1. PART I
A Thousand Years of Arabic Autobiography

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CHAPTER ONE
The Fallacy of Western Origins

European scholars from the late eighteenth through the first half of the twentieth century, including Goethe, Herder, and Dilthey, called for the collection and study of autobiographical writings. They conceived of this as a broad category of literary production that encompassed writings from both earlier historical periods and other cultures; however, in the mid-twentieth century, autobiography was dramatically reconstructed in western literary criticism as a cultural product unique to modern western civilization. This new formulation appeared abruptly, fueled perhaps by the impending collapse of the colonial encounter and perhaps also by the “threat” of cultural relativism. In the simplest of terms, immediately after World War II, western literary critics suddenly ceased to write of autobiography as a literary category parallel to “novel” or “biography,” both of which easily admit of cross-cultural and historical comparisons, and began instead to treat it as the exclusive creation of the modern West. One of the clearest assertions of this new stance was penned by Georges Gusdorf in a 1956 article that has been characterized as the very foundation of modern autobiography studies.^[1]

It would seem that autobiography is not to be found outside our cultural area; one would say that it expresses a concern peculiar to Western man, a concern that has been of good use in his systematic conquest of the universe and that he has communicated to men of other cultures; but those men will thereby have been annexed by a sort of intellectual colonizing to a mentality that was not their own . . . .

The concern, which seems so natural to us, to turn back on one's own past, to recollect one's life in order to narrate it, is not at all universal. It asserts itself only in recent centuries and only on a small part of the map of the world.^[2]

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Gusdorf's assertions have been reiterated many times in subsequent works by other scholars such as Roy Pascal.

It is beyond my scope to suggest why autobiography does not come into being outside Europe, and the existence of such a work as Babur's memoirs of the sixteenth century, which would occupy a significant place in the history of autobiography had it belonged to Europe, makes one hesitate to generalise. But there remains no doubt that autobiography is essentially European. Where in modern times members of Eastern civilisations have written autobiographies, like Gandhi for instance, they have taken over a European tradition.^[3]

The French critic Georges May adds a further claim—that autobiography emerged uniquely within the cultural influence of Christianity. He asserts, albeit with some minor reservations, that as a literary form the autobiography is a western phenomenon invented by modern Europeans and linked inextricably with Christianity.^[4] The assumptions evident in the work of Gusdorf, Pascal, and May recur in most western writings on the topic of autobiography, even those focused on discrete aspects of the subject, such as childhood memoirs.

The Childhood [autobiography] is a genre which presupposes a sophisticated culture. It is inconceivable among primitives; even in the contemporary Third World, itemerges only in imitation of culturally more advanced models. It demands a sense of form, and the intellectual ability to adapt the ill-balanced and misshapen material of experience to the harmony of literary expression without overmuch distortion of the original truth. It requires a grasp of the epic dimension, and the severe discipline of a controlled rhythm. . . . It demands self-knowledge. (Emphasis added)^[5]

The canon of pre-twentieth-century autobiographies that has emerged in the West over the past century, the body of texts deemed by scholars to represent the genre's most noteworthy and significant examples—including those of Augustine, Abelard, Suso, Margery Kempe, Petrarch, Cellini, Cardano, Montaigne, Rousseau, Goethe, Benjamin Franklin, and others—has remained for historical, political, and academic reasons predominantly modern western European, overwhelmingly male, and in that already relatively narrow category, predominantly French, German, and English. Although notable additions in recent years have included surveys of women's autobiographies, African American slave autobiographies, working-class autobiographies, and modern autobiographical traditions from other regions, the myth of origins constructed by Gusdorf, May, Pascal, and others remains fundamentally unchallenged.^[6]

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Autobiography's shift from a general category of literature as conceived by Goethe, Herder, and Dilthey to the culturally specific genre advocated by Gusdorf, May, and Pascal represents a highly significant, and politically suspect, turning point in western intellectual history. It marks a reorientation that seeks to distinguish fully formed, authentic, modern western selves from the incomplete individual consciousnesses of earlier periods and inauthentic, facsimile selves produced by modern nonwestern cultures in imitation of their superiors. Seen in this light, autobiography is positioned at the very crux of literary scholarship's relationship to earlier historical periods and to other cultures and is currently privileged as a defining discursive marker for what it is to be “modern” and what it is to be “western.”

How many exceptions are needed to cast doubt on the assumption of western origin and exclusivity and allow it to be critically reexamined? While the established canon includes many texts significant for the study of French or English autobiography, the validity of such a restricted corpus as the basis for statements extended to autobiography in cross-cultural and even global contexts is both problematic and underdetermined. Although there is an obvious need for western scholars to gain access to nonwestern traditions, the theory-generating bodies of the western literary academy are resolutely entrenched, even now, within the confines of European languages and literatures.

Western scholarship on autobiography thus recapitulates the act of autobiography. It views literary history as leading inevitably to a predetermined end point—the modern western autobiography—much the way the autobiographer views the passage of larger historical events only as they have affected himself or herself, and the random events contributing to the development of his or her personality as leading, as if by design, inexorably and directly to the moment of writing. Both view the past teleologically.

Western literary scholars and social historians have also consistently imputed changing forms of literary expression, somewhat ingenuously, to historical changes in “self-consciousness.” Thus the structural and rhetorical characteristics of the western chronological, narrative-based autobiography have become the gauge by which scholars seek to measure the level of “self-consciousness” and “individual identity” present in other historical periods and other cultures, bypassing the changing literary conventions that mediate these expressions of the Self. The almost inevitable result is that other, particularly nonwestern, forms of autobiography are discounted as immature and underdeveloped, as pale shadows of the “real” or “true” autobiography known only in the modern West, and therefore as literary productions clearly not born of the same sense of individual identity.

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Western Reception of Arabic Autobiography

Until recently, there existed only two serious treatments of premodern Arabic autobiography in western scholarship: one by Georg Misch and the other by Franz Rosenthal.^[7] Their pioneering work merits close attention, as their writings established both the parameters and the tone for subsequent studies in this area by western and Arab scholars. Both Misch and Rosenthal approached their research armed with philosophical assumptions that, though now dated and even condemned, are critical for understanding and evaluating their work. Both sought, not to analyze a history of changing literary conventions for the representation of the human life experience (i.e., autobiographies as literary texts), but rather an essentialized self that they deemed easily and directly discernible through the literary representation. In addition, they believed firmly in the historical development of a culturally defined “Western self,” the superiority of which was assumed unquestioningly, as were the existence of a modern western “individualism” and “self-awareness” not found in other societies or other historical periods. Their work thus focused as much on disproving the existence of “true” autobiography in other cultures as it did on tracing the history of autobiography. In the sixty years since the publication of their works, little new scholarship on the topic of premodern Arabic autobiography has appeared. As a result, even later scholars who clearly do not share the philosophical and social assumptions of Misch or Rosenthal have continued to cite their readings of specific texts while ignoring the larger arguments within which those readings were originally situated.

Georg Misch was the student, research assistant, and son-in-law of the famous nineteenth-century German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey. Dilthey believed in the central importance of autobiography as a historical document and indeed that the autobiography furnished the basic, indivisible building block of all historical writing. He saw in it the “most direct expression of reflection on life.”^[8] Misch not only shared his teacher's utilitarian view of autobiography as the foundation of the study of history but also saw himself as one in a long line of German scholars concerned with the history of the autobiography as an important aspect of the history of humanity:

Herder stimulated a whole group of scholars to collect superb self-portraits from the most diverse lands and ages. He explained, in the foreword to such a collection, which first appeared in Germany in 1790, that a “library of authors writing about themselves” would make an excellent “contribution to the history of mankind.” Goethe then conceived of the idea of a “comparison of the so-called confessions of all the ages”: the great progression of the liberation of the human personality would be thereby illuminated. (Emphasis added)^[9]

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Misch's massive Geschichte der Autobiographie (The History of Autobiography) traces autobiographical writing and self-depiction from its ancient roots to what is, for Misch, its emergence as a mature, historically useful, engaging expression of an individual's ability to reflect on his or her age in the writings of Rousseau. He sets out to tell the story of how the autobiography metamorphosed into perfection with Rousseau and portrays that development in decidedly teleological fashion as parallel to, and resulting from, the development of self-consciousness and individual personality in the West. This progression, as Misch sees it, moves from a general absence of a sense of individual self to a self-conscious concern with the subject. According to Misch, the autobiography “belongs, in its essence, to the recent formations of higher stages of culture.”^[10] He investigates the autobiography as an important aspect of the stage-by-stage development of the “western” psyche. Autobiographical writings marginal to this progression are swept aside, albeit not without some difficulties.

Nevertheless, and contrary as it would seem to his stated intention, Misch devotes considerable space to ancient “Oriental” autobiographical writing, launching his multivolume study with a treatment of autobiographical writings from such traditions as those of ancient Egypt, the Fertile Crescent, and the Old Testament Books (specifically Ezra and Nehemiah). Although he concedes that the autobiographical writings of the ancient Orient are “unexpectedly numerous,” there is in this richness an “infinite poverty of a sense of the individual.”^[11] It is not until he reaches Greece in the “post-Homeric” and “Attic” periods that Misch speaks of “development.”^[12]

Misch notes that the autobiography appears as a genre unto itself in Greece in the fourth and fifth centuries C.E.^[13] Although many of the authors of autobiographies in this period and slightly before were inhabitants of the eastern Mediterranean (e.g., Galen, Nicholas of Damascus), Misch is careful to portray the autobiography as a product of the West. He dismisses the idea that eastern cultures may have added to the development of western autobiography with a discernible degree of awkwardness: No one, he claims, “would consider the new autobiography as an Oriental outgrowth merely because its representatives and some isolated traits of its physiognomy stemmed from provinces with especially strong Oriental strains.”^[14] Such conclusions notwithstanding, Misch devotes hundreds of pages to various periods of Arabic autobiographical writing. He could not read Arabic, however, so his analysis of individual works (for which he relied on translations or on Rosenthal's work; see below) is less important for our purposes than his general cultural orientation. Particularly instructive in this regard is the procedure by which he dismisses pre-Islamic Arabic poetry

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Misch begins his treatment of Arabic autobiographical writing with an exhaustive survey of pre-Islamic poetry as an expression of the voice of the individual.^[15] He is initially enthusiastic about the individualistic quality of the pre-Islamic corpus and goes to great lengths to explain it; in the final analysis, however, the Bedouins' individuality as expressed in pre-Islamic poetry reflects, for Misch, a profound conformism, despite all appearances to the contrary. The perspective of the pre-Islamic poet is not that of one who looks outward from within but rather that of one who views himself as an elemental, integrated part of the environment and his social group.^[16] The pre-Islamic poet suffers from the fact that he lives in a “one-dimensional intellectual realm.”^[17] Thus Misch dispenses with the poetry itself, apparently disregarding his initial instincts, and proceeds to base his conclusions on a suspect anthropologism applied to an area in which he has no expertise.

If Misch feels compelled to solve the “problem” of individuality in pre-Islamic poetry, the far larger corpus of autobiographical material in the Islamic Middle Ages presents him with even greater difficulties. He confesses the existence of “an astonishingly great number” of such autobiographies “when compared to the state of formal autobiographies from the corresponding time of the Christian Middle Ages.”^[18] He concludes, however, that “the Arabic scholarly biographies are characterized, just as are the Byzantine, by a stage of self-consciousness in which development, as far as we can see, has come to a standstill.” He finds a “paucity of human sentiment” to be their most basic characteristic.^[19]

There was a degree of cross-fertilization between Misch and Rosenthal, who were researching and writing about Arabic autobiographies at the same time. Rosenthal hails Misch's achievement as “a classic work of Classical scholarship,”^[20] and Misch in turn welcomes the materials provided by Rosenthal, for they added to and reinforced his own conclusions. Although Misch's treatment of Arabic autobiographical writings is more wide-ranging and ambitious than Rosenthal's, Rosenthal was the first Arabist to turn his attention to the question of the Arabic autobiography as such.

In contrast to Misch, Rosenthal concentrates on a modest collection of Arabic texts that appear to have unambiguous pretensions to autobiography. Rosenthal does not explicitly develop a genre definition, nor does he concern himself with other manifestations of autobiographical writing, although he acknowledges that they take many forms in Arabic. He speaks simply of a collection of “actual, coherent autobiographies,” whose number appears significant standing alone, yet pales in comparison to the totality of Arabic literary production in the Middle Ages.^[21]

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Rosenthal examines these texts one by one, after a brief and useful discussion of possible Greek and Persian influences on the Arabic autobiographical tradition. He ascribes primary influence to later classical authors such as Galen. But Rosenthal, like Misch, finds the source material wanting. His views are perhaps best summarized in the opening and closing remarks to his study:

The autobiographical tradition in Islam is bound less to personality than to the subject matter. The experiences of the individual, as such, do not offer the incentive for their being communicated, but rather do so only through their generally applicable pedagogic content.^[22]

None of the autobiographies came into being out of a consciousness of the individual value of the uniquely personal.^[23]

These views of Misch and Rosenthal are even more curious when seen against the background of nineteenth-century European scholarship in which the Arabs were noted for their concept of the individual in contrast to the Europe's lack thereof before the Renaissance.

In the Middle Ages Man was conscious of himself only as member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air. . . . [M]an became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such. In the same way the Greek had once distinguished himself from the barbarian, and the Arabian had felt himself an individual at a time when other Asiatics knew themselves only as members of a race.^[24]

Similar to the historical shift in the definition of autobiography noted at the beginning of this chapter, this image of the individuality of the Arabs dropped out of western scholarly discourse and was replaced by its diametric opposite.

Rosenthal thus operates within categories very similar to those used by Misch, positing an idealized autobiography (perhaps typified by Rousseau, possibly deriving from Augustine) never to be realized in Arabic. This idealization is part unarticulated genre theory (successful autobiographies have a certain relationship to personality not found in Arabic examples) and part unarticulated theory of personality or of individuality (those incidents of individuality worth observing, depicting, and so on, are not to be found in the Arabic examples, perhaps because their authors did not experience them). Neither of these mutually reinforcing preconceptions is made explicit in Rosenthal's monograph. They appear clearly, however, in the judgments he renders about individual texts and about the genre as a whole. The following examples are characteristic of the uniformly negative evaluations he offers about many of the texts he discusses.

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In the opening passage of his most autobiographical work, al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl (The Deliverer from Error), al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) describes having explored a series of competing schools of religious thought before finding spiritual satisfaction in mysticism. Rosenthal declares that the description is “markedly . . . improbable” and that therefore “psychological veracity is not touched upon.”^[25] Ultimately, Rosenthal feels compelled to point out how unfavorably al-Ghazālī's autobiography compares to that of Augustine. Rosenthal's judgments about Samaw’al al-Maghribī's autobiography are particularly harsh. Samaw’al (d. 1174), a Jewish convert to Islam, is said by Rosenthal to lack “the religious drives necessary for the inner veracity of a religious conversion.”^[26] Further, Rosenthal all but accuses Samaw’al of lying about the dreams he had portending his conversion to Islam.^[27] Usāma ibn Munqidh (d. 1188), author of a highly entertaining book-length autobiography, is faulted for failing to possess insight into the “world-historical meaning” of the events that he witnesses and also for being unable to distinguish between meaningful and meaningless events.^[28] The autobiography of Abū Shāma (d. 1268), perhaps because it is written in the third person, is called “the first proof of how . . . the expression of consciousness of the self [in the Arabic tradition] has loosed itself totally from any relationship at all to inner worth.” The work has, for Rosenthal, the effect of the “most meaningless, emptiest exaggeration.”^[29]

Obviously, a student of literature might today perceive these same characteristics—accepting for the sake of argument that Rosenthal's caustic barbs correctly describe some aspects of the texts addressed—as features to be analyzed: the autobiographer's manipulation of the narrative in a way that might not correspond to the actual order of the events experienced (al-Ghazālī); the question of the autobiographer's veracity and the role of autobiography as “conversion narrative” (Samaw’al); the selection of both large historical events and minute personal details with which to construct a portrait of a life (Usāma); and the relationship between the author's conception of self and the literary structure of the autobiographical text (Abū Shāma). Indeed, Rosenthal's own categories of thought, such as “psychological veracity,” “religious drives,” “the inner veracity of conversion,” “meaningful” versus “meaningless” events, and the “world-historical meaning” of witnessed events, might today require more intellectual archaeology than those of the medieval texts he finds so unilluminating.

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Despite Rosenthal's categorical judgments, his achievement must not be overlooked: he was the first modern scholar to identify the genre of Arabic autobiography and to collect many of its important texts. He also, along with Misch, underscored the connection between the Greek and Arabic traditions of autobiographical writings. Without his monograph on the subject, which for all its archaisms was nevertheless pioneering and magisterial, the present study might never have been undertaken. A remarkable indication of the significance of Misch's and Rosenthal's work is that neither has been superseded in more than half a century of subsequent scholarship. Indeed, the small body of texts they examined became an accepted canon in scholarly circles, and their conclusions have been echoed for decades in many contexts.

Arabic Scholarship

The first scholarly treatments of the Arabic autobiographical tradition in twentieth-century Arabic scholarship owe much to Rosenthal's original presentation of the corpus and refer to only a handful of texts not treated by him; understandably, however, they do not agree with some of Rosenthal's unremittingly negative evaluations of the texts themselves. Iḥsān ‘Abbās's monograph, Fann al-sīra (The Art of the Sīra), explores the Arabic literary genre sīra, which combines both biographical and autobiographical dimensions (see below). The last chapter of the work focuses on premodern Arabic autobiographies and describes seventeen texts in some detail.^[30] ‘Abbās groups the texts into five large categories: (1) purely anecdotal texts (akhbārī maḥḍ); (2) texts of explanation, elucidation, warning, or justification (tafsīr, ta‘līl, i‘tibār, tabrīr); (3) texts of spiritual struggle; (4) texts recounting the author's adventures; and (5) other. In the same year, Shawqī Ḍayf published a study of Arabic autobiography the title of which, al-Tarjama al-shakhṣiyya (The Self-Authored Tarjama), refers to a different, though related, genre of Arabic literature, the tarjama, or biographical notice (see below).^[31] He, too, groups these self-narratives into five categories: (1) philosophical, (2) scholarly and literary, (3) spiritual/mystical, (4) political, and (5) modern. Both works are primarily descriptive, and, although they provide readings of the texts that are more grounded in the conventions of the Arabic literary tradition, neither successfully opened up the field of autobiographical studies among Arab scholars in the disciplines of Arabic literature or Middle Eastern history.

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A more recent study of modern Arabic autobiography by Yaḥyā Ibrāhīm ‘Abd al-Dāyim, al-Tarjama al-dhātiyya fī al-adab al-‘arabī al-ḥadīth (The Autobiography in Modern Arabic Literature), addresses the premodern autobiographical tradition in a rather different manner.^[32] First, ‘Abd al-Dāyim categorizes the texts primarily by the authors' motivations for writing them, and second, he addresses the literary dimensions of the texts more directly. Although dealing with nearly all of the same texts as his predecessors, ‘Abd al-Dāyim sees a significant connection between the premodern and modern traditions of Arabic autobiography, albeit with a noticeable dislocation caused by the rapid adoption of certain western cultural forms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Treating autobiography primarily as a literary (rather than historical) form, he deems many medieval texts to have reached a high level of literary development. Among those he cites as communicating a sense of “literary pleasure” similar to modern texts are the autobiographies of al-Mu’ayyad al-Shīrāzī, Ibn Buluggīn, Ibn al-Haytham, al-Rāzī, Usāma ibn Munqidh, Ibn Khaldūn, and al-Sha‘rānī.^[33]

General Misconceptions

In the field of Middle Eastern studies, Arabic autobiographies became “orphan texts,” dismissed by literary scholars, historians, and political scientists for conflicting reasons. Three primary assumptions seem to have hindered recognition of this tradition and greater scholarly attention to this corpus. The first has been the assumption that autobiography is extremely rare in Arabic literature. Edward Said, for example, writes, “Autobiography as a genre scarcely exists in Arabic literature. When it is to be found, the result is wholly special.”^[34] Stephen Humphreys refers to autobiography as “a very rare genre in Islamic literature.”^[35] Albert Hourani wrote of Rashīd Riḍā, the early-twentieth-century Egyptian reformer: “He has left us something which is rare in Arabic, a fragment of autobiography which in fact is a history of his intellectual and spiritual formation during the first thirty years or so of his life.”^[36] However, the idea that autobiography is almost nonexistent in Arabic literature may already be changing, for in the revised edition of Hourani's work (1983), this line was altered to read: “He has left us something which is not so rare in Arabic as was once thought, a fragment of autobiography [emphasis added].”^[37]

The assumption that premodern Arabic autobiography is a rarity has been repeated in even more categorical terms in one of the few recent works to address the topic directly, the edited volume Middle Eastern Lives: The Practice of Biography and Self-Narrative.^[38] For example, Marvin Zonis writes:

Those works from the region that achieve the “true potential of the genre” are few in number, limiting the utility of autobiography for illuminating Middle Eastern conceptions of the self. But not only is autobiography generally lacking; biographies, indigenous to the region, are also in relatively short supply. . . . It is no wonder, then, that autobiography and biography are not yet part of the genres of literature in the Middle East.^[39]

Zonis goes on to lament the problems that the lack of Middle Eastern autobiographies causes the historian:

The relative absence of autobiographies deprives investigators of the Middle East, both Western and Middle Eastern scholars, of the opportunity to examine first-person data on the life course as it is lived in the Middle East.^[40]

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Zonis's conclusions are vastly overstated. Leaving aside the question of biography, if we search only for modern, politically oriented autobiographical texts (the field that most interests Zonis), we find from Egypt alone autobiographies by ‘Abbās II (the last khedive, r. 1892–1914), Muḥammad Najīb (first president of Egypt), Anwar al-Sādāt (third president of Egypt), Jihān al-Sādāt (first lady), ‘Alī Mubārak (statesman and cabinet minister under several successive governments), Ibrāhīm Fawzī Pasha (military general), Nubar Nubarian (statesman and minister), Rashīd Riḍā (political and social reformer), Hudā Sha‘rāwī (early feminist), Bābakr Badrī (Sudanese leader of the Mahdist movement that opposed Anglo-Egyptian rule), Aḥmad ‘Urābī (leader of the 1881–82 rebellion), Salāma Mūsā (social and political thinker), Ṭāhā Ḥusayn (cultural figure and minister of education), ‘Uthmān Aḥmad ‘Uthmān (political figure and commercial developer), Aḥmad Amīn (literary historian), Khālid Muḥammad Khālid (religious reformer), Muḥammad ‘Abduh (the single most influential religious reformer of the nineteenth century), Muḥammad Farīd (nationalist political figure), and Sayyid Quṭb (religious reformer of the Muslim Brotherhood), as well as ‘Abd al-‘Aִzīm Ramaḍān's full-length study of twentieth-century Egyptian political memoirs covering many less famous examples.^[41]

The overall impression that Arabic autobiography is an extremely rare phenomenon is due primarily to the small number of examples that have been available to scholars. Rosenthal treats twenty-three texts in his article.^[42] The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature cites seventeen of these texts^[43] and Bernard Lewis lists twenty-one of them in his survey, “First-Person Narrative in the Middle East.”^[44] Iḥsān ‘Abbās treated seventeen texts, and Shawqī Ḍayf broadened the field slightly by treating twenty-six.^[45] A 1989 dissertation by Saleh al-Ghamdi presents twenty-seven autobiographical works dating from the ninth to the sixteenth century.^[46] Thus the same corpus of approximately two dozen texts has provided the foundation for all twentieth-century studies of the genre of Arabic autobiography up to the present. Although a large number of premodern Arabic autobiographical texts have been edited from manuscript and published in Arabic in the sixty years since the publication of Rosenthal's study, there simply has not been a conceptual category for premodern Arabic autobiography in either western or Arab scholarship that would cause them to be grouped together and thereby draw the attention of scholars.

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A second major assumption follows from the supposed rarity of Arabic autobiographies: those few texts that have attracted scholarly attention have been presumed to be, and have therefore been studied as, anomalies rather than as part of a literary genre or historical tradition. Ironically, al-Suyūṭī, writing in 1485, was far more aware of the Arabic autobiographical tradition than most Arab or western scholars are today. This tendency to examine autobiographical texts as isolated, unrelated texts has even affected the scholarly understanding of the course of twentieth-century Arabic literature. Although several modern autobiographies, particularly that of Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, are considered to be among the greatest works of modern Arabic literature, surveys of that literature have completely ignored the genre. Instead, the attention of the literary establishment, influenced by the prestige of the novel in the West, has been focused almost entirely on the development of the Arabic novel. Modern Arabic autobiographies are thus most often dealt with as romans manqués.^[47] The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature contains no separate treatment of modern autobiography and notes only that several early Arabic novels were autobiographical^[48] and that Ṭāhā Ḥusayn's work, al-Ayyām, is an autobiography.^[49] Pierre Cachia, author of a study on Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, does not mention any other autobiographies in his collection of essays surveying modern Arabic literature.^[50] And M. M. Badawi, who briefly treats the ubiquitous al-Ayyām, finds it disappointing for not being more of a novel:

But despite the fact that it is one of the most attractive literary works in modern Arabic, al-Ayyām is not a novel. For all its irony and detachment, its vivid characterization, its humorous and pathetic situations, it is still no more than an inspired autobiography.^[51]

This treatment of autobiographies, both medieval and modern, as a collection of unrelated texts, on the one hand, and as awkward (mis)representations of other genres such as biography, historical writings, or novels, on the other, has led scholars to ignore both the historical links between these texts and the literary discussions and evaluations of the genre of autobiography penned by premodern Arab authors. The late medieval critical discourse in which writers addressed issues such as whether an autobiography is more historically reliable than a biography, whether it is more virtuous to leave the writing of one's life to others (thus avoiding charges of vanity and self-aggrandizement), whether one should write an autobiography as a separate work or embed it in larger work, and so forth, has been completely ignored.

The third major hindrance to the study of Arabic autobiography has been the early judgments of Misch and Rosenthal that these Arabic texts do not constitute “true” autobiographies. Their opinions have been accepted as authoritative and repeated uncritically in survey works for more than half a century, a state of affairs that has successfully discouraged any serious reevaluation of the genre. This alleged shortcoming is variously formulated as the absence of any depiction of the author's personality or personal life or as a sweeping generalization that Arabic biographies and autobiographies deal only with types and classes rather than with individuals. Gustave von Grunebaum, for example, writes:

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Much of Arabic autobiography is limited to the listing of significant dates: birth, study, public appointments. The personality behind the events remains shrouded. . . . Only rarely does a scholar—and all the Muslim autobiographers are scholars or theologians of one sort or another—describe his personal character.^[52]

Thus western scholarship has created out of the Arabic autobiographical and biographical traditions a literary construct in which we find individual texts describing “types” rather than a type of text describing individuals. This construction is based on a model so steeped in a particular modern western conception of biography and autobiography that scholars are unable to address effectively an auto/biographical tradition possessed of different literary conventions. This line of thought derives in part from modern expectations that an autobiography should reveal an interior self different from, and even at odds with, the exterior public self. In short, the reader confronted with statements such as those cited above could easily conclude that autobiography and even biography are either nonexistent or exceedingly rare in Arabic and that the few examples that do exist are completely devoid of merit or interest. Such a conclusion would be, quite simply, false.

Against this prevailing current, a few dissenting voices have occasionally been raised, most often by scholars of other traditions who have on the whole been more impressed with the Arabic texts in question than have western Arabists. The University Library of Autobiography (1918) included not only translations of the autobiographies of Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna), al-Ghazālī, and Tamerlane but also a sympathetic introduction by Charles Bushnell.^[53]

The wonderful “confession” of Saint Augustine created no school, was imitated by no successors until, some six hundred years having passed, we begin to trace the rising culture of the Middle Ages. We then find the first autobiographical successors of Saint Augustine not among Christians, nor even among Europeans, but among the Arabic scholars of the Mohammedan Empire.^[54]

Nearly sixty years later, Aldo Scaglione noted with surprise that, although they had been readily available in translation for decades, none of these texts had yet been treated in any existing western study of autobiography. In his own study devoted to the question, Is there really no true autobiography outside of Christian Europe? in which he examines the texts cited above as well as a fourth medieval Arabic autobiography, that of the famous fourteenth-century historiographer Ibn Khaldūn, Scaglione felt it necessary to substantiate his case by comparing each of these texts with contemporary European texts generally accepted as classic autobiographies.^[55] He argues that because the Islamic texts can be shown to share basic characteristics with the canonical European texts, they must therefore also be deemed autobiographies. Though the arguments he presents are compelling, his conclusions have had little impact.

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S. D. Goitein's opinion similarly offers a remarkable contrast to those of his contemporaries regarding the nature of the Arabic auto/biographical tradition. He states in reference to al-Balādhurī's Ansāb al-ashrāf (Genealogies of the Descendants of the Prophet Muhammad):

First and foremost, I was impressed by the endless number of individuals whose personality is clearly brought out, in one way or another, by those ancient Arabic narratives. In the case of prominent actors on the scene, this is being done in monographs, composed of consecutive accounts, complemented by longer or shorter disconnected anecdotes, and concluded, usually subsequent to the story of his death, by a formal description of his character, illustrated again by the narration of relevant deeds, dicta, or incidents.^[56]

This work by al-Balādhurī (d. 892) is not strikingly different from the rest of the Arabic tradition; Goitein's reading, however, is notably different from those of many of his peers. He sees in the compound nature of these texts (narratives, disconnected anecdotes, quotations, formal descriptions of character, deeds, dicta, etc.), not a chaotic jumble devoid of personalities, but a discourse of multiple texts that is, in part, deeply concerned with the portrayal of character.

Only as more Arabic autobiographical writings find their way into print and translation will scholars be able to evaluate this tradition from a firmer foundation. In comparison to the extraordinary corpus of premodern Arabic biographical materials, the strand of autobiographical writings will always appear a weaker step-sibling. In comparison to the corpus of European autobiographical texts for many of the same periods, however, the Arabic corpus is a tradition of substance clearly worthy of further exploration. Its study seems particularly vital as its very existence calls into question many western assumptions about the representation of self, consciousness, personality, and identity.

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A reading of the corpus used as the basis for this study, a far larger body of texts than previously assembled, leads to a number of initial conclusions: (1) Arabic autobiographies—defined as texts that present themselves as a description or summation of the author's life, or a major portion thereof, as viewed retrospectively from a particular point in time—are far more numerous than has been assumed, even though they constitute a minor genre when contrasted with the vast body of Arabic biographical and prosopographical writings; (2) premodern Arabic autobiographers reveal considerably more about their personal and “inner” lives in their texts than has been previously documented, but much of this information is made manifest only through careful, close reading of the texts and a thorough awareness of their social milieus and literary strategies; and (3) a general literary “autobiographical consciousness” became firmly established in the medieval Arabic literary tradition, an awareness that is articulated in passages of Arabic autobiographies that address various motivations for writing autobiographies, the works of earlier autobiographers, and the ethical and religious implications of writing autobiographies.

Redefining the Issues

In attempting to provoke a reevaluation of autobiography in world literature, two courses of action are possible. One is to unearth the noncanonical elements subversively present in the current western canon and so recover or reemphasize these aspects of cultural diversity. It is rarely stressed, for example, that Galen and Nicholas lived and wrote in Asia Minor (in modern-day Turkey and Syria) or that Augustine, whose work is held to rest so squarely within the western European tradition of autobiography, wrote from North Africa and that it is a North African childhood and youth that he describes so intensely in his Confessions. Nor is it often stressed, although modern scholars often construct Augustine's work as the foundation of the western autobiographical tradition, that more than seven centuries passed before a “true” European was to write an autobiography that approached the works of these figures. Thus, both geographically and historically, these writers of seminal autobiographies must be insinuated into the western tradition by adjusting the (sometimes suspiciously) flexible boundaries of “western culture.” Why, for example, should Europeans construe themselves as any more the heirs to Greek thought than Islamic culture when Islamic culture, in Arabic linguistic form, adopted, nurtured, and added to that body of knowledge for centuries before its transmission to Europe proper?

Even in the body of texts written by Europeans as conventionally defined, there are some intriguing moments of possible contact with other traditions. Several scholars have pointed out, for example, that one of the few autobiographies by a medieval European monarch, the Libre dels Feyts of James I of Aragon (1208–76), appears to be heavily influenced by, if not overtly modeled on, medieval Arabic literary forms. There were as yet few European examples of autobiography to be imitated and none at all for the autobiography of a king.^[57]

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The other more ambitious and potentially more fruitful course of action is to open up nonwestern traditions of autobiography for closer examination. Chinese literature offers an example of an autobiographical tradition that endured for centuries and underwent a number of rises and falls in popularity and several major transformations in terms of form and genre, yet has scarcely been touched on in western scholarship.^[58] The Chinese tradition appears to present a fascinating parallel to the Arabic tradition in that it, too, has provoked little attention among modern native scholars and both traditions may be said to have been far better known among late medieval literati than among twentieth-century academics. The Tibetan tradition presents itself as another interesting candidate for in-depth study. Tibetan spiritual autobiographies are not only numerous and extremely sophisticated but also constitute a major portion of the earliest known Tibetan texts.^[59] Thus the Tibetan autobiographical tradition seems to offer us a remarkable counterexample in which spiritual autobiography is not a late-developing genre but rather one of the foundational genres of an entire literary tradition. A reexamination of medieval and early modern Japanese nikki works (inadequately referred to in English as “diaries”) and other autobiographical texts seems to be equally promising. Such works as the eleventh-century Heian literary diaries of Murasaki Shikibu, Sarashina, and Izumi Shikibu and, from later periods, texts such as the autobiography of Arai Hakuseki (1657–1725) and the spiritual autobiography of his contemporary, Hakuin Ekaku (1686–1769), all seem ripe for reevaluation with fewer Eurocentric and presentist assumptions about the literary conventions of “true” autobiography and a less parochial conceptualization of ideas such as the self, the human personality, and “individualism.”^[60]

Given the importance accorded autobiography for the understanding of culture, personality, and society, it is imperative to study nonwestern traditions both for their own sake and comparatively. This path of study will highlight previously overlooked aspects of European autobiographies and should provoke new and insightful readings. The present work is designed as a step in this direction.

The Arabic autobiographical tradition presents itself as a particularly important example by virtue of both its historical and its textual dimensions. It is a tradition that originated early (ninth–eleventh centuries), has endured for more than a millennium, evolved in a number of different directions in terms of formal characteristics, and, perhaps most important, articulated itself in discussions and critical writings about the autobiographical act.

With this background in mind, the simple phrase of our fifteenth-century Arab autobiographer, Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī, “Scholars from ancient to modern times have continually written biographical accounts of themselves,” stands as a significant challenge to the views of late-twentieth-century literary scholarship on the history of autobiography in world literature and the act of portraying the self in human culture.

Notes

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CHAPTER TWO
The Origins of Arabic Autobiography

Biographical Traditions: Early Prototypes

The Arabs of pre-Islamic times practiced a type of oral biography in the form of short narratives called akhbār (sing. khabar). When reciting his genealogy, a tribesman would add identifying remarks and accounts of memorable incidents associated with certain figures in the lineage.^[1] Similarly, a poem would be transmitted along with reports about the poet and the occasion for the composition of the verses. These paired elements, the informational khabar and the transmitted text (whether a list of names or a poem), affirmed each other's authority and authenticity, and the joined elements of anecdote and poem, or anecdote and genealogy, commonly remained together in oral tradition as a single discursive unit. For this reason, perhaps, the khabar remained unitary and limited in focus and never expanded to the point of becoming the summation of a life.^[2] With the advent of Arabic writing and the proliferation of literacy, it was primarily by the accumulation and combination of akhbār that biographies (along with various sorts of extended history accounts) were first constructed. The pattern of linking poetry and prose into a single discourse imprinted itself very strongly on early Arabic written literature and greatly influenced the formation of written historical and literary genres during the early Islamic period (seventh–ninth centuries).^[3]

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From the rich but fragmentary materials of oral tradition, a written scholarly tradition of compilation and anthologization emerged. Under the early caliphs of the Umayyad dynasty (661–750), the historical lore of the pre-Islamic Arabs, along with reports of events in early Islamic history, was committed to writing. Massive collections of poems, place-names, genealogies, rare and obscure vocabulary, and many other types of knowledge were compiled directly from oral sources. The tenth-century bibliographer Ibn al-Nadīm has left a catalog of these early works, which also included lists of caliphs, compilations of anecdotes about poets, and incidents from the lives of early political figures. From such early collections of akhbār, later historians compiled the first dynastic and annalistic histories, sometimes juxtaposing conflicting accounts in a single work and leaving the reader to choose among them. Finally, reports of the words and actions of the Prophet Muhammad were collected in authoritative compendiums that listed the transmitters of each report by name. Eventually, the written tradition began to generate its own distinctive genres, less dependent on the form of the raw data being collected, among which were a number of genres that can be more properly termed biographical in varying degrees.

Influenced perhaps by the genealogical model, the earliest independent biographical listings take as their subject groups of specialized professionals such as ḥadīth transmitters, poets, singers, and so forth, rather than single individuals.^[4] The treatment of subjects as members of a group, however defined, remained the most common technique of Arabic biographical writing. The major exception was the life of the Prophet Muhammad, recensions of which date back to the eighth century. Early versions of his life story, called maghāzī (military expeditions), deal primarily with his campaigns, while later compilations, called siyar (see below), offer accounts of his career from birth to death.^[5] Although biographies of later figures were never as detailed as those of the Prophet, the siyar provided a model of life narration whose influence is evident in the biographical as well as the autobiographical writings of later centuries.

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By the seventh century, the reports of the Prophet's career had been collected and arranged into a sequential narrative. But many scholars were interested in such reports only to the extent that they could support, or produce, a particular interpretation of the law. Reports of legal, ritual, and theological importance were thus separated out and given the name ḥadīth, “reports of the Prophet's exemplary words and deeds.” To confirm the reliability of ḥadīth reports, it was necessary to examine the men and women who had transmitted them. Did the scholar cited as the transmitter of a particular report have a reputation for veracity and good character? Could he have met the teacher from whom he claimed to have heard the ḥadīth? Were the two men actually in Mecca (or Medina, or Kufa) at the same time? Did he receive authorization (ijāza) to transmit this particular report? And so forth. To keep track of such information, ḥadīth scholars compiled lists of the Prophet's companions and of those Muslims of subsequent generations who transmitted on their authority. Many such lists contain little more than names, in chronological or alphabetical order; others, however, notably the compilation of Ibn Sa‘d (d. 845), contain extensive akhbār about many of their subjects. As crucial elements in the authentication of transmitted knowledge, biographical data were rapidly assimilated to, and developed within, the domain of historical writing.^[6]

Biographical Writing: Literary Genres

The most significant types of Arabic biographical writing that present themselves as complete summations of a life in one fashion or another are sīra, tarjama,barnāmaj, fahrasa, and manāqib. The sīra and tarjama were both geographically and historically quite widespread and are dealt with in detail below; the terms barnāmaj and fahrasa, however, have been limited to specific regions and periods. The term barnāmaj, in the sense of biography, was used almost exclusively in Islamic Spain (eighth–fifteenth centuries) and later, to a much lesser extent, in North Africa,^[7] while the use of fahrasa or fihrist to denote a biography or autobiography is restricted to North Africa and particularly to Sufi contexts.^[8] For brevity's sake, as the barnāmaj and fahrasa refer to texts that are structurally almost identical to the tarjama, they are addressed here as regional variants of that basic form.

As we shall see, the genres sīra and tarjama (in its several variant forms) eventually developed recognized subgenres in which the author recorded his own life rather than that of someone else. These constitute the two genres of early medieval Arabic literature that most closely resemble the western concept of autobiography. The last of the biographical forms mentioned above, however, the manāqib (lit. “virtues”), never seems to have been used for autobiographical purposes; the form was apparently too explicitly linked to praise and encomia to be adapted for use in autobiographical writings. Manāqib works were written about religious and political figures, groups of people, occasionally of cities, and even of the Islamic religion itself.^[9] The vast majority, especially in later centuries, were focused on religious figures, particularly Sufi mystics. Other terms associated with the biographies of religious figures are akhbār (accounts), akhlāq (morals), faḍā’il (superior qualities), khaṣā’iṣ (attributes), and ma’āthir wa-mafākhir (glorious deeds and gracious qualities). These forms, however, along with the manāqib, remained entirely biographical in nature and never seem to have developed parallel autobiographical traditions, as did the sīra and tarjama forms.

Sīra (Exemplary Life Story)

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The sīra is the earliest of the full biographical forms, dating at least to the second Islamic century (eighth century) with the works of Ibn Isḥāq (d. 767) and Ibn Hishām (d. 828 or 833) on the Prophet Muhammad. Derived from the verb sāra, meaning “to go” or “to travel,” the noun sīra denoted a path or journey, one's manner of proceeding, and by extension, the behavior or conduct of an individual.^[10] It eventually came to mean a biography, in particular that of the Prophet Muhammad. The form soon came to serve as a vehicle for the retelling of other famous lives, such as Ibn Shaddād's sīra of Saladin (Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ayyūbī), Badr al-Dīn al-‘Aynī's biography of the Mamluk sultan al-Mu’ayyad, al-Sayf al-muhannad fīsīrat al-malik al-Mu’ayyad (The Fine Indian Blade on the Life of King al-Mu’ayyad), and many others.

The sīra thus became an independent work devoted to the biography of an individual; although there are far fewer of these texts than the hundreds of thousands of shorter biographical notices that have come down to us, they still constitute a sizable body of literature. In addition, the term sīra appears to have carried the connotation of an exemplary life, such as that of the Prophet Muhammad or his son-in-law, ‘Alī, and in certain later periods is found predominantly among Shi‘ite writers. In the late medieval and premodern periods, the title manāqib (virtues) became the most common term for single-subject biographies of religious exemplars. Despite the change in nomenclature, manāqib works often proceeded in the manner of a sīra, documenting the subject's career from birth to death using eyewitness testimony and lists of teachers, students, family members, and works composed.

The term sīra grew to encompass autobiographies as well, as seen in the case of the work of another al-Mu’ayyad, al-Mu’ayyad al-Shīrāzī (d. 1077), who recounts the events of his own life, although it is difficult to determine whether the title Sīrat al-Mu’ayyad was originally used by the author or applied to the text by later copyists. In any case, the two types of sīra, biographical and autobiographical, were not initially distinguished from one another. The genre, as such, consisted of the literary representation of a life as a subgenre of history and did not differentiate between first-person and third-person texts; and as some autobiographical texts were also written in the third person, the texts themselves were at times not formally different. Although a sīra might be given a formal, often flowery, title when composed, it later often came to be known simply as “The Sīra of so-and-so” in medieval bibliographies, indexes, and cross-references in other works.^[11]

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The term sīra in reference to an independent auto/biographical text became less and less common over the centuries (with the exception of its continual use in reference to the biography of the Prophet), and fifteenth-and sixteenth-century writers such as al-Suyūṭī, Ibn Ṭūlūn, and al-Sha‘rānī do not even mention it in their discussions of autobiography. One reason for this disappearance may be that by this later period the term sīra had also come to designate a genre of folk epic, such as the epics of the poet-warrior ‘Antar ibn Shaddād, the heroine Dhāt al-Himma, and the Bedouin tribe of the Banī Hilāl.^[12] This extension of the term may well have grown out of the idea of the exemplary life, for the genre consists primarily of highly romanticized accounts of larger-than-life heroes and their adventures. The term was revived in the twentieth century, however, in modern Arabic both as a term for biography and as part of a compound neologism, al-sīra al-dhātiyya (self-sīra), now the most common term for autobiography.

Most Arabic biographical writings from the early medieval to the modern period, however, do not take the form of independent works, that is, as individual sīras (Ar. pl. siyar), but rather in various forms of biographical collections and anthologies. The production of biographical dictionaries (ṭabaqāt ), annalistic histories (tawārīkh), which included biographical notices, and biographical materials preserved in anecdotal form (akhbār) reached stupendous proportions during the Islamic Middle Ages. Some of the larger biographical compendiums contain well over ten thousand biographical notices, and the number of compendiums themselves is in the thousands. Biographical writing was for centuries one of the most widespread genres of Arabic literature.^[13]

Ṭabaqāt (Biographical Dictionaries)

Most Arabic biographies are found in special collections, referred to in English as “biographical dictionaries” or “biographical compendiums.” The earliest of these were devoted to the generations (Ar. sing. ṭabaqa) in a category or class of people, hence the Arabic name for the genre, ṭabaqāt (lit. “generations”). A great number of different “classes” (sing. ṣinf or ṭā’ifa) provided the framework for such compendiums in the Islamic Middle Ages: Qur’ān reciters, physicians, caliphs, scholars of ḥadīth, jurists of the Shāfi‘ī legal tradition, theologians of the Mu‘tazilī school, Shi‘ite scholars from Bahrain , grammarians from Yemen, famous women scholars of Egypt, poets of the sixteenth century, poets the author met personally, teachers of the author, and so on. Occupations, geographic origins, sectarian and dogmatic affiliations, historical periods (particularly centennial compilations), tribal and family groupings, and even first names and nicknames were all used as parameters for defining a particular group to be covered in a given biographical dictionary. Women scholars were commonly included in medieval biographical compendiums, and some collections devoted special sections to various classes of women including poets, religious scholars, and mystics.^[14] The variety as well as the number of ṭabaqāt works is at times overwhelming. Medieval Islamic society preserved massive amounts of biographical data, and these data were accessed, referenced, and cross-referenced in a multitude of ways.

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The organization of these biographical works and other reference works from the same period reflects an intellectual milieu in which classification and categorization, often involving the marshaling of astonishing amounts of specific detail such as dates, names, book titles, and lists of teachers represented the predominant methodology for the acquisition, organization, authentication, and transmission of knowledge. The ubiquity of this intellectual methodology has led some modern scholars to decry the entire Arabic autobiographical and biographical tradition as one concerned only with human beings as representatives of classes or (stereo)types and not with individuals and individual characteristics.

This judgment misses the point of classical Arabic biographical writing as its practitioners understood it. Beginning in the ninth century and possibly earlier, Muslim scholars elaborated competing visions of (religious) authority according to which various groups of qualified practitioners (e.g., ḥadīth scholars, jurists, Sufis) claimed responsibility for the maintenance of aspects of the Prophetic legacy. Given this framework, the biographer's primary task consisted of establishing the specific group's claim to the Prophetic legacy and then documenting the transmission of that legacy from one generation of practitioners to another. This paradigm carried over even to groups whose relation to the Prophet and the Revelation were tenuous or nonexistent (physicians, singers, poets, etc.), all of whose biographers wrote of them as members of professional collectivities. Especially in the more obviously religious contexts, the biographer had little incentive to document his subjects' idiosyncrasies. Thus ṭabaqāt do not fail to take account of individuality; rather, they succeed in excluding it.^[15]

This does not mean that ṭabaqāt entries entirely lack individuation; indeed, many of them contain vivid incident and evocative detail. The amount of individuation and detail varies according to both the “class” of the person represented and his or her social and historical prominence: famous figures almost invariably receive more detailed treatment; biographical notices of poets generally feature more clearly delineated personalities than those of ḥadīth scholars. Yet even these elaborations must be understood in the context of collective and contrastive self-definition through biography. A figure who attained exemplary status in his professional collectivity, or who became a subject of dispute in the controversies that erupted between scholarly and professional groups, attracted to himself or herself evidentiary narratives pro and con, all of which found their way into his or her biographical entry. Disputation, competition, and contention prompted a similar expansion of autobiographical narrative, as the works of Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq, Ibn Buluggīn, and al-Suyūṭī—among others—show.

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Seen in this light, the relationship of autobiography to biography appears to be rather ambiguous. On the one hand, biography provided a literary framework for the emergence of autobiographical literary forms. On the other hand, if the overall project of biography tended to downplay and even exclude “individuality,” it is difficult to see how the emergence of autobiography as a literary act can be traced directly to the biographical endeavors that preceded it. Even so, the raw material and research methodologies used by compilers of these biographical dictionaries eventually gave rise to autobiographical writings in the form of the tarjama, an individual (biographical or autobiographical) entry in a larger compilation.

Tarjama (Biographical Notice)

Most of the entries found in biographical compendiums belong to the genre tarjama, a term with Aramaic origins that can be referred to simply as a “biographical notice.”^[16] In modern Arabic the term literally means a “translation” (cf. Aramaic targum) or an “interpretation,” a sense that was also present in medieval Arabic. But in medieval Arabic the verb tarjama also meant to give a work, or an individual section of a work, a title or heading, as seen in the introduction to a work by the famous Andalusian judge, al-Qāḍī ‘Iyāḍ: “I have given it the title [wa-tarjamtuhubi-] Madhāhib al-ḥukkām fi nawāzil al-aḥkām [The Methods of Judges in the Judgment of Cases].”^[17] By extension, the term may have come to mean a work that was divided into sections with headings.

The term tarjama thus contains three central and interrelated ideas, that of explanation or interpretation, that of transformation into a different medium, and that of clarification by means of division into sections and labeling. The tarjama as biographical notice may be taken to be a representation of a person, to be distinguished from the physical being; it is an inexact, imperfect copy of a life, just as a commentary cannot represent the original text, or a translation represent the Qur’ān.^[18] But it is a key to the person, a clarification, an attempt to label and explain his or her actions and accomplishments and make them comprehensible to posterity and accessible to the student. To reach the original person in a more direct fashion can only be accomplished by reading the original text, that is, his or her works, or by receiving his or her teachings through oral transmission, passed down through generations of teachers. The biography may therefore be seen as a commentary on an original, a key to a great thinker, past or present.

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The basic constituent parts of a tarjama usually consisted of an account of the subject's name and ancestry, date of birth (and death, if applicable), a catalog of teachers (mashyakha, mu‘jam, or thabat),^[19] a bibliography of works written by the subject (fihrist or fahrasa),^[20] travel and pilgrimage accounts (riḥla),^[21] and collections of entertaining or illuminating anecdotes (nawādir and akhbār).^[22] In addition, depending on the subject's professional affliation, a tarjama might include collections of personal letters and formal epistles (rasā’il and ikhwāniyyāt),^[23] selections of poetry (shi‘r),^[24] accounts of visions and dreams (manāmāt or manāẓir),^[25] and accounts of minor miracles (karāmāt) and virtues (manāqib).^[26]

These sections of the tarjama were also composed and published in certain contexts as independent works completely separate from any entry in a biographical compendium. These forms (both as traditional sections of a tarjama and as independent works) merit careful study both for the information they contain about Islamic society in different time periods and as the means for representing dimensions of an individual's life. Unfortunately, however, most of them have attracted little scholarly attention because they fall outside the primary lines of modern historical and religious research. It is astonishing how little information is available about the historical development of these forms despite their status as the primary vehicles through which an enormous amount of knowledge about premodern Arabo-Islamic society has come down to us. Literary scholars have rejected them as more properly the realm of historians, and historians have, on the whole, treated them as transparent and unproblematic, deeming the literary conventions either obvious or uninteresting.^[27]

The Arabic tarjama represents a carefully categorized frame for depicting the most crucial information about a person in an intellectual context that focused on a person's value as a transmitter and contributor to knowledge and to a shared academic and spiritual heritage. The categories in which this information was presented existed both as constituent parts of the tarjama itself and, when expanded, as independent literary genres that could circulate on their own.

Curiously, the portion of the tarjama for which the least articulated terminology developed was the opening narrative segment, which provided the historical “life story” of the subject, although some sources do refer to this section of a tarjama as the sīra. Here a sharp contrast with the western tradition becomes quite clear, for it is only the “life story” that is generically labeled and developed in the western tradition as auto/biography. In the West, it is relatively rare for this narrative to be coupled directly with a person's literary, artistic, or intellectual output; even personal letters are often edited and published separately. In a lengthy medieval Arabic tarjama, however, the basic historical information was often combined directly with the biographer's (or autobiographer's) selection of the subject's best poetry, letters, and bons mots; the subject's life story and literary production were thus often represented side by side and traveled through time together as the tarjama was quoted, expanded, or summarized by later biographers and compilers.

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Autobiographical Subgenres

When the author of a biographical compendium came to a point where it was logical or desirable to write his own entry, he did so in either the first- or third-person voice, and the result was termed a tarjamat al-nafs, “self-tarjama,” or the author was said to have written a tarjama of himself (tarjama nafsah or tarjama li-nafsih). Even more widespread as a practice was the writing of a self-tarjama so that it could be included in a biographical compendium edited by someone else. At times these autobiographies were produced at the direct request of the compiler of the biographical dictionary. Many such texts are included in collections that consist primarily of biographies and are sometimes only identified as autobiographies by a single line or phrase such as “the following text that he wrote about himself.” The autobiographical text mught appear in its complete form, or the compiler might present only selections from the autobiography, which are then interspersed with material from other sources confirming, contradicting, or supplementing the autobiographical passages. At times the result is a seamless account in which it is quite difficult to distinguish between the hand of the biographer and the hand of the autobiographer; at other times the final product may clearly reproduce the voice of the autobiographer separate from that of the biographer and those of additional sources.

One rich example of this process is the “autobiography” of Ibn al-‘Adīm (d. 1262) as told to Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī (d. 1229), which includes passages, carefully distinguished as such, from Ibn al-‘Adīm's written autobiography (produced at the request of Yāqūt), oral material collected from Ibn al-‘Adīm in an interview with Yāqūt about the written autobiography, as well as a variety of other sources, both written and oral.^[28] Yāqūt (one of the major biographical compilers of his day and himself the author of an autobiography) meticulously reproduces all of these separate voices in this text and in a number of similar examples. The resulting texts reveal a great deal about Yāqūt's methodology in conducting interviews, gathering information, and assembling texts from oral and written primary sources. Through these texts we can catch glimpses of the autobiographical substrata of the mass of biographical writings that have come down to us in anthologized form. A thorough examination of the biographical compendiums should provide more concrete indications as to the nature and extent of such autobiographical practices, even though many of the autobiographical texts referred to are no doubt lost.

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Thus the biographical tarjama, like the sīra, developed an autobiographical subgenre. At first, these self-composed autobiographical notices were scarcely distinguishable from their biographical siblings; this subgenre continued to exist for centuries. Eventually, however, the self-tarjamas provided a major impetus for the development of independent autobiographies and began to take on distinguishing characteristics of their own.

Other Influences

Discussions of the contribution of ancient Greek and Persian literatures to the development of Arabic autobiography focus primarily on the impact of works by the Greek physician Galen of Pergamon (d. ca. 200) and the Persian physician Burzōē (sixth century).^[29] Arabic translations of these texts circulated widely in the Middle Ages, and references to them appear in several Arabic autobiographies written between the tenth and twelth centuries. The philosophers al-Rāzī (Latin Rhazes) and Ibn Sīnā (Latin Avicenna), the physicians Ibn Riḍwān and Ibn al-Haytham, and Samaw’al al-Maghribī, a Jewish convert to Islam, all note their familiarity with one or another of these texts in their own autobiographical writings.^[30]

Burzōē is best known as the translator of the famous collection of animal fables, the Panchatantra, from Sanskrit into Middle Persian. His Persian text was then translated into Arabic by Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ (d. 755 or 756) in the early eighth century and retitled Kalīla wa-Dimna. All that is known about Burzōē's life comes from the short texts prefaced to various redactions and translations of Kalīla wa-Dimna, which include at least five different versions of his travels to India and two versions of his autobiography. One of the most common of the accounts of his journey to India relates that the Persian king Khusraw Anūshirawān (r. 531–79) had heard of a fabulous collection of tales in India and charged Burzōē with the task of obtaining it. Once in India, Burzōē resides in the court of the Indian king for a time before daring to attempt to see this marvelous book. He befriends an Indian by the name of Azawayh and discourses lengthily with him on the nature of true friendship. Finally, he makes his request, and Azawayh brings him the book from the king's chambers. Burzōē copies it, translates it, and then returns to Persia. King Khusraw is so pleased that he offers Burzōē whatever reward he should desire, but Burzōē accepts only a cloak as recompense and requests that his own life story be appended to the work. The king orders this done.

Another version has Burzōē traveling to India in search of powerful herbs that grow in the mountains there, which, when properly prepared, are capable of reviving the dead. Despite many attempts, Burzōē fails in this task. He then meets a group of Indian sages, however, who explain that this legend is but an allegory: the mountains are wise men, the herbs their books, and the dead the ignorant of the earth. Satisfied with this explanation, Burzōē returns to Persia and presents a large number of books he has translated to King Khusraw.^[31]

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Burzōē's autobiography offers yet another version of the events narrated in the account of his journey to India. An accomplished physician, Burzōē despairs of his craft because, in the end, he can only cure disease temporarily and all of his wards eventually succumb to death. He seeks spiritual solace, but none of the religions he turns to offers an answer to his malaise. In the text he twice mentions that he traveled to India, presumably as part of his spiritual quest, and once notes that he translated books there. Eventually, however, he renounces the world and becomes an ascetic.

Burzōē's life story is recounted in an ahistorical mode devoid of such details as names, dates, or places and is structured in a manner that evinces little sense of chronology. It can scarcely be said to have influenced the vast majority of Arabic autobiographies, which are specifically devoted to documenting the historical details of their authors' lives. Yet one text in particular, by al-Ghazālī (d. 1111), does bear some resemblance to Burzōē's text. Al-Ghazālī was a religious scholar and professor at the pinnacle of his highly successful career when he suffered a crisis that literally left him unable to speak. According to his autobiography, al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl (The Deliverer from Error), as a result of this episode he retired from public life in pursuit of Truth.^[32] None of the known schools of religious thought satisfied him, however, until he encountered Sufi mysticism, which provided the spiritual peace he craved. He withdrew from the world to live the life of an ascetic but eventually, years later, returned to his post and wrote his autobiography as a guide to other seekers. Thus, unlike Burzōē's nihilistic despair, al-Ghazālī's text draws on Islamic traditions of didacticism and emulation and offers itself as a guide to the true path.

Galen of Pergamon included personal references and autobiographical details in a number of his writings, but two works in particular are thought to have had some influence on the early Arabic tradition: On My Books and On the Ordering of My Books. In the former, Galen sought to provide a definitive list of his own works after having noted in the book markets of Rome that some of his works were circulating under the names of other authors and still other works were being falsely attributed to him. In the latter, however, Galen did more than simply list his works. In the opening section he attempted to order them as they should be read by students, from the most basic texts to the most difficult and complex, while in a subsequent section he provides brief accounts of his reasons for writing certain works and the time and place in which he did so. In this rough chronology Galen includes brief references to his travels and education and his lengthy conflicts with rivals jealous of his success.^[33]

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Autobibliographies similar to Galen's On My Books did indeed become one of the common features of Arabic autobiography. At times these book lists circulated independently, but more often, unlike Galen's work, they were included in a larger autobiographical work that also documented other aspects of the author's life such as his birthdate, genealogy, teachers, and travels. Although On the Ordering of My Books includes more in the way of personal detail, no Arabic autobiography is structured in a manner similar to Galen's text. The one element for which there are numerous parallels, however, is Galen's account of his jealous rivals. Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq's autobiography (translated in this volume) is very similar in tone to passages in Galen, and Ḥunayn, the preeminent translator of Galen of his day, was certainly familiar with this text; however, Ḥunayn's account is more closely patterned on the biblical/Qur’ānic account of Joseph, which he, as a Christian, would have known equally well (see the introduction to the translation). Another account of intellectual rivalry is found centuries later in the autobiography of al-Suyūṭī, also translated in this volume.

It is clear that the autobiographical writings of both Burzōē and Galen circulated widely and may thus have helped to set the stage for the emergence of the Arabic autobiographical tradition; however, other than the autobibliography subgenre noted above, neither text seems to have influenced in any direct manner the form, structure, style, or content of Arabic biographical or autobiographical writing.

A final thread that played a critical role in the rise of Arabic autobiography was that of spiritual, particularly Sufi, autobiographical writings the origins of which are traced by Rosenthal as far back as al-Muḥāsibī (d. 857) and al-Tirmidhī (d. 898), and continue through al-Ghazālī's al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl and the works of many later Sufi autobiographers such as al-Simnānī, Zarrūq, al-Sha‘rānī, al-Yūsī, and Ibn ‘Ajība.^[34] In these works the author's path of spiritual development constitutes the central focus of the text. They are thus by definition texts that portray primarily an “inner self” and are constructed on a model of transformation and development. They are also, even more clearly than their scholarly counterparts, constructed as models for emulation in the sense that embedded in the text is a call or an invitation to the reader to travel the same spiritual path. Several of these texts culminate with the author's “conversion” to the spiritual or mystical life and may thus also be linked to conversion autobiographies such as those by Samaw’al al-Maghribī, who converted to Islam in the twelfth century, and the Christian writer Fray Anselmo Turmeda, who converted to Islam in the fourteenth century.

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Autobiography as a specific type of Arabic literature thus evolved mainly in the context of the Arabic biographical tradition, which in turn had emerged primarily as a branch of historical writing. Autobiographical writing developed first within two primary forms: sīra and tarjama. Limited exposure to pre-Islamic Greek and Persian models in Arabic translation exerted some influence on physicians and philosophers of the tenth to twelfth centuries—the two classes of scholars most directly involved with ancient Greek and Persian thought. The Sufi spiritual autobiography also emerged as a recognizable subtradition of its own, which in turn influenced even some nonspiritual autobiographical texts. The two recognized indigenous Arabic genres, self-sīra and self-tarjama, took on numerous modified forms in different social and literary contexts, but they continued to be understood by late medieval and premodern writers as constituting a single recognizable act of writing an account of one's life for posterity regardless of the formal differences in the resulting texts.

Notes

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CHAPTER THREE
Toward a History of Arabic Autobiography

If the origins of Arabic autobiographical writing in the sīra and tarjama traditions seem to be clear, the historical time frame for the emergence of a general recognition of the autobiographical act within the Arabic literary tradition is more difficult to determine. One of the major obstacles to the study of Arabic autobiography so far has been the tendency to view autobiographical texts as isolated anomalies rather than as examples of a literary-historical tradition. The sheer number of premodern Arabic autobiographical texts now available effectively negates this approach. Even more telling than the raw numbers, however, are the direct historical connections linking many of these texts and their authors and the recurring pattern of historical “clusters” of autobiographical production. These relationships not only establish the familiarity of authors with earlier autobiographies and autobiographers but also provide the groundwork for an understanding of the development of literary conventions in Arabic autobiographical writing. This chapter provides a basic historical overview of several discrete dimensions of the development of Arabic autobiography by surveying, first, historical connections among texts and authors; second, diverse authorial motives for writing autobiographies as expressed in the texts themselves; and third, the emergence of a general “autobiographical anxiety” as reflected in texts written in justification and defense of the autobiographical act by Arabic autobiographers.

Historical Clusters

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The first “proto-autobiographies” appear to have been composed in isolation from each other. Ḥunayn's ninth-century “Trials and Tribulations” account (translated in this volume) focuses on a defense of himself and his reputation against charges of iconoclasm; al-Muḥāsibī's spiritual manual, Kitāb al-Naṣā’iḥ (The Book of Advice), from the same century is significant primarily as a model for later writers assessing and evaluating their spiritual progress; and al-Tirmidhī's text (translated in this volume), Buduww sha’n abī ‘Abd Allāh (The Beginning of the Affair of Abū ‘Abd Allāh), consisting of a very brief life narrative accompanied by a series of dream accounts, seeks primarily to establish the spiritual authority and status of its author.^[1]

If these earliest Arabic autobiographical writings seem to have been composed in isolation from one another, already by the tenth and early eleventh century, short autobiographies by the philosophers and physicians al-Rāzī, Ibn al-Haytham, Ibn Sīnā, and Ibn Riḍwān were circulating in well-known anthologies and would have been familiar to many scholars over a large geographic expanse. In the same period, the politically and polemically oriented autobiographies of Ibn Ḥawshab (d. 914) and Ja‘far al-Ḥājib (d. ca. 954) were circulating in Shi‘ite circles; these two texts survive only as fragments, but internal textual evidence indicates that the complete texts were of substantial length.

In the late eleventh and twelfth century, there appears to have been a flowering of autobiographical writing and personal record keeping, which, if these did not constitute full autobiographies as such, were widespread enough for biographers such as Yāqūt to draw on extensively in compiling their biographical dictionaries. Autobiographical writings by al-Dānī, al-Fārisī, al-Bayhaqī, Ibn Ma’mūn, Yāqūt himself, and others circulated in this manner. Two lengthy, independent autobiographies from the beginning of this period, those of Ibn Buluggīn and al-Ghazālī, were composed within a few years of each other (ca. 1095 and 1107), the former being a political family history in which the author's life occupies well over half the work and the second a systematically organized account of the author's spiritual crisis, exploration of differing schools of religious philosophy, and eventual acceptance of Sufi teachings. The life story of Samaw’al al-Maghribī (d. 1174), which recounts his conversion from Judaism to Islam and is attached to an anti-Jewish polemical treatise, also dates to this period.

In the late twelfth and early thirteenth century, there appears a cluster of distinctive and noteworthy autobiographical texts written by a group who lived in Damascus and Aleppo during and immediately after the time of Saladin, among whom we can establish a number of direct personal links:

1. ‘Umāra al-Ḥakamī al-Yamanī (d. 1175), poet, diplomat, and historian executed by crucifixion for treason and/or heresy on the orders of Saladin;
2. Usāma ibn Munqidh (d. 1188), nobleman who fought in the counter-Crusades as one of Saladin's commanders;

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3. ‘Imād al-Dīn al-Kātib al-Iṣfahānī (d. 1201), Saladin's personal secretary and later chronicler of his reign (selections translated in this volume);
4. Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī (d. 1229), literary historian and prominent biographer who compiled an enormous biographical encyclopedia of literary figures, including several of his fellow autobiographers;^[2]
5. ‘Abd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī (d. 1231), prominent physician and teacher who met Saladin and was rewarded with a position and government stipend (autobiography translated in this volume);
6. Ibn al-‘Adīm (d. 1262): prominent historian of Aleppo and personal friend of Yāqūt (autobiography translated in this volume);
7. Abū Shāma (d. 1268), historian of Saladin's reign and dynasty (autobiography translated in this volume); and
8. Sa‘d al-Dīn ibn Ḥamawiyya al-Juwaynī (d. 1276), military governor, historian, and finally Sufi mystic.^[3]

Given their prominence and fame, this group of literati were well aware of one another's careers and writings; and, indeed, several of them met face-to-face. ‘Imād al-Dīn quotes from ‘Umāra's autobiography in his own work, Kharīdat al-Qaṣr (The Pearl of the Palace), referring to it as the book that ‘Umāra wrote (muṣannafuhu).^[4] Although he cites primarily ‘Umāra's poetry, he presents the poems for the most part in the order in which they occur in ‘Umāra's autobiography, rather than in that of his dīwān (collected poems).^[5] On one of his frequent trips to Cairo, ‘Imād al-Dīn actually had ‘Umāra's poetry recited to him by the son of Usāma ibn Munqidh, who had heard it from the poet himself—the poetry of one autobiographer recited to another autobiographer by the son of a third autobiographer!^[6] In addition, passages from Abū Shāma's historical work, Kitāb al-Rawḍatayn (The Book of the Two Gardens), the supplement to which includes his autobiography, seem to indicate a familiarity with both ‘Umāra's work^[7] and Sa‘d al-Dīn Juwaynī. ‘Abd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī describes meeting ‘Imād al-Dīn al-Kātib al-Iṣfahānī in his autobiography, and Yāqūt personally commissioned the autobiography of his close friend, Ibn al-‘Adīm, for inclusion in his compendium.

The production of multiple autobiographical texts from this rather close-knit literary and scholarly group may have been prompted by these many personal connections, or the large number of autobiographies known from this period may only reflect the fact that it has been more intensely researched than most other periods of Islamic history. Another possibility, noted by Rosenthal, is that the tremendous political instability of the period may have helped to foster a fertile context for autobiographical production.^[8]

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As a result of the considerable attention devoted to the period of Saladin and the Crusades by both Arab and western historians, most of these texts are well known, commonly used as historical sources, and usually recognized and treated as autobiographies. Among them, however, the work of ‘Imād al-Dīn al-Kātib al-Iṣfahānī stands out, for it is ostensibly a biography of Saladin. Yet later Arab sources such as al-Suyūṭī and al-Sha‘rānī consistently refer to it as an autobiographical work.^[9] They clearly assessed the work from its contents and not from the formal framing device of its title and dedication. Since ‘Imād al-Dīn wrote of himself extensively in this work, it was deemed an act of self-tarjama.

Two other historical clusters appear in Spain. The autobiographer Ibn Sa‘īd al-Maghribī (d. 1286) knew of the earlier autobiographical notices of Ibn al-Imām (d. 1155), al-Ḥijārī (d. 1155), and Ibn al-Qaṭṭā‘ (d. 1121).^[10] Later, Lisān al-Dīn Ibn al-Khaṭīb (d. 1374) states that he saw and read the autograph copy of the eleventh-century autobiography of Ibn Buluggīn when he visited southern Morocco, where Ibn Buluggīn had died in exile, and then returned home to write his own autobiography. He might also have been familiar with the autobiography of Abū Ḥayyān al-Andalusī (d. 1344) who lived a generation earlier, the text of which—although now lost—achieved some fame in the late Middle Ages and was still being cited two centuries later by al-Suyūṭī and al-Sha‘rānī in Egypt as a lengthy autobiographical work; it was probably written during Abū Ḥayyān's sojourn in Egypt. Only a few years after Lisān al-Dīn ibn al-Khaṭīb wrote his text, the famous historiographer Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406), whose family was originally from Spain, and who had met and worked with Ibn al-Khaṭīb in Spain in 1363, also wrote an autobiography.^[11] It is clear that by the end of the fourteenth century there were numerous examples of independent, lengthy autobiographies circulating throughout the Arabic-speaking world.

A more tenuous, but still intriguing, connection lies in an encounter that took place between Ibn Khaldūn and Tamerlane (Timur-lenk) outside of Damascus in 1401. Ibn Khaldūn was trapped inside the city during Tamerlane's siege, but Tamerlane had heard of Ibn Khaldūn's presence and wished to meet him. Ibn Khaldūn describes in a dramatic scene in his autobiography being lowered over the city walls by rope in the middle of the night. Over a period of six weeks, the two met several times and discussed a variety of topics, including Ibn Khaldūn's life story, Tamerlane's genealogy and place in history, the kings of the ancient world, and the geography of the Maghreb. At Tamerlane's request, Ibn Khaldūn wrote out a great deal of information, including a book-length description of the Maghreb. Ibn Khaldūn was eventually released and allowed to return to Cairo.

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It seems plausible that when Tamerlane questioned Ibn Khaldūn about his life, as they had discussed Ibn Khaldūn's other writings, Ibn Khaldūn may have mentioned that he had penned an account of it. And Ibn Khaldūn, as a historian, might well have asked whether an official biography (or autobiography) of Tamerlane was available, or in the process of being written, that he could consult. In any case, soon thereafter Ibn Khaldūn decided to expand his earlier autobiography so as to include his encounter with Tamerlane and republish it as an independent volume, for it had previously existed only as a chapter in a larger historical work.^[12] An autobiography of Tamerlane also appeared and was for centuries accepted as authentic, although in recent decades most modern scholars have come to agree that it was probably created a century or more after Tamerlane's death and was perhaps written by one of his descendants.^[13]

One of the largest clusters of texts is that associated with Ibn Ḥajar al-‘Asqalānī and his pupils. Ibn Ḥajar (d. 1449) wrote several brief autobiographies (one of which is translated in this volume). His student al-Sakhāwī (d. 1497) wrote a thirty-page autobiography that he included in his celebrated biographical compendium of the ninth Islamic century as well as an independent autobiography that remains in manuscript,^[14] and two of al-Sakhāwī's students, Ibn Dayba‘ (d. 1537) and Zarrūq (d. 1493), each wrote autobiographies. Another of Ibn Ḥajar's students, al-Suyūṭī, wrote a substantial autobiography that was then emulated by Ibn Ṭūlūn al-Dimashqī (d. 1546) and al-Sha‘rānī (d. 1565). At more than seven hundred printed pages, al-Sha‘rānī's text is the longest premodern Arabic autobiography known to us. These texts circulated widely and were cited by later autobiographers as far afield as India (al-‘Aydarūs; d. 1628) and Morocco (Ibn ‘Ajība; d. 1809).

A later thread links members of Sufi circles in North Africa. Ibn al-‘Ajība (d. 1809) was familiar with the autobiographical works of al-‘Arabī al-Darqāwī (d. 1823),^[15] Zarrūq (d. 1493), al-Sha‘rānī (d. 1565), and al-Yūsī (d. 1691). Still another cluster is found in the Shi‘ite community in Jabal ‘Āmil (now southern Lebanon) during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including Zayn al-Dīn ibn ‘Alī al-‘Āmilī (d. 1558), his great-grandson, ‘Alī ibn Muḥammad al-‘Āmilī (d. 1692), and Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan al- Ḥurr al-‘Āmilī (d. 1688).

One fascinating cluster of Arabic autobiographies written by enslaved West Africans appeared in the early nineteenth century in the United States and the Caribbean. These were made famous by the American popular press and played prominent roles in several political causes célèbres. Although the authors were not personal acquaintances, they may very well have known of one other. It seems that those who solicited these autobiographical texts did in fact know of the other cases; thus, if the texts themselves were not directly linked, the political forces that motivated their composition certainly were. The best documented are those written by Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān, and ‘Umar ibn Sa‘īd.^[16]

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Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq (d. 1850), later renamed Edward Donellan, was originally from Timbuktu and educated in Jennah. As a child he traveled extensively with his teacher but was captured at the age of fourteen or fifteen by the Ashanti and sold to Christian slave traders. He arrived in the West Indies in 1807 or 1808 and ended up keeping the accounts for the plantation where he was a slave. He kept these records in Arabic script, which he then read aloud each evening to the plantation owner in pidgin English. A visitor to the plantation, Dr. Madden, was so moved by Abū Bakr's literacy, his faith in the One True God, his highborn rank (he was later often referred to as a prince), and his desire to return to his homeland that he fought for his manumission, which was eventually granted in a British court. On his route homeward, in August 1835, Abū Bakr stopped in England. There, at the request of his hosts, he wrote out his life story in Arabic. Though only a few pages long, it offers a vivid description of his childhood education, his travels, his capture and sale as a slave, and his experiences among the Christians.

‘Abd al-Raḥmān (d. 1829), known as “Prince,” originally from the region of Futa Jalloun, was educated in Timbo, Jennah, and Timbuktu. He was captured at the age of twenty-one while leading a military expedition, sold into slavery, and then purchased by a landowner in Tennessee. He ran away but could not manage to live in the wild and so finally returned. Eventually he married and had several children. In 1807, in an astonishing development, he encountered in the Natchez market John Coates Cox, a man who had lived in Timbo twenty-five years earlier as a guest of his father. Cox recognized ‘Abd al-Raḥmān and tried to buy him but was rebuffed. He then petitioned the governor for the slave's manumission but failed. Finally he launched a publicity campaign with the help of a local newpaper that promised to publish and deliver to ‘Abd al-Raḥmān's father a letter written by his son in Arabic. The U.S. State Department became involved, and ‘Abd al-Raḥmān was freed, but he did not wish to return to Africa without his wife and children. With help from friends, he launched a lecture tour across the northern United States to raise money to buy his family's freedom. For a year he was probably the most famous African American in the nation. During his tour he was constantly asked to write things in Arabic (when asked to write the Lord's Prayer, he would dutifully copy out the opening chapter of the Qur’ān). At the request of those fighting for his cause, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān wrote a short autobiography in Arabic that was translated into English and reprinted as part of the newspaper war that had erupted after his liberation. Eventually his wife was freed, and the two of them sailed for Liberia in February 1829. On arrival they were delayed by the rainy season, and, tragically, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān died of fever before being able to complete the final leg of his journey home. His brief autobiography, written in Arabic and broken English, recounts his life up to the death of his friend, Mr. Cox.

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‘Umar ibn Sa‘īd (d. 1864), also known as “Prince Moro,” was originally from the region of Futa Toro. Accounts of how he ended up being sold as a slave vary, but he eventually arrived in South Carolina, probably in 1807. Reporters portray him as a man of royal lineage and as a converted and faithful Christian. In 1831 he composed an autobiography in Arabic, later translated in two different versions, both of which were published. He even entered into correspondence with Francis Scott Key, author of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” He remained in the United States until his death; the Arabic text of the autobiography, lost since 1925, resurfaced in 1998 and has been published with an introductory analysis.^[17]

In all three cases, the popular press constructed these slaves as “Moors,” as opposed to “Africans”; as royalty (all three were again and again referred to as princes); and as Muslims who worshiped God, in contrast to pagans. The popular press also sought to portray them as potential (or actual) converts to Christianity. But it was their ability to write in Arabic that set each of them on the road to celebrity. In the 1820s even many staunch supporters of slavery were shocked that literate men of noble rank and education were being maintained as slaves; much of the encouragement for setting these men free came from Southern slave owners. In all three cases, the autobiographies were produced at the request of white friends, but the texts clearly draw on features of the Arabic religious biographical tradition (although it is unclear, from the evidence available, whether any of these men had read an Arabic autobiography).

In the nineteenth century, the advent of Arabic printing assured the more rapid dissemination of new texts in the Arab Middle East. The semiautobiographical accounts of travels to Europe such as al-Ṭahṭāwī's Takhlīṣ al-ibrīz ilā talkhīṣ Bārīz (Purified Gold from an Account of Paris Told), published in 1834, as well as experiments in autobiographical fiction such as Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq's al-Sāq ‘alā al-sāq fīmā huwa al-Faryāq (Thigh upon Thigh on the Question of Who Am I), published in 1858, found substantial readerships. In scholarly circles ‘Alī Mubārak published an account of his life in his massive geographic-biographical compendium of Egypt, al-Khiṭaṭ al-tawfīqiyya (1888–89), which was later imitated by Muḥammad Kurd ‘Alī in his six-volume geographic-biographical compendium of Syria, Khiṭaṭ al-Shām (1925–28), which concludes with Kurd ‘Alī's autobiography. In 1898 the famous poet Aḥmad Shawqī prefaced his autobiography to his four-volume anthology of poetry, al-Shawqiyyāt, which unleashed a storm of newspaper commentary. And a wave of political memoirs by figures such as Ibrāhīm Fawzī Pasha (who wrote a personal, and at the time highly controversial, account of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan campaigns) and, later, Nubar Nubarian Pasha (Armenian-Egyptian civil servant), Sa‘d Zaghlūl (Egyptian nationalist leader), and Bābakr Badrī (Sudanese nationalist leader) and a putative autobiography by Aḥmad ‘Urābī (leader of the Egyptian rebellion of 1881–82), also originated in this period.

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In short, these historical clusters of autobiographical production and the myriad individual links among various authors and texts make it clear that Arabic autobiographical writing constituted an often tightly knit literary tradition over many centuries. It is important to note, however, that in only a few of the cases do the autobiographies in these historical clusters actually resemble one another as texts. While the biographical branches of the sīra and tarjama genres remained in formal terms often rigidly conventional, their autobiographical counterparts expanded and evolved beyond the original conventions and purposes of their type. Whereas biographers usually accepted the conventions of earlier examples in their own fields, autobiographers found precedents but did not view them as binding formal models. As a result, the corpus of Arabic autobiographies displays a high degree of formal variety and includes a number of highly idiosyncratic texts. Perhaps this was possible precisely because the production of autobiographical texts remained limited in comparison to that of biographies and prosopographical notices. This degree of variation may also explain why the establishment of different categories or types for Arabic autobiographies in the medieval and premodern periods has proved of such limited usefulness.^[18] Such divisions group together texts that have few formal similarities and at the same time obscure precedents and influences that cut across the boundaries of these heuristic categories.

Whether contact took place between authors or through reading another autobiographer's text, what seems to have been communicated is the autobiographical act as precedent, rather than specific formal characteristics or a sense of what the style or content of an autobiography should be. To whatever degree these authors influenced, motivated, or inspired one another to interpret their lives in literary representations, they did so in a manner that left themselves free to tailor their interpretations to their own individual needs and desires. This history of formal innovation seems to be indicative of an individualistic impulse that is connected in a very significant way to self-portrayal in the Arabic literary tradition.

Authorial Motivations

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The earliest autobiographical texts covered in this survey, those from the ninth through the eleventh century, present themselves directly, with little in the way of framing or justification and no overt concern about how the reader will interpret the fact that the author is writing of himself: Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq and al-Rāzī write to defend themselves against their critics; al-Muḥāsibī's brief autobiographical passage is of a spiritual nature and located in a larger guide to his followers; al-Tirmidhī wrote to establish his own spiritual status and did not provide any introduction or dedication for his text; the works of Ibn Ḥawshab, Ja‘far al-Ḥājib, and al-Mu’ayyad al-Shīrāzī are all memoirs of Shi‘ite religiopolitical activities of the tenth and eleventh centuries; Ibn al-Haytham, al-Dānī, and Ibn Riḍwān wrote scholarly reports of their lives without framing devices to articulate the authors' aims beyond the overtly historical. Two texts from the eleventh century, by Ibn Sīnā and Ibn Buluggīn, are notable from the point of view of the emergence of autobiography as a literary act.

The autobiography of Ibn Sīnā has been well known among western scholars for quite some time and has been edited and published from several different sources.^[19] Although written as a scholarly autobiography, it is more detailed than other contemporary examples of this type.^[20] The autobiography focuses on Ibn Sīnā's childhood and youth and ends while he is still a young man. Ibn Sīnā's student, al-Jūzjānī, later continued the text as a biography, providing an account of the remainder of Ibn Sīnā's life.

The appearance of the text in the biographical dictionary ‘Uyūn al-anbā’fī ṭabaqāt al-aṭibbā’ (The Sources of Knowledge about the Generations of Physicians), by Ibn Abī Uṣaybi‘a (d. 1270), provides an example of how such texts were transmitted during the Middle Ages. The entry on Ibn Sīnā includes a short introduction by the compiler, the text of the autobiography itself, the biography by al-Jūzjānī, a short bibliography of Ibn Sīnā's works, a selection of his poetry, and a bibliographical addendum.

The autobiography proper has come down to us without any formal preface or dedication. In the various medieval biographical compendiums in which it appears, however, compilers prefaced the text in a way that reveals how it was received. Ibn Abī Uṣaybi‘a, for example, wrote:

He related his experiences and described his life so that everyone else could dispense with his own account. And therefore we have confined ourselves for that reason to what he related about himself and also to those of his experiences described by Abū ‘Ubayd al-Jūzjānī, the companion of the Shaykh.^[21]

Al-Qifṭī (d. 1248) included Ibn Sīnā's text in his biographical compendium of scientists and physicians, Ta’rīkh al-ḥukamā’ (History of Scientists), which may have been Ibn Abī Uṣaybi‘a's source, and prefaced the text with the statement: “One of his pupils asked him about his past, and so he dictated what has been recorded from him to [the pupil], which was that he said . . .” A number of the compilers use the Persian term sar-guzasht (recollections) in presenting the text of the autobiography proper, which may well indicate a lingering sense of ambiguity in that period about what Arabic term should be used to describe such a text.^[22]

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The remark by Ibn Abī Uṣaybi‘a that Ibn Sīnā composed his own account of his life so that others would not do so reflects a concern echoed by a number of later writers. For them, the issue was not to write an (auto)biographical text so that such a text would exist but rather to write an account of their lives before others should do so, thus asserting control over the content and presentation of the material and preventing the spread of factual errors. Ibn ‘Ajība (d. 1809), for example, writes that he discovered that his colleagues and pupils were gathering biographical notes about him: “And therefore, fearing that they might allow some addition or omission to slip into their work, I decided to report, with God's assistance, what I have seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears, for that which is transmitted is not that which was actually seen.”^[23] Al-Sakhāwī (d. 1497) notes of ‘Abd al-Ghānī al-Maqdisī that a certain Makkī ibn ‘Umar ibn Ni‘ma al-Miṣrī “collected a tarjama of him before he could collect one himself.”^[24]

The frame created by al-Qifṭī for Ibn Sīnā's autobiographical text, that of writing in response to a request from someone else, is a common prefatory device found in many genres of writing in the Islamic Middle Ages. Whether the request was real or simply a rhetorical device, this opening was deployed by autobiographers and then reused and transmitted by later compilers of biographical compendiums. Al-Sakhāwī, for example, writes that he wrote “a tarjama of himself in response to those who asked him concerning it [ijābatan li-man sa’alahu fīhā].”^[25]

In contrast, the autobiography of ‘Abd Allāh Ibn Buluggīn (d. after 1094) provides explicit, self-conscious justifications for the autobiographical act. In his introduction, Ibn Buluggīn explains that he wishes to portray the truth and that the “intention in this enterprise of mine is not to narrate some entertaining tale [nādiramustaṭrafa] or some strange anecdote [ḥikāya mustaghraba] or an edifying or profitable notion [ma‘nā yu’addī ilā ta’addub wa-intifā‘].”^[26] Rather, he declares that he shall eschew fancy language and embellishment and relate the events of his life directly: “I believe that a continuous narrative is better in both form and composition than one which is cut into pieces. I would like, therefore, to write this work in a manner that flows [smoothly] from topic to topic.”^[27] Among his motives for writing are “to enumerate the blessings of God and to thank Him as is His due, as God has urged in addressing His Prophet: 'And as for the bounty of your Lord, speak!' [Q 93:11]”^[28] and to defend the reign and reputation of his dynasty. These concerns are reiterated in the closing chapter of the work. Perhaps the most striking detail in this passage is that Ibn Buluggīn felt it necessary to justify not the act of recording his life or the history of his family but rather the technique of presenting his work as a coherent narrative instead of as a sequence of carefully substantiated historical anecdotes along with their sources.

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The reference here to Qur’ān 93:11 as part of the motivation for writing an autobiography is intriguing. The same verse is quoted in an earlier, well-known work by another Andalusian writer, Ibn Ḥazm (d. 1064), Ṭawq al-ḥamāmafi al-ulfa wa-l-ullāf (The Neckring of the Dove on Lovers and Love). In the context of discussing fidelity, Ibn Ḥazm writes: “I do not say what I am about to say in order to boast, but simply relying upon the precept of God Almighty Who says, 'And as for the bounty of your Lord, speak!'”^[29] The verse appears to have been deployed as a disclaimer of pride or arrogance when speaking about oneself. Ibn Buluggīn's text provides the earliest-known use of this verse in connection with the writing of an autobiography, but it was later used by a number of Arabic autobiographers in other regions. They could not have picked up this usage from Ibn Buluggīn's autobiography, however, because it did not circulate widely; in fact, it appears to have remained in the original autograph copy of the author or possibly in a single copy made directly from the original. Only one manuscript of the work is extant, that discovered in the library of the Qarawiyyīn Mosque in Fez, Morocco, which was published by E. Lévi-Provençal in the 1930s.^[30] Lisān al-Dīn Ibn al-Khaṭīb saw the autograph copy of Ibn Buluggīn's work on a visit to Aghmāt, Morocco, where he had been held in captivity. Apart from two other brief references to the work, also by fourteenth-century writers, the book seems to have remained completely unknown, uncited, and unreferred to, until this century.^[31]

The next occurrence of Qur’ān 93:11 in an autobiographical text appears to be in Abū Shāma's thirteenth-century work written in Syria, followed by its use nearly two centuries later in the title and preface of al-Suyūṭī's text from Egypt. The use of this verse in three geographically and historically separate instances raises several questions. Are these parallel citations coincidental or related? If the latter, are they related to each other via other autobiographical texts, through Qur’ānic commentaries, or perhaps through other channels such as popular usage of this verse in oral discourse, public sermons, and the like?

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The connection between Qur’ān 93:11 and the act of writing an autobiography is not as direct as might appear at first glance. In the context of this particular chapter of the Qur’ān, “The Morning Light ” (Sūrat al-ḍuḥā), the command “And as for the bounty of your Lord, speak!” is addressed to a singular, male interlocutor identifiable as the Prophet Muhammad:

• In the Name of God the Merciful, the Compassionate!

1. By the morning light!
2. By the darkening night!
3. Your Lord has not forsaken you, nor does He feel spite.
4. The Hereafter is better for you than this [first] life!
5. Your Lord will lavish [bounties] on you and you will know delight.
6. Did He not find you an orphan, then give you respite?
7. Find you unaware, then guide you aright?
8. Find you wanting, and then provide?
9. So as for the orphan, wrong him not!
10. And as for the beseecher, shun him not!
11. And as for the bounty of Your Lord, speak!^[32]

Discussion in many Qur’ānic commentaries is restricted to whether the term “bounty” (ni‘ma: the Arabic is singular, although commonly translated as “blessings”) refers to the Qur’ān itself, so that “speak” would mean “recite,” or, alternatively, to the status of prophethood, in which case “speak” would mean “inform people that you are God's messenger.” The generalization of this verse to apply to anyone other than the Prophet himself is therefore a secondary development, not a close or literal interpretation of the text.^[33]

A preliminary study of the major Qur’ānic commentaries only partly answers these questions. Al-Ṭabarī's tenth-century commentary offers only a synonym for the word “speak,” dhakara, meaning “to mention” or “to state.” It is nonmainstream scholars such as the Mu‘tazilites (a theological school that advocated free will, divine justice, and allegorical interpretation of the Qur’ān) and Shi‘ites (who recognized a series of spiritual leaders after the Prophet Muhammad possessing direct inspiration from God) who first concerned themselves with broader issues and questions. In the case of Qur’ān 93:11, one early treatise, that of the Mu‘tazilite al-Qāḍī ‘Abd al-Jabbār (d. 1025), extends the message of the verse beyond the immediate addressee, the Prophet, to all Muslims, thereby generalizing the obligation of showing one's gratitude for God's blessings to the entire Islamic community. One century later, the commentator al-Zamakhsharī (d. 1144), also a Mu‘tazilite, not only included this broader interpretation but also supported it with a number of Prophetic traditions. More significantly, his text includes the term iqtidā’, “to take as an example or model,” along with an anecdote involving ‘Alī (fourth caliph of the Islamic community and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad) being asked to speak of himself. When he at first refuses, he is reminded of this Qur’ānic verse and only then agrees.

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In most of the major commentaries subsequent to al-Zamakhsharī (with the exception of al-Bayḍāwī's paraphrastic commentary), passages concerning this verse include an ever-larger number of Prophetic traditions in support of the broader interpretation, including examples of members of the Prophet's family speaking of themselves in response to questions and referring directly to the concept of exemplarism. Chronologically, this development roughly parallels the proliferation of autobiographies beginning with the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The large cluster of autobiographies written in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by Ibn Ḥajar and his students follows immediately on Ibn Ḥajar's own study of the Prophetic traditions cited in al-Zamakhsharī's commentary. Ibn Ḥajar's student al-Suyūṭī includes in his commentary on the Qur’ān a greater number of ḥadīth concerning this verse than any previous or later commentator; and he himself, as already mentioned, inspired several of his own students to write autobiographies. The increasing number of ḥadīth cited in support of this interpretation of the verse may have been inspired by the proliferation of autobiographical writings, and it is clear that the interpretation of this verse as applicable to all Muslims and all blessings, the concomitant growth of autobiographical writings, and the increased anxiety demonstrated in those texts in the fourteenth to the sixteenth century all reflect broader developments in medieval Islamic society and thought.

From the twelfth to the fourteenth century we encounter autobiographical texts written in a number of different forms: scholarly vitas, spiritual guides, conversion narratives, belletristic works, and historical works in which the author plays the central role. Almost none, however, betrays any misgivings on the part of its author about engaging in the act of writing about himself. One exception is Ibn Sa‘īd al-Maghribī (d. 1286), who wrote: “I excuse myself for this desire to write my own biography [tarjamatī] here with the same excuse used by Ibn al-Imām in [his book] Simṭ al-jumān [The String of Pearls], and the excuse of al-Ḥijārī in his book al-Mushib [The Lengthy Account], and Ibn al-Qaṭṭā‘ [d. 1121] in al-Durra [The Pearl].”^[34]

By the end of the fifteenth century, Arabic writers displayed increasing awareness of earlier autobiographical writings. Al-Sakhāwī, writing in 1466, gives a long list of noteworthy Arabic biographies beginning with those of the Prophet in the introduction to his biography of his teacher, Ibn Ḥajar. This list also contains the following references to autobiographies:

1. The historian al-Ṣārim Ibrāhīm ibn Duqmāq al-Ḥanafī collected a tarjama of himself [jama‘ahā li-nafsih].
2. Ibrāhīm ibn ‘Abd al-Raḥīm ibn Jamā‘a collected a tarjama of himself.
3. Iftikhār al-Dīn Ḥāmid ibn Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Khwārizmī al-Ḥanafī wrote a tarjama of himself in one fascicle [tarjama li-nafsih fī juz’ ].
4. Al-Ṣalāḥ Abū al-Ṣafī Khalīl ibn Aybak al-Ṣafadī collected a tarjama of himself.
5. I saw a booklet [kurrāsa] in the script of al-Samaw’al ibn Yaḥyā ibn ‘Abbās al-Maghribī, later al-Baghdādī, in which he states the cause for his conversion to Islam, and it is like a tarjama of himself [wa-huwa shibh al-tarjama li-nafsih].
6. Abū Muḥammad ‘Abd Allāh ibn Muḥammad ibn Hārūn al-Ṭā’ī. I think he himself wrote it [aִzunnuhā li-nafsih].
7. Al-Ḥāfiִz ‘Abd al-Ghanī ibn ‘Abd al-Wāḥid al-Maqdisī . . . Makkī ibn ‘Umar ibn Ni‘ma al-Miṣrī collected a tarjama of him before he could collect one on himself [sabaqahu ilā jam‘ihā li-nafsih].
8. Muḥammad ibn Abī Bakr ibn ‘Abd al-‘Azīz ibn Muḥammad al-‘Izz ibn Jamā‘a wrote a fascicle [juz’ ] which he called Ḍaw’ al-shams fīaḥwāl al-nafs [The Light of the Sun on the States of the Self] in which he gave a tarjama of himself [dhakara fīhā tarjamat nafsih].
9. The compiler [of the present work], Abū al-Khayr Muḥammad ibn ‘Abd al-Raḥmān al-Sakhāwī, collected a tarjama of himself in response to those who asked him to do so [ijābatan li-man sa’alahu fīhā].

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10. Al-Shams Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad ibn al-Khiḍr al-‘Ayzarī al-Dimashqī collected a tarjama of himself.^[35]

Of these nine autobiographies, cited haphazardly in the introduction to a biography, only two have come down to us.

As we have seen, authors had begun to write autobiographical texts for a wide variety of purposes by the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and these diverse purposes were reflected in the development of a number of innovative forms: political autobiographies (Ibn Buluggīn, Ibn Ḥawshab, al-Ḥājib Ja‘far), belletristic autobiographies (‘Umāra al-Yamanī, Usāma ibn Munqidh), conversion autobiographies (the Jewish convert Samaw’al al-Maghribī and his later counterpart, the Christian convert ‘Abd Allāh al-Turjumān [ = Fray Anselmo Turmeda]). By the late fifteenth century, when Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī was writing his autobiography, the various threads of development had cross-fertilized and influenced one another such that different types of texts and different authorial motivations are difficult to distinguish. Al-Suyūṭī's autobiography touts scholarly and intellectual achievements; in it the traditional elements of the tarjama have been drastically expanded, reframed as a spiritual duty, and then validated by his citation as precedents of three scholarly autobiographies (al-Fārisī, Ibn Ḥajar, Abū Shāma), two political autobiographies (al-Iṣfahānī, Ibn al-Khaṭīb), one belletristic autobiography (‘Umāra), and two texts that have not come down to us (Yāqūt, Abū Ḥayyān). Notably missing from his list is any overtly spiritual autobiography, although he himself had been ceremonially invested as a Sufi.

A half century later when the Sufi shaykh al-Sha‘rānī wrote his autobiography demonstrating spiritual rather than intellectual achievements, he borrowed al-Suyūṭī's list of earlier autobiographers and added four new names (Abū ‘Abd Allāh al-Qurashī, Abū al-Rabī‘ al-Mālaqī, Ṣafī al-Dīn ibn Abī al-Manṣūr, Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī) and discreetly dropped ‘Umāra al-Yamanī, whom Saladin had crucified for heresy and possibly treason.^[36] Al-Sha‘rānī, however, recasts the entire list of writers as religious scholars by including the appropriate religious title—shaykh, imām, or mujtahid—for each. He then discusses his reasons for writing an autobiography both in scholarly terms, also borrowed from al-Suyūṭī, and in mystical terms, taken from the works of his Sufi masters. Finally, he composes the body of his text in a completely idiosyncratic manner by listing separately each blessing he has received from God. Not only were the formal features of the textual tradition flexible, but the entire tradition was liable to differing portrayals; it could equally well be characterized as one of scholarly, textual precedents (al-Suyūṭī) or as one of spiritual predecessors (al-Sha‘rānī).

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Autobiographers of the late fifteenth through the nineteenth century, such as al-Sakhāwī, al-Suyūṭī, Ibn Ṭūlūn al-Dimashqī, Ṭāshköprüzāde, al-Sha‘rānī, al-‘Aydarūs, ‘Alī ibn Muḥammad al-‘Āmilī, and Ibn ‘Ajība, all demonstrate their familiarity with the Arabic autobiographical tradition in a variety of ways: by including lists of previous autobiographers in the introductions to their works, by incorporating earlier autobiographies into their own historical or ṭabaqāt works, or by borrowing justifications for writing an autobiography from the prefaces of earlier texts.^[37] On the whole, beginning in the late fifteenth century, Arabic autobiographers become more and more concerned with the careful framing of their texts, the articulation of their motivations, and defending themselves from potential charges of vanity, falsification, and innovation.

Autobiographical Anxieties

Todorov remarks that “the historical existence of genres is signaled by discourse on genres.”^[38] Autobiography, in the form of tarjamat al-nafs, engendered a scholarly and religious discourse in Arabic literature at least as early as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This was the era of al-Suyūṭī, al-Sakhāwī, Ibn Ṭūlūn al-Dimashqī, and al-Sha‘rānī, all of whom included discussions of autobiography in their writings.

The passage cited in the introduction to this volume from one of al-Suyūṭī's autobiographical works presents his justifications for writing an autobiography. These were the obligation to enumerate the blessings one has received from God as an act of thanks, emulation of the many respected figures who had previously composed autobiographical works, and the laudable nature of writing whereby one passes on information of one's life to subsequent generations, to which he appended his claim that he did not write his book out of pride or conceit. Implicit in al-Suyūṭī's argument about autobiography as historical writing is his belief that a firsthand account by the author is more reliable than an account written by others.

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Four decades later, Ibn Ṭūlūn al-Dimashqī (d. 1546) was to write the following in the introduction to his autobiography:

The author of a tarjama sometimes sets it apart in a separate work, as did our teacher Abū al-Fatḥ al-Mizzī (and I have followed him in this here); and sometimes someone else writes a separate work about him (and this is better), as the expert on prophetic tradition Shams al-Dīn al-Sakhāwī did in his work al-Jawāhir wa-l-durar [Jewels and Pearls], a tarjama about his teacher, the great scholar of Islam, Ibn Ḥajar. Our teacher, the historian Muḥyī al-Dīn al-Nu‘aymī followed him in this by writing an independent tarjama of his teacher and ours, the ḥadīth scholar Burhān al-Dīn al-Nājī. But sometimes a tarjama is not set apart in a separate work, but is found within another of the author's works, as our teacher, the consummate scholar Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī, did by mentioning himself in his medium-sized book Ṭabaqāt al-nuḥāt [The Generations of Grammarians]. In it he said:

I hoped that there would be some mention of my name in this book to be blessed by, and in imitation of, the deeds of those of my predecessors who mentioned their own names within their writings on history, such as the Imām ‘Abd al-Ghāfir in his al-Siyāq [Continuation],^[39] Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī in his Mu‘jam al-udabā’ [Biographical Dictionary of Writers], Ibn al-Khaṭīb in his Ta’rīkh Gharnāṭa [History of Granada], and al-Taqī al-Fāsī in his Ta’rīkh Makka [History of Mecca]—these latter two wrote their tarjamas at great length—Ibn Ḥajar in his Quḍāt Miṣr [The Judges of Egypt], and innumerable others.^[40] Then there are those who wrote of themselves [in a biographical compendium] under the first letter of their name, such as al-Fāsī and Ibn Ḥajar, and I have followed them in this. There are also those who wrote of themselves at the end of a book, and in the case of Yāqūt this involved a fortunate coincidence since his name begins with Y [the last letter of the Arabic alphabet].

And I [Ibn Ṭūlūn] say: This coincidence also happened to our teacher, the ḥadīth-scholar Jamāl al-Dīn Yūsuf ibn ‘Abd al-Hādī when he wrote an entry on himself and inserted it into his compendium of Ḥanbalī scholars in his book Manāqib Imām Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal [Praiseworthy Qualities of the Imām Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal]; he wrote a lengthy autobiography [aṭāla fī tarjamatih].^[41] I have even heard him recite this aloud and at that time he mentioned to me what the ḥadīth-scholar Abū ‘Abd Allāh al-Bukhārī said in his Ṣaḥīḥ, quoting Rabī‘a^[42]: “It is not fitting that anyone who possesses even a small amount of knowledge should allow himself to be forgotten.”^[43]

When Ibn Ṭūlūn declares that it is “better” that someone else write one's biography than to write a text about oneself, it seems clear that it is better, not from a historical, factual point of view, but from a moral or ethical point of view; it spares the author the temptations of pride or arrogance and being accused thereof. It was in fact standard practice for a student to compile a biography of his teacher, sometimes on the basis of autobiographical materials supplied by the teacher. Ibn Ṭūlūn, however, curiously states that he wrote his autobiography at the request of his teacher, Shaykh Muḥyi al-Dīn al-Nu‘aymī, rather than at the far more usual request of a student.

Another major Arabic autobiographer of the sixteenth century, the Sufi shaykh ‘Abd al-Wahhāb al-Sha‘rānī, pulls all of these threads together in his lengthy defense of autobiography. He asserts that autobiography enables others to emulate one's good characteristics, functions as an enduring act of thanks to God that outlives the author, and provides useful information for future generations. Al-Sha‘rānī firmly supports the idea that a firsthand account is more reliable than someone else's rendering and substantiates this argument with quotations from the Prophet Muhammad, the Qur’ān, and the mystical philosopher Ibn al-‘Arabī. His final argument reiterates that, in writing an autobiography, one is following the example of great figures of the past. He closes with a spirited denial that an autobiography is written out of pride.^[44]

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Ibn ‘Ajība, a Moroccan Sufi writing in 1807, also cites the desire for historical accuracy as the primary justification for writing an autobiography. Rather than allow his students to compile a biography—a task that they had apparently already begun—he forestalled their work by writing his own text, preferring to provide a more reliable account himself: “Fearing that they might allow some addition or omission to slip into their work, I decided to report, with God's assistance, what I have seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears, for that which is transmitted is not that which was actually seen.”^[45] Ibn ‘Ajība also cites the Qur’ānic injunction to speak of God's bounty and gives a list of famous Sufis who had previously written autobiographies to further justify his undertaking.

The judgment that an autobiography is a more reliable account than a biography fits quite closely with the structure of Islamic historiography and religious sciences in general, where eyewitness accounts were carefully transmitted for centuries in both oral and written form. This advantage from the point of view of historical methodology, however, did not entirely outweigh the fear of stumbling into the moral pitfalls involved in writing about oneself.

This brief historical survey provides a rough sense of how the writing of autobiography became an ever more conscious act within the Arabic literary and historical traditions, an act at times fraught with significant “autobiographical anxieties.” Paradoxically, the need to justify the writing of such a text appears to have grown most intense in the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries, a period in which the autobiographical act itself had become fully established and quite widespread. Nevertheless, it also seems reasonable that critical debate over a literary genre should intensify after it achieves a certain currency. In any case, just as autobiography itself grew out of a genre, the tarjama, concerned with maintaining the lines of inheritance back to exemplary figures including the Prophet, eventually it too came to carry a legacy, to which its inheritors staked their own claims.

Notes

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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]

Unfortunately, no samples of Ibn Buluggīn's poetry are included in either the Arabic published edition or the English translation.

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.

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]

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.

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]

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In discussing life's trials, wealth, power, and happiness, Ibn Buluggīn portrays himself poignantly as a man who at one point had possessed everything, then had it all taken from him by his enemies, and who now writes as a prisoner in exile from his native land.

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]

On the birth of his children, he writes:

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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]

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.

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).

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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.

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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

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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.

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― 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.

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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.”

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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]

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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.

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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.

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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]

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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.

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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

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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]

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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.

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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:

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]

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.

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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”).

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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

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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).

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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]

O Fate, you have stricken the hand of glory with paralysis,     and its neck, once so beautifully adorned, you have stripped bare.

As if in a premonition of his own end, the poet concluded:

Wretched ‘Umāra spoke this ode,     fearful of murder, not fearful of error!

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:

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The origins of this religion spring from a man     who strove so much that they addressed him as `Lord of Nations'!

‘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.

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:

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― 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:

I do not chase away the birds from trees     whose fruit I know from experience is bitter.

Then I asked him about his pain and he said:

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.

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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:

Could perhaps the sorrows which now beset me     conceal behind them approaching release?

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:

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.

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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

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