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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