Classical Arabic Stories Read online

  The first two centuries of Islam was the period when adherence to truth was becoming a devotional requirement in literature, and when a story form such as that of the khabar began its spread in Arabic letters with its often short form and its chain of transmitters to lend authority (or the semblance of authority) to factual claims.

  I have attempted to represent the many genres selected from important collections or single works. However, I do not offer samples from the Arabian Nights because the Nights are represented well in translation.

  Observing the development of the old Arabic story, one can see that, although Islam’s early insistence on veracity in literature interfered with its natural development, it was able, in a short period, to resume its normal pace, constantly veering toward complexity, reflecting an active and engaging art of storytelling. Perhaps the most important observation in this process is that the art of literary prose opted out of poetry’s focus on the higher echelons of society and gazed at the whole of an Islamic public that was growing firmly in urbanity, depicting a people many of whom came from lower social strata: wily beggars, tricksters, party crashers, and others who resorted to tricks and simulations to survive. The antihero appears quite early in Arabic fictional history. A world inhabited by personalities who were neglected, almost unseen for centuries in much of world fiction, is depicted now, as early as the second century after Islam/ninth century C.E.,5 as alive with humor and mischief, a virtual presence of an acknowledged rogue in a thriving civilization.

  A short description here of pre-Islamic literary genres will be of use. The art of storytelling has universal features and, in many of its genres in any one culture, coincides with its prototypes in other cultures, particularly in the chronological story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Nonetheless, there are at least three major genres that are specifically Arab in origin: the khabar, the short anecdote that usually takes a genealogical list of transmitters (isnad) as an introduction to the story; the assemblies, or maqamat; and the visit to Heaven, exemplified first and foremost in the story of the Prophet’s ascension to stand at the hands of God.

  The Myths of Arabia

  For myth is at the beginning of literature…

  — Jorge Luis Borges

  The mythic apprehension of experience is the early human gaze at the universe, the outcome of the human encounter with its mysteries, of the desperate desire born in the human heart to fathom its insoluble dilemmas. It was also the answer to man’s desire to overcome the hindrances of his life, the evil that can beset it, and the incapacities and human limitations that he discovers in himself. This is where man’s deep interest in magic and superhuman solutions took a grip on the mind and heart.

  This has been a universal phenomenon in literature. Before Islam, the Arabian Peninsula was teeming with myths and legends,6 but the advent of Islam as a major doctrine interrupted the progression of this early human conceptualization of the universe, quickly arresting and transcending the mythic stage of the human confrontation with the mysteries of the cosmos as it offered a finalized explanation of human life and of the universe. A humanization of experience was sought, away from the world of fantasy and mythic apprehension of the cosmos. The former outlook on an awesome world full of wondrous visions and superhuman marvels, lodged in the intriguing realm of mystery, was now restrained by the new religion that left almost nothing unaccounted for. Under the wing of Islam, that intriguing world of mystery and uncanny powers was now deciphered, its enigmatic phenomena laid bare by the clear capacity to see in all this the hand of the One Unseen God, who can never be represented or portrayed but who controls everything.

  The world of mystery in pre-Islamic times, the world of inexplicable phenomena that had dominion over the human mind, had created a deeply perplexed human being, posing great challenge to his mortal powers and capabilities. This was conducive to a magnificent retaliation, to a great creative invasion of the mysteries surrounding man, to a creation, often wild, of fictive accounts depicting feats of human conquest where “human” was aggrandized and invested with the potency of the gods. All this disappeared in early Islam and would recur only centuries later when the need for popular romance, refreshing memories of conquests and potency after political defeats, became a major force.

  The Arab imagination was conquered by the Word, the magnificence and rhetorical sweep of the Quran. All fictive delineations of the unseen God were taboo. Even early Arabic poetry after Islam refrained from actual rapport with the divine. It would be much later that the Sufis, the Islamic mystics, would approach the Holy with all their senses, merging poetry with sensuous faith and familiarizing the never-seen, the never-imagined face of God.

  Christianity, which is very much alive in Islam, did not experience the same tightly secured horizons built around intrinsic human limitations; the story of Christ, his short, immaculate life, his suffering and violent death, his glorious resurrection, never failed to bring out a surge of fervent devotion in believers. This gave expression, over and over again, to a magnificent play of visual religious representations that gave scope to the greatest display of inventiveness and creative passion. The Christian religion, moreover, was a miracle-making creed: the crippled made ambulant, the blind given sight again, the dead resurrected. It confirmed the miraculous and the superhuman, reflecting a continuation of some pre-Christian beliefs and imaginings. Islam, and I am speaking here of early Sunni Islam, when it came to superhuman expectations, was austere, alien to a continued age of miracles. Even the jinn in the Quran were humanized. Although the story of the birth of Jesus and of Maryam’s virginity and immaculate conception are reiterated in one of the most sublime chapters of the Quran (surat Maryam) and were made part of basic Islamic belief, the crucifixion was rejected: no precedence to killing prophets should be considered possible. The stories of the other Jewish prophets were repeated with awesome reverence, but they, like the story of Jesus, were easily isolated from everyday Islamic devotional preoccupations and did not reside in the Islamic imagination. Islam stood within the boundaries of the rational, and Muhammad performed no miracles. Although there remained a reverence for the wonders of nature, often alluded to in the Quran itself with great literary power, the factual and rational, not the miraculous, were the gateway to the faith. Conviction came through a disposition, ripe and ready, for a more comprehensible order of belief, an answer to the long Arabian search for God; it needed no miracles. Creative minds could not happily improvise on the given Word, contemplate fantastic devotional meanderings, not in this early period. Except for the Prophet’s nocturnal trip to the Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and his ascent to Heaven to stand before God, Sunni Islam would remain rational. There was a kind of sustained completeness about the early Islamic message that allowed few diversions in literature, and hence few fantastic turns. Except for the intriguing verbal images of Paradise, described in the Quran in luminous and picturesque detail, pictorial representation of the holy personages was not allowed. The Muslim was left to embrace abstract concepts, which he could not negotiate at will, add to or question at will, except in short periods of Islamic history, as during the time of the rational movement of al-Muʿtazila in the second to third (eighth to ninth) centuries.

  This situation affected the progress of the story, the workings of the creative imagination. The early Muslims were restricted to the dictated word, to the given description of the details of the Islamic call and the life of the Prophet and his companions. Any myths surrounding their lives and those of the people around them were impossible. Many intrusions into the details occurred, but never to the degree approaching mythic exposition and delineation. Sunni Islam retained a rational explanation of the universe. The age itself accommodated, sometimes to the point of fanaticism, a concept of veracity and an insistence on truth. The religious tale one expects to have been nurtured in early Islam did not develop enough to become a genre in itself and was replaced by the Quran’s teachings.

  Modern Arabs, perhaps heedless of
the natural affinity of early cultures with mythic conceptions of the universe, have thought of their history as remarkably devoid of mythologies. The main cause behind this unawareness has perhaps been Islamic pietism, for not only did a prudent adherence to the letter of the creed arrest the development of mythic thinking, but also, in order to secure concepts of life within the strictly defined precincts of monotheistic Islamic devotion and belief, it discouraged a circulation of myths suggesting an alternative interpretation of the world. Pre-Islamic poetry was cleansed of any devotional mention of pagan gods, and, though enough remained for later scholars to collect, myths were not part of the early Islamic imagination and engagement. A return to mythic dramatization was inevitable in time, however, even in some Islamic sects.

  Nonetheless, despite the prohibiting atmosphere dominating the early Islamic narrative scene, some transmitters of prose lore, even during the first century, related mythic tales of wonders and marvels resisting religious stricture. However, Arabic stories of superhuman marvels and wonders would return with force in later centuries, as can be seen in some travel books and in the folk romances, among which the fourteenth- century folk romance of Sayf Ben Dhi Yazan7 is a prime example.

  In modern times various efforts to reconnect with the mythologies of the pre-Islamic past were made in the early decades of the twentieth century, first mainly by Arab poets, particularly the expatriate poets in the Americas,8 followed in midcentury by a number of scholars working to uncover the rich presence of myths in pre-Islamic Arabia, whose work has indeed added greatly to our knowledge in this still only partially mined field of Arab cultural history. Modern Arab writers and intellectuals in general, with no extant Arabian myths about them, only skimmed this area of knowledge, made available to them by modern Arab scholars through painstaking research.9 They seemed unable to assimilate into their consciousnesses the vivid presence of myths in pre-Islamic Arabia and their significance, their very normalcy, and to realize their activity in all cultures, a testimony to the unity of human creativity, to a cohesive universal vision as all cultures yield to the same basic conditions of life on earth and to the awesomeness of the cosmos and its incomprehensible phenomena.10

  Legends of Heroism and Chivalry: Ayyam al-ʿArab

  From this encounter with the mysteries of the cosmos, a deep longing was born in man to conquer its dangers and hazards and assert man’s potency. Hence the persistent recourse to heroism, conquest, the transcendent capacity to overcome human vulnerability and, by virtue of man’s own might and courage, triumph through encounters with its own kind.

  Besides stories built around myths and the superhuman hero, the desert Arabs, who had to fight for survival in a region of great scarcity, knew memorable encounters of tribe with tribe, in fights to secure proprietorship, hegemony, or status. It was normal that, around these encounters, intricate war legends celebrating heroism, loyalty, and tribal vendettas arose. The Bedouin Arabs in pre-Islamic Arabia seem to have been fond of their battle legends, all initially committed to memory and passed on generation to generation. Many are still extant. From these early pre-Islamic days, the Arabic predilection for factuality in their accounts is clear. These tales, despite their inevitable dramatic exaggeration, do not, as a rule in this period, touch on the supernatural or mythic. The legends that have come down to us, adorned with poetry expressive of the conflict and chivalry of such encounters, are well-crafted factual accounts. Many told not only of courage and chivalry but also of sometimes heartrending emotional conflict.

  An example is the story of ʿAntara, a black poet of note in the pre-Islamic period who was the son of a notable Arab from the southern ʿAbs tribe and an Abyssinian slave mother and who was himself regarded as a slave by his father. The story is dramatic enough in its own right, with ʿAntara’s desperate love for ʿAbla, his white cousin, and his feats of courage in defense of the tribe, which procured his emancipation and marriage to his love. The happy conclusion of ʿAntara’s story did not necessarily characterize other tales, which can be tragic, as in the Kulaib / Bassous heroic tale. The elaborate story woven around Kulaib, head of the tribe of Taghlib, depicting his arrogance and megalomania, his confiscation of people’s rights and property, and finally his punitive death at the hands of his brother-in-law, Jassas, of the tribe of Bakr, sister tribe to Taghlib, is interwoven with the agonized experience of Jalila, Kulaib’s wife, also the sister of Jassas. Caught in the clutches of a treacherous fate that made her a pawn between husband and brother, she experienced great suffering, especially felt in the story’s tragic end: Jalila was pregnant with Kulaib’s child when he was killed. Having been sent back to her tribe after her husband’s demise, Kulaib’s son is born in the Bakr tribe and grows up unaware that the uncle bringing him up was the killer of his father. According to the old Arabian tribal laws, it was the duty of the son to kill his father’s killer, and therefore, when he eventually learns the truth, he has no alternative but to kill the man who has loved and raised him.11

  Such tales of conflict show a sophistication unexpected at that early age in the life of the Arabic story. Although mirroring a possible experience within the well-established traditions in the culture, the interpretation of the conflict and its introduction into the story reflect a complexity and a sensibility of great significance. Even if one were to argue the possibility of these tales’ having been improvised after Islam, the same impression would hold, as it would still belong to a remote time in Arabic literary history.

  The Romantic Love Story

  The romantic love story took hold of the Arabic popular imagination during the Umayyad period, a period reflecting, in certain parts of the peninsula, particularly in the region of Hijaz, where most of these love stories thrived, many signs of a romantic apprehension of experience. These enduring and charming love accounts formed a genre by themselves and were the purest expression of the ancient Arabian soul, full of nostalgia, loyalty, chivalry, and a catching tenderness toward women that cannot fail to touch one’s heart even after many centuries. They were sometimes tragic or semi-tragic accounts, but always anguished stories of unrequited attachments and unreachable dreams; they spoke of a great, idealized love, the love that brings delirium to the heart, that in some cases dements, claiming not only the length of life but also sometimes life itself. Madness is the lot of Qais ibn al-Mulawwah, known as Majnun Laila (Laila’s Madman [d. 68 / 688]), whose beloved Laila was married by her father to another man because the poet had announced his love for her in his verse. The story repeats itself again and again. Its pattern had been set by the tragic experience of al-Muraqqash al-Akbar12 in pre-Islamic times, and the change in fortune in the Umayyad age, in lifestyle, in possibilities did not arrest its relentless perpetuation. At first glance one may think there is no difference between one story and the other. The men were steadfast, anguished, and inconsolable, totally dedicated to the object of their love; the women were mainly passive, loving in silence, their serene suffering, their defenseless acquiescence setting the stage for millions of women in the long Arabian future. Volition in love was denied to both.

  The Umayyad period (40 / 660–132 / 750) was a formative time when major changes took place in Arabic literature, in both poetry and prose. It was in this period that the Arabic love story took front stage, particularly in the Hijaz region, its prominent place pointing to the rise of a romantic current in literature in answer to the deep anxiety that had taken hold of the pre-Islamic Arabs with the advent of a new, all-controlling religion, the sudden changes and contradictions that had beset Arabian life and the difficulty of achieving a complete adjustment to a growing new urbanization. Added to this in Hijaz was the region’s deprivation of its former status as the center of political life and the anxiety among the thwarted Hijazi aristocracy who remained there. There was political struggle with rising hopes for some and disappointments for others; there was formidable social change accompanying developing urbanization and the influx of multitudes of non-Arabs to the growing cities
, old and new,13 including slave girls and singers. There was a psychological resistance to the new lifestyle, which was threatening the inherited, well-established mores and attitudes that had heretofore shown resilience to change. Also present was the enticing opportunity for migration to more fertile lands away from the beloved but barren desert habitat that had sheltered, for countless centuries, their history and particular character. Despite the great improvements that changed fortunes for and opened far wider horizons to the new Muslims, the abrupt and numerous changes imposed on them brought bewilderment and fear, and a feeling of nostalgia for the lost ways of life, particularly to the Bedouins. Literature itself had a need for change as an art. After this massive transformation, and the influence of Quranic language and style, there arose an imperative necessity for change in the subject matter, language, and style of literature. Literature needed to capture and express the new restiveness of the age.

  The new centers of literature during the Umayyad period were, first, Hijaz, the birthplace and early seat of Islam, which had just lost its central power to the Umayyads in Damascus; Iraq, forever a place of strife and unrest; and the seat of power in the Damascene region. These three centers exhibited different literary features. While Damascus encouraged eulogy in particular, the major poets living in Basra and Kufa, in Iraq, foremost of whom were al-Farazdaq (24 / 640–111 / 729) and Jarir (33 / 653–113 / 730), found their outlet in skillful and sometimes hilarious satire. But the rest of Arabia, particularly the region of Hijaz, the area of thwarted dreams, tended to concentrate more on the literature of love; Hijaz was the center of music, the lyric, and the love story. If the heavy satire in Iraq had a streak, too early acquired, of decadent romanticism, a purer, more immediate kind of romanticism illumined the rich love literature, especially that of the chaste lovers of the Umayyad age.