Conclusion

This survey of roughly one hundred forty texts has revealed certain dimensions of the Arabic autobiographical tradition, but only at the cost of obscuring others. These texts came into being in different historical periods and diverse societies. By seeking a sense of the whole, the present study has perforce focused primarily on shared elements and historical connections and has not attempted to situate each text deeply within the specific context of the individual life and literary production of each author. Such detailed analysis would, in any case, go far beyond the scope of a single study. The larger view presented here, however, provides critical insights that will allow for more accurate assessments of individual texts when analyzed principally in their specific historical milieus.

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There are clearly far more premodern Arabic autobiographies in existence than have previously been assumed; however, the works included in this study represent only a portion of the tradition as a whole. What portion they represent cannot be known with any certainty at this time. Judging from this partial view, the evidence seems to indicate that the production of Arabic autobiographies continued at a steady pace over the millennium extending from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries and over a broad geographic expanse. Arabic autobiographers were well aware, certainly no later than the twelfth to fourteenth century, of the “autobiographical act” and of certain precedent-setting texts. At certain points, historical clusters of autobiographies were produced by circles of authors who either knew each other personally or read each other's texts; in some cases, an autobiography by a particularly influential or respected figure motivated the writing of an entire sequence of autobiographical texts. In at least one period, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a sense of “autobiographical anxiety” emerged that motivated authors to pen elaborate defenses of autobiographical writing. The larger sociopolitical reasons for this anxiety have yet to be fully explored.

The body of texts examined here exhibits a range of form and content difficult to refer to as a single “genre” or as a formal category. Curiously, even in cases in which direct personal links between authors and earlier autobiographical texts can be demonstrated, no fixed form for autobiographical representation emerges. Texts produced within the historical clusters are as formally diverse as the tradition taken as a whole. In contrast, biography, a far more common literary genre, developed within forms that maintained a stronger sense of constraint than their autobiographical counterparts. It seems clear that biographers within a single lineage (e.g., scholars of the Ḥanbalī school of law, Sufi mystics, etc.) established conventions for later generations; for autobiographers, in contrast, each generation found earlier precedents but not binding formal models. This may be a consequence of the relative infrequency of autobiographies and the resulting ad hoc nature of each example. Although these texts do not display a limited set of shared formal characteristics, they were consistently grouped together as a category by medieval and early modern Arabic writers. The best approximation of that category seems to be understanding these texts as resulting from the same literary act: the act of “interpreting,” “representing,” or “portraying” oneself in written form.

Despite a general awareness of autobiography as a distinct category of writing, it never became an “organized science” to the degree that biography and prosopography did. In part this may be a direct result of the differing natures of the two endeavors: biography and prosopography in the Arabo-Islamic tradition were both essentially cumulative and ever expanding. Compilers and redactors freehandedly amended, expanded, and rewrote biographical accounts to suit different contexts and even different political purposes. Autobiographies could not be rewritten with nearly the same freedom without fundamentally altering their status as texts. As we have noted above, however, in regard to such texts as those by Ibn Sīnā, ‘Abd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī, and Ibn al-‘Adīm, anthologizers did rework certain autobiographies in a number of creative ways by appending additional material, inserting passages and commentary, or quoting only extracts of the original. In essence, autobiographical texts were sometimes manipulated to fit the practices of biography and prosopography.

Personality and Self

Autobiographers in the Arabic tradition appear to have made independent choices concerning how much of what we would term their “private” lives to include in their works. Literary convention seems neither to have encouraged nor to have hindered such expression; but the elements that we as twenty-first-century individuals most associate with the realm of “private” life were never the central focus of premodern Arabic autobiographical texts. This study has attempted to approach these texts from a perspective relatively uncolored by modern preconceptions, analyzing instead four sets of recurring features that may help in uncovering the modes of self-representation these authors used to construct their individual identities: portrayals of childhood failures, portrayals of emotion through the description of action, dream narratives as reflections of moments of authorial anxiety, and poetry as a discourse of emotion. These represent but a handful of many possible approaches to this highly diverse body of texts.^[1]

While these texts at first glance look less “personal” than modern autobiographies (Arabic or western), they are not therefore less “individuating.” They are, in fact, each replete precisely with the specific details of an individual life. In many cases, they clearly communicate a strong sense of the author's personality. There may be many ways in which the medieval and premodern texts in this corpus differ from modern examples, but to attribute this difference to a less developed sense of “individual identity” would certainly be neither accurate nor intellectually useful.

Cultures in different historical periods foreground different characteristics and behaviors as being more closely tied to the innermost identity of their members: piety, poetry, sexuality, handwriting, class, ethnicity, emotions, citizenship, and other concepts have all had their day at one time or another, in one culture or another, as reflections or constituents of the “self.” Any study that purports to examine the concept of “personhood” in a particular period of any society would have to be based on a broader foundation than a corpus consisting only of autobiographical texts. Autobiographical writings may offer a particularly rich source, but they provide only a portion of the data needed to address larger questions: Which elements of human behavior are seen as significant to individual identity? Is the human personality seen as essentially unchanging or fluid? Is the human “self” seen as an organic whole such that an individual's characteristic manner of being (bios) is commensurate with the individual? Or does the “self” exist in a bifurcated state (inner/outer, private/public)? And if so, what is the perceived relationship between these elements? Direct reflections? Mirror images? Are they elements that coexist in relative harmony, or are they by definition in conflict?

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Only a partial answer to these questions can be offered based on the surveyed texts. These authors portray themselves both as distinct individuals and as participants in various significant relationships. The relationships most clearly foregrounded in these texts are “vertical” or “genealogical” connections. In the context of the family these reach back in time to parents, grandparents, and more distant ancestors, on the one hand, and forward in time through children and grandchildren, on the other; this is paralleled in the sphere of education by the meticulously noted relationships with teachers and the mention of students. In contrast, there are strikingly few portrayals of “lateral” relationships with siblings, fellow students, friends, and colleagues. The only clear exceptions to this principle are autobiographers who wrote their texts based on their relationship with famous figures of their time, such as ‘Imād al-Dīn's relationship with his patron, Saladin.

It was the purpose of many of these authors to demonstrate their part in the passage of history—and a major element in the concept of history was the transmission of authority, legitimacy, and descent. This can be seen in realms as diverse as genealogy, religious authority, political legitimacy, scholarly knowledge, and mystical enlightenment; by contrast, artistic genius in poetry and music was far less likely to be understood in this paradigm. Thus a great deal of the material in these autobiographical texts serves to locate the authors in their appropriate channels of transmission. Yet, to be part of this larger flow of transmission did not hinder the understanding of oneself as an individual. One rather common motif in medieval Arabic scholarly literature, for example, is the author's claim to have provided in a given work ideas and insights that are unique and unprecedented in his field. Equally common is the writer who complains that he cannot find other minds of his caliber or other figures at his moral or spiritual level.

Did this paradigm of “genealogical” transmission also apply to the concept of character? If character were understood primarily as an enduring, inherited template, then the careful documentation of earlier generations of one's family and, to a lesser extent, the documentation of one's offspring would be of more significance than the documentation of friendships or relationships with siblings. This perhaps explains why far more attention is paid in these texts to describing the personalities of the author's parents, grandparents, and even uncles than to describing those of siblings or friends.^[2] Yet these same autobiographers often mention ways in which they, as adults, differ from their childhood selves; the author's own character undergoes clear transformation in many of these texts.

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The image derived from these autobiographies of the personality as part inherited and yet also changing is echoed in medieval Arabo-Islamic theoretical writings on the question of human character. The scholar Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī (d. 1023) in his “Treatise on Life” (Risālatal-ḥayāt) treats the various elements of a person's character as being divided into two categories: “Some of these dispositions can be caused to disappear through conscious effort [riyāḍa] or can at least be somewhat attenuated, while the other portion constitute the very form of the soul and one therefore cannot hope to rid oneself of them or to purify them.”^[3] A variety of terms are used in this discussion: ṭab‘ (innate nature), akhlāq (character/ personality), ‘ayn (essence), ṣifāt (characteristics), fiṭra (temperament/nature) and sajīya (disposition). Although coming to a complete understanding of the individual terms is a complicated undertaking, Abū Ḥayyān and a number of his contemporaries are in agreement as to this dual aspect of human personality—some aspects of a person's personality undergo growth and transformation, while others remain fixed and unchanging.^[4]

Western societies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century are also characterized by a dichotomy in the conceptualization of the self, but the division cuts along the axis of public and private. This distinction appears to have become more and more clearly drawn in recent centuries. Ironically, as Habermas and others have pointed out, the modern western “private” self emerges historically with the very literary genres that make the “private” public—diaries, journals, memoirs, autobiographies—and in tandem with fictionalized “private” lives in the form of the novel.^[5] The emergence of the modern western sense of “private” takes place most decidedly in public.

It does not seem that premodern Arabic autobiographies existed in the same tension-filled space between the public and private, or that this bifurcation of the self is a formulation that would have made any sense to these authors. It is not at all clear that premodern Arabic autobiographers would have interpreted western-style confessions and detailed accounts of love and sex as being any more indicative of an “inner” self than the driest of Arabic autobiographical writings. Accounts of sexual encounters, desires, practices, and techniques would not have been unfamiliar to them, but they would have found these discussions strangely misplaced and more fitting to books of erotica such as The Delights of Hearts or The Perfumed Garden, or to books on the theory of love, such as The Ring of the Dove.^[6] They would certainly have had difficulty accepting a psychology that placed sexual behavior at the very center of the formation of personality and selfhood. For a sense of the “inner” self, they would have searched for evidence of intellectual, spiritual, or mystical experience and the cultivated expression of emotion in poetry.

Literary Conventions

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Arabic autobiography emerged from the context of historical and biographical literature. Although it never slavishly adopted the forms of history and biography, it maintained some of the basic techniques of those intellectual fields. Arabic autobiographies demonstrate a concern with historical fact and truth that immediately involves methods of establishing the authority for certain statements. The historical conventions for asserting authoritative accounts of events in Arabic literature, however, bear little resemblance to modern western “realist” conventions found in western historical writings, including biographies and autobiographies.^[7]

Perhaps the single most significant discrepancy between the two practices is the role of narrative as a means of apprehending and presenting a life: the life as story. Out of the kaleidoscopic mix of experience and memory, the western autobiographer has traditionally opted to couch the entire span of life in a single, rather cohesive tale, imposing the structure of the metanarrative on the whole. The surge in popularity in the writing of autobiographies and the concomitant rise of the novel in European literatures reveals the two genres to be very close siblings, with the structure of the Bildungsroman so closely resembling that of many autobiographies that only the (hotly disputed) issue of truth versus fiction at times separates them. Some scholars see this interaction between autobiography and novel flowing more strongly in one direction, and some the other. It would appear that Rousseau's groundbreaking achievement may only have been possible in the wake of the publication of a half century of fictional lives. Arguing for the flow of influence in the other direction, Roy Pascal, for example, finds that “the nineteenth-century novels that delve deep into childhood, from Dickens and the Brontës onwards, are unimaginable without the great autobiographies [of Rousseau, Goethe, Franklin, Gibbon, and Wordsworth].”^[8] The modern hybridization and convergence of the autobiographical novel and the fictionalized autobiography may be the true culmination of the western autobiography/novel tradition. In contrast, this subjection of the facts and shorter anecdotal episodes to a larger narrative structure is found in only a handful of premodern Arabic autobiographies.

A second point of comparison between Arabic and western practices is closely connected to the western notion of life as narrative: chronological order. Although some of the narratives given canonical status in western culture are not revealed in simple, chronological order (e.g., Homer), western autobiographies, from the Middle Ages onward, display a distinct propensity toward linear narration. Chronological structure even figures in many modern western definitions of autobiography. Yet there is nothing inherently natural about linear chronologism: human memory is not linear and indeed is far more susceptible to associative linkages. The act of reconstructing the past from the author's present is not a chronological or linear process, and even primary experience is not decoded linearly but rather with many mental leaps forward and backward in time. Chronological linearity as an instrument of coherence and authority is fundamentally tied to massive cultural shifts in the European Renaissance and Enlightenment.

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Arabic autobiographers, in contrast, had at their disposal a rich palette of literary conventions for asserting the veracity of an account, such as providing outside authoritative testimony for points that readers might doubt if recounted only on the authority of the author, as well as alternative conventions for portraying emotions and inner motivations, such as poetry, visions, and dreams. For many Arab autobiographers, the intellectual techniques of categorization and enumeration served as the primary format for communicating information about a human life. The common western convention of dividing the autobiographical narrative into chapters derives historically from fictional discourse (such as that of episodic romances) or the practice of theater (scenes and acts) rather than from the structures of real-life experience or historical writing. When Arabic autobiographers included divisions in their texts, they most often did so according to rational criteria, such as dividing the time line into periods such as years (similar to a chronicle) or according to thematic organization, devoting separate chapters to teachers, publications, family history, and so forth.

The Status of Arabic Autobiographies as Texts

The authors of premodern Arabic autobiographies assumed that their autobiographical texts would be read in conjunction not only with selections of their poetry but also with their other intellectual or artistic productions. The autobiography did not represent a unique moment for self-representation but rather a frame or summation for revealing a certain portrait of the whole, a context within which one's work would then be placed and evaluated. In this framework it was most important to portray one's place within the larger transmission of knowledge from respected sources of the past, through the present, into the future. It was important to establish one's family background as this would not ordinarily be expressed in one's other works. It was equally significant to delineate one's acquired authority by carefully listing one's teachers and the works one had studied. It was also of consequence to establish the degree to which one had contributed to this body of knowledge by presenting the quantity and quality of one's intellectual or artistic production; this occasionally extended to presenting or reporting the testimony of one's peers as to one's status and worth. If one had been accused of wrongdoing, misinterpreted, or slandered, here was a framework within which one could launch a defense by guiding the reader to a proper understanding of one's actions or words, or to a proper interpretation of one's published work.

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Amid all these concerns there existed also the urge to present a personal self as the source of these works or deeds; but it was not necessary to do this entirely in this one text, for one's poetry, personal correspondence, formal epistles, sermons, dream accounts, entertaining anecdotes, travel journals, and so forth, all also served in part to express oneself to the larger world and to future generations. Often these other types of text were transmitted alongside the autobiography itself.

Some Arabic autobiographers penned rather dry autobiographies while at the same time making remarkable disclosures about themselves in their other writings, as did Ibn Ḥajar al-‘Asqalānī and Abū Shāma. In some autobiographical works this urge toward the personal is distinctly foregrounded, and in others it plays a very marginal role. Some Arabic autobiographies therefore pose a serious challenge to any methodology that might attempt to read them as closed texts, as complete statements on their own. At one level they are indeed complete representations and to some degree they circulated as such; at another level, however, many of them were never conceived of as wholly isolated representations.

Some medieval and early modern Arabic autobiographies do not possess the “boundedness” or “insularity” of more recent examples but rather emerge from a literary context in which various types of borrowing, imitation, reworking, unattributed quotation, and allusion—virtually every possible form of intertextuality—were commonplace. Even the physical object of the “book” did not possess the definition it later came to possess, with multiple works by the same author or a random selection of smaller works often being bound into a single volume. However carefully these authors may have constructed their autobiographical works, and however lengthy these may be, only a few of the autobiographers represented here would ever have conceived of a reader who would select this, and only this, work from among their writings for study or analysis. Although compilations of biographical and prosopographical materials were extremely common, no such collection of autobiographies was ever attempted. One can certainly read and analyze texts from the genre of “writing a tarjama of oneself” in isolation and even find them fascinating, instructive, and at times emotionally moving. It is, however, the other level, the level at which these texts act as lenses through which to view the author's assembled literary corpus, that probably far more closely resembles the understanding shared by premodern Arab autobiographers and their readers, an understanding akin to a premodern “autobiographical pact.”^[9]

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The spectacular explosion in popularity of the autobiography in Europe from the late eighteenth century onward is presumably linked to social forces that eventually affected—through the political and cultural contacts of the colonial era—the similar burst of popularity the autobiography experienced in twentieth-century Arabic literature. Modern Arabic autobiography is in fact often relegated to the status of a genre that has simply been “borrowed” from the West; however, this should not be assumed a priori without careful documentation and analysis. Ṭāhā Ḥusayn's influential childhood memoirs published in 1926–27 have at times been explained as a result of his studies in Europe; he was also, however, the single most influential Arab literary historian of his day and possessed a vast and intimate knowledge of pre-Islamic, classical, and medieval Arabic literature. His detailed and personal account of his childhood may at first glance seem to be a borrowing from modern European tradition, though this view becomes more difficult to maintain when it is asked which European texts might have influenced him. When viewed as part of the Arabic autobiographical tradition, however, his autobiography seems to be the culmination of a centuries-long chain of texts that included more and more intimate anecdotal material about the periods of the author's childhood and youth. Indeed, when viewed in this manner, the strangely “classical” characteristics of the third-person voice, the highly stylized language, and the pedagogical tone all seem familiar rather than foreign elements.

Long before the genre had taken hold in European literatures in its modern, most recent form, the idea of writing an account or an interpretation of one's life was an accepted intellectual and literary endeavor in Arabo-Islamic culture. Autobiographers writing in Arabic left behind representations of their lives specifically crafted as texts for subsequent generations.

Into the Twentieth Century

In 1898, when Egypt's poet laureate, Aḥmad Shawqī, published the first volume of his four-volume anthology, al-Shawqiyyāt, he included a brief autobiography that not only traced his personal life but also included a discussion of those classical Arab poets who most strongly influenced him. In addition, he identified some of the European literature he had read. This autobiography sparked a heated debate in the press concerning the role of traditional grammatical and linguistic correctness versus innovation and western influence in the Arabic poetic tradition. The series of articles criticizing Shawqī's work, together with published responses to them, developed into a public forum for discussing the many social and cultural changes now recognized as the Arab nahḍa, or “Renaissance,” of the second half of the nineteenth century. Shawqī's most vociferous and most famous critic was Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī, himself a famous writer, and best known as the author of Ḥadīth ‘Isā ibn Hishām, a collection of piquant social criticisms couched in the medieval genre of the picaresque maqāmāt.^[10]

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The element that is usually remembered from this debate is the linguistic conservatism of Shawqī's critics and their fundamental argument that the Arabic poetic tradition did not need, indeed should not be subjected to, innovation of any kind. Similar criticisms were leveled against al-Yāzijī, Jubrān Khalīl Jubrān (Kahlil Gibran), and others. A forgotten element of the debate is that al-Muwayliḥī wrote two articles specifically criticizing Shawqī's autobiography, taking him to task first for even having written an autobiography and second, given that he did write one, for having included personal information in that text.

Briefly, al-Muwayliḥī charged that (1) Shawqī had, by writing an autobiography, praised himself rather than leave it to others to praise him; (2) Shawqī had written this account of himself in prose, whereas, as a poet, he should let his poetry stand as his sole public voice; (3) he had done what no other Arab poet had done by including an autobiography in his poetic anthology;^[11] and (4) Shawqī had found new and innovative ideas while pursuing his education in Europe and such foreign influence was repugnant, particularly in the realm of poetry in which the Arabs excelled and far surpassed westerners:

The Gracious Poet has, in his introduction, treated himself in a way that earlier poets did not do in their collected works; indeed, they left it to others to speak of them. The most we have observed among Arab authors is that if they wished to speak of themselves, they spoke only of their literary origins and not of their personal [genealogical] origins. They might, for example, mention from whom they had learned, whom they had met, and what they had studied and memorized. As for our Gracious Poet, well, he lists four personal origins for himself, and does not list a single literary origin, when he says:

"I am thus Arab, Turkish, Greek and Circassian by my grandmother on my father's side. . . . Four origins gathered into a single branch: It is not impossible for God/to gather the whole world into one."^[12]

Finally, al-Muwayliḥī criticized Shawqī for writing of his memories of childhood encounters with the khedive (the ruler of Egypt) and other notables, for these memories, he claimed, reveal the poet's arrogance and vanity.

Thus Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī in 1898–99 cast at Aḥmad Shawqī many of the charges against which al-Suyūṭī, Ibn Ṭulūn, al-Sha‘rānī, and others had sought to defend themselves in the introductions to their autobiographies four centuries earlier. Al-Muwayliḥī's articles were angrily refuted by the Lebanese literary critic and pan-Arabist thinker Amīr Shakīb Arslān. Though Shawqī and Arslān eventually won the day, no Arabic autobiographies were published for an entire generation until the appearance of Ṭāhā Ḥusayn's al-Ayyām in 1926–27. After that, the floodgates opened.

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Strangely enough, although al-Shawqiyyāt has gone through more than a dozen new editions and reprints, Shawqī's autobiography has never been reprinted as part of the collection. Where Aḥmad Shawqī's autobiography once stood, an introduction by Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal has been substituted in every subsequent printing. Al-Muwayliḥī's articles, however, anthologized in al-Manfalūṭī's Mukhtārāt (Literary Selections), became obligatory reading in many public schools of the Arab world for decades. Arslān, perhaps to prove his point, went on to write his own autobiography in 1931, but by that time the point was moot and autobiographies were being written and published at an ever-increasing rate.^[13]

The present study ends here in the first decades of the twentieth century. Although political and cultural engagement with the West led to rapid and complex transformations in the genre of Arabic autobiography, echoes of the literary conventions of the premodern tradition are still found in many texts even from recent decades. Literary figures such as Bint al-Shāṭi’ and Muḥammad Qarah ‘Alī insert samples of their own poetry into their autobiographies much as premodern Arabic autobiographers did.^[14] The literary critic Amīr Shakīb Arslān includes in the preface to his autobiography a list of predecessors that includes al-Suyūṭī, Ibn Sīnā, Ibn Khaldūn, and Lisān al-Dīn Ibn al-Khaṭīb as several of those authors themselves did.^[15] Anīs Frayḥa addresses his autobiography to his son Riḍā much as ‘Abd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī, Ibn al-Jawzī, Abū Ḥayyān al-Andalusī, al-Baḥranī, Princess Salmé, and Ṭāhā Ḥusayn addressed their works to family members of the next generation.^[16] Some twentieth-century Arabic autobiographers, beginning with Ṭāhā Ḥusayn himself, continue to write in the third person. Muslim religious scholars such as Shaykhs ‘Abd al-Ḥamīd Maḥmūd, Muḥammad Mitwallī Sha‘rāwī, and ‘Abd al-Ḥalīm Kishk have produced autobiographies that are so close to the conventions of classical Arabic autobiography that one recent writer has termed them “tarjama-reflexes.”^[17] Modern Arab scholars and writers have even written self-authored biographical notices for inclusion in biographical dictionaries as Ibn al-‘Adīm and others did for Yāqūt in the thirteenth century.^[18] And at least one Arabic autobiographer has produced texts in both the traditional and the modern mode: the Syrian scholar Muḥammad Kurd ‘Alī (1876–1953) first produced a short, traditional version of his life story in the mid-1920s that was included as the final section of his Khiṭaṭal-Shām (Description of Syria) in open imitation of ‘Alī Mubārak who had published his Khiṭaṭ of Egypt three decades earlier and included his autobiography. Kurd ‘Alī then expanded his text into a four-volume work twenty years later and rewrote it in a manner marked by a much greater use of linear narrative and a far more modern literary style.^[19] In short, although twentieth-century Arabic autobiographies display many formal characteristics not found in premodern Arabic texts, a degree of continuity can yet be discerned, testifying to the strength and impact of earlier literary practices of “interpreting the self.”

Notes

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