Questions & Answers

       

The contexts of the literary tradition

          

The Arab League, Arab nationalism; Arabic numerals, Arabic litera- ture; the Arabian Peninsula, the Arabian Nights. The English language makes use of several epithets to describe the people, language, and region whose literary creativity is the topic of this book. The Arabic lan- guage itself, by contrast, has a single word, ¨arabı̄, an adjective derived from what must be one of the earliest words in the history of the lan- guage, ¨arab, originally used to describe the nomadic peoples in the central regions of what is now termed the Arabian Peninsula. Quite how far back the existence of the ¨arab can be traced is difficult to say, but a group called the ar-ba-a-a are cited as components of an army in cunei- form inscriptions dating from as early as    . At the end of the s the same word, ¨arab, was used by Jamāl ¨Abd al-Nās·ir (Nasser), the President of Egypt, when he proclaimed in a speech that ‘from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arabian Gulf we are Arabs’.

In this chapter I will provide a series of contexts that are intended to serve as background for the investigations of the genres of Arabic liter- ature that follow. Firstly I will discuss two particular contexts within which the literary tradition has been created, developed, and recorded: the physical and the linguistic. A more diachronic approach will then be used for an overview of the historical background against which the lit- erary texts were produced; it will be subdivided into two parts, a first that looks at rulers and the changing patterns of authority, and a second that examines some of the intellectual debates against the background of which Arabic literature has been composed.

                 

The pre-Islamic poet, Labı̄d, includes the following lines in the opening section of his famous Mu¨allaqah poem:



Sites dung-stained and long abandoned after times of frequentation, with their changing seasons of peace and war,

Fed with spring rains of the stars, hit by the thunder of a heavy rainstorm or fine drizzle,

Falling from every passing cloud, looming dark in the daytime and with thunder resounding at eventide.

The effect of rain on a desert environment is truly remarkable; the trans- formations that it brings about are immediate. While water – its pres- ence or absence – was a very practical aspect of life within the desert existence of the earliest poets, it has been a potent image for the modern poet as well, one of fertility, of potential, of revolution. Labı̄d’s twenti- eth-century successor, the Iraqi poet, Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb (d.), devotes a poem to rain (‘Unshūdat al-mat

· ar’) which evokes the imagery of

the earliest poetry in the cause of his country’s liberation:

On the night of departure how many tears have we shed, and then, for fear of reproach, pretended it was rain . . . Rain . . . Rain . . . Since our childhood, the skies were always cloudy in wintertime, and rain poured down, but every year, as the earth blossomed, we stayed hungry, Never a year went by but there was hunger in Iraq. Rain . . . Rain . . . Rain . . .

And, as desert-dwellers know only too well, water, this same essential, life-giving resource, can also have a potent destructive force. The flash- floods of the wādı̄ (stream-valley) can bring sudden death, a fate that is depicted with telling effect both at the conclusion of another Mu¨allaqah poem from the earliest period of poetry, that of Imru’ al-Qays, and in the fate of the hero’s mother in the novel, Nazı̄f al-h

· ajar (The Rocks

Bleed, ) by the Libyan writer, Ibrāhı̄m al-Kūnı̄ (b. ). The tension between these dualities of aridity and moisture, of death

and birth, has been a constant in the Arab world for the entire period represented within these pages. The text of the Qur©ān itself shows an obvious concern with the rigours of daily life in the way it depicts Paradise as a well-watered garden. This struggle to survive in such a del- icate ecological balance continues to affect the lives of people who live in large areas of the Middle East and has a substantial effect on patterns of homogeneity within particular areas and nations. Thus, a nation such

 An introduction to Arabic literature

as Egypt, whose people cling to the fertile Nile Valley region, will tend to possess a greater sense of identity than one like the Sudan or Algeria, where geographical factors and sheer distances will serve to create real and psychological barriers.

While the coastal regions of the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Gulf, have always served as a base for wide-scale regional commerce, reflected in the famous Sindbad cycle from the Thousand and One Nights, the seas of the Middle East do not appear to have roused the interest of Arab littérateurs to any great extent. Perhaps as is the case with English literature, it needed the concern of an islander, the Sicilian ibn H· amdı̄s (d. ) who later travelled to Spain, to produce Arabic poetry depicting the sea. In the main, however, it is the land that has served as a major means of identity for the Arab people; the fate of the Palestinians, with their annual ‘Day of the Land’, is a potent con- temporary symbol of that sentiment of long vintage.

The other primary geographical feature of the region is mountains. Northern Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon, and the Maghrib, for example, possess mountain ranges that have played a major role in the cultural life of their people. Mountains are often akin to cultural breakwaters, in that they can afford refuge to minority groups. The Atlas Mountains of the Maghrib have served to create a large divide between those living on the coastal plain and the mountain dwellers; in this case differences of lan- guage – Berber, French, and Arabic – only compound attitudinal differences created by different means of subsistence (animal herding and agriculture) and widely variant types of education and culture. In Yemen and Lebanon, they have provided lines of separation between different religious and political groupings, as twentieth-century conflicts in both regions have convincingly demonstrated.

This wide expanse of territory that constitutes the Arab world, with its variety of geographical and climatic features, is peopled by citizens of many nations who speak Arabic and thus trace their linguistic and cul- tural origins back to the Arabian Peninsula. Many of the predominant themes depicted in the literature of the pre-Islamic period – the power of community, encampments, travels, horses, camels, palm-trees – con- tinue to resonate in the minds of Arab littérateurs. The texts of the Qur©ān and prophetic tradition (h

· adı̄th) are filled with references to

the image of the palm-tree; the latter source enjoins mankind to ‘honour the palm-tree which was created from Adam’s own clay’. Relics of this aspect of the pre-Islamic way of life endure in colourful ways: the system of metrics devised by the great scholar of al-Bas·rah, al-Khalı̄l ibn

The contexts of the literary tradition 

Ah· mad (d. ), uses the term bayt (tent) for the line of poetry, and sabab (tent-rope) and watad (tent-peg) for the segments of an individual foot. The ancient virtue of s

· abr (tolerance of adversity, endurance) was often

invoked by the vagabond (s · u¨lūk) poets of the pre-Islamic period in their

taunts levelled at the ‘soft’ life of the tribe, and has since been cited often to explain a willingness to ‘bide one’s time’: in the case of the Crusaders, for example, who were eventually ejected after centuries of occupation. Yet another such traditional virtue is that of hospitality, a quality that, as any visitor to the Arab world knows, remains as prevalent and forceful as ever.

When the great social historian, Ibn Khaldun (d. ), wrote the Introduction (Muqaddimah) to his book of history, he proceeded to develop a cyclical theory of civilisation that was based on the traditional tribal virtues of the Bedouin, some of which we have just mentioned: courage, endurance, and, above all, group solidarity. His model at the time envisaged two elements – desert culture and civilisation, with the former continually replacing and invigorating the latter. The growth of cities in the Arab world, and especially the emergence of the great Islamic centres – al-Bas·rah, Baghdād, Cairo, Qayrawān, Fez, and Cordoba, for example – as sources of religious debate and intellectual dynamism, was to have a major impact on both urban and provincial life, frequently to the detriment of both. Cairo, the capital city of Egypt, is perhaps the most extreme example of this, in that fully one quarter of the inhabitants of the entire country live within the city’s boundaries. But people still leave the countryside and pour into the cities; and this is just one type of migration. The discovery of oil and the vast wealth that it has brought to the countries of the Gulf region has led to the migra- tion of huge numbers of workers in search of a living wage.

There are two particular ‘lenses’ through which the Western world examines the Middle East that need to be identified; not so much to avoid their use as to admit the limitations that they impose. The first involves treating ‘the Arabs’ and ‘Islam’ as monoliths, and indeed often to fuse the two into one. To be sure, the majority of Arabs are Muslims, but there are significant communities of Arabs who are not – the Maronites of Lebanon and the Copts of Egypt, for example. On the other hand, many Muslims are not Arabs; Iranians, for example (whose Persian language is a member of the Indo-European family), Pakistanis, and large communities in Malaysia, Indonesia, and China. But, beyond these points of information, there lies the assumption that the peoples of a region as diverse in history and culture as the one that we have just

 An introduction to Arabic literature

outlined can be described as a single, unified whole on the basis of their being linked by a common language (in itself a problematic notion, as we shall see below). The same principle can be applied to Islam, an entity which the Western world has always found it convenient to treat as a monolith in order to compensate for a failure to investigate its variety. Perhaps we might suggest, adopting de Saussure’s well-known categories, that Islam, like other faith systems, clearly stipulates what constitutes its langue – the canonical texts that lay down the basis for its principles, but that the parole, the actual application in such areas as the difference between the tenets of the Sunnı̄ and Shı̄¨ı̄ communities and the practices of Sufism and popular Islam, present us with a staggering variety of beliefs and rituals which reflect the world-wide scope of the faith.

The second ‘lens’ that I have been using is the term ‘Middle East’, an American term that, along with the European ‘Near East’, reflects the geographical location of those who coined it. Numerous scholars have addressed themselves to the precise designation of this ‘region’, pointing out as they do so that very few of the borders in the region were drawn by its inhabitants. For some the Middle East is coterminous with ‘the Fertile Crescent’, the ‘central lands’ of the region – Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Egypt. However, in academic terms departments that carry the name ‘Middle East’ will teach not only Arabic, but also Persian and Turkish (and often other languages as well), thus including within their purview the broader definition of the Arab world represented by not only ¨Abd al-Nās·ir’s Ocean-to-Gulf phrase, but also the Arab nations represented at the United Nations and the Arab League. It is this broader definition of the world of Arabic literature that will be intended when the phrase ‘Middle East’ is used in this book; indeed, the need to examine the literature of al-Andalus in the West and, on occasion, the lands ‘beyond the river’ in the East require an even broader definition.

                   

Arabic is a Semitic language, and is regarded by historical linguists as the member of that family of languages that has preserved the largest number of features of postulated proto-Semitic. It is the official lan- guage of a large number of nations in Africa and Asia: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, the Sudan, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. These nations make up what is

The contexts of the literary tradition 

known as the ‘Arab world’. The Arabic language also has official status in Israel, and, because of continuing contacts across the desert regions of North Africa, is used for communication in such states as Senegal, Mauritania, and Chad. If we include within our purview the use of Arabic as the canonical language of Islam, then the spread of nations and peoples becomes enormous, incorporating Iran, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Afghanistan, and Indonesia as Muslim countries, and sizeable communities in many other countries, of which Tadjhikistan, India, the Philippines, China, France, Britain, and the United States are merely a representative sample. Arabic is also the official language of the League of Arab States founded in Cairo in , and is one of the official languages of the United Nations.

Linguists term Arabic one of those languages that are ‘diglossic’, by which they imply that its native-speakers will use different registers of language according to the requirements of the social situation involved. The first language of every native-speaker of Arabic will be one of a number of colloquial dialects. That language will be used in the home and in day-to-day communication between inhabitants of the dialect area in question. As is the case with any language, there are of course many sub-dialects within each country and region, but one may begin by making a distinction on the broadest scale between the dialects of the Maghrib (Libya and westward) and those of the Eastern countries. Within the latter group the dialect of Cairo has, by dint of population size and the widespread popularity of contemporary Egyptian media, come to be regarded in the region (and among Western Arabists) as the colloquial that is at least understood (if not spoken) by the largest number of people. Other clusters of dialects include the ‘Levantine’ (Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria) and the Gulf (Saudi Arabia, Iraq and the Arab Emirates).

The emergence of these dialects seems to have begun with the early conquests of Islam. As the Muslim soldiers from different tribes of the Arabian Peninsula congregated in the garrison cities of the border regions (such as al-Kūfah, Fust·āt·, and Qayrawān), the practicalities of day-to-day – not to mention, military – living demanded that their different language systems be fused into a common medium of commu- nication. To these changes implicit in the geographical diversity of the Muslim community in the classical period has been added in the past century and a half a further differentiating factor in the form of neolo- gisms and technical terms culled from the lexica of Western languages, initially Italian as a result of trade with Genoa and Venice, but later

 An introduction to Arabic literature

French and English. Thus, the Lebanese word for a lorry or truck is kamiyon while in Jordan the word is lūrı̄.

For the many inhabitants of the Arab world who receive little or no education the colloquial dialect will be the only language they use to communicate. While a number of television programmes will be broad- cast in the colloquial dialect of the region, newspapers and televised news bulletins use the ‘standard’ language which we will discuss below. Because of the predominantly oral nature of the colloquial dialects we possess little historical record either of their use in daily communication or of the various types of entertainment that may have been performed in them, but the demands of modern drama for realism on stage have led not only to the performance of plays in the colloquial language but also to the publication of some of the texts of those plays in printed form.

The colloquial dialect is then the first language of all native-speakers of Arabic. Those who attend school and even proceed on to university acquire as a second kind of Arabic language the written form of Arabic that is standard throughout the Arab world and thus a major expression of the Arab individual’s sense of identity and unity with his fellow Arabs. While very early examples of the language are to be found in Assyrian, Nabatean (first century   to fourth century   ), and Palmyrene (first to third centuries   ) sources, the great ideal for this standard Arabic language is provided by the Qur©ān, regarded as the supreme and inim- itable masterpiece of Arabic. The Qur©ān’s clear statement that it is ‘an Arabic Qur©ān’ and that every sacred revelation comes to its people in their own language initiated a movement of standardisation that, to a remarkable degree, has preserved the classical patterns of standard Arabic morphology and syntax. In the eighth and ninth centuries the grammarians of al-Kūfah and al-Basr· ah set about sifting and recording the principles of the language, and local variants that fell outside the framework of such a system of ‘regularity’ were scrupulously noted, pre- sumably so as to be avoided at all costs.

However, in spite of the availability and application of such powerful conservative forces, the written Arabic language did undergo the natural process of linguistic change. From the outset, some regions adopted the language as their own mode of written communication: Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, for example. Others adopted Arabic as part of the process of conversion to Islam, but indigenous regional languages remained a pow- erful source of social cohesion – as with Berber in the Maghrib, for example. Persian and Turkish later reassumed their positions as the

The contexts of the literary tradition 

primary mode of cultural expression for their native speakers while Arabic maintained its canonical status within those spheres (such as the law) where the role of Islam retained its significance. Those inhabitants of the conquered territories who converted to Islam brought to Arabic several features of their own native languages, and this gradual process of adaptation and change was accelerated by the translation movement of the eighth and ninth centuries (discussed in more detail below) whereby works from the Indo-Persian and Greek traditions were ren- dered into Arabic. As the intellectual centres of the expanding Islamic community now became the bases for scholarship in a huge variety of disciplines – for example, grammar, law, mathematics, astronomy, music, philosophy, medicine, and literature – so did the Arabic language become a clear, subtle and adaptive medium for recording a truly remarkable tradition of learning.

While the great canonical Islamic works of the classical period of Arabic learning show a remarkable degree of unanimity regarding the appropriate level of discourse to be used, the different cultures gathered together within the framework of Islam, the wide variety of subjects that were the object of scholarly research, and the sheer passage of time made it inevitable that elements of difference would also emerge in the written language. However, the very regularising instincts of the gram- matical tradition and our less than complete knowledge of some six cen- turies (twelfth to eighteenth) of Arabic linguistic history combine to make it difficult to comment in detail on the effects on written Arabic discourse of a period in which the dominance of other languages (par- ticularly Ottoman Turkish) and the political fragmentation of the Arabic-speaking regions seem to have served in several spheres to narrow the gap separating the structures of the written language from those of the colloquial dialects.

Whatever the case may be, the movement of cultural revival that fol- lowed contacts with the Western world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries found itself able to revive the classical tradition of language and to reassert the primacy of its principles in the face of yet another process of cultural and linguistic interchange, this time with the forces of European colonialism. Such is the continuing immense prestige of the standard language – the language of the Qur©ān and the classical heritage of Arab-Islamic culture – that the morphology and syntax of modern written Arabic show remarkably little change from those of the classical written language. Organisations such as the Language Academies of Damascus (founded in ) and Cairo (founded in )

 An introduction to Arabic literature

have met with the somewhat equivocal success that characterises such institutions everywhere in monitoring language change, most particu- larly in the lexical realm. Even so, the hallowed place accorded the stan- dard written form of the language within the cultural mindset of the vast majority of Arabic speakers today, whatever their nation, race, or relig- ion, makes it a principal symbol of stability in a context of continual change.

Combining our discussion of these two types of language, the collo- quial and the standard, we may suggest that a native-speaker of Arabic operates along a spectrum that starts from a pole represented by the col- loquial language. Those people who enter the educational system will move along that spectrum towards the achievement of the status of an educated person. Here the linguistic yardstick is the classical Arabic lan- guage and its current manifestation, often termed modern standard Arabic. Quite apart from the chronological distinction implied by the ‘classical’ language of the cultural heritage and the ‘current’ (or ‘modern’), there are other distinct levels of language at this end of the spectrum also: from discussions among educated people on the media, to news bulletins, to official speeches and sermons, and to some types of drama.

While linguists specialising in the study of Arabic may endeavour to describe the language as it is used by its native-speakers, religion and cul- tural heritage combine to assign widely variant degrees of prestige to the different types. We can begin by considering the terms themselves. Al- fus

· h · ā (or Al-lughah al-fus

· h · ā) is in the form of a comparative adjective: it

implies ‘the language that is more correct’. The dialects by contrast are called ¨āmmiyyāt (languages of the populace) or the less pejorative lughāt dārijah (current languages). The attitudes implicit in these terms colour the discussion of the cultural value of many modern literary genres, most especially drama and fiction. They have also served to consign sur- viving texts of earlier popular literature to the realm of non-literature; this includes the Thousand and One Nights itself, a work that was recorded in a form of the written language that reflects the discourse practices of story-telling rather than those of élite literature.

One of the features of Arabic which links it to the other Semitic lan- guages is the basis of its lexicon on a series of consonantal patterns usually called ‘roots’. Thus, the triconsonantal pattern K-T-B denotes the semantic field of ‘writing’. KaTaBa means ‘he wrote’, KāTiBun (the active participle) means ‘a writer, scribe, secretary’, maKTūBun (the

The contexts of the literary tradition 

passive participle) means ‘written, fated’, maKTaBun (the noun of place) means ‘desk, office’, Kitābun means ‘book’, KuTTāBun means ‘Qur©ān school’, and so on.

This algebraic approach to language analysis also makes its way into morphology. The consonantal structure of the verb F-¨-L (to do) becomes the framework which can be used to illustrate the forms of verbs and nouns; they being two of the three categories in Arabic grammar, while the third is ‘particles’ – whatever is not a noun or verb. Using once again the root pattern K-T-B I can say that KaTaBa (‘he wrote’, also the basic morphological pattern for the verb) is of the pattern Fa¨aLa while KāTiBun is of the pattern Fā¨iLun. When we turn to the verb, we find that each example will have two basic time frames – complete and incomplete, active and passive participles, and a gerund (for example, QaTaLa, ‘he killed’; yaQTuLu, ‘he kills’; QāTiLun, ‘killer’; maQTūLun, ‘killed’; QaTLun, ‘murder’).

Arabic has two types of sentence structure: the nominal sentence which begins with a noun, and the verbal sentence which begins with a verb. Using the two ‘stars’ of Arabic grammar sentences, ¨Amr and Zayd, and their preferred verb, ‘to strike’, I can say: ¨Amrun D

· aRaBa

Zaydan and D ·

aRaBa ̈ Amrun Zaydan, where the English translation of both is ‘¨Amr struck Zayd’. The former is a nominal sentence; the assumption behind the choice of this kind of sentence structure over a verbal sen- tence is that ¨Amr is to be the topic about whom a particular piece of information is to be imparted.

The features of the Arabic language, its huge lexicon with a concom- itant potential for enrichment and obfuscation, its repertoire of morpho- logical transformations, its exultation in the sheer beauty of the sound of words, these elements have served as the inspiration for generations of littérateurs who have made virtuoso use of the potential it offers.

                   

Introduction

The breadth of the geographical space into which the Islamic domin- ions expanded is matched by the length of their recorded history. If we adopt the year    – the beginning of the hijrah era marked by the Prophet Muh· ammad’s ‘emigration’ from Mecca to Medina – as a point of reference, then we are talking of some thirteen centuries. However, this time frame also has to be extended backwards. In Chapter  I noted

 An introduction to Arabic literature

the primary historical division that is created by the revelation of the Qur©ān to Muh· ammad: between an Islamic period and a pre-Islamic one, termed al-jāhiliyyah (the period of ignorance). However, as the Muslim community began to realise the need to codify the Arabic lan- guage and to assess the accuracy of the memories of transmitters (the Arabic term is ‘carriers’) of the Qur©ānic text, the pre-Islamic period came to be regarded as a repository of information that was of extreme value to the emerging scholarly communities in the fields of the Islamic sciences. One of the most illustrious of the early historians, al-T· abarı̄ (d. ), begins his account with the story of the Creation and the Fall and then uses a combination of biblical, pre-Islamic Arabian and Iranian myths as a means of linking together received wisdom concerning the earliest periods in the region that was brought together under the aegis of Islam.

Pre-Islamic Arabia

The Arabian city of Mecca (Makkah) is set in the mountains to the east of the Red Sea coast at approximately the halfway point between South Arabia and the lands of the Fertile Crescent to the north. Mecca was a thriving mercantile community, but it was also renowned for other reasons. Close by were Mount ̈ Arafāt, a traditional place of pilgrimage, and the town of ¨Ukāz· which was the venue of a celebrated annual poetry festival at which tribal poets would compete. Within the city of Mecca itself was the Ka¨bah, a remarkable sanctuary enclosure that served as the focus for the worship of a number of pagan deities. The guardians of this shrine in the sixth century were the tribe of Quraysh. Apart from cities such as Mecca, another kind of venue at which the more sedentary tribes would cluster was the oasis, which, needless to say, provided other opportunities for commercial activity. One such was the town of Yathrib, some two hundred miles due north of Mecca. It was to this town that Muh· ammad travelled in secret in . As it became the centre of the new Muslim community, so did its name change to Madı̄nat al-nabı̄ (the city of the Prophet), abbreviated to al-Madı̄nah or Medina.

The harsh terrain and climate of the central regions of the Peninsula seem to have served for the most part as effective barriers to incursions from the outside. To the north and east two tribal confederations served as buffers between the peoples of the Peninsula and the two major empires of the region. The Banū Ghassān fulfilled this function vis-à-vis

The contexts of the literary tradition 

the Byzantine authorities based in Constantinople (now Istanbul), while the Banū Lakhm operated from a capital at al-H· ı̄rah in Southern Iraq in their dealings with the Sasanian rulers of Persia.

                                   

It was in the city of Mecca that Muh· ammad received his first revelation in about   . Following the death of his father, he had been taken under the protection of his uncle, Abū T· ālib, and had successfully engaged in trade on behalf of a wealthy widow, Khadı̄jah, whose offer of marriage he accepted. Following his custom of contemplating as he wandered the hills near the city, he heard a voice that told him: ‘Recite in the name of your Lord who created, created mankind from a blood- clot’ (Sūra ). This was to be the first of the revelations that he received for the rest of his life and that were gathered together after his death as the Qur©ān. When Muh· ammad began to preach his message – of a transcendent God who passes judgement on sinners and of his own role as a prophet – the reaction of the Meccans was one of antipathy to both the content of the message and its implications for their way of life. Following the death of both Abū T· ālib and Khadı̄jah in , the situa- tion of Muh· ammad and his followers became progressively more difficult, and in  he accepted the invitation of a group of tribal leaders in the oasis of Yathrib to serve as arbiter in their dispute with each other. This emigration (hijrah) is a major event in Islamic history in that Muh· ammad’s arrival in Medina marks the beginning of the forma- tion of the Muslim community that was soon to burst out of the Arabian Peninsula and establish itself as a major world religion.

 An introduction to Arabic literature