CHAPTER FOUR
Arabic Autobiography and the Literary Portrayal of the Self
The two previous chapters traced the history of Arabic autobiographical writing from its emergence in the ninth century through its development into a self-conscious critical discourse in the late fifteenth century. This chapter takes a closer look at the texts themselves, addressing issues of the literary portrayal of the self.
Western scholarship is far from unanimous on a definition of “true” autobiography (Arabic or otherwise). In recent years, scholars have deployed a variety of (often conflicting) criteria involving the literary portrayal of the author's “personal,” “inner,” or “private” life as the measure of real autobiography. These criteria are more often than not latent and unarticulated; however, a revealing pattern emerges from discussions of which text constitutes the first “true” autobiography in a given tradition.
The pioneer of critical study of the Arabic tradition, Franz Rosenthal, sees the beginnings of Arabic spiritual autobiography in the writings of al-Muḥāsibī (d. 857) and considers the earliest secular autobiography to be that of Ḥunayn ibn Iṣḥāq (d. 873 or 877).[1] Anwar al-Jundī declares that al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) was the first Arab to write his memoirs,[2] whereas Marshall G. S. Hodgson states that al-Ghazālī was the only true premodern Arab autobiographer.[3] Philip Hitti and Nikita Elisséeff say that Usāma ibn Munqidh (d. 1188) was the first;[4] ‘Alī ‘Abd al-Wāḥid and Ṭāhā Ḥusayn consider Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406) the first;[5] and ‘Izz al-Dīn Ismā‘īl claims that it was Ṭāhā Ḥusayn himself (d. 1973).[6] For Thomas Philipp, a pre-twentieth-century Arabic autobiography is an impossibility: “It would be misleading to attempt the reconstruction of the history of the [Arabic] autobiography.”[7] This, in his opinion, is because “true” autobiography in Arabic springs without predecessor or precedent, fully formed and completely modern, from the pen of Jurjī Zaydān in 1908. He rejects as autobiographies texts by Zaydān's contemporaries ‘Alī Mubārak (d. 1893), Mikhā‘il Mishāqa (d. 1888), and Ibrāhīm Fawzī Pasha (d. 1902). For Philipp, the boundary between proto-autobiography and real autobiography in Arabic literature can be drawn at one specific moment in time.
There is a distinct tendency for scholars to identify more and more recent texts as the first “true” autobiography; in essence, the definition of autobiography among scholars of Arabic literature is becoming more tightly constrained by modern western concepts of the genre, many of which have been generated by critics only in the past thirty years. This general tendency is, in methodological terms, self-defeating: by imposing ever more modern definitions of “true” autobiography, scholars have set ever more recent historical limits for the genre and its presumed concomitant cultural manifestations, including individual identity and self-awareness. This categorization renders the “true” autobiography an extremely recent phenomenon in both western and Islamic societies. From this perspective, autobiography can possess—exactly as Philipp claims—no history. By accepting only the most recent concept of western autobiography, literary historians have created an ever-receding horizon whereby only the nearest historical examples of either culture are acceptable as mature examples of the genre.
Another significant methodological problem plagues approaches that seek to define the genre of autobiography by establishing a specific starting point: nearly all such studies presume that an era of “true” autobiography is subsequently and universally ushered in with the publication of the first real exemplar of the genre. In the western tradition, for example, scholars have identified Rousseau over and over again as the first “true,” “real,” or “modern” autobiography. Paradoxically, if scholars were to apply the same criteria they use so stringently in distinguishing Rousseau from his close predecessors (e.g., Cellini and Cardano) with equal assiduousness to autobiographies produced after Rousseau, there would remain remarkably few “true” autobiographies to study.
Nor do any of these scholars seem willing to address the vacuum that their opinions leave behind: once the line has been drawn at the first “true” autobiography (Arabic or otherwise), what status is to be accorded the many earlier self-conscious, self-authored texts that purport to give a complete representation of the author's life? The critical issue becomes whether to address these earlier texts as autobiographies, in the sense of a portrayal of the self, or as some other category of life representation. The answer to this question hinges both on our modern expectations of autobiography as a genre—that it should reveal a private, psychological inner self beyond an exterior, public self—and on our expectations of autobiography as a portrayal of an individualized identity or personality. To what extent are these modern expectations generalizable across cultures and literatures? Any eventual judgment will necessarily involve the interaction between two opposing approaches to the study of autobiography.
The first approach is to seek in these texts elements that we, as twenty-first-century readers, readily identify as the portrayal of an inner self: the emotional life of the author, his or her private behavior, the disclosure of motivations and reactions, and the evaluation of the author's personality, sexuality, and so forth. The first section of this chapter operates entirely at this level of analysis. The second section pursues a rather different course, one based on different assumptions about the relationship between literary representation and the “self.”
Essentializing the Self: Private Life and Personality in the Memoirs of Ibn Buluggīn
Assuming for the sake of argument that concepts such as “private,” “personal,” and “inner self” are unchanging and ahistorical, and that what appears to us to be personal (versus public) is in fact so, then a number of the Arabic texts in this survey may certainly be judged true autobiographies, even by such presentist standards. These texts possess many of the criteria sought by modern western scholars such as direct portrayal of the author's thoughts, emotional reactions, and an awareness of psychological development and maturation from childhood through adulthood to old age. One such text is the autobiography of Ibn Buluggīn (d. after 1094).
The eleventh-century prince Ibn Buluggīn was the last member of the Berber Zīrid dynasty to rule the kingdom of Granada in southern Spain. After he was deposed in 1090 by the invading Almoravids, he was sent into exile in Aghmāt, Morocco, where he lived out the rest of his life as a captive and wrote his memoirs in about 1094. The first third of the text consists of an apologia for Ibn Buluggīn's dynasty. The initial four chapters of the work deal with his forebears and their reigns. In chapters five through twelve Ibn Buluggīn describes his own life and reign. One fascicle, which included a discussion of Ibn Buluggīn's ascension to the throne, is missing in the single known manuscript. As mentioned above, Ibn Buluggīn felt it necessary to justify not the writing of his autobiography per se but the continuous narrative style that he used in writing it.
The final chapter is of most interest to us here, for, having recounted the events of his life in chronological order, he now stops to evaluate his experiences.
Unfortunately, no samples of Ibn Buluggīn's poetry are included in either the Arabic published edition or the English translation.I have now described some of the events that took place in al-Andalus [Islamic Spain], the role of our dynasty and the end to which our fates brought it, as best my memory and ability have allowed, right up to the present. Let me now mention some of the poetry I composed concerning all this, in periods when my mind was unoccupied by troubles and my soul at ease, which left me free to ponder all manner of beautiful things and to experience joy at the sweetness of all news. I have never presumed to possess any particular talent as a poet, however, nor was I much concerned with it, for I composed only when I discovered something that caught my attention or sought to produce an eloquent description of something I wished to portray.[8]
Ibn Buluggīn then turns to the horoscope cast by the court astrologers in his youth and compares it to his life as it actually unfolded.
He notes that the horoscope correctly predicted that his children would be born late in his life, that he would have a lifelong attraction to boys with mercurial characteristics but at the same time harbor an aversion to any unlawful relations with them, and that he was, as predicted, afflicted with melancholy and other frightful psychological ailments. He does not concur, however, with the enduring good fortune the astrologers foresaw for him, for in reality his life had been filled with quite the reverse.Everything is set at one's conception and birth. In the predictions calculated from the hour of my birth, I have read of characteristics that I have indeed noted in my nature and disposition, despite the fact that those who made those predictions wrote them down when I was but a child and could not have known anything of my circumstances in life [aḥwālī]. This document was hidden from me by [the minister] Simāja for a time, until it came into my hands against his will. This disturbed him, for he feared I would grow vain from the good fortune foretold therein. In it I read of wondrous and strange things.[9]
Ibn Buluggīn discusses at some length the topics of medicine, health, eating habits, sexual mores and appetites, whether astrology is a true science or quackery, whether it is good to be informed of the hour of one's death ahead of time, the existence of jinn and angels, and the role of pleasure and love in life. After citing earlier authorities on each topic, he gives his own opinion. On wine drinking, for example, he writes:
My opinion about wine is that if someone's mood grows more composed by drinking a lot of it, then no one should say to him, “Drink less!” And to someone for whom it is pleasing to drink but a little, no one should say, “Drink more!” A reasonable person detects this on his own and, knowing what is not in harmony with his nature, does not exceed that. . . .
People say that drinking relieves anxieties, but I say that it only excites them, depending upon one's mood when one begins to drink: if one is happy, drinking will arouse feelings that one had previously pacified, and if one is beset with cares, it will remind one of the situation one is in and of even worse situations, and lead one down evil paths.[ . . .] Sadness comes from what has happened in the past, and sometimes wine will distract one from that, but nothing brings on sleep like sadness coupled with remembering what has gone before or looking through a book seeking only to read of what has happened in the past.[10]
On the birth of his children, he writes:I myself have been afflicted with such troubles, for human nature is indeed one and varies only slightly, which is why humans have been ordered [by God] to love each other as they love themselves, in hopes of justice and fairness [from Him].
I find my feelings toward great wealth now, having possessed it and then lost it, more abstemious than before I gained it, though I was at that time better off than I am now. I feel similarly about all that I possessed in the way of power to command and forbid, the amassing of treasures, elegant foods, clothing, riding animals, and buildings, and the other luxurious circumstances among which I was raised; indeed, they were so luxurious that one could not wish for or even imagine something of which I was not given the very best and even more. These riches were not suddenly cut off, nor did they disappear after only a brief moment, that I should linger in sorrow over them and think of them as having existed only in my dreams. I possessed them for a period of twenty years [during my reign], and nearly that long [before my reign] while I was growing up in the very lap of luxury.
I find myself now, after having lost all this, more desirous of having children than of anything I have described, since I did not have any before. I have said to myself: I already obtained the goals that people strive for in this world, and in doing so acquired fame from horizon to horizon. But there is no escape from losing these things, sooner or later, during one's lifetime or at one's death. So I reckon those twenty years as one hundred—they are gone “as if they had not flourished yesterday!” [Q 10:24]. Now it is more fitting for me to contemplate what it is I seek. And it is God's prerogative to order what He wills![11]
The final passages of the text contain an impassioned plea to the reader to judge the author well and to disdain the malicious slanderers who have attacked his reputation. A last angry tirade is addressed directly to his detractors. Unfortunately, the very last lines of the text are illegible in the manuscript.One of the blessings God bestowed upon me was that He made my firstborn child a girl. Our entire tribe still considers themselves blessed by her and strongly dislike having sons as their firstborn. I saw that the joy of my father, Sayf al-Dawla—May God have mercy on him!—was not fulfilled by similar good fortune.[ . . .] After this God granted me two sons, but we did not celebrate their births, so that our fears for them would not be joined with [the misfortune] of my own path. This was a kindness granted me by the Beneficent in His graciousness and generosity. To enumerate God's blessings is an act of giving thanks for them [fa-ta‘dād ni‘am Allāh shukr lahā], and to proclaim this with gratitude and devotion, not out of pride or vanity, is among the most important duties a person undertakes.
[ . . . ]I then turned my attention to composing this book which—by my life—shall take the place of a son who causes the memory of his father to live on in the world. In it, I have explained aspects of myself, for those who are uninformed, that have been obscured by evil things that have been said and by what the envious have claimed led to my downfall.[ . . .] I have written this book for people of kindness and truth who have been confused by the matter, for those who love me and wish me well.[12]
Ibn Buluggīn situates his life within the history of his dynasty, evaluates his own reign, and discusses the political and military intrigues of his day. But as an author, he also steps back from that “public” life and evaluates its course, comparing it to earlier astrological predictions and examining his own personality and emotions, his private habits and behavior, his likes and dislikes, his hopes and desires, and how these changed as he aged.
Ibn Buluggīn's text is not an isolated example of such self-revelatory writing. Many autobiographers tell us of the trials and tribulations they faced in their careers and evaluate their causes at a very personal level. Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq (ninth century) devotes his entire autobiographical work to a description of the difficulties he experienced as a result of the slander of his rivals and how he eventually survived to overcome them. Ibn Riḍwān (eleventh century) recounts his poverty as a youth pursuing his studies, bemoans the fact that he did not have enough money to marry until comparatively late, and expresses general pessimism about the state of scholarship, particularly in the field of medicine, in his day. Al-Jazā’irī (seventeenth century) on the one hand takes pride in the amount of suffering he has endured and on the other recounts these tribulations with a great deal of wit and humor often directed at himself.[13] Al-Baḥrānī (eighteenth century) traces his life through periods of hardship and misfortune until he finally succeeds in accumulating the material wealth with which he, as a narrator, is obsessed throughout his account (translated in this volume).
Many authors also give overt portrayals of dramatic moments in their emotional lives. Abū Ḥayyān al-Andalusī (fourteenth century) wrote his autobiography (text not extant) as an act of mourning the untimely death of his daughter Nuḍār; in it he recorded what he would have wished to have told her of his life. Ibn al-Jawzī (twelfth century) wrote an account of his life for his son as a legacy, exhorting him to lead a good and productive life. Much later, Princess Salmé of Zanzibar (nineteenth century) and Ṭāhā Ḥusayn (twentieth century) also addressed their autobiographies to their children. The Sufi shaykh Zarrūq (fifteenth century) writes that the early death of his mother completely reoriented his life, causing him to devote himself to his studies and to the pursuit of a pious way of life, to the astonishment of his family and relatives. ‘Alī al-‘Āmilī (seventeenth century) writes poignantly and at some length of the tremendous grief he experienced at the death of his twenty-two-year-old son and of how it changed his attitude toward life and includes the poem he wrote as an elegy (translated in this volume). Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq (nineteenth century) interrupts his prose narration to include the elegaic poem he wrote in grief at the death of his young son.
Several authors express their awareness of the passing stages of life and find in the onset of old age a motivation for looking back over the life they have lived. Usāma ibn Munqidh (twelfth century) penned his autobiography at the age of ninety and waxed eloquent in describing the onset of old age and senility, how he could at the time of writing scarcely recognize in himself the younger Usāma, and how he continually bemoaned his past life. He includes one of his own poems on this theme and then begs the reader's pardon for the digression. Abū Shāma (thirteenth century) places the moment in which his hair suddenly turns gray—at the age of twenty-five—at the very center of his autobiography, likening it to old age and evaluating its significance. At this point in the text he also includes a poem about the event (translated in this volume).
Private personal habits also find their place in a number of these texts. Ibn Sīnā (eleventh century), in a frequently cited example, recounts that he used to drink a glass of wine when he felt overcome by sleep while studying late at night, which would revive him and allow him to continue his work. Al-Yūsī (seventeenth century) relates that when he first got married as a young man, the pleasures of his nuptial bed kept him from concentrating on his studies for months and describes the great effort with which he finally mastered his physical desires and was able to return to his education. Ibn ‘Ajība (eighteenth century) writes that he was a handsome youth and that many women attempted to seduce him with their charms but that with God's help he did not fall into temptation. Jurjī Zaydān (nineteenth century) recounts his early experimentation with masturbation and how, on overhearing adult men say that it weakened the body, he thereafter decided to refrain from it.
Portrayals of close relationships with parents, siblings, and spouses also appear; at the same time, there is a notable lack of depictions of close friendships in these texts. Al-Tirmidhī (ninth century) provides an intriguing portrait of his wife's close involvement in his spiritual life and progress; indeed, by the end of his autobiography, his wife assumes the primary role in the narrative (translated in this volume). Ibn Buluggīn (eleventh century) tells early in his memoirs of the tenderness and affection his grandfather felt for his father, who was an only son, and how after the death of his father at just twenty-five that affection was transferred to himself. His grandfather took him out of school when he was still a child so that he could sit in court and learn the ways of kings. The father of Usāma ibn Munqidh (twelfth century) is a very powerful figure in his memoirs, and many anecdotes depict a close and enduring friendship between father and son. Zarrūq (fifteenth century) is saddened that his father died before he was old enough to know him but refers to his mother harshly, as “a wasteful woman.” In contrast, he speaks very fondly of his grandmother, who raised him after he was orphaned. Ibn ‘Ajība (eighteenth century) devotes a brief chapter of his autobiography to listing his wives and children; although his account is on the whole very sparse, it does touch, rather diplomatically, on how his favorite wife, unlike the other women he married, was not of high rank. ‘Alī Mubārak's father (nineteenth century) constantly rescued him from his escapades by helping him out of prison, allowed him to leave harsh teachers who beat him, and at one point endangered his entire family by trying to sneak his son out of the government school in Cairo where ‘Alī Mubārak lay deathly ill in the infirmary (translated in this volume). Princess Salmé (nineteenth century) recounts numerous anecdotes describing her intense love for her father, the ruler of Zanzibar, and family relations at the royal court.
It appears, then, that authors of autobiographies chose to include information about their private lives based to a great extent on individual impulse rather than on established literary convention. It is clear that although the tradition of Arabic autobiography did not require that authors reveal their private selves in detail, neither did it preclude this, even when we define these terms as the depiction of behavior, relationships, and reactions that modern western readers deem “personal” or “private.”
Historicizing the Self: Deciphering the Autobiography of Ibn Ḥajar
Another approach to the issue of literary representations of the self is to ask whether our modern conceptualizations of such terms as “personal,” “private,” and “inner self” are completely applicable to premodern texts, whether they are as obvious and as unchanging as they may at first appear. We live in a time characterized by an intense dichotomy in the conceptualization of the self into public and private. Was this true in earlier periods? Is this true in other cultures? In the post-Freudian western world, for example, sexual acts and sexuality have come to constitute a major portion of the private self and of personal identity and are seen as a window into the subconscious. Did they do so in premodern worldviews, or were they instead similar to table manners, bathing, and toiletry, that is, personal and bodily behaviors that, although private, play no great role in defining the self? Should we instead be looking more closely at recurring elements in premodern texts that may have played significant roles in representing the self similar to the role now played by sex and sexuality? The problematization of terms such as “personal,” “private,” and “inner self” requires of us far more intense study of the changing constraints of literary representation through which such conceptualizations make themselves known.
In the work of Ibn Buluggīn we found many of the qualities modern readers would expect from an autobiography: an author's critical evaluation of his own personality, a retrospective examination of the course of his life, and even a sense of imparting some of the hard-learned lessons of that life to posterity. Far more problematic, however, are those texts that are but brief accounts of the external events of a life and which apparently offer us little of the author's personality. Among later medieval Arab authors, one of the most famous—and driest—of these texts was that of Ibn Ḥajar al-‘Asqalānī (d. 1449). The text constitutes little more than an encyclopedia entry, written in the third person, located in the author's biographical compendium of the judges of Egypt. It is short enough to be cited in its entirety.
Ibn Ḥajar al-‘Asqalānī: Aḥmad b. ‘Alī b. Muḥammad b. Muḥammad b. ‘Alī b. Aḥmad. From the town of ‘Asqalān by origin, Egyptian by birth and upbringing, resident of Cairo. He was born in the month of Sha‘bān in the year A.H. 773 [1372 C.E.] and his father died in the month of Rajab 777 [1375 C.E.]. His mother had already died while he was still a young child, so he was raised an orphan. He did not enter Qur’ān school until he was five years old and only completed memorizing the Qur’ān when he was nine. He was not prepared to pray the tarāwīḥ prayers of the holy month of Ramadan publicly until the year 785 [1383 C.E.], when he had already turned twelve.[14]
His guardian was the famous Ra’īs Zakī al-Dīn Abū Bakr b. Nūr al-Dīn ‘Alī al-Kharrūbī, the head of the merchants' guild in Egypt who had become a neighbor that year and who took him in when he had no one to support him. In that year he studied the Ṣaḥīḥ of al-Bukhārī with the greatest authority in the Ḥijāz, ‘Afīf al-dīn ‘Abd Allāh al-Nishāwarī, the last of the companions of Raḍī al-Dīn al-Ṭabarī, Imām at the Maqām [of Abraham in Mecca]. But he did not complete his studies, for it happened that he did not hear the entire work, though he received a certificate for his teacher's teachings anyway.
― 81 ―He also studied it with Shaykh Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad b. ‘Umar al-Sallāwī al-Dimashqī, who taught beneath the living quarters of al-Kharrūbī in a house which was at the Ṣafā Gate, on the right when heading out towards Ṣafā, known as the House of ‘Aynā’ the Sharīfa [descendant of the Prophet Muhammad], daughter of the Sharīf ‘Ajlān. In this house there is a window which looks out over the Holy Mosque in Mecca and whoever sits there can see the Ka‘ba and the Black Stone in its corner. The reader and the listener used to sit there without a bench beneath the aforementioned window. The teacher of the author [of this autobiography] would sit there along with the others who studied with him. When the reciter read, the teacher would order them to listen until he had finished reading to the very end of the book. But the author [of this autobiography] occasionally went out to take care of some need or other and there was no one taking roll. So my source for [the Ṣaḥīḥ of al-Bukhārī] is Shaykh Najm al-Dīn al-Murjānī, who taught it to me properly much later; I have relied upon him by virtue of my trust in him.
After that [the author] memorized books of abridgments [mukhtaṣarāt] of the fields of study. It was necessary that someone take him in hand, and this fell to Shaykh Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad b. ‘Alī b. Muḥammad b. ‘Isā b. Abī Bakr b. al-Qaṭṭān al-Miṣrī, so [the author] attended his lessons. Al-Qaṭṭān revealed to him works of history while he was still studying in the children's Qur’ān school and filled his mind with many things about the lives [Ar. aḥwāl, lit. “conditions”] of the ḥadīth transmitters.
Meanwhile he also heard lessons from Najm al-Dīn b. Razīn and Ṣalāḥ al-dīn al-Ziftāwī and Zayn al-Dīn b. al-Shiḥna and he looked into the literary arts starting from the year 792 [1390 C.E.]. He composed poetry and wrote odes in praise of the Prophet as well as short occasional pieces.
Then he met with the greatest transmitter [of ḥadīth] of the era, Zayn al-Dīn al-‘Arāqī, in the month of Ramadan in the year 796 [1394 C.E.]. He stayed on with him for ten years while the art of ḥadīth was revealed to him. Before that year had ended, he produced for his Shaykh, the authority [musnid] of Cairo, Abū Isḥāq al-Tanūkhī, the work al-Mi’a al-‘Ushāriyya [a collection of one hundred Prophetic ḥadīth].
The first person to read it in full was the transmitter Abū Zar‘a b. al-Ḥāfiִz al-‘Arāqī [son of his teacher, the famous ḥadīth scholar just mentioned].
Then [the author] traveled to Alexandria and attended lessons from its authorities at that time. Later he went on the pilgrimage and traveled through Yemen. He attended lessons from scholars in Mecca, Medina, Yanbu‘, Zabīd, Ta‘izz, Aden, and other cities and villages.
In Yemen he met the great scholar of Arabic lexicography, a man with- out rival, Majd al-Dīn b. al-Shīrāzī, and received from him one of his most famous works called al-Qāmūs fī al-lugha [Dictionary of the Arabic Language]. He met many of the learned men of those cities and then returned to Cairo. Next he traveled to the Levant and heard lessons from scholars in Qaṭiyya, Gaza, Ramla, Jerusalem, Damascus, al-Ṣāliḥiyya, and other villages and cities.
His stay in Damascus was one hundred days, and what he heard in that period amounted to nearly one thousand fasicles of ḥadīth, among which were some from the great books: al-Mu‘jam al-awsaṭ [The Middle Collection] by al- Ṭabarānī, and Ma‘rifat al-ṣaḥāba [Knowledge of the Companions] by Abū ‘Abd Allāh b. Manda, most of the Musnad of Abū Ya‘lā and others.
Then he returned and completed his own book, Ta‘līq al-ta‘līq, about the lives of the greatest of his teachers, and so others began to take ḥadīth dictation from him. He remained the protégé of Shaykh Sirāj al-Dīn al-Bulqīnī until he granted him a certificate [to teach law and grant legal opinions]. After al-Bulqīnī granted him a certificate [adhina lahu] he obtained the certificate of Shaykh al-Ḥāfiz Zayn al-Dīn al-‘Arāqī.
― 82 ―Then he began to compose his own works. He dictated al-Arba‘īn al-mutabāyina [Forty Variant Ḥadīth] in the Shaykhūniyya college starting in the year 808 [1406 C.E.], then he dictated from ‘Ushāriyāt al-ṣaḥāba approximately one hundred sessions over a number of years. Then he was given charge of the teaching of ḥadīth at the al-Jamāliyya al-Jadīda college, and he dictated there, but he cut short his dictation when he left in the year 814 [1411 C.E.]. He worked at writing books and was then appointed to the position of shaykh of the Baybarsiyya college, then with the teaching of Shāfi‘ite law at the al-Mu’ayyadiyya al-Jadīda college. Then he was appointed judge on the seventeenth of the month of Muḥarram in the year 827 [1423 C.E.]. Thereafter, he convened a new dictation session from the beginning of the month of Ṣafar of that year until the present.[15]
This is precisely the type of text that helped to generate the image among western scholars of an utterly impersonal auto/biographical tradition. Yet we have only to examine the autobiographies of Ibn Ḥajar's own students to realize that Ibn Ḥajar's text is at the far end of the spectrum in the Arabic tradition in terms of its brevity and laconic style. Even in the case of this text, however, a careful reading reveals several noteworthy features.
First, the author carefully positions himself from the opening passages in a very modest stance concerning his intellectual achievements: he did not enter school until age five, did not finish memorizing the Qur’ān until age nine, did not pray the tarāwīḥ prayers until age twelve, and so forth. His language leads us to believe that he was somehow constantly behind schedule either because of his status as an orphan or because he was a slow student; yet from the information that can be gleaned from contemporary biographies and autobiographies, none of these ages are older than average. We know from other sources that his leading the tarāwīḥ prayers during Ramadan was delayed for a year by a trip to Mecca that he made in the company of his guardian, but it is probable that he is more concerned with projecting a self-effacing attitude.[16]
It is also striking that the only passage with any material detail at all is the one in which he describes his early attempts to master the Ṣaḥīḥ of al-Bukhārī. Suddenly, in this passage we have a house, its location, a window, a view of the Ka‘ba, and students and teacher sitting on the floor beneath that window. Equally sudden is the shift to the first-person voice: “So my source for [the Ṣaḥīḥ of al-Bukhārī] is Shaykh Najm al-Dīn al-Murjānī, who taught me properly much later; I have relied upon him because of my trust in him.”
The terminology of the Arabic passage directly reflects medieval Islamic teaching methods—“I heard this work from,” “I completed my audition of such and such a work,” “I mastered my audition,” “I was granted a certificate to transmit such and such a work”—in which a teacher or reciter read aloud a work that was then taken down in dictation by pupils (hence the use of terms such as “hearing” and “audition”) and discussed; and if a student wished to receive an ijāza, or certification, as a transmitter of that work, he then read the work back to the teacher and answered his questions about the text.[17] The work in question, the Ṣaḥīḥ of al-Bukhārī, is a collection of the traditions [ḥadīth] of the Prophet Muhammad, the field of study in which Ibn Ḥajar himself became the greatest authority of his time. It is not just any collection, however, but one of the canonical “Six Books.”[18] That Ibn Ḥajar should recount to us his failure to master this basic work first from Shaykh al-Nishāwarī and then from Shaykh al-Sallāwī, and both times for completely unsubstantial reasons, is somewhat akin to Einstein recounting that he failed mathematics over and over again in school. And his meticulous description of this particular scene as being literally within sight of the Ka‘ba in Mecca—the single most sacred spot on earth in Islam—adds more than a hint of irony.
Ibn Ḥajar may have had a number of different motivations for narrating these specific events in greater detail than the rest of his text. He may have wished to document meticulously his own authority to transmit this work; given his stature at the time of writing, however, it hardly seems likely that this would have been questioned. Alternatively, he may have been motivated by a desire to establish his own modesty concerning his intellectual achievements in a continuation of the rhetoric of the opening passage. He may even have wished to be an encouraging example to later striving students, particularly those who experienced hardships in childhood and began their schooling at a disadvantage.
When we read this passage against the background of Arabic autobiography as a whole, however, a far more important observation emerges. Among those premodern autobiographical texts that treat the author's childhood, a very large portion recount anecdotes of childhood embarrassments, failings, misbehavior for which they were punished, incidents in which they played the role of fool or were the butt of a joke, and so forth. Even those texts that uncritically laud the adult autobiographer as a major intellectual or spiritual authority often include rather detailed anecdotes of the authors as ordinary and quite fallible children. Over and over again Arabic autobiographers include humorous, often endearing, stories of themselves as children, even when they continue their accounts in the most serious tones when dealing with their adult lives and achievements. It is one of the most enduring and often-repeated motifs of premodern Arabic autobiography.[19]
Al-Tirmidhī (ninth century) begins his autobiography (translated in this volume) by admitting that he had to be pressed to study by his father until he finally acquired the habit and left off childish games and play. He also notes that he was twenty-seven years old when he finally succeeded in memorizing the Qur’ān after a “conversion experience” while returning from the pilgrimage. This late beginning in religious life is all the more remarkable in that the focus of al-Tirmidhī's autobiographical work is to demonstrate his status as a spiritual authority.
Ibn Sīnā (late tenth/early eleventh century) confesses that although he had mastered all of the other sciences, he was unable to comprehend Aristotle's Metaphysics even after having read it “forty times,” until he finally came across a copy of al-Fārābī's commentary that enlightened him. It has been argued that the stages of Ibn Sīnā's education should be read as an allegorical treatise on the intellect;[20] whatever the case, this story, which portrays the hitherto insatiable student as utterly confounded, is one of the most memorable scenes in the narrative.
‘Abd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī (late twelfth/early thirteenth century) recounts that, despite the best preparation at home, he could understand nothing of the teacher's “incoherent babbling” when his father first took him to school and that only when he was turned over to the teacher's assistant was he able to make sense of the lessons. He later describes in detail the warm friendship and camaraderie that developed between himself and this blind teaching assistant and how they later studied as colleagues under this same teacher (translated in this volume).
Zarrūq (fifteenth century) tells of being caught listening to storytellers in the marketplace and being rebuked by a male relative for his idleness; he never returned to hear their performances. He also recounts that when he experimented with being decorated with henna, he was scolded by a female relative for wearing the mark of a woman and never again adorned himself. He was also reprimanded for reaching out toward the food at a meal before their family's guest had begun to eat. Orphaned at an early age, his grandmother raised him using a number of clever ruses to inculcate good behavior. To encourage him to pray, she placed a dirham coin under his pillow as reward, a trick that also kept him from looking at the possessions or wealth of others with greed or envy. To teach him to appreciate their daily sustenance, she would cook food and hide it, then tell the young Zarrūq that they had no food that day. Together they would pray for God's beneficence and the food would miraculously appear. Zarrūq's childhood memories evoke both the naïveté of youth and the experience of gradually learning right from wrong.
Al-Yūsī (seventeenth century) tells us that he was so bashful about having to excuse himself to answer nature's call while in school and having to relieve himself in the proximity of others that he frequently stayed out of school rather than face that embarrassment. To conceal his ploy, he would wait along the road for his schoolmates and join them as they walked home, pretending that he had spent the entire day with them. The scoldings he received did not change his behavior; rather, the early death of his mother and the resulting emotional crisis he experienced motivated him to conquer this shyness, attend school, and devote himself so assiduously to his studies that his acquaintances found him unrecognizable as his former self.
Yūsuf al-Baḥrānī (eighteenth century) tells of being educated by his father but confesses that he was unfortunately not a very good pupil, as he was at that time still dominated by “the ignorance of youth” (translated in this volume).
Ibn ‘Ajība (eighteenth century) used to get himself and his clothing so wet doing his ablutions before prayer that his mother tricked him into believing that it was permissible to do ablutions with a stone (by Islamic law this is only acceptable when traveling where water is not available and in certain other cases); he did not discover the truth until much later in life. On the whole, Ibn ‘Ajība recounts primarily anecdotes that demonstrate his precocious piety and serious demeanor; some of the gullibility of a child attempting to impress the adults around him, however, still manages to shine through.
‘Alī Mubārak (nineteenth century) describes his childhood misbehavior at length. He constantly ran away from teachers and various employments, eventually even ending up in jail, until he finally found his way into a goverment school in Cairo as a teenager. Mubārak offers numerous explanations for his misadventures and in doing so carefully shepherds our sympathies even when portraying himself as a most troublesome child (translated in this volume).
Mubārak, who went on to play a prominent role in Egypt as an educational reformer, also tells us that his first encounter with geometry left him totally bewildered. The mystical drawings seemed to resemble the strange talismans of folk healers and wandering dervishes. His confusion was only alleviated later by a superlative teacher who opened his mind and heart. He praises at some length the excellent techniques of this teacher. Later, he is again frustrated in his studies as a member of a delegation to France, where Egyptian officials insisted that the delegation be taught engineering in French before they had studied the French language! He also describes the personal study habits he developed in order to succeed.
Jurjī Zaydān (nineteenth century) writes of learning to read, write, and recite the Psalms, at which time his father declared his education to be complete, although he could not understand a word of the text (which may in fact have been in Syriac rather than Arabic). He also describes the ongoing tension between himself and his father concerning the amount of schooling he should have and what occupation he should take up.
Finally, in the most famous avatar of this motif, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn (late nineteenth/early twentieth century) relates in detail his experience of memorizing the Qur’ān as a blind child. Despite his great pride in this achievement, through lack of practice he forgot it and to his shame was found out in a very painful moment in front of his father and a guest. He then memorized it again and again forgot it, and finally, only on the third try, did he succeed in memorizing and retaining it.
Ibn Ḥajar thus includes in his fourteenth-century text a motif found in Arabic autobiographies in the centuries both before and after his own. Whether this is due to an awareness of earlier autobiographical writings or to literary convention, or whether it was simply a habit of medieval scholars and teachers to share such anecdotes, we do not know. But again and again, Arabic autobiographers who confess no real failings as adults begin their autobiographies with accounts of childhood failings or embarrassments, portraying themselves as slow or inept students, as having started their schooling late or having lagged behind their classmates in their studies, and as having possessed a child’s naive or ridiculous beliefs. While the inclusion of such anecdotes hardly constitutes deep analysis of psychological development, it is equally clear that the weltanschauung of these authors is far from what has been previously claimed: “a person is viewed as a type rather than an individual and . . . this view is static: there is no awareness of the development of a person's character.”[21] Even the terse scholarly prose of Ibn Ḥajar reveals the inaccuracy of such a statement.
One critical issue emerges from these passages that confide intimate information to the reader about the author's childhood: they establish the autobiographical authority of the text and mark it as distinct from a biography. Such information was known to the author alone. Even if a scholar shared such stories with his closest disciples, out of respect students refrained from including them in their biographical accounts of their teacher. It was apparently unacceptable for anyone but the author himself to present this type of self-effacing anecdote. What might at first glance seem to detract from an autobiographer's authority as an intellectual or religious figure may well have aided in establishing the authority of the autobiographical text. Moreover, as autobiographies were written in either the first-person or third-person voice, such passages may have played a critical role in projecting the autobiographical nature of a text.
Ibn Ḥajar is, moreover, one of many writers who included far more information about his life in his other works than he did in his formal autobiography; in fact, very little of what we know about him comes from this short text.[22] He was, for example, also a poet, and his collected poetic works were disseminated and transmitted along with his scholarly works on ḥadīth and his famous biographical dictionary covering the eighth Islamic century, the first of the great all-inclusive centenary biographical collections.[23]
Despite its brevity and impersonal nature, this text set a powerful precedent. Ibn Ḥajar's credentials as a scholar were unassailable. That he had written a biography of himself, however brief, was immediately noted by his students, who later imitated him. His rival protégés, al-Sakhāwī and al-Suyūṭī, each wrote autobiographies, and al-Sakhāwī's two students, Ibn Dayba‘ and Zarrūq, then each wrote an autobiography. Al-Suyūṭī's student Ibn Ṭūlūn al-Dimashqī wrote an autobiography, and ‘Abd al-Wahhāb al-Sha‘rānī wrote his seven-hundred-page autobiography on the basis of al-Suyūṭī's, carefully excluding all mention of the autobiographies of al-Sakhāwī and his students (the rival lineage) when listing autobiographies by respected predecessors in his introduction. Finally, later writers such as al-‘Aydarūs and Ibn ‘Ajība were able to cite all of these texts as precedents for their own.
Ibn Ḥajar's sketch of his life is clearly meant to be read against the backdrop of his other works; no amount of careful reading will turn this into a detailed portrait of the author's personality. Yet we have seen that a close reading grounded in comparison with other Arabic autobiographies does demonstrate that there is more to this text than first meets the eye. It is noteworthy that such an expanded reading is possible even with an autobiographical text couched in this sparse format. Applying this approach to lengthier, more detailed texts is not only more easily accomplished, but the resulting insights are proportionally greater as well.
Reading for Stylistic Convention in the Autobiography of al-Suyūṭī
Another example of the close reading of literary conventions can be found in a recent analysis of the representation of the author's emotions in the autobiography of al-Suyūṭī.[24] In this case, insight is derived not from a broad-based comparison with other texts but rather close attention to the details of a single author's style. At several critical points in the author's life, where a modern reader might expect a description of the author's innermost emotions, al-Suyūṭī tells us what he did, rather than how he felt, deploying a rhetoric of action rather than of emotion. In one incident that demonstrates this narrative mode, the author prepares to deliver his first public lecture. We are given information about which teachers are to be present, his mentor's approval, setting the date of the lecture, the open invitation sent out to the public, and even the author's preparatory notes for the lecture itself. Rather than describe his nervousness, however, al-Suyūṭī reports: “I went to the tomb of the Imām al-Shāfi‘ī—May God be pleased with him!—and requested him to intercede for me for God's help.”[25] This account of his actions, though devoid of explicit references to emotions, would have conveyed much to his contemporary readers about his state of mind before this dramatic moment in his life.
Another device used several times in the same text is the author's description of the emotions of those around him rather than his own. In a poignant scene describing his father's final illness, he notes that a female relative sent for a holy man to come and pray for the father's recovery—testament to the state of fear prevailing in the household—and that the other members of his family were in despair. When he notes his father's death, when he himself was but five years and seven months old, he concludes the passage laconically, “And thus I grew up an orphan.”[26] This last image occurs immediately after a reference to the Qur’ān and would have resonated strongly with contemporary readers. The Prophet himself was raised an orphan, and the Qur’ān contains several frequently cited passages relating to the treatment of orphans. Indeed, the chapter of the Qur’ān from which al-Suyūṭī drew the title of his work (Speaking of God's Bounty) contains two such passages, including “So as for the orphan, wrong him not!” (Q 93:6).[27] When it comes to the portrayal of his own emotions, al-Suyūṭī as autobiographer consistently prefers to report his actions rather than describe his mental state.
Two different sets of insights emerge from the examples above: (1) by studying premodern Arabic autobiographies as a series of linked texts, we have noted a commonly recurring motif, that of childhood failure or embarrassment, which seems to occur only in autobiographical writings and with a regularity that invites further analysis; and (2) a close examination of those moments that appear to be emotionally charged in a single text reveals how one autobiographer succeeds in communicating his emotional state without departing from the event-based mode of his account. Applying a similar strategy to the corpus of texts assembled here, and seeking out motifs and devices that seem within the context of this tradition to indicate some form or representation of inner emotion or private experience—though they may not coincide precisely with modern western ideas of that realm of human experience—points to two recurring features as particularly deserving of further analysis: the narration of dreams and the use of poetry.
Dreams, Visions, and Unseen Voices
Medieval Arabo-Islamic culture possessed a rich literature on dreams and their interpretation.[28] The early dream manuals of Ibn Sirīn (d. 728), Ibn Abī al-Dunyā (d. 894), and Ibn Qutayba (d. 889) circulated widely for centuries; these were adapted and added to by many later writers. A twelfth-century biographical dictionary by al-Ḥasan ibn al-Ḥusayn al-Khallāl (d. 1127), The Generations ofDream Interpreters (Ṭabaqāt al-mu‘abbirīn), listed more than six hundred famous practitioners of the craft of dream interpretation.[29] The Old Testament, the Qur’ān,[30] the ḥadīth of the Prophet Muhammad,[31] as well as the neighboring cultures of Greece, Persia, and India, all provided extensive material for the development of Arabo-Islamic beliefs and practices concerning dreams and their interpretation. One Arabic autobiographer, Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq (d. 873 or 877), translated the dream manual of Artemidorus (second century C.E.) from Greek into Arabic in about 873. Ibn Sīnā, another autobiographer, wrote a dream interpretation treatise of his own.[32] The surviving thirteen-month fragment of the diary of Ibn al-Bannā’ (d. 1078) includes some twenty-five narratives of dreams seen by the author, his family and friends, for which he provides interpretations. Ibn Khaldūn, also an autobiographer, ranked dream interpretation among the sciences of Islamic religious law.[33] The erudition of Arabic writers in the matter of dream interpretation acquired such renown that by the tenth century a Byzantine author seeking to lend his Greek dream manual additional authority pretended to be an Arab writer, though his ignorance of Islamic religious practice and his detailed knowledge of orthodox Christian practice combine to reveal his true identity.[34]
Most early Arabic authorities state that a dream (manām) or vision (ru’yā) can originate either with God or with the Devil; some held that the Devil was capable of producing dreams only at night and that therefore dreams seen during the day were from God. (It should be noted that the language of these texts does not always allow us to determine whether the “dreams” or “visions” in question are experienced in the state of sleep or wakefulness.) In addition, a famous ḥadīth of the Prophet Muhammad states: “Whoever sees me in a dream has indeed seen me, for the Devil is incapable of assuming my form [man ra’ānī fī l-manām fa-qad ra’ānī laysa li-l-shayṭān ‘an yatamaththala ṣūratī].”[35] Thus visions of the person of the Prophet himself assumed a character separate from that of other dreams and came to play a major role in spiritual biography and autobiography.[36]
Almost all early sources recognize at least two categories of dreams: literal dreams, which require no extensive interpretation, and symbolic or allegorical dreams, which require specialized interpretation. Since the first category is taken to be self-evident, the majority of oneirocritical works deal exclusively with the latter category (Ibn Abī al-Dunyā being a notable exception). The most common type of treatise on dreams was the dream manual or dictionary, which listed instances of dreams and their interpretations or specific symbols and their meanings.[37] In accounts of literal dreams, the entry concerns how and when the event actually took place, and these dreams are often tied to specific persons; in accounts of allegorical dreams or symbols, the entry includes the interpretation or meaning, and most often no information is given concerning an actual occurrence of this dream. One additional category of dreams, sometimes subsumed under the category of literal dreams, is that of messages, often in the form of poems, that are delivered to the dreamer by figures such as angels, prophets, dead relatives, or former teachers. In these dreams the act of interpretation concerns only the text rather than any form of visual imagery. This category is in turn closely related to the concept of the “unseen caller” or “unseen voice” [hātif], which was common already in pre-Islamic poems and narratives.[38] In all of these categories, the most common functions for dreams (as portrayed in dream manuals) are either as portents of future events, in which case the act of interpretation is an attempt to decipher the event before it actually occurs, or as the affirmation or legitimization of an act or a person's status.[39]
The growing body of recent scholarship on Arabo-Islamic dream literature deals almost exclusively with the areas of dream theory and interpretation. The questions posed by the analysis of Arabic autobiographies, however, are somewhat different and center on dreams as they appear in a specific narrative context: How do Arabic autobiographers deploy dreams in their texts? When and why are they included? What do they represent, and what function do they serve?
A large number of the texts in the present corpus include dream narratives; indeed, in two cases (al-Tirmidhī and Abū Shāma) dream narrations occupy well over half the body of the text. Modern readers might be tempted to see the inclusion of dreams as a portrayal of the author's “inner experience” and even as a potential reflection of the author's innermost personality ripe for psychological interpretation. The textual evidence suggests otherwise. Arabic autobiographers most often do not include dreams as reflections of their personalities but rather as messages from outside themselves that act as portents of the future or as authoritative testimony affirming or legitimizing a particular action or an individual's status. The deployment of the dream thus betrays a moment of “anxiety” reflected not so much in the content and symbolism of the dream itself but rather at the point of its inclusion in the text. What assertion or action in the account does the author feel requires this supporting testimony? Interpretive theory of the period most often understood symbolic dreams to be related not to the personal life of the dreamer but to that area of life that was indeed filled with uncertainties—one's political, social, and financial status. In the medieval Arabic tradition dreams about sex, for example, were interpreted as being about political and social life. In modern western cultures one may have dreams about one's public life, but these are often interpreted as betraying anxieties about sex or other private matters, while in the Islamic Middle Ages if one had dreams about sex, they were thought to reveal insights about one's public life. The vast majority of the dreams found in this corpus of autobiographies, however, are of the literal type that require little or no symbolic interpretation.
The dream narrative that provides the dramatic high point of the account (translated in this volume) attributed to Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq (d. 873 or 877) of his trials and tribulations is one such literal dream.[40] Ḥunayn, a physician and translator, recounts his experiences in the pattern of the biblical/Qur’ānic Joseph story. He, like Joseph, is wrongly accused and imprisoned. The ruler, in this case the caliph, is ailing and has a dream that eventually leads to Ḥunayn's release, the restoration of his possessions, and his elevation to a position of power. The dramatic moment comes not in the interpretation of the dream, as in the scriptural versions, but in the caliph's public narration of the dream before the court. In his dream he sees two figures who are identified as Jesus and Ḥunayn. Jesus tells the caliph that he must pardon Ḥunayn, who has been falsely accused, and should call him to his side and take whatever medication Ḥunayn prescribes. Although the dream requires no interpretation, it is critical to the narrative as a whole, as it provides the only motivation for Ḥunayn's release and restoration to favor.
Al-Simnānī (d. 1336) (text translated in this volume) lived a sumptuous life in his youth as an intimate companion in the court of Sultan Arghūn in northeastern Iran. At the age of twenty-four, just at the moment of charging into battle, he heard a “rebuking voice” and saw a vision of the Hereafter. The experience left him gravely ill and eventually led him to abandon the life of the court and to pursue a life of asceticism and mysticism.
The Jewish scholar Samaw’al al-Maghrībī (d. 1174) saw the prophets Samuel (his namesake) and Muhammad in dreams immediately before his conversion from Judaism to Islam. However, in his autobiography, which he appended to a polemic tract against Judaism, stung by criticism that he might have converted because he had been “deceived by jumbled dreams” [aḍghāth aḥlām; see Q 12:44], he asserts that the dreams were not the cause for his conversion but rather a warning:
Despite Samaw’al's need to clarify that he converted on the basis of rational arguments and proofs of Islam's status as the true faith rather than solely because of his visions, he obviously considered the dreams significant and persuasive for at least some of his readers, for he would not otherwise have included them in his text.The reader of these pages should now understand that it was not the dream that had induced me to abandon my first faith. A sensible man will not be deceived about his affairs by dreams and visions, without proof or demonstration. . . . It was those proofs and demonstrations that were the cause of my conversion and for taking the right path. As to the dream, it served merely to alert and to prod me out of my procrastination and inertia.[41]
Samaw’al al-Maghribī's dream of the Prophet Muhammad and al-Simnānī's vision in the midst of battle provide the background to the authors' religious conversions. Samaw’al converted from Judaism to Islam and al-Simnānī gave up worldly life to devote himself to mysticism. Rosenthal, as we have seen, deemed Samaw’al's account of his vision unconvincing. But the important point is that these authors, and others we shall discuss below, reported these experiences with the clear expectation that their readers (or at least some of them) would find these accounts convincing. They are reported as acts of suasion and, in these two cases, provide the sole motivation offered in the text for one of the most important decisions of the authors' lives. These reported experiences, in this sense, function much as an act of personal confession or divulgence functions in a modern western autobiography: the author reveals a previously hidden and completely personal motivation for a dramatic act in his past.
A similar dream that motivates the author's action is that of ‘Imād al-Dīn al-Kātib al-Iṣfahānī (d.1201) (text translated in this volume). He was accompanying Saladin's uncle, Nūr al-Dīn, when they arrived at a mosque that had recently been damaged in an earthquake. Nūr al-Dīn pledged to have the mosque restored and to have the prayer niche decorated in gold and mosaic, but he died before carrying out his plans. Nūr al-Dīn later appears to ‘Imād al-Dīn in an admonitory dream saying that the prayer niche needs his attention. ‘Imād al-Dīn replies that he has appointed someone to take care of it, but Nūr al-Dīn repeats his message. ‘Imād al-Dīn immediately writes to his retainer, who indeed had not yet begun the work, and tells him to begin the restoration forthwith.
Another function of dreams is not the legitimation of an act or decision by the author but an affirmation of his spiritual or scholarly status. Al-Tirmidhī (d. between 905 and 910) (text translated in this volume) recounts his conversion experience to the mystical life while in Mecca on pilgrimage. In this case, the conversion itself is not occasioned by a vision; however, when he is later describing how he immersed himself in fasting and prayer, secluded himself from society, and took long walks in the wilderness, amid the ruins and in cemeteries, he begins recounting a series of dream narratives. First, he tells us of his own visions of the Prophet Muhammad. Next he recounts his wife's dreams (which occur sometimes in Arabic and sometimes in Persian) in which she encounters angels who give her messages to pass on to her husband. These dreams were, according to al-Tirmidhī, “always so clear and so obvious that they needed no interpretation.” Finally, he recounts dreams of acquaintances and friends about him (“I saw the Prophet—may God bless him and grant him peace!—surrounded by light and praying with [the author] right behind him, praying along with him”).
Similarly, the scholar Abū Shāma (d. 1268) (text translated in this volume) recounts his own dreams and then those of his mother, his brother, and a number of acquaintances, all of which point to Abū Shāma's high standing as a scholar. In his case, several of the dreams are explained in the text by various devices, including by figures in the dream itself. For example, the author's brother dreamed that he saw Abū Shāma dangling from a rope hanging down from heaven; he asks a figure in the dream the meaning of this and is whisked off to the Dome of the Rock where the figure explains to him that his brother has been given knowledge similar to that which had been given to Solomon.
The single most common dream motif in this corpus of autobiographies, however, is a dream seen by one of the author's parents that is a harbinger of his birth and that, in addition, sometimes leads to the choice of name or profession for the child.[42] Ibn al-‘Adīm (d. 1262) (text translated in this volume) reports that his father was deeply saddened by the death of his first son at an early age, but then he had two dreams. In the first the dead child appears and says, “Father, tell my mother that I want to come to you,” and in the second he sees a shaft of light emerge from his male organ and hang over their house. The dream is interpreted to mean the arrival of a son, and shortly thereafter the mother gives birth to the author. Similarly, the father of al-‘Aydarūs (d. 1628) had a dream two weeks before the author's birth in which he saw gathered a number of Muslim mystics. Because of this dream, his father was convinced that his son would become an important man and gave him three names from those of the two saints he saw in his vision: ‘Abd al-Qādir and Muḥyī al-Dīn after Shaykh al-Jīlānī and Abū Bakr after Shaykh Abū Bakr al-‘Aydarūs.
Only a small number of the dreams cited in these texts are complex enough to be susceptible in any interesting way to psychoanalytic interpretation. Dream accounts are found, however, in a wide variety of sources in premodern Arabo-Islamic culture, and such interpretation might prove more useful elsewhere. In this particular body of texts, dreams at times communicate the author's justification for earlier actions or affirmation of his status and occasionally serve as portents of the future. Almost all are tied, one way or another, to the issue of textual authority. They function as the displaced authority of the authorial “I”: what the author cannot say merely on his own authority, he can support with testimony from an outside source through the narration of a dream or vision. This interpretation does not address the “reality” of the dreams themselves or even the author's sincerity but rather the selection of dream accounts and the occasion for their inclusion in texts that purport to be a truthful representation of the author's life.
Poetry: An Alternative Discourse
The vast majority of Arabic autobiographies contain at least some examples of the author's poetry. The inclusion of representative or remarkable samples of someone's poetry is standard practice in Arabic biography, the purpose of which is usually to demonstrate the subject's literary achievement and cultivation. Autobiographers followed suit by including selections from their poetry in their texts, but in many cases this poetry marks a significant and highly emotional event in the author's life. Thus, while modern editors and scholars of medieval and premodern autobiographies for a variety of reasons have often deleted or ignored these verse passages, in fact poetry should be understood as a central—not merely “decorative”—element in the Arabic autobiographical tradition.
The practice of poetry in Arab culture differs significantly from its practice in western societies. First, poetry emerged as the earliest and most highly prized literary form in the pre-Islamic era, particularly the formal “ode” (qaṣīda), and, in general terms, has retained that position until the present time.[43] Second, up until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, poetry and prose interacted in a close and interesting manner in Arabic literature. Although poetry was often collected and published in works containing virtually no prose, there were few genres of prose that did not contain occasional and sometimes quite substantial amounts of verse.
In the oral culture of the pre-Islamic Arabian peninsula, poetry was the mode of authoritative discourse whereas prose was often denigrated as unfixed in form and therefore unreliable. Poetry, because of its formal structure in meter and rhyme, is more impervious to change in oral transmission; prose, because of its lack of structure, is more susceptible to alteration. The earliest Arabic prose narratives from oral tradition to find their way into writing were accompanied by poems. The Battle Days of the Arabs (Ayyām al-‘arab) took a bipartite discursive form: each historical narrative was validated and confirmed by its accompanying poem(s), while the context for the composition and original performance of the poem(s) was spelled out in the prose narrative.[44] Many of the early genres of Arabic literature (seventh–tenth centuries) directly reflected oral origins in their formal features, and the vast majority of medieval Arabic literary genres assimilated prose and poetry into a single style that moved back and forth between the two with great ease (see, e.g., the selections from ‘Imād al-Dīn al-Kātib al-Iṣfahānī's al-Barq al-shāmī [The Syrian Thunderbolt] translated in this volume).
Poetry communicated ideas in a “marked” discourse separate from prose. As mentioned above, it could be used to delineate a formal or authoritative speech act, but it could also be used to express deeply felt emotions: love, grief, loneliness, anger, yearning. All these were themes more often expressed in poetry than in prose. Because of its durability, its perceived beauty, and the amount of control it demonstrated on the part of the author, poetry functioned as an acceptable code for expressing things that, if expressed in plain language or in actions, might be culturally unacceptable.[45] Though it might be unseemly to lose control of one's emotions, to express those same raging feelings in verse offered a socially satisfactory alternative. In contrast, poetry could also degenerate into a language of clichés and mannerisms, with the same motifs and images recurring over and over. What functioned very well as emotional release for a yearning lover or a bereaved parent might later simply not be deemed a “good poem” from the viewpoint of the literary historian.
An excellent example of the significant role of poetry in public life is found in the career of ‘Umāra al-Yamanī, the only one of our medieval autobiographers to have earned fame primarily as a poet. Born in Yemen, ‘Umāra had a tumultuous career as a scholar and a merchant, then as a diplomat (he was sent to Cairo as ambassador to the Fatimid dynasty), and finally as a court poet.[46] He fell in and out of favor with the Fatimid authorities, even to the point of being kept under house arrest in the southern Egyptian city of Qūṣ for several months. His autobiography recounts that during his stay among the Fatimids he was often pressured, unsuccessfully, to profess the Shi‘ite creed of that dynasty. Despite the vicissitudes of his career under the Fatimids and his refusal to accept their religious doctrine, he is portrayed by later sources as having maintained a noteworthy fidelity to that house even after its fall. After Saladin's ascension to the throne, which officially reestablished Sunnī Islam in Egypt, ‘Umāra was viewed as a Fatimid sympathizer and suspected of being a Shi‘ite himself. He composed a number of formal odes of praise to Saladin and other Ayyūbid princes, but none of these seem to have earned him favor in Saladin's eyes. Finally, he addressed an ode of “complaint” (shakwā) to Saladin that quickly achieved renown. It opened with the lines:
O Ear of the Days, if I speak, pray listen to
the choking of this consumptive, the moaning of this miserable man!And retain every sound whose call you hear,
for there is no use in asking you to lend an ear if what it hears is not retained.
But even this formal sixty-four-verse ode did not bring him Saladin's favor or attention. At approximately the same time, ‘Umāra composed an elegaic ode for the fallen Fatimid dynasty that achieved even more fame. One critic wrote of it: “Never has a better poem been written in honor of a dynasty which has perished.”[47]
As if in a premonition of his own end, the poet concluded:
O Fate, you have stricken the hand of glory with paralysis,
and its neck, once so beautifully adorned, you have stripped bare.
Biographical sources recount two differing, though possibly related, reasons for his dramatic death. In one version, ‘Umāra is accused of being part of a political conspiracy aimed at reinstating the Fatimid regime and is sentenced to death along with the other plotters. In the more widely circulated version, and that subscribed to by his contemporary and fellow autobiographer ‘Imād al-Dīn, he provoked the anger of Saladin by composing an ode said to contain a heretical verse:
Wretched ‘Umāra spoke this ode,
fearful of murder, not fearful of error!
‘Imād al-Dīn notes that the verse is probably spurious and was most likely falsely attributed to ‘Umāra.[48] Even so, Saladin had ‘Umāra executed in 1175, either by hanging or crucifixion. Poetry was, at times, a very serious business. Whether or not the story is true, the fact that ‘Umāra's crucifixion over a verse of poetry gained enough credence to be accepted conveys some of the importance assigned to poetry in Arabic literary practices.
The origins of this religion spring from a man
who strove so much that they addressed him as `Lord of Nations'!
Though ‘Umāra was the most renowned poet-autobiographer in the Arabic tradition until Aḥmad Shawqī in the late nineteenth century, poetry played a role in the lives of nearly all of these writers, and even in the texts of many of their autobiographies. In premodern Arab societies nearly all educated literary, political, and religious figures composed poetry at least occasionally. Some composed enough poetry that their verses survived independently in collected or anthologized works, but for most, the poems live on embedded in their other writings, including their biographies or autobiographies. Almost all of the autobiographers represented in this corpus are known to have composed poetry. Some, such as Lisān al-Dīn Ibn al-Khaṭīb and ‘Umāra al-Yamanī, included many pages of their poetry in their autobiographies; others made only passing reference to theirs. Even autobiographers who did not include a selection of their poetry as a separate section of their texts occasionally resorted to poetry to mark an emotional event or moment in their narratives.
When the ninety-year-old Usāma ibn Munqidh (twelfth century) muses lyrically on old age, he closes his thought with a poem followed by an apology to the reader for his digression.
Little did I realize at that time that the disease of senility is universal, infecting everyone whom death has neglected. But now I have climbed to the summit of my ninetieth year, worn out by the succession of days and years, I have become myself like Jawād the fodder dealer, and not like the generous man [Ar. jawād] who can dissipate his money. Feebleness has bent me over to the ground, and old age has made one part of my body enter through another, so much so now that I can now hardly recognize myself. Here is what I have said in describing my own condition:
― 97 ―
When I attained in life a high stage,
for which I had always yearned, I wished for death.Longevity has left me no energy
by which I could meet the vicissitudes of time when hostile to me.My strength has been rendered weakness, and my two confidants,
my sight and my hearing, have betrayed me since I attained this height.When I rise, I feel as if laden with a mountain;
and when I walk, as though I were bound with chains.I creep with a cane in my hand which was wont
to carry in warfare a lance and a sword.My nights I spend in my soft bed, unable to sleep,
wide awake as though I lay on solid rock.Man is reversed in life: the moment he attains perfection and
completion, he reverts to the condition from which he started.[49]
When ‘Abd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī (thirteenth century) waits at the deathbed of his lifelong companion and intellectual alter ego, Shaykh Abū al-Qāsim al-Shāri‘ī, their final exchange (as reported in the autobiography) occurs in verse.
I stayed with Abū al-Qāsim—we were inseparable morning and night—until he passed away. When his illness grew worse, and his head cold turned to pneumonia, I advised him to take medication, but he recited the following verse:
Then I asked him about his pain and he said:
I do not chase away the birds from trees
whose fruit I know from experience is bitter.
More pain cannot be caused
than that of a dying man's wound.
When al-‘Alī al-‘Āmilī (seventeenth century) is distraught over the loss of his son, Ḥusayn, who died at the age of twenty-two, he begins to express his grief in prose but then shifts to poetry.
By God, the sun has neither risen nor set,
but that you have been my heart and my concern,Never have I sat addressing a group,
but that you were my speech to my companions,Nor have I sighed, happy or sad,
but that your remembrance was linked with my breaths,Nor have I been about to drink water out of thirst,
but that I saw your image in the glass.O star whose life was so short!
thus it is with shooting stars;Eclipse came to him in haste, before his time,
overwhelming him before it reached the haunt of moons.The crescent of days past did not fill out,
and did not tarry till the new moon.I mourn for him, then say, hoping to console,
“You are fortunate; you have left behind the world and its pain.”I remain among enemies and he is with his Lord:
how different are our neighbors!As if no living creature had died but he,
and no mourner wailed for anyone but him.
Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq (nineteenth century) likewise finds it appropriate to express his grief at the death of his young son in verse; after describing the boy's illness and death, he concludes with a seventy-two-verse elegy composed in his memory that opens with the lines:
My tears after your passing, at every remembrance of you flow;
my memories of you are a hidden pyre.O departed one, you have abandoned a soul
which burns with grief in the fiercest fire.[50]
‘Alī Mubārak (nineteenth century) recounts that when he was a teenager, as he lay on what he thought was his deathbed, locked in a school infirmary in Cairo, he heard that his father was conspiring to sneak him out by bribing the guards. Despite his joy at the possibility of freedom, he felt he must refuse because the government punished severely not only those students who ran away from the schools but also their entire families. At this moment he cites a single verse of poetry to signal his emotion:
Similarly, when Mubārak is forced out of his powerful political posts by an envious rival during the reign of the khedive Sa‘īd, he bitterly cites an aphoristic line of verse to sum up the situation:
Could perhaps the sorrows which now beset me
conceal behind them approaching release?
Like the secondary wives of a beautiful first wife, they say of her face,
out of envy and spite, that it is unlovely.
But perhaps the role of poetry as a discourse of emotion is most poignantly captured in a simple phrase by ‘Imād al-Dīn al-Kātib al-Iṣfahānī (twelfth century) in his autobiography: “I missed my family dreadfully and expressed my feelings in verse at every stop on the road.”[51]
In the Arabic literary tradition poetry has also been used for other purposes—as artistic embellishment, as formal speech, as authoritative speech, as a means of persuasion—but its role as a rhetoric of emotion is most significant here. It acts both as an alternative discourse that expresses personal feelings and as a means of lending emotional weight to the recounting of an event in a biographical or autobiographical narrative.
In addition, the capacity to be moved to compose poetry by beauty, grief, joy, pride, or spiritual experience was taken as a measure of a person's inner feelings and sensitivity. Rather than see the raw expression of one's emotional reactions as a significant act that revealed the heart or soul, it was the reflection of these feelings in “art,” in the composition of poetry, that was deemed meaningful. In this sense the Arabic aesthetic of poetry might far more fruitfully be compared to that found in tenth-century Heian Japan than to that of modern western societies.[52]
Poetry is found both alongside autobiographical texts (that is, appended in a separate chapter or section) and embedded in autobiographical accounts. These passages or sections would often have been understood by premodern readers to reflect the author's emotional, inner life. Poetic passages might include courtly praise poems or occasional poems that reveal little of the author's personality; others, however, reflect poignant moments of love, loss, or great joy. Medieval and modern readers had, and continue to have, the choice of evaluating such passages for their artistic merit or for their impact in the context of the author's life; that is, in terms of their formal features or as a moment in which to identify directly with the author's feelings. If such moments at are times clichéd, the power to impress with poetic excellence may be impaired, but not necessarily the potential to move the reader emotionally.
The study of premodern Arabic autobiographical texts is hampered by a historical shift in Arabic literary discourse. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Arab cultures began to adapt a view parallel to that prevalent in the West—that poetry and prose are separate discourses that should not intermingle.[53] Before that, a very large percentage of Arabic literature of all kinds, including autobiographies and biographies, were part poetry and part prose. The interaction between the two was a significant feature of the text. In the late nineteenth century, some of the first Arab attempts at writing novels maintained this dual dimension and the prose narrative was often interrupted by lengthy sections of verse.[54] By the turn of the twentieth century, however, poetry and prose had separated irrevocably and prosimetric forms all but disappeared from high literature, although they continue to exist in folk genres.[55] As a result, modern editions of premodern Arabic autobiographies at times do not include the poetry that was part of the original text. We have already noted that the autobiographies of Ibn Sīnā and Ibn Buluggīn, for example, now circulate in editions without the poetry that accompanied them in medieval times. This is a development that deprives the modern scholar of an important insight into the personal, emotional side of premodern authors.
Notes
1. Franz Rosenthal, “Die arabische Autobiographie,” Studia Arabica 1 (1937): 11–12, 15–19; Saleh al-Ghamdi, “Autobiography in Classical Arabic Literature: An Ignored Genre” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1989), 31–33, concurs. [BACK]
2. Anwar al-Jundī, al-A‘lām al-alf (Cairo: Maṭba‘at al-Risāla, 1957), 1:100. [BACK]
3. M. G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 2:180. [BACK]
4. Philip Hitti, introduction to Kitāb al-i‘tibār (1930; rpt. Baghdad: Maktabat al-Muthannā, 1964), 25; Nikita Elisséeff, Nūr al-Dīn: Un grand prince musulman de Syrie au temps des croisades (Damascus: Institut Français de Damas, 1967), 1:22. [BACK]
5. ‘Alī ‘Abd al-Wāḥid, ed., Muqaddimat Ibn Khaldūn, 2d ed. (Cairo: Lajnat al-Bayān al-‘Arabī, 1965), 1:152; Taha Hussein [Ṭāhā Ḥusayn], ‘Ilm al-ijtimā‘, vol. 8 of al-Majmū‘a al-kāmila li-mu’allafāt Ṭāhā Ḥusayn (Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-Lubnānī, 1973), 27. [BACK]
6. ‘Izz al-Dīn Ismā‘īl, al-Adab wa-funūnuh, 3d ed. (Cairo: Dār al-Fikr al-‘Arabī, 1965), 235. [BACK]
7. Thomas Philipp, “The Autobiography in Modern Arab Literature and Culture,” Poetics Today 14, no. 3 (Fall 1993): 583. [BACK]
8. Ibn Buluggīn, Mudhakkirāt al-Amīr ‘Abd Allāh ākhir mulūk, banī zīri bi-Gharnāṭa al-musammā bi-kitāb al-tibyān, ed. E. Lévi-Provençal (Cairo: Dār al-Ma‘ārif, 1955), 178; cf. The Tibyān: Memoirs of ‘Abd Allāh b. Buluggīn, Last Zīrid Amīr of Granada, trans. Amin T. Tibi (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1986), 174. [BACK]
9. Ibn Buluggīn, Mudhakkirāt, 179; cf. Tibi, Tibyān, 174. [BACK]
10. Ibn Buluggīn, Mudhakkirāt, 184, 187; cf. Tibi, Tibyān, 178, 180. [BACK]
11. Ibn Buluggīn, Mudhakkirāt, 196–97; cf. Tibi, Tibyān, 187–88. [BACK]
12. Ibn Buluggīn, Mudhakkirāt, 199–200; cf. Tibi, Tibyān, 189–90. [BACK]
13. Devin J. Stewart, “The Humor of the Scholars: The Autobiography of Ni‘mat Allāh al-Jazā’irī (d. 1112/1701),” Iranian Studies 22 (1989): 47–50. [BACK]
14. The reference is to the tradition of having boys who have finished memorizing the Qur’ān recite the Holy Book publicly during Ramadan by leading the congregation in the special evening prayers (tarāwīḥ) of that month. [BACK]
15. “Ibn Ḥajar went on to finish his work Raf‘ al-iṣr but did not complete his own biographical notice. The remainder of his biography is found in al-Suyūṭī's Ḥusn al-muḥāḍara.” Editor's note in Raf‘ al-iṣr ‘an quḍāt miṣr [History of the Judges of Egypt] (Cairo: al-Maṭba‘a al-Amīriyya, 1957), 85–88. [BACK]
16. Sabri K. Kawash, “Ibn Ḥajar al-Asqalānī (1372–1449 A.D.): A Study of the Background, Education, and Career of an ‘Ālim in Egypt” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1969), 75–76. [BACK]
17. See George Makdisi, The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981); Johannes Pedersen, The Arabic Book (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Jonathan Berkey, The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo: A Social History of Islamic Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Michael Chamberlain, Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus, 1190–1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). [BACK]
18. In addition to al-Bukhārī, the “Six Books” included another Ṣaḥīḥ by Muslim and four books of Sunan by al-Sijistānī, al-Tirmidhī, al-Nasā’ī, and Abū Mājah. [BACK]
19. Dwight F. Reynolds, “Childhood in One Thousand Years of Arabic Autobiography,” Edebiyât: Special Issue—Arabic Autobiography, N.S. 7, no. 2 (1997): 379– 92. [BACK]
20. See Dimitri Gutas, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition: Introduction to Reading Avicenna's Philosophical Works (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988). [BACK]
21. E. M. Sartain, Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 1:137. [BACK]
22. Franz Rosenthal, “Ibn Ḥadjar al-‘Asḳalānī,” EI23:776–78. [BACK]
23. Ibid., 776; see Ibn Ḥajar al-‘Asqalānī, Uns al-hujar fī abyāt Ibn Ḥajar (Beirut: Dār al-Rayyān li-l-Turāth, 1988); and Kawash, “Ibn Ḥajar.” [BACK]
24. Kristen Brustad, “Imposing Order: Reading the Conventions of Representation in al-Suyūṭī's Autobiography,” Edebiyât: Special Issue—Arabic Autobiography, N.S. 7, no. 2 (1997): 327–44. [BACK]
25. Ibid., 332. [BACK]
26. Ibid. [BACK]
27. Autobiographers who were orphaned of one or both parents in early childhood include Ibn Ḥajar, al-Suyūṭī, Zarrūq, Ibn Dayba‘, al-Yūsī, Ibn ‘Ajība, Babakr Badrī, and ‘Alī al-‘Amilī, whose father left when he was six years old and died when he was sixteen. [BACK]
28. See, for example, the 181 titles cited by Toufic Fahd, “Inventaire de la littérature onirocritique arabe,” in La divination arabe (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1966; rpt. Paris: Sindbad, 1987), 330–63; also, Gustav von Grunebaum and R. Callois, eds., The Dream and Human Societies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966); and John C. Lamoreaux, “Dream Interpretation in the Early Medieval Near East” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1999). [BACK]
29. Cited in M. J. L. Young, “Arabic Biographical Literature,” in Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: Religion, Learning and Science in the ‘Abbasid Period, ed. M. J. L. Young, J. D. Latham, and R. B. Serjeant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 174. Al-Khallāl's original work apparently listed 7,500 practitioners of the craft; a summary of it including 600 dream interpreters was consulted by the scholar al-Dīnawarī around the year 1000. See Lamoreaux, “Dream Interpretation,” 29–31. [BACK]
30. See, for example, Qur’ān 37:101–5 (Abraham's dream); 12:4–7 (Joseph's dream); 12:36–37 (prisoners' dreams interpreted by Joseph); 12:43–49 (Pharaoh's dream); 48:27 (the vision of Muhammad). [BACK]
31. Fahd, La divination arabe, 256–68. [BACK]
32. M. A. M. Khan, “A Unique Treatise on the Interpretation of Dreams by Ibn Sina,” in Avicenna Commemoration Volume (Calcutta: Iran Society, 1956), 255–307. [BACK]
33. Ibn Khaldūn, The Muqaddimah, trans. F. Rosenthal (New York: Pantheon, 1958), 3:103. [BACK]
34. Steven M. Oberhelman, The Oneirocriticon of Achmet: A Medieval Greek and Arabic Treatise on the Interpretation of Dreams (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1991). [BACK]
35. Ibn Abī Dunyā, Morality in the Guise of Dreams: Ibn Abī al-Dunya, a Critical Edition of Kitāb al-manām, ed. Leah Kinberg (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994), 81. Shi‘ite sources claim the same status for the Imāms (man ra’ānā fa-qad ra’ānā fa-inna al-shayṭāna lā yatamaththalu binā), ‘Alī al-‘Āmilī, al-Durr al-manthūr, 2 vols., ed. Aḥmad al-Ḥusaynī (Qom: Maktabat al-Mar‘ashī al-Najafī, 1978), 2:197. [BACK]
36. See Jonathan G. Katz, Dreams, Sufism, and Sainthood: The Visionary Career of Muhammad al-Zawāwī (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996); Ignaz Goldziher, “The Appearance of the Prophet in Dreams,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1912): 503–6. [BACK]
37. An English collation of several medieval Arabic works into a single dream dictionary is available in Yehia Gouda, trans., Dreams and Their Meanings in the Old Arab Tradition (New York: Vantage Press, 1991). [BACK]
38. See the autobiography of al-Simnānī (translated in this volume) for an example of the hātif. [BACK]
39. See Leah Kinberg's series of articles on this topic: “The Legitimization of Madhāhib through Dreams,” Arabica 32 (1985): 47–79; “The Standardization of Qur’ān Readings: The Testimonial Value of Dreams,” The Arabist: Budapest Studies in Arabic 3–4 (1991): 223–38; and “Literal Dreams and Prophetic Ḥadīth in Classical Islam—A Comparison of Two Ways of Legitimization,” Der Islam 70 (1993): 279– 300. [BACK]
40. The text poses a number of problems and may not even have been written by Ḥunayn himself. See Michael Cooperson, “The Purported Autobiography of Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq,” Edebiyât: Special Issue—Arabic Autobiography, N.S. 7, no. 2 (1997): 235–49. [BACK]
41. Samaw’al al-Maghribī, Ifḥām al-yahūd, Silencing the Jews, ed. and trans. Moshe Perlmann (New York: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1964), 87–88. [BACK]
42. Galen of Pergamon reports that he was trained in medicine and philosophy as a result of powerful dreams dreamed by his father. Arthur J. Brock, Greek Medecine, being extracts illustrative of medical writers from Hippocrates to Galen (London: Dent and Sons, 1929), 180. [BACK]
43. In reading western treatments of modern Arabic literature, one might assume that the novel has long been the most prestigious form of literary expression in Arabic. This is a view promulgated primarily in western scholarly discussion and certainly did not hold true in the Arab world itself, with the possible exception of Egypt, until very recently. Indeed, many of the objections voiced about the awarding of the 1989 Nobel Prize for literature to the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz were raised precisely because the prize was being given for a form (which many view as adopted from the West) that has played a far less significant role in Arab culture and society than poetry. [BACK]
44. A fascinating modern echo of this is found in the words of a Jordanian Bedouin versed in tribal histories: al-guṣṣa illī mā ‘indhā gaṣīda kidhib (A story without a poem is a lie!), quoted in Andrew Shryock, “History and Historiography among the Belqa Tribes of Jordan” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1993), 295. [BACK]
45. This aspect of poetry is analyzed in a modern context in Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); however, it has been a general characteristic of Arabic poetic discourse since the pre-Islamic period. [BACK]
46. ‘Umāra was also the author of a fascinating history of Yemen about which his translator has written: “‘Omārah has preserved for us an exceedingly curious picture of Arab life and manners, such, I may perhaps venture to say, as is only excelled in Arabic literature by the tales of the Thousand and One Nights.” Henry Cassels Kay, Yaman: Its Early Medieval History (London: E. Arnold, 1892), x–xi. [BACK]
47. Quoted in Jawad Ahmad ‘Alwash, Umara al-Yamani the Poet (Baghdad: al-Ma‘ārif Press, 1971), 120, drawn from Aḥmad al-Maqrīzī, al-Khiṭaṭ (Cairo: B. al-Suluk, 1914), 2:392. [BACK]
48. ‘Imād al-Dīn al-Kātib al-Iṣfahānī, Kharīdat al-qaṣr (Damascus: al-Maṭba‘a al-Hishāmiyya, 1964), 104. [BACK]
49. An Arab-Syrian Gentleman and Warrior in the Period of the Crusades: Memoirs of Usāmah ibn-Munqidh, trans. Philip K. Hitti (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 190–91. [BACK]
50. Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq, al-Sāq ‘alā al-sāq fī mā huwa al-Faryāq (Paris: Benjamin Duprat, 1855), 614. [BACK]
51. ‘Imād al-Dīn al-Kātib al-Iṣfahānī, quoted in al-Fatḥ al-Bundarī, Sanā al-barq al-shāmī, ed. Ramazan Şeşen (Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-Jadīd, 1971), 114. [BACK]
52. Marilyn J. Miller, The Poetics of Nikki Bungaku: A Comparison of the Traditions, Conventions, and Structure of Heian Japan's Literary Diaries with Western Autobiographical Writings (New York: Garland, 1985). [BACK]
53. Dwight F. Reynolds, “Prosimetrum in 19th- and 20th-Century Arabic Literature,” in Prosimetrum: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Narrative in Prose and Verse, ed. Joseph Harris and Karl Reichl (Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 1998), 277–94. [BACK]
54. See, for example, the novels of Salīm al-Bustānī (d. 1884). For a treatment of the life and work of al-Bustānī, see Constantin Georgescu, “A Forgotten Pioneer of the Lebanese `Nahḍah': Salīm al-Bustānī” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1978). [BACK]
55. One modern echo of the use of poetry in Arabic autobiography can be found in Bint al-Shāṭi’ [‘Ā’isha ‘Abd al-Raḥmān], ‘Alā jisr bayna al-ḥayāh wa-l-mawt (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-‘Āmma al-Miṣriyya li-l-Kitāb, 1967), which both opens and closes with selections from the author's poetry. [BACK]