Autobiographical Anxieties
Todorov remarks that “the historical existence of genres is signaled by discourse on genres.”[38] Autobiography, in the form of tarjamat al-nafs, engendered a scholarly and religious discourse in Arabic literature at least as early as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This was the era of al-Suyūṭī, al-Sakhāwī, Ibn Ṭūlūn al-Dimashqī, and al-Sha‘rānī, all of whom included discussions of autobiography in their writings.
The passage cited in the introduction to this volume from one of al-Suyūṭī's autobiographical works presents his justifications for writing an autobiography. These were the obligation to enumerate the blessings one has received from God as an act of thanks, emulation of the many respected figures who had previously composed autobiographical works, and the laudable nature of writing whereby one passes on information of one's life to subsequent generations, to which he appended his claim that he did not write his book out of pride or conceit. Implicit in al-Suyūṭī's argument about autobiography as historical writing is his belief that a firsthand account by the author is more reliable than an account written by others.
Four decades later, Ibn Ṭūlūn al-Dimashqī (d. 1546) was to write the following in the introduction to his autobiography:
When Ibn Ṭūlūn declares that it is “better” that someone else write one's biography than to write a text about oneself, it seems clear that it is better, not from a historical, factual point of view, but from a moral or ethical point of view; it spares the author the temptations of pride or arrogance and being accused thereof. It was in fact standard practice for a student to compile a biography of his teacher, sometimes on the basis of autobiographical materials supplied by the teacher. Ibn Ṭūlūn, however, curiously states that he wrote his autobiography at the request of his teacher, Shaykh Muḥyi al-Dīn al-Nu‘aymī, rather than at the far more usual request of a student.The author of a tarjama sometimes sets it apart in a separate work, as did our teacher Abū al-Fatḥ al-Mizzī (and I have followed him in this here); and sometimes someone else writes a separate work about him (and this is better), as the expert on prophetic tradition Shams al-Dīn al-Sakhāwī did in his work al-Jawāhir wa-l-durar [Jewels and Pearls], a tarjama about his teacher, the great scholar of Islam, Ibn Ḥajar. Our teacher, the historian Muḥyī al-Dīn al-Nu‘aymī followed him in this by writing an independent tarjama of his teacher and ours, the ḥadīth scholar Burhān al-Dīn al-Nājī. But sometimes a tarjama is not set apart in a separate work, but is found within another of the author's works, as our teacher, the consummate scholar Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī, did by mentioning himself in his medium-sized book Ṭabaqāt al-nuḥāt [The Generations of Grammarians]. In it he said:
I hoped that there would be some mention of my name in this book to be blessed by, and in imitation of, the deeds of those of my predecessors who mentioned their own names within their writings on history, such as the Imām ‘Abd al-Ghāfir in his al-Siyāq [Continuation],[39] Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī in his Mu‘jam al-udabā’ [Biographical Dictionary of Writers], Ibn al-Khaṭīb in his Ta’rīkh Gharnāṭa [History of Granada], and al-Taqī al-Fāsī in his Ta’rīkh Makka [History of Mecca]—these latter two wrote their tarjamas at great length—Ibn Ḥajar in his Quḍāt Miṣr [The Judges of Egypt], and innumerable others.[40] Then there are those who wrote of themselves [in a biographical compendium] under the first letter of their name, such as al-Fāsī and Ibn Ḥajar, and I have followed them in this. There are also those who wrote of themselves at the end of a book, and in the case of Yāqūt this involved a fortunate coincidence since his name begins with Y [the last letter of the Arabic alphabet].
And I [Ibn Ṭūlūn] say: This coincidence also happened to our teacher, the ḥadīth-scholar Jamāl al-Dīn Yūsuf ibn ‘Abd al-Hādī when he wrote an entry on himself and inserted it into his compendium of Ḥanbalī scholars in his book Manāqib Imām Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal [Praiseworthy Qualities of the Imām Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal]; he wrote a lengthy autobiography [aṭāla fī tarjamatih].[41] I have even heard him recite this aloud and at that time he mentioned to me what the ḥadīth-scholar Abū ‘Abd Allāh al-Bukhārī said in his Ṣaḥīḥ, quoting Rabī‘a[42]: “It is not fitting that anyone who possesses even a small amount of knowledge should allow himself to be forgotten.”[43]
Another major Arabic autobiographer of the sixteenth century, the Sufi shaykh ‘Abd al-Wahhāb al-Sha‘rānī, pulls all of these threads together in his lengthy defense of autobiography. He asserts that autobiography enables others to emulate one's good characteristics, functions as an enduring act of thanks to God that outlives the author, and provides useful information for future generations. Al-Sha‘rānī firmly supports the idea that a firsthand account is more reliable than someone else's rendering and substantiates this argument with quotations from the Prophet Muhammad, the Qur’ān, and the mystical philosopher Ibn al-‘Arabī. His final argument reiterates that, in writing an autobiography, one is following the example of great figures of the past. He closes with a spirited denial that an autobiography is written out of pride.[44]
Ibn ‘Ajība, a Moroccan Sufi writing in 1807, also cites the desire for historical accuracy as the primary justification for writing an autobiography. Rather than allow his students to compile a biography—a task that they had apparently already begun—he forestalled their work by writing his own text, preferring to provide a more reliable account himself: “Fearing that they might allow some addition or omission to slip into their work, I decided to report, with God's assistance, what I have seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears, for that which is transmitted is not that which was actually seen.”[45] Ibn ‘Ajība also cites the Qur’ānic injunction to speak of God's bounty and gives a list of famous Sufis who had previously written autobiographies to further justify his undertaking.
The judgment that an autobiography is a more reliable account than a biography fits quite closely with the structure of Islamic historiography and religious sciences in general, where eyewitness accounts were carefully transmitted for centuries in both oral and written form. This advantage from the point of view of historical methodology, however, did not entirely outweigh the fear of stumbling into the moral pitfalls involved in writing about oneself.
This brief historical survey provides a rough sense of how the writing of autobiography became an ever more conscious act within the Arabic literary and historical traditions, an act at times fraught with significant “autobiographical anxieties.” Paradoxically, the need to justify the writing of such a text appears to have grown most intense in the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries, a period in which the autobiographical act itself had become fully established and quite widespread. Nevertheless, it also seems reasonable that critical debate over a literary genre should intensify after it achieves a certain currency. In any case, just as autobiography itself grew out of a genre, the tarjama, concerned with maintaining the lines of inheritance back to exemplary figures including the Prophet, eventually it too came to carry a legacy, to which its inheritors staked their own claims.