Classical Arabic Stories Read online

  Many literary historians have attributed the phenomenon of love stories mainly to social and political causes. The region of Hijaz, where the greatest spiritual revolution had taken place and from where the most forceful thrust into the world had been effected only a few decades earlier, was now, in the Umayyad period, suffering, as noted above, from political impotency after the citadel of government had moved to Damascus, a move intended to leave the Hijaz area as depoliticized as possible. However, this was a period of great anxiety for all Arabs, whose whole way of life had been altered within the span of a single generation. The radical change in fortune, lifestyle, and expectations, which had so quickly overtaken them, was not immediately internalized, and they found themselves engulfed by political upheavals, civil wars, and sectarian factionalism. A tense and nervous spirit was released, informed by the need for escapism or sensationalism, expressing itself not only in individual rebellions but also, in Hijaz, in romantic eroticism and, in the famous Iraqi souqs of al-Mirbad, in Basra, and al-Kunasa, in Kufa, in satirical poetry. The two genres represented a sort of poetic catharsis. Both the erotic and the satiric proved to be in great popular demand.

  The love accounts, in both poetry and prose, assumed the two opposing features of chaste and profane love, establishing a fabulous convention of unforgettable love lore to posterity that has never died down.

  It is important to note that these two kinds of love stories were not purely Umayyad; the stage had already been set earlier in pre-Islamic times with such stories as “Midad and Mai,” in the Book of Crowns (see below). This is one of the stories making up an early pattern of the romantic and tragic chaste love story that became widespread in the Umayyad period. “Midad and Mai” is the story of the unconsummated love between Midad, a young dignitary from Mecca, and his cousin Mai, which ends with the self-inflicted death by thirst of the two lovers, who, broken down with despair and anguish for each other, willfully deny themselves water and, separately, die of thirst (hence the non-Islamic nature of the story).14

  A similar story, more akin, for its involvement with a poet, to the chaste Umayyad love stories involving more than a few famous Umayyad poets, is the sixth-century tale of al-Muraqqash al-Akbar. The story of his love for his cousin Asmaʾ is one of a desperate attachment to the beloved, who is married off to another man, causing the devoted lover to pine and, in this case, die in the process of looking for her. Only about twelve poems remain from the verse of this poet, but the story is a lovely and complex account not simply of his love for Asmaʾ but also of the greed and treachery of her father, who had promised her to him on condition he would leave in search of money but then, in his absence, married her off to a richer man; of the cruelty and intrigue of the maid and her husband, who accompanied al-Muraqqash on his quest for Asmaʾ but later abandoned him to die alone in a cave; of a brother’s loyalty, who discovers the situation and rushes to help him only to arrive too late. It is an intricate story fit for a modern-day film.

  On the other hand, the story of al-Muraqqash al-Asghar, also of pre-Islamic times, belongs to the realm of the profane. The protagonist is also a poet, and his illicit relationship with a Yemeni princess, the daughter of the king, and also with her chambermaid is more profane than any of the erotic stories narrated from the Umayyad period. Her father orders the princess kept under constant guard, allowing no man to enter the premises. However, al-Muraqqash is carried to her nightly on the back of her chambermaid, but an observant watchman sees how the footprints of the chambermaid are deep on entering the premises but lighter on going out, and the trick is discovered.

  Despite the restrictions imposed on love by a people so zealous about their women throughout the known Arab history, lovers in the early classical period continued to choose their own destiny. They adulated the object of their love, allowing their passions to make apparent their undying yearnings to the beloved, even sometimes to the extent of delirium, as in the case of Qais ibn al-Mulawwah, known as majnun Laila (Laila’s Madman). For after Laila was married off to a man from another tribe, Qais spent the rest of his life roaming the wilderness, mourning his love in a poetry aesthetically potent and emotionally moving. His love, even with all the torment it produced, was a most desired attachment that he steadfastly coveted. Witness the madman, insatiable, unrelenting, holding on to the curtains of the Kaaba and beseeching God to increase his love for her, affirm and intensify it, and bolster it in his heart. The story of Qais ibn Dharih (d. 68 / 688) and his love for Lubna, his adored but childless wife, whom he is forced, through the intrigues of his parents and their rigid insistence, to divorce, recounts the same kind of anguish and single-minded quest for the beloved. What is amazing in these stories is not only the perpetual freshness of every encounter with the beloved but also the demonstration of an unwavering constancy in the male lover, belying what is regarded as virile masculine qualities: inconsistency and instability in love. A number of these idealized stories survived the centuries because their protagonists were well-known poets.15 Perhaps the best known among them is Jamil ibn Maʿmar, known as Jamil Buthaina, whose love for Buthaina lasted all his life, until his death in Egypt in 82 / 701. It is the same story of forced separation and of permanent fidelity. Jamil was a famous figure in the Hijaz, and there is no doubt that the story attached to him is authentic. Some of the most charming and tender verse on love and the beloved was written by Jamil.16

  These tragic love stories,17 which reflected extreme situations, also suited the general mood. However, the accumulation of so many love stories showing great similarity to one another points to the rise of a literary fashion that dominated the literary milieu in the Hijaz for a time, then disappeared. A fashion is not a trend; it takes shape, in literature, when an individual work expressing something found to be exciting and suitable to the prevailing tastes is taken up by a number of authors in a certain period, runs its course, then is overtaken by the forces of change, often through aesthetic fatigue, and dies out. A trend, on the other hand, does not disappear completely; it dissipates, giving way slowly to a new, often corrective trend that coexists with it for some time. This internal movement in the creative realm explains why, in some literary ages, we invariably have at once the old and the new, the traditional and the innovative.

  The stories were also an implicit rebellion against existing social norms, an indictment of the strict taboos of the culture, which were accentuated by Islam. But this rebellion was never realized. No hard-hearted patriarch was ever defied and brought down, and the chastity of the Arab woman was going to remain forever at the heart of the highest morality, the proof of family honor and a never-violated ethical code. The longing for volition in love, for the attainment of love’s greatest ecstasy, was to linger for centuries in the Arab soul, transcending the rich urban centuries of the empire, with their abated, colorful male sexuality, their open negotiations with the erotic, to surface again in various periods and areas of the Arab world, then assert its hard command among modern Arab poets and writers of fiction in the first half of the twentieth century. Umayyad ʿUdhri love, as it came to be called with reference to the ʿUdhra tribe in the Hijaz, which boasted the greatest number of lovers annihilated by love (“a people who, when they love, they die”),18 was a battle in which the lovers were always defeated, their resistance and constancy only a symbol of a vanquished soul that gallantly persevered.

  The perseverance in love was not, would never be permeated with the hope for union and bliss. It often ended in stalemate, sometimes, as in the case of Laila’s tormented lover, in madness and death. But the love story that aspires to immortality has perforce to revolve around deprivation and loss and the attempt to transcend them or defy them with an avowal of constancy. The best, the most memorable love literature is not usually created out of the delight of fulfilled passion and permanent union.

  It is interesting to observe the contradictory situations during the Umayyad age. While the most powerful public drama was taking place in Damascus, where the
citadel of government had moved, and on the vast frontiers of the quickly expanding Arab domains, a concentration on the most private of experiences was demonstrated in the Hijaz, where, instead of the brisk public energy with which that region had reverberated only a few decades earlier, the self-absorption in these stories signaled a retreat from public involvement, and, despite the similarities the love tales show, a concentration on individualized, private experience is paramount and the intimate voice of the bereft lover is heard. There is a clearly discernible inwardness of the lover in these stories, an attitude perhaps seen here very early in literary history but regarded today as the earmark of the modern novel.

  Not to be overlooked is the other, contrasting vogue that existed side by side in the Umayyad era with that of chaste and unfulfilled love: while those wretched, mostly Bedouin lovers were mourning their fate, there was a group of other lovers, mainly in the cities of Hijaz, now flourishing with a new wealth and great resurgence in the arts of music and song, who knew well how to enjoy life. Led by that blithe-spirited poet ʿUmar ibn Abi Rabiʿa (23 / 643–93 / 711), they had no patience with constancy and sorrow. A number of them were poets, and some of the most charming stories were about them. Both kinds of experiences were the result of the same motivation: the need for escapism.

  As mentioned, it was with the establishment of urban life in the many cities that mushroomed in the vast Abbasid empire (which began in 132 / 750) that much of the emotional attachment to the purity of love and its constancy subsided. Except for rare instances, we do not find, in the long Abbasid era, that burning out of the soul for the sake of the beloved, that concentration and permanent devotion, that tenderness and chastity. The profane erotic trend became almost the norm in the Abbasid age, and with the great influx of all kinds of slaves of both genders and of many races, the nature of love changed on the whole and became inured to the pursuit of pleasure, at times targeting a homosexual experience. Love proves capable of undergoing many transformations, of experiencing mutations of mood and intensity; and fiction will have a wide variety of themes, away from the unrequited love stories of the Umayyads. But for the Umayyads, these tragic stories were a great representation of a private tragedy begun very early in Arabic culture.

  Whether the love stories were all genuine, concerning real historical figures or not (some, such as the story of ʿUmar ibn Abi Rabiʿa and Jamil ibn Maʿmar, or Jamil Buthaina, are certainly genuine), their existence, often in elaborate construction, in an age of eroticism remains of relevance. They reflected a culture neither repressive nor permissive19 that shaped their existential experience. Whereas the stories of unfulfilled, chaste love and enduring constancy were more popular, there was profanity even in the first century, however well camouflaged.20 This other kind of love developed with the centuries, including in part the homosexual experience of lovers in the breadth and length of the Islamic empire, from Cordova to Baghdad.

  The Short Anecdote

  There are many examples from the khabar (pl. akhbar) genre in this anthology. The khabar is usually a short anecdote, resembling the very short story of modern times.21 It often has a pretension to truth and revolves around real or the simulation of real protagonists and thus is always one step away from pure fiction. It is found in abundance in the many large and small collections assembled by various anthologists, medieval and modern. Khabar anecdotes reflect medieval Arabic social and intellectual life, its beliefs, mores, experiences, and colorful diversity. These anecdotes usually begin with a list of genealogical transmitters forwarding the individual khabar, a practice that was the result of the need to proclaim “truth” in narration, which Islam, particularly in its earlier phases, demanded of believers. Through this procedure, accounts that might have been imaginary assumed the appearance of truth.

  The issue of veracity in studying the khabar genre should be crucial when looking for the social aspects of medieval Arabic life. However, whether a single khabar anecdote is based on truth or fiction, it is its aspects as an art form that engage the critic and literary historian, whose primary interest is to observe the development of the art of storytelling in Arabic. The most interesting artistic aspects of this genre are its terseness of expression, its closed structure, and its conciseness, which entails great control of language and expression, as well as its immediacy. Some anecdotes are short stories or episodes, some no more than brief comments, wise or comic, on various aspects of life,22 and other longer accounts of more complex events or stories. They always develop toward a conclusive ending. The language of these narratives usually lacks the intimacy that would arouse ardor, nostalgia, or deep compassion. That was the provenance of the Umayyad love story and the endearingly subjective love poetry that often accompanied such stories. It must be kept in mind that the age when the khabar flourished, the height of Abbasid hegemony, was a realistic age, one that had abandoned the romanticism of the Umayyad age.

  The khabar is a purely Arabic genre, issuing from both the early Islamic discouragement of purely fictitious narratives but also the old Arabic mastery, since pre-Islamic times, of succinct, cogent expression, with little of the redundancies or flabbiness afflicting Arabic prose much later. It was also a direct contradiction to the endless tales found in the Book of Crowns, where one story grows out of another. The interest in the many compendiums containing hundreds of anecdotes23 stems from other human incentives: the curiosity about Arabic and particularly Abbasid life revealed, pulsating with all kinds of experience and with the smells, sounds, colors, and rhythms of place, and the interest found in the variety of human encounters, some of an amusing, even a mischievous and comic appeal. The history of a place, a people, the very conscience of the Abbasid experience are brought to light in these narratives. Indeed, the whole Arab cultural and social heritage, during one of its richest periods, has a genuine treasure in these many dictionaries and compendiums.

  The insistence on veracity began early after Islam. The first Islamic century displayed a close attention, whether spontaneous or imposed, to the demands of the new faith in its urge to spread the message of the new religion to the surrounding world. Islam brought fame, wealth, and conquest to this half-forgotten area of the planet. Arabia had burst out into the world, and from desert harshness and scarcity a landscape of fruits and flowers and running waters was attained. This sudden and decisive movement opened many avenues to the Arabs, who had been hemmed in in the vast and mostly arid desert of Arabia, counteracting, but only to a limited extent, the strong tribal identity of Bedouin Arabs now entering the age of urban life. It also eventually brought a sense of a new Arab / Islamic identity, which thereafter remained vivid in the Arab consciousness.

  The khabar is linked with the ninth-century scholar, philologist, and anthologist al-Asmaʿi (124 / 741–216 / 831), and such later linguists as Ibn Duraid (223 / 837–321 / 933). By the fourth / tenth century, the form had become widespread. Because of the fear of exaggeration and waywardness and the possible dissemination of narratives estranged from Islamic teachings, fiction in early Islam was suspect. Religious authorities wanted the new Muslims to concentrate on the Quran and on the teachings of the Prophet, which enveloped everything. Much later, the jurist, linguist, and religious savant Ibn al-Jawzi (511 / 1117–597 / 1200) gave six main factors he felt had negatively affected the storytelling art: first, people tended to reject anything that had not existed at the time of the Prophet; second, the stories of the ancients were regarded as rarely accurate, especially those about the Israelites.24 Third, storytelling tended, it was felt, to distract from the study of religious texts; fourth, there were many narratives in the Quran and among the traditions of the Prophet that rendered these unreliable stories superfluous; fifth, some of the narrators who adopted Islam introduced into their stories alien elements that tended to change the hearts of the public; and sixth, most storytellers, whether from ignorance or a lack of genuine piety, did not pay enough attention to a story’s veracity.25

  The khabar established itself
strongly and for many centuries as a major method of narration, factual and fictive, and constituted numerous entries in the many large compendiums and dictionaries in which Arabic heritage is so rich. They coexisted with new fictive genres created by the Arabs themselves or imported from the conquered worlds of India and Persia.

  The importance in Arabic literature of the broad public is seen even in pre-Islamic times. With the romantic love stories in the Umayyad age, its place was firmly established. And even after the full evolution in the Abbasid period of a royal caliphate, with its pomp and ceremony, a new proud and mighty upper class, a vast bureaucracy and complex infrastructure, a large, powerful merchant class with great economic power, and the introduction of luxury and city refinements into the lives of the upper echelon of society,26 the interest of both the humbler urban public and the desert Bedouins continued in prose literature. At this point, and I am talking here of the classical Abbasid centuries, poetry and prose took divergent paths. On the one hand, formal poetry preserved, even augmented its elitist status,27 sustaining the sublime rhetoric and sonorous tones of the eulogy, elegy, and satire and achieving, in some special experiments, an elaborate and intricate grace in a poetry that reflected an art for art’s sake approach devoted to painting nature with words. This art form had begun in Arabic in pre-Islamic times with the minute descriptions of both domesticated animals (the camel and the horse) and the desert and its fauna but flourished later, in the early fourth / tenth century and thereafter, with elaborate descriptions of fertile nature (a point to ponder in the context of literary history and comparative literature). On the other hand, the Arabic fictional experience seems to contradict Northrop Frye’s categorization of fiction in the West according to neat differentiations and gradations in the status of the hero (which is not exactly accurate for the West either).28 Right from its earlier experiments we see a rather inclusive attitude toward social levels, and a mixture of protagonists from varied strata of life is presented.