicket wolf, when alerted and nearing water; And shortening a cloud-shaded day – and pleasing is such a day – With a plump and pretty one, beneath a pole-propped tent. No less revealing of the dominant values of the period is Amr ibn-Kultu¯m’s boasting of the power of his tribe:

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Well have the Ma addi tribes experienced When on their plain the tents are pitched That we are the ones who feed when we have means, And we the ones who ravage when we are tested; That we are the ones who guard what we desire, And we the ones who settle where we choose; That we are the ones rejecting what we abhor, And we the ones who seize what pleases us; That we are the ones protecting who obeys us, And we the ones who show resolve against defiance; That when we come to water we drink it limpid, While others drink the turbid and the muddy!

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*** This conventional tripartite arrangement of the ode is intriguing. An early attempt to account for it was made by the critic ibn-Qutayba (828–89) in the introduction of his Book of Poetry and Poets. His suggestion was that the poet began with some amatory verse to establish a rapport with his audience, since the subject is one in which almost everyone has some interest, “lawful or unlawful”. He then expatiated on the hardships he had endured on his way to his patron, and having thus implied a claim for recompense, he finally launched into his eulogy. This exposition has some merit so far as the nası¯b is concerned, which is not without parallel in other literatures, as in one kind of

8

THE ROOT

Icelandic narrative poem where each phase of the story is preceded by a couple of amatory verses.3 In other respects, however, Ibn-Qutayba appears to have had in mind a later situation, in which poets made a living by seeking the patronage of the mighty and the wealthy. Modern scholars have looked closely into the structure of the qası¯da 4 and offered subtler explanations for the multiplicity of its ˙ parts.5 One suggestion is that the ode be taken as a formally delivered message intended to influence, and as such comparable to a Ciceronian oration consisting of exordium, narration, argumentation, and conclusion. Another is to compare it to a sonata with its succession of movements, or to the classical mythopoesis, in which Act I recalls a lost Eden, Act II is the hero’s home-leaving and quest, and Act III closes with his re-creation. Although thought-provoking, these speculations are not unstrained, nor do they fit all the plain facts. Taking the existing texts at face value and without attempting to fit them into a strict formula, one notices that the first part does indeed – as Ibn-Qutayba observed – strike a universal theme that helps to establish a rapport between the poet and his audience, the second depicts the environment, and the third celebrates some of the qualities that a man of the desert needs for survival. If one also takes into account that the tripartite arrangement was a highly-prized form but not a must for every poetic outburst, one can see how it suits a special formal and competitive occasion – such as a poetry-fair – at which a poet would want to gain the good will of his audience, display the range of his gifts and demonstrate their relevance to the life of his contemporaries. This in turn raises the question whether the classical Arabic poem, monothematic or tripartite, possesses organic unity. This has

3 T.M. Johnstone, “Nası¯b and Manso¨ngur”, Journal of Arabic Literature, III (1972), pp. 90–95. 4 E.g., Mary Catherine Bateson, Structural Continuity in Poetry: a Linguistic Study of Five Pre-Islamic Arabic Odes, Paris, Mouton & Co., 1970. 5 Conveniently surveyed in Jaroslav Stetkevych, The Zephyrs of Najd, Chicago U.P., 1993, pp. 9–49. But see also Shawkat M. Toorawa’s review of Suzanne P. Stetkevych (ed.) Reorientations: Arabic and Persian Poetry, in Journal of the American Oriental Society, 117, 4 Oct.–Dec. 1997) pp. 759–762.

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THE ROOT

been a concern of Arab critics only in modern times and under the influence of European practice and perception. Attempts to demonstrate the cohesion of particular poems have followed, occasionally revealing some previously unsuspected wealth of associations. Yet the effort also seems to imply that the absence of such unity is a disqualification. In the Arab literary tradition, a poet was often exalted or condemned on the strength of a single line or a short sequence of lines. Attention was given to the balance of themes and the smoothness of transitions, but analyses of the structure of an entire poem were virtually unknown.6 The fact is that the length of a line makes it possible for the Arab poet to round off a thought, a notion, an image, a fancy within its limits. Indeed when, in early Islamic times, prosody was codified, it was considered a fault if a line could not stand by itself, notionally or in grammatical structure. The cohesion of a succession of lines, let alone an entire ode, is not so evident. Especially in a monorhyme poem, it is easy to drop some lines, incorporate others, or rearrange the order. In the passage from Antara already quoted, for example, the first line was striking enough to spawn comparable additions which in some editions are integrated into the text, producing:

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They call out “ Antara!” and the lances are like The ropes of a well in my black charger’s breast. They call out “ Antara!” and the swords are like The flashing of lightning in the darkened clouds. They call out “ Antara!” and the arrows are like A flight of locusts over a waterpoint. They call out “ Antara!” and chainmail is like The eyes of frogs in a rippling pond.

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Similarly, Zuhayr’s suspended ode closes with seventeen sententious lines with little relevance to his main theme or continuity between them. As he was renowned for his wisdom, one may suspect that

6 For a full treatment of this subject, see G.J.H. Van Geert, Beyond the Line, Leiden, E.J. Brill, 1982. And for an example of how extensively the lines of a poem may be shuffled around, see James E. Montgomery, The Vagaries of the Qası¯dah, E.J.W. Gibb Memorial Trust, 1997, pp. 33–36. ˙

10

THE ROOT

some anonymous aphorisms that fitted the metre and rhyme of his great poem were added to it. And when in the body of his ode one encounters these lines: Do not withhold from God what is in your souls to hide it: Whatever is withheld from God, He knows. It may be delayed, deposited in a book and retained For the Day of Reckoning, or it is hastened for requital one may well infer that the insertion was made in Islamic times. *** How reliable, then, is this enormous corpus of pre-Islamic poetry? There have always been suspicions about the authenticity of texts that were not committed to writing until the period to which they relate was over. Some of the earliest transmitters were credited with extraordinary feats of memory but not with the strictest honesty. At least one modern critic7 has argued that the bulk of reputedly pre-Islamic poetry was fabricated later, mainly to suit a Muslim agenda. Rightly, so extreme a verdict has been rejected by most scholars. Admittedly, some incidental accounts and attributions relating to the poetry – such as an elegy by Adam on the death of Abel – are manifest fantasies and are to be discounted. More stubborn difficulties arise from the apparent uniformity of language in the compositions of poets said to belong to different, widely scattered tribes; but the existence of a literary idiom shared by many does not strain credibility if there were occasions on which poets met and vied with one another. Besides, dialects are not rigidly exclusive and impervious, as present-day folk poets demonstrate when they form puns by exploiting linguistic characteristics of different regions. Above all, the corpus handed down is too substantial and too self-consistent to be globally discredited. For it to have been fraudulently created would have required not only a 7 This is Ta¯ha¯ Husayn (1889–1973), in his Fi sˇ-Sˇi ri l-Ja¯hilı¯, ‘On Pre-Islamic ˙ ˙ Poetry,’ Cairo, Da¯ru l-Kutub, 1926. Although his conclusion is overstated, many of the observations leading to it deserve close attention.

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11

THE ROOT

large number of highly gifted forgers, but also large-scale collusion on the character it was to be given. Even if there was some sifting, some redaction, some filling of lacunae, some falsification, these would have passed muster only if they fitted in with existing models and fell into an existing pattern. The tendency would be to accentuate the pattern, not to subvert it. As is true of any ancient literature orally transmitted, specific texts need to be approached critically, cautiously. But the general character of the pre-Islamic poetry handed down may be taken to be authentic – possibly with one corrective. For the total absence of any expression of religious loyalty in it calls for some questioning. A widely accepted view is that religion sat lightly on the nomads’ shoulders, and an ideal of muru¯ a, ‘manliness’, did duty instead. But if so, why was there such violent opposition to the preaching of Islam? Why were there hundreds of idols for the Prophet to destroy in Mecca? Is it not odd that the few references to these idols in a literary context are in derogatory anecdotes? An instance of this is the story that when Imru u-l-Qays’s father was killed, the poet consulted an idol to find out if the time was propitious for him to take revenge, but the arrows he drew repeatedly counseled “no action” until he flung them in the face of the false god saying, “If it was your father who had been killed, you would not be holding me back!” Later in Islam, not a few anecdotes had currency such as that a man pretending to be Moses was brought for judgment before the prince, who challenged him to turn his staff into a serpent; the man countered, “First you must say as did Pharaoh, ‘I know of no lord of yours other than myself (Qur a¯n 28:38)” and the prince released him rather than utter such words. Apocryphal as the story undoubtedly is, it shows how reluctant a Muslim was to put an impious statement into his mouth, let alone the mouth of an honoured forefather. Is it not likely that – formally at least – the poetry proudly recited as one’s ancestors’ glorious achievement abounded in invocations to pagan deities, later bowdlerized? There is another aspect of life in pre-Islamic Arabia on which the poetry is silent. The Arabs were no strangers to sea-faring, to fishing and pearl-diving. They had mercantile cities plagued with social tensions, of which the plight of orphans, often mentioned in

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12

THE ROOT

the Qur a¯n, was a symptom. At the heart of the malaise was the fact that enterprising merchants did not feel responsible for kinsmen who – perhaps deservedly – had fallen on evil days as tribesmen did. What is more, the city dwellers had links with politically advanced neighbours – Byzantine Syria, Abyssinia, Persia. They had a regular trade, with Mecca as its hub, requiring secure caravan routes through the territories of several tribes. The fact that there were agreed months of truce, fairs serving a wide territory, a pantheon in Mecca housing the idols of many tribes, implies some progression towards – and a growing need for – broader loyalties than to the tribe. But the evidence is that poetry was born of nomadic desert life, and it is the ethos of this nomadic desert life that its conventions perpetuated. It is in this sense that poetry was said to be “the record of the Arabs”, The ideal of muru¯ a which glorified a readiness to ride instantly into action at the slightest threat to one’s honour or interests, without a moment’s hesitation to reckon the likely cost, fitted the experience of the desert tribesman, but it could command only lip-service from the canny, calculating merchant, or the responsible civic leader. It was for the new religion first preached in Mecca to offer an answer to new needs.

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13

2 THE STEM

Chapter 26 of the Qur a¯n is entitled “The Poets”, and it culminates in verses which read: “The poets are followed by the misguided. Have you not seen that they wander in this valley and that, and that they say what they do not do – except those who have believed, who do good deeds, remember God constantly, and have prevailed after they were wronged?” It is tempting to see in this passage a blanket condemnation of poets and their imaginative ways. But the Prophet is known to have been fond of poetry, and he had his own champions among poets. The poets targeted by the Qur a¯n were specifically the pre-Islamic ones, who were the guardians and spokesmen of the ethos of the nomadic tribes. Unlike the merchants of Mecca and of other cities who needed long-term planning, cautious consideration of their options, and measured enterprises, the Prophet’s tribe of Quraysˇ being particularly noted for its staidness and prudence, the desert Arab “with his hand against every man and every man’s hand against him”, could survive only if he was ready to spring into bold and dangerous action, without pausing to calculate the risks involved, the moment he or his fellow-tribesmen were challenged. Such headstrong qualities appear to have come within the connotations of the word ja¯hil, which cannot have had entirely pejorative connotations since Amr ibn-Kultu¯m in his mu allaqa boasted of his tribe’s fearsome power with the words:

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Let no one act the ja¯hil against us, Else we shall be more ja¯hil than all ja¯hils.

15

THE STEM

It is against this ethos rooted in a narrow tribal loyalty, and against the poets who celebrated it, that the Qur a¯n fulminated, and eventually the word ja¯hil came to mean merely “ignorant” and the pre-Islamic period, ignorant as it was of God’s will for His creation, became known as the Ja¯hiliyya. Instead, Islam was to institute a “brotherhood of believers” in which “an Arab has no pre-eminence over a non-Arab except he be more pious”, making the Arabs not only the propagators of a world faith but also the catalysts, and their language the medium, of a many-faceted culture. The transformation, however, was not effected overnight. The first century and a half after the death of the Prophet in 632 was to witness a vast expansion of Islam and the rapid creation of an empire engulfing Persia to the East and Hellenized territories in the Fertile Crescent and North Africa. But it was also a period of great turmoil. A widespread apostasy within Arabia had to be put down by force of arms; Caliphs were murdered; the great schism occurred between the Sunnites or orthodox Muslims, and the Shiites1 who held that the Caliphate ought to be restricted to kinsmen of the Prophet, beginning with Alı¯ ibn- Abı¯-Ta¯lib, who ˙ was the Prophet’s cousin and his son-in-law. Power struggles enlisting religious and ethnic interests flared and led to the foundation of the Umayyad dynasty, with its capital in Damascus, in 661, before authority passed in 749 to the Abbasids, with their seat in Iraq. The poetic production contemporary with the Prophet and immediately following his death is generally considered somewhat disappointing, presumably because the poets were disoriented by the challenge to their traditional function and values. But it was not long before the old standards reasserted themselves. It was usual for a budding poet to serve a kind of apprenticeship by acting as rhapsodist to an established master; when he reached competence, he would acquire a rhapsodist of his own who would perpetuate the process. There was in fact such a direct line of succession from the pre-Islamic Zuhayr all the way to Kutayyir (660–723).

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1 The partisans of Alı¯ were first known as his sˇı¯ a. The word has passed into English as ‘Shiah’, and from it was formed that adjective ‘Shiite’.

16

THE STEM

There were of course new allegiances to proclaim, new notions to express and new images to unfold. Ka b (d.648/9) the son of Zuhayr, on his way to make obeisance to the new power in Medina, composed an ode which began conventionally with an amorous prelude in which the poet recalled his unrequited love for Su a¯d, then went on to praise the Prophet and his companions in terms that include some new metaphors, but otherwise might equally have been applied to a tribal chief (bası¯t/lu¯): ˙

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I am told that the Apostle of God has threatened me, But I have hope of the Apostle’s forgiveness. Soft! May you be guided by Him who gave you the gift Of the Qur a¯n with its admonitions and expositions. ... The Apostle is truly a light by which one is illumined, A drawn blade of Indian make among the swords of God, In a company of Quraysˇ, of whom one called out While yet in Mecca: “Off [to Medina]!” They went and it was no weaklings who went, Not shieldless or mountless or swordless in battle. ... They neither rejoice when their lances attain a tribe, Nor are they distressed when attained. They never are gashed except in the neck, And never retreat from the fields of slaughter.

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Hassa¯n ibn-Ta¯bit (d. before 661), the poet closest to the Prophet, ˙ adapted traditional themes to new purposes, as in his reminiscing (tawı¯l/du¯): ˙ In Tayba are traces of the Messenger, and associations ˙ That shine while other traces fade and their fire dies out. Indelible are the signs in a hallowed site Where stands the pulpit which the Guide used to ascend. Immediate successors also give evidence of their attachment to the new order, with some appropriate new values and new images

17

THE STEM

mingled with inherited ones. But even after Islam was wellestablished, there were those who were wary of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, Muhammad ibn-Muna¯dir (d.814) urging ˙ that discourse should be of the divine law but also (munsarih/ru¯): ˙ . . . Of the wonders of our ja¯hilliyya For it is wisdom and experience. There are, in fact, in the first century of Islam remarkably few expressions of religious fervour except in the poetry of the Kharijites. These were once supporters of Alı¯ in his contest for the Caliphate against the Umayyads, but they broke away in 657 when he agreed to arbitration instead of doing battle, for in their eyes he was setting the judgment of humans above that of the Lord of Hosts. They then isolated themselves in communities rigidly observant of religious practices and intolerant of all others. In return, they were mercilessly hunted down by their former allies. Their appellation is derived from the Arabic root xaraja, ‘to go out’, so that xa¯rijı¯, (plural xawa¯rij) means ‘a seceder’, one who has opted out. It is not without some irony that the term came virtually to mean ‘a heretic’ whereas it is their religious fervour that their many fine poets express. Thus the intrepid warrior Qatarı¯ ibn-al-Fuja¯ a (d.698/9) (rajaz/a¯dah): ˙

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Till when shall martyrdom pass me by, When death to us is an ornamental collar? No wont of ours is flight from strife. To piety, Lord, swell my devotion, Then increase my spurning of life. Similarly, Abu¯-Bila¯l Mirda¯s (d.680/1) trumpeted his defiance (bası¯t/ ˙ a¯lı¯):

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We care nothing, once our souls depart, What you do with our limbs or bodies. It is Paradise we seek when our skulls are laid Beneath the dust like crumbling colocynth. I am one whom the Lord despatches to His tryst When other hearts collapse for fear of calamities.

18

THE STEM

The earth has given me what it now reclaims, And my deeds are offered for the final reckoning. And I¯sa¯ ibn- A¯tik al-Xattı¯ most specifically proclaimed his priorities ˙˙ (wa¯fir/mı¯):

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My father is Islam, none else, Though others boast of Bakr or of Tamı¯m. Each of the tribes champions its pretender, To make him out of noble stock. Yet there is no nobility, though lofty be the origins: Only the pious have nobility. The Arabs did in fact long retain their tribal loyalties, and even carried them far from their original home, for much ancestral pride was invested in them. Even though – Islamic teaching apart – it was in the long term interest of the Caliphs and their governors to wean their subjects from narrow affiliations, they were not always consistent in their policy, for often the easiest way of putting down a fractious tribe was to levy a punitive force from its traditional enemies. And as non-Arabs converted to Islam, old habits of thought were perpetuated in that it was under the name of mawa¯lı¯, i.e. tribal clients, that they were integrated into the community. The persistence of old standards is nowhere more explicit than in the long and fierce poetic vendetta fought by Jarı¯r (c.653–729) and al-Farazdaq (c.640–728), lambasting each other personally and belittling the tribe that each of them championed, in poems that were mostly unrestrained and often scabrous streams of vituperation, publicly declaimed and widely circulated, each inviting a counterblast using the same metre and rhyme. In one, al-Farazdaq echoed Amr ibn-Kultu¯m’s pre-Islamic boast (ka¯mil/ a¯lı¯):

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By the weight of mountains is our staidness measured, But our ja¯hil outdoes all other ja¯hils! Jarı¯r’s response was a poem recounting ancient battles in which al-Farazdaq’s tribe had been humiliated, dwelling not only on its

19

THE STEM

inability to protect its women, but also on the double slur that its men were incapable of satisfying their oversexed women: There the Laha¯zim kept toying with women On a day when they stank of urine, Weeping of an evening for fear of captivity, As they lay amid baggage and saddlery – Let it not escape you that the Muja¯sˇi Have the semblance of men, but men they are not – Like hyenas the women sniff at the exhausted male, And over a distended penis they moo for three nights.

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And later in the same poem he said of his rival’s aunt, a highly respected lady: Sakı¯na wishes that her neighbourhood mosque Had pillars consisting of penises of mules. Al-Farazdaq is said to have admitted that this was the most hurtful line directed at him, because he could never enter a mosque without being reminded of it. Indeed a satirist was never so successful as when he gave currency to a highly quotable line, to which sly indirect reference could be made even in the victim’s presence, high-placed though he might be. How stubborn the old loyalties were is shown when, in yet another poem, Jarı¯r reversed Islamic priorities by using religious history to bolster the reputation of the Mudar group of tribes ˙ against its rival (ka¯mil/na¯): He Who denied the Taxlib all claims to honour Has placed both prophethood and caliphate with us. The hold of the past was further strengthened by the scholarship that took shape at the time. The need to ensure a correct interpretation of the Scriptures, all the more urgent as non-Arabs in huge numbers adopted Islam as their faith and Arabic as their language, stimulated the study and codification of grammar and lexicography. Remarkably keen and industrious men of learning

20

THE STEM

recorded every idiom, every variant, every peculiarity of speech of Arabian origin that reached their ears. They questioned every nomad coming into town, and even caused some amusement by their fondness for recondite locutions which they called xarı¯b, ‘rarities’, and these some of the glib beduins were all too willing to produce. But it was in pre-Islamic poetry that they found their most precious and abundant source material, and on it and on the Qur a¯n they built what came to be known as the traditional sciences. Most directly relevant to literature was the prosodic system devised by al-Xalı¯l ibn- Ahmad (718–91). He worked out the ˙ rhythmic patterns he found in pre-Islamic poetry, added a couple that blended with them, and ended with sixteen metres. Yet one of these metres, the rajaz, is set apart from all the others, so that a composition in rajaz is never designated by the word usually applied to a poem but is called an urju¯za (plural: ara¯jı¯z), and its author was known as a ra¯jiz and not as a sˇa¯ ir. Just why so sharp a distinction is made remains a puzzle to many scholars,2 for there are early instances of its use in ways and for purposes similar to those of other metres. Possibly the fact that it allows for many variations in scansion made it a favourite for improvizations. At any rate, it came to be used mainly for the versification of scientific and other non-poetical material, and then not as a monorhyme but with only the hemistichs of the same line rhyming with each other. Evidently the words sˇi r and qası¯da were initially reserved for ˙ monorhyme odes in specified metres, although their use has been extended to ‘poetry’ and ‘poem’ of any kind. Scholarship undoubtedly favoured some antiquarianism. When Ibn-Qutayba in the introduction to his critical Book of Poetry and Poets, proclaimed that he would judge fairly, giving no precedence to the Ancients merely because they were ancient, he was bearing witness to what was in fact the prevailing assumption. Monorhyme compositions in one of the classical metres remained standard until

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2 See Manfred Ullmann, Untersuchungen zur Ragˇazpoesie, Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 1966. Extensive rajaz texts from the Umayyad period are being edited by Jaakko Ha¨meen-Anttila, and published in successive volumes by the Finnish Oriental Society in Helsinki.

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THE STEM

the middle of the twentieth century, but it was not only in its formal characteristics that the criteria set by the pre-Islamic poets proved not undeservedly dominant. There were enough residual tribal loyalties, enough attachment to the pristine values of forefathers, even some nostalgia for desert life, to make a great deal of early Islamic poetry, such as that of Du-r-Rumma (d.735), consonant with its antecedents. Yet the conditions under which Arabs lived and functioned were being transformed, and changes in literary practice were bound to follow. The most consequential in the long run was that eulogies and satires were brought into the service not only of tribal pride, but also of religious and political factions. There was an ideological element in the support of the Sˇı¯ a, but praise of the ruling Umayyads was more rewarding, seducing such as al-Kumayt (c.679–744) and Kutayyir (d.723) away from their sympathies for the descendants of Alı¯. By becoming the eulogist of the Umayyads, the Christian al- Axtal (d. c.710), who is also famous for his wine˙ songs, pointed the way to what eventually became the brightest prospect for the professional poet: court patronage. Of greater aesthetic interest was the emergence of two schools of love-poets, one centred in the main cities of Arabia that was flirtatious and self-indulgent, the other associated with desert tribes and noted for constancy in love. Of the first, the most celebrated exponent was Umar ibn- Abı¯Rabı¯ a (644–712 or 721) who wrote (xafı¯f/a¯bı¯):

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Bring her out, swaying like a wild cow Amid five of her age, with swelling breasts. A cloistered one is she, the texture of her cheeks Suffused with the water of youth – The icon of an assiduous monk, Fashioned beside the altar. “Do you love her?” they asked. Said I, “Much – To the number of stars and pebbles and grains of dust!” Her fatal charms, her neck, enhanced By a colouring that glittered like gold, Recalled the glory of the sun Emerging from darkness and clouds.

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THE STEM

Playful as his fancies were, they could take extravagant turns, even allowing for the fact that it was conventional in Arab love poetry to praise a woman for the coolness and sweetness of her saliva (tawı¯l/ ˙ amı¯): Would that I, as death approached, Could sense what lies between your eyes and mouth. Would that the bathing of my corpse were with your saliva, And my embalming be of your cartilage and blood! Would that in death my bedmate be Sulayma¯ Over there – in Paradise or Hell! How bold the city poets could be is exemplified by what UbaydAlla¯h ibn-Qays ar-Ruqayya¯t (c.636–99) composed about the wife of the heir to the Umayyad throne when she accompanied her husband on a pilgrimage to the holy cities (wa¯fir/buha¯):

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In my sleep she came to me, and I said, “This is the time to have commerce with her.” When I had had my joy of her, And the sweetest of her inclined to me, I drank from her lips until I was filled, And still went on to drink of her. I was her bedmate through the night, elated, She pleasing me, I pleasing her. I made her laugh, I made her cry, I dressed her and I stripped her. I fondled her and she embraced me; I coddled her and angered her. It was a night that – in a dream – we spent In fellowship and sport. The desert poets, on the contrary, celebrated in chaste terms the frustrated but undying love each of them experienced for one woman. Around each is woven a story so stereotyped that it has been suggested it belongs to folk narrative rather than history: the poet falls in love with a woman whom he is not allowed to marry

23

THE STEM

for a variety of reasons – one of which, unattested elsewhere, is that tribal mores forbade the union of any two whose love had become public knowledge – or else he does marry her but is forced to divorce her; he then expresses his yearning to the end of life and even beyond. Typical is the story of Qays ibn-al-Mulawwah ˙ (d. 689?), who became mad with love of his Layla¯ and is therefore known as Majnu¯n-Layla¯, which means literally Layla¯’s madman. The other beduin love-poets also often had their name linked with that of their beloved – thus Kutayyir- Azza ( Azza’s Kutayyir), and Jamı¯l-Butayna (Butayna’s Jamı¯l). They stand in striking contrast with Ubayd-Alla¯h, to whose name the plural ‘ar-Ruqayya¯t’ was added because among the ladies whose charms he sang were three who shared the name Ruqayya! In Arabic, the poetry belonging to the less wayward beduin tradition is usually called udrı¯, ostensibly because perhaps its main exponent, Jamı¯l ibn-Ma mar (d.701), belonged to the tribe of Banu¯- Udra, but by a felicitous coincidence the word udrı¯ also means ‘virginal’. Fanciful though the accounts may be, the poetry is usually delicate and sometimes touches depths of universal experience, although it does not always escape the abrupt changes of direction that result from treating each line as a self-contained unit. Thus Jamı¯l ibn-Ma mar (tawı¯l/du¯): ˙

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Whatever I forget, it shall not be her words As she approached my meagre camel, “Is it for Egypt you make?” Nor her saying, “But for the watching eyes, I should have come to you. Forgive, my fathers be your ransom!” O my friends! The passion I would hide is manifest, And my tears this morning bear witness to what I would conceal. By God, I can see that many a tear As our parting extends shall more profusely flow. If I say, “The love in me, o Butayna, is fatal to me,” She answers, “It abides, and shall increase.” If I say, “Restore some of my reason that I may live Among men,” she answers, “Far is it from your reach!”

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THE STEM

So neither was I refused what I came requesting Nor does her love, among all things that perish, perish. Be requited with reproaches, Butayna, At a time when lovers are praised as they part. I told her, “Between us abide – mark it well! – A covenant of God’s, and promises. My love for you was new, and it was old – And love is nothing if not new and old.” A case can be made that there is very little in this love poetry for which no antecedents may be found in pre-Islamic models, for there were even then poets reputed to be enslaved by love, known as al-mutayyamu¯n. But – in addition to an occasional startlingly new notion, such as Jamı¯l’s invocation of a divine covenant between lovers – one can sense in these later poets a more gently nuanced intimacy, and some reflections of a more advanced social life as well as a more merciful environment than that of the desert. So it is that – rare as yet – one comes across instances of the poet bringing Nature into sympathy with his own mood, as in Majnu¯n Layla¯’s (tawı¯l/bu¯): ˙ Dove in the wood, why do you weep? Has a consort left, or a lover been unkind? Passion and yearning called out to you when, movingly, The hailer of the morning trilled, Echoing doves that hearkened to her voice, Each to each kindly and responsive. These love poets dwelt mostly on their own sentiments, but it is also worthwhile to record an uncommonly detailed description of a beautiful woman by a traditional poet, al-Marra¯r al- Adawı¯ (d.718) (ramal/ir or ur):

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Pleasing in her is a brilliant white complexion Delighting the eye, and long abundant hair; In its coils the pin is lost to sight, But if she lets it down it sweeps the ground,

25

THE STEM

Curly and thick, set on a large head, and falling On either side in girth-like tresses. Broad in the forehead, she is one Excelling other women in brightness of the brow. She has the eyes of an antelope, alone with her fawn, Stretching to crop the lote trees and acacias. In smiles, her teeth are camomile flowers, Serrated and set off in darkened gums. Taste her mouth and you will find it like Honey freshened with cold snow. Fair and smooth is her cheek, long her neck, Her breasts still forming, not folding over yet, Thrusting forward her shift with the likes of oryx noses, In a plump bosom, not wanting in flesh. Slender of waist, spare in the flank, But full below, where the girdle is tightened. Her buttocks fill her indoor shift, Like hillocks of sand ranged side by side. When she walks out to visit neighbours, She scarcely reaches them without losing breath, Her inner thighs flapping against each other, And she swaying like a palm-tree being rooted up, Her legs apart as she approaches, Large her body, heavy her hips, swinging her gait. Seventy weights of silver go to make her anklets, Yet when she forces them on, they break! All the while, non-Arab converts to Islam were adopting the language of the Revelation as also the language of their intellectual pursuits, without jettisoning their own cultural heritage altogether. Sooner than might have been expected, some were integrated into the Arabic poetic scene. Eminent among these was Basˇsˇa¯r ibn-Burd (c.714–84), who was of Persian descent and whose attachment to Islam was so suspect that he was put to death. Yet he was a master not only of Arabic but also of its poetic tradition, so that although he was blind from birth he could handle themes of which he had no personal experience with vigour and a somewhat distinctive imagination, as when he described (tawı¯l/ibuh): ˙ 26

THE STEM

. . . An army like a wing of night, advancing Through pebble and thorn, its lances red-tipped. We set forth when the sun, still under its mother’s veil Looked out upon us, the dew as yet unthawed. And we dealt blows that no one tasted but he tasted death, Disgrace overtaking those who saved themselves in flight. The dust raised high above our heads and our flashing swords Resembling a night of falling stars. But he could also compose light amorous verses, with an incidental reference to Ha¯ru¯t, one of the angels mentioned in the Qur a¯n as having taught sorcery to the Babylonians (ka¯mil/ra¯):

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Black-eyed, when she looks at you, It is wine that her eyes pour out. Resonant, her words are like Stretches of meadow clothed in flowers, As if, from under her tongue, Ha¯ru¯t was breathing magic, And what her clothes enfold You fancy to be gold and perfume. She is like a cold and limpid draught Which you drink when breaking a fast – A genie, a human, Or more imposing still: an in-between! An anecdote revealing both Basˇsˇa¯r’s mischievous sense of humour and the concern of contemporary scholars has it that he once told friends that an ass of his that had died appeared to him in a dream, told him that he had died of love for a beautiful jenny and recited a poem (ramal/a¯nı¯) he had composed on the subject. It contained a line in which he spoke of the jenny having a cheek equal to the “sˇayfara¯nı¯’s”. Inevitably, a member of his audience asked what that was. Basˇsˇa¯r closed the trap he had baited by saying that he did not know – it must have been an instance of asses’ xarı¯b and the enquirer should address his question to the next ass that he met!

27

THE STEM

Finally, a governmental development was to have far-reaching effects on the literature. The first rulers over the empire had relied on local civil servants to run the business of government, and these kept their records in their own languages until the Umayyad Caliph Abd-al-Malik, who ruled from 685 to 705, ordered that chancery documents be in Arabic. This forced the language into areas with which it had not previously been familiar. It also gave employment, prestige, and power to those who could handle it expertly. Out of the efforts of the Secretariat was to grow a recognized prose literature in which the “epistle” had pride of place. Until then, the eloquence of orators had been celebrated, and material of literary value, including accounts (some of which may have been fictional) concerning the poets, had been incorporated in histories and in accounts of the Prophet’s deeds and sayings, known as hadı¯t in ˙ Arabic or ‘Traditions’ in English. But none of this had been isolated as creative literary activity. As for the Qur a¯n, although it became an intimate part of every educated Muslim’s consciousness and often quoted, it was held to be superhuman and inimitable. Now, however, reputations were built on the skill displayed in prose compositions, and it is in this connection that the word adab acquired a literary sense. Earlier usage of derivatives from the same root most commonly conveys the sense of “training”, sometimes also of “custom”. If in addition there has been some conflation with adb, which denotes a sustained or habitual activity,3 then an official’s adab would be his usual practice, his expertise, his accomplishments, one of which would be the ability to compose good letters. Out of the epistle a variety of essay-like prose pieces eventually developed which became the nucleus of an abundant prose output, so that the word adab acquired other connotations, and eventually it was extended to mean ‘literature’ in general. At this early stage, however, inasmuch as the content of an official letter was of no intrinsic literary import and might even have been determined by a superior, it was the writer’s linguistic and stylistic competence that was at a premium. Accordingly, the first prose

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28

THE STEM

writers to acquire notoriety were state officials such as Abd-alHamı¯d al-Ka¯tib (c.685–750) who in fact wrote an epistle on the ˙ qualities and expertise required of a secretary. Another such official, the Persian Ru¯zbı¯h, more commonly known by the Arabic name Abd-Alla¯h ibn-al-Muqaffa (d.757?), also wrote a book on the adab of secretaries, but in addition he produced the first recognized and enduring work of Arabic prose literature: a collection of fables of Indian origin which he translated from Persian under the title of Kalı¯la wa Dimna, the names given to two jackal narrators appearing in it. However, state officials – especially in other branches of government than the Secretariat – needed not only the ability to manipulate words, but also technical skills (to calculate taxes and measure taxable property, for example) which in turn depended on a wide competence in sciences. The need was supplied by Syrian Christians who – better than the Byzantines, who balked at features of Greek thought that offended their Christian sensibilities – had long been the guardians of Hellenistic culture. Having previously translated works of Greek philosophy and science into Syriac, they were now to practise their expertise and propagate it in Arabic. The effect on literature was not immediate, but familiarity with Greek logic is evident in the theological debates that raged at the time. It is under the Caliph al-Ma mu¯n (813–33) that large-scale and systematic translation of Greek works was undertaken, and later still that Islamic orthodoxy got a firm and lasting formulation. But already in the last decades of the eighth century, to the poetic tradition of the Arabs and the teachings of the Qur a¯n were added the creative energies and cultural affinities of non-Arab subject peoples and the stimulation of Greek thought. These were the main ingredients to be integrated in a brilliant civilization that is best termed Islamic rather than Arab, but of which Arabic was the principal medium of expression. With the benefit of the stability and prosperity brought about under the Abbasid dynasty, Arabic literature entered upon centuries of solid achievement.

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3 THE BIFURCATION

Arabic literature has been substantially shaped by a number of interrelated constants that will feature in successive chapters, but that it is useful to identify at this point. There is no word for “Arabia” in Arabic. It is most commonly known as “the country of the Arabs,” and even the word for “country” is a plural, so that perhaps the phrase is better translated as “the settlements of the Arabs”. At any rate, the land was attributed to the people, not the people to the land. Furthermore, the word for “Arabs” – a collective noun, not a plural – derives from a root which most commonly denotes articulateness or expressiveness. A woman who wears her heart on her sleeve, for example, is said to be aru¯b. The Arabs were, originally, those who could make themselves understood. And somewhat more pointedly than the Greeks’ description of other nations as “barbarians”, the Arabs’ earliest word for “others” – in early usage, the Persians – was ajam, derived from a root which primarily means “crunching with the teeth”, often connotes indistinctness and also produces a jam, the word for brute animals. From the start, therefore, what made Arabs recognizable to one another was not a geographic or an ethnic feature, but a language. These Arabs burst into literary history with an imposing corpus of pre-Islamic poems so firm in structure, so consistent in character and even so full of conventions that, although the earliest texts are from the fifth century, they appear to be the result of a long development. Furthermore, their language seems closer to protoSemitic than are other branches of the same family recorded earlier. This has led Sabatino Moscati to infer that, because life in the

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31

T H E B I F U R C AT I O N

desert is an endless repetition of the same annual cycle, conservatism was deeply ingrained in the Arabs. These features are not without parallel in other cultures, and could not be expected to colour the very wide role that Arabic was soon to play on the world scene, if it had not been for two other interrelated factors that were to give linguistic standards uncommon prominence in Arabic literature. The first was dogmas concerning the Qur a¯n; the second was the challenge to Arab self-esteem. The Qur a¯n asserts in more than one passage that the revelation has been sent down in Arabic, and in 12:2 it describes itself specifically as “an Arabic Qur a¯n”, and as a glorious text in a guarded tablet (85:22). In time, after heated debates between theologians, it became dogma that it was the uncreated word of God, existing from the beginning of time. Furthermore, the challenge it issued to unbelievers to produce a su¯ra – i.e., a chapter – comparable to it (2:23) was taken to refer not so much to its contents as to its inimitable eloquence, and its revelation on the tongue of the Prophet became his authenticating miracle. Accordingly, the authoritative commentaries aim primarily at bringing out every meaning that the text may possibly convey, and to do this they look closely into the syntax and diction of the text, also into rhetorical devices when these lead beyond the literal sense of the words. They may also dwell on complicated technicalities of language, as when Bayda¯wı¯ (d. between ˙ 1282 and 1291), discussing – in his authoritative Commentary – the letters that occur separately at the beginning of several chapters of the Qur a¯n, offers various explanations of their signification. These include some that exploit the numerical value of letters to suggest that they may have predictive functions concerning history. Attractive as these may be, the view to which Bayda¯wı¯ gives the greatest amount of ˙ space is that they include significant proportions of each phonetic group of letters, and he expresses a preference for this over all other interpretations, deeming it “more in keeping with the subtleties of revelation”, for “coming from an illiterate man who has not mingled with the lettered” – as the Prophet was deemed to be – “it is seen as improbable, wonderful, miraculous”.1

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1 See P. Cachia, “Bayda¯wı¯ on the Fawa¯tih”, Journal of Semitic Studies, 13, 2 ˙ ˙ (Autumn 1968), pp. 218–231.

32


All this gave the language a sacred character. It was essential to the study of religion and of many other subjects related to it, including law. It had a part in the devotions even of the unscholarly. It spread with the spread of Islam. It became the basic medium of expression of an entire civilization, so that – as a result of different forces from the ones that prevailed initially – an Arab to-day is best defined as someone whose first language is Arabic rather than someone descended from Arabian stock. And since it was tied to a timeless text, Arabic became strongly resistant to change. Islam also released the energies that early Arabians expended in inter-tribal conflicts, so that they quickly conquered a vast empire, which included nations steeped in the culture of the Persians and the Byzantines. Most of these nations adopted Islam, and Arabic with it. But, for all that Islam proclaims the brotherhood of all believers, the conquerors were slow to divest themselves of tribal loyalties or ancestral pride. The dictum “to the victor the spoils” fitted in with their past experience, and the inherited system under which they could integrate the new Muslims was to regard them as mawa¯lı¯, i.e. tribal clients. Initially, the original Arabians were a genuine military e´lite, and even after they had lost their political and cultural primacy, they tried to cling to their superior status. This did not sit well with the more sophisticated converts. The tension increased and became functional after the Caliph Abd-alMalik late in the seventh century decreed that state records be kept in Arabic, so that command of the language became the key to high office, and non-Arabs found themselves at a disadvantage. With growing acrimony, the Arabs of Arabian descent were derided as “camel-drivers and lizard-eaters”. To this, the most effective counter was to exalt the language in which the Revelation had come – and this no convert to Islam could gainsay – and the undeniably magnificent poetry to which it had given rise. The linkage of the language with this poetry was all the more intimate as the poems provided the lexical underpinning for the interpretation of the Scriptures. Linguistic and literary conservatism were closely coupled, reinforcing each other. The practice of the early poets, pagan though they were, became a binding criterion, revealingly called “the tent-pole of poetry”. The critic Ibn-Qutayba

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(828–89) – while protesting that he was not one to favour the Ancients merely because they were ancient – yet wrote in connection with the classical tripartite ode: Later poets have no right to deviate from the ways of the Ancients in any of these divisions. Thus they may not halt by an inhabited dwelling or weep over a permanent edifice as the Ancients halted by a deserted encampment or half-effaced traces of a dwelling. They may not travel on an ass or a mule and neither may they describe them, as the Ancients traveled on camels, male and female. They may not come to limpid running water as the Ancients made their way to brackish and turbid waterpoints. On their way to the patron who is to be eulogized, they may not traverse lands adorned with narcissi or myrtles or roses, as the Ancients were accustomed to faring over tracts covered with speedwell or hanwa, or ˙ ox-eye. And in the tenth century, it was deemed part of the formation of the most highly admired of Arab poets, al-Mutanabbı¯ (915–65), that he had spent some time sharing the life of a Beduin tribe. It became commonplace to claim that eloquence was natural to an Arab, and a saying was attributed to the Prophet that God had sent down excellence on three human organs: the hearts of the Greeks, the hands of the Chinese, and the tongues of the Arabs. Insensitive to the ironic use that could be made of it, Arab literary critics went on quoting this saying until late in the nineteenth century. In reality, changes were bound to take place, and did take place, both in linguistic practice and in literary conventions. But by the educated minority who, in century after century, determined what was to be admitted to the canon and what was not, these changes were resisted, minimized, or ignored. How literary practice was affected in succeeding centuries will become apparent in the next chapters; but a summary view of the way that linguistic conservatism functioned in changing conditions is instructive at this point. Some differences in linguistic usage are known to have existed among the tribes even in pre-Islamic times, and are reflected in the

34


few minimal variants allowed in Qur anic recitation. They were bound to be multiplied and magnified as the tribes scattered in a vast empire and the language came to be used by different ethnic groups and in widely differing contexts. By the second half of the eighth century, the gaps had widened sufficiently to cause problems for arbiters of taste. Basˇsˇa¯r ibn-Burd (714–784) was accused of using “Nabatean jargon” and a little later Abu-l- Ata¯hiya (748–828) was similarly reproached for having “brought the language of the market-place into poetry”. Yet one cannot detect traces of such intrusions in the texts that have survived them, and one must surmise that these were expurgated. Even more tellingly, al-Ja¯hiz (c.776–868/9) in the next generation ˙ ˙ records jokes built on misunderstandings between desert Arabs, who reportedly still spoke inflected Arabic, and city dwellers who did not. Yet the literary establishment, urban though it was, set its face hard against the admission of any form of spoken Arabic into the canon. An apocryphal but revealing anecdote intended to account for a non-classical verse form known as the mawa¯liya¯, which is not attested until the twelfth century, nevertheless links it with the fall from Ha¯ru¯n ar-Rasˇı¯d’s favour of the powerful Barmecide family in 803. It has it that the Caliph then decreed that no poetry be composed in honour of the former viziers. Yet one of his own slave girls sang a four-line mawa¯liya¯ bemoaning their fate, and when called to account for her deed, the defence she offered was that this was not sˇi r, ‘poetry’, because it was not grammatically inflected. It is in Andalusia – presumably because it was not completely Islamized or Arabized – that, in the tenth century, a small breach is found in the fortified walls of classicism. This was in an innovation: an elaborate kind of strophic poem known as the muwasˇsˇah, ˙ composed entirely in the classical language except for the closing line or couplet, which is in a mixture of Arabic and Spanish. What is even more significant is that the muwasˇsˇah is almost certainly ˙ derived from a simpler form of folk poetry, the zajal, which is entirely in the local vernacular. It is true that in the literary record the zajal appeared later than the muwasˇsˇah, but this ties in with the ˙ persistent reluctance of the learned to commit folk texts to writing. And once it had broken the surface of literary history, the zajal

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gained sufficient currency in Spain to earn notoriety for one of its masters, Ibn-Quzma¯n (c.1086–1160). The zajal eventually spread to other parts of the Arab world, the term being sometimes loosely used for all verse compositions in the colloquial. To it were added descriptions of several other nonclassical verse forms, including the mawa¯liya¯ mentioned above. It became customary to refer to these departures from the classical monorhyme as “the seven arts” although they were more numerous, for it was not always the same seven that were included in different collections. The first study of the kind was by a well-established poet in Iraq, Safiyy-ad-Dı¯n al-Hillı¯ (1278–c.1349). Characteristically, he ˙ ˙ confessed that he had composed a great deal in these various forms in his misguided youth, but had retained only enough of these immature efforts to illustrate his treatise. Some present-day collectors of folk literature are equally apologetic about their efforts. Following al-Hillı¯, other reputable poets occasionally toyed with ˙ non-classical verse forms involving colloquial usage, but their compositions along these lines were regarded as curiosities or humorous sallies at best, and were usually excluded from their collected works. This has been true even of a major modern poet such as Ahmad Sˇawqı¯ (1868–1932). The latest compilation of his ˙ ˙ poetry ignores his zajal altogether. And in a nine-volume edition of his complete works,2 his zajals are relegated to the end of the last volume, long after the focus has moved from his poetry to his prose and to his plays. Moreover, in his introductory volume the editor says of them and of the poet: “They are not worthy of him, but such is one of the impositions made by an environment in which the colloquial predominates”. In modern times, the insistence on “correct” classical usage for all serious writing does create difficulties for the journalist who tries to reach as wide a public as possible, or the scientist who relies on the colloquial for all his everyday contacts, depends heavily on Western sources for his research, yet has to record his own findings 2 The first of these two publications is asˇ-Sˇawqiyya¯t, ed. Alı¯ Abd-al-Mun im Abd-al-Hamı¯d, Cairo, asˇ-Sˇarikatu l-Misriyyatu l- A¯lamiyyatu li n-Nasˇr, 2000. ˙ ˙ The second is al-Mawsu¯ atu sˇ-Sˇawqiyya, ed. Ibra¯hı¯m al- Abya¯rı¯, Beirut, Da¯ru lKita¯bi l- Arabı¯, 1994–5; the quotation is from vol. 1, p. 527.

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in yet another medium of expression. Even schoolchildren have to learn their history and geography in a form of the language they do not speak at home. Nevertheless, departures from the inherited standard continue to be branded as “linguistic heresy”. Furthermore, the issue has been complicated by political passions, for the regional dialects are seen as divisive of the Arabs, and arguments for their use in writing are roundly condemned as the machinations of Zionists, imperialists, and colonialists. The man of letters too finds himself under some strain when dealing with the social realities of everyday life. There have therefore been occasional debates on the issue, but no radical change of emphasis. A formula widely adopted since the late nineteenth century has been the use of language as close to everyday speech as is allowed by classical grammar. Besides, the classical vocabulary has been expanded and adapted, although even this has been resisted, for as late as in the 1920s some diehards like ar-Ra¯fi ı¯ (1880–1937), still argued that only those ignorant of the treasures of Arabic needed neologisms or borrowings from other tongues. The admission of the vernacular into the literary canon, however, has been resisted by modernists and conservatives alike. In 1938, the leading Arab critic of the day, a staunch modernist and a stylist credited with having given the literary idiom much vigour and fluidity, Ta¯ha¯ Husayn (1889–1973), ˙ ˙ branded the colloquial form of the language as a corrupt dialect, unsuitable to the needs of advanced intellectual life, and he maintained his opposition to it to the end of his days, fearing that to open the door to it would lead to the splitting of Arabic into regional languages, as different from one another as the Romance languages now are. The vernacular has in fact carved a place for itself in plays and in the dialogue of narrative fiction, but attempts to generalize its use have made no headway. And the novelist best known outside the Arab world to-day, Najı¯b Mahfu¯z (1911–) still ˙ ˙ considers the colloquial “a social disease”.

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running about the streets” and turned his attention to the way they were formulated. And Ibn-Qutayba sorted poetry into four categories: Excellent both in wording and in ideas, superior in wording but short on ideas, attractive in ideas but poorly worded, and finally deficient in both. Evident in this stratification is not only the total separation of form and substance, but the precedence given to form. A contributory factor may have been that Aristotle’s Poetics and his Rhetoric were translated, but – presumably because of the paganism that informed them – not the literary works to which they, and especially the Poetics, are relevant. The prestige of Aristotle, by Arabs often called ‘the First Teacher’, may have lent to rhetorical skills an intrinsic and independent value. How this affected literary practice is discernible in most of the acknowledged masterpieces from the ninth century onward, but is most explicit in a confrontation that took place between two leading prose writers of the tenth century, al-Xuwa¯rizmı¯ (934–93), and Badı¯ -az-Zama¯n (i.e. ‘The Wonder of the Age’) al-Hamada¯nı¯ (968–1008). We have only the latter’s boastful account of the occasion, recorded in a collection of his Epistles. It is far from evenhanded or reliable in its details, but it leaves no doubt about the criteria by which the contestants were judged. It makes out that in answer to a challenge by al-Xuwa¯rizmı¯ a contest was held in the house of the vizier Abu-l-Qa¯sim al-Mustawfı¯ before a number of eminent men of learning. The duel was a protracted one. It included the improvization by each of a poem on a theme and with a rhyme chosen by the audience, followed by a full debate in which each criticized his rival’s composition and defended his own. The contestants then moved to the composition of epistles – an important genre, for an early outlet for elegant prose and a remunerative occupation for prose writers was in official correspondence, and out of the epistle grew the literary essay. In a style heavy with rhymes and conceits al-Hamada¯nı¯ picks up the narrative:

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I said, “Offer the utmost that you can encompass, the ultimate of which you are capable; select whatever lies within your reach, and I shall counter with four hundred different letter-writing formats in which if you manage to walk on two

38


feet and I fail [to surpass as if] flying on two wings – indeed if you excel in any one of these formats and do not fall behind altogether – yours shall be the upper hand and the racewinner’s trophy. Thus I might say, ‘Compose a letter within which one may find the answer’ – would you be able to do so? Or I might say, ‘Write a letter in the sense that I indicate and compose a poem again in the sense I determine, in such a way that both end with the same words’ – would your arm stretch so far? Or I might say, ‘Compose a letter in the sense that I specify and prescribe, and recite whatever poems I specify without labouring or faltering, in such a way that what you end up writing may be read from the end to the beginning, making sense if read from the bottom up’ – would you aim a true dart at such a target, or hazard a gambler’s arrow and reach a measure of success? Or if I said, ‘Compose a letter which read from beginning to end would indeed be a letter, but reversing the order of the lines would be the answer’ – would your flint strike fire then and fulfil its purpose? Or if I said, ‘Compose a letter in a given sense containing none of the [six] disjunctive letters [which in the Arabic script cannot be joined to the next], such as a ra¯ at the beginning of a word or a da¯l in the middle, all this impromptu without resting your pen’ – would you do so? Or if I said, ‘Compose a letter void of alif and la¯m [the two letters which make up the definite article], yet in which the sense would fit the wording as if poured into a mould and without straying from the intended meaning’ – would your stance then be a praiseworthy one, and “would thy Lord raise thee to a station of honour [Qur a¯n 17:79]? Or if I said, ‘Compose a letter entirely free of the [thirteen] undotted letters’ – would you attain any sufficiency, or generate enough saliva to wet your uvula? Or if I said, ‘Compose a letter on a given theme where every line would start with a jı¯m and end with a mı¯m’ – would you reach a bow-shot with such a bow, or advance a single step on such territory? Or if I said, ‘Compose a letter which if read haltingly or recited twistedly would be verse’ – would you ‘cut a dash’ with such poetry? Aye, by God, you would indeed hit something but it would be your own body,

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and you would cut something but it would be off your beard! Or if I said, ‘Compose a letter which interpreted in one way would be a eulogy, but in another it would be abuse’ – would you extricate yourself from such an undertaking? Or if I said, ‘Compose a letter which you no sooner have written than you commit it to memory without a [second] glance’ – would you be confident of reaching the point at which I could no longer outreach you? But the divorceé’s anus knows best! Al-Xuwa¯rizmı¯ demurred on the ground that such pursuits were “sleight-of-hand” so al-Hamada¯nı¯ agreed that the contest be on the drafting of a run-of-the-mill epistle such as anyone can produce. The topic set was the perennial one of “coinage and its corruption, trade and its stagnation, goods and their unavailability, prices and their rise”. Al-Hamada¯nı¯ produced one that was not only superior in elegance but also made sense and maintained a rhyming pattern whether read from first word to last or from last to first. The taste for such verbal gymnastics was already getting formalized in a branch of rhetoric which came to be known as the “science” of badı¯ . It got its name from a book so titled, written by the poet-caliph Ibn-al-Mu tazz (861–908), in which he described five “arts” and twelve “embellishments”. The distinction he was making between these two terms is unclear, and the word badı¯ itself has many connotations, including those of novelty and of aesthetic quality, so that in this context it has often been translated as “the New Style”, although the author made the point that the devices he isolated were to be found in older texts. Precisely what were the issues that precipitated the first formulations of this “science” has been the subject of close scholarly attention.3 The effect on literary production may be seen in a prose genre known as the maqa¯ma, a short narrative to which al-Hamada¯nı¯ gave currency and which soon reached a peak of refinement at the

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3 See: Heinrichs, Wolfhart, “Isti‘a¯rah and Badı¯ ‘ and their Terminological Relationship in Early Arabic Literary Criticism,” Zeitschrift fu¨r Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften, Band I, 1984, pp. 180–211. Also Stetkevych, Suzanne, “Abu¯ Tamma¯m and the Poetics of the Abba¯sid Age. Leiden, Brill, 1991.

40


hands of al-Harı¯rı¯ (1054–1122). A short passage setting out how a ˙ petition to a powerful official should read has been translated4 as: . . . None is miserly but the fool, and none is foolish but the miser; and none hoards but the wretched; for the pious clenches not his palms. But thy promise ceases not to fulfil; thy sentiments cease not to relieve; nor thy clemency to indulge; nor thy new moon to illumine; nor thy bounty to enrich; nor thy enemies to praise thee; nor thy blade to destroy; nor thy princeship to build up; nor thy suitor to gain; nor thy praises to win; nor thy kindness to succour; nor thy heaven to rain; nor thy milkflow to abound; nor thy refusal to be rare. In the words of the translator, such effusions “may be set down by Europeans as merely examples of laborious trifling”. But to understand the effect that this particular sample has on an Arab reader, one needs to savour what is sounds like in the original: ma¯ danna lla¯ xabı¯n : wa la¯ xubina illa¯ danı¯n :: wa la¯ xazana ˙ ˙ illa¯ sˇaqiyy : wa la¯ qabada ra¯hahu taqiyy :: wa ma¯ fati a ˙ ˙ wa duka yafı¯ : wa a¯ra¯ uka tasˇfı¯ :: wa hila¯luka yudı¯ : wa ˙ hilmuka yuxdı¯ :: wa a¯la¯ uka tuxnı¯ : wa a da¯ uka tutnı¯ :: wa ˙ ˙ husa¯muka yufnı¯ : wa su daduka yuqnı¯ :: wa muwa¯siluka ˙ ˙ yajtanı¯ : wa ma¯dihuka yaqtanı¯ :: wa sama¯huka yuxı¯t : wa ˙ ˙ sama¯ uka taxı¯t :: wa darruka yafı¯d : wa radduka yaxı¯d ˙ ˙

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The rhyming and the pairing of words that differ in only one letter are evident, but in addition taqiyy and yafı¯, yufnı¯ and yuqnı¯, yuxı¯t and taxı¯t look exactly alike in the Arabic script except for the arrangement of dots. Furthermore, yuxı¯t and taxı¯t have the additional subtle attraction for those versed in Arabic linguistics that they create the illusion of deriving from the same root because they could be parts of the conjugation of the same verb whereas

4 Thomas Chenery, The Assemblies of al-Harıˆri, I, London and Edinburgh, Williams and Norgate, 1867, pp. 136–7.

41


they are etymologically unrelated. And the crowning merit of the passage is that from beginning to end it consists of words made up of dotted letters alternating with entirely undotted ones. That such priorities were not confined to a few Olympians of Arabic literature is shown by the fact that a highly-placed interpreter of Islamic law, Sˇayx-al-Isla¯m Izz-ad-Dı¯n Abd-as-Sala¯m as-Sulamı¯ (1181/2–1262), issued an authoritative opinion enjoining the officials in charge of mosques not to use in their preaching the kind of ornate prose that common people did not understand.5

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*** This marks a split of some importance. For centuries, the literature perpetuated through the written word, and which has long been labeled “Arabic Literature” without further qualification, has been the literature of an e´lite free to devote itself to the production of works of great refinement, but for the eminence it chose to occupy it has also had to pay a price: a distancing from the everyday concerns of the common people. This distancing cut out from the purview of most Arab scholars, and consequently of Arabists who rely on published works, the whole of folk literature. In pre-modern sources, if this is mentioned at all, it is usually with distaste, a signal exception being Ibn-Xaldu¯n (1332–1406), who in the closing pages of the imposing Prolegomena to his universal history credits beduin poetry with genuine literary quality. Otherwise, the early manifestations of folk literature are attested only by sparse and haphazard mentions in the sources, and these are often condemnatory. Thus the chronicles for the year 887/8 mention that the Caliph al-Mu tamid (ruled 870–92) urged the common people to attend to their business instead of idling by the roadside and listening to story-tellers. As has already been mentioned, an identifiable folk verse form, the zajal, earned a stable place in literary history in Andalusia, and it opened the door to a number of others. What is recorded in treatises on the “seven arts”, however, often appears to be creations by literate poets in accordance with the rules of

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5 Fata¯wa¯ Sˇayxi-l- Isla¯m Beirut 1996, p. 485.

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Ö Izzi-d-Dı¯n Ö Abdi-s-Sala¯mi s-Sulamı¯, ed. M.J. Kurdi, 42


versification they detected. Recording genuine folk poems remained haphazard and fragmentary. Prose narratives are somewhat more profusely recorded, but they are to some extent distorted, for the texts committed to writing were made at least minimally conformable with classical syntax. This tendency is manifested even in modern times. Gaston Maspe´ro, a French Egyptologist who, early in the twentieth century, took an interest in contemporary folklore but whose Arabic was not sufficiently fluid, reported that he relied on his Egyptian secretary to take down the words of a folk story-teller, but when he pleaded to have the stories written down exactly as they were spoken, his amanuensis pleaded that he could not make himself do that, because it was “bad Arabic”. This is what may be presumed to have happened with the Arabian Nights, a collection of stories known to have started with translations from the Persian in the ninth century, but first written down in the fourteenth. What translations do not show is how poor they are in style, and because of this as well as because they are deemed to be unedifying, they were despised by Arab intellectuals until the high regard in which they were held by Europeans gave them some prestige in Arab eyes. They commanded so little scholarly attention that the oldest manuscript was not edited until late in the twentieth century. A scholarly – or at least a serious – approach to Arab folk literature is a recent and as yet a limited and patchy development, and it is sometimes skewed by subservience to theory or ideology. Thus we find, despite much evidence to the contrary, assertions that the same song is never sung in the same way twice, or that metres fit perfectly into the classical mould, or that the performers are animated by revolutionary anti-establishment zeal. On the few occasions in the past when the establishment writers proved willing to take more than a passing interest in what their humbler brethren were producing, the contact proved productive. The maqa¯ma which al-Hamada¯nı¯ is credited with having invented and in which al-Harı¯rı¯ excelled, usually a short narrative in which a ˙ glib and likeable rogue plays an amusing trick on his betters and gets away with a small prize, is manifestly of folk origin. So, demonstrably, is the multi-rhymed Andalusian muwasˇsˇah. The ˙ 43


divorce, therefore, was not complete, but more often than not the folk literature has found itself in the doghouse. *** The most far-reaching and most intriguing feature of this relationship is that – at least until the nineteenth century – the ‘high’ literature appears to have abandoned to its lowly counterpart entire areas of valid artistic expression. It is difficult to understand why, unless it be that what the folk artists undertook was ipso facto tainted in the eyes of their betters. Thus despite the wealth and variety of folk tales of which The Arabian Nights is but one example, pre-modern men of letters often recounted anecdotes that had a claim to historicity and occasionally wrote imaginative works such as Ibn-Tufayl’s ˙ (c.1100–1185) Hayy ibn-Yaqza¯n, but they developed no sustained ˙ ˙ and recognized fictional narrative genre other than the maqa¯ma. The indications are that story-telling lay beneath the dignity of an intellectual unless it became the vehicle for stylistic excellence. No less revealing is that modern Arab scholars have expressed puzzlement why Arabic has no epic, usually relating this to the fact that the Iliad and the Odyssey had not been translated by the early Muslims because they dealt with pagan gods, as if no Muslim had composed the Sˇa¯h-Na¯meh, and without lowering their gaze sufficiently to note that in the field of folk literature there are no fewer than ten epic cycles, one of which – the saga of the Banu¯Hila¯l – is still very much alive. Also usually ascribed to the failure to tap Greek models is the absence of a theatrical tradition in pre-modern times. It is well established that at the popular level there were not only puppet shows and shadow plays, but also – perhaps as early as in the tenth century – live actors apparently forming itinerant companies. Unfortunately these activities have left no written record, except for three shadow plays by Ibn-Da¯niya¯l (d.1310), written in a high style but presumably retaining a popular character. This paucity may again be due to the widely observable fact that folk literature was seldom committed to writing except when it was given a correct linguistic cachet. What meagre – and late – indications we have of folk performances suggest that they were mostly comedies

44


of low taste. Whether the art occasionally rose – or had the potential to rise – to greater heights is a matter of conjecture. A weighty consideration first mooted by Professor Gustav von Grunebaum6 is that serious drama, and especially tragedy, calls for conflicts of wills that are inconsistent with the Islamic world order, as it requires Man’s total submission to God. This, however, assumes that all Muslims are totally compliant with the demands of religion. To counter this assumption one need only quote a few lines from the poet al-Mutanabbı¯ (c.915–65), an ambitious man reduced to paying court to potential patrons he often despised: Mine is a heart not to be solaced with wine, And a life span such as the niggardly bestow, And an age peopled by little men Though massive are their cadavers. Not of them am I, though I live amongst them – Dust is the ore where gold is found! Rabbits except that they are kings, Their eyes wide open though they are asleep, With bodies that death belabours, Their nemesis none but overeating. Is there not in this material for a tragedian to exploit? *** The factors skimpily sketched here have combined to separate the educated e´lite from the common folk, and between the thirteenth and the eighteenth centuries this e´lite made verbal skill the supreme quality to be sought in literature. How valid or vital is such a literary criterion? Since then, Arab men of letters have turned their back upon this phase of their past, but they have remained linguistically conservative, and therefore kept somewhat aloof from the common folk and their literature. How rewarding or how costly has this been? After the facts have been fleshed out, these issues will have to be confronted at the end of the last two chapters of this book. 6 Studien zum Kulturbild und Selbstversta¨ndnis des Islams, Zurich & Sttutgart, Artemis, 1969, pp. 36 ff.

45

4 THE MAIN GROWTH

Poetry The generation that straddled the eighth and ninth centuries in the main cultural centres of Islam was well-favoured by Fate. There was stability and there was wealth. At least for those on the higher reaches of the social scale, the choicest products of many lands were at hand, and the accumulated lore of several civilizations was being tapped. There was luxury for the self-indulgent and stimulation for the thinker. A good four centuries of imposing literary creativity were to ensue. If there had also been champagne in the air, it would certainly have been enjoyed and celebrated by Abu¯-Nuwa¯s (d.c.810), who summed up his philosophy as (sarı¯ /an):

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Four things give life To heart and soul and body: Water, gardens, wine, And a beautiful face. He was a court wit who, under the slightly distorted name of Abun-Nawwa¯s has passed into folklore as the hero of thousands of amusing anecdotes. He was also one of the most gifted and original of Arabic-speaking poets who – perhaps playing the part of a ritual clown, giving tongue to what others dare not say – sang boldly and freely of wine-bibbing and homosexual love. A peculiarity of Arabic grammar is that there need be no concord in number or gender where the implications are clear, so that a poet may speak

47

THE MAIN GROWTH

of “his eye” filling with tears and he may refer to his beloved in the masculine even when a woman is intended. But Abu¯-Nuwa¯s leaves us in no doubt that his preference was for youths on whose cheeks the down was just beginning to sprout. He did sometimes compose odes along traditional lines, but he could also make fun of the classical amorous prelude, usually called “standing” or “weeping over the ruins” (ramal/as): Ask him who weeps over a razed encampment Upstanding, “Where’s the harm if he sat down?” The theme with which he preferred to start several of his poems was that of “a hair of the dog”. The most notorious example is one in which he expounded the philosophy of the sybarites of his day, with their predilection for drinking bouts enjoyed in the coolness of an evening or at dawn, the wine served by a xula¯miyya – a word made up of the term for a slave boy, but with the addition of a feminine ending, so that it may be translated as a “boyette” (bası¯t/a¯ u¯): ˙

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Stop chiding me – reproach is but incitement – And treat me, rather, with what itself is the disease: With yellow wine, in whose court no sorrows can abide – Were stone to touch it, the stone would then be touched with joy – Served by one with a cunt in the garb of one with a penis, Having two lovers: the sodomist and the fornicator. She stood holding her jug – and murky was the night, But from her face a light brightened the room. Out of the spout it flowed: limpid, And such that for the eye to catch it is to be blinded. Too delicate is it for water, which does not match it In subtlety; too coarse is water to mingle with it; But blend it with light and it will blend, Generating radiances and flashes. It is served to youths to whom even Fate submits, Bringing them nothing except what they desire. It is for this I weep, and not for some encampment In which some Hind or some Asma¯ resided.

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48

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THE MAIN GROWTH

Heaven forfend that Pearl have tentage pitched for her, With camels and goats wandering about. So tell the one who claims a measure of philosophy in Knowledge, “One thing you have attained, but many have escaped you. Set not a limit to His forgiveness if you are punctilious; To circumscribe it is to debase Religion.” The shock intentionally produced by one scabrous line ought not to obscure the poetic use made of scientific terminology in the description of the wine, or the casuistry of the final argument. Besides, Abu¯-Nuwa¯s stands out among poets not only in that most of his poems are more closely knit than those of others who made each line an independent unit, but also in that several of them are epigrammatic, with the purport of the entire composition dependent on the closing lines, as in (munsarih/lı¯): ˙

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Better than standing over ruins Is a cup of wine topping inebriety Which a black-eyed one, slender-waisted, Well-proportioned, and full-hipped Passes round youths not one of whom is intemperate, Or vile, or given to sin. As it goes round in his hand and comes into view, You perceive in it the like of torches, His own cheeks matching the dog-rose As the blush of demureness pervades them. But if you desire some trifling with him, He cautions: “Beware of such a deed!” So as I came to dread his departure And in his largesse he lavished kisses, He signaling departure to whom he favoured And I for love of him distressed, I called upon Satan and said, “All my expedients have failed me: My linkage with the one I love Is close, but not complete.”

49

THE MAIN GROWTH

Old Nick reversed his obduracy: Our pimp he became – and so he remains! Abu¯-Nuwa¯s was of Persian descent, and by Arab authors homoerotic poetry is often ascribed to Persian influence, but ribaldry has a place in most literatures and is especially to be expected in a society that kept most free women segregated. It was, in fact, to occupy a fairly extensive space and carry various overtones in Arabic literature1 as part of an even wider and indeterminate corpus that usually went under the heading of muju¯n, a word which literally means ‘shamelessness’. This in turn came under the rubric of hazl, perhaps best translated as ‘jocularity’, the implication being that it was intended only to entertain. Hazl was not always salacious: it covered any undignified behaviour or trait, such as gluttony. In sharp distinction from satire, the poet usually attributed the unseemly deed to himself. And unlike satire, its place within the canon was uncertain, some authorities accepting it as valid literary activity, others implying that it was at best marginal. Diametrically opposed to self-indulgence and apparently a natural reaction to it was asceticism, and this found expression in the work of a close contemporary of Abu¯-Nuwa¯s, known as Abu-l- Ata¯hiya (748–828). He also at one time sang of wine in the company of golden youths, though without the raunchiness of Abu¯Nuwa¯s. In time, however, he became the mouthpiece of a very different ideal, expounded in an uncommonly simple and direct style (sarı¯ /iyah):

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A loaf of dry bread Eaten in a corner, A jugful of cool water From a limpid source, A diminutive room Where your soul is uncluttered,

1 See J. W. Wright, Jr, and Everett K. Rowson (ed.). Homoeroticism in Classical Arabic Literature. New York, Columbia University Press, 1997.

50

THE MAIN GROWTH

Or an isolated mosque Away from the throng, Where you study a folio With your back to a column Pondering what happened In centuries past – These are better than hours Indulged in lofty palaces, With retribution to follow In a hot fire. And he never wearied of the theme of “vanity of vanities” (wa¯fir/ a¯bı¯): Procreate for death, build for dilapidation, For you are all on the way to perdition. For whom do we build when to dust We are doomed to turn, as from dust we were made? O Death, I see no remission from you: You come, neither wronging nor favouring any. You seem to assault my hoariness As hoariness assaulted my youth. And his last word in cynicism (bası¯t/lu¯): ˙ Eat what you please: All foods are perishable, And all who eat shall surely be eaten. Two stories are told to account for Abu-l- Ata¯hiya’s change of heart. One is that it was the result of a frustrated love. The other, recorded in Abu-l-Faraj al- Isfaha¯nı¯’s (d.967) invaluable Book of ˙ Songs deserves a closer look. This has it that an admirer asked Abu-l- Ata¯hiya to recite to him some of his best verses.

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He replied, “You should know that what I have composed is poor.” “How so?” I said. He elaborated, “Poetry ought to be like that of the great among the Ancients, or like the poetry of Basˇsˇa¯r or of Ibn-Harma [a poet famed for his fidelity to the

51

THE MAIN GROWTH

standards of the Ancients – c. 709–c.792]. If it is not to be so, then the right course for the poet is the use of a diction which, like mine, is clear to the mass of the people. It is especially so in ascetic poetry, for asceticism is not the way of kings or of transmitters of poetry, or of amateurs of xarı¯b. It is, rather, most attractive to ascetics, to students of the Prophet’s sayings and of the Divine Law, to those who make a show of such, and to the common people. What these like best is what they understand.” The anecdote then goes on to quote with approval some of Abu-lAta¯hiya’s ascetic poetry, and to report that Abu¯-Nuwa¯s greatly admired it. It is highly unlikely that Abu-l- Ata¯hiya spoke so disparagingly of his own work. The words are, rather, an instance of what Arabs call lisa¯n al-ha¯l, literally ‘the tongue of the condition’, a form of ˙ expression in which words are put into someone’s mouth not because he actually spoke them, but because – at least in the writer’s understanding – they sum up the situation in which he found himself, so that the device may be called ‘interpretative attribution’. The significance of this passage goes beyond the characterization of a particular poet’s career. It poses the question whether the mainstream of Arabic literary creativity was to aim at pleasing potentates or proletarians. It does not come down heavily on the side of the one or the other. Indeed it asserts that excellent poetry may be produced in either camp; but it does imply that a courtoriented career is the more attractive to a poet. So it proved to be. A poet’s richest prospect was to go in search of a patron, who might have been a lowly official or dignitary, or merely a wealthy individual genuinely fond of poetry or eager to have his prestige celebrated and inflated. The poet would declaim an encomium in his presence and be rewarded on the spot – and if not satisfied the poet might turn away and satirize him as a skinflint. As one disappointed encomiast put it, he might at least be reimbursed for the alms he would have to give in atonement for the lies he had told. But if his reputation grew, the up-and-coming poet would graduate from single performances before some obscure

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52

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THE MAIN GROWTH

chieftain to a permanent position at the court of ever more munificent princes. And the fact that the central power of the Abbasids soon ceased to be absolute resulted only in an increase in the number of courts, ostensibly subordinate to that of the Caliph but vying with one another in magnificence. For poets, the rewards could be substantial: “You have shod my horses with gold” the renowned al-Mutanabbı¯ said to the most liberal of the patrons he served. This set-up had the effect of making the glorification of power the dominant theme of Arabic poetry in the golden age of Islamic civilization. Needless to say, it was not the only one. Both Abu¯-Nuwa¯s and Abu-l- Ata¯hiya had had access to the Caliphal court, and both muju¯n and asceticism found ample expression among their successors, alike in princely circles and in humbler ones. Love poetry too was assured of a place in the amatory prelude of the traditional ode even if it had not been an imperative of human nature. However, any inference that the generation of Abu¯-Nuwa¯s was poised to revolutionize poetic practice would have been mistaken. The power of tradition was not to be shaken, the more so as court life readily accommodated formality. New motifs were bound to arise, different public events were to be memorialized, and greater refinement of expression was expected and achieved. But the prosody based on pre-Islamic practice remained firm. And although interest in the desert journey, which was the middle part of the tripartite ode, dwindled, the example of the Ancients continued to be honoured, and to a large extent followed. In fact, conventions multiplied. What could one praise a Maecenas for except his power, his high birth, his lofty attainments, his valour in war and his munificence in peace – even if the individual addressed did not quite live up to the ideal? Similarly, a scholar was to be lauded for his learning and his virtue. And amatory verses demanded that the poet describe himself as pining for the favours he was denied by a cruel mistress, different though the social reality might have been. The main consequential deflection in the overall direction taken by the poets was the growing use of the devices of verbal ornamentation soon to become the subject of the independent branch of Rhetoric known as badı¯ . Its invasion of poetic practice

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53

THE MAIN GROWTH

is associated with the name of Abu¯-Tamma¯m (c.805–845). He was steeped in the classical tradition, having compiled a highly regarded anthology of his predecessors’ poetry, and the bulk of his own compositions is of solid quality. He was not out of step with his contemporaries in his taste for hyperbolic descriptions. Thus the ideal of feminine beauty being a slender waist over fleshy buttocks (a common comparison being with a palm-tree growing out of a sand dune), his own description of the woman he praised was (tawı¯l/lu¯): ˙

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A slender one – if anklets were refashioned Into ornate belts, they would fit loosely round her. Only occasionally did he strain to bring in some prećieux wordplay, as when – in the course of a conventional amatory prelude – he spoke of a lost love then apostrophized himself with these words (ka¯mil/a¯mu¯): Did your eyes scatter tears when an ash-coloured dove Called out at the time when darkness is scattered? Do not sob in response, for her apparent weeping Is merriment, whereas yours is a torment. Such are pigeons – hama¯m – but if frowardly you change ˙ The first vowel to i, they are death – hima¯m! ˙ More commonly, he used his verbal skills economically and to good effect. A memorable poem of his celebrates a victory by the Caliph al-Mu tasim over the Byzantines in a campaign which ˙ was launched against the advice of the astrologers. It starts (bası¯t/bu¯): ˙

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A truer informant than books is the sword, Its edge separating resolve from mere trifling. White are the blades, not blackened the pages, Their surfaces cleared of doubts and misgivings. The lines are striking enough even in translation, but many more subtleties are embodied in the Arabic text:

54

THE MAIN GROWTH

as-sayfu asdaqu anba¯ an mina l-kutubı¯ ˙ fı¯ haddihi l-haddu bayna l-jiddi wa -l-la ibı¯ ˙ ˙ bı¯du s-safa¯ ihi la¯ su¯du s-saha¯ ifi fı¯ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ mutu¯nihinna jala¯ u sˇ-sˇakki wa-r-riyabı¯

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Here hadd is used once in the sense of ‘edge’ and once as ˙ ‘separation’; saha¯ ifi is an anagram of safa¯ ihi; mutu¯n which in ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ relation to swords is translated ‘surfaces’ would have meant ‘texts’ in relation to books; and jala¯ which in this context means ‘clearing’ also denotes the burnishing of a sword. Finally hadd and jidd, ˙ although pronounced differently, are in the script differentiated only by a dot. The rapid spread of this predilection for verbal artifice, combined with the demands of court poetry, did not edge out motifs of personal experience or of broad human perception. Ibn-ar-Ru¯mı¯ (836–96) – whose name implies that he was of Greek descent, since the Byzantines as heirs of the Holy Roman Empire were known to the Arabs as ‘Ru¯m’ – mourned the death of a son in a somewhat prolix and meandering poem which nevertheless resonates with intimate grief. He started with an apostrophe to his own eyes which bore some kinship to Victor Hugo’s appeal to Providence to be allowed to weep even as he resigned himself to his daughter’s death. And he ended with a traditional invocation recalling the parched deserts of Arabia rather than the valley of the Tigris and the Euphrates, but not inconsistent with his own turmoil (tawı¯l/dı¯): ˙

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Your weeping relieves though it nothing avails; Be lavish, then, for he is gone who to me was your equal. ... Death targeted my middle son – O God! How did it come to pick the necklet’s centrepearl? ... He lingered in our arms, his soul sloughing off And shriveling as does a myrtle branch. Oh that a soul should shed breath after breath As pearls slip off an unknotted string!

55

THE MAIN GROWTH

... Our children are like the most precious of organs: Whichever we lose is of all the most grievously missed. ... Muhammad! All things dreamed up as solace ˙ To my heart have only added to its passion. Your two surviving brothers, I perceive, shall be Truer kindlers of sorrows than a flint: When they play where once you played, innocently With the like of fire they scorch my heart. ... Though you are banished to the unpeopled realm, yet I Am in the realm of men as lonely as if the sole creation. Upon you be the peace of God – a wish from me, and from Storms true to their pledge of lightning and of thunder. Love also – even if expressed in stiffly conventional terms – was assured of a permanent place in poetry, as in al-Buhturı¯’s (821–97) ˙ (xafı¯f]da¯): One whom I love most persistently denies me. He initiates rejection, then redoubles it. Many are his arts: He reveals each day An innovative manner of tyrannizing me. In denial he forbids; in salving he bestows; In union he draws near; in rejection he departs. Having spent the night in anger, I yet start the day resigned – A master in the evening, and a slave when morning comes! In this or that condition, I would yet ransom with my soul A fawn whose comeliness proves contagious at a touch! As for court-poetry, it was never better served than it was by al-Mutanabbı¯ (c.915–65). This was not his name but a sobriquet meaning ‘the self-styled Prophet’. The reason is that in his late teens he tried to lead some nomadic tribesmen in a small-scale rebellion in the Syrian desert. He failed and is known to have been imprisoned for a while. The story gained currency that he had claimed to be a prophet and to have composed a Qur a¯n consisting

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56

THE MAIN GROWTH

of 114 chapters like the genuine one. This is the kind of accusation which, under a theocratic system of government, was likely to be directed at a failed revolutionary especially if he was famous for his eloquence; but it is extremely unlikely that he would have got off so lightly if he had actually defied the passage in the Qur a¯n which challenges unbelievers to produce its like. He did in fact excel in all that was expected of a poet in his day. He could toy with words as skilfully as any. Exalting the power of a patron he could address him with (tawı¯l/mu¯): ˙

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If what you purpose is a deed commensurate with you, It comes to pass even before commands are given but the line is so full of words that may double as grammatical terms that it may also be rendered, with equal purport: If what you purpose is a verb in the imperfect tense, It passes to the perfect before the particles requiring the jussive intervene. And he had a gift for coining aphorisms in memorable lines that could “gain the currency of proverbs” as an Arabic idiom puts it, to the admiration of critics (xafı¯f/mu¯): Abase yourself and abasement will come easy: A wound causes no pain to a cadaver; or (wa¯fir/mı¯): When you venture in search of a desired honour Be not content with any lower than the stars: The taste of death in a despicable cause Is the taste of death in an exalted one; or (xafı¯f/a¯na¯): Whenever Fate causes a reed to grow Man fits a spearhead to the reed.

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THE MAIN GROWTH

What marks him out, however, is that his verse had a rhythmic sweep that is not easily accounted for by the standard scansion, and that a powerful personality shines through even when he deals with impersonal themes. It was not an amiable personality; rather, he was one “whose spirit with divine ambition puff’d makes mouth at the invisible event.” And it was his cursed spite that he was destined to sing the praises of wielders of power – rabbits who happened to be kings – many of whom he despised. One senses that in addressing women he would rather, like Imru u-l-Qays, have been a chooser than a beggar, and he did mildly protest against the convention of the amatory prelude (tawı¯l/amu¯): ˙

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If praise is intended, the amatory must precede – Is every eloquent poet enslaved by love? Yet it did not do him undue violence to fall in with his public’s expectation that a poet had to plead for the favours of beautiful women, proud though he was, for what nobility demanded of a man was, as al-Ja¯hiz (c.776–868/9) put it, that he humble himself ˙ ˙ before his inferiors, deal fairly with his equals, and assert himself before his superiors, and Ibn-Hazm (994–1064) specified in his ˙ treatise on love where women fitted into that equation. Besides, in a classical ode the love theme need only be a prelude to a hero’s journey that will test his mettle. In an early poem, al-Mutanabbı¯ described in extravagant terms the beauty of his beloved, and then went on to expound his own valour, in a passage which incidentally refers to David as the inventor of armour (xafı¯f/dı¯): Here is my lifeblood, in your power. Put it to death And so abate its torment – or else increase it. A peer to my languor is a hero trapped By the grooming of a lock, or by a neckline. Unlawful is the drinking of any blood, Except the blood of a bunch of grapes. Pour this to me, then – my soul be ransom for your eyes, O gazelle! My possessions, old and recent, too. My whitened hair, my self-abasement, my emaciation And my tears are witnesses to my passion.

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THE MAIN GROWTH

What day was there when you granted me the joy of union But that you distressed me with three days of rejection? And so my sojourn in the Naxla area was but Like the Messiah’s sojourn among Jews. My bed is the back of a horse; besides, My shirt is knitted iron, Well-joined, all-enveloping, supple, like water glistening, Its fashioning perfected by David’s hand. What merit would be mine if I contentedly received The life that Time deals out, soon turning to adversity? ... Live proudly! Or else die honourably Amid the thrusting lances and the fluttering pennants, For spearheads are best for dispelling rage Or quenching the thirst of rancorous breasts. Other travels of his gave better scope for his lyricism, as in his description of the Valley of Bawwa¯n in the vicinity of Shiraz, in which he makes use of the legend that Solomon controlled the jinn and could speak the language of birds (wa¯fir/a¯nı¯): Among all resting spots, those of the Valley hold The status of spring among the seasons, But the Arab knight there is a stranger In features, weaponry, and tongue. Playgrounds of the jinn – were Solomon himself To visit them, he would have need of an interpreter. They lured our horsemen and our horses so I feared That these – though pure-bred – might yet turn restive. We set off early, the branches shaking Over their manes the likes of silver beads. And I moved on, the boughs hiding the sun Yet letting through radiance enough for me. Through them the East projected on my clothing Gold pieces that elude one’s finger-tips, And peeping from them: fruits that bring to mind Liquors that hold their shape without containers.

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There also water-courses run in which the pebbles tinkle As bracelets do upon fair maidens’ arms. But most of his compositions were panegyrics for men who wielded various degrees of authority. It is more than likely that his main hope was to attain through the favour of a ruler what he had failed to get by force of arms, and it is a fact that access to the corridors of power could yield additional benefits to those who had the skill and acumen to recognize and take advantage of opportunities. Al-Mutanabbı¯, however, though he praised a succession of petty rulers, declaring of one after another that his station was higher than the sun or the moon or some other heavenly body, was too boastful and too fond of panache to make useful alliances and handle intricate court intrigues. His best years – from 948 to 957 – were spent in the service of Sayf-ad-Dawla, the founder of the Hamda¯nı¯ dynasty, whose writ did not extend ˙ far beyond Aleppo, but who was a prince after al-Mutanabbı¯’s heart, often engaged in border battles with the Byzantines but also maintaining a brilliant court that attracted many of the leading intellects and artistic talents of the day, including a cousin of the prince, Abu¯-Fira¯s (932–68), who was no men poet himself. Al-Mutanabbı¯ was richly rewarded with money, but he remained a suppliant. Like a delinquent schoolboy he had to plead illness when he failed to deliver a poem that had been expected of him, and he had to take part in drinking parties that he heartily disliked. But his panegyrics resounded far and wide – and he seldom failed to embed in them a few lines singing his own praise as a doughty warrior and a supreme poet. So in a poem declaimed on the occasion of a religious feast, addressing Sayf-ad-Dawla (tawı¯l/da¯): ˙

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This day among days is like you among mortals: As peerless among them as you among men. So Fortune decrees that an eye outsee its sister, And a day be master over another. ... You are, I perceive, all forbearance in absolute power. Should you wish, your forbearance might be a sword.

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Nothing kills the freeborn like forgiveness – But where is the freeman who requites a good deed? But you surpass all others in judgment and wisdom As you outrank them in virtue, status, and lineage. Your deeds are too subtle for minds to perceive – We concede the obscure and accept what is clear. Be my shield from the envious – restrain them: It is you who have made them envious of me. Fortified by your favour, my wrist wields a sword That lops off many heads while still in its sheath. Nothing am I but a lance which you carry: It adorns on parade and strikes terror when pointed. Time is but a reciter of my necklace-like poems: When I string them together, the ages recite them. So bestirred, the laggard advances, baring his arm; So moved, even the tone-deaf sing out with a trill. Reward me for all the poems you hear, for it is My poems repeated that eulogists bring you. Ignore all but my voice, for mine is the one That soars and is copied – all others are echoes. His comparison of himself to a lance was particularly felicitous as the occasion was marked by a military parade, but the lines that followed could scarcely have won him many friends, and in time he roused animosities among so many that he had to depart in some haste. His next destination was Egypt, and his next patron was the exact opposite of all that al-Mutanabbı¯ admired in Sayf-ad-Dawla. This was Ka¯fu¯r, a black eunuch, a slave of the ruling Ixsˇı¯dı¯ dynasty, acting as regent during the infancy of the heir. Ka¯fu¯r was an able ruler, but the fact that he accomplished his purposes without spectacular feats of arms did not endear him to al-Mutanabbı¯, who later was to claim that the poems he had composed in his praise were meant to be ironic. Indeed one of these contains a line which may be read as (tawı¯l/a¯nı¯): ˙ Will me some bounty, whether or not you bestow it, For whatever you wish me is coming my way.

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One may doubt whether it was actually declaimed in this form or was doctored later, for not only does it make little of Ka¯fu¯r’s generosity, but the second hemistich may also be interpreted as: “For no matter what you wish me, you are my she-ass.” After four years which al-Mutanabbı¯ claimed he spent virtually as a prisoner in Egypt, he managed to leave, and as soon as he was out of Ka¯fu¯r’s reach he composed a vitriolic satire in which he dwelt rancorously not only on his former patron’s race, but also on the physiological features of eunuchs (bası¯t/du¯): ˙ I dwelt among liars whose guest Is barred alike from food and from departure. Men’s liberality is dealt by hand, theirs by the tongue – May we be spared both them and their largesse! Death does not come to pick their souls except With aloes-wood in hand to neutralize the stench. Each has a flaccid anal-strap, and flanks distended, And is reckoned as neither a man nor a woman. ... Never buy a slave unless you buy a stick as well, For slaves are unclean creatures, and accursed. ... From whom might the castrate black have learned nobility? His white-skinned kinsmen or his proud forefathers? Or else his bleeding ear tagged by the trader’s hand? Or yet his price when for two coppers his sale falls through? And the poem ended with the mock excuse: “White sires prove incapable of worthy deeds – how then the castrate blacks?” Al-Mutanabbı¯ then struck out East in search of another patron, but on his way he fell foul of local chieftain called Dabba ibn-Yazı¯d ˙ al- Utbı¯ and satirized him in a crudely worded poem in which he gloated over the fact that the man’s mother was reputed to have been raped, making out that she was not the rapist’s victim but that “her perineum fucked his prick”, so that the keynote of his address to the son is (mujtatt/bah):

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What shame is it to you That your mother be a whore? It is no burden to a dog That he be a bitch’s son. Shortly after, on the way between Wa¯sit and Baghdad, the poet’s ˙ retinue was waylaid by brigands reputedly related to Dabba, and al˙ Mutanabbı¯ together with his son and some of his retinue were killed. Even more basically at odds with the values of his society than al-Mutanabbı¯ was al-Ma arrı¯ (973–1058). Blind from the age of four, he is remembered mainly as an austere recluse and a cynic. He was not, however, without pride or ambition, and is known to have sought fame and fortune in his younger days, but he was quickly disenchanted with the ways of the world. As he had modest private means, he retired to his native town of Ma arra in the district of Aleppo, to live in his “three-fold prison”: his house, his blindness, and the confinement of his spirit in a vile body. In his own words (wa¯fir/a¯da¯):

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The phoenix, I perceive, is too mighty to be hunted. Resist, then, whom you have the power to resist. Never have I desisted from a quest. Rather It is Fate that will not yield the reins. ... Think ill of all your brethren And trust no heart with your own secret, For if Gemini had probed them as I have It would not rise for fear of treachery. I shun Mankind, so I am not befriended, And I excel my foes, so I am not opposed. With the prevailing taste for verbal artifice he had no quarrel, but in other respects he exhibited an original mind and a bold spirit. An intriguing undertaking of his was the composition of thirty poems on a subject as difficult for a blind man to handle and as remote from his experience as one can imagine: armour. No doubt this served a favourite theme of his: that against death there is no defence; but the challenge to his virtuosity was also a consideration.

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Furthermore, several of these poems are conceived as the utterance of an imaginary character in a specified situation – for example, a lad approaching manhood and enquiring of his mother what has happened to his father’s armour.2 This gives them a dramatic quality unparalleled in pre-modern Arabic poetry. Another innovation of al-Ma arrı¯’s was a collection of poems entitled Luzu¯m ma¯ la¯ yalzam, literally ‘Adhering to what need not be adhered to’, in which he imposed upon himself two rules additional to those of classical prosody: maintaining a rhyme consisting of two syllables instead of one, and composing at least one poem with each phoneme in the language – i.e. each consonant combined with each vowel in turn – for a rhyme. There could scarcely be a more artificial framework for poetic compositions, and the tour-de-force was not achieved without some straining; it nevertheless produced some deep-delving poems. One such, which makes use of some of the women’s names commonly found in conventional love poetry and also makes reference to the account that the ancient poet Imru u-l-Qays warmly praised one Amr ibnDarma¯ for the protection he had given him in an hour of need, runs (bası¯t/ma¯ ı¯): ˙

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The heart is like water and passions float upon it Like bubbles that in water are formed. Out of it they were born, and then comes what transforms them, So the covenants made with some Hind or Asma¯ are worn out. Our words are like humans, some bad and some good, And men are like Time, made of light and of darkness. Spoken of is an Age that shall yield to men’s bidding, So that ease shall replace wretchedness, And the hawk shall look up to the rabbit As did Imru u-l-Qays to Ibn-ad-Darma¯ . I do not believe that this shall ever be. Seek, rather, access to water for a thirsty soul.

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2 See my “The Dramatic Monologues of al-Ma‘arrı¯”, Journal of Arabic Literature, 1 (1970), pp. 129–136.

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A recurrent concern of his was with death and its apparent finality, as in this poem where there is an appropriate reference to A¯d, one of the ancient nations said in the Qur a¯n to have been utterly destroyed by God (xafı¯f/a¯dı¯):

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Equally vain, in my faith and my conviction Are the mourner’s sobs and the singer’s trills, And alike in any gathering are the voices (if truly measured) Of the lamenter or the bearer of good tidings. That dove perched on a twig off a swinging bough – Is it weeping or is it singing? Friend, see how our graves fill the wide earth; ¯ d? Where, then, are the graves from the days of A ... Many a tomb has been a tomb time and again, Laughing at the crowding in of opposites. Many a burial has been over the remnants Of other burials through succeeding ages. ... Nothing but weariness is life. I wonder only At him who hankers for more of it.

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His cynicism bracketed the entire race of men (bası¯t/bu¯): ˙ Better than the best of them is a rock That does no injustice and utters no lies. So profound a disillusion with the created world has raised doubts whether he believed in a Creator. Certainly for the outer forms of religion, including the sacred rites of the Muslim Pilgrimage, he had a Voltairian contempt (mutaqa¯rib/ar): I marvel at Chosroes and his subjects Washing their faces in bovine urine; At the Nazarenes’ cult of a god oppressed, Wronged through life and yet unsuccoured; At the Jews’ belief in a god who loves The sprinkling of blood and the smell of burnt flesh;

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And at multitudes faring from distant lands To fling some pebbles and kiss the stone. How strange are all these teachings of theirs – Must all of mankind be blind to the Truth? But what of the basic tenets of the faith? On these – such as the belief in an afterlife – his poetry abounds in radically contradictory statements. But if – especially where apostasy is a capital offence – action (or inaction) speaks louder than words, the witness of his life (unless we assume a disguised sexual dysfunction) is that he deliberately chose not to bring new life into the world. In a passage that is not only double-rhymed but also juggles with the word la¯m which stands both for ‘body’ and for the letter ‘l’ while ba¯ means either ‘coitus’ or the letter ‘b’, the two letters if linked producing the word lubb, i.e. ‘heart’ or ‘understanding’, he asserts (tawı¯l/ ˙ ba¯ u¯):

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The link of procreation has stretched from Adam to me, But to my body no coition is linked. Amr has yawned because Xa¯lid did, by some contagion, But not to me has this contagion reached. What made me shun all creatures is my cognizance of them And knowledge that the worlds are merely motes.

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And the epitaph he is said to have wanted carved on his tomb was: “This my father perpetrated on me; I have inflicted it on no other.” Al-Ma arrı¯’s career is a monumental example of the triumph of individuality in a world of conformity, and of the ability of poetic genius to break through a carapace of convention. But – except, ironically, for the fact that his use of double rhyming became an additional item in the science of badı¯ – he founded no new school and signaled no new trend in the poetry of the time. On the contrary, the frisson nouveau was to be the growing contribution of mysticism to literature. There is indeed even for the uninitiated a compelling quality to the experience of the Su¯fı¯s – the mystics of Islam – and the ˙ vividness of their visions, as in this devotional piece by an-Niffarı¯ (d. c.1000):

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He made me stand in the stance of Death. Then I saw that all deeds are evil. I saw fear control hope. I saw that wealth had become a fire and was joined to the Fire. I saw poverty as an argumentative opponent. I saw that everything was capable of nothing. I saw the Kingdom of the Seen as self-delusion and the Kingdom of the Unseen as deceit. I called out to Learned Knowledge but it did not answer. I called out to Mystic Knowledge but it did not answer. I saw that every thing had surrendered me. I saw that every creature had deserted me. Knowledge came to me but I saw in it only obscure conjecture and fleeting obscurity. Nothing availed me but the mercy of my Lord. He said to me: Where is your Learning? And I saw the Fire. He said to me: Where are your deeds? And I saw the Fire. He said to me: Where is your Mystic Knowledge? And I saw the Fire. Then he unveiled to me His Unique Knowledge, and the Fire abated. He said to me: I am your protector. And I steadied. He said to me: I am your Knowledge. And I spoke. He said to me: I am He who seeks you. And I emerged. Yet to enter even partly into the experience of the great mystics demands and deserves a fuller, more sustained, and more extensive study than can be attempted here. Muslim thinkers have themselves been inclined to rein in the impulses of their mystics. As is attested by the sickeningly cruel execution of al-Halla¯j in 922 for ˙ proclaiming “I am the Truth”, the Sufis were not readily accepted by the establishment, if only because the assumption that truth could be attained by individual devotional exertion seemed to challenge the theology and the canonical law derived from a literal interpretation of the Scriptures, and thereby strip the rules that govern society of their precise import. A balance was eventually struck by the great exponent of dogmatic theology al-Xaza¯lı¯ (1058–1111), who proved to himself and to others that the Sufis could extend religious experience to the utmost attainable in this earthly life, provided that they confined themselves to seeking nearness to God and did not fall into the heresy of claiming union

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with Him. He also held that the inherited dogmas were sufficient for the salvation of the ordinary believer. This formula has prevailed, and justifies a measured approach to Sufi pronouncements. Suffice it to glance at how they enriched literary sensitivity. The Sufi quest is perhaps best encapsulated in the Qur anic verse (2:115): “Whichever way you turn, there the Face of God is.” The greatest of the Arab Sufi poets, Ibn-al-Fa¯rid (1181– ˙ 1235), celebrated his sense of God’s omnipresence in these lines (bası¯t/jı¯): ˙

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If absent from me, then does every organ see Him In every subtle, pleasing, joyous notion, In the sound of the lute and of the gentle flute As they harmonize in trilling tunes, Where from their thickets gazelles go roaming In evening coolness, or when the dawn breaks out in brightness, Where the dew comes down from the clouds Upon a carpet of light woven from flowers, Where the breeze trails her skirt and at sundown Regales me with the sweetest fragrance, And in my kissing the lips of the cup, sipping The flow of wine in a restful pleasure-ground. With Him, I know not what banishment is, And when together, my mind senses no alarm. Constrained by love and rewarded with ecstatic visions, the Sufis naturally expressed themselves in familiar poetic language. In fact, an early poem that occurs in three variants each attributed to a different author, one of them an early mystic woman named Ra¯bi a al- Adawiyya (d.801), has raised doubts whether it dealt with human or divine love, or had passed from one motif to the other. In one of its versions it reads (mutaqa¯rib/a¯ka¯):

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I have two loves for you: a love born of attraction, And a love that is your due. As for the love resulting from attraction, It is that I have thoughts of you and of none other.

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As for the love that you command by right, It is your stripping of the veils so I may see you. And praise for this or that is not due me – Yours is the praise alike for this and that. Indeed it became common for the Sufi poets to make use of the vocabulary and conventions of love- and of wine-poetry to such an extent that the inadvertent reader may not always sense that he is dealing with one of their mystic texts. This is but one feature of a justly renowned poem by Ibn-al-Fa¯rid known as ‘the Poem of the ˙ Way’ which comes close to summing up his mystic experience. It runs to more than 760 lines, so that it is the longest in Arabic, and presumably the longest monorhyme in any language, and it remains remarkably supple although bejeweled with rhetorical devices. It starts (tawı¯l/tı¯): ˙ My rested eye poured out for me the drunkenness of love, My cup being the face of one who surpasses beauty. I let my friends assume that in the wine they drank Lay the inner secret of my eye-born liveliness; My pupils did duty for my cups, and from her qualities, Not from the liquor, was my yearning drawn. The time has come to thank the young men in the tavern Who helped to hide my passion, though well-known are my ways. A transcription of the last two lines will show the density of the word-play: wa bi l-hadaqi staxnaytu an qadahı¯ wa min ˙ ˙ sˇama¯ iliha¯ la¯ min sˇamu¯liya nasˇwatı¯ fa fı¯ ha¯ni sukrı¯ ha¯na sˇukrı¯ li fityatin ˙ ˙ bi-him tamma lı¯ katmi l-hawa¯ ma a sˇuhratı¯

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Mine among these tents is one who to me Is miserly with union, lavish in alienation, Set apart and surrounded with spearheads and blades, Holding sway over our minds as she sways, So chaste that informality is tantamount to veiling, Two cloaks enfolding her: my heart and my soul. ... Hers are the full moon’s qualities, my self her firmament, My purpose rising up to her as she arises – Her mansions being my arm for a pillow, My heart for a dwelling, my eye when she reveals herself. The rain is but the outflow of my tears, And lightning but the incandescence of my sighs. The ways of the Sufis are many. A tarı¯qa, a ‘way’ is in fact the word ˙ used in Arabic to denote an Order of devotees – in English, commonly called ‘dervishes’ – who follow a particular discipline instituted by a great teacher. What these ‘ways’ have in common is not easily summed up. Drastically condensed, the Sufis’ own formulation is that they are driven to seek identity with the Spirit of the Prophet, which is believed to have existed before Adam was given a physical form. Achieving this brings recognition of the Unicity of God and of one’s subsistence only through God. This occurs in a moment of glorious enlightenment, which does not become a permanent condition, although one’s earthly life is inevitably marked by it. Every step of this formulation is linked, if only by very subtle inferences, to a Qur anic verse or to a recorded saying of the Prophet’s. This did not always clear Sufis from the suspicion that they dipped into the heresies of incarnationism or pantheism. And what is one to make of these often-quoted lines by Ibn- Arabı¯ (1165–1280), which stand in striking contrast with al-Ma arrı¯’s strictures on all the religions known to him (tawı¯l/a¯nı¯): ˙

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I used of old to disown my friend If my religion was not close to his. But now my heart accepts all likenesses. It is pasture to gazelles and monastery to monks,

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A house for fires, a temple for circumambulators, Tablets of the Torah and text of the Qur a¯n. I follow the creed of Love wherever its mounts May lead – Love is my religion and my faith.

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Sufism undoubtedly grew from an Islamic seed in Islamic soil, but its shoots sometimes bolted vigorously enough to split their own calyx.

Prose The period of signal poetic creativity beginning late in the eighth century also witnessed the rapid and imposing development of the adab which we have encountered as almost synonymous with the practice of state secretaries. What the word adab came to signify has exercised many scholars,3 without yielding a precise, unequivocal, or stable definition. Suffice it that it was sometimes used to denote a specific literary genre, widely but not unchallengeably taken to be a learned and wide-ranging but non-technical miscellany. More generally, however, it was applied to prose writing of artistic quality. Occasionally, too, anticipating its modern usage, it seemed to cover all literature. What is easier to describe is the direction taken by the prose writers who gained recognition as literary figures. The association with chancellery duties was not broken: several of the most celebrated prose writers, such as Ibn al- Amı¯d (d.970), as-Sa¯hib ˙ ˙ ˙ ibn- Abba¯d (938–95) or Ima¯d ad-Dı¯n al- Isfaha¯nı¯ (1125–1201) ˙ were State secretaries. No doubt it was their command of the classical language that was their primary qualification for the office, but not necessarily their originality or inventiveness. In the immense record of as-Sa¯bi ’s (925–94) correspondence, for example, most of ˙ ˙

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3 See each of the reference works listed in the Bibliography; also Nallino, CarloAlfonso, La Litte´rature Arabe des Origines a` l’E´poque de la Dynastie Umayyade, Paris, Maisonneuve, 1950; pp. 7–34; and Pellat, Charles, “Variations sur le the`me de l’adab” in his E´tudes sur l’Histoire Socio-culturelle de l’Islam. London, Variorum reprints, 1976.

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the items are written on behalf of one eminent man to another, fulsomely congratulating him on some success or warning him against insubordination. Personal letters, however, could become pieces of fine writing: One from Ibn-al- Amı¯d containing a description of the sea was so admired that it was circulated among the learned. It is easy to see how such epistles – expressing, for example, a preference for spring over summer flowers – may grow into essays. Besides, the Arabic word for an epistle, risa¯la, literally means ‘a message’, and may carry lofty connotations – for was it not a divine message that the Prophet delivered to Mankind? Many of the ‘epistles’ produced in this period were veritable monographs, substantial in length and learned in content. In modern Arab universities, the word has been adopted for ‘a dissertation’. From all this, one may deduce the qualities that conferred on a prose piece literary status. It may be taken for granted that the text should be in good classical Arabic. It tallies with the fact that the word adab also means “politeness” that the writing should be such as would gain acceptance in refined circles: elegant, polished, and – increasingly in subsequent centuries – ornamental. According to Ibn-Qutayba (828–89), unlike the specialist who needs to concentrate on one branch of knowledge, a man of adab should (anticipating Matthew Arnold’s critic) acquire “the best of everything”. Arab authors did not have to be inventive. But they had to be wide-ranging and well-informed; in fact, many of their products were compilations of previously known material, the originality lying in the selection and the purpose to which it was put. The first of the Arab prose writers to acquire fame without being a State official was a giant. Known by the sobriquet al-Ja¯hiz, ‘the ˙ ˙ goggle-eyed’, he was a man of insatiable curiosity and inexhaustible energy – an overactive thyroid gland possibly accounting for both his appearance and his productivity. Some two hundred titles are attributed to him, although only about one-fifth have survived. He was the head of a theological school, but his writings are studded with information about such disparate topics as the training of slave-girls as singers, the effects of castration on humans, the instruction of children, and a report that Musaylima – one of the false prophets who attempted to emulate the founder of Islam – tried to convince people that he could summon an angel by flying a

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kite “such as children make out of paper”. He is credited with an entire book on animals, but his scholarliness was such that he apologized for not writing about fish because sailors made unreliable informants. Another book of his on misers had several imitators, miserliness being the most despicable trait in the eyes of Arabs, who use the same word for generosity as for nobility. And most relevant to the study of literature is a major work of his, a modern edition of which runs to more than five hundred pages; it is entitled al-Baya¯nu wa t-Tabyı¯n, which may be translated as ‘Lucidity and Elucidation’, although baya¯n became a technical word for ‘Rhetoric’. Al-Ja¯hiz wrote in a vivid and vigorous style, often marked by ˙ ˙ rhythmically balanced clauses and assonance but direct and shorn of verbal gymnastics, and punctuated with witticisms and even some quite bawdy jokes. He deliberately tried to spare his reader tedium by varying his material, although his verve sometimes led him into lengthy digressions which are usually enjoyable, but frustrating to the scholar who is eager to pursue a particular theme. A brief extract from a substantial disquisition on eloquence may illustrate his usual practice of interweaving material from many sources with his own pithy observations. It concerns the judge Iya¯s ibn-Mu a¯wiya who was famed for his good judgment but also for his garrulity4:

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Abd-Alla¯h ibn-Sˇubruma once said to him, “You and I are Öincompatible: You have no desire to shut up, and I have no desire to listen!” He once joined a circle of members of the tribe of Quraysˇ in the Damascus mosque, and took command of the assembly. What they noticed was that he was ruddy and ugly, shabby in appearance and austere, so they made light of him. When they realized who he was they apologized to him and said, “The fault is partly ours, but partly also yours, for you came to us in the garb of a pauper, then spoke the language of kings.”

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I have known people to approve of his retort to some who said to him, “Your only fault is that you admire your own words.” He asked, “Do you admire them?” They said, “Yes.” He rejoined, “I have an even greater right to admire what I say and what I do.” Now this is not – God preserve you! – what people include under the heading of conceit. What is considered blameworthy is not that one should perceive the excellence of which one is capable. Perception is no part of conceit, which is indeed to be deprecated. Tradition has it that the Prophet said, “The believer is he who deplores his faults and rejoices in his good qualities.” The Caliph Umar was told, “So-and-So does not know what evil is.” He replied, “He is the more likely to fall into it.” . . . Abu-l-Hasan reports: Iya¯s was told, “Your only fault is ˙ your garrulity.” He asked, “Is what you hear from me true or false?” “It is true,” they said. “Well then,” he retorted, “an excess of good can only be good.” But that is not correct. There has to be an end to discourse, and a limit to the zest of listeners. What goes beyond the bearable and leads to weariness and boredom – that surplus is mere babbling. It is idle talk. It is the verbosity that you have heard wise men condemn.

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Equally characteristic of al-Ja¯hiz is that a few pages further on, still ˙ ˙ on the subject of eloquence, he draws entirely on his own perceptions and taste in urging those who relate a witticism by a coarse beduin or a suave city-dweller to retain the flavour of the original without attempting to smooth the roughness of the one or correct the solecisms of the other. This leads him to observe that men often take pleasure in the lisping of a slave-girl as long as she is young and pretty, but not when she is a mature woman. This in turn leads to a further digression about pet-names with which a young girl may be babied, but which become ridiculous when still used in addressing her when she has become “a senile old woman, laden with flesh and piled high with fat.” Al-Ja¯hiz was succeeded by a number of distinguished writers, ˙ ˙ who however were soon seduced by the subtleties of badı¯ , so that rhyming and rhetorical devices such as are encountered in the poetry eventually became inseparable from artistic prose. This was

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also further embellished with the addition of a few lines of poetry here and there. The ground covered was vast and varied, reflecting individual interests as different as those of Abu¯-Hayya¯n at˙ Tawhı¯dı¯ (c.927–1023), who had philosophical and mystic procliv˙ ities, and those of at-Ta a¯libı¯’s (961–1038), who minutely tabulated such trivia as offensive nicknames and such coincidences as that the only two Caliphs called Ja far were both murdered on a Tuesday night. Scattered among these writings, especially those of at-Tawhı¯dı¯ ˙ and at-Tanu¯xı¯ (940–94) are not a few anecdotes and short narratives, usually presented as factual accounts with a chain of named transmitters to authenticate them. There was, however, resistance to the mere telling of stories, especially of made-up stories that had no purpose other than entertainment. This may have stemmed from a Qur anic condemnation of “one who buys idle stories in order to lead men astray from the path of God” (31:6), a verse which is known to have been directed at an individual who vied with the Prophet for public attention, but which – like all other Scriptural texts – could be given universal relevance. Several pronouncements attributed to the Prophet are equally intolerant of purposeless pastimes. A not unreasonable inference is that to gain admission to the literary canon, a piece of fiction had to have some additional virtue. In fact, the only narrative genre to be established and accepted as literary in premodern Arabic literature was the maqa¯ma, valued above all as a vehicle for verbal virtuosity. Long credited with being the originator of the genre, Badı¯ -azZama¯n al-Hamada¯nı¯ composed a number of short narratives, some covering only a couple of pages, strung together by having in almost all instances the same narrator and the same named antihero: a plausible silver-tongued rogue who lives by his wits, perpetrating some petty fraud and getting away with a free meal or some meagre booty. The story line is certainly not what al-Hamada¯nı¯ may be credited with having innovated, for there are strikingly similar short narratives in earlier writings, especially in at-Tanu¯xı¯’s Relief after Hardship which – as the title indicates – delights in accounts of good fortune attained, whether as a providential reward for

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THE MAIN GROWTH

patience and virtue or as ill-gotten gains. The folk character of many of these stories is evident, although the pretence is maintained that they are factual. The word maqa¯ma itself5 is open to speculations that would favour a folk origin. The accepted English translation of a maqa¯ma is “an assembly”, and such indeed is one of the many significations the word has. More pertinent, however, is that maqa¯ma is derived from a root which means “to stand”, and several of its connotations have to do with “making a stand”. Thus in early usage it could convey the sense of “a tragic situation” calling for a bold deed, a prowess, a combat. In the ninth century, it was used in the sense of an edifying harangue delivered by a beduin magnifying pristine virtues in opposition to soft urban ways. But a little later the rough beduin had become a figure of fun, and anecdotes abound about the tufaylı¯, the parasitic intruder on ˙ sophisticated company, and the mukaddı¯, the petty trickster. Al-Hamada¯nı¯s anti-hero is just such a character, and one of his maqa¯mas harks back to the earlier perception, the hero for once being an austere man carrying a bier who meets a group of young men bent on pleasure and sternly reminds them of approaching doom. Besides, in several of his stories the anti-hero’s feat consists of formulating or solving a riddle, yet another common element of folklore. What al-Hamada¯nı¯ added to the mix was to make each maqa¯ma peak into a marvel of linguistic and rhetorical skill, although the narrative leading up to it was mostly plain and unrhymed, but still elegant. That is not to say that he was word-bound. The stories are lively and amusing; the tricks are varied and sometimes ingenious; the social observation is often acute. One may instance the maqa¯ma of Baghdad in which a country yokel comes to the capital and falls into the hands of a glib city slicker who hails him as the son of an old friend, addressing him by a name of his own invention, and without giving him time to gather his wits he invites him to share a rich meal, then – on the pretence that he is off to fetch some iced water – he leaves him to pay the bill. The picture

5 See R. Blache`re, “E´tude Se´mantique sur le nom maqaˆma”, Mashriq, 47 (1953), 646–657.

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drawn of the simple villager having pulled up the hem of his robe and gathered the ends round his waist in order to free his legs for motion on the long march is one that may be encountered to this day. So is the fact that he carries the few coins that he possesses in a fold of his clothing, tied so tightly that when he has to part with them he needs to use his teeth to undo the knot. Also true to life is that when the worst has happened he is so befuddled that he can only mutter that the stranger kept calling him by the wrong name. Barely a century later, al-Harı¯rı¯ (1054–1122) – the most admired ˙ of al-Hamada¯nı¯’s successors – had extended the use of rhymed and highly decorated prose to the whole text, made the anti-hero’s trick almost always consist of dazzling his victims with a display of verbal fireworks, and reduced the narrative to little more than a framework for this display. A detail easily overlooked is that al-Harı¯rı¯’s anti-hero pleads for ˙ sympathy on the ground that he is a refugee from the Crusaders. It is part of the wide picture that the Crusades, which left so deep a mark on the consciousness of the countries that launched them, had few echoes in the literature of the lands they targeted, although some interesting sidelights on their presence in the Holy Land may be found in the autobiography of Usa¯ma ibn-Munqid (1095–1188). It is consistent with the literary establishment’s low valuation of mere fiction that pre-modern Arabic literature produced few works and evolved no genre that called for sustained and unified imagination. Indeed the only extensive and – if only in part – challengingly imaginative prose work to appear in the Islamic heartlands and to command the attention of scholars is the the Epistle of Forgiveness, by the poet al-Ma arrı¯. It was probably written in 1033. Couched in heavily ornamented prose, tackling a wide range of literary and theological topics in no discernible sequence and to no clear purpose, it has intrigued, challenged, and exercised a number of modern scholars. It is triggered by a long and rambling letter from an aged and learned admirer called Ibn-al-Qa¯rih who starts with a description ˙ of his formation and interests and reflections upon his life experience, but who is also at pains to display his erudition in comments on the pronouncements and deeds of an assortment of poets and other personalities.

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THE MAIN GROWTH

Al-Ma arrı¯’s response begins fancifully: he imagines that his correspondent has reached Paradise and describes his experiences there, which include a peep into Hell. Only then does he pick up the points made in the letter, not so much answering them as setting off on tangents from them. Protestations of sincerity, for example, lead to a discussion of the insincerity and self-interest that dominate relations not only between humans but also in the animal kingdom. The topics dealt with are as random as they are in the original letter; there is also a long excursus into false beliefs, in the course of which neither sects no individuals – not even some respected theologians – are spared. It is the first part of al-Ma arrı¯’s epistle – the vision of the Afterlife, long antedating Dante – that has raised problems of interpretation and cast doubts on how true a believer the author was. Much of it is in the form of literary discussions, for the hero is shown questioning some of the great poets of the past – including pre-Islamic ones who have been forgiven their paganism, hence the title of the entire work – on some lines attributed to them, sometimes even starting squabbles among them, for their salvation has not cured them of their vanities. Their pleasures too seem to be luxurious elaborations of earthly delights: In preparation for a banquet, beasts are painlessly slaughtered and heavenly corn is ground by houris reciting verses as they operate handmills pointlessly made of pearls and precious stones. Despite scriptural references and pronouncements consistent with orthodoxy, it becomes difficult to accept that the visions are intended as anything but parodies of popular concepts, especially when one comes across a houri whose buttocks can instantly wax or wane to suit the tastes of the elect.

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Folk literature The Arab literary establishment’s attachment to the classical language has had the effect of banishing from scholarly attention a vast area of popular Arab creativity, even though the few occasions on which it interacted with the “high” literature have proved fruitful. Some elements of this alternative literature have found echoes in the written sources, disguised as fact as we

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have seen in antecedents of the maqa¯ma, or imbedded in literary history as in the stories concerning the Udrı¯ poets. But they were not recognized as valid literary works in their own right, and were not written down unless reworded into at least minimally “correct” classical Arabic. The process has been particularly inimical to verse compositions as these could not be upgraded in this fashion without destroying metre and rhyme. Indications that these compositions had some currency early in Islamic times are skimpy and indirect. Differences between the Arabs and the non-Arabs in setting their verse to music thrust themselves on al-Ja¯hiz’s attention, but he did not elaborate. ˙ ˙ Hints that some poets departed from classical prosody are few and not undisputed. Rare and insufficient are such accounts as that the celebrated singer Ibra¯hı¯m al-Mawsilı¯ (742–804) when drunk used ˙ to sing lines that offend against classical prosody and grammar alike:

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I came from the streets of Mosul carrying my pots of wine. For one who drinks in kingly company, intoxication is a must! Scholarship in this area is still recent and limited, and there may yet be great discoveries to be made. But for the time being, the record of early Arabic folk poetry is virtually a blank. Common sense tells us that once spoken Arabic had parted from the classical and split into many regional dialects, as al-Ja¯hiz explicitly ˙ ˙ testifies, the unlettered were sure to create their own songs to mark the great occasions as well as the daily concerns of their lives. How extensive and how varied these can be is unfolded only in the present-day scene, where folk traditions can be studied at first hand. These traditions are very much alive, conservative but also functional and therefore subject to change, so that only very rarely and very cautiously may one yield to the temptation to seek in the present an echo of the past. Thus one popular Egyptian traditional song is claimed to have been composed for the wedding in 896 of Qatr-an-Nada¯, ‘Dewdrop’, the daughter of ˙ the semi-independent ruler of Egypt, Xuma¯rawayh, to the Caliph al-Mu tadid. Similar songs are known to last well over a century, ˙

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THE MAIN GROWTH

sometimes retaining obsolete words, and a wedding-song is particularly likely to be long-lived, but for the history attached to this one there is no firmer evidence than that it concerns a woman who bears the somewhat uncommon name of ¨ Atr-in˙ Nada¯, as it is pronounced in Egypt. The refrain refers to the practice of staining a bride’s hands and feet with henna on her wedding-night. It runs:

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The henna, the henna, o Dewdrop! Your prime – my love, my precious – so passionrousing! And the stanzas, quaintly expressive of the possessiveness of young love, run: How I fear your mother might be asking for you; I’d hide you in my eyes – my soul – painting kohl over you. How I fear your sister might be looking for you; I’d hide you in my hair – my precious – and plait it over you. Should trouble-makers come enquiring after you, I’d hide you in my breast – my soul – with pearls over you. Folk creations in prose have been better served by the written word, although still in a fragmentary and somewhat distorted fashion. One may assume, for example, that some narratives of Oriental provenance that surfaced only in Islamic Spain must also have had some circulation in the intervening provinces. Most profusely attested in the heartlands, however, are the extravagantly fantastic tales, fed by Persian and Indian imagination and further enriched by the Arabs, which are exemplified in the Arabian Nights. It is one of the many ironies and misunderstandings bordering the entire field that of all Arabic literary works this collection is the best known to the Western general reader, and is therefore assumed to be broadly representative of the Arab-Islamic mindset, whereas it has been mostly despised by the educated Arab,

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both because of its unedifying content and because of the poverty of its language and style, undetectable in translation. Its kernel was a collection of Persian stories entitled Haza¯r Afsa¯na, ‘A Thousand Tales’, to which a frame story of Indian origin was fitted and to which many more orally transmitted narratives, mainly of Syrian or Egyptian origin, were gradually added. They were first written down in the fourteenth century, but the genre attracted so little scholarly attention that this first manuscript was not edited until 1984, by Harvard Professor Muhsin Mahdi. Before this was done, Arabic printings had been slipshod and editors had taken liberties with the text, the first translator Antoine Galland (1646–1715) adding to it material of a different provenance, notably the popular story of Aladdin. None of this robs the work of its appeal. The narrator’s skill, especially in nesting stories within stories, has long been admired. So has the luxuriant imagination. But those who wish to read it as a social document need to be alerted to a common source of misunderstanding: the assumption that the characters’ frequent invocation of God is a sign of piety. The fact is that in everyday speech Muslims take the name of the Lord very lightly, and a “By Allah!” is no more significant than an “Ah, well. . .” The viewpoint is intensely human, depicting not the outside reality so much as the dream of the deprived, in which nothing is ordinary or workaday but every woman is either a miracle of beauty of an embodiment of evil and ugliness, and abject fortune can be spectacularly reversed by a trick of magic or the intervention of a jinn. And the dream has to fit into a world in which no action engenders a commensurate reaction, but where is enthroned an arbitrary and capricious Providence – or is it a repressive social order? Also a part of folk literature are at least ten extensive narratives which some scholars are reluctant to call epics and would rather label romances, but which certainly contain elements of what is usually associated with the epic. Most of them are recited in prose, with only the highlights sung. Several have pre-Islamic beginnings, and of these the most substantial and long-lived is an elaboration of the career of the warrior-poet Antara, with his name shortened to Antar. When eventually an integral version of it was printed, it ran to well over five thousand pages. There are references to its

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THE MAIN GROWTH

existence in some form as early as in the ninth century, and although we must guard against the assumption that the texts that were put on paper at much later dates are true to an orally transmitted art or may safely be projected on to the past, the story as we have it is consistent with very early beginnings followed by elaborations in the first two centuries of Islam. An essential theme running through it is that Antar is the son of a free man and of a black slave woman, and is therefore born black and bond; and although he earns his freedom and single-handedly repeatedly saves his tribe from disaster by his prowess, he is often despised and ill-used by his own. Like a true paladin, he is a defender of helpless women. For love of his cousin Abla whose hand he is repeatedly promised then denied, he undergoes ordeals and braves many dangers. He does marry her eventually, but they are temporarily estranged when she tests his devotion by demanding that he kiss her foot; this is more than his pride can thole, so he leaves in high dudgeon and marries another. He takes part in numberless single combats and contests with jinn and with wild animals, but above all he conducts a huge number of campaigns that – although set in pre-Islamic times – pit him not only against Arab tribes but also against the enemies that Muslims encountered only later, including Persians, Indians, Byzantines, Andalusians, and even Franks. His end comes at the hands of a foe he had blinded earlier but who has learned to direct his arrows at sounds, although Antar retains enough strength to kill his assailant before he dies himself. Other such epic tales have traceable historical beginnings, by far the most important being the Hila¯liyya, i.e. the story of the Banu¯Hila¯l, originally an Arabian tribe that claimed descent from Hila¯l ¯ mir, a noted supporter of the Prophet. By the eleventh ibn- A century, the tribe had moved to Upper Egypt, but was proving troublesome to the Fatimid dynasty then ruling the country. When in addition the Fatimid possessions in North Africa broke away and transferred their allegiance to the Abbasid Caliph of Baghdad, Egypt’s ruler al-Mustansir tried to solve two problems by sending a ˙ Hila¯lı¯ force against the rebels. It scored a quick success by taking Qayrawa¯n in 1052, but the contested territories then split into several emirates, pitting the Hila¯lı¯s into a long struggle mainly

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THE MAIN GROWTH

against the Zana¯ta tribe. These contests provided ample material for folk poets to embroider. In the main, they celebrate the exploits of Abu¯-Ze¯d il-Hila¯lı¯, who was famous for his ruses as well as his valour; but variety is provided not only by a number of sub-heroes and villains but also by some strongly delineated characters, such as Sulta¯n Hasan who is noted for the kingly qualities of generosity ˙ ˙ and hospitality, and his sister al-Ja¯ziya, who is highly regarded not only for her beauty but also for her wisdom. The Hila¯liyya is the only epic cycle that has survived to the present day, giving scholars the opportunity of observing how the art is practised and how the texts are constantly being remoulded and modified by new experiences. One last quandary regarding the pre-modern record needs to be approached from the folk angle. It is the almost total absence of any dramatic literature. Dramatic activity of several kinds is known to have existed for some time. Entirely religious and confined to the Shiah is the commemoration every year of the death of the Prophet’s grandson al-Husayn, who had been a contender for power but was cornered ˙ and killed by the Umayyads at Kerbela in Southern Iraq in 680. The event was traumatic, and its commemoration is known to have started almost immediately, but the form this took can only be surmised from later practice. To this day, in many Shiite communities ceremonies are held in which the story is formally recited, and in Kerbela itself a great pageant is held at which the events are reenacted, but unlike the Oberammergau passion play the purport is not to revile the killers but to manifest guilt and penitence for having failed to defend the martyr. Secular forms of theatrical activity, however, appear to have developed independently. There are references to public performers of one kind or another as early as in the eighth century. Just what they did and when they flourished has to be deduced from a minute examination of how a number of words of uncertain and unstable signification are used in a number of different contexts.6 Broadly,

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6 This has been meticulously done by Shmuel Moreh in Live Theatre and Dramatic Literature in the Medieval Arab World, New York University Press, 1992.

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the earliest seem to have been engaged in various kinds of buffoonery, one of several terms used, masxara, literally ‘laughingstock’, eventually passing into European languages as ‘masquerade’. Indications soon multiply that there were men and women who donned the distinctive garb and caricatured the behaviour of holders of public office, but they may have been no more than participants in processions or pageants. A further hint of the existence of a theatrical profession and of the status it commanded is that one of the many words for a prostitute, in use by the tenth century, is mu¯mis, the Greek word from which the English ‘mime’ is derived. Intriguingly, al-Ja¯hiz mentions men who could imitate ˙ ˙ the speech of different regions, affect a stammer, or rouse dogs by imitating their bark. Were these mere pranksters? They did have the qualities and skills one associates with acting. There are indeed in the literature of this period a few explicit references to somewhat dramatized monologues in which a performer impersonates a character and speaks at some length on a specific topic, with at most minimal interventions by other characters. But of plays with a developed plot there is no sign. Firmer information is available about the shadow theatre, in which a performer or performers stationed behind a translucent screen projected on to it the shadows of figures cut out of leather and spoke their lines. The Fatimids who ruled Egypt in the tenth and eleventh centuries are known to have employed such performers to entertain their soldiery, and there is a specific reference to Saladin having attended such a show in 1171. A lengthy description in Ibn-al-Fa¯rid’s major poem leaves no doubt ˙ that the performances could be very elaborate. But the only indication we have of the kind of show that was presented comes from Ibn-Da¯niya¯l (1248–1310), an eye-doctor who turned to this art and wrote for it three plays that have survived. They are gratifyingly varied and ingeniously constructed. The first mainly features a libertine who proclaims his intention of reforming and seeks the services of a female marriage broker to help him on the way, he dwelling in prurient detail on his past debaucheries and she on the joys she has to offer. The second has a character portraying a succession of rogues, tricksters, beggars, and prostitutes who made up the underworld, each describing his speciality. The third has a

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lovelorn man and the male object of his attention setting up contests between cocks, goats, and bulls that they possess, the losing bull finally being slaughtered to provide meat for a banquet to which lovers of all kinds are invited. The plays all end dutifully with the characters repenting and reforming, but it is on what they need to repent of that the texts dwell. The humour is loud, lewd, and scatological, but it is not devoid of real wit or of a measure of social satire. Significantly, the texts are mostly in a mixture of highly competent verse and ornate prose, and all but a few passages that dip into the vernacular are in grammatically impeccable classical Arabic, establishing once again that the primary criterion for recognition by the establishment was linguistic. These three plays have a place at least in the muju¯n half-light of the literary canon; but Ibn-Da¯niya¯l had no successor. The genre had its inception and its subsequent life entirely at the folk level.

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5 THE IBERIAN BRANCH

The penetration of the Iberian Peninsula by the Arabs began in 711, in the days of the Umayyad Caliphate. The people they had to conquer were known to them as “Vandalos” and they named their new domain “al- Andalus”. When the Umayyad dynasty lost the heartlands, one of its scions detached Andalusia from the Abbasid empire and established a rival Caliphate in Cordova. This, however, disintegrated in the first half of the eleventh century into a number of city-states, which eventually fell to North African dynasties. The last Muslim stronghold in Granada fell to the Christian Reconquista in 1492. What marks out Andalusia for separate treatment, however, is not its political distinctiveness, but the fact that Iberia was never completely Islamized or Arabized, so that for nearly eight centuries a mixed population of Muslims and non-Muslims, of Arabic- and Romance-speakers, sometimes under Muslim and sometimes under Christian rule, lived close together and interacted intimately and extensively. Indeed many of those known to the West as “Moors” were Iberians who adopted Arabic as their language and often also Islam as their faith. This is evident from the names of some poets, such as Ibn-Basˇkuwa¯l (1101–83), i.e. ‘Son of Pasqual’, and it implies that branches of one family could come under different religious or linguistic designations. Even more numerous must have been the undistinguished thousands of Romance-speakers who had a working knowledge of everyday Arabic but no overarching attachment to the language of the Qur a¯n. There was much they could share with the Arabs at the folk level, but to the classical Arabic tradition they had little access.

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THE IBERIAN BRANCH

Silent or dismissive as the Arabic sources tend to be on folk literature, there is enough scattered and incidental information to justify the inference that the Arabic-speaking invaders brought with them a low-brow tradition as well as a high one. Several of the public entertainments bordering on dramatic activity that were known in the heartlands are encountered in Iberia as well, and it is clear that they are not merely the result of parallel developments, for some distinctive terms associated with them, including a kind of hobbyhorse called kurraj, which is of Persian origin, occur in a recognizable form in Andalusia. But here also there is little to show that elaborate plays were performed. Significantly too, some popular narratives surface in Spanish translations although the Arabic originals are lost. One is an account of the Prophet’s ascension to heaven, mentioned at the beginning of the fifty-third chapter of the Qur a¯n and subsequently much embroidered. Another is the legend of Alexander, which is not of Arab origin, but which in the Spanish version has Qur anic echoes in that it refers to the hero as “the Two-Horned” and involves an encounter with Gog and Magog (Qur a¯n 18:83–99). As is observable elsewhere, popular songs got shorter shrift, but a casual observation in Ibn-Bassa¯m’s (1084–1147) that people sang “in the manner of the Arab camel-drivers and of the Christians” meshes with the commonsense assumption that at the folk level traditions were melded. The effects on the literature produced were profound and illuminating.

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Poetry The intellectual e´lite remained remarkably close to its counterpart in the East. It was not unusual for Muslim scholars to travel far and wide in search of knowledge, and Andalusians are known to have gone to the heartlands in appreciable numbers, to have kept abreast of what was produced there, and to have welcomed eminent men originating there as arbiters of taste. Indeed at least until the eleventh century, they looked East for cultural guidance. When Ibn- AbdRabbih (860–940) compiled a thesaurus, he included in it no Andalusian composition other than his own. For a local poet to be

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THE IBERIAN BRANCH

dubbed “the Mutanabbı¯ of the West” was to have his pre-eminence recognized – and three were so honoured: Ibn-Ha¯ni (b. between 932 and 937, d. c.973), ar-Rama¯dı¯ (d.?1013), and ibn-Darra¯j (958–1030). Understandably, Ibn-Hazm (994–1064), a man of great ˙ learning in the traditional sciences of Islam, a thinker, and a poet of occasional brilliance, was sufficiently riled to protest (tawı¯l/bu¯): ˙

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In the firmament of knowledge I am the luminous sun, But my fault is that I rose in the West! He had a point, for Andalusia produced not a few men of genius such as Ibn-Zaydu¯n (1003–70) who, after an eventful and often costly political career, could summon tender memories of early days in Cordova and its summer resort in az-Zahra¯ . He had had a love affair with Walla¯da the daughter of the last Umayyad Caliph, herself a poetess. It had ended bitterly, with her turning her affections to a rival of his and bestowing on him (in verse) the sixfold label of “sodomist, catamite, adulterer, wittol, cuckold, and thief”. Nevertheless, time had healed his wounds sufficiently so he sang, still drawing on ancient imagery in which lightning bore the promise of vivifying rain, as well as on vivid Qur anic descriptions of Heaven and Hell (bası¯t/ı¯na¯): ˙

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Haste to the Palace, swift lightning! Pour out a blessing On one who once dispensed pure passion and affection; And bear – o Eastern breeze! – our vital supplication To one who, living, even from afar, revived us. O for a garden that long yielded to our sight Soft garden roses, youth-lustered, and wild ones too! O for a life from whose blossom we have drawn Diversities of hopes and miscellanies of delight! O for a bliss so opulent that for a while We strutted in brocades of grandeur, trailing our skirts! ... A Paradise, whose Kawtar flowed with sweet and limpid waters Has been supplanted by the bitter and purulent fare of Hell,

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As if we never spent a night in unison, Luck closing the eye of our detractor – Two secrets in the keeping of the dark, concealed Until the tongue of dawn all but betrayed us. If there is not to be another meeting in this life, Then in the stance of Resurrection be our tryst – it shall suffice. Every one of the themes encountered in the heartlands was pursued by the Andalusians, from muju¯n to mysticism, from Ibn-Zaydu¯n’s record of an intensely personal experience to Ibn-Zamrak’s (1333–93?) praise of the last Muslim dynasty in Spain, carved line by line round the walls of the main hall in the Alhambra as a royal family’s portraits may be hung in the picture gallery of a European palace. Some modern scholars, keen to find a native Spanish note in this literature, have noted in Ibn-Hazm and in ar-Radiyy (the son ˙ ˙ of al-Mu tamid who ruled over Seville from 1069 to 1091) a comparison of the beloved to an angel, which does indeed suggest a Christian influence for the Muslim poets’ imagination did not usually stretch to female angels or angelic women, but such occurrences are extremely rare. If there is in mainstream Andalusian poetry a feature that marks it out from that of the heartlands, it is at best impressionistic and at most a matter not of substance but of degree – a heightened lyricism, perhaps, and a special attachment to the beauties of nature, notably in the work of Ibn-Xafa¯ja (1058–1138/9) who was nicknamed “the gardener” (ka¯mil/ı¯lu¯):

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I sip my wine while gentle is the breeze And leafy umbrage makes a quivering bower. The flowers are wakened eyes, moist, And the waters are smiling, pleasing, shiny. Out of the lightning, clouds have emerged, Crowding the horizon – squadrons and pennants – So that boughs in the wood exchange their fragrances, And brooks and mountain streams fill up, Embracing the trees which sway in thankfulness And joy, while in the branches coo the doves.

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The meadows quiver in contentment, giddy; Embraced by an Eastern breeze, they yield. Well-watered, they were silvered by dew; This gone, they are gilded by the sunset, And into the veil of a cloud now peers An eye made languid by somnolence, Quiescent, like a patient longing for a visit, Or like the compliant lover at sight of a dear one. So far as the lofty monorhyme ode is concerned, therefore, the Andalusians remained faithful to the tradition elaborated by their brethren in the heartlands. They were far more radical and creative, however, when they brought into the light of literary history two strophic, multi-rhyme verse forms known as zajal and muwasˇsˇah.1 ˙ The zajal is entirely in the Andalusian vernacular, and its place in the record is indissolubly associated with the name of IbnQuzma¯n (c.1086–1160), a wit and a frequenter of sophisticated libertine circles. He was well-acquainted with conventional poetry and sometimes composed in the classical idiom. He was long credited with being the “inventor” of the zajal, but he himself named several predecessors, and it is evident that the genre had a long history before he put his imprint upon it. In its commonest form, a zajal starts with a rhyming couplet which then serves as a refrain and provides a binding rhyme; it is followed by a number of strophes each introducing a new rhyme but ending with a line that reproduces the rhyme of the refrain, so that the rhyme scheme of the entire composition may be represented as: AA bbbA(AA) cccA(AA), etc. One of Ibn-Quzma¯n’s zajals deserves to be singled out both because it illustrates the genre and because it gives some inkling of what a popular show was like. Here, as translated by James T. Monroe and emended by Moreh (who takes Qurro to refer to a male dancer, and the “Villager” to a

1 One of several meanings of zajal is ‘raising the voice’, but it also has idiomatic associations with the voice of angels or of jinn. Muwasˇsˇah means ‘intricately ˙ ornamented’, but also ‘wearing a wisˇa¯h‘, which is a woman’s belt or sash. ˙

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sketch) are the refrain (in italics) followed by the first three and the last of its eight strophes2: Greetings to you, greetings to you I’ll be soon with you! Prepare the kettledrum And take the framedrum in hand. Hurry, hurry, the castanets, Let no one be remiss in playing them! And if a tambourine were available, The addition would be excellent, And the reed, my friends, The reed, will revive you. Cover Qurro for me In an inclined veil, Let him wear a taffeta robe With a full embroidered flag. Let there be amulets upon him Like those that come from Babylon. Don’t nap, by God For I know you well! Your ‘Villager’ is waiting, Enliven the stage! Whoever gets out of tune, Slap him on the nape of the neck! Zuhra, Maryam, Aysha, Where are you? Get moving! Ululate O little whores with him who leads you. ... I love all of you, By the Prophet, love me in return. Without you, I’m unhappy, So are you, without me. If anything should befall me, Mourn for me, all of you. 2 Shmuel Moreh, Live Theatre and Dramatic Literature in the Medieval Arab World, New York University Press, 1992, pp. 141–2.

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And if anything should befall you I will mourn for you. By Arab historians of literature, the muwasˇsˇah is said to have been ˙ invented by a blind poet of Cabra who died early in the tenth century, but credit at least for developing it is also given to others. The earliest recorded example is by Uba¯da ibn-Ma¯ -as-Sama¯ (d.1028 or 1030). Except for one feature which will presently be discussed, the standard muwasˇsˇah is entirely in classical Arabic. Its structure is a ˙ somewhat more intricate one than that of the zajal in that the initial couplet is not merely repeated after each strophe but is matched by a new couplet using the same rhyme, so that the usual scheme may be represented as AA bbbAA(AA), cccAA(AA), dddAA(AA), etc. Variations and elaborations are also encountered, achieved mainly by the addition of internal rhymes. Some remain very close to classical prosody except for the multiplicity of rhymes. One such is by Ibn-Sahl (1212–51), a convert from Judaism. It is in the ramal metre and retains the division of lines into two hemistichs but with a different rhyme at the end of each hemistich, resulting in alternating rhymes throughout – i.e. ABAB cdcdcdABAB efefefABAB, etc. It is an insistent protestation of love, ending in two Qur anic references – one to the fiery furnace into which Abraham was cast but which God commanded to be cool and harmless to him (21:69), and one to the injunction that warriors yield one-fifth of their booty to God and His Prophet and to charity (8:41):

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Does the fawn of the secluded pasture know that from his covert He has inflamed a lover’s heart abiding there? Now does this heart burn and flicker as when The East wind plays with embers. O full moons that have risen on the day of parting, Resplendent, to lead me to delusion, No fault is in my passion, except The ultimate of beauty in you, eyesight in me. I pluck delights though my heart is scarred, My delectation of the beloved being only in thought.

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When I bemoan to him my passion, he but smiles As do the hills at the rain-laden clouds, The tear-like drops performing on them a funeral rite, While in their splendour they celebrate a wedding. If you should ask what my offence against him is: Mine is the punishment, and he the sinner. The morning sun has chosen in his countenance A dawning spot wherein to set. Tears have conveyed to him my yearnings, And my glances gild his cheeks. My ministrations make roses bloom When surreptitiously I glance at him, And so I wonder what makes illicit The plucking of these roses by their grower. When I bemoan to him my ardour, His eyes but bring me to the point of death. His glances leave me with no more breath Than ants leave traces on solid rock. And still I thank him for what he spares, And do not reproach him for what he has despoiled. I deem him just when he oppresses me, And my reprover’s words are tantamount to dumbness. No power to judge remains in me Since he became my very breath. Within me he has set a fire That blazes uncontrollably all the while. It is but cool and wholesome in his cheeks, But in my bowels it is hot and burning. The law of love makes him a fierce, bay lion, And yet I fancy him a fawn. Said I, when he appeared in warlike panoply, And with his glances for a bodyguard:

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“O you who seize my heart as booty, Let union be the fifth that you surrender!” Love was in fact almost exclusively the theme of the muwasˇsˇah. Not ˙ a few, however, differ from Ibn-Sahl’s in that they can hardly be reconciled with classical Arabic scansion. Structurally, too, a pattern evolved that required most muwasˇsˇahs to run to five strophes, ˙ framed of course by the shorter refrain-like units. Some scholars also give special importance to the middle strophe as holding the essence of the composition, perhaps even revealing the identity of the beloved. But all authorities agree that the final refrain-like unit, called the xarja, is the culmination which the entire muwasˇsˇah is ˙ designed to reach. What is more – and this is the only departure from classical Arabic that is allowed – the xarja should be a provocative statement put into the mouth of a woman, couched in the vernacular or in a mixture of Spanish and vernacular Arabic, and is often borrowed from an existing popular song. Here, with the Arabic words transcribed in italics and the Spanish in Roman, is an example: Tant t’amaray illa con isˇ-sˇartı¯ ˙ An tajma xalxa¯lı¯ ma a qurtı¯ ˙

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which may be translated: I shall love you so much, but only on condition That you join my anklets to my ear-rings. The word xarja is derived from a root (already encountered in connection with the Xa¯rijites) which denotes ‘exiting’, and this may be the sole reason why it was applied to the last part of the muwasˇsˇah. It is intriguing, however, that a closely related verb, ˙ axraja, was used at the time for ‘putting on a show’ and has been retained in modern times for producing a play or a film. Is it too fanciful to imagine a muwasˇsˇah as a performance in which the ˙ verses in pure Arabic are recited or sung by a man while a woman familiar only with the forms of expression current among the common people mimes or dances, and comes into her own at the end by singing the punch-line?

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It is obvious that the zajal and the muwasˇsˇah are closely related. ˙ Because the muwasˇsˇah was attested earlier, it was long assumed ˙ that it was the parent, with the corollary that the zajal poets could not handle complicated rhyme-schemes and therefore simplified them. If only because the discernible trend in folk poetry has been towards elaboration rather than simplification of rhyme and structure (as will be shown in connection with the modern mawa¯liya¯), the likelier inference is that the zajal is the progenitor, and only the antipathy of Arab scholars to the vernacular delayed its appearance in the record. Modern scholarship has unearthed more evidence in favour of this view. Moreover, several features shared by both forms, such as the fact that some compositions are compatible with the Arab metrical system and some are not, suggest multiple influences not unlikely in the folk literature of a mixed population. Yet the debate has sometimes been skewed by national pride and by the odd notion that for one culture to adopt and adapt what it finds desirable in another is a surrender and a mark of inferiority.3

Prose In prose as in poetry, it was works compatible with the standards established in the heartlands that the Andalusians retained as part of their ‘high’ literature. They had their stylists, such as al-Fath ibn˙ Xa¯qa¯n (d.1134) and asˇ-Sˇaqundı¯ (d.1231). They also composed ˙ maqa¯mas, notably fifty heavily ornamented ones by al- Asˇtarkuwı¯, i.e. ‘Of Estercuel’, (d.1143); but it is significant that Andalusians also included under this rubric elegant compositions studded with badı¯ even if they had no narrative component – one by Umar al-Ma¯laqı¯ in 1440, for example – strengthening the view that it was the rhetorical element that was the distinguishing mark of the genre.

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3 Contributors to this discussion have been S.M. Stern, Emilio Garcıá Go´mez, James T. Monroe, L.P. Harvey, T. J. Gorton, J. D. Latham, David Semah, Federico Corriente Co´rdoba, Alan Jones, Samuel G. Armistead, David Wulstan, and – drawing on comparable Hebrew texts – Yosef Yahalon, Ulf Haxen, and Susan Einbinder.

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Andalusians also produced three prose works remarkable for their cohesion or their sustained inventiveness, and as such virtually unparalleled in the East until modern times. Ibn-Hazm’s The Ring of the Dove is a clearly conceived and ˙ fairly well organized treatise on love. Its indebtedness to Greek thought is evident in its assertion that love is a reunion of parts of souls that have been separated in the physical universe, but it is also reinforced with accounts of the actual experiences of the author and of some individuals known to him, and embellished with not a few verses by Ibn-Hazm and by others. It also has revealing ˙ sidelights on the society of the time, at least at its higher levels, such as that the segregation of the sexes was not as hermetic as is generally supposed, if only because a measure of familiarity was extended not only to blood relations but also to a wide circle of dependants. Much delicacy is also implied in the author’s account of his love for a slave girl – a blonde – whom he courted for two years, to no effect. Impressive too is the almost matter-of-fact acceptance of homosexual love as a reality. And none of this is at odds with Ibn-Hazm’s known strictness in the interpretation of ˙ canonical law, for unstated but implicit throughout is the assumption that love is no justification for sex outside marriage. Indeed sexual attraction is said to be called ‘love’ only metaphorically, and the nature of the love contemplated in this work is best characterized in the account of a lover who rebukes his beloved for making an improper suggestion, which he deems inconsistent with their God-given union. A delightfully imaginative work is the Epistle of Familiar Spirits and Demons by the poet Ibn-Sˇuhayd (992–1035). It is said to have been provoked by attacks on the author made at court, and parts of it are a discourse by a goose and a discussion of poems composed by an ass and a mule, which appear to be satires on unidentified individuals. But the bulk of it – like al-Ma arrı¯’s Epistle of Forgiveness but written before it – describes a journey in a supernatural realm in the course of which Ibn-Sˇuhayd meets not the great poets and prose-writers of the past, but their familiar spirits. The device enables the author to endow each with physical and intellectual attributes that reflect the character of the litte´rateur’s known works. Ibn-Sˇuhayd then engages each of them in a literary

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discussion, himself adopting the style of his interlocutor or offering a matching verse composition of his own. The encounter with al-Ja¯hiz’s spirit, for example, leads to a comparison of this early ˙ ˙ master’s prose, whose sweeping rhythm was achieved by parallel clauses and assonance, with the crafted succession of versicles rhyming in pairs that had become standard, and that the Prophet was said to have condemned as akin to the incantations of pagan soothsayers. Ibn-Sˇuhayd pictures himself approaching, with Zuhayr as his guide, an assembly of imposing personalities: We became the centre of their halo-like seating arrangement. All eyes were on an old man, bald, his right eye protuberant, wearing a tall white cap. I asked Zuhayr sotto voce, “Who is this?” He replied, “ Utba ibn-al- Arqam, the familiar of al-Ja¯hiz; his patronymic is Abu¯- Uyayna.” I exclaimed, “My ˙ ˙ father be his ransom! There is no one I wish to meet other than him and Abd-al-Hamı¯d’s familiar.” Zuhayr said, “That ˙ is the old man next to him.” He then informed al-Ja¯hiz of my ˙ ˙ interest in him, whereupon he invited me to come forward and engaged in conversation with me, the rest of the assembly remaining silent. Eventually he said, “You are quite an orator and a good threader of words, except that you are addicted to rhymed prose, so your discourse is verse rather than prose.” I said to myself, “By God, he has struck you down with his weapon and brandished his assonance!” But to him I said, “This is not – may God exalt you – because I am ignorant of what rhymed prose amounts to, or of the superiority of assonance and antithesis, but in my country I look in vain for true knights of self-expression. My bane is the stupidity of this generation of men, so it behooves me to resort to the parallelism of rhymed prose to move their hearts” . . . He asked, “Is it so despite such grand appearances – the size of those inkstands and the magnificence of these hoods?” I replied, “Yes, these are but the bark of trees – they bear no fruit and exhale no fragrance.”

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The whole creation is a fanciful, light-humoured but not unsubstantial way of presenting literary criticism.

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Even more substantial and inventive is Ibn-Tufayl’s (c.1100– ˙ 1185) book-length epistle which has been translated under many titles but is known mainly by the name given to its hero, Hayy ˙ ibn-Yaqza¯n, i.e. ‘Alive son of Awake’. The name is taken from a ˙ philosophical work by Ibn-Sı¯na¯ (930–1037), who is known in the West as Avicenna, and reflects one of the main concerns of Muslim philosophers (later also of Christian thinkers), that of reconciling philosophy with revelation. At the same time, the narrative anticipates in some ways both Robinson Crusoe and Rousseau’s L’E´mile. It tells of a child who is nurtured by a gazelle and grows up in total isolation from humans. In seven phases of seven years each, solely by the exercise of his faculties (except for one instance of divine illumination, which may be taken to indicate a natural receptivity in Man), Hayy goes through all the gradations of ˙ knowledge, from mere perception of physical properties to the discoveries of science by observation and by experimentation, to notions of the universe and hence of the Creator, to absorption in Him and vision of a Truth beyond words. When finally he makes contact with humans who have had the Revelation, Hayy finds that ˙ his conclusions are compatible with those not of the literal-minded among them, but of the more thoughtful and contemplative. As for the masses, after trying in vain to enlighten them, he realizes that his preaching can only destabilize them, so he not only leaves them in their limited understanding of the Scriptures but confirms them in it, judging that it at least ensures a fair ordering of society. He and a like-minded Muslim thinker then retire into a solitary life. Can one find in the originality displayed by Andalusian prose writers traces of stimulation that may be ascribed to folk literature? Ibn-Tufayl at least seems to have drawn on such a source, for ˙ stories of children surviving without human nurture are common in folklore, and one such occurs in the legend of Alexander that was known in Andalusia. Possibly indicating yet another instance of Andalusian originality is an obscure reference to a book entitled Muhammad wa Su da¯, ˙ said to have been written by an eleventh century physician called Ibn-al-Kina¯nı¯ and now entirely lost. The title, conjoining the names of a man and a woman, suggests that it was a romance. If so it was at variance with the e´lite’s general disapproval of mere story-telling,

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and its disappearance may reflect the lack of respect that such nonconformity entailed.

Coda The cross-fertilization that fostered so much innovation among the Andalusians was to benefit their neighbours as well. It was through Spain that some Arabic works originating in the heartlands reached the Christians. Thus in the thirteenth century, John of Capua translated Kalı¯la wa Dimna under the title of Directorium Vitae Humanae, and Fr. Anselmo de Turmeda’s Disputa del Asno (1417) appears to have drawn to some extent on one of The Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, a collection of scientific and philosophical essays produced in the heartlands in the tenth century. At the more popular and local level, however, interaction was more extensive although not readily identifiable. The melding that produced the zajal presumably also affected Spanish and possibly Provençal songs; in fact one of these, by Guillaume IX, contains what appears to be some garbled Arabic. It is not irrelevant that the word ‘troubadour’ is made up of the Arabic tarab, which may ˙ mean ‘passion’ of any kind but more specifically the response to music, with the Spanish suffix dor. The fact that some narratives of Eastern origin have been retained only in translation has already been noted, and if Dante needed an outside stimulus for creating the Divine Comedy, this is more likely to have been the account of the Prophet’s ascent to the heavens, known to have had wide diffusion in Spanish, French and Latin, than either Ibn-Sˇuhayd’s or al-Ma arrı¯’s compositions, as has sometimes been mooted. More far-fetched is the surmise that the picaresque novel, developed long after the Reconquista, was to some extent inspired by the maqa¯ma; if there is any indebtedness there, it would more probably be to the folk narratives from which the maqa¯ma itself derived. By far the most direct, ascertainable, and lasting line of succession led elsewhere. The Jews of Spain, who often fared better under Muslim than under Christian rule, were particularly attracted to the “high” classical literature of the Arabs – perhaps because they too had a special regard for language. Their greatest scholar, Maimonides (1135–1204), wrote in Arabic. Others

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translated and then imitated maqa¯mas and muwasˇsˇahs, giving a ˙ running start to the Hebrew literature that raced ahead in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. And demonstrating how creative cultural borrowing can be, they adapted the muwasˇsˇah ˙ form to devotional purposes it never had in Arabic.

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6 THE STUNTING

The period extending from the latter part of the thirteenth century to the end of the eighteenth is widely regarded by Arabs and Arabists alike as one of stagnation or decline. Convenient dates for marking the beginning and the end of this unhappy phase are the fall of Baghdad to Mongol invaders in 1256 and the Bonaparte expedition to Egypt in 1798. Actually, the first of these events is only the most dramatic of several incursions from the Far East into Islamic lands, and the second merely brings to a sharp point the growing ascendancy of Europe, already evident in the Christian reconquest of Andalusia in 1492, and gradually outpacing the Muslims in the arts and sciences, and – more threateningly – in exploration, trade, and the control of resources. For a long dominant civilization to lose power and intellectual vitality – whichever be the cause and which the effect – is nothing unusual. But tying cultural developments directly and immediately to political and military history is simplistic and can be misleading. Some of the literary features strongly associated with this period can be traced back to the eleventh century, and some innovations occurred much later. All the same, how Arabic literature fared under the stresses of political and social decline deserves closer attention, but not surprisingly it has attracted comparatively few researchers so far, so the conclusions that are to be drawn at this stage are necessarily tentative. The hordes that broke into Islamic lands at different times did not affect Arabic literature as radically as may be surmised. They did not snuff out the superior culture they found; rather, they were themselves Islamized. They did, however, retain power where they

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could. Even in Egypt and Syria, from which the Mongols were turned back, it was the Mamlu¯ks – the slaves who were trained as soldiers – who ruled from 1250 to 1517 and the Ottoman Turks who succeeded them. In most of the lands of Islam, the Arabs ceased to be the governing e´lite. The Arabic language consequently lost some of the territory it had long dominated. It retreated from its European outposts in Spain, Sicily, and southern Italy, leaving behind only some telling lexical fossils – words like ‘cypher’, ‘magazine’, or ‘admiral’, so long ensconced in European languages that they are no longer thought of as borrowed, least of all from the Arabs. The Persians revived their own language for literary purposes. And as the Ottomans imposed their authority over most Islamic territories other than Persia, Turkish became the supreme administrative medium, and a necessary key for the ambitious who wanted access to the courts of Sultans and princes. Arabic, however, remained the language of religion and of traditional scholarship. It was written more extensively than ever, in immense compilations of transmitted knowledge. And the concern for its purity was undiminished.

Belles-lettres There was no lack of competent contributors to the top stream of literary production, every feature of their “tent-pole” monorhyme poetry being a continuation or intensification of what had been established in the preceding period. All the standard themes from lovers’ desperation to military glory were artfully pursued – as by asˇ-Sˇa¯bb az-Zarı¯f (1263–89) in one poem (ka¯mil/a¯qu¯): ˙ ˙ Do not hide how longing has afflicted you; Expound your passion, for lovers we all are. ... Be not dismayed, for you are not the first of lovers To be laid low by cheeks and eyes, or in another (bası¯t/lu¯): ˙

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In war they are such that their white swords Have reddened cheeks, though shyness is not their wont. When lightning-like they are drawn, they turn to clouds From whose sides flows a copious rain. Mere mention of battle sets their flanks aquiver As if to talk of death were words of love. Praise of the mighty could be hyperbolic, as in Ibn-Nuba¯ta’s (1287–1366) (bası¯t/ma¯): ˙ Mere mention of your hands’ largesse brings one close to wealth, And kissing the dust on your sandals slakes one’s thirst. Such servility adds piquancy to the sally made by another poet known as al-Jazza¯r (1204/5–73/4) because he made a living as a butcher (xafı¯f/a¯ba¯): How can I not throughout my life Praise butchery, rejecting literature? Now that I practise it, the dogs beseech me. As poet, I solicited the dogs! One could trace a long succession of poets who pursued hackneyed themes, relying for effect on well-worn images and hyperbole rather than originality or warmth. The most highly regarded of the eighteenth century men of letters, al-Barbı¯r (1747–1811), could crowd into a descriptive couplet a paronomasia – wa safat, ‘and ˙ was limpid’, and wasafat, ‘described’ – and a cerebral comparison ˙ corresponding to nothing actually experienced (bası¯t/at): ˙ A night whose hours were beautiful and limpid The like of which none living saw or described. Its stars, revealed by the air, Were valued pearls that overran the sea of darkness. Sufism had penetrated the establishment while also maintaining a fervent following among the common people. The various orders

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differed somewhat in their emphases, but most were careful not to appear to overstep the plain sense of the Scriptures or the dictates of canonical law. A theme Sufism could share with conventional Islam was reverence for the person of the Prophet, and a great deal of devotional poetry focused on him. The most celebrated composition of the kind is a poem by al-Bu¯sı¯rı¯ (1212–1294, 5, or ˙ 6) known as ‘the Mantle’ because after he had completed it the poet dreamt that the Prophet visited him, touched him, and cast his mantle upon him, with the result that he was cured of his paralysis. It is a competent, flowing composition of about 160 lines, which starts with pious injunctions to renounce the world and mistrust the inclinations of the self; the poet then turns to praising the Prophet, drawing both on Scriptures and on popular lore to recount the wonders that accompanied his birth, the miracles associated with him in his lifetime, not least of which is the revelation of the Qur a¯n; he dwells also on his night journey and ascent to the heavens; he describes his military successes; finally he begs for the Prophet’s intercession on his behalf and supplicates God to forgive his sins and bless the Prophet. To those who are already familiar with the material and do not bring to it the fervour of a believer, the Mantle is a predictable and somewhat pedestrian recapitulation, with only a few flashes of the kind of artistry that was held in honour at that time. The richest passage happens to be a description of the Prophet’s brothers-inarms, along much the same line as Ka b ibn-Zuhayr had followed centuries earlier (bası¯t/mı¯): ˙

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Their white swords are reddened when pulled out Of the enemies’ black locks. They write with the dun lances of Xatt, and their pens ˙˙ Leave not one letter in the body undotted. Fully armed, theirs are distinguishing marks – As a rose is distinct from a thorn. The wind of victory favours us with their fragrance Such that we deem each knight a flower bud. On horseback, the tightness of their resolve – not of their saddlery – Made them seem as sturdy as mountain bushes.

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So fearsome that the foes’ hearts flew off in terror, And you could not distinguish the valiant from the lambs. For whoever has the support of the Apostle of God Reduces to silence the threatening lions at home in their lairs. If the wording and the imagery seem strained, it is because they have been forced to accommodate a wealth of rhetorical devices. In the first line, the verbs used for thrusting then withdrawing swords are the ones associated with coming to a water-point in the desert and then riding away. In the second, Xatt is a location reputed to ˙˙ produce the best lances but the word may also mean ‘script’ so the ‘dun’ implements may be either lances or reed-pens. There are also near-puns – i.e. puns between words sharing the same consonants – in the conjunction of kamı¯, ‘knight’, with akma¯m, ‘buds’; of hazm, ˙ ‘resolve’, with huzum, ‘saddlery’; of faraq, ‘terror’, with tufarriq, ˙ ‘distinguish’; of bahm, ‘valiant’, and buham, ‘lambs’; and finally of a¯ja¯m, ‘lairs’, and tajim, ‘reduced to silence’. The taste for rhetorical devices received a fillip when Safiyy˙ ad-Dı¯n al-Hillı¯ (c.1278–c.1349) composed another poem in praise ˙ of the Prophet – acknowledging his debt to al-Bu¯sı¯rı¯, as was ˙ traditional, by adopting the same metre and rhyme – but with the avowed purpose of bringing into use every ‘embellishment’ known to badı¯ . He in turn had a succession of imitators, all using the same metre and rhyme, but each trying to swell the bag of tricks. Such formal compositions, known as badı¯ iyya¯t, focus attention on what had become a consuming concern of men of letters. It became the pride and the joy of badı¯ specialists – and of not a few poets and prose-writers – to invent, refine, divide and sub-divide ever more ingenious devices that exploited all the potentialities of words. By far the favourite was the paronomasia, the pun intended not for humorous but for aesthetic effect, and it was eked out into nearparonomasias, toying with words that differed in only one phoneme, or that looked graphically alike except for the disposition of dots. Closely related were the double entendre and the anagram. Verses were written that read as praise but with a rearrangement of the dots became satirical. Passages were composed that arbitrarily excluded some letters of the alphabet. Extremely complicated

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puzzles, especially relating to personal names, were put into verse. Poems celebrating some event almost always ended with a line or a hemistich in which the numerical equivalents of the letters added up to the year of the occurrence. Poets produced feats of breath-taking dexterity, such as using all the letters of the alphabet in a single line, or on the contrary restricting oneself in an entire poem to the letters that occur in the short introductory chapter of the Qur a¯n, tours de force that cannot be translated, and probably cannot be replicated in other languages. One example that can be offered here is a single line by Ibn-an-Nabı¯h (c.1164–1222), which sums up the two titles to glory deemed supreme in a prince (ka¯mil/fı¯):

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The burning of the ember of his sword for the aggressor, The distillation of the wine of his liberality for the supplicant. The wording and the imagery are strained, but the effect sought can be gauged only in transcription, for each word in the first hemistich is matched by one in the second, contrasting in meaning but phonetically identical except for one letter or for the arrangement of letters: Fa-harı¯qu jamrati sayfihı¯ li-l-mu tadı¯ ˙ wa-rahı¯qu xamrati saybihı¯ li-l-mu tafı¯. ˙

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In a badı¯ iyya of his own, an-Na¯bulusı¯ (1641–1731) brought the tally of what are known to rhetoricians as ‘schemes’ up to nearly two hundred. He was himself praised in year 1136 of the Muslim calendar (1723/4) with a long poem by an-Nahla¯wı¯ each hemistich ˙ of which added up to 1136 twice; in addition, the first letters of the verses formed two more lines featuring the same mathematical feat. Almost as word-bound were the prose writers, several of whom – such as Ibn-al-Wardı¯ (1292–1349) who is also known as a poet, and the polymath as-Suyu¯tı¯ (1445–1505) – contributed to the ˙ essentially decorative genre of the maqa¯ma. Even in other formats high standards of elegance were sought. A sufficient sample is part of a long encomium that as-Safadı¯ (d.1363) wrote for a fellow˙ ˙ scholar, rhymed of course but also containing a deliberately

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misleading reference to an Isha¯q and a Ya qu¯b whose names are ˙ conjoined in the Qur a¯n as they are in the Bible, the learned being expected to detect that the first of the two is intended to be the famous singer of a bygone age, Isha¯q al-Mawsilı¯ (767–850): ˙ ˙

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He preached, splitting hearts asunder. He made the tears of sinners flow. He warned against evil and his rhymes were like the melodies of Isha¯q, his listeners as weepy as Ya qu¯b’s eyes. ˙ In oratory he is like a full moon amid clouds, or as if his pulpit were a bough and he a dove upon it; or as if in a sea his virtues were its waves, and its pearls emulated his words.

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Non-classical verse forms Yet there was one development that held immense potential for innovation. The attention given by the Andalusians to strophic forms of poetry opened the door to a comparable initiative in the heartlands. The linkage is clear, for the first treatise on the muwasˇsˇah was written ˙ in Egypt by Ibn-Sana¯ -al-Mulk (1155–1211) who also tried his hand at similar compositions, but it is worth noting that in bi-lingual xarjas it did not occur to him to mingle classical and colloquial Arabic; he opted instead for a mixture of Arabic and Persian. More locally rooted and more stimulating was a treatise entitled al- A¯tilu l-Ha¯lı¯ wa l-Muraxxasu l-Xa¯lı¯ (which may be loosely ˙ ˙ ˙ translated as ‘the Unadorned Bejeweled and the Underpriced Revalued) by the same al-Hillı¯ who created the first badı¯ iyya. In ˙ this new work he expounded and illustrated what came to be known as ‘the Seven Arts’, i.e. the classical ode, the zajal, and five other verse forms that lend themselves to composition in the vernacular. Imitators later named and described other such forms, each keeping his total to seven. A noticeable feature of these non-classical verse forms is that they have names – like bullayq or wa¯w – that do not sit comfortably as derivatives from Arabic roots. One, the du¯-bayt, is Persian. The one that al-Hillı¯ acknowledged as most important ˙ and that has proved the most productive and long-lived, the mawa¯liya¯, has some evident kinship with the mawa¯lı¯, the non-Arab

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converts to Islam. All this suggests that, like the zajal in Spain, they grew out of the fusion of Arab with local non-Arab traditions, and that like the zajal they were in use long before any were committed to writing. In fact the mawa¯liya¯ is credited with an ancestry that goes back to the eighth century, although this is based on fanciful and mutually exclusive anecdotes. What is of consequence is that the way now lay open for poets occasionally to adopt these verse forms and compose pieces in the regional vernaculars and serving purposes unfamiliar to the classical tradition, including short narratives.1 One such is a mawa¯liya¯ attributed to Umar ibn-al-Fa¯rid. Like all mawa¯liya¯s ˙ recorded at that time, it is a monorhyme quatrain (each line being what would be a hemistich in classical poetry) in the bası¯t metre. ˙ In this instance, the rhyme is xnı¯. The badinage exploits features of the butcher’s trade, including the fact that the usual way of skinning an animal was to puncture the skin in a leg and blow into it to separate the skin from the flesh:

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To a butcher I said, “I love you! You penetrate me, You kill me!” He said, “It’s my trade – do you blame me?” Inclining to me, he kissed my foot to soften me. With slaughter in mind, he pumps me up to skin me. What the status of such compositions was is a moot question. Except when illustrating a treatise such as al-Hillı¯’s, established ˙ poets seem to have resorted to them mainly for humorous purposes, and as such they are only haphazardly recorded mainly in biographical notices, seldom included in a poet’s collected works. No one made a literary reputation solely on the strength of his attainments in these “seven arts”. A near exception may be one alXuba¯rı¯ who was active in the second half of the fourteenth century; he was a traditionist and jurist who composed some traditional poetry, but who also put together a collection of his zajal, now lost. A long narrative poem recounting the Prophet’s ascent to the 1 For an example recounting a seduction, culled from al-Hillı¯’s treatise, see my “An ˙ Early Example of Narrative Verse in Colloquial Arabic,” Journal of Arabic Literature, 21. 2 (September 1990), pp. 165–71.

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heavens and ascribed to someone of that name was found among the papers of a Cairo street singer late in the nineteenth century,2 but the attribution is scarcely a reliable one. Solid information and possibly some useful perspective may be mined from the career of ibn-Su¯du¯n (1407–64), the most intriguing and most challenging figure of the entire period we are now considering. The son of a Circassian mamlu¯k, he was born in Cairo and given a sound traditional education fitting him for a career as a religious scholar. For a while he lived conventionally, acting as ima¯m, i.e. leading prayers in several mosques, although he made a poor living mainly as a copyist and a tailor. He also had some success as a serious poet, until – to his father’s outrage – he turned to humour and to popular entertainment, being credited with reviving the shadow theatre after it had been banned in 1452. He died in Damascus. He collected his own literary compositions in a work entitled Nuzhatu-n-Nufu¯s wa Mudhiku-l- Abu¯s.3 This he divided into two ˙˙ parts, one labeled jiddı¯, ‘serious’, and the other hazlı¯, ‘diverting’. The serious part consists of eighty-eight poems, of which seventysix are unexceptionably classical in grammar and prosody and deal with love, praise, and pious themes. The remaining twelve are in non-classical metres, some in the vernacular. Included in this section – for such were by then standard features of canonical literature – were isolated couplets embodying some witticism, such as a pun on the name of an individual or the fanciful description of a pimple; also some more elaborate verses toying with the numerical value of letters of the alphabet. Of greater interest in this context is the ‘diverting’ part. It consists mostly of quite short pieces. Here again, the monorhyme verse compositions are in classical Arabic, but there are many more strophic ones, and these are in the vernacular. The main source of humour especially in verse is a very common theme in all hazl

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2 Urbain Bouriant, Chansons Populaires Arabes en Dialecte du Caire d’apre`s les Manuscrits d’un Chanteur des Rues. Paris, Ernest Leroux, 1893. 3 Ably studied and edited as Bringing a Laugh to a Scowling Face by Arnoud Vrolijk, Leiden, Research School CNWS (School of Asian, African, and Amerindian Studies), 1998.

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composition: expressions of gluttony, always in the first person, accompanied by extravagant descriptions of food; but Ibn-Su¯du¯n also cultivated the truism, a sententious proclamation of a selfevident truth, which presumably was meant to be declaimed in a grand oratorical manner. He combined these two favourite themes in (xafı¯f/lu¯): The sea is a sea, and the palm-trees are palms. An elephant is an elephant, and a giraffe is tall. The earth is earth and the sky is something else, And birds ply the space in-between. Water flows over static sand, And one detects in it a flowing movement. One who believes that water will assuage his hunger, Is – I swear – deluded and a clown. But one who swims in it with his clothes on Is wet himself, and so are his clothes. If stormy winds blow over a meadow, The earth stands firm, it is the trees that bend. How sweet bananas are when peeled And softened with juices and with ho-ho-honey. Ah for vermicelli with sug-sug-sugar treated! For want of such my heart is passionately blighted. And you who “kill” by doctoring the hashish that doctors you – O besotted one! – you are the killer and the killed. If you wish it to revive you, then kill it well, And in abundance, for a little is of no use. Either of these features is worked into – or, more effectively, sprung upon – a great variety of contexts, including some solemn ones, such as the affirmation of faith with which sermons and other public discourses were initiated, or this address to pilgrims returning from Mecca (bası¯t/a¯dı¯): ˙ Happiness be yours, you who visited the Guide. Yours has been the hoped-for bliss, both going and returning.

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You have witnessed a land honoured by the Chosen One, Where the cameleer’s song brings peace to the spirit. You have seen some things that I have seen, of which I tell, among the songs I sing. One who accompanies pilgrims in their faring, And with their caravan traverses valley after valley Can see them drinking water when they thirst, And eating food when they are hungry. Many are the themes exploited, including sex, although not so blatantly or crudely as may have been expected. The prose pieces are even more varied, and are mostly in the classical idiom and amply ornamented with the resources of badı¯ . They include anecdotes told with some verve. Several are about eccentric behaviour, as in the case of the lad so jealous of the fuss made of his sister on the occasion of her wedding that he insists on being dressed and made up like her. Others are about simpletons like the grown-up whose parents forgot to have him circumcised when he was small. His mother now tricks him into submitting to the operation by assuring him that the barber advancing upon him with a razor is there to shave his head; at the crucial moment, his attention is diverted by being told literally to “watch the birdie,” and he is then pacified by being assured that the same would never be allowed to happen again. In the same vein but appropriately couched in the vernacular is what purports to be a letter from a village yokel to his family, full of witless queries and comments and recounting how, having washed a shirt he had soiled because he had eaten too much laxative food and having hung it up to dry, it had been blown down by the wind, but he rejoiced that he had escaped injury by not being in it. Ibn-Su¯du¯n’s use of the vernacular was in fact sparing, largely determined in the prose passages by the subject matter, as it was in the poetry by the verse form. Thus two formal maqa¯mas are in the classical idiom and amply ornamented with the resources of badı¯ , although they still make room for some verse in the vernacular and for the favourite theme of food. Particularly appealing to scholars who have coped with classical Arab scholars’ line by line

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commentaries on religious or literary texts – perhaps also to a wider circle of readers familiar with the subtleties of deconstructionists – is a mock “explication” that turns a simple colloquial expression into an involved absurdity. In the same vein but in the vernacular is a parody of the common Islamic practice of submitting questions of canonical law to a recognized religious scholar for an authoritative interpretation. In this, a simpleton requests clarification of the difference between a horse and a boat, and gets a fancifully intricate answer. Yet Ibn-Su¯du¯n has been all but ignored in literary histories, and all writings in the vernacular by him and by other educated authors have been relegated by silent consent to a grey area of indeterminate literary status, vaguely lumped with folk literature. These imitations are not genuinely folkloric, however. This is evident in an anonymous mawa¯liya¯ quoted by al-Hillı¯, for which the boast is ˙ made that each line has four words, twenty-four letters, and thirteen dots,4 although some may have gained enough popularity to pass into folk literature. Their standing presents a problem that will have to be wrestled with before the end of this chapter.

Folk literature The ever-widening gap that existed between the language reserved for learning and for fine expression and the language of everyday communication was inseparable from a measure of contempt for folk literature and for those who produced it. This is nowhere more explicitly – or crudely – expressed than in asˇ-Sˇirbı¯nı¯’s (d.1687) Hazzu l-Quhu¯f fı¯ Sˇarhi Qası¯di Abı¯-Sˇa¯du¯f. It is both necessary and ˙ ˙ ˙ revealing to expound the title. The first part is an elaborate pun which may be translated either as “The Shaking of the Skull-Caps” or “The Stirring of the Yokels”; the second presents the book as a commentary on an ode by a peasant who is given a ridiculous name associating him with the levering device used for lifting bucketfuls of water from a stream to a field that required irrigation. Needless

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4 See my “The Egyptian Mawwa¯l: its Ancestry, its Development, and its Present Forms”, Journal of Arabic Literature, 8 (1977), p. 81.

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to say, the ode is a fictitious one, revealing the peasant as a gross, groveling, and grasping being. The mock commentary occupies only a part of the diatribe, but the rest is in the same vein. The work begins with praising God for “endowing men of good taste with subtlety of character and sweetness of tongue, and reserving ill-nature and thick temperament for their opposites, the common country folk and denizens of animal pens”. It abounds with anecdotes a sample of which tells of the peasant who has access to the household of a prince and is impressed by his host’s delicacy when he sees him tossing a rose to his wife as an invitation to intimacy; trying to ape his betters, he flings a brick at his wife, gashes her head, and is sentenced by the governor to a sound flogging. Villagers’ love-making is described and their love-songs are parodied in repulsive terms. The point is repeatedly made that they are beyond redemption, and Alı¯, the venerated cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, is quoted as having enjoined his followers not to educate the sons of the vile as it would only make them seek high positions from which to humiliate the asˇra¯f, a term which literally means ‘noble’ but which is more specifically applied to the descendants of the Prophet. Such broadsides are at best an indication that there was a folk poetry to parody. No kinder but slightly more informative is an aside from an-Na¯bulusı¯ when expounding the double entendre: “Some of the common people have taken to using it in verse, but without expertise, so what they produce is a distortion of words, corrupt and incompatible with the definition of the trope; as the wording is obscene and the sense vile, it is offensive to one’s ears”.5 The ‘Seven Arts’ are a great deal more valuable in revealing some of the patterns, if not the purport, of the folk songs they imitated. The continued popularity of the narrative genres may be inferred from the condemnations issued by a succession of religious authorities such as as-Subkı¯ (1327–70), ibn-Katı¯r (c.1300–73), and as-Suyu¯tı¯ (1445–1505). It is also more positively attested by the ˙ unbroken transmission of the Arabian Nights.

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5 This is almost certainly a reference to the zahr, a kind of punning achieved by distortion of the pronunciation, which will be dealt with in the next chapter.

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The epic motifs certainly thrived, new cycles coming into being, notably one inspired by the warlike exploits of the Mamlu¯k Sultan Baybars, who ruled Egypt and Syria from 1260 to 1277, and scored successes against the Mongols and the Crusaders, as well as against local rivals for power. It is on record that in the eighteenth century these were still being celebrated, along with those of the Hila¯lı¯s, of Antar, of Sayf ibn-Dı¯-Hazan, and of Du¯-l-Himma. There are also occasional references in the chronicles of the period and in the accounts of European travelers to the persistence of the kind of semi-theatrical activities noted earlier: the participation of buffoons and masked characters in popular celebrations, which could indeed be rowdy. From the fourteenth century on, one comes across compositions in the vernacular called maqa¯mas in which representatives of various trades describe their activities. These may have been declaimed or enacted, or even incorporated in shadow plays. The shadow theatre appears to have thrived and to have acquired a measure of social recognition. It was put to an uncommon use in 1517 when a performance was given before the Ottoman Sultan Salı¯m I enacting his conquest of Egypt and the hanging at his command of the last Mamluk Sultan, Tu¯ma¯n Bay. Nearly a century later, one Da¯wu¯d al- Atta¯r also known as ˙˙ al-Mina¯wı¯ is reported to have put on in Cairo and Alexandria a shadow play celebrating the defeat of the Crusaders in the twelfth century, then to have gone to Istanbul in 1612 to take part in festivities connected with the marriage of the daughter of the Sultan to a former governor of Egypt, and to have returned via Damascus and Jerusalem. Finally, from European travelers in the eighteenth century, such as Niebuhr, come the most explicit accounts that there were professional actors and actresses who could be hired to perform short farces in the courtyards of houses. A link between the different strata of society was provided by the Sufi orders, also known as the dervish brotherhoods. Each had a teacher and guide whose reputation for holiness and privileged knowledge endowed him with considerable authority. Round him was a narrow circles of initiates, then wider and wider circles of adherents differing in the extent of their commitment, some merely attending weekly meetings. Any of these could seek the advice of the leader in personal or social problems. Some brotherhoods were

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associated with particular trades. All could attract members of different social positions. They came close to functioning as church, social club, and professional association. Their poems, tracts, and litanies were widely diffused. It is not surprising either to find that many Sufis used the vernacular in their writings. Islam denies the existence of saints or of miracles performed by any but the prophets, but Sufi literature abounded in accounts of holy men and of the wonders their intervention brought about. Some of their stories lent themselves to interpretation at different levels. An example is a report that a holy man called ibn-as-Sabba¯x was about to perform his ablution by the ˙ ˙ river in preparation for prayer when he heard a commotion, and found that a man had been attacked by a crocodile; so he interrupted his devotional activity, walked on water, ordered the crocodile to die, and brought the injured man to safety. Such a story might merely leave the simple-minded dumbfounded at the supernatural power that a man of God could summon; others might be exercised by the priority he gave to action over ritual.

A balance sheet The question must now be posed: Why is this period widely characterized as one of stagnation? More specifically: Why is its top stream credited with an abundant production but no departure from earlier models? Arabic literature shared in the hardening of arteries that came with age and the loss of vitality that the entire culture suffered after Europe had gained ascendancy in intellectual pursuits and in power. But there must have been within its mainstream factors that hastened the decline, for its symptoms were manifested early, whereas architecture was to go through one of its most splendid periods under the Mamlu¯ks, the study of history was to stimulate Ibn-Xaldu¯n (1332–1406) to highly original theorization about society and culture late in the fourteenth century, and science – notably the criticism and emendation of the Ptolemaic system in astronomy – was still vigorously pursued both in Persian and in Arabic by Sˇı¯ra¯zı¯ (d.1311), asˇ-Sˇarı¯f al-Jurja¯nı¯ (d.1413), al-Xafrı¯ and al-Barajundı¯ (c.1524) as late as in the sixteenth century.

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One factor was the e´litism that went hand-in-hand with the use of one form of the language for all learned pursuits and other forms for everyday exchanges. It had its bluntest expression in Hayy ibn ˙ Yaqza¯n when the hero opted not only to leave but to confirm the ˙ populace in its imperfect understanding of Truth, specifically asserting that most men are no better than irrational animals. It is this view that is echoed by asˇ-Sˇirbı¯nı¯ and that accounts for the utter disregard of folk perceptions even when folk performances were deemed entertaining enough to gain entry to high circles. E´litism was not enough, however, to prevent the educated from occasionally adopting the vernacular idiom in verse forms of lowly extraction. This was in itself a significant innovation, and one that bore promise of bold ventures in new directions. Yet somehow experimental impulses were bracketed together with some of the already familiar themes of muju¯n and hazl into an in-between territory where they were neither condemned nor given intellectual weight. What denies a poet entry into the top stream of canonical literature has never been stipulated and remains both indeterminate and inconsistent. Certainly the use of a vernacular form of Arabic is a strike against him. Even a departure from classical prosody created a negative reaction, as witness the fact that two of our main sources of information on Andalusian literature, Ibn-Bassa¯m (1084– 1147) and al-Fath ibn-Xa¯qa¯n (d.1134), recorded no muwasˇsˇah. ˙ ˙ Evidence of further selectivity is that ibn-Sana¯ -al-Mulk reported that the vast majority of the muwasˇsˇahs known to him did not fit the ˙ classical system of scansion; if so there must have been some heavy culling since then in the process of transmission. In the seminal treatise that first recorded the ‘Seven Arts’, al-Hillı¯ wrote that he had ˙ composed a great many such non-classical poems in his youth, had not attached much importance to them and had not intended to put them permanently on record, but that when pressed to write his treatise he had retained only the minimum needed for illustration. Some modern collectors of folk material are equally defensive about their activities. And in a study on the literature of Sufis,6 a modern Arab critic excluded all their writings in the vernacular on the

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6 Sa¯fı¯ Husayn, al- Adabu s-Su¯fiyyu fı¯ Misr. Cairo, Ma a¯rif, 1964, p. 8. ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙

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ground that these are best considered “a part of folk literature that overindulges in the miraculous, taking refuge in the imagination as an escape from reality . . . and resulting from collective rather than individual perceptions”. The subject-matter also counts, but how? Of Ibn-Su¯du¯n, his contemporary as-Saxa¯wı¯ (1427–97) wrote that he “applied himself to literature and excelled in it, but mostly followed a path that was an excess in buffoonery, jest, wantonness and dissoluteness”. Does this imply a disqualification mainly on moralistic grounds? Yet he was never as ribald as Abu¯-Nuwa¯s or as iconoclastic as al-Ma arrı¯. A possible clue is provided by a poem which Ibn-Su¯du¯n composed when his mother died, recalling how responsive she was to his every need. In his study accompanying the edition of the text, Arnoud Vrolijk comments (p. 45): “To the average reader this would appear to be a very personal and intimate picture of the tender loving mother figure who spoils her little boy and cannot let him go, not even when he is married, and who meddles with the education of his children.” Yet Ibn-Su¯du¯n himself placed this poem under the rubric of hazl. The reason, I suspect, is that – having specified that his bereavement occurred when he was forty-four years old – he used nursery words in evoking her early solicitude at any expression of hunger or thirst, and showed no rebellion at her continued mothering later on. What may escape the Western reader is how important dignified behaviour is to the Arab. Even uncontrolled laughter is felt to be demeaning, hence the ambivalence about humorous writing. As a very perceptive modern critic, Ta¯ha¯ ˙ Husayn, observed7: “We are a people who prefer seriousness to jest ˙ – or, say, we prefer sternness to smiling. When we trifle (and we trifle a great deal) we do so by a kind of peculation – we actually purloin our trifling! We feel, as we trifle and dally, that we are doing something unusual, something illicit. We are stern even when we trifle.” Finally, literary prestige belonged to an overwhelming extent to the purveyors of ‘tent-pole’ literature, and in this conservatism was supreme. With the prosody rooted in antiquity and the language anchored in the Scriptures, the very brilliance attained between the

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7 Sawtu Ba¯rı¯s, vol. 1. Cairo, Ma a¯rif, 1943, p. 48. ˙

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ninth and the twelfth centuries had crowned an already mixed metaphor by crystallizing the themes that it was licit for a poet to pursue, and even the sentiments that it was proper for him to express! If this is not sufficiently evident in the way poet after poet praised each of his patrons, it is made explicit in a passage in IbnHazm’s treatise on love where, after quoting some lines of his own ˙ composed at the behest of a princess and advocating nothing worse than relaxation with wine and music in pleasant surroundings, he expressed his disapproval of their content, quoted the Qur a¯n’s condemnation of unbelieving poets, then added: “but it is wrong for one who writes verse to depart from the customary usages of poetry”. At the level which commanded the highest approval, therefore, Arabic literature had become the appanage of a narrow e´lite. At one in its belief-system and steeped in traditional sciences, what it expected of the men of letters within its ranks was not that they extend its perceptions, but that they titillate its well-established aesthetic sensibilities. Badı¯ served it well in this respect. In his extensive commentary on his own badı¯ iyya, an-Na¯bulusı¯ repeatedly addressed “those who are knowledgeable about literature” as he described schemes in which a poet fashions a line in such a way that his audience can complete it for him, or hints at a pun that is not realized on paper but consummated in the reader’s mind. Modern Arabs look back on this phase of their literary heritage as an exercise in futility. But a practice that gave satisfaction to generations of educated men is not to be so lightly dismissed. It was a literature for connoisseurs, who could get as engaged in the aesthetic process as sports fans are carried away by appreciation of the skill with which their idols play to rules. And no one who has tried to write creatively is unaware of the power of words to open out new avenues of thought or imagination. Toying with words is, of course, not peculiar to Arabic. In English, one may instance not only the writings of Lyly and Marlowe in a short-lived and bygone age, but also a piece by the very modern Salman Rushdie entitled “Yorick” and describing itself as “the tale of a piece of vellum”8:

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. . . Yorick’s saga, of course, that same ancient account which fell, near enough two hundred and thirty-five years ago, into the hand of a certain – no, a most uncertain – Tristram, who (although Yseult-less) was neither triste nor ram, the frothiest, most heady Shandy of a fellow; and which has now come into my possession by processes too arcane to detain the eager reader. Truly, a vellumminous history! – which it’s my present intent not merely to abbreviate, but, in addition, to explicate, annotate, hyphenate, palatinate and permanganate – for it’s a narrative that richly rewards the scholar who is competent to apply such sensitive technologies. The Arab masters of badı¯ would have repudiated the inclusion of “palatinate and permanganate” as they make no sense at all in the context and have a place in it only because of a weak rhyme. They would also have been in two minds about the levity that informs the piece, for although they were not strangers to humour, they thought of their art as primarily decorative. In other respects, however, they would have recognized in the author a kindred spirit. More importantly, toying with words can be so much a part of one’s mental equipment that it becomes a genuine expression of perception and sentiment. Al-Mu tamid (1039–95), who ruled Seville until 1091, was no mean poet. But having been compelled to seek the help of the North African dynasty known as the Almoravids against Christian forces, he found himself at the mercy of his ally and spent the last four years of his life in chains in Morocco. Further distressed by news of the death of his two sons, Fath, which literally means ‘a victory’ or ‘an opening’, and Yazı¯d, ˙ which means ‘he increases’, his reaction was to cry out: “O Fath, ˙ [by your martyrdom] you opened the gates of mercy for me, and in Yazı¯d God will increase my reward!” Similarly, Ibn-Nuba¯ta mourned the death of a son in lines in which the words for physical appearance and for character, xalq and xuluq, and for doves and for tree-leaves, wurq and waraq, not only share the same consonants but are identical in the script (bası¯t/qı¯): ˙

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Beauties of form and character make me weep for you As weeps for the meadow the cloud’s abundant flow.

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In their outpouring my subtle words moan over you, O bough! – so hear the moaning of the doves among the leaves. Where Arabic stands alone is in the extent to which badı¯ was enthroned among literary values, and the length of its reign. For there is an absolute limit to its inventiveness, and a saturation point beyond which it can only recycle itself. The collusion of linguistic purism, e´litism, and conservatism had isolated the intelligentsia from the concerns of the common people, and from the realities of everyday life that cried out for change.

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7 THE GRAFTING

Arab-Islamic civilization had reached a low ebb in the eighteenth century. If it was to lift itself by its own bootstraps, it might have done so in either of two ways. Since religion was central to it, the witness of its past is that resurgence might start with a movement of religious reform that would then work itself into political and cultural life. At least two such movements arose, the Wahha¯bı¯ that took shape in mid-eighteenth century and gave rise to the Sa u¯dı¯ dynasty in Arabia, and the Sanu¯sı¯ which was born early in the nineteenth century and one of whose leaders reigned for a while over Tripolitania. Both had their greatest success in desert areas, the least accessible and – until the discovery of oil – the least desirable parts of the Arab world. Another way of bringing about a resurgence was by responding in kind to the rising power and pressure of Europe. The need for this was first felt in Turkey, the heart of the Ottoman empire, and it led to military and administrative reforms that were likely to trickle down to the Arab provinces. The Arabs did not have to wait for any of these promises to be fulfilled, however, as the Bonaparte expedition brought them both the motivation for change and the ready-made models to follow. Egypt was the first to feel the sting and stimulation of European ambitions, and it remains one of the leaders of the resulting readjustment, so it is in its modern history that the pattern of actions and reactions and of their manifestations in literature is most conveniently traced. But except for the centre of Arabia itself, every one of the Arab countries has in modern times come under the direct domination of one Western European country or another

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– Britain, France, then briefly Italy – and has gone through much the same sequence of changes, although telescoped into a shorter period. Muslim lands had been conquered before, but by barbarians who were themselves absorbed into the faith and culture of Islam. But now the challenge was both military and intellectual. The vast majority of Muslim Arabs were left helpless, at times resigned and at times resentful or rebellious. But some responded to the challenge in ways that gave them an active role in the far-reaching changes that followed.

The new e´lite Bonaparte’s army held Egypt only from 1798 to 1801, when it was ousted by a joint Turkish and British force. Nevertheless, it had given a convincing demonstration of European superiority in military matters, and – since it had been accompanied by a team of scholars who carried out an impressive amount of research – it also provided a glimpse of an unfamiliar way of life and thought. The encounter had been unfriendly and its effects might soon have been dissipated had there not been a vigorous and forward-looking minority that saw in those foreign ways necessary means to desirable ends. It was this minority that formed a new e´lite, sidelining the old. Nothing less than a drastic reorientation was involved. And before the literature it produced is considered, its progress needs to be charted – if only in very broad terms – through a succession of phases During the first three quarters of the eighteenth century, the initiative came from on high. In Egypt, power was acquired by Muhammad Alı¯, an ambitious Albanian officer who had been a ˙ member of the Ottoman force sent to expel the French and who set about creating an army like Bonaparte’s. To this end he engaged European experts, sent his most promising subjects to study in Italy and in France, formed an extensive educational system, ordered technical texts to be translated, copied European methods of administration, founded industries – all with militaristic rather than liberal aims in view. For a while, he extended his dominion and his priorities to the Sudan, the Levant, and even the Hija¯z. ˙

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Even after his military ambitions had been frustrated, the dynasty he had founded maintained the direction he had taken. By the end of the third quarter and before the British occupied the country, Egypt had a school system and a penal code derived from European models. What is more, the benefits of European technology, such as the railway installed by Stephenson’s son between Cairo and Alexandria, were there for all to see, fostering a loose association of progress with things Western. By 1870, Butrus al-Busta¯nı¯ (1819–83) was welcoming any development that ˙ could multiply contacts with Europe in order to lift Arabs from the depth into which their culture had fallen. Even when, in an article in al-Hila¯l on 1 May 1895, a member of the prominent Ya¯zijı¯ family called Abd-Alla¯h Salı¯m had occasion to bemoan Arab women’s imitation of Europeans in their dress and manners, he found it necessary to precede his strictures with: “No two people disagree that Westerners remain earnest and active in building up knowledge and demolishing ignorance. But it is not our purpose here to survey their valuable accomplishments and their services to Mankind”. At the same time, Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905) provided ˙ intellectual leadership for a movement that aimed at reforming Islam and channeling into it the growing energy and vitality that seemed to be seeking a new direction. Developments in Egypt were being watched in other Arab regions. Besides, Algeria and Morocco were being herded in the same direction by direct French intervention. The Lebanon which had a concentration of Christians in communion with one or another of the Western churches, was particularly receptive to Western ideas. It was now favoured with the attention of American Protestant and French Catholic missionaries who during this period founded schools and later rival universities, so that the Lebanon has to this day maintained a higher percentage of literacy than any other Arab country. At this time, however, it was in Egypt that Lebanese Christians found the greatest scope for their energies. The counterpoise of the head start enjoyed by Arab Christians in Egypt as well as in the Levant is that there has often been some ambivalence – and some suspicion – about where their sympathies lie.

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In literature, however, the standards of a previous age continued to be acknowledged, even though new forms of self-expression were coming into use. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the occupation of Egypt and then of the Sudan by Great Britain and of Tunisia by the French confirmed and gave greater urgency to the sense that domination by the West could best be countered by emulating it. And since both the powers that imposed themselves on Arab attention proclaimed similar values, the West was seen as monolithic. European standards began to penetrate the most intimate strongholds of society: Qa¯sim Amı¯n (1865–1908) published, in 1899 and 1900, the first two books advocating the emancipation of women. Politically, however, how the occupied were to view themselves and how their basic loyalties were to crystallize became an issue: Was it as an Oriental, a Muslim, an Arab, or a citizen of a regional entity that one was to resist foreign control? It was in the first quarter of the twentieth century that trends and determining factors took a semi-permanent form. The first Egyptian university organized on a European model was founded in 1907. Islam lost much of its directive force in public affairs, and the main sequel to its reform movement no longer led progressive thought but adopted many of the values of the Westernizers. Nationalism now roused great passions, at some cost to relations between Muslim majorities and Christian minorities; but whether the focus was to be pan-Arab or regional was virtually taken out of Arab hands when, at the end of the first World War, the Ottoman Empire was dismembered and its Arab provinces were put under European tutelage and started on the road to becoming nationstates on the European model, with the corollary that religious loyalties had to take second place to nationalism. The seed of the Palestine problem was also sown at that time. In literature, European norms were now almost unquestioningly applied. The next quarter of a century saw all the Arab countries in the Fertile Crescent and in North Africa under direct European occupation, and all therefore nursing parallel aims of self-assertion and dreams of freedom and democracy. By impairing the supremacy of the British and the French, the second World War

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heightened the Arabs’ militancy, but also afforded them a wider choice of models. Subject to substantially the same cultural forces, their literary production became increasingly uniform. The second half of the twentieth century brought independence to one Arab country after another. Democratic government and Arab unity, however, proved difficult to achieve. Arab writers’ fascination with the West remains undiminished but they feel more pressingly responsible for their society’s fate. They therefore keep a keen eye on Western political ideologies and literary models, but apply them more and more pertinently to their own problems. With this rough outline of the evolving concerns of the new e´lite in mind, one may now turn to the actual literary production.

Prose The features of a foreign culture that are most readily accepted are those that yield an immediate, practical benefit. Abstract values come later. Through most of the nineteenth century, despite the far-reaching changes that took place in government and society, the literary standards of a previous age continued to be honoured. Na¯sı¯f al-Ya¯zijı¯ (1800–71) emulated al-Harı¯rı¯’s maqa¯mas with ˙ ˙ considerable skill and success. All writing with literary pretensions remained heavily rhymed, as in a long letter of condolence addressed by Muhammad al-Muwaylihı¯ (1858–1930) to the ˙ ˙ Turkish Minister of Education over the death of his daughter. It bemoaned the fact that “the rose had been plucked before it had bloomed and been torn from the branch before its time, that the fawn had been snared from its bower before its term had been reached, that the dove had been snatched from its nest before the ring had formed round its neck or its song had been perfected, that the bough had been lopped before it had borne fruit, that the crescent had been obscured before it had become a full moon, when it had but started on its cycle, the clouds casting their cloak over a ray of hope that it emitted, and the envy of Fate undoing an hour of joy that it afforded”. And the words at the end of the versicles are ibba¯niha¯ and awa¯niha¯, xama¯ iliha¯ and maxa¯ iliha¯, jı¯duha¯ and nasˇı¯duha¯, itma¯rihi, ibda¯rihi, and adwa¯rihi, and finally rida¯ ahu and wara¯ ahu.

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To the end of the century, manuals of criticism and collections of metrical puzzles bore witness to the persistence of conservative literary taste. A curiosity is that in 1868 a Lebanese Maronite priest called Arsa¯nyu¯s al-Fa¯xu¯rı¯ published a badı¯ iyya, which he claimed to be his second, in praise of Jesus. And yet a kind of writing had come into circulation that was not immediately hailed as a literary phenomenon but that slaked the public’s thirst for information on things and peoples previously unknown but whose power was all too obvious. There was no greater or abler purveyor of such information than at-Tahta¯wı¯ ˙ ˙ ˙ (1801–73). He had accompanied one of the educational mission Muhammad Alı¯ sent to France and was then to spend a long ˙ career in the service of the State as chief translator of military, scientific, and legal texts, and as founder in 1835, and subsequently director, of a School of Languages. But he also wrote with no little acumen and discrimination about many aspects of life in Europe. Unlike many later authors, he was not overawed by everything he encountered. Over literature he passed quickly, noting that Europeans also have a “science of literature” which they call rı¯tu¯rı¯qı¯, although the Arabs excel them in it and appear to stand alone in badı¯ . He also recognized that there are conventions acceptable in some languages and not in others – for example, Arab poets delight in the sweetness of a woman’s saliva, but this is deemed disgusting in Europe. But his blanket judgment was that “there is no doubt that Arabic is the greatest and most splendid of all tongues – indeed can tinsel be compared to pure gold?” Another popular writer on Europe was his contemporary Fa¯ris asˇ-Sˇidya¯q (1804–87), a Lebanese Maronite who became a Protestant and collaborated in the translation of the Bible into Arabic, then added Ahmad to his name when he converted to ˙ Islam. He was erratic and fanciful, but also full of verve and sometimes Rabelaisian humour. In his book on Malta, where he resided for fourteen years as Director of the American Missionary Press, he wrote of the Great Siege in 1565 as if it was the Muslims who were beleaguered on the island and the Christians who were trying to dislodge them. In a chaotic book on Europe reflecting his acquaintance with England and France, he jumbled together statistics on military strength, snippets of history, linguistic

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oddities, and unexpected angles on social customs (such as that divorce is so difficult to obtain among Christians that the English resort to selling their wives, at least one piece of evidence for this having reached him through The News of the World). But his curiosity was not always so far off the mark, and his personal observations – such as three paragraphs in his book on Malta on the language of gestures – were sometimes quite novel and arresting. The most original and entertaining of his books is a fictionalized autobiography, the title of which may be very loosely rendered as “A leisurely account of what makes the Fa¯riya¯q”, this last word being a telescoping of his name. In this, although he much preferred the Arab literary tradition to European practice and particularly favoured rhymed prose which he deemed superior to poetry because it requires thematic continuity, he himself occasionally got impatient with it and turned to a direct and lucid style that foreshadowed later developments. The taste for information on all aspects of life in the wide world outside and the need for a functional prose in which to convey it were to be met by yet another importation from Europe: Journalism. The Bonaparte expedition had brought to Egypt its first printing press, and set an example by publishing a newspaper, Le Courrier d’E´gypte, and a periodical, La Dećade. Muhammad ˙ Alı¯ followed its example with an official Gazette. It was the Lebanese Christians, however, who were to prove the mainstay of a free press, beginning in the 1850s; but it was in Egypt that they then found scope for their energies. It was they who founded, and for several generations directed, the most prestigious and influential of Egypt’s journals, including al- Ahra¯m, ‘the Pyramids’, and al-Hila¯l, ‘the Crescent’, founded in 1876 and 1892 respectively and still in existence. Also notable in this context as well as in theatrical activities was the career of a Cairo-born Jew called Jacob Sanua (1839–1912) who professed sympathies with Muslim reformist and Egyptian nationalist causes. In 1877 he launched the first Arabic satirical paper, in which he attacked the ruling Khedive so bluntly that within a year he found it necessary to move to Paris. From there he continued to produce and distribute his publication – each number consisting of four lithographed pages containing cartoons,

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occasionally formal articles in the classical idiom, but mostly sharp political comments in the form of dialogues in the vernacular. At that time, the author always drew himself in European clothes and signed himself “Professeur James Sanua”, transliterating this as Jı¯ms Sa¯nu¯wa¯. It is only later that, in pursuit of popularity, he assumed the garb of an Arab scholar and called himself asˇ-Sˇayx Ya qu¯b Sanu¯ .The title of the paper was frequently altered, but it ˙ usually embodied some form of Sanua’s nickname, Abu¯-Nazza¯ra ˙˙ Zarqa¯, literally ‘the Wearer of Blue-tinted Eye-glasses’. The number of newspapers and journals multiplied rapidly, although many were short-lived. By the end of the nineteenth century, in Egypt alone, 169 such publications are known to have been in circulation, including three ladies’ journals. although a census in 1897 reported a literacy rate of only 4.1%, Arab journalism was to keep on growing, and to prove extremely important to men of letters. As long as literacy remained low, it provided some practical training and the most remunerative outlet for the budding writer, and to be entrusted with the literary column even in a newspaper has been a signal mark of success. Many of the major literary works of the twentieth century were collected articles; even books conceived as a unified work were first serialized in a journal before appearing as a book, often produced on the journal’s own press. More specifically, if only because of the constraints of time and the need to reach a wide public, journalism brought into being a kind of writing that was more functional and purposeful than decorative. This was favoured only by a few such as Adı¯b Isha¯q ˙ (1856–85), who noted that rhymed prose was unknown to any but the Arabs and was therefore “unnatural”, peculiar to a period when new ideas were in poor supply. To most, the plain speech of the journalists was seen as a necessity rather than a desirable stylistic feature. But by the beginning of the twentieth century perceptions had changed. An unsigned article in al-Hila¯l in July 1904 reads:

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between a hand naturally white with fingertips manicured by file and scissors and other toiletry devices, and a hand bearing a primitive design with fingertips dyed with henna. The newspaper article became father to the literary essay. The quality most readily recognized in a writer was the ability to bend the classical language to new, vigorous and relevant purposes. Those who rose to the top early in the twentieth century, such as Ta¯ha¯ Husayn and al- Aqqa¯d (1889–1964} earned their reputation ˙ ˙ as stylists as well as innovators. They did not specialize in any one genre; and because the readership was so small – literacy in Egypt rose to only 17% by 1927 and to between 25% and 30% by mid-century – they also had to be prolific if they were to sustain themselves as men of letters. Thus Ta¯ha¯ Husayn, who at one time ˙ ˙ argued that Egypt was not an Oriental but a Mediterranean country, produced nearly 1,500 articles, several translations, and sixty-six original books which included literary studies, novels, short narratives, histories, and educational works. A purist in language, he amply demonstrated his ability to use classical Arabic not only in formal academic studies but also in imaginative contexts. In a re-telling of ancient Islamic legends inspired by Jules Lemaıˆtre’s En Marge des Vieux Livres, he could enliven the sober narrative by picturing the turmoil of the Prophet’s grandfather, disquieted by a recurrent vision urging him to dig the well that is now a feature of the pilgrimage to Mecca:

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Look at him – he hesitates: Is he to throw himself into the waves of sleep billowing before him? Or is he to remain on shore, teased by sleepiness but staying awake? Let him resist sleep all he can – those tumultuous waves are well able to overrun the shore, to engulf him and engulf all else beside him. . . Come, sleep, you have nothing to fear! These waves assuage, they do not drown! It was a time when Arabs were swamped with European romantic models, and these induced an outpouring of emotion. Mayy Ziya¯da (1886–1941), not a very substantial writer but as fine a stylist as any in her day, saw prose as “nothing but poetry that escapes the

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strict rules of metre”. She maintained for about ten years an amorous correspondence with Jibra¯n Xalı¯l Jibra¯n (1883–1931) although they never met. In one of her published effusions, she wrote: I have an unshakeable confidence in you, even as my rebellious heart overflows with tears. It is in your mercy that I shall take refuge when my hopes fail, to you that I shall vent my sorrows – I whom you picture as playful and volatile. To you I shall enumerate the burdens that have bent my shoulders and bowed my head since the dawn of my days – I who move flanked by wings and crowned with a wreath. I shall call you Father and Mother, acknowledging in you the authority of an elder and the governance of a master. I shall call you my people, my kin – I who know that these are not always loving. I shall call you my brother and my friend – I who have no brother and no friend. I shall acquaint you with my weakness and my need of knowledge – I whom you imagine to have the strength of heroes and the impregnability of champions. I shall reveal to you my need of tenderness and compassion, then weep before you, though you shall not be aware of it. I shall seek your opinion and advice when my thinking is confused and the ways ahead unclear. If I behave badly or commit some error, I shall come to you in humility and awe, to await your reproof and your punishment. The most far-reaching change, however, was that fictional narratives entered the literary canon. The impetus for this came from translators. The needs of the State had led to the formation of a body of able and hard-working officials headed by at-Tahta¯wı¯, ˙ ˙ ˙ but the skills they had acquired did not have to be restricted to the production of technical texts. Significantly, it was during a period of retrenchment that at-Tahta¯wı¯, reduced to running a primary ˙ ˙ ˙ school, turned his hand to the translation of a literary text: Feńelon’s Te´le´maque, completed in 1851 but not published until 1868.

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There soon was a demand for narratives. Journals provided an outlet especially for short stories, translated, adapted, or imitated – the dividing line between these categories often being blurred, for translators did not always acknowledge their source, and I have been told by some authors that as late as in the 1930s they found it easier to break into print if they labeled their effusions “freely translated”. With novels too, before readers’ tastes became more sophisticated, the bulk of the translations were of thrillers, spy stories, penny dreadfuls, and the like. Action novels like Robinson Crusoe and some of the works of Alexandre Dumas and Sir Walter Scott also found favour. Most highly prized in the nineteenth century was Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie as translated by Muhammad Utma¯n Jala¯l (1828/98). ˙ Such borrowings from a foreign culture, it needs to be stressed, are not acts of submission. In the first place, the translator’s selection and the readers’ acceptance are a wilful filtering process. Paul et Virginie had a particular appeal for the Arabs of the period because the climax has Virginie on board a sinking ship and she literally chooses to die rather than yield to a sailor’s entreaty to take off her voluminous skirts so he may save her. The text was also arabized to some extent, for it was in rhymed prose highlighted with occasional verses, and the characters were given names phonetically close to the originals but not entirely foreign to Arab ears. The first original long narratives of recognized merit were in fact hybrid forms that had some roots in the Arabic tradition. The most important is Muhammad al-Muwaylihı¯’s (1858–1930) ‘The ˙ ˙ Discourse of I¯sa¯ ibn-Hisˇa¯m’ which was published serially between 1898 and 1902. It tells of the adventures of a resurrected Pasha from the early nineteenth century who is bewildered by the changes that have taken place until he is befriended by the character whose name occurs in the title, and who becomes the narrator. This name is in fact identical with that of the narrator in the maqa¯mas of al-Hamada¯nı¯. The work has therefore been called ‘an extended maqa¯ma’, and indeed each episode resembles a maqa¯ma and starts in rhymed prose but turns to a more direct style when it launches into the narrative. Far from being decorative, however, its purpose was social criticism, and as such it was eminently successful. It was not, of course, a work of unified conception, but its framework was

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well suited to the needs of a periodical publication, striking whatever topic came to the author’s attention, so that when he had occasion to go to Paris, his characters went with him. A couple of imitations followed, but the genre was soon crowded out by works closer to the European model. A pioneer was Jurjı¯ Zayda¯n (1861–1914), who founded the journal al-Hila¯l in 1892. Among his many publications were one romantic and twenty-one historical novels. The latter followed an almost unchanging formula: Twined with a major episode in Islamic history is the fate of a pair of lovers who never waver in their fidelity or virtue but whose fortunes suffer repeated setbacks due to mislaid messages and villainous intrigues until they come to a happy ending coinciding with the triumph of the historical hero. These novels reached a wide public and were translated into Persian and Urdu. Yet Zayda¯n himself was ambiguous about the literary status of his novels. He sometimes claimed that they were intended to teach History, and he was in fact favoured as a candidate for the Chair of Islamic History in the newly created Egyptian University, except that there was opposition to a nonMuslim occupying such a post. His ‘ Arma¯nu¯sa the Egyptian’, for example – Arma¯nu¯sa being the daughter of the governor of Egypt who is secretly opposed to the ill-treatment of the Copts by the Byzantines (referred to as ‘Romans’) and is therefore prepared to welcome the Arab invaders – has a title-page which claims that it “incorporates details of the conquest of Egypt and of Alexandria at the hand of Amr ibn-al- A¯s in early Islam (640 C.E.) with extensive ˙ exposition of the conditions of the Arabs, their customs, their character, their clothing, and of the conditions of the Copts and the Romans in that period”. Yet when these novels were serialized in his journal, it was usually under the rubric “Entertainment”. An article which appeared in al-Hila¯l on 15 February 1897, unsigned but almost certainly by Zayda¯n, flits between notions that do not quite integrate into a literary concept:

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man is greatly in need of literary sciences in order to cultivate his mind, elevate his emotions, refine his morals, and widen the circle of his experience. . . . Novels fall into several categories: historical, scientific, literary, entertaining, and moralistic. . . . Those who would translate novels ought to observe the following rules: (1) They should choose the novels that befit the tastes and morals of Orientals; (2) These should be free of anything that would embarrass readers or corrupt their morals, so that even a virgin would not blush at the events described; (3) They should be written in natural, simple language, neither strazined nor out-of-the-way, for philological [sic] words are better suited to maqa¯mas and philological works than they are to the novels which people read in their leisure, to refresh their minds after the demands of work . . . and (4) They should be moderately priced. Is it implied that historical novels are not literary? That it is because they are mere pastimes that they are to be written in a simple language? That there is a place for ornate and recherche´ writing in what is truly literary? If so, it is a double irony that Zayda¯n has been more highly esteemed by modern Arabs as a pioneer of the simple functional style than as a novelist. Of course, mere intelligibility is not a sufficient quality to earn recognition as a man of letters. The most admired prose writer of the early twentieth century was al-Manfalu¯tı¯ (1876–1924), who ˙ described himself as a worshiper of beauty in all its forms, including the beauty of words. Although he knew no foreign language, he recast in his own lush style four French novels, including once again Paul et Virginie to which he gave the simple title ‘Virtue’. And he wrote a large number of short pieces collected under the appropriate titles of ‘Views’ and ‘Tears’, many of which have a slight narrative framework in which he set a scene of heartrending pathos leading to a grandiloquently expressed moral. In one such, “The First Cup”, the narrator tells of a friend who fell victim to the demon drink, and it rises to this climax: I entered his house but recognized neither the home nor its master, for I did not find in it that lofty spirit that once

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flapped his wings through its rooms and halls. I saw no smoke rising from the kitchen. I heard no servants chattering, no children weeping, no bells ringing. It was as if I had entered a grave to visit the dead, not a home to comfort the living. I made for the sick bed, and its tattered mosquito-net revealed a shadow on which nothing was left but skin clinging to whittled bone. I said, “O shadow that raises its eyes to heaven, I once had within this skin of yours a beloved friend – can you lead me to him?” After an interval he moved his lips and said, “Is it So-and-So’s voice that I hear?” I said, “Yes. What ails you?” He uttered such a sigh that his flanks nearly collapsed, and answered, “I bemoan the first cup.” I said, “What cup do you mean?” He said, “I mean the one to which I surrendered my wealth, my mind, my health, my honour, and to which to-day I surrender my life”. The elaboration of the argument and the homily that follow need not be laboured here. Despite the popularity of the genre, the sentiment (shared at one time by Sir Walter Scott) lingered that mere story-telling was not a proper occupation for a man of learning. The work of an obscure translator called al-Xara¯bilı¯, published in 1905, is prefaced with an assertion that its justification was not the narrative or the exercise of the imagination, but “lessons in manners and refinement”. And the first original Arabic novel of recognized literary merit was published anonymously. This was Zaynab, written by Muhammad Husayn Haykal ˙ ˙ (1888–1956) in 1913, while he was studying law in France. The heroine who gives the novel its title is a village girl in love with a fellow-villager, but she docilely marries the richer man her father has chosen for her and she dies of consumption. A parallel but not fully developed sub-plot has Ha¯mid, an educated young man who ˙ comes to the village of his birth only on vacation, being attracted to Zaynab, although he too has had a bride chosen for him while still a child. Romantic in its love themes and in its idealization of village life, Zaynab has also been praised as the forerunner of the realistic and the social novel because of its concern with the poor and its implied rebellion against age-old customs.

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It was in fact well ahead of its time, for it triggered no immediate development. It was not until the 1920s that competent short story writers came to the fore, the most celebrated being Mahmu¯d Taymu¯r (1894–1973) who early in his career used “the ˙ Egyptian Maupassant” as a pen-name. Well-suited to the needs of journals and allowing the writer to assume different viewpoints and priorities at different times, the short story quickly became a favourite vehicle for political and social affirmations as well as for romantic, idealistic, and often escapist effusions. The novel, which assumes a consistent underlying world view and demands powers of sustained and unified invention for which the Arabic literature of the past offered few models, had a more chequered history. The genre was given a powerful fillip when Ta¯ha¯ ˙ Husayn published serially in 1926–27, then as a book in 1929, ˙ a touching account of his early days as a blind boy in an Upper Egyptian village. This was immediately hailed as a masterpiece, and was the first piece of modern Arab literary writing to gain international recognition, being translated into English as An Egyptian Childhood then into many other world languages. He was later to add two more autobiographical volumes. And his example was quickly followed by other writers, already established in other genres, who now produced novels with a strong autobiographical element, such as al-Ma¯zinı¯’s (1890–1949) Ibra¯hı¯m the Writer in 1931 recounting the hero’s relations with three women of different character and status, and Tawfı¯q al-Hakı¯m’s (1898–1987) ˙ The Return of the Spirit in 1933, the title of which is meant to emphasize the author’s participation in the 1919 uprising against British rule, although the bulk of it is a lively description of the disorderly but amiable household in which he spent some of his teens. Each of these subsequently produced other novels built round their personal experiences. Most of the fiction produced in the 1930s and early 40s reflected the combination of nationalist, democratic, and romantic ideals that had penetrated the e´lite. Historical novels projected modern values into the past, the poor were sympathetically depicted as victims of oppression, and love stories spun webs that stirred the aching heart even if they did not always accord with the conventions that still ruled family life. Underlying them all were

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secularist assumptions. Ignorant provincial clerics could be derided, as in Ta¯ha¯ Husayn’s autobiography, but faith is hardly ˙ ˙ ever brought into the plot as a positive force. Yahya¯ Haqqı¯’s ˙ ˙ (1905–93) The Saint’s Lamp published in 1944 is a partial exception. It portrays a Western-trained doctor who sets up practice in a poor quarter of Cairo; as his patients believe in the curative power of the oil taken from a lamp in the near-by mosque, he finds it effective to draw on their beliefs as well as on his medical training. It is a call for a partnership – but scarcely an equal one – between East and West, Religion and Science. As al-Ma¯zinı¯ was to admit in his The Story of a Life, he and many of his contemporaries were recording experiences which they genuinely believed were their own whereas they were derivative: “In my youth, the impact of life registered in me not directly but through the medium of books. I was like someone hypnotized by another, his opinions, feelings, emotions, fancies, hopes, fears, loves and hates being generated in him by the hypnotist”. But the Second World War showed that Britain and France were not all-powerful, that there were other models to choose from and act upon – models from Eastern as well as Western Europe, and increasingly from America. With independence came a heavier sense of responsibility than when the occupier could be blamed for all that was wrong. Literature was pervasively politicized. And whereas it was nineteenth century European romanticism that had dominated the 1930s, increasing maturity and the spread of education shortened the time lag with which world movements or even literary fashions reached the Arab world. Not that the perceptions of the previous generation have disappeared: Stories of heroic resistance to oppression continue to be exploited, as in a succession of novels and plays by asˇ-Sˇarqa¯wı¯ (1920–87), the most impressive of which was Egyptian Earth (1953), in which the reputedly quiescent peasants are made to take up their cudgels and resist the exactions of the local Pasha and of the corrupt agents of the Government. Even al-Manfalu¯tı¯ has remained in print. But for ˙ the avant-garde, realism, commitment, socialism became the loudest clarion calls. The standards to which the present-day Arab writers hold themselves are still those that have proved their efficacity in the

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West. It is by these that they measure the global culture in which they seek a dignified position. The experiences of Oriental nations, including those of fellow-Muslims in Turkey or Iran, get scant attention in Arab universities or Arab writing. There is little that is distinctively Arab in their narrative techniques either. That an indigenous one might have been developed is suggested by an early clumsy novel entitled The Maid of Dansˇawa¯y by Mahmu¯d Haqqı¯ ˙ ˙ (1884–1964). In it he recounts somewhat fancifully what happened in 1906 when three British officers went shooting pigeons mindless of the fact that these are considered village property, and were set upon by the villagers of Dansˇawa¯y with the result that one officer died. A special court was convened under the presidency of Butrus ˙ Pasha Xa¯lı¯, and it passed savage sentences on a number of the villagers. In his novel, Mahmu¯d Haqqı¯ puts into the mouth of the ˙ ˙ prosecutor a long speech in which he denounces Egyptians as a treacherous and ungrateful nation, citing himself as an example of a traitor to a people who have reared him and raised him to a high position. It is an ironic application of the device long known to the Arabs as ‘the tongue of the condition’, but it has had no sequel. Instead, it is such techniques as “the stream of consciousness” or the polyphonic narrative that are being used, and they are used to good effect. What is significant is that the leading novelists have turned their backs on blind imitation and escapism and taken to using all the literary resources known to them to probe genuine problems plaguing their society. How searching and far-reaching they have been may be judged by some of the high points in the career of Najı¯b Mahfu¯z (1912–), the first Arab writer to make a name ˙ ˙ for himself in the narrative genres alone, and so far the only one to be awarded, in 1988, the Nobel Prize for Literature. Initially, he planned to write a series of novels on Ancient Egypt, but his second, Ra¯du¯bı¯s (1943), portraying a popular young pharaoh whose excesses cost him the support of his subjects, was read as an accusation directed at King Fa¯ru¯q. He then turned to realistic depictions of life in the lower middle-class quarters of Cairo, and three of his novels produced then, now known as the Cairo Trilogy, followed the fortunes of one family between the two Word Wars, the first generation fired by the patriotism of the 1919 uprising

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against the British, the last divided between communism and Islamic revivalism. Then in 1959 he startled the public by publishing serially in the daily al-Ahra¯m a long novel which has been translated as Children of Gebelawi. Ostensibly, it was another Cairene novel, and three chapters appeared before it was perceived that it was an allegory which has been interpreted in somewhat different ways, but the core of it is that God is represented as a racketeer who leaves his fortune in trust for his descendants, but these soon fall into evil ways; Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad attempt to bring back order ˙ and justice, but their success is only temporary; hope is then placed in the scientists, although these also are in danger of being corrupted when they enter into an alliance with the politicians. The author has since specified that it was the popular understanding of religion that he was attacking. Nevertheless, the novel was banned in Egypt, but was published in book form in the Lebanon in 1967. Najı¯b Mahfu¯z has produced many more imaginatively con˙ ˙ structed and technically polished novels that, at least until he was well into his seventies, have been above all uncompromisingly honest probes into problems of modern Arab society. Almost at random, one may single out The Thief and the Dogs which enters into the consciousness of a criminal until, pursued by the police and their dogs, he is shot dead; it can be read as a thriller, except that the fugitive is a would-be socialist Robin Hood who keeps hitting the wrong target. Al-Karnak (1974) is deceptively titled, for the name is that of a cafe´ where some of the regular customers periodically disappear and no one ever asks any questions for it is understood that they are political dissidents now in the hands of the secret police and at the mercy of a zealous, patriotically motivated torturer. And The Journey of Ibn Fattouma (1982) takes one to imaginary lands representing different levels of culture, the last one being Islam as he would have it understood. Too many to be listed are other gifted writers who have contributed significant works. But among major themes struck one may stop briefly by at-Tayyib Sa¯lih (1929–) who in Season of ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ Migration to the North (1966) explored the problem of cultural identity in terms of a Sudanese man’s association with three English women. In The Seven Days of Man (1966), Abd-al-Hakı¯m Qa¯sim ˙

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(1935–90) chronicled the gradual disintegration of a Sufi brotherhood. In The Whore’s Wedding (1978), at-Ta¯hir Watta¯r (1936–) set ˙ ˙ ˙˙ his story in a brothel to parallel aspects of life in an authoritarian and exploitative society. In The Committee (1981), Sun -Alla¯h ˙ Ibra¯hı¯m (1937–) portrayed his hero, who has been searching in vain for an honest leader, at odds with an unnamed but dreaded committee and ultimately left to “eat himself” – an idiom which means “to brood ineffectually in solitude”. And Yu¯suf Idrı¯s (1927–91), a man of many talents, was such a master of the short story that he could in “an Affair of Honour” portray an innocent and charming young village girl traumatized and soured by the indelicate process of having her virginity ascertained, and he could in others fire broadsides alike at reactionary religious leaders and illiberal military governments. He and several others named here have been in jail more than once. Needless to say, the major historic events that have shaken the Arab world in the second half of the twentieth century – the Algerian war of liberation, the strife between Muslims and Christians which from 1975 until 1990 tore a Lebanon long idealized as the home of toleration and gracious living – have had loud reverberations in the literature. So has the incessantly bleeding wound of Palestine. It features in many works that are concerned with other issues as well, notably in the novels of Halı¯m Baraka¯t ˙ (1936–), Jabra¯ Ibra¯hı¯m Jabra¯ (1920–94), and Sahar Xalı¯fa (1941–). ˙ But the most direct and effective representations in fiction have been by Xassa¯n Kanafa¯nı¯ (1936–72), a prominent member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who was killed in the blast of a car bomb. He made his mark not by vehement denunciations of Israeli misdeeds but by measured representations of the inadequacy of Arab leadership and the insufficiency of Arab solidarity. In his Men in the Sun (1963) three Palestinians reduced to homelessness and penury pay the driver of a water tank vehicle to smuggle them into Kuwayt. He hides them in the tank where they can breathe as long as the lid is left open; at the border, however, he has to clamp it down while he has his papers checked. But the officials are so lackadaisical and so intent on exchanging bawdy jokes that by the time the driver can move the vehicle again, the men have suffocated, and he abandons their bodies in a garbage dump.

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The international scene is also very much in Arab writers’ line of vision. Events are interpreted in line with ideologies of foreign origin. As is admitted by a character in Rasˇı¯d ad-Da ı¯f’s (1945–) ˙ ˙ Dear Mr. Kawabata – a novel in the form of a letter addressed to the Japanese novelist who was awarded the Nobel prize in 1968 – the communists involved in the Lebanese civil war insisted on calling their opponents “bourgeois” rather than “Christians”, and their communism seemed to them validated by the Soviet Union’s successes in realms of no immediate relevance, such as space exploration. In turn, the collapse of the Soviet Union, has deepened the distress resulting from the frustration of many Arab hopes and left Arab writers somewhat disoriented, unwilling to abandon their ultimate hopes but no longer certain that they are on the right road to attaining them. Hence the latest uneasy, fragmented novels of such as Ilya¯s Xu¯rı¯ (1948–). One force welling up from deep within the society, however, has elicited no positive response from the e´ lite. It is Islamic fundamentalism, which has been gathering enough momentum to affect social and political life. It had never lost its hold among the common folk, but it has also gained a following among some layers of the educated, especially after the disastrous 1969 “six day war” with Israel. It is as if these said to themselves: “We have tried to be pale imitations of Westerners, and it has not served us well. Let us try to find renewed guidance from the past.” By the spokesmen of the e´lite, however, the movement has been largely ignored, or else it has been roundly condemned. In Algeria where it has asserted itself too violently to be dismissed as an irrelevancy, Wa¯sı¯ni l- A raj (1954–) for one puts into the mouths of characters in his Sayyidat al-Maqa¯m 1 (1995) comments that carry wide implications even for the teachings of classical Islam. They bewail the fact that after independence the politicians who mistrusted thinking men created “a socialist country run on capitalist charters” but blame them mainly for opening the door to “blind locusts that devour what is green and what is dry” and

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1 Published in Cologne by al-Kamel Verlag. The quotations that follow are from pages 75, 74, 42–3, 229–30, and 157. The title may be roughly translated as ‘Honoured Lady’.

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that never weary of repeating the same judgments for more than fourteen centuries. The protagonists rail repeatedly against selfappointed “guardians of intentions” whose motto is “an ignorant man is a reliable man”, and who inveigle impressionable young men into becoming bullies ready to liquidate all the “enemies of God”, so that “we are like a dead man who is resurrected then returns to his original burial ground, without objecting to being buried, but protesting vehemently against being buried in anything but his original tomb.” An even more radical departure from traditional Islam is to be found in a novella by Abd-al-Hakı¯m Qa¯sim, the title of which may ˙ be translated as “Sundry Tidings from the Afterlife”.2 In this, the author takes advantage of the Islamic belief that immediately after burial the dead are interrogated and punished by two angels called Na¯kir and Nakı¯r. The novella rapidly sketches the life of an unnamed individual, and then presents the whole of his dialogue with the two angels. Its most significant feature, however, is not what the dead man has to say for himself, but the angels’ explanation of the basis on which judgment is to be made. By picking sentences from here and there and ignoring in whose mouth they are placed, one may summarize the author’s thesis in his own words:

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Canonical Law is one of the matters that have to be clarified. The basic rule is not a set pattern superposed on the intellect; it is itself the subject of intellectual consideration. The Law thus loses its power to compel, but it acquires a new compelling power deriving from the fact that the basic rule reinforces instinct instead of emasculating it. This compelling power results not from an authority’s imposition, but from creation’s desire to abide by a basic rule. Among our first concerns, therefore, must be how to understand instinct. It is every being’s desire – beginning with the most primitive forms of life – for survival and evolution. The competitive struggle 2 Published with another novella entitled “al-Mahdı¯”, Beirut, Da¯ru t-Tanwı¯r, 1984. Both are translated – not accurately throughout – by Peter Theroux in Rites of Assent, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1995.

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for survival is the primitive, distorted form of this instinct, which then corrects itself, until it reaches perfection in the human being whose survival and evolution is conditional upon the survival and evolution of others. The condemnation of murder and of harmful action is the essence of every law. The Law is thus a formulation of instinct realized in glorious moments of human history, when prophethood is the obverse of the Law, and the conformity of instinct and law is complete. That is the golden age of every prophecy: the Law actualizes the genius of human thought, and prophethood actualizes the genius of the individual human. This seems marvelous until it leads to investing the Law with holiness and prophethood with miraculousness amid the cheering of the believers. The hallowing of texts and the belief in miracles are the inevitable consequences of fear – the fear of losing the moment when Law and instinct are in perfect conformity. Thus does authority pass into the hands of the social element most knowledgeable about the Law and least respectful of it, into the hands of those who transmute it from thought to holy book – that is to say, to a subjugating authority.

The theatre To an even greater extent than the novel, Arabic drama is indebted to European models. The French who came to Egypt with Bonaparte had plays performed for their entertainment, and some Egyptian guests were present on occasion. Arab travelers in Europe too, including Sˇidya¯q, saw plays and mused on Arab themes that might be treated dramatically. And it was one such traveler to Italy and France, a Lebanese merchant called Ma¯ru¯n an-Naqqa¯sˇ (1817–55), who determined to “pour European gold into Arab moulds”, and in 1847 he put on The Miser in the courtyard of his own home in Beirut, with members of his family as performers. It was opera rather than what he called “prosa” that had fired his imagination, and the entertainment was largely sung, but the theme – influenced by Molie`re’s L’Avare but not closely following its plot – was scarcely operatic. He died after he had produced only two more plays, but his work was continued first by his brother Niqu¯la¯

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(1825–94) then by his nephew Salı¯m (1850–84), both of whom added quite a few translated or adapted plays to the repertoire. It was Egypt, however, that offered by far the better scope for such endeavours. By 1867, Cairo had a theatre in the Azbakiyya quarter, and a year later as part of the celebrations for the opening of the Suez Canal, a fine Opera House was built and Aida was commissioned for its inauguration but was not ready in time, so Rigoletto was presented instead. Italian and French companies were invited to perform, and they sometimes recruited local talent for the minor parts. Jacob Sanua apparently acquired some theatrical experience in this way. He then formed a short-lived troupe of his own which included two Jewish actresses. Between 1879 and 1872 he put on thirty-two short pieces of his own composition. Most of those that have survived are rather slight humorous playlets, but one of them, The Co-Wives, on the troubles of a man in a polygamous marriage, was a daring one for a Jew to present. In 1876 Salı¯m an-Naqqa¯sˇ transferred his troupe – which also included actresses – to Alexandria. His example was followed by other Lebanese Christians who, in the theatre as in journalism, took the boldest initiatives but found it most profitable to function in Egypt. The first Muslim to form a troupe was the Damascene Abu¯-Xalı¯l al-Qabba¯nı¯ (1841–1902) who also migrated to Egypt. Until the first World War, a number of such troupes functioned in Egypt, one hiving from another. Their repertoires seem impressive for they included masterpieces of Corneille, Racine, and Shakespeare, but their performances were mainly musical entertainments framed in a dramatic plot, and their stars – including al-Qabba¯nı¯ himself, and the most famous of all, the Egyptian Sala¯ma Hija¯zı¯ ˙ (1852–1917) – were singers. The first valiant attempt at classical theatre was made by another Lebanese residing in Egypt, Jurj Abyad (1880–1959). Financed by ˙ the Khedive, he studied acting at the Paris Conservatoire from 1904 to 1910 and gained practical experience with French troupes. It was with one such that he returned to Egypt, performing in French; but when the troupe returned to France he stayed behind to form his own. It opened in 1912 with a repertoire which included Oedipus Rex, translated by Farah Antu¯n (1874–1922) and ˙ ˙ Othello, translated by Xalı¯l Mutra¯n (1872–1949). This and several ˙

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other similar ventures which he launched alone or in partnership with others proved financially precarious, but he had a long career as the foremost Arab tragic actor. Between the two World Wars, two more lines of theatrical activity were opened which were to prove themselves financially selfsustaining. Each was associated with a prominent stage personality. Yu¯suf Wahbı¯ (1898–1982) was a man of means and an actor endowed with a great presence and a powerful voice. He founded his own theatre in 1923 and almost to the end of his life he was immensely successful mainly in melodramas, his best known being Sons of the Rich, an adaptation of François Coppeé’s Le Coupable, in which an eminent judge has a woman of the streets brought before his bench, and as she unfolds her story he realizes that she was once an innocent young woman that he seduced, whereupon he rises in his seat and confesses in a stentorian voice that the guilt is his. The other contributor to the live theatre was Najı¯b ar-Rı¯ha¯nı¯ ˙ (1891–1949). From bi-lingual music-hall skits which derived their humour from misunderstandings between people who did not speak the same language, he developed the character of Kisˇkisˇ Bey, a villager of some standing in his own ambit who is easily imposed upon when he first comes to the big city, but whose common sense rooted in basic realities eventually gets the upper hand. This led to a long line of comedies increasingly sophisticated, and increasingly earnest in their social criticism. Oddly, until the 1930s the connection between performing plays and writing plays was rather ragged and indeterminate. The one was entertainment, the other was literature – or was it? The issue was clouded both by the fact that the live theatre favoured the vernacular form of the language, and by the long standing association of pubic performances with despised folk activities. That the link existed no one questioned, but neither did anyone attempt to investigate it or define it. As late as in the 1920s, the theatre was in the grip of actormanagers who either wrote, commissioned, or bought scripts that then became part of their stock in trade. The texts were seldom published at the time, and the actual author’s name seldom acknowledged. On the other hand, the most hard working

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purveyor of theatrical texts in the nineteenth century was Muhammad Utma¯n Jala¯l. He translated into Egyptian vernacular ˙ verse six of Molie`re’s comedies, three of Racine’s tragedies, and three untraceable Italian plays. He also wrote a two-act comedy of his own; yet he was never associated with the live theatre. No one made a reputation primarily as a playwright. A few nineteenth century original “plays” mentioned in the sources, notably The Fatherland by Abd-Alla¯h an-Nadı¯m (1843/4–96) were school productions. The most highly regarded dramatic texts were those performed by Jurj Abyad. A mark of some importance was made ˙ by the rather scholarly Farah Antu¯n who applied himself to the ˙ ˙ problems of writing for the theatre and some of whose plays, translated or original, were both published and performed, but without achieving great popularity. Then between 1929 and 1932 the most highly regarded poet at the time, Ahmad Sˇawqı¯ (1868– ˙ 1932) published four historical dramas and one comedy in classical Arabic verse whose literary status was indubitable, although they are seldom performed in their entirety. The final admission of drama into the literary canon, however, is indissolubly associated with the work of Tawfı¯q al-Hakı¯m (1898–1987). ˙ In a memoir entitled The Prison of Life, al-Hakı¯m recounts how, ˙ although he was the son of a judge who wanted him to follow in his footsteps, he was stage-struck from an early age. He secretly associated with people active in the theatre, who were scarcely considered respectable. He shared the interests of eager young men who went through the pages of La Petite Illustration searching for summaries of plays that had appeared in Paris. These they adapted to suit the conventions of a society that did not allow unrelated young men and young women to mingle freely, and they would label the resulting text “from the pen of” So-and-So, a formula that obscured whether it was a translation, an adaptation, or an original composition. They would then try to sell it to a theatre owner or manager for a lump sum. Al-Hakı¯m himself wrote – under a ˙ pseudonym – six such plays for the Uka¯sˇa brothers, but these he considered trivial and even after their authorship had been disclosed he did not have them published under his name. In Paris where he was sent to study law he discovered that drama was a prestigious art form that commanded the attention of

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eminent literary critics. He came back home determined to write intellectually satisfying plays. His first effort was The People of the Cavern, based on the legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus to which there is a brief reference in the Qur a¯n. In this he followed the fortunes of three men who take refuge in a cavern in order to escape the tyranny of a pagan king. They fall asleep, and waken three hundred years later to find themselves in a changed world which ought to be more favourable to them but to which they are so ill-attuned that they return to the cavern. It was written in 1928, first published in 1933, and chosen for the inaugural performance of the newly created National Troupe in 1935. He wrote several more of what he termed “cerebral” plays – ˇSahraza¯d, Pygmalion, Oedipus King, Praxa – all of which have a bearing on a favourite theme of his: the incompatibility of what he called the Real and the Actual, and what others would term the Ideal and the Real. He claimed that these were not intended to be staged, at least not before a public insufficiently grounded in the material on which he drew, and they seldom were. But he also wrote some seventy plays remarkable for their variety and inventiveness, the setting seldom being contemporary society. His familiarity with stage business showed in the piquant situations and ingenious plots he devised, although the denouement was sometimes arbitrary. A prime example is The Perplexed Sultan in which a Mamlu¯k who has acceded to the throne is found to be unqualified to rule because he was not properly manumitted. He therefore has himself sold by auction on the understanding that his new owner would then free him, and is bought by a reputed brothel-keeper who insists that he spend one night in her establishment; but it turns out that she has been misunderstood and is really a patroness of the arts. A Journey to To-Morrow has another elaborate plot serving a constant priority of his. The setting is an imaginary heavenly body on which humans discover they need neither food nor air to survive because they are like batteries constantly recharged by contact with the ground; and the purport is that once physical needs are supplied, it is Art that becomes mankind’s supreme priority. His readiness to experiment resulted in The Tree Climber, the title of which is derived from a piece of folk nonsense verse and the plot is a bewildering sequence of events involving a twice married man and

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a green lizard in a tree. This has been much discussed as the first absurdist play in Arabic; but the author maintained that it was absurd only on the surface; indeed it can be read as a political statement, in which the two marriages refer to the revolutions of 1919 and 1952, the first of which al-Hakı¯m considered a true ˙ resurgence of Egypt’s ancient spirit whereas he came to see the second as a costly failure, although he continued to profess that Egypt’s spirit, symbolized by the green lizard, was unquenchable. The name of the next generation of dramatists is legion. A sampling of their extensive and challenging creations should include Sala¯h Abd-as-Sabu¯r’s (1931–81) free verse play The ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ Tragedy of al-Halla¯j, translated by Khalil I. Semaan as Murder in ˙ Baghdad to suggest a parallel with T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. It is a powerful and moving evocation of the ordeal to which the tenth century mystic was subjected, but its distinctive emphasis is most explicit in the words ascribed to a minor character who starts with a reference to the distinctive cloak worn by Sufis:

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Does the cloak prevent us from awareness of oppression? Or from withstanding the oppressor? Or from diverting evil from our weaker brethren? Do you not see some aspirants who revel in the garment, And as they step up to asceticism, renouncing self-indulgence, They hanker for the vilest of all pleasures, The pleasure of ignoring Suffering and Mankind. Of a different temper but no less far-reaching in his concerns and sympathies was Yu¯suf Idrı¯s, whose exposition of Mankind’s attachment to a master-to-servant relationship in al-Fara¯fı¯r, ‘the Flutterers’ has a Brechtian quality. Another play of his tells of a revolutionary leader who, having attained absolute power, decrees that for the sake of equality his subjects must all wear clothes that feature black and white stripes. In time, however, he realizes that life has become drab and decides to proclaim that all colours are to be lawful. But the revolutionaries who brought him to power are now the establishment and want no change, so when he addresses his public to promulgate the new order, they drown his voice with a recording of a previous speech of his affirming the

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opposite. The title of the play, il-Muxattatı¯n, is a pun, for it may ˙˙ ˙ mean either ‘the striped’ or ‘the planned’.

Poetry Unlike novelists and dramatists, Arab poets had behind them an immensely powerful tradition to sustain them as they encountered new challenges. Besides, it is arguable that when cultures meet, the literary genres that concretize concepts in the guise of interacting lifelike characters are more readily assimilated than those that remain at an abstract level. The fact is that Arab poets were slower to learn from European models than were the prose writers. During most of the nineteenth century, there were those who recorded the wonders of Western technology, as did Sa¯lih Majdı¯ (1822–81), making use of the legend ˙ ˙ of a magnificent city whose inhabitants were exterminated by God (ka¯mil/a¯ ı¯):

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Is this a city above the unplumbed waters Moving with greatest beauty and magnificence? Or is it Iram reappearing, with its pillars Fashioned of bright silver? Or is it the pleasure steam-boat, its line extended By the lord of the land, the most favoured of all?

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And there were those who drew the moral that the superiority of Europeans called for emulation, not submission – as did Mahmu¯d ˙ Qa¯ba¯du¯ (1815–71) (tawı¯l/muhu¯): ˙ They planted the lofty tree of civilization – its branch Mathematics, and natural science its stem. So in its shade they had a resting place Whose keep had means to counter all assaults. ... Sons of the faith, is it befitting that they excel us In a glory whose proudest reach was once our own? I swear: the one laid down in dust is not so dead As one who, capable of wealth, appears resourceless!

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But in giving tongue to the themes that had long been the concern of poets, the standards of the preceding centuries remained in honour. When Sˇa¯kir Sˇuqayr (1850–96) praised a fellow scholar with the words (mutaqa¯rib/ar): Lofty his status, clear his eloquence, Smooth his tongue, prolonged his contemplation, Unsullied his fingers, pious his heart, Ascending his destiny, lasting his mark, his craftsmanship can be fully appreciated only when the original is transcribed: l-maka¯ni jaliyyu l-baya¯ni Ö Aliyyu Taliyyu l-lisa¯ni maliyyu l-basar

˙ ˙ Naqiyyu l-bana¯ni raqiyyu l-jana¯ni Raqiyyu z-zama¯ni, baqiyyu l- atar.

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There was no impetus then to translate European poetry. Muhammad Utma¯n Jala¯l’s verse translations of La Fontaine and ˙ of several plays had little bearing on lyrical poetry, especially as most of them were in the vernacular. More intriguing is a fragment of Boileau’s L’Art Poe´tique which he rendered in the rajaz metre, traditionally reserved for didactic texts. What gives it some relevance is that in relaying Boileau’s advice to the budding poet to study the works of great predecessors, Muhammad Utma¯n Jala¯l ˙ substituted Arab poets of the past for Boileau’s French masters, and the exemplars he chose belonged not to the immediately preceding age but to a period of purposeful achievement extending from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries. It was in fact the instinct of the most gifted poets of the late nineteenth century who felt the need for an energetic new departure to turn not to foreign models but to predecessors of proven quality and energy. And because they remained within the bounds of their heritage, they quickly achieved a high level of fluency and sophistication. Keenly aware of the problems of their day, sensing also that it was no longer a munificent prince but a restive public that they

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needed to address, these neo-classicists often composed oratorical pieces that were in fact declaimed at public meetings and were labeled “platform poetry”. Thus al-Jawa¯hirı¯’s (1900–1997) bitter “Lullaby for the Hungry” begins (ka¯mil/a¯mı¯): Sleep, you hungry populace, sleep – May the gods of food watch over you! Sleep, for if you cannot get your fill Of wakefulness, then of sleep. Sleep to the cream of promises Mixed with the honey of words. Sleep and you shall be visited by the maidens Of dreams under the wings of darkness. To light you, you shall have a disc-like loaf As round as is the full moon, And you shall see your spacious hovels All paved with marble. Sleep and you shall be healed – how good it is For one to sleep through great calamities! So conscious were they of current issues that some of their compositions resembled editorials or newspaper reports in verse. Thus Ha¯fiz Ibra¯hı¯m (1872–1932) recorded a demonstration ˙ ˙ mounted by women during the 1919 Egyptian uprising against the British (ka¯mil/nah):

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The fair ones emerged in protest, and I Went to observe their muster. ... Like asters they came out, Shining in the dark. ... Marching in dignity, Their hair laid bare, When lo! An army approached, The reins of horses loosened, And soldiers with their swords Aimed at their necks –

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Canons and rifles, Swords and lances Horses and horsemen Encircled them. Their weapons that day Were roses and sweet basil. Two armies clashed for hours That age the unborn, And the women waned For might is not theirs; They fell back and scattered Back to their homes. So may the proud army find joy, Having won and prevailed! The most accomplished of the neo-classicists was Ahmad Sˇawqı¯. ˙ He claimed to have been influenced by European poetry for he had resided in France and Spain and translated Lamartine’s “Le Lac” although this translation has been lost. His enormous poetic output included innovations, such as narrative poems, some addressed to children. He also composed some verses in the vernacular. But it was in the classical Arabic tradition that he found an authentic and resonant voice. Nature provided scope for his lyricism, as in this fanciful description of the moon rising over water (mutaqa¯rib/ ab):

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May we be ransom for a guest awaited Who has appeared in wondrous guise, His harbingers make mountains quiver As passion causes flanks to quiver. With glitter he adorns the seas: Theirs are the cups and his the bubbles. He lights the highlands as he ascends, He lights the plains as he regresses. From the sea he reached us in a barque Of silver, its oars of gold. We mused: This might be Solomon had he not died, Or Pharaoh were he borne by stars,

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Or Chosroes with his fire unquenched, Or Joseph if he had not aged. But no! These were not crowned with light, Nor was their throne above the clouds. He made his deepest mark, however, in resounding odes – some in direct imitation of great predecessors – celebrating current or historical events and designed to defend or glorify Egypt, Arabs, and Islam. One such was an imitation of al-Bu¯sı¯rı¯’s “the Mantle” ˙ which runs to 190 lines and acknowledges its indebtedness by adopting the same metre and rhyme as the original. He kept to its succession of themes, but when recounting the Prophet’s role in history he showed himself painfully aware of the polemics raised by Christians concerning Holy War and of the irony that it was they who now held military superiority. With sentiments that few in the nineteenth century would have disowned, he addressed his words to the Prophet, using “ignorance” in the Islamic sense of not having received a divine revelation (bası¯t/mı¯): ˙ Your brother Jesus addressed a corpse; he came to life. You also raised whole generations of the dead – For ignorance is death, and given miraculous power, One may then raise from ignorance or from the tomb. They say that you waged war though God’s apostles were not sent To kill or to shed blood. Mere ignorance, dream-like delusion, sophistry! Your conquest by the sword came after conquest by the pen. When all the worthy had come to you of their own will, The sword took charge of the unknowing and the rabble, For if you counter evil with gentle measures you are left Resourceless; but meet it with its like and it is cauterized. ... You taught men everything they did not know, Including warfare with all its sureties.

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You called them to a struggle that gave them mastery: On war is cosmic and international order founded. ... But yesterday some thrones were raised, and others tottered Which but for missiles would have been unnotched. The partisans of Jesus have mustered shattering devices, And we but muster the plights of shattered people. And he ended with this invocation on behalf of the Prophet’s nation: With him, o Lord, You granted Muslims a good start; Complete Your favour and grant them a good ending. There were other voices at the time, however, that played down religious differences in the interest of Arab brotherhood as arRusa¯fı¯ (1875–1945) urged, or more widely still in deference to ˙ Beauty, of which az-Zaha¯wı¯ (1863–1936) said (ramal/ad): It was preached to mankind By Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, ˙ Revealed on the Mount, Incarnate in Jesus, Recited in the Qur a¯n, And day by day re-echoed.

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Yet by then Western models had penetrated prose writing, and there were voices urging a parallel development in poetry. Xalı¯l Mutra¯n (1872–1949) proclaimed his intention of innovating ˙ without offending against past standards. Like the neo-classicists, he spoke out on contemporary issues as when he addressed the British concerning censorship laws (ramal/ra¯): Break the pens! Will breaking them Stop hands from carving stone? Lop off the hands! Will lopping them Stop eyes from looking daggers? Put out the eyes! Will blinding them Stop breaths from rising in a sigh?

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Choke breaths – that is your utmost. It will relieve us of you, so we thank you! But his also are gentle intimate pen-portraits, such as this description of a child (mujtatt/a¯jı¯): Light-spirited she steps As lightly does the sandgrouse, Unceasingly fluttering Like mercury aquiver; Her fairness tinted, her form An ivory statuette, Bi-coloured, or of one hue Delightfully blended. An imposing literary achievement in the early twentieth century was Sulayma¯n al-Busta¯nı¯’s (1856–1935) translation of the Iliad into Arabic verse, started in 1887 and published in 1913. This was, however, a monumental work in every sense of the word. More lastingly influential and particularly assiduous both in precept and example were three – al- Aqqa¯d (1889–1964), alMa¯zinı¯, and Abd-ar-Rahma¯n Sˇukrı¯ (1886–1958) – who befriended ˙ one another in 1909 and for a while pooled their efforts. The first two published a collection of critical articles which they entitled ad-Dı¯wa¯n, ‘the Tribunal’, so the three are usually linked together as the Dı¯wa¯n school. What they had in common was that – unlike most writers of their time – the foreign language they mastered was not French but English, so it was the poetry of late English Romantics that they translated and emulated. Al- Aqqa¯d especially preached a literary creed derived mainly from Hazlitt and other nineteenth century English critics, and he was soon followed by many who not only subjected contemporary production to such Western criteria as “the organic unity” of a poem but also searched for their applicability to the classical heritage, where they do not always sit comfortably. A sample of their soul-searching is in a poem entitled “Perplexity” by Abd-ar-Rahma¯n Sˇukrı¯ (bası¯t/ı¯hı¯): ˙ ˙

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I am surrounded by a sea of Yours, unknown to me And by a wasteland whose confines I cannot see. I spend my life with my own soul a stranger, And round me is a universe of unreached ends. ... My soul is like a lute within Your grasp. Loosen Your hands, and free some of its songs. The Romantic stream was generously fed from afar by Lebanese e´migre´s to the United States, now known as the Syro-American school. These were mostly Christians, and as such they fitted easily into a Western environment and readily absorbed its dominant tastes and perceptions. Their high priest was Jibra¯n (1882–1931), who in the last ten years of his life wrote only in English, awkwardly spelling his name “Gibran Kahlil Gibran”, but gaining enthusiastic admirers for his lush imagery and glossy diction, notably in The Prophet. To Arabic literature he contributed innovations both in form – as in his many prose poems – and in mood and theme, for he was often sententious but he could also lightly sing his delight in Nature, as in this poem which is in one metre (xafı¯f) but rhymes in couplets: Have you, of an afternoon, Sat like me among the vines, With the clusters overhanging Like golden constellations? To the thirsty they are springs, To the hungry they are food. They are honey, they are perfume; To those who wish it they are wine. Have you made of grass your bed, And of empty space your quilt, Making light of what is coming, And forgetting what is past? The Syro-American poets were numerous and productive, covering a wide range of themes involving the emotions. One among many was Mı¯xa¯ ı¯l Nu ayma (1889–1989) who in fact returned to the

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Lebanon in 1932. His service in the United States army at the end of the first World War and the honours rendered to its dead stung him into bemoaning, in finely crafted stanzas, the inglorious state to which the Arabs had descended. The closing lines are: Brother, who are we? No fatherland, no kin, no neighbour! Whether sleeping or waking, our garment is shame and disgrace. We and our dead alike have filled the world with stench. So bring a shovel and follow me to dig another trench In which to bury our living. The two main pillars sustaining neo-classicism in Egypt, Ahmad ˙ Sˇawqı¯ and Ha¯fiz Ibra¯hı¯m, died in 1932. Already by the late 1920s ˙ ˙ so many factors favouring Romanticism had come together that a young Tunisian born in an oasis and knowing no foreign language but influenced by al- Aqqa¯d and the Syro-Americans, asˇ-Sˇa¯bbı¯ (1909–35), emerged as a talented poet whose promise was cut short by a very early death, but not before he had sung in a multirhymed poem utterly at variance with Islamic ritual:

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Is a temple to beauty By visions and fancy. In shaded humility, And lighting candles.

All through the 1930s and early forties Arab Romanticism was in full spate. Initially at least, it was undeniably derivative. Literary journals brought out spring numbers celebrating the revival of nature even in Egypt where nature never dies and spring is a season of dust storms. It became fashionable for a while to invoke the Greek gods sometimes appropriately as when an important publication took the name Apollo, but sometimes also in contexts that betrayed little acquaintance with anything but the names. But the period was one of impotence and frustration for the Arabs, so that the agony to which Ibra¯hı¯m Na¯jı¯ (1898–1953) gave tongue had wider reverberations than in individual souls (xafı¯f/ im):

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Alone am I in the wilderness, perplexed, astray. Oh, when shall the clouds remember the wastelands? Mercy, o ye Heavens! My mouth is dry, And my throat foreswears the water springs. The founts of hope have dried, and there remains not even The flicker of a dream in sleeping eyes. In the ugly reality lay the justification for his desire to seek a realm “beyond the clouds”, and he gave escapism its ultimate formulation in a multi-rhymed poem (ramal): Bring me my lyre and leave me to imagination! Let me drink fancy! Beguile me with the absurd! Abandon truth to those who want it. Discernment is my foe. Flood me with error! Take the lights away. Perchance I shall find mercy in the womb of night. And Alı¯ Mahmu¯d Ta¯ha¯ (1902–49) addressed an idol he had himself ˙ ˙ compounded out of every kind of beauty he could find (xafı¯f/qı¯):

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The star bears witness what magnificence I drew from it, what limpid sheen. The bird bears witness how many of its songs I poured, like wine, upon your hearing. The vine bears witness how much of its fruit I pressed, How many cups I filled out of my cruse. The land bears witness that I left no laurel Unculled from the leafy mantle of the spring. The sea bears witness that I left in it no pearl Worthy of your brow, befitting it. But then he turns to Nature and says: I am, o Mother, the maker of a smiling hope In the semblance of a visioned morrow. I cast it as a creator does who loves Art, ascending to the subtlest notions,

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And I looked for life in it, but was denied The throbbing of life in my creation. But by the late 1940s there were signs of impatience with such escapes into unreality. When in 1947 Luwı¯s Awad (1915–90) ˙ published his translations of Prometheus Unbound and of Adonais, he also pointed out that the idealistic Shelley who was much admired by the Romantics was also a committed political reformer. And the new mood found expression in a radically new form of expression, soon to be known as “free verse”. Within months of each other, two Iraqi poets, as-Sayya¯b (1926–64) and Na¯zik al-Mala¯ ika (1923–), published poems that retained the basic metric units of classical Arabic prosody but in lines of unequal length and either unrhymed or following no set rhyming pattern. The innovation sparked a long and often violent controversy, but it was soon adopted by some all over the Arab world, and although traditional verse forms are still practised, it is free verse that has virtually become the norm. The effect of the new prosody has been far-reaching, for it has put an end to all that went with the imposing rhythm and resonant rhyme of the self-contained end-stopped line. And along with the formal change came a keen awareness of new models and new needs. Initially, the dominant influence was that of T. S. Eliot, and especially of The Wasteland. In his poetry, as-Sayya¯b and others read a sweeping condemnation of Western civilization. This may not have been Eliot’s intention, but if his style with its fractured images reflected the disruption of values experienced by Europeans as a result of the first World War, it also suited the experience of the Arabs buffeted by the Great Powers and faced with the dissection of Palestine. Eliot was not to remain their sole literary mentor. At least among the avant-garde, every new voice that was raised in English or French, or even in Russian or in Spanish, had its echoes in Arabic, and with a shorter time lag than in the past. Above all, with increasing awareness of their responsibility for their own fate and with greater maturity, the Arab poets did not remain imitators. The standards and the patterns may have been derivative, but they were

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applied to genuine Arab predicaments with stringency and sophistication. Rather than trace once again the forces, trends, and issues encountered in the works of prose writers, it may be most useful here to round up a few fragments of how Arab poets of the second half of the twentieth century have given tongue to their experiences as individuals, as social beings, and as members of the human family. Intensely personal is as-Sayya¯b’s recall, while harassed by poverty and ill-health, of early days in his native village by the river Buwayb. One of his images seems to derive from the legend of the Inchcape Bell. The other is of a fixture in every poor Arab home: a large water jar, porous so that the water exuding from it cools the contents by evaporation, the excess draining into a bowl beneath, the drops falling in with a ‘plop’ that the name of the river seems to reduplicate: Buwayb. . . Buwayb. . . Bells of a tower lost at the bottom of the sea. Water in the jars, and sunset in the trees. And the jars ooze bells of rain Whose crystal melts into a moan: “Buwayb, o Buwayb”. And in my heart a yearning darkens For you, Buwayb, My river, sorrowful as rain. Al-Bayya¯tı¯ (1926–99) depicts the culturally uprooted Arab as “a Traveler without Luggage” and uses appropriately disjointed language: Within me a soul is dying. Like a spider, My soul is dying. And on the wall The light of day. It sucks my years and spits them out as blood, the light of day.

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Not for my sake was it ever made, this day. The door is closed. It never was, this day. I shall be! No use! I shall always be from nowhere. I have no face, no history – from nowhere. Niza¯r Qabba¯nı¯ (1923–98) was in his day the most widely read poet, mainly because his diction was always luminously simple and musical. During the first half of his career he sang of hardly anything but love. His “Coffee-cup Reader” has an u¯b rhyme occurring at irregular intervals: She sat – and fear was in her eyes – Pondering my upturned cup. She said, “Do not grieve, my son, But love is your written doom. He dies a martyr, Son, Who dies for faith of the beloved. Your cup is a fearsome world, And your life is none but ventures and wars. You shall love often, very often, You shall die often, very often. You shall love all the women on earth, And come back a defeated king!” But then he turned to political themes, and in a denunciation both of modern tyranny and of outworn values, he assumed the role of a man accused of murdering a religious leader; rough-handled by the forces of the State, he confesses: In killing him I killed All the cockroaches that mutter prayers in the dark, All the idlers on the pavements of dreams. In killing him I killed All the parasites in the garden of Islam, All who seek a sustenance From the emporium of Islam. In killing him I killed – O worthy masters! –

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All those who for a thousand years Have been fornicating in words. Of a different temper, highly innovative and subtle to the point of obscurity is Adu¯nı¯s (1930–) whose pen-name reflects not the Romantics’ shallow interest in Greek gods but a later fascination with myths of death and resurrection. Part of a poem entitled “The New Noah” reads:

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If time was to begin all over again And water flooded the face of life And the earth shook and God hastened Requesting of me, “Noah, save The living!” I would not heed God’s words. I would roam in my ark Clearing pebbles and mud from the eyes of the dead. I would open out their depths to the flood. I would whisper in their veins that we Are back from the wilderness, out of the cave, That we have altered the firmament of years, And that we sail undeterred by fear, And do not listen to the words of God. And in another poem is his summing up of an era: A coffin wearing the face of a child A book Written in the entrails of a crow. A monster stepping up holding a flower. A rock Breathing in the lungs of a madman. This is it. This is the twentieth century. As for the plight of Palestine, it encapsulates so many of the Arabs’ frustrations that it has figured in the anxieties of many an Arab poet. But Palestine has its own poets who have eloquently recorded their agonies and their hopes, without sparing themselves or their

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leaders for their failures and for the besetting sin of self-deceit. Prominent among them is Mahmu¯d Darwı¯sˇ (1941–). His reaction ˙ to the bloodletting which has already stained the beginning of the twenty-first century is a poem entitled “The Sacrifice”. Like other Muslim poets, including as-Sayya¯b, he uses the figure of Jesus as the epitome of sacrifice. This latest poem is in spurts of four to six lines echoing the rhythm and the rhyme of the Qur anic verses which tell of the birth of Jesus (19:1–40) but it ignores the Qur anic teaching that Jesus was not crucified. Parts of it read:

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Which heavenly favour shall we deny? Who but you Shall make us triumph? Who but you shall liberate us? You were born on our behalf. You were born of light And of fire. We were carpenters gifted In the making of crosses. Take up your cross and rise Above the Pleiades. . . . Come forth! Step up, alone! Be our only Metaphor above the singers’ abyss. We who idle And sleep on horseback, we ask you to be faithful. Be faithful to the progeny and to the mission. Be faithful To the beautiful myths. Be faithful! . . . Be not broken. Be not victorious. Be suspended In between. If you are broken, you break us. And if Victorious, you break us and destroy our temple. Therefore Be dead-alive and alive-dead, so the priests may continue To ply their trade. Be a shadowy phantom.

The literary medium Despite the new directions and purposes adopted by Arabic literature in modern times, radical changes in the literary medium have been resisted. It was in journalism, with its need to reach as wide a readership as possible, that the temptation was strongest to adopt the language of everyday speech. Abd-Alla¯h an-Nadı¯m who had been renowned as a master of ornate prose adopted a much simpler style

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in the first short-lived newspaper that he launched in 1881. Then in 1892 in another paper that he founded, al- Usta¯d, ‘the Professor’, he cast a few articles dealing mostly with matters of concern to women in the form of dialogues entirely in the vernacular. But he soon abandoned the experiment – although some of the readers’ letters he published favoured it – and reverted to his earlier practice of using a vocabulary and constructions close to the colloquial, but remaining strictly within the limits of classical Arabic syntax. This is what has come to be known as modern standard Arabic. Except in one sizeable area, an-Nadı¯m’s formula has not been significantly stretched since, either by journalists or by literary prose writers. Only since the 1950s have a few indisputably ungrammatical usages – such as omitting case endings in proper nouns – come to be not sanctioned, but passed over in silence. The one area in which the vernacular has secured a foothold is the dialogue of plays and fictional narratives. Its acceptance in the live theatre was inevitable if only because performances could be attended by the unlettered, or even by European residents whose patronage was at one time not insignificant but who seldom learned classical Arabic. But dramatists with literary pretensions and fiction writers were ill at ease when putting words into the mouths of ordinary people in contemporary situations. An early solution adopted by Mı¯xa¯ ı¯l Nu ayma in a play and by al-Ma¯zinı¯ in his novels was to make the educated speak in the classical idiom, and the uneducated in the colloquial. This was no gain in verisimilitude, for speech is not a marker of class in the Arab world, and in an exchange of questions and answers between characters of different social status it could be ludicrous. A stir was created in 1956 when al-Hakı¯m published ‘The Deal’, a text which can be read as either ˙ classical or colloquial Arabic. This he termed “the third language”, but this was only a typographical device, using peculiarities of the script to disguise the difference between various forms of Arabic but allowing the producer to stage the play in any form he chose. In the end, the issue has been settled by default, the use of any of the vernacular forms of the language raising no eyebrows, especially in comedies and dramas with a contemporary setting. Bolder attempts at giving the vernaculars a rightful place within the literary canon have been individual and sporadic. Muhammad ˙

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¯ n Jala¯l’s verse translations of European plays, including some ÖofUtma Racine’s tragedies which could well sustain a classical rendition, have remained an oddity. Mahmu¯d Taymu¯r who at one time ˙ believed that the vernacular was certain to become the standard literary medium had to demonstrate his ability to handle the higher form of the language by publishing the same play in two versions. He was eventually elected to the Academy of the Arabic language pointedly on the strength of his publications in the classical. In 1942, Luwı¯s Awad wrote a book-length memoir of his student ˙ days in Cambridge University in the vernacular, specifically to prove that it was adequate for the discussion even of subtle intellectual issues. It was at first denied publication on political grounds, but when it appeared many years later, it laid him open in 1964–65 to prolonged attacks in which he was described as “a tool in the hands of missionaries and colonizers for the elimination of the Arabic language”. Having by then launched himself into an academic career, he said he had no cause to continue his linguistic experiment. Purists who can thole no departure from classical norms have not died out. To the linguistic argument surveyed in an earlier chapter has been added a political one: the classical language unifies the Arabs, the vernaculars divide them. Already in November 1892 one of the contributors to the controversy roused by an-Nadı¯m’s linguistic experiments, who signed himself only Ahmad, was warning that European schools in the East were ˙ intent on killing Oriental languages. Hence the vehement denunciation three quarters of a century later of the colloquial as linguistic heresy and of any argument in its favour as the work of colonialists, Zionists, and communists! The final position is neither entirely self-consistent nor clearly definable. There is a growing recognition of not one but two literary streams in addition to the canonical one. One of these is called “vernacular literature” and has largely inherited the indeterminate status of what used to be classed as hazl. It includes non-classical verse compositions, now collectively called zajal. It has its celebrities, such as Michel Tra¯d (1912–) who is credited ˙ with considerable originality, including some metrical innovation. But to this is added what is virtually a new genre: caustic political satire in verse. Its pioneer was Bayram at-Tu¯nisı¯ (1893–1961) who

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published extensively in various periodicals, including at one time two satirical ones of his own. He dogged Egypt’s royal family with a strophic poem which he expanded over the years. It had a catchy but almost untranslatable refrain, marmar ya¯ zama¯n marmar, literally “Embitter, o Age, embitter” but conveying something like “Do your worst, Fate!” Dating back to 1920 is a strophe which picked up the rumour that the newborn prince who was to become King Fa¯ru¯q was conceived out of wedlock: The goose was slaughtered before the wedding. The lane was opened before the appointed day. When the scandalous woman came to be married, I said: “Restrain your tongue! Let lassies find cover!” At-Tu¯nisı¯ has been succeeded by Ahmad Fu a¯d Najm (1929–) ˙ whose material, usually sung by his associate Sˇayx Ima¯m, is circulated in cassettes but is also increasingly finding its way into print. A sample of his irony occurs in a song which recounts that “a responsible source” has declared that the cheap brown beans that are often all that the masses can afford are more wholesome and nutritious than meat; this moves the satirist to offer this “madman’s” suggestion:

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na sibu¯na nmu¯t bi l-lahma öwih˙intu ˙ t ı¯sˇu w ta¯klu l-fu¯l Ö Leave us to die of eating meat, And you live on and eat the beans! Needless to say, both at-Tu¯nisı¯ and Najm fell foul of the government of their day. They are often loosely spoken of as folk poets, but it is to the political consciousness of the educated that they address themselves, and with the educated public they are immensely popular. It is an indication of the arbitrariness of the literary canon that satirical plays in the vernacular are included in any general study or survey of Arabic drama, whereas satirical verse in the same idiom is unlikely to feature in a comparable work on poetry. The other non-canonical stream is the folk literature. It became a subject of academic study in the second half of the twentieth

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century, but it remains largely in the hands of folklorists rather than literary critics. A partial exception has been the Arabian Nights. Mainly – as Ta¯ha¯ Husayn admitted in an article published ˙ ˙ by al- Ahra¯m on 3 September 1949 – because of the interest taken in it by Europeans, its literary qualities have had a measure of recognition. The live theatre, itself a venture of dubious status, was first to exploit some of its material, as did Ma¯ru¯n an-Naqqa¯sˇ in his second play. Since then, more than any other native source, it has supplied themes for new creations by canonical writers of undoubted status. When these dip into folk material, they naturally breathe their own priorities into it. This is true even of such as Najı¯b Suru¯r (1932–78), even though he claimed to be entirely the product of a village upbringing.3 In other respects, the folk literature has remained almost entirely beyond the pale.

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Folk literature This is as yet an uncharted sea, and the most that can be offered here is a brief and tentative sketch of the range and character of folk artists’ activities in one country: Egypt. It may serve as a gauge of what is to be found in other regions, and as a hint of what may have existed but gone unrecorded in previous centuries. A word of caution must first be addressed to those who first venture on to this sea. It is that what has been established as normative in European folk literature is not necessarily true of its Arab counterpart. For example, it is often but not always true that the folk poet is a singer who composes orally and whose performance is shaped by his contact with a live audience. The fact is that there are performers who do not compose and composers who do not perform. Thus Mustafa¯ Ibra¯hı¯m Aga¯g who died ˙˙ during the 1930s and who was much respected by performers even a generation later was a traditionally educated man who made a living as a clerk in the Cairo railway yards but who had his voluminous output printed in cheap booklets or taught directly

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3 See my “Folk Themes in the Work of Najı¯b Suru¯r”, Arabic and Middle Eastern Literatures, 3, 2 (July 2000), pp. 195–204.

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to performers. There are some indications that he was in a position of some authority in a guild of folk performers, of which no trace is now left It follows that it is also often but not always true that a song is never sung in exactly the same form twice. Arab folk artists rely on memory to an extent that Westerners – who sit through concerts at which the soloist performs without a scrap of paper before him – find it difficult to credit when the currency is words. The catalogue of ascertainable facts is far from complete, but it is impressive. The main outlet for the folk artists is at religious festivals, including the celebration of the birthdays of holy men, of whom there are hundreds. At the core of such celebrations are ceremonies held by Sufi brotherhoods. These feature songs in praise of the Prophet, the recitation of traditional poems including some in classical Arabic, and the recounting of edifying stories, all of which propagate distinctive perceptions and attitudes among the masses and make their mark on many folk literary genres. There are, in fact, performers who sing nothing but religious songs. But accompanying religious festivals are fairs at which caterers and entertainers of all kinds try to sell their wares. Of the epic cycles known to have existed, the only one still alive is the Hila¯liyya. What this means is that there is an imposing number of singers who specialize in it. They do not have a standard text to follow. They learn the “facts” as history and recycle them, one episode at a time, in words of their own or of their informants’ coinage. The performance may consist of a number of monorhyme songs with brief spoken transitions and introductions; in another tradition strongest in the south of Egypt, entire episodes are sung in quatrains following the rhyme scheme aaaB cccB dddB, etc. All this may suggest that it would be easy to insert new elements, but neither the poets nor their audience would favour the invention of new incidents in what they take to be history. Two authors4 assert that an-Nadı¯m, who had had to go into hiding for ten years because of his participation in the rebellion that led to the British 4

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Ahmad Amı¯n, Qa¯mu¯su l˙ 1953), and Ahmad Rusˇdı¯ ˙ 1956), v.2 pp. 72–91.

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occupation of Egypt in 1882, and two others who had been similarly involved, cast their experiences into verses – in the case of the latter two, ten thousand verses – to be incorporated in the Hila¯liyya. It is difficult to see how this could be done if there was no fixed text, but if they circulated pieces that could be remoulded to fit in with traditional characters or incidents, the use made of them by later performers is now impossible to detect. Story-telling also had its professionals, who found steady employment in some coffee-houses, but they have been supplanted by the radio. A sample of a long narrative of the kind embodied in the Arabian Nights was recorded in the nineteenth century5 in two versions, one Syrian and one Egyptian. It is an amusing story of a blacksmith called Ba¯sim whom the Caliph delights to plague by banning his trade, and then every successive trade to which Ba¯sim turns for a livelihood; but each ordeal ends with Ba¯sim making more money than he had ever done before. Within this framework, the story-teller obviously allowed himself a great deal of leeway for the successive steps taken differ considerably in the two versions. He would also exploit opportunities for humour: at one point the Egyptian version has Ba¯sim acting as a court messenger and warning a troublesome woman that the judge might exile her to Minyit-id-Durra¯g, which it is easy to surmise was the location in which the story was being told. The two versions differ in one recurrent detail: Ba¯sim celebrates each success with food and hashish in the Egyptian version, with food and wine in the Syrian. And they part ways more substantially in the ending: Ba¯sim gains the Caliph’s favour thanks to the intervention of a female jinn in the Egyptian version, but by a display of ready wit in the Syrian. Shorter narratives of many kinds are of course part of the lore that ordinary people pick up and exchange. Like commercial travelers’ jokes, they are used semi-professionally especially by women who build up a repertoire in order to gain entry to harems where, having established a congenial atmosphere, they can then sell some wares and broker marriages.

5 Comte Carlo de Landberg, Baˆsim le Forgeron et Haˆruˆn er-Rachıˆd. (Leiden, Brill, 1888).

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These stories are not all naive. One that I heard from a cook starts with a historical character: Abu-l- Abba¯s al-Mursı¯, an eminent Sufi whose name indicates that he was from Murcia, although his shrine is in Alexandria. The story is that he was a very rich man who built a mosque and assigned a black slave of his, Ya¯qu¯t (which means ‘ruby’), to be its muezzin. But worshipers accused Ya¯qu¯t of carelessness because the timing of his calls to prayer was sometimes different from that of other muezzins. His master repeatedly reproved or castigated him, but he offered no excuse until he was on his death-bed. He then told his master that he had been privileged to hear the call to prayer sounded by the angels round the throne of God, so that his timing was the true one whereas others depended on their imperfect senses to estimate the position of the sun that determines when the prayer is to be held. Why had he not revealed this before? Because, he said, people admire a woman for her beauty or a man for his cleverness when these qualities are unearned boons from God. Had his own boon been known, then whenever his voice was heard from the minaret, men’s thoughts would turn not to devotion but to wonder at the man who heard the angels. This would make him not a guide but an obstruction on the true path. His master agreed, but judged that after his death it would be good for men to know of his miraculous gift, and in his slave’s honour he built another mosque which bears his name: Ya¯qu¯t-al- Arsˇ, ‘the Ruby of the Throne’. There is also an abundance of tangy proverbs, such as “Be patient with the vile one: either he’ll shift or a calamity will come and shift him”, “in its mother’s eye, the monkey is a gazelle”, or – recalling the cruelest method of execution to signify that one has nothing more to fear – “the man impaled can curse the Sultan”. The folk theatre has virtually died out, overtaken rather than subsumed by developments of Western inspiration. There are indications that before this happened, buffoons and masked characters continued to perform at popular festivals and processions throughout the nineteenth century. The text of some live “plays” by one Ahmad al-Fa¯r dated 1909 shows them to be no more than a ˙ succession of scenes bearing little relation to one another and laced with a great deal of gratuitous vulgarity. One, for example, has a

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soldier flirting with a girl and boasting of the battles he has fought; he names these as the battle of Massawa, of the Sudan, of Sohag, of Bulaq, and of one of the main streets in Cairo where he bared his bottom for people to abuse him until dawn. That there were somewhat worthier activities may be surmised from earlier references to farces performed by live actors, including some which made fun of Europeans. These are described in some detail by these same Europeans, notably by Edward Lane (1801–76) in his immensely valuable and often reprinted Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, written between 1833 and 1835 although not published until later. An intriguing snippet of information comes from a Scottish traveler who saw Ma¯ru¯n an-Naqqa¯sˇ’s second play in Beirut in 1850.6 He did not know much Arabic, but his observations are valuable. They include: A short farce occupied the interval between the second and third acts. It was a husband befooled by his wife, a very grave case, and the ex-Mufti judged it to be so, taking the most vivid interest in its progress and repeatedly informing the one party of the proceedings of the other. . . . The husband at last is undeceived, by observing from the window at the side the lady and her lover while the Mufti from the Salle d’Orchestre commented vigorously on the guilty nature of the proceedings of the one and the extreme imbecility of the other. The roars of laughter which these cross purposes produced conferred on the farce unbounded success, which all were agreed to attribute to the actor whose part the author had not inserted. No Arab source mentions this farce, and no author has claimed or been given credit for it. May one infer that some of the folk performers had been brought in to eke out the programme with an item from their repertoire? A shadow theatre is said to have continued to function in Cairo in the early twentieth century, until it was eventually closed by the

6 David Urquhart, The Lebanon (Mount Syouria). (London, 1860), vol. 2, pp. 178–180.

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authorities who deemed its performances to be excessively pornographic. During my childhood in Egypt in the 1930s, a popular form of entertainment was a kind of peep-show called sandu¯¨ id-dinya¯, ‘the ˙ world box’, and known to the foreign community as ‘the panorama’. A man carrying an elliptical-shaped box approximately five feet wide on his back and a trestle in his hand would stop wherever he found space, open out the trestle and balance the box on top, then in return for a small fee he would let a customer stand at each of three peep-holes. What they would see was a fore-runner of the comic strip: on a canvas stretched between two rollers was a succession of pictures illustrating some story – it might be an episode of the Hila¯liyya – which he would recount while reeling the canvas from one roller to the other. There were also shows of the Punch-and-Judy type known as ¨ arago¯z, but unlike the Turkish karago¨z from which the name derives these featured visible puppets, not shadows projected on a screen. In the realm of folk songs there is an embarrassment of riches. There are not a few set songs of long standing. One was transcribed by Edward Lane between 1833 and 1835. Its opening quatrain reads:

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Ya¯ bana¯t Iskindiriyya Masˇyikum a l-fursˇ-ı xiyya Tilbisu l-kasˇmı¯r bi-tallı¯ Wi sˇ-sˇafa¯yif sukkariyya Girls of Alexandria, Your walking on rugs is a delight. You wear tinseled cashmere, And your lips are sugar-sweet.

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This is still sung nowadays with only one change: the word fursˇ has been replaced by bahr, so that the second line becomes “Your walking ˙ by the sea is a delight”. As Alexandria is famous for its magnificent beaches, the entire physical and social setting is transformed. Every folk performance starts with calling down blessings on the Prophet and his kin, so there is an abundance of devotional poetry, but also of love songs, gnomic poetry mainly bewailing the uncertainties of life and the unreliability of kinsfolk and friends, as

173

THE GRAFTING

well as work songs, children’s songs, and nonsense verse. Of verse forms too there is a great variety. They start with what is almost a game: the poet picks an easy rhyme and rapidly intones as many short verses as come readily to his tongue, even at the cost of abrupt changes of subjects. Somewhat more formal is the quatrain with alternating rhymes, a favourite especially for gnomic motifs, as in this opening song in which the pronunciation is sometimes distorted to facilitate the rhyme: kala¯mı¯ b-az¨kur alla¯h ö awwil ila¯h a l-xal¨ -ı ra¯dı¯ örafa Öis-sama¯ö min ˙fo¯¨ alla¯h Ö öÖ wi b-ismu huwwa basat il- ara¯dı¯ ˙ ö ˙ With my first words I mention God, A god who favours His creation. He raised the heavens, from above He set it high, And by His name he spread out the land. hilw in-nabı¯ wi hilw-ı ra¨ abı¯h ˙ ˙ ya¯ ma huwwa badr il-budu¯ra min yo¯m gubra ı¯l ra¨ a bı¯h min sa¯bi sama fagg-ı nu¯rah Fair is the Prophet, fair to observe – The ultimate of full moons is he. From the day that Gabriel took him aloft From seventh heaven his light burst forth.

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The distorted pronunciation noted here gives a very mild foretaste of a highly prized form of artistry called zahr, ‘flower’: the coining of polysyllabic punning rhymes, usually in threes, in which only the basic consonants are readily recognizable, whereas gemination, vowels, semi-vowels, and glottal stops may be altered, added, or subtracted at will; advantage is also taken of peculiarities of pronunciation in different dialects to achieve the pun. This feature occurs whenever and wherever a poet chooses to display his skill, but it is most intimately associated with the verse form inherited from previous centuries, the mawa¯liya¯, now almost always called the mawwa¯l. Early examples are all monorhyme quatrains in the bası¯t metre – aaaa – the unit being what would be a hemistich in ˙ 174

THE GRAFTING

classical prosody. But rhyme schemes have since been elaborated by the addition between the last two verses of an unrhymed line, or by a tercet sharing a new rhyme in which case the last line will also have within it an echo of the new rhyme, or finally by the further addition between the two tercets of a sestet of alternating rhymes, so that these augmented rhyme schemes may be represented as: aaaxa aaa zzz (z)a aaa bcbcbc zzz (z)a. Although poets feel free to vary the patterns and even take liberties with the metre, many a self-contained lyrical song is built on either of the latter two rhyme schemes. Here is one transcribed as sung but with the standard pronunciation of the distorted words added between square brackets: busta¯n habı¯bı¯ tarah manga ala l- ı¯da¯n ˙ ˙ ˙ My beloved’s garden has yielded mangoes on the boughs. iha¯bi ahsab ana¯ sˇuftuh alal ı¯da¯n [ ala l- ı¯de¯n] ˙ My boon, I reckon, is that I spied him on both annual feasts. xalla¯ni atsˇa¯n w ana¯ wa¯¨ if alal ı¯da¯nı¯ [ alı¯l adda¯nı¯] ˙ He left me thirsty: as I stood ailing, he passed me by. ana¯ ¨ ult-ı ya¯ gamı¯l ra¯ ı¯ lı¯ bi n-nazar marra I said, “Fair one, acknowledge ˙me with but one look; ill ana¯ ta ba¯n ba¨ a¯ li zama¯n ala¯ sˇa¯nak For I am long afflicted over you. unzur li ha¯lı¯ sïya¯bı¯ a l-gasad marra [ma¯rra] ˙ ˙ Consider my state: My clothes slip over my frame uyu¯nak kama n-nibl-ı guwwa l-gism-ı alasˇa¯nak [ ale¯sˇ sˇannak] Your eyes are like darts in my body – why the assault? min husn-ı hazzı¯ fı¯ sa t il-hazz wi gama¯lak [ga malak] ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ Luckily, at ˙an auspicious ˙moment came an angel. ana¯ ¨ ult-ı ya¯ gamı¯l fe¯n il-widd wi gama¯lak [gamı¯lak] I said, “O fair one, where are your affection and your kindness?”

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lafat yi¨ ul-lı¯ ana¯ mahsu¯b fı¯ gama¯lak [gamm-ı ma¯lak] ˙ He turned and said, “I am reckoned among your possessions; tarrif gama¯lak [gima¯lak] wi mitharram alal ı¯da¯nı¯ [ ala lli ˙ ˙ a¯da¯nı¯] Hobble your camels: You are excluded from those who oppose me.”

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Most revealing of the common people’s values are narrative songs that usually run to about two hundred lines and form the climax of a performance. The versification may be very crude: a succession of stanzas with plain rhymes each followed by a simple refrain. More commonly, however, they are fitted into the mould of a mawwa¯l, stretched either by using the seven- or the thirteen-line rhyming pattern as a recurring stanza, or by adding sestets with new alternating rhymes between the two tercets of the thirteen-line mawwa¯l: aaa bcbcbc dedede fgfgfg . . . zzz (z)a and the most ambitious or pretentious poets use zahr throughout. The themes most abundantly served are religious ones, mostly Qur anic stories retold, or legends and miraculous deeds connected with the Prophet. Contemporary occurrences are also recounted, including some indicating tension between Muslims and nonMuslims. But by far the most popular of these are stories of so-called “honour crimes”, in which a woman who has strayed from the strict path of virtue is slaughtered by her father or her brother, a deed that the law of the land does not entirely condone but that earns the perpetrator the admiration of his peers. The most celebrated was the murder in 1925 of Sˇafı¯qa, who had become a prostitute, by her brother Mitwallı¯, an Army Sergeant-Major, also known as il-Girga¯wı¯ because he was born in Girga¯, in Upper Egypt. The deed is still sung in dozens of versions, some as extended mawwa¯ls and others in plainer metrical forms. One consists of a succession of punning monorhyme tercets separated by a simple refrain: ya xi mitwallı¯ ya Girga¯wı¯, in which ya xi conveys ‘o my brother’. The climax recounts how the hero has traced his sister to

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THE GRAFTING

a brothel, done his duty after reminding himself that she commands no one’s respect, then asks for public recognition: mitwallı¯ da ra¯gil tag¨ı¯l u sakkı¯n [sa¯kin] wara¯h biba¯n il-be¯t sakkı¯n ata bi xadabu f ı¯du s-sakkı¯n ˙ Mitwallı¯ is a staid and quiet man. The doors of the dwelling are locked behind him. He comes in anger, knife in hand. wi ¨ a¯l dı¯ law ka¯n alı¯la minzorha¯ [mı¯n yizurha¯] wi ja sarı¯ talaf minzorha¯ [manzarha¯] ˙ wi azal il-gitta min zorha¯ He said, “If she was ill, who would visit her?” Quickly he disfigured her And severed the corpse at the neck. wi tala il-balako¯na b sikkintu ˙ yigü¯l garh fı¯ gälbi sikkintu [sakkintu] ˙ ya na¯s wassa u¯-li sikkintu [sikka ntu] He went out on the balcony with his knife Saying, “A wound in my heart I have assuaged. Good people, clear a way for me!”

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le¯lt il-bura¯q in-nabı¯ sarr [sara¯] il-mala¯k li z-ze¯n gat lu illi a¯man ala d-dı¯n sarr w illi kafar hallı gätlu ˙ On the night of the Bura¯q the Prophet journeyed. The angels to the Fair One came. He who accepts the Faith rejoices; He who rejects it may lawfully be killed.

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177

THE GRAFTING

Coda Do the two realms of literary expression, the canonical and the folk, fit into one picture? The terminology relevant to Western societies’ division into economically determined classes fits awkwardly into this context. Two schoolteachers, one with a degree from a modern university and one a graduate of the religiously conservative university of al- Azhar may be deemed to belong to the same social class, but their literary predilections are vastly different. The relevant distinctions to be made are between three groups: those who have had a Western or Westernized education, those who have had a traditional Islamic one, and those who have had virtually no schooling. The first group is now the e´lite; it holds the initiative in cultural matters and determines what the literary canon is to be. The second retains basically Islamic traditions and values. The third is the one that produces and consumes folk literature; at present, it is numerically the majority. It is a great deal closer to the second group than to the first: it shares its belief-system albeit in a crude form, and a good deal of its literary raw material is drawn from what used to be standard books several centuries ago; what sets the two apart is that the traditionally educated are the most unyielding in their reverence for the classical language. As for the Westernized e´lite, very few of its new values have trickled down to the masses – some elements of national pride when it does not clash with religious loyalties, but hardly any moderation regarding the relation between the sexes; and its own attitude to the masses is benevolent rather than sympathetic. What price e´litism, then? The Arabs’ attachment to the classical language has ensured an impressive continuity in that a person of modest education can, if he takes trouble with dictionaries, have access to the literature of the past sixteen centuries. It has ensured a higher quality than might have been expected in a largely illiterate society. It has provided cultural if not political unity over a vast area. It is even arguable that it has lent to the regional vernaculars a measure of stability. Not until it was carried to excess and been married to a sense of social and inborn superiority did it isolate the literature from the perceptions of the common people, and from reality.

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THE GRAFTING

The new e´lite differs in that it set out not to be e´litist. What first shaped its consciousness was the pressure exerted upon the Arab world mainly by Britain and France, both of which professed substantially the same values and seemed consequently to ensure enviable power for their government and well-being for all their citizens. The results were desirable. In the eyes of the intellectuals who were seizing the initiative, the means was simply knowledge. They took this body of Western knowledge to be firm and selfauthenticating, and assumed that anyone who had access to it would come to share their priorities, so they had only to widen the circle of the educated to ensure unanimity of views and collaboration for the common good. Muhammad Abduh is ˙ reported to have told his followers that they need only control education for ten years to form a new generation that would bring about the desired reforms. In 1912, Muhammad Husayn Haykal ˙ ˙ (1888–1956), who was a prominent politician as well as a man of letters, opposed a law that would have banned the seizure of small farms on the ground that it would work to the detriment of those who knew what it took to bring about the scientific and financial progress of the nation. In 1922, when the dominance of the European powers was at its highest and most extensive, it seemed more obvious than ever that the way to counter them was to emulate them, distant as the goal might be, and Muhammad Sabrı¯ ˙ ˙ suggested that the motto for Egypt should be “Work in the Darkness of Hope”. The generation that reached maturity then had a ready-made model for a programme of action that would benefit all. It meant well. In the 1930s, schoolboys in their middle teens gave serious thought to their future roles as leaders. In most instances, this was no more than a pipe-dream, but there were those who actively and effectively dedicated themselves to it. Alla¯l al-Fa¯sı¯ (1910–74), who rose to be Morocco’s nationalist hero, is reported to have gathered his friends together when he was fifteen to ask them whether he would serve his country better as a theologian or as a man of letters, and he wrote (tawı¯l\bu¯): ˙

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Having reached fifteen, am I yet to play, To trifle and enjoy the pleasures of life?

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THE GRAFTING

I have a lofty vision and a haughty spirit That seeks a place atop the Milky Way, ... And mine is an ill-starred nation, yet to find Its way to the life that it must have. The result was paternalism. It was for the enlightened to act on behalf of the benighted until these in turn saw the light. Whether in the name of Islamic reformism or nationalism or democracy or socialism, the assumption was always that it was for those who knew to act for the good of those who did not. It never entered their calculation that even when instructed the many might adopt different priorities. Even less did it occur to them that the many might be consulted, that their bards might be given a hearing. The most strident expression of this paternalism is in a novel by Tawfı¯q al-Hakı¯m (1898–1987) based on his experiences as a prosecutor in ˙ a rural area and translated as “The Maze of Justice”. Noting how bewildered villagers were by a law that took so little notice of reality that it fined them for drinking unfiltered water when no other was available, he commented: These peasants whose eyes have been eaten away by pus since childhood and whose perceptions have been untended under successive rulers of all races cannot be relied upon to exercise judgment or discrimination . . . One must make allowance for the mentality of these people, the extent of their perceptions, their mental capacity – or else let these perceptions be raised to the level of modern laws. One result is that most modern Arab writers view themselves principally as reformers, as moulders of the future. A literature that aims mainly at entertainment is not for them, as witness the fact that no detective novel writer has emerged amongst them, popular as such works are in translation. Forces that restrict their zeal – foreign rule, illiberal government – are vigorously dissected, denounced, or satirized, often at no small cost. But flaws or retarding factors that arise from within the constituency with which they identify or that they have taken under tutelage tend

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THE GRAFTING

to be downplayed or ignored. It is a fact that many men with an advanced education of a Western type have no choice but to marry an illiterate woman brought up to uphold traditional values, yet one looks in vain for novels or plays that investigate the kind of family life that ensues. The persistence of “honour crimes” still glorified by folk poets is seldom probed, and in the few instances in which it has been touched upon – as in Ta¯ha¯ Husayn’s The Call of ˙ ˙ the Curlew or Yahya¯ Haqqı¯’s (1905–93) “The Postmaster” in the ˙ ˙ collection entitled Blood and Mud – it has been to bring out the pathos of the situation. And a reader who depends on the literary writings of the e´lite would scarcely gain any understanding of the resurgence of Islam as a political and social force. Education is constantly being extended. Radio, television, and the cassette reach out to ever wider circles and bring some of the creations of the e´lite even to non-readers. Is it only a matter of time before the good intentions of the few are realized and the gap between the learned and the common folk is eliminated? There has been progress, but it has not been even or continuous. Are novels using such sophisticated techniques as the stream of consciousness and the flashback as readily understood by the half-educated as were the straightforward, chronologically developed stories of earlier generations? Yu¯suf Wahbı¯ used to take his melodramas on provincial tours, performing in modest cinema halls serving a wide area, and I can recall that in the 1930s and 40s even peasants would trek on foot from surrounding villages to be stirred by a spectacle that might not come their way again for several years. Do the experimental plays of to-day reach out beyond a public of connoisseurs in the big cities? And are the artists content with a succe`s d’estime and becoming impatient with the less perceptive? And on religious and gender issues, is the chasm being bridged? On the few occasions when the literatures associated with different social strata interacted, they enriched each other. The common folk owe their belief system and probably their taste for verbal games to the old e´lite. The old e´lite acquired the maqa¯ma and the multi-rhymed verse forms when it lent an ear to the folk artists. Perhaps also the old e´lite playing literary games in its ivory tower could not have been so conservative, and the new e´lite

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rushing headlong into modernization could not have been so innovative, if the folk literature had not been there to cater for the needs of the many. It remains true that for a rounded view of Arab literary creativity and of the forces that animate Arab society, the witness of the folk artist complements, balances, and illumines that of the e´lite.

182

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The supreme work of reference on all topics concerning Islam is the Encylopaedia of Islam, published by E.J. Brill of Leiden. The second edition is now in progress. Handy and of more immediate relevance is the Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, 2 vols., edited by Julie Scott Meisami and Paul Starkey and published in London and New York by Routledge in 1998. The fullest literary history covering all periods is the Cambridge History of Arabic Literature, published by Cambridge University Press and begun in 1981. Of its seven projected volumes, all but the penultimate – the one dealing with the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries – have appeared. Also dealing with the entire period but in a different arrangement is Roger Allen’s The Arabic Literary Heritage: The development of its genres and criticism, Cambridge University Press, 1998. There are no recent surveys of pre-modern literature, but still useful are: Gibb, Hamilton A.R. Arabic Literature: an Introduction. Oxford University Press, 1921, 1963. Lichtenstadter, Ilse. Introduction to Classical Arbic Literature. New York, Twayne, 1974. Nicholson, Reynold A. Literary History of the Arabs. Cambridge University Press, 1907, 1930, 1966. And some anthologies in translation, also pre-modern: Arberry, Arthur J. Arabic Poetry: a Primer for Students. Cambridge University Press, 1965. Lyall, Charles. Translations of Ancient Arabic Poetry: chiefly pre-Islamic. London, William and Norgate, 1930 (first published 1885). Monroe, James T. Hispano-Arabic Poetry. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1974.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Nicholson, R.A. Translations of Eastern Poetry and Prose. Cambridge University Press, 1922; London, Curzon Press, 1987. Modern literature has been surveyed in the following: Badawi, Mustafa M. A Short History of Modern Arabic Literature. Oxford University Press, 1993. Brugman, J. An Introduction to the History of Modern Arabic Literature in Egypt. Leiden, Brill, 1984. Cachia, Pierre. An Overview of Modern Arabic Literature. Edinburgh University Press, 1990. Anthologies of modern literature abound. Among the most inclusive are: Jayyusi, Salma Khadra (ed). Modern Arabic Poetry: an Anthology. New York, Columbia University Press, 1987. Jayyusi, S.K. and Roger Allen (eds). Modern Arabic Drama: an Anthology. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1995. Johnson-Davies, Denys. Arabic Short Stories. London, Quartet Books, 1983, 1994. Johnson-Davies, Denys. Under the Naked Sky: Short Stories from the Arab World. American University in Cairo Press, 2001. No single work covers all aspects of Arab folk literature, but the following will fill some gaps: Cachia, Pierre. Popular Narrative Ballads of Modern Egypt. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1989. El-Shamy, Hasan. Folk Traditions of the Arab World: a Guide to Motif Classification. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1995. El-Shamy, Hasan. Folktales of Egypt. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1980. Lyons, Malcolm C. The Arabian Epic, 3 vols. Cambridge University Press, 1995. Moreh, Shmuel. Live Theatre and Dramatic Literature in the Arab World. Edinburgh University Press, 1992.

184

INDEX

The diacritics, although used to distinguish different Arabic phonemes, do not affect the alphabetization. Also ignored when occurring initially (and always printed in the lower case) are the article, al-, and its variants in which the ‘l’ is assimilated to the next consonant. In English and in French too, an article occurring at the beginning of a title is ignored. Arab authors identified in the text by a string of names are listed under both the first and the last separable items. Names that occur only in footnotes or incidentally in a quotation are not included in the Index. Also excluded are rulers and other public figures who did not actively affect literary developments. Abbasid (dynasty) 16, 29, 53, 82, 87 Abd-al-Hakı¯m Qa¯sim 140, 143 ˙ amı¯d al-Ka¯tib 29, 98 Abd-al-H Abd-Alla˙¯ h an-Nadı¯m 147, 164–6, 169 Abd-Alla¯h ibn-al-Muqaffa 26 Abd-Alla¯h Salı¯m al-Ya¯zijı¯ 125 Abd-al-Malik (Caliph) 28, 33 Abd-ar-Rahma¯n Sˇukrı¯ 156 ˙ ¯ r, Sala¯h 149 Abd-as-Sabu ˙ 110, 179 ˙ Abduh,˙ ˙Muhammad ˙ Abraham 93 Abu¯-Bila¯l Mirda¯s ibn-Hudayr, also ˙ 18 known as ibn- Udayya Abu¯-Fira¯s al-Ha¯rit ibn- Abi-l Ala¯ al-Hamda¯nı¯˙ 60 ˙ ayya¯n at-Tawhı¯dı¯ 75 Abu¯-H ˙ ¯ 171 Abu-l-˙ Abba¯s al-Mursı Abu-l- Ata¯hiya Isma¯ ı¯l ibn-alQa¯sim 35, 50–52 Abu¯-Nazza¯ra Zarqa¯ = Sanua, ˙ Jacob ˙130

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al- Ahra¯m (newspaper) 129, 140, 168 Aida (opera) 145 ajam 31 Aladdin = Ala¯ -ad-Dı¯n 81 Alexander, Legend of 88, 99 Alexandria 116, 125, 134, 145, 171, 173 Algeria, Algerian 125, 141, 142 Alı¯ ibn- Abı¯-Ta¯lib (cousin and ˙ the Prophet) 16, son-in-law of 18, 22, 115 Alı¯ Mahmu¯d Ta¯ha¯ 159 ˙ ammad ˙ (founder of Alı¯, Muh ˙ dynasty) 124, 128, 129 Egyptian Alla¯l al-Fa¯sı¯ 179 amatory prelude = nası¯b 4, 8, 58 America, American(s), U.S.A. 125, 128, 138, 157, 158 Amı¯n, Qa¯sim 126 Amr ibn-Kultu¯m 8 Andalusia, Andalusian(s) 35, 42–3, 82, 87–101, 103, 109, 118 Anselmo de Turmeda 100 Antara ibn-Sˇadda¯d al- Absı¯, also: Antar 1, 7, 10, 81–2, 116 Antu¯n, Farah 145, 147 ˙ 158 ˙ (journal) Apollo al- Aqqa¯d, Abba¯s Mahmu¯d 131, ˙ 156, 158 Arabian Nights = Thousand and One Nights 43–4, 80–1, 115, 168, 170 ¨ arago¯z 173 al- A raj, Wa¯sı¯nı¯ 142 Aristotle 38 “Arma¯nu¯sa the Egyptian” = Arma¯nu¯sa l-Misriyya 134 ˙ Arnold, Matthew 72 Arsanyu¯s al-Fa¯xu¯rı¯ 128 L’Art Poe´tique 151 al- Asˇtarkuwı¯, Abu-t-Ta¯hir ˙ ¯˙mı¯ 96 Muhammad at-Tamı ˙ l-Ha¯lı¯ wa l-Muraxxasu ¯ tilu al- A ˙ ˙ ¯ lı¯ = “the l-Xa Unadorned ˙ Bejeweled and the Underpriced Revalued” 109 al- Atta¯r, Da¯wu¯d = al-Mina¯wı¯ 116 ˙ ˙ 144 L’Avare

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badı¯ 40, 53, 66, 74, 96, 107, 113, 120, 122, 128 Badı¯ az-Zama¯n al-Hamada¯nı¯, Abu-l-Fadl Ahmad ibn-al˙ 43, 75–7, 133 ˙ Husayn 38–40, ˙ badı¯ iyya, badı¯ iyya¯t 107–9, 120, 128 Banu¯-Hila¯l = Hila¯lis = Hila¯liyya 44, 82–3, 116, 169–70, 173 Banu¯- Udra 24 al-Barajundı¯, Abd-al- A la¯ 117 Baraka¯t, Halı¯m 141 al-Barbı¯r, ˙ Ahmad 105 Barmecide(s) ˙= Barmakı¯, pl. Bara¯mika 35 “Ba¯sim the Blacksmith” = Baˆsim le Forgeron et Haˆruˆn er-Rachıˆd 170 Basˇsˇa¯r ibn-Burd 26–7, 35, 51 al-Baya¯n wa t-Tabyı¯n 73 Baybars (Sultan), az-Za¯hir 116 ˙ ˙¯ h ibn- Umar al-Bayda¯wı¯, Abd-Alla ˙ 32 Bayram at-Tu¯nisı¯ 166, 167 al-Bayya¯tı¯, Abd-al-Wahha¯b 161 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, JacquesHenri 133 “Blood and Mud” = Dima¯ un wa Tı¯n 181 ˙ Boileau-Despre ´ aux, Nicolas 151 Bonaparte, Napoleón 103, 123, 124, 129, 144 “Book of Poetry and Poets” = Kita¯bu sˇ-Sˇi ri wa sˇ-Sˇu ara¯ 8, 21 “Book of Songs” = Kita¯bu l- Axa¯nı¯ 51 “boyette” = xula¯miyya 48 Brecht, Bertolt 149 “Bringing a Laugh to a Scowling Face” = Nuzhatu-n-Nufu¯s wa Mudhiku-l- Abu¯s 111 Britain,˙ ˙British throughout Ch. 7 al-Buhturı¯, al-Walı¯d ibn- Ubayd 56 ˙ ¯ q 177 al-Bura

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al-Burda, “the Mantle” 106–7, 154 al-Bu¯sı¯rı¯, Sˇaraf-ad-Dı¯n Muhammad ˙ ˙ 106–7, 154 al-Busta¯nı¯, Butrus 125 ˙ al-Busta¯nı¯, Sulayma ¯ n 155 Butrus al-Busta¯nı¯ 125 ˙ Byzantine(s) 13, 29, 33, 54, 55, 60, 82 Cairo, Cairene 111, 116, 125, 129, 138–40, 145, 172 “Cairo trilogy” = at-Tula¯tiyya 139 Call of the Curlew” = Du a¯ u-lKarawa¯n 181 “Children of Gebelawi” = Awla¯du Ha¯ratina¯ 140 ˙ Christian(s) 22, 29, 65, 87, 90, 99, 100, 103, 121, 125, 128, 129, 141, 142, 145, 154, 157 “Co-Wives” = id-Darrite¯n 145 ˙ ˙ = al-Lajna 141 “The Committee” Coppeé, François 145 Corneille. Pierre 145 Le Coupable 146 Le Courrier d’E´gypte 129 Crusades, Crusaders 77, 116

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Grunebaum, Gustav von 45 Guillaume IX 100

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Ibn- Abd-Rabbih, Abu¯- Umar Ahmad 88 Ibn-al-˙ Amı¯d, Abu-l-Fadl ˙ Muhammad 71–2 ˙ ¯ rid, Umar 68–70, 84, 110 Ibn-al-Fa Ibn-al-Fuja¯˙ a, Qatarı¯ 18 Ibn-al-Kina¯nı¯ 99 ˙

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Ibn-Tufayl, Abu¯-Bakr Muhammad ˙ 99 ˙ 44, Ibn-Xafa¯ja, Abu¯- Isha¯q Ibra¯hı¯m ˙ 90 Ibn-Xaldu¯n, Abu¯-Zayd Abd-arRahma¯n 42, 117 ˙ Ibn-Zamrak, Muhammad ibn-Yu¯suf ˙ 90 Ibn-Zaydu¯n, Abu-l-Walı¯d Ahmad ˙ 89–90 Ibra¯hı¯m, Ha¯fiz 151, 158 Ibra¯hı¯m, S˙un ˙-Alla¯h 141 ˙ Ibra¯hı¯m al-Maws ilı¯ 79 Ibra¯hı¯m Na¯jı¯ 158˙ “ Ibra¯hı¯m the Writer” = Ibra¯hı¯mu l-Ka¯tib 137 Idrı¯s, Yu¯suf 141, 149–50 Iliad 44, 155 Ilya¯s Xu¯rı¯ 142 Ima¯d-ad-Dı¯n al- Isfaha¯nı¯ 71 Ima¯m, Sˇayx 167 ˙ Imru u-l-Qays 5, 6, 12, 58, 64 India, Indian(s) 29, 80, 82 ¯ rik al-Xattı¯ 19 I¯sa¯ ibn- A ˙˙ al- Isfaha¯nı¯, Abu-l-Faraj 51 al- Is˙ faha¯nı¯, Ima¯d-ad-Dı¯n 71 ˙ Isha¯q, Adı¯b 130 ˙ Italian(s) 104, 124, 144, 147 Italy, Izz-ad-Dı¯n Abd as-Sala¯m asSulamı¯ 42

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Maimonides, Moses 100 Majdı¯, Sa¯lih 150 ˙ ¯ = Qays ibn-alMajnu¯n˙ Layla Mulawwah 24 ˙ ¯ zik 160 al-Mala¯ ika, Na al-Ma¯laqı¯, Umar 96 mamlu¯k, mama¯lı¯k 104, 111, 116, 117, 148 al-Ma mu¯n (Caliph) 29 al-Manfalu¯tı¯, Mustafa¯ Lutfı¯ 135, ˙ ˙˙ ˙ 138 Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians 172 “Mantle, poem of the” = al-Burda 106–7, 154 maqa¯ma, pl. maqa¯ma¯t 40, 43, 44, 75–6, 96, 100, 101, 108, 113, 116, 127, 133, 134, 181 Marlowe, Christopher 120 al-Marra¯r al- Adawı¯ = Ziya¯d ibnMunqid ibn- Amr 25 Ma¯ru¯n an-Naqqa¯sˇ 144, 168, 172 Maspe´ro, Gaston 43 Maupassant, Guy de 137 mawa¯lı¯ 19, 33, 109 mawa¯liya¯ = mawa¯liyya = mawwa¯l 35–6, 96, 109, 110, 114, 174–6 al-Mawsilı¯, Ibra¯hı¯m 79 al-Maws˙ ilı¯, Isha¯q 109 ˙ ˙ ¯ da 131 Mayy Ziya “The Maze of Justice” = Yawmiyya¯tu Na¯ ibin fi l- Arya¯f 180 al-Ma¯zinı¯, Ibra¯hı¯m Abd-al-Qa¯dir 137, 138, 156, 165 Mecca, Meccan 2, 4, 13, 15, 17, 112, 131 “Men in the Sun” = Rija¯lun fi sˇ-Sˇams 141 Michel Tra¯d 161 ˙ ¯ = Da¯wu¯d al- Atta¯r 116 al-Mina¯wı ˙ ¯ l 18 Mirda¯s ibn- Udayya, Abu¯˙-Bila “The Miser” = al-Baxı¯l 144 Mı¯xa¯ ı¯l Nu ayma 157–8 Molie`re, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin 144, 147 Mongol(s)_ 103, 104, 116 Monroe, James T. 91–3 Moreh, Shmuel 83n, 91–3

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Najm, Ahmad Fu a¯d 167 an-Naqqa¯sˇ˙ , Ma¯ru¯n 144, 168, 172 an-Naqqa¯sˇ, Niqu¯la¯ 144 an-Naqqa¯sˇ, Salı¯m 145 nası¯b = “amatory prelude” 4, 8, 58 Na¯sı¯f al-Ya¯zijı¯ 127 ˙ al-Mala¯ ika 160 Na¯zik News of the World 129 Niebuhr, Karsten 116 an-Niffarı¯, Muhammad ibn- Abdal-Jabba¯r 66˙ Niqu¯la¯ an-Naqqa¯sˇ 144 Niza¯r Qabba¯nı¯ 162 Noah 163 Nobel Prize 139, 142 North Africa(n) 16, 82, 87, 121, 126 Nu ayma, Mı¯xa¯ ı¯l 157–8, 165 Nuzhatu-n-Nufu¯s wa Mudhiku-l˙ ˙ to a Abu¯s =”Bringing a Laugh Scowling Face” 111

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Robinson Crusoe 99, 133 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 99 Ru¯m = Byzantines 35 ar-Rusa¯fı¯, Ma ru¯f Abd-al-Xanı¯ 155 ˙ Salman 120 Rushdie, Ru¯zbı¯h = Abd-Alla¯h ibn al-Muqaffa 29

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Sulayma¯n al-Busta¯nı¯ 155 Sun -Alla¯h Ibra¯hı¯m 141 ˙ “Sundry Things from the Afterlife” = Turafun min Xabari l-A¯xira ˙ 143 Sunnı¯, Sunnite(s) 16 Sˇuqayr, Sˇa¯kir 151 Suru¯r, Najı¯b Muhammad 168 ˙ = mu allaqa¯t “Suspended odes” 2n, 4, 15 as-Suyu¯tı¯, Jala¯l-ad-Dı¯n Abu-l-Fadl ˙ 108, ˙115 Syria, Syrian(s) 13, 26, 56, 81, 104, 116, 170 Syriac 29 Syro-American(s) 157–8

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at-Ta a¯libı¯, Abu¯-Mansu¯r Abd-al˙ Malik 75 Ta¯ha¯, Alı¯ Mahmu¯d 159 ˙ T˙ a¯ha¯ Husayn 11n, 37, 119, 131, ˙ 137, ˙ 138, 168, 181 Ta¯hir Watta¯r 141 ˙ -Tahta¯wı ˙ ¯˙, Rifa¯ a Ra¯fi 128, 132 at ˙ ˙ ˙¯ xı¯, Abu¯- Alı¯ al-Muhassin at-Tanu ˙ ibn- Alı¯ 75 Tarafa ibn-al- Abd 7 t˙arı¯qa 70 ˙Tawfı¯q al-Hakı¯m 137, 147–9, 165, ˙ 180 at-Tawhı¯dı¯, Abu¯-Hayya¯n Alı¯ ˙ ibn-Muh ammad˙ 75 ˙ mu¯d 137, 166 Taymu¯r, Mah ˙ 140 at-Tayyib Sa¯lih ˙ ˙ “Tears” = ˙al- ˙Abara¯t 135 Te´le´maque 132 “The Thief and the Dogs” = al-Lissu wa l-Kila¯b 130 ˙ ˙ and One Nights = Thousand Arabian Nights 43–4, 80–1, 115, 180 “the tongue of the condition” = lisa¯nu-l-ha¯l 52, 139 ˙ 166 Tra¯d, Michel ˙ “The Tragedy of al-Halla¯j” = Ma sa¯tu-l-Halla¯j ˙149 ˙ “The Tree Climber” = Ya¯ Ta¯li a-sˇ˙ Sˇajara 148 Tripartite ode 4, 9, 21, 53

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Troubadour 100 tufaylı¯ 76 ˙at-Tu¯nisı¯, Mahmu¯d Bayram 166, ˙ 167 Turk(s), Turkey, Turkish 104, 105, 123, 124, 127, 139, 173 ¯da ibn-Ma¯ -as-Sama¯ 93 ÖUba ö ö Ubayd-Alla¯h ibn-Qays arÖ Ruqayya¯t 23–4 ¯ 24, 79 Ö udrı Uka¯sˇa brothers 147 ÖUka¯z 2 ÖUmar˙ ibn- Abı¯-Rabı¯ a 22 ÖUmar ibn-al-Fa ö Ö , Abu-l-Qa¯sim Ö Sˇaraf-ad-Dı¯n¯ rid ö ˙ 68–70, 84, 110 Umayyad (dynasty) 16, 18, 22, 23, 28, 83, 87, 89 “Unadorned Bejeweled and the Underpriced Revalued” = al- A¯tilu l-Ha¯lı¯ wa l-Muraxxasu ˙ l-Xa¯lı˙¯ 109 ˙ urju¯za: see rajaz Usa¯ma ibn-Munqid 77 al- Usta¯d 165 Utma¯n Jala¯l, Muhammad 133, 147, 151, 165 ˙

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Vandal(s), vandalos 87 “Views” = an-Nazara¯t 135 ˙ Voltaire = François-Marie Arouet 65 Vrolijk, Arnoud 111n, 119 Wahbı¯, Yu¯suf 146, 181 Wahha¯bı¯, Wahhabism 123 Walla¯da bint-al-Mustakfı¯ 89 Wa¯sı¯nı¯ al- A raj 142 Watta¯r, at-Ta¯hir 141 ˙ ˙˙ ˙ over “weeping the ruins” = al-buka¯ u ala l- atla¯l 4, 48 ˙ = Ursu“The Whore’s Wedding” Baxiyy 141 World War(s) 126, 138, 139, 145, 146, 158, 160

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al-Xafrı¯, Muhammad ibn- Ahmad ˙ ¯n 117 ˙ Sˇams-ad-Dı Xalı¯fa, Sahar 141 ˙

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al-Xalı¯l ibn- Ahmad al-Fara¯hı¯dı¯ 21 ˙ Xalı¯l Mutra¯n 145, 155 ˙ ¯, Muhammad Najı¯b 136 al-Xara¯bilı xarı¯b 21, 27, 52˙ xa¯rijı¯, xawa¯rij = Kharijite(s) 18, 95 xarja 95, 109 Xassa¯n Kanafa¯nı¯ 141 Xatt, xattı¯ 106–7 ˙ ˙ tı¯,˙ ˙ I¯sa¯ ibn- A¯tik 19 al-Xat ˙ ˙¯ lı¯, Abu¯-Ha¯mid al-Xaza ˙ Muhammad 67 ˙ al-Xuba¯rı¯, Abd-Alla¯h Xalaf ibnMuhammad 110 ˙ xula¯miyya = “boyette” 48 Xu¯rı¯, Ilya¯s 142 al-Xuwa¯rizmı¯, Abu¯-Bakr Muhammad ibn-al- Abba¯s ˙ 38–40

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Yahya¯ Haqqı¯ 138, 181 ˙ ¯ t-al˙ Arsˇ 171 Ya¯qu al-Ya¯zijı¯, Abd-Alla¯h Salı¯m 125 al-Ya¯zijı¯, Na¯sı¯f 127 Yu¯suf Idrı¯s ˙141, 149–50 Yu¯suf Wahbı¯ 146, 181

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az-Zaha¯wı¯, Jamı¯l Sidqı¯ 155 zahr 173, 176–7 ˙ zajal 91–3, 96, 100, 109, 110, 166 Zana¯ta 83 Zayda¯n, Jurjı¯ 134–5 Zaynab 136 Ziya¯da, Mayy 131 Zuhayr ibn- Abı¯-Sulma¯ 5, 10, 16, 17, 98

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