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Introduction to The Portrait of Abū l-Qāsim al-Baghdādī al-Tamīmī
Introduction to The Portrait of Abū l-Qāsim al-Baghdādī al-Tamīmī
Emily Selove2021, The Portrait of Abū l-Qāsim al-Baghdādī al-Tamīmī
Hikayat Abi l-Qasim al-Baghdadi (The Portrait of Abu l-Qasim al-Baghdadi) is an 11th-century Arabic work by Abu l-Mutahhar Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Azdi which tells the story of a Baghdadi party-crasher crashing a party in Isfahan. It is introduced by its author as a microcosm of Baghdad. This work, written in prose but containing numerous poems, is widely hailed among scholars as a narrative unique in the history of Arabic literature, but The Portrait also reflects a much larger tradition of banquet texts, from "Trimalchio's Dinner Party" and Plato's Symposium to the works of Rabelais. It also paints a portrait of a party-crasher who is at once a holy man and a rogue, a figure familiar among scholars of the ancient Cynic tradition or other portrayals of wise fools, tricksters, and saints from literatures around the Mediterranean and beyond. While some early scholars of The Portrait dismissed it as disgusting and obscene, this work, with its wealth of material-cultural, philosophical, spiritual, and literary treasures, is much more than just a "dirty book". Following an introduction, which offers new insights into the relationship of the work to both its Greek predecessors and to its European descendants, the volume presents a new, improved edition of the Arabic text, together with a richly annotated translation, that aims at being both scholarly and readable, reflecting the often racy style of the Arabic. This makes it not only useful to specialists and students of medieval Arabic literature, but also accessible to a much wider general readership of those interested in comparative literature or "world literature". There are extensive indexes of names, places, subjects, and rhymes.
Related Papers
2021 •
By Ibn Qutaybah Arabic Edition and Translation into English Edited by James Montgomery and Peter Webb Translated by Sarah Bowen Savant and Peter Webb
During the late 19th century the Arabic public sphere in Egypt and the Levant and the Arab language began a process of rapid integration into the European-dominated world order of nations and national cultures. This process shaped public institutions and discourses homogeneous with those of European countries and a Modern Standard Arabic language made up of elements increasingly interchangeable with European equivalents. National consciousness, while emphasizing the distinctiveness of the Arabic language, at the same time worked to make Arabic the “equal” of its European counterparts in communicative tasks and capacities. A major factor in this process was the integration of the Arabic literary heritage into a world order of literature made up of universal literary genres and national literatures. The translation of contemporary European literary works played a central role in this process, but so did, in a different way, the translation of literary “classics,” such as those of ancient Greek literature. A celebrated instance of this phenomenon is Sulayman al-Bustani’s translation of the Iliad into Arabic which was published in Cairo in 1904. Unlike translations of modern fiction, drama, and poetry, the rendering of this ancient classic into Arabic had a limited scope in developing new means of linguistic expression in Arabic, or establishing new literary models. The publication of this translation was a momentous event in Arabic letters, and continues to be remembered as such, I argue, because of the enormous distance this project traversed in assimilating the Arabic literary heritage to world literature. The actual translation of the Homeric verses, an estimable achievement in itself, is only one portion of the massive undertaking al-Bustani took upon himself and on which he labored for 17 years. The poem is accompanied by an extensive introduction of nearly two hundred pages, copious explanatory notes that dwarf the poetic text, numerous illustrations, two indices, and three glossaries. The introduction and notes deal as much with the history, genres and lore of the Arabic literary heritage as they do with information necessary for understanding the ancient Greek poem. Al-Bustani’s effort in his scholarly disquisition is to uncover an Arabic literary history and generic framework that is parallel to and on an equivalent footing with those of European literatures -- and indeed, world literature in general. It is discovered that the epic (malḥama, al-Bustani’s term) is a genre to which Arabic has made significant contributions and that Arabic pre-Islamic or “jāhilī” poetry and legends occupy the same position in Arabic literary history as the “jāhilī” ancient Greek poetry and mythology do for European literatures. The translation of world literary classics into Arabic thus not only brings Arabic into line with other national languages that provide their citizens with access to these works, but reconfigures the Arabic literary heritage so that its works find their place in the literary world in which the Iliad occupies a central position. This reconfiguration, however, is not a clean break with the past, but a transformation of the meaning of existing categories that preserves their rootedness in the past. Al-Bustani’s Iliad project, therefore, is a prime instance of a literary translation that brings world literature into Arabic and at the same time brings Arabic into world literature on its own terms, or at least apparently so.
Middle East Studies Association Bulletin
Modern Arabic Literature, edited by M. M. Badawi. (The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature). 571 pages, map, bibliography, index, chronological table. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1992. $125.00 (Cloth) ISBN 0-521-33197-81999 •
2012 •
Classical Arabic prose, for the most part, does not merit literary study. At least this is the impression conveyed by two recent works of reference,2 in which the discussion of classical poetry reflects a level of sophistication and reflection which the survey of prose does not pretend to. Having worked on classical prose literature for some time, we feel that more can be said about it than the surveys referred to above suggest. We propose here to describe the characteristics and development of this branch of Arabic writing in the light of current research, to identify problems connected with the study of it and to indicate some paths which future investigations could take. If comprehensiveness were ever possible , it is obviously out of the question in an article of this kind; our aim is above all to stimulate reflection about a corpus of works signifrcant both in quantity and in quality. We have used the following definition of classical Arabic prose literature as a starting point: works principally in prose, in which there is a pervasive concern with artistic expression as well as the communication of information. The qualifrcation "principally in prose" refers to the fact thatjuxtaposing prose and poetry is one ofthe characteristic features of this literature; to consider only those works which are exclusively in prose would be entirely contrary to its spirit. We have confined ourselves to the cAbbasid period, and have concentrated on the 3rd/9th to 5th/11th centuries, the heyday, or "classical" ug., of pre-modern Arabic prose. It must be borne in mind, however, that many texts which appear in the works of this period took shape in the Bth century or, in individual cases, even earlier, and the literary sensibility of later writers, such as the authors of the works discussed here, was moulded by the exemplary character of texts handed down by tradition. But the emergence of major works and the elaboration of a highly sophisticated prose style, in which acoustic elements play an increasing part, justify this period being considered as a golden age of Arabic prose literature. Original works by authors make up only a small part of this literature. The major part of it consists of collections of speeches, letters and short
THE PORTRAIT of Abū l-Qāsim al-Baghdādī al-Tamīmī
(Ḥikāyat Abī l-Qāsim al-BAghdādī al-Tamīmī)
by Abū l-Muṭahhar al-Azdī (5th/11th c.)
edited, translated, and annotated
by Emily Selove and Geert Jan van Gelder
حكاية أبي القاسم البغداديّ
لأبي المطهّر الأزديّ
حقّقها وترجمها وعلّق عليها
أملي سيلوف وخيرت يان فان خلدر
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface............................................................................................................................... [3]
Introduction .................................................................................................................... [4]
The Author and Date of Composition............................................................. [8]
The Voice of the Donkey................................................................................... [11]
The Sufi Connection.......................................................................................... [19]
The Ḥikāyah High and Low................................................................................ [23]
The Manuscript.................................................................................................. [23]
The Editions........................................................................................................ [25]
The Translations................................................................................................ [27]
A Note on Transliteration................................................................................. [32]
Facsimiles............................................................................................................. [33]
The Portrait of Abū l-Qāsīm al-Baghdādī al-Tamīmī: Annotated Translation........... [37]
Ḥikāyat Abī l-Qāsim al-Baghdadī al-Tamīmī: Edition of the Arabic Text.................... [259]
Table of Contents of The Portrait of Abū l-Qāsīm al-Baghdādī al-Tamīmī................... [445]
Index of Names of Persons and Tribes........................................................................ [447]
Index of Place-Names..................................................................................................... [454]
Index of Selected Arabic and Persian Words and Terms.......................................... [459]
Index of Verses................................................................................................................ [465]
Bibliography.................................................................................................................... [496]
PREFACE
This book presents the story of a day and night spent in Isfahan in the life of a fictional man from Baghdad called Abū l-Qāsim, written in Arabic by an obscure author called Abū l-Muṭahhar al-Azdī at some time in the first half of the 5th/11th century and preserved in a single manuscript. Abū l-Qāsim attends a convivial party at which he insults his Persian hosts at great length, extolling Baghdad at the expense of Isfahan. Near the end, in a rather sudden volte-face, he praises Isfahan. A great quantity of poetry is recited. In the course of the text one comes across many topics such as food, love, horses, wine, river boats, music, chess, all of which makes the work a treasure trove for those interested in the literary, cultural, and material history of that period.
This book offers the third edition and the second complete English annotated translation of the work. It was first edited in 1902 by Adam Mez, who supplied useful notes to the often very difficult text. Many readings were improved by ʿAbbūd al-Shāljī in his edition of 1997, which is marred, however, by his cavalier editorial practice. Moreover, he incorrectly attributed the work to the famous prose writer Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī (d. 414/1023). Having published a monograph on the book (Ḥikāyat Abī l-Qāsim: A Literary Banquet, 2016), Emily Selove decided to make an improved edition and a readable annotated English translation that aims at striking a middle course between the very loose and often inaccurate French rendering by René Khawam (24 Heures de la vie d’une canaille, 1998) and the scholarly translation by Mary St. Germain, incorporated in her doctoral dissertation (“al-Azdī’s Ḥikāyat Abī al-Qāsim al-Baghdādī: Placing an Anomalous Text within the Literary Development of its Time”, 2006); all this in collaboration with Geert Jan van Gelder, whose interest in the work goes back to 1977 when he acquired a copy of Mez’s edition, and who has fond memories of reading parts of the book with her and Adam Talib in Oxford in 2009. Emily Selove first came across the Ḥikāyah as an undergraduate at Cornell studying with Shawkat Toorawa (now of Yale), who generously continued to offer guidance and moral support ever after. She read the first half of the text while she was a PhD student at UCLA with her doctoral advisor, Michael Cooperson, who gave invaluable advice on initial drafts of the translation.
We are also indebted to several persons whom we pestered with queries, such as Anna Livia Beelaert (Leiden) and Kevin van Bladel (Yale), who tried to make sense of a few garbled Persian phrases; Dionisius Agius (Exeter), who helped with the nautical passages; and Pernilla Myrne and Marlé Hammond, who read the Zād Mihr passages with Emily Selove and offered their insights. We are grateful to the E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Trustees for accepting the volume in their series. Our thanks naturally extend to the two external readers for their useful anonymous reports and comments. One of these readers made so many corrections and suggestions, almost all of which we adopted, that we felt that anonymity should be waived. His identity having been correctly guessed by us, James Montgomery (Cambridge) allowed us to name him and thank him for his extraordinarily thorough and helpful contribution. We are also grateful to the British Library for the permission to reproduce a few folios of the manuscript of Ḥikāyat Abī l-Qāsim.
INTRODUCTION
Scholarly writers have a sometimes tiresome inability to proceed with the discussion of a topic without first precisely and exhaustively defining its terms. This presents a real dilemma when embarking on an introduction to Ḥikāyat Abī l-Qāsim, since we cannot be sure when it was written, who was its author, or what literary genre it belongs to. Even translating the title is far from straightforward. Many studies of the text have foundered on these questions without moving much beyond them, and the only point that everyone can agree upon is that the Ḥikāyah is thoroughly obscene.
We will cast a certain amount of doubt even on this point of agreement in our introduction, and offer some new thoughts on the question of date and authorship. We will then go on to provide some observations on the subject of donkeys and other related topics, but we should first linger over the question of the Ḥikāyah’s literary genre. Much of the scholarly debate surrounding this text has centred on the decision of one of its editors to publish it under the title of a lost work of the important prose writer Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī (d. 414/1023), al-Risālah al-Baghdādiyyah, and indeed the Ḥikāyah refers to itself as a risālah in its opening and closing passages (§§ 10 and 486). Risālah here would be defined as a composition in the high literary style of epistolary writing (often employing sajʿ, rhymed prose) that would often take the form of a monograph. It is a form influenced by the Greek culture of letter writing,
Arazi and Ben-Shammay, “Risālah”. and no doubt the Ḥikāyah displays (like many of the Arabic texts to which it is comparable) a Hellenistic love of the wine-drenched sympotic literary setting, with its atmosphere of debate and intellectual exchange, coupled with a hedonistic focus on sexy young cup-bearing youths or beautiful singing girls. Like another sympotic Arabic text, Daʿwat al-aṭibbāʾ,
Daʿwat al-aṭibbāʾ (The Physicians’ Dinner Party), a witty satire on medical practice and quackery by the Christian theologian and physician Ibn Buṭlān (d. 458/1066). An edition and English translation by Philip Kennedy in the Library of Arabic Literature series is in preparation. it falls somewhere between a risālah and a maqāmah,
ʿAbbās, Malāmiḥ yūnāniyyah, 191–92. a genre of high literary episodic fiction that was in turn influenced by the risālah and later conflated with it.
For discussions of the maqāmah genre with reference to the Ḥikāyah, see Kilito, Les Séances, Kennedy, “Maqāmāt as nexus”, and Hämeen-Anttila, Maqama.
One scholar of the Ḥikāyah (ʿAlī ʿUqlah al-ʿArsān) denies that it can be a maqāmah because it is too long, and too divergent in both style and content. Rather he compares the apologetic prologue of its author to those found in Greek drama, and otherwise likens it to theatrical character sketches.
al-ʿArsān, al-Ẓawāhir al-masraḥiyyah, 112, 12. He then rewrites it as a heavily bowdlerised theatre script.
al-ʿArsān, al-Ẓawāhir al-masraḥiyyah, 132 ff. Shmuel Moreh later took up his argument that the Ḥikāyah should be read as material for a live performance, and points out that it incorporates material also used in the famous 14th-century shadow plays by Ibn Dāniyāl.
Moreh, Live Theatre, 94–100. He was later refuted in his claim that the Ḥikāyah represented material for a live performance by Rowson, “Review: Live Theatre”, 466–68. Hämeen-Anttila also addresses the question in Maqāma, 85–87.
Al-ʿArsān further states that the Ḥikāyah creates a new literary form, developed from the maqāmah and concerned especially with questions of mimesis
al-ʿArsān, al-Ẓawāhir al-masraḥiyyah, 122, Horovitz addresses the translation of the word mimesis in relation to the Ḥikāyah in Spuren griechisher Mimen, 18. Also see Pellat, “Ḥikāya”, and Gabrieli, “Sulla Ḥikāyat”, 34. (muḥākāh, or ḥikāyah as it calls itself in §§ 3, 7, and 487). This claim at least is obviously true, as is his observation that there is an element of performance implied in this kind of imitation, and the Ḥikāyah’s introduction indeed suggests that this performance might be public, addressing itself to its “energetic listeners” (man nashiṭa li-samāʿihā). The more common meaning of the word ḥikāyah is “story” or “tale”, but its original sense is “imitation”, indicating an imitating performance or citation; imagine a stand-up comedian doing an impression, with mystico-philosophical overtones.
For the most thorough explanation of “ḥikāyah” see Moreh, Live theatre, chapters “Ḥikāyah,” 87–103, and
“Ḥikāya and Literary Genres: Maqāma and Risāla,” 104–22. For the mystico-philosophical overtones, see “The Sufi Connection”, below. James Montgomery, discussing al-Jāḥiẓ’s use of the term, translates it as “representation”, adding that to al-Jāḥiẓ the word ḥikāyah “combines the idea of mimesis and mimicry with that of verbatim and accurate quotation, almost to the point of impersonation or ventrilocution”.
Montgomery, Al-Jāḥiẓ: In Praise of Books, 153. Our initial translation of the title was therefore “An Imitation of Abū l-Qāsim”, which was, however, disliked by the anonymous readers, who suggested various alternatives such as “The Portrait of Abū l-Qāsim”, “The Posturing of Abū l-Qāsim”, “The Party: The Impressions of Abū l-Qāsim”, and (abandoning the attempt at a translation), “The Ḥikāyah of Abū l-Qāsim”. We thought of “An Impression of Abū l-Qāsim”, but in the end we adopted the first-mentioned suggestion.
This question of mimesis has been discussed at length in a recent monograph Ḥikāyat Abī l-Qāsim: A Literary Banquet,
Emily Selove, Ḥikāyat Abī al-Qāsīm: A Literary Banquet. whose contents we will briefly summarise and comment upon here, so as not to have to further repeat them in this introduction. A Literary Banquet first reviews the scholarly responses to this text, whose obscenity has often coloured or distorted these responses.
Especially De Goeje, “Abulkasim”, 723, Brockelman, “Alazdi”, 1569, and Mubārak, Nathr, 419. Especially early scholars often compared it to Greek or Roman precedents, and most especially to Petronius’s Satyricon.
Gabrieli, “Sulla Ḥikāyat”, 36. Von Grunebaum, “Aspects”, 259-81. Khawam, 24 heures, 10.
Adam Mez’s decision to edit the text in 1902 in turn stemmed from his interest in Greek theories of literary mimesis and their reception in Arabic literature. He called Abū l-Qāsim “ein bagdâder Sittenbild”, a depiction of the manners and customs of a Baghdadi.
A Literary Banquet goes on to provide a summary of events of the text accompanied by early drafts of some of the translation included in this volume. We can summarise this summary of events as follows: the Baghdadi party-crasher Abū l-Qāsim walks into a party in Isfahan, weeping and reciting pious verse. In response to a comment from a fellow guest (“Come off it! Everybody here drinks and fucks!”), he changes his demeanour, obscenely insulting the guests and gradually growing drunk on wine. He talks at length about the superiority of Baghdad to Isfahan, and then changes his tune, describing the superiority of Isfahan to Baghdad in almost the same terms. At the end of the day, he grows so drunk that he passes out. The following morning, he resumes his pious poetry and weeping, leaves the party exactly in the manner that he joined it.
Although the action takes place in Isfahan, in Persia (present-day Iran), where the principal spoken language was and is Persian, all dialogues and monologues are in Arabic, except for a few words and expressions in Persian. Even at a time when Persian had already re-established itself as a literary language—Persia’s “national epic”, Firdawsī’s Shāhnāmah (The Book of Kings), was completed in 400/1010—the use of Arabic at the banquet is not necessarily a distortion of reality on the part of the author, because Arabic was still written and spoken widely by many native Persians in the 10th and 11th centuries
See Bosworth, “The Interaction of Arabic and Persian Literature and Culture in the 10th and early 11th Centuries”. The literary and cultural dominance of Arabic is also evident from the large parts devoted to Persia in Arabic anthologies such as Yatīmat al-dahr compiled by al-Thaʿālibī (d. 429/1038) and Dumyat al-qaṣr by al-Bākharzī (d. 465/1075). and in Isfahan in particular, Arabic was favoured as “the language of social distinction”.
Durand-Guédy, Iranian Elites and Turkish Rulers, 41.
The second chapter of A Literary Banquet, “A Microcosm Introduced”, lingers over the author al-Azdī’s fascinating introduction, in which he promises to be a mime (ḥākī) of a Baghdadi friend he once knew, whom he here names Abū l-Qāsim (a name of significance, as mentioned further below). He will present this friend, he says, as a microcosm of the city of Baghdad; he then quotes al-Jāḥiẓ’s description of man’s mimetic abilities and his claim that this proves that man is himself a microcosm.
“A Microcosm Introduced” also addresses the Ḥikāyah’s unusual depiction of time. We can here add that the Ḥikāyah can be classified as a “circadian narrative”, which, like Joyce’s Ulysses or Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, fits into a 24-hour period. The author’s introduction further implies that it can be read in the same amount of time that the events depicted take to unfold (§ 7). Overall the Ḥikāyah presents an unusually strict adherence to what we might call an Aristotelian ideal of unity of time and place, all while depicting a grotesquely full microcosm. This 24-hour period furthermore appears to repeat on a cycle, with the end of the text resembling its beginning. It could even be said to have a loose “chiastic” structure (roughly speaking, following an ABBA pattern), in that Abū l-Qāsim enters the party as a holy man (A), insults the guests (B), erupts when one of the guests laugh at him (C), praises Baghdad and insults Isfahan (D), then praises Isfahan and insults Baghdad (D), erupts when one of the guests laugh at him (C), insults the guests (B), and exits the party as a holy man (A).
Mary Douglas analyses this structure in texts from many cultures of the ancient world in Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition. James Monroe has extensively explored the structure in Arabic poetry in, e.g., “The Mystery of the Missing Mantle”.
The second chapter of A Literary Banquet also dwells on a central point of the study at large, which is the uneasy relationship between representation and reality in the Ḥikāyah. As Daniel Beaumont writes of al-Maqāmah al-maḍīriyyah by Badīʿ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī (d. 398/1008), it could be said to adhere to the “Derridean madhhab” in its quasi-deconstructive depiction of language as an unruly, self-perpetuating entity that obscures and obstructs reality, or calls the nature of reality into question.
Beaumont, “A Mighty and Never Ending Affair”, 152. The third chapter of A Literary Banquet, “Crashing the Text”, further develops this idea, showing that (as in al-Maqāmah al-maḍīriyyah) the relationship of food to speech demonstrates this problematic relationship of representation to reality in a culture anxious about the power and influence of its own language.
See Van Gelder, Of Dishes and Discourse, for an introduction to this theme in medieval Arabic Literature. This chapter relates the Ḥikāyah’s depiction of a party-crashing character at a banquet to those found in some Greek and Roman sympotic texts to show their shared themes, with special focus on the figure of the party-crasher as (an unreliable) guide for the reader. Chapter four, “Mujūn is a crazy game”, focuses on a specific scene in the Ḥikāyah in which the protagonist, Abū l-Qāsim, plays a fellow guest in a game of chess. It offers a definition of mujūn as a kind of game, and further explores the complicated relationship of representation to reality, while attempting and failing to reconstruct the chess game played through an examination of Abū l-Qāsim’s often nonsensical speech.
The final chapter of A Literary Banquet, “The Cosmic Crasher”, is also the most important, which is why its ideas will be further developed in sections below (“The Voice of the Donkey”, and “The Sufi Connection”.) This chapter begins by asking why the often foul-mouthed and badly-behaved Abū l-Qāsim (“Father of al-Qāsim”) shares his name
His teknonym (kunyah); his given name is Aḥmad, which is a variant of Muḥammad (the Prophet Muḥammad is also called Aḥmad). with the prophet Muḥammad, whose son al-Qāsim passed away at a young age. Abū l-Qāsim’s name is one hint that he is possibly meant to represent the paradoxical joining of the prophet Muḥammad and Iblīs (Satan), to whom he is often compared (e.g. in § 467, where he declares, “I am Satan uncircumcised!”, or in § 487, where the narrator states that, “Abū l-Qāsim al-Baghdādī ... was the pride of his time and the equal of Satan”).
Al-Iṣfahānī’s Kitāb al-Aghānī (v, 231–36) records an interesting account of Satan crashing a courtly banquet, although he was much better behaved there than Abū l-Qāsim. This paradoxical joining in turn represents the microcosm’s joining of opposites in divine unity. The chapter “The Cosmic Crasher” also dwells on the blurred lines between tricksters and holy men in Arab culture and beyond. It concludes by suggesting that the Ḥikāyah could even be read as a distorted imitation of the Qur’an. Very shortly after the publication of A Literary Banquet, Sarah Bin Tyeer made a related claim.
Sarah Bin Tyeer, “The Qur’an and the Aesthetics of Adab”; see also below. She also mentions the Ḥikāyah briefly in her The Qur'an and the Aesthetics of Premodern Arabic Prose, 214–15.
A Literary Banquet concludes by describing the final scenes of the Ḥikāyah which exploits the tension between Abū l-Qāsim as microcosm and Abū l-Qāsim as tired old man. The study concludes with a comparison of the Ḥikāyah to the story of Philemon and Baucis from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which the Gods Hermes and Zeus visit an elderly couple disguised as uninvited guests, and then transform the house into a temple.
As our annotation of the translation will show, the text contains innumerable unacknowledged quotations of short poems and snippets of prose; there is probably much more of it that we have missed or have not been able to trace to its original author. Thus the Ḥikāyah may strike a modern reader as paradoxically being stolen to a large degree, which we would call plagiarism today, and being very original at the same time, by moulding the largely derived material into a long and unified literary narrative. It is as if the author wanted to compose a text that offers a combination of an anthology or thesaurus on various topics (love, sex, invective, food, wine, perfume, chess, boats, swimming . . .) with a story, thus combining, in true adab style, the useful with the entertaining: a repertory helpful to would-be authors and for general erudite conversation, in the form of an amusing narrative.
The Author and Date of Composition
The author of the Ḥikāyah, Abū l-Muṭahhar Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-Azdī, is otherwise unknown and absent from the contemporary biographical dictionaries. Mez
Mez, xv; cf. Brockelmann, Geschichte, Supplement, I, 254. believed that he could be identified as Abū l-Muṭahhar al-Iṣfahānī, a poet who has an entry in the anthology Dumyat al-qaṣr by al-Bākharzī (d. 467/1075)
al-Bākharzī, Dumyat al-qaṣr, i, 434–36. and who is also mentioned there as the author of a book entitled Ṭirāz al-dhahab ʿalā wishāḥ al-adab.
al-Bākharzī, Dumyat al-qaṣr, i, 13. Nothing else is known about this person or his book; the few quoted fragments of panegyric poems provide no clues and the kunyah Abū l-Muṭahhar is by no means rare. Others have considered this name a pseudonym for Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī, and the most recent editor of the book, ʿAbbūd al-Shāljī, published his edition under the title of a lost risālah of this famous author, as mentioned above. This question has been debated by many modern scholars,
St. Germain’s dissertation provides an extensive consideration of this debate (“Al-Azdī’s Abī al-Qāsim al-Baghdādī”, 10–35). Also see al-Ḥusayn, “Muqāḍāh”, 17, al-Rāwī, “A-hiya al-Risālah al-Baghdādiyyah”, and ʿArsān, al-Ẓawāhir, 108 n. 127. Almost every scholar of the Ḥikāyah at least mentions the matter. Among those who reject the attribution to al-Tawḥīdī are Moreh, Live Theatre, 95; Cooperson, “Baghdad in Rhetoric and Narrative”, 112, n. 118; and Sezgin, Geschichte des Arabischen Schrifttums, Band XVII, 160, n. 1. but we can now assert with a reasonable degree of confidence that al-Tawḥīdī is not the author, based on the name mentioned in a poem in the course of Abū l-Qāsim’s drunken insult to a fellow guest (§ 418):
Who will let me meet with you alone;
For even were you Dubays in al-Ḥillah
I would shit along your beard
Like a lightning bolt, so help me God!
Dubays ibn ʿAlī (r. 408–74/1017–82) was a Mazyadid ruler in al-Ḥillah and central Iraq.
He was born in 394/1003–4. See al-Ṣafadī, Wāfī, xiii, 510, Bosworth, “Mazyad”. If he was already famous enough to be mentioned in verse in this manner, it is sufficient proof that al-Tawḥīdī, who reportedly burned all his books in his old age in 400/1010, and who is said to have died in 414/1023–24 aged over 100, cannot have quoted this poem and cannot have been the author of Ḥikāyat Abī l-Qāsim.
The first, to our knowledge, to notice this and conclude that therefore al-Tawḥīdī could not be the author of Ḥikāyat Abī l-Qāsim was Muḥammad ibn (bin?) Tattā, in an article published in 2010 (Ibn Tattā, “Ḥikāyat Abī l-Qāsim al-Baghdādī”, 1132–33). The Ḥikāyah does, however, quote liberally from the writings of al-Tawḥīdī, most notably in the section discussed below in “The Sufi Connection”. Like the character Abū l-Qāsim, al-Tawḥīdī was an often sharp-tongued wanderer with a propensity for mysticism.
It also still seems likely that the work was composed during the late Būyid period,
The Būyids (also called Buwayhids) were the dominant dynasty in Iraq and parts of Persia from the middle of the tenth to the middle of the eleventh century AD. See Cahen, “Buwayhids”. a time of radical literary and philosophical exploration. Because the Būyids were of Iranian origin, but held sway in Baghdad while the Abbasid caliphs acted as figureheads, the Būyid period was also a time that invited explorations of the relative merits of Baghdad and equivalent Iranian centres of civilisation (like Isfahan). This is a main theme of the Ḥikāyah.
A Literary Banquet explores this theme in the section “Baghdad the Party-Crasher”, of the chapter “A Microcosm Introduced”, 78–86.
There are, however, hardly any concrete references to political events or names of prominent persons that could help in dating the time of composition or the time in which the story is set. Abū l-Qāsim claims to have seen a theologian called al-Wāsiṭī, who died c. 306/918 (see § 278), which seems to set the story in the late 3rd/9th or early 4th/10th century. But in the following section (§ 279) a certain Abū Ṣāliḥ al-Hāshimī is speaking, who may be identified as someone who died much later, in 369/979. In § 266 Abū l-Qāsim mentions the well-known scholar Abū ʿUbayd al-Marzubānī, who died in 384/994, and in § 274 a poem is quoted by a poet who died c. 420/1029. It would be difficult to reconcile these various dates and one should probably not expect the author to have thought carefully about a precise date of the story.
Isfahan
Arabic spellings are Iṣfahān, Aṣfahān, Iṣbahān, and Aṣbahān. enjoyed almost a century of prosperity under the Persian Būyids, from c. 323/935. A rival dynasty, the Ghaznawids, invaded the city in 420/1029, massacring many of its inhabitants; another dynasty, the Seljuqs under Ṭughril Beg, conquered Isfahan twice, first 431/1040 and then in 442/1051 after a prolonged siege. This was followed by a period of renewed prosperity.
On the history of Isfahan in the relevant period, see e.g. Hossein Kamaly, “Isfahan.vi. Medieval”, in Encyclopædia Iranica, xiii, 641–50, A. K. S. Lambton, “Iṣfahān”. i. History”, in EI2, iv, 97–105. Baghdad, too, had a turbulent history. The geographer al-Muqaddasī, in his Aḥsan al-taqāsīm fī maʿrifat al-aqālīm (Best Divisions for Knowledge of Regions) written in 375/985, calls it “too renowned to need description, more glorious than we could possibly portray it” but he adds that “the authority of the caliphs declined, the city deteriorated, and the population dwindled. The City of Peace is now desolate”.
al-Muqaddasī, Aḥsan al-taqāsīm, 119–20, tr. Basil Collins, 100. During the Būyid period (334/945–447/1055) Baghdad was in decline; there were conflicts between Sunnis and Shi’is. Many perished in fights and fires; the irregular militia of the ʿayyārūn brought its share of destruction.
See e.g. A. A. Duri, “Baghdād”, in EI2, i, 894–908, esp. 900.
The superiority of Baghdad to Isfahan, so eloquently and volubly stated by Abū l-Qāsim, may therefore be as fictional as the protagonist himself; perhaps al-Azdī composed his book in an elegiac mood, dwelling on bygone glory just as early Arab Bedouin poets described abandoned desert sites where once they enjoyed company and loved women, a pervading motif throughout classical Arabic literature.
St. Germain (Al-Azdī’s Abī al-Qāsim al-Baghdādī”, 53–87) devotes much of her introduction to the analysis of the overall structure of the Ḥikāyah in terms of an Arabic tripartite qaṣīdah or ode, with an elegiac opening (nasīb), a “journey” (raḥīl), and a final section combining panegyric (madīḥ) with invective (hijāʾ) and vaunting (fakhr). We find this presumed close parallel between the Ḥikāyah and the qaṣīdah rather strained. For one thing, vaunting and invective are by no means limited to the final part. Abū l-Qāsim is a master of hyperbole and distortion and his words should not be taken at face value. The lengthy comparison of two towns is a common theme in literary texts: Kufa vs. Basra, Mecca vs. Medina, Damascus vs. Cairo, Damascus vs. Baghdad, Málaga vs. Salé, all these have been the subject of literary debates (munāẓarāt),
See e.g. Arazi, “Matériaux pour l’étude du conflit de préséance entre la Mekke et Médine”; Van Gelder, “Kufa vs Basra: The Literary Debate”; Wagner, “Die arabische Rangstreitdichtung. usually of a more balanced character than Ḥikāyat Abī l-Qāsīm in which only one speaker dominates and where Isfahan has to bear the brunt of his sustained invective before he makes up for this in a much shorter section in praise of Isfahan.
Although the positive and negative attributes that Abū l-Qāsim ascribes to Baghdad and to Isfahan are, for the most part, rhetorical commonplaces, the rivalry between the two cities was real enough, at least to some Isfahanis who styled their city as the “second Baghdad” (in the words of Ibn al-Faqīh
Ibn al-Faqīh, Mukhtaṣar, 254.). Durand-Guédy takes Ḥikāyat Abī l-Qāsim’s lengthy and violent reworking of this debate as proof “of how seriously that claim was taken in the caliphal capital,” and goes on to point out that when Baghdad’s fortunes fell, those of Isfahan rose.
Durand-Guédy, Iranian Elites and Turkish Rulers, 47-50. The Ḥikāyah’s depiction of Isfahan can be linked to other apparently factual claims about the medieval city, ranging from the use of manure in its agriculture, to its rigid policing of Sunni orthodoxy; both the implied miserliness and bigotry may explain why a party-crasher championing the multiplicity of the microcosm serves as Isfahan’s nemesis in the Ḥikāyah.
See Selove, Ḥikāyat Abī al-Qāsim, pp. 82 and 154–55 where both claims are confirmed by the geographer Yāqūt (d. 626/1229). Durand-Guédy discusses the cities “ultra-Sunni tendencies” in relation to its rivalry with Baghdad, Iranian Elites and Turkish Rulers, 50. Nevertheless, the Ḥikāyah clearly does not aim to provide an accurate historical account of anything; indeed the deceptive potential of literary language appears to be one of its themes, as explored in the following section.
The Voice of the Donkey
In explaining his literary project, the author makes a striking comparison (§ 5). He says he is like a man described by al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 255/868 or 869), who would stand in a neighbourhood of Baghdad popular with the muleteers, and he would make donkey noises. So well did he imitate the voice of the donkey that he brayed better than the donkeys themselves, and even those sick and overworked donkeys otherwise immune to the pleasures of life would perk up and take heart at his voice.
This is taken as proof that man is a microcosm, capable of embodying all the animals in his person. Since this idea is thoroughly explored in A Literary Banquet, we will leave it aside for now to discuss the significance of donkey imitation in Arabic literature and beyond, for donkey imitation has a long (if not illustrious) history in world literature.
Given the immediate cultural context of the Ḥikāyah, we might first think of the Qur’an, where the voice of a donkey is compared to the braying of a boasting, arrogant man:
Q Luqmān 31:18–19, translation Alan Jones.
Do not turn your cheek from men in disdain, and do not walk in the land in exultation. God does not love anyone who is conceited and boastful. Be modest in your walk and keep your voice low. The most disagreeable voice is that of the ass.
In promising to provide a ḥikāyah (“imitation”, “impression”, or “portrait”) of the people of Baghdad, and in comparing himself to a donkey imitator, the author is playfully alluding to the arrogant boasting of the typical Baghdadi, a trait for which they were indeed famous.
See Cooperson, “Baghdad in Rhetoric and Narrative”.
The sura in which this verse is found condemns those who mock the Qur’an or distract from its study by telling idle tales.
From Tafsīr al-Jalālayn at Q Luqmān 31:6–7: “This was al-Naḍr b. al-Ḥārith. He used to visit al-Ḥīrah for commerce and purchase books containing the stories of the non-Arab peoples and then recount these to the people of Mecca. He would say ‘Muhammad recounts to you the stories of ʿĀd and Thamūd whereas I relate to you the stories of the Persians and the Byzantines!’ They would thus go to enjoy his stories and neglect to listen to the Qur’an.” Also see The Study Quran, 1000-1001. In invoking the voice of the donkey in this context, the Qur’an participates in a long-lived literary metaphor, in which a man imitating the voice of an animal stands for that which is base, laughable, and misleading in humankind’s artistic and cultural productions, as opposed to that which is sublime or divinely inspired. For example, in Bakhtin’s famous analysis of the works of Rabelais, he describes the carnival tradition of the “feast of the ass”, in which a mock mass is performed where words like “amen” are replaced with the bray of the donkey. He then refers to the “widespread ass-mimes of antiquity”,
Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, 78. though regrettably he does not cite any specific sources (beyond mentioning the famous transformation described by Apuleius, on which see more below).
The most obvious comparison from Hellenistic Greece is not with a donkey-imitator but the pig imitator, Parmeno. When a theatre hosted a pig-imitating contest, Parmeno won, despite the fact that his cheating rival smuggled a real pig under his arm. For beating a real pig at a pig imitating contest, Parmeno became mockingly proverbial for a job well done: “Nicely done, but nothing compared to Parmeno’s sow!”
The Oxford Anthology of Roman Literature, 15-16, citing Plutarch, Table-Talk 674c. Thanks to István Kristó-Nagy (Exeter) for drawing our attention to this story.
But the richest and most striking comparison is with a story from Cervantes’ Don Quixote (first published in 1605). Although written probably 500 years after the Ḥikāyah, Cervantes’ work shares some strikingly similar images in common with al-Azdī and his contemporaries, as we discuss after our analysis of the tale of the donkey imitators, which is as follows.
Book II, chapter 25.
Don Quixote, having met a man hurrying with a load of weapons down the road, begs to hear his tale, and in a nearby inn where they both stop to rest, the man obliges. He tells Don Quixote that he is from a village where a councilman lost a donkey, and having obtained the assistance of another councilman, set off into the woods to find it. By happy coincidence it turns out that both men were virtuosos at the art of donkey imitation, so they decided to split up and make donkey noises while wandering through the forest in hopes that the lost donkey might hear and respond. So skilled were they at their art, however, that they repeatedly mistook one another’s donkey imitations for the real thing, and thinking they had located the lost donkey, hurried through the woods only to find one another instead.
“By God,” says one councilman, referring to his skills at braying, “nobody’s better than me, not even donkeys!” The other agrees and praises him by saying “that between you and a jackass there’s no difference at all as far as braying is concerned.”
Trans. Edith Grossmann, 621.
Sadly, the two men do not elicit a response from the real donkey, who they later discover has been eaten by a wolf, and who is therefore beyond reach of the inspiration experienced by the “sick and overworked” donkeys roused by the donkey imitator mentioned by al-Jāḥiẓ. But the owner of the lost donkey in Don Quixote is consoled somewhat by the experience, telling his friend, “As long as I was able to hear you bray so beautifully, compadre, I consider the effort of looking for him well worth the trouble, even though I found him dead.”
Ibid., 622.
When the two proud donkey imitators return to their village and boast of their skill in braying, word of their adventure travels to the neighbouring town, where it inspires such mockery, causing young boys to bray sarcastically on the streets, that the two villages go to war with one another. This is why the narrator from the first village is hurrying with weapons down the road when he meets Don Quixote.
In keeping with rest of the work, which is constantly professing itself to be a true story in such a way as to make the reader sure that it is not, the narrator begins his donkey tale by saying, “Everybody who knows the truth of the matter tells the story with the same details, and in the same manner that I’m telling it now.”
Ibid., 621. As is well known, Don Quixote’s madness stems from reading too many books about knights in shining armour, and mistaking their fantastical battles with giants and sorcerers for the truth. Shortly after hearing the donkey imitation story, Don Quixote is similarly confused by a puppet show about two ill-starred lovers pursued by a hoard of Moors, and he ends up attacking and slashing the Moorish puppets, much to the dismay of the puppeteer.
These are quite mocking portrayals of art imitating life. It is positively dangerous, in fact, to confuse these lowly attempts at artistic mimesis, these donkey imitations and puppet shows, with real life, as this results in madness, absurd battles, and the wanton destruction of valuable puppets. Nor are the artists themselves engaged with the sublime, but are portrayed as men wandering around a forest braying like asses.
In likening himself to a donkey imitator, the author of the Ḥikāyah is adopting a self-abasing, abject posture, in keeping with the apologetic tone of his introduction, in which he promises a work full of plagiarism, language errors (laḥn), tedium, and obscenity. He clearly shares Cervantes’ interest in the pitfalls of artistic mimesis. The word ḥikāyah was itself used to translate the word “mimesis”,
The standard equivalent of “mimesis” in Arabic is muḥākāh, derived from the same root as ḥikāyah, but less ambiguous since it does not mean “story”. but the Ḥikāyah repeatedly casts doubt on the ability of its language to represent the truth, most obviously in praising Baghdad and blaming Isfahan, and then switching to praise of Isfahan and blame of Baghdad in much the same language. The tricky nature of the relationship of the Ḥikāyah’s language to the truth is the main topic of A Literary Banquet so we need not belabour the point here; suffice it to say that alluding as it does to the Qur’an in its closing passages, it appears to paint itself as a failed mimesis of the sublime work on a macrocosmic scale (§ 458):
On that morning the first thing that would be heard was his yell. And he would say, “We’ve woken up and the power is to God! Welcome to a new day and a writer bearing witness! Write: In the name of God the merciful, the compassionate, Abū l-Qāsim ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad al-Tamīmī al-Baghdādī says, I bear witness that there is no god but God alone without partner, and that Muḥammad is His servant and His messenger. ‘Our Lord, we believe in what You have sent down . . .” etc.
Q Āl ʿImrān 3:53. “In the name of God the Merciful and the Compassionate, ALIF LĀM MĪM,
Several Surahs of the Qur’an begin with one or several letters, the meaning of which is unknown. ‘The sending down of the Scripture of which there is no doubt, from the Lord of the living beings.’”
Q al-Sajdah 32:2. He would mutter in his speech, then sound out with something from the word of the Almighty: “Their sides shun . . .” etc.
Q al-Sajdah 32:16: “Their sides shun their couches, as they call upon their Lord in fear and hope, and they spend from what We have bestowed on them.”
Abū l-Qāsim, the “voluble loudmouth” (§ 11), is surely a far cry from his namesake, the prophet Muhammad. But since their complicated relationship is also explored extensively in the chapter “The Cosmic Crasher” of A Literary Banquet, which furthermore deals with the question of donkeys in relation to man as a microcosm, we will here turn back to Don Quixote and other matters concerning donkeys.
Don Quixote playfully claims to be a translation of an Arabic book, so it is no surprise that we can perceive an Arab cultural influence at work in the story, in which the expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain constantly unfolds in the background. Nizar Hermes and others have demonstrated that Cervantes was intimately acquainted with Islamic culture and influenced by its literature.
Hermes, “Why you can’t believe the Arabian Historian”. He shows definite parallels with e.g. The Arabian Nights as well as the maqāmah genre. But we were surprised to find a strikingly specific image, besides that of the donkey imitator, shared between the Ḥikāyah and Don Quixote—that of the toothpick used as a false badge of wealth and satiety by a poor man putting on airs.
One notes that refined persons should never use a toothpick in public, see al-Washshāʾ, al-Muwashshā, 142. In making fun of a such a person at the Isfahani party, Abū l-Qāsim says (§ 57): “Naked in his woven Indian sandals, hungry toying with an entire lamb, naked in a fancy shawl, hungry and picking his teeth! Sell those adornments and put an end to your hunger!”
This same image appears in Don Quixote, and what is more, it occurs when the fictional Moorish author, Benengeli, speaks in his own voice (a rare occurrence). Musing on the subject of poverty while Don Quixote secretly darns his hole-filled socks, Benengeli exclaims, “How wretched is the wellborn man who nurtures his honour by eating badly, behind a closed door, playing the hypocrite with the toothpick he wields when he goes out after not having eaten anything that would oblige him to clean his teeth!”
Cervantes, Don Quixote, Book II, chapter 44 (tr. Grossman, 741–42).
It is striking that this parallel with an Arabic text is put into the voice of an Arabic-speaking character, but Edith Grossman tells us in a footnote that the same image can be found in the 16th-century picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes,
Grossman, 742. See Two Spanish Picaresque Novels: Anon., Lazarillo de Tormes, Francisco de Quevedo, The Swindler (El Buscón), tr. from the Spanish by Michael Alpert, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969, 59: “And to satisfy that ridiculous honour of his he took a straw (there weren’t even enough of them in the place) and went and stood in the doorway picking his teeth which had nothing stuck between them.” a text itself influenced by the maqāmah genre.
Hermes, “Why you can’t believe the Arabian Historian Cide Hamete Benengeli”, 214. And in this text we find that one poverty-stricken but proud character affects wealth with this same toothpick trick in Tratado 3, all while residing in Toledo, a city famous for its translation of Arabic literature. In Tratado 2, in the nearby town of Maqueda, a stingy priest served by the poor young protagonist had, like Abū l-Qāsim, “eyes like balls of mercury”, a striking image we have not found elsewhere. The knot of possible influences here is perhaps too difficult to disentangle.
We find another image in Don Quixote startlingly familiar to the scholar of Arabic literature: when Sancho becomes governor of Barataria, he is distressed to find that whenever he is served the fine foods fit for a governor, an overzealous doctor enumerates their medical dangers and whisks them away before he can have a bite.
Cervantes, Don Quixote, Book II, Ch. 47, tr. Grossman, 757–61. This forms the main theme of the 11th-century physician Ibn Buṭlān’s comic medical miser/party-crasher story Daʿwat al-aṭibbāʾ (The Physician’s Dinner Party, mentioned above).
What are we to make of these literary parallels, that echo like the voices of donkey imitators in a forest, confusing us as to their origins and significance? Given that the Ḥikāyah itself is almost literally a mere “tissue of citations” (as Roland Barthes describes all texts in “Death of the Author”), we can hardly suggest that it is the source of inspiration for the donkey or the toothpick image in Don Quixote. We know, after all, that the donkey imitator story comes not from al-Azdī but from al-Jāḥiẓ, and as for the toothpick image, it could have its origins in any of the sources that the author vaguely cites in his introduction (§ 2):
… the extraordinary ideas invented by the minds of well-read scholars, as well as the marvellous innovations born of the genius of the prominent modern poets.
By modern poets (muḥdathūn) he means urban poets from the middle of the 2nd/8th century onwards. These are the sources I have drawn from in my book, adorning myself with their work and often passing it off as my own; I have heard with my own ears the witticisms they have discussed at length and competed over. I have also included excerpts of my own poetry, letters that I have circulated, and records of literary gatherings that I have attended.
Readers of world literature are accustomed to finding similar images in texts from very different times and places, and one could easily write a work in the vein of the famous Motif-Index of Folk-Literature by Stith Thompson for high literature as well.
One striking example is the image of a human having sex with a donkey. Like the image of a man imitating a donkey, this confluence of human and ass is found in very different times and places, though often with a more profound, didactic purpose than might be expected. For example, an anecdote about a man having sex with a donkey is used in a 9th-century Zoroastrian refutation of Islam and Christianity to make a complex point about the problem of evil: “A man was seen having sex with an ass. ‘Why are you committing this abomination?’ they asked him. He said by way of excuse, ‘Well it’s my ass!’”
Our translation of the Latin translation of the Pahlavi Skand-Gumanik Vizar, rendered in Latin within Manasce’s French translation because of its obscenity, Une apologétique, 159. This anecdote was brought to our attention by Kristó-Nagy, “Violent, Irrational, and Unjust God”, 159. This is used to mock the argument that because God is absolutely sovereign over all creation, He cannot be accused of committing violence against it.
In the famous 15th-century sex manual by al-Nafzāwī, al-Rawḍ al-ʿāṭir (The Perfumed Garden), a seemingly light-hearted tale about a woman who has sex with a donkey makes a deadly serious point not only about the famed trickiness of women, but also about the importance of a man’s obligation to sexually satisfy his wife.
al-Nafzāwī, al-Rawḍ al-ʿāṭir, 131–32, English tr. in The Perfumed Garden of the Cheikh Nefzaoui, 169–71. Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, the well-known 13th-century Persian Sufi poet, tells the story of a maid who enjoys having sex with a donkey by placing a gourd around the base of his penis to prevent it entering too deeply. When her mistress witnesses her pleasure, she attempts the same trick, but not knowing to use the gourd, she is impaled and dies.
Rūmī, Mathnawī, V, 1333–1405, ed. and tr. Nicholson, V, 88–93. Rūmī is famous for teaching profound lessons using earthy images that are easy to grasp, and here he teaches the importance of proper instruction when pursuing the sometimes seemingly hedonistic lifestyle of the Sufis (a topic mentioned in the following section). He also teaches the importance of moderation in all things.
The mistress’s problem of too much of a good thing does not present any trouble to the lover of Apuleius’s protagonist Lucius, when he is transformed into an ass. Won over by the donkey’s genteel ways, and perhaps able to sense his inner humanity, this noble matron enjoys his full assets in terms too strong for the Elizabethan translator William Adlington to dare to render, and his editor Stephen Gaselee follows suit in 1915, writing in a footnote: “In a note referring to the whole of this passage Adlington writes: ‘Here I have left out certain lines propter honestatem’, in which his modesty is much to be commended, and will here be followed.”
Apuleius, The Golden Ass, X:22, p. 511. It appears that the lines in question are these: Illa vero, quotiens ei parcens nates recellebam, accedens totiens nisu rabido et spinam prehendens meam appliciore nexu inhaerebat, ut Hercule etiam deesse mihi aliquid ad supplendam eius libidinem crederem. “She, indeed, as many times as I, trying to spare her, held back my buttocks, would as many times draw closer with an eager striving, and grasping my prick, would join with me more clingingly, so that, by Hercules, I even thought I would be unable to completely fulfil her desire!”
Although these lines have of course been translated by more modern scholars than Gaselee and Adlington, we here translate them again in recognition of the fact that only by wallowing bravely in the muck will we reach the sublime, or as Rūmī might explain it, a chickpea must grow in the soil before it is boiled into hummus.
This is “Chickpea to Cook” in the Coleman Barks translation, 132–33. For it is immediately after this sexual encounter of Lucius the donkey, that he is asked to perform the same act with a condemned female criminal who is a heartless murderer, but he refuses to pollute his body by comingling with her. In the very next chapter, by the grace of the Goddess Isis, he is transformed back into a man, and becomes a holy priest.
This tale is often read as a Neoplatonic parable of the ascent of man to a higher level of existence, which cannot be achieved except after, like Lucius the ass, we overcome the humiliating earthiness of this worldly life. Perhaps we can see a parallel with Abū l-Qāsim’s rising in the morning after his drunken night of debauchery, reciting religious verses and adopting the appearance of a holy man. We suspect, however, that unlike the timeframe of Apuleius’s tale, the chronotope of the Ḥikāyah is cyclical, and Abū l-Qāsim will again descend into his lower self, and again emerge, and so on. And like Abū l-Qāsim, donkeys represent the seeming imperfection of God’s creation. “Perfection belongs to God alone”, as the ass puts it in The Case of the Animals versus Man Before the King of the Jinn (4th/10th century). Here the ass appears to be defending their flawed human rivals by arguing that nothing in creation is without lack, giving as examples the retrograde motions, eclipses, and flickering of the heavenly bodies.
Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ / The Brethren of Purity, The Case of the Animals versus Man Before the King of the Jinn, 64 (Arabic), 124–25 (English translation).
It is clear that the donkey had a lascivious reputation for sharing man’s lower impulses; al-Jāḥiẓ’s Kitāb al-ḥayawān records that along with pigs, they are particularly inclined to engage in homosexual sex, both gazing at one another “like men gaze at slave boys” and displaying “effeminacy,” i.e. showing signs of both active and passive homosexuality
al-Jāḥiẓ, Ḥayawān, iv, 51–52. (like Abū l-Qāsim, “a top and a bottom” (§ 11: lūṭī ḥalaqī)). Al-Jāḥiẓ quotes a saying of the Arabs that “Whoever fucks a donkey, fucks a fucker” (used to refer to getting the better of a champion).
al-Jāḥiẓ, Ḥayawān, ii, 256. Perhaps the donkey is Abū l-Qāsim’s spirit animal; he is described as being “stubborn as a donkey” early in the Ḥikāyah (§ 13).
In a forthcoming article, “The Apotropaic Phallus in Medieval Arabic Literature and Culture?: The Evil Eye and Other Shared Beliefs of the Roman and the Arabo-Islamic Empires,” Selove argues that like the donkey and the apotropaic phallus with which he can be associated, Abū l-Qāsim’s banquet obscenities may have the power to ward off the evil eye. This would put him in company with centuries of court jesters and other entertainers, often with physical abnormalities such as dwarfism, who were considered not only amusing but lucky. There is evidence that imitating the bray of the donkey had this apotropaic power. Al-Jāḥiẓ mentions (Ḥayawān, vi, 358) that desert-dwelling Arabs, upon entering a village afflicted with a pestilence or possibly with demons (jinn), would bray ten times like a donkey in order to avert the evil.
For more on the phallic symbolism of donkeys, also see Richard Bulliet’s chapter “Early Domesticity: My Ass and Yours” in his Hunters, Hamburgers and Herders, which traces the fall of the donkey as a sacred phallic symbol in ancient times to a symbol of shame and stupidity in modern times. He devotes a great deal of attention to the story of Lucius the ass. After tracing the sacred significance of the donkey back to Ancient Egypt, he mentions the association of the donkey with the kāhin (pre-Islamic soothsayer) as well as with prophecy, and the belief that the donkey is somehow attuned to the spirit world (which is why he brays when he sees a devil). He furthermore explores the claim that the prophet Muhammad’s donkey was descended from the donkeys ridden by previous prophets, all of whom were potentially gifted with the power of human speech. Although donkeys are not known for their intelligence (al-Jāḥiẓ repeatedly remarks on their ignorance (jahl), and a famous Qur’an quote comparing the jews to “donkeys laden with books” is not flattering), Baghdadi folk wisdom implies that these fools are in fact wise fools, communicating with their apparently stupid gaze, “You say that I am a donkey, but truly, you are the real donkeys.”
Al-Jābī, Akhbār al-ḥamīr, 25; on p. 23 he cites al-Shāljī (editor of the Ḥikāyah) and his work on the sayings of Baghdadis. Al-Shāljī frequently draws on this native knowledge in his footnotes to his edition.
Unfortunately, there is no donkey sex in the Ḥikāyah, and although there is horse sex, it appears to be used only as a simple insult against the honour of the victim’s mother, without a deeper didactic meaning (§ 29):
May to the mother of the Department’s Head
All horny horses in the land be led.
He is, to me, a dog, or else a dog’s dry shit
(There isn’t much to choose ’twixt him and it).
This is not to suggest, of course, that the Ḥikāyah itself is lacking in sublimity or profundity, or is, in the words of one of its critics, viel Schmutz, wenig Geist.
M. J. de Goeje, Review of Mez’s edition, 723. We believe otherwise, as we explain in the following section.
The Sufi Connection
Modern scholars of the Ḥikāyah all emphasise the obscene shocking quality of the work, and it is no wonder; the Ḥikāyah very much begins in this vein, and paragraphs 24-85, in which Abū l-Qāsim obscenely taunts his fellow guests, set the tone for the rest of the book. We think, however, that these scholars overemphasise the Ḥikāyah’s obscenity, often suggesting that it is obscene and nothing else. After all, a full half of the book consists of chaste love poetry, nostalgic memories of Baghdad, rich imaginings of luxurious household items, chaste and clever bits of word play, swimming and sailor terminology, and praise for fine people and horses. Even the most recent (and otherwise excellent) article on the Ḥikāyah by Bin Tyeer
Bin Tyeer, “The Qur’an and the Aesthetics of Adab”. misses somewhat the importance of the balance between high and low in creating the image of the microcosm. Published too soon after A Literary Banquet to benefit from or respond to its argument that Abū l-Qāsim represents the paradoxical joining of the prophet Muhammad and Satan in the figure of a microcosm, this article reads him as being simply satanic,
e.g. compare our readings of the “I am” speech (§ 23), in Bin Tyeer, “The Qur’an and the Aesthetics of Adab”, 291–93, and Selove, Ḥikāyat Abī al-Qāsīm: A Literary Banquet, 150–56. Balda’s “Marginalité et eloquence contestatoire” is also used as a foil to the argument that Abū l-Qāsim represents both high and low in A Literary Banquet, 17, which otherwise benefits greatly from her readings. while stating elsewhere that Abū l-Qāsim “embodies two concrete realities, each cancelling out the other.”
Bin Tyeer, “The Qur’an and the Aesthetics of Adab”, 283. I think that, in effect, Selove and Bin Tyeer essentially came to similar conclusions about the Ḥikāyah at the same time and independently of each other, which I take as a vindication of both of our readings. I also agree with Bin Tyeer’s overall point about the inappropriateness of applying Bakhtinian theories of the carnivalesque to this literature (see The Literary Banquet, p. 139, 149-150), with the caveat that medieval humour of both the Arabic-speaking and the European worlds could often be strikingly similar, and the lines between “East” and “West” in the medieval/Renaissance world are in this way, as in many others, extremely blurred.
This idea of the paradoxical joining of Satan and Muhammad to represent the oneness of God and His creation is found in Sufi literature.
Ḥallaj, Ṭawāsīn, 49, Awn, Satan’s Tragedy, 123–24. Speaking more generally, as Melvin-Koushki writes in his article-in-progress, "Imperial Talismanic Love”, “Islamic civilization, more than any other before or since, was characterized by its total embrace of contradiction and ambiguity as organizing principles for society and culture. Thus Islam has been historically lived as paradox.” It is important to note that one of the lengthiest stretches of non-obscene text in the Ḥikāyah, §§ 264–94, which describes the ecstatic state of the audience listening to girls and boys singing their chaste verses of love, repeatedly mentions the Sufis, some of whom were known for seeking the divine in a rapturous state achieved by listening to music (ṭarab). When reading these descriptions of people behaving ecstatically, we are reminded of similar descriptions of the behaviour of madmen (including wise and holy fools).
Collected by Dols in his chapter “The Holy Fool”, Majnūn, 366–422. For example:
Then you would see Abū ʿUbayd Allāh al-Marzūbānī, when he hears this song, rolling in the dust, overcome, frothing, grunting, thrashing, biting his fingers, kicking his feet, and slapping his face a thousand times a second. He comes out like he’s doing an impression (ḥikāyah) of the crazy ʿAbd al-Razzāq at Bāb al-Ṭāq! [§ 266]
He behaves this way in response to a musical performance of the slave girl Khalūb, which concludes: “I think in its piercing a cure I may find / or, if pierced again, may at least die.
By al-ʿAbbās ibn al-Aḥnaf, Dīwān, 74; Anonymously in al-Tawḥīdī, Imtāʿ, ii, 177.”
In his response to this poetic likening of the lover’s glance to a kind of pharmakon, containing in one substance the opposites of poison and cure, al-Marzūbānī (a man notable for his intelligence and learning) here becomes the madman or the fool. The word ḥikāyah is evoked, recalling us again to the introductory description of man as ḥākī, who in his ability to display all the contradictory elements of the universe, embodies the microcosm. The ecstatic behaviour of these men resembles that of the microcosm Abū l-Qāsim himself at the end of the Ḥikāyah, when overcome with wine and music, he dances and shouts until he falls on the floor (§ 457).
Abū l-Qāsim describes one listener in this section, Ibn al-Ghaylān, as being so overcome in his ecstasy and ṭarab that he appears to lose himself altogether, so much so that fellow audience members react as if he had been possessed by a jinnī:
…the rapture of Ibn Ghaylān al-Bazzāz at the tremulous tones of Rayḥānah the slave girl of Ibn al-Barīdī when she sang,
Give youth its due, so long as you have youth as an excuse;
enjoy your boyhood, fall in childish love without restraint!”
And someone would say to Abū l-Qāsim at this point, “What was Ibn Ghaylān doing when she sang this that was so remarkable?”
And he would say, “O good Sir!, when he heard it, his eyes would roll back in his head and he would fall in a faint crying for camphor and rosewater. Someone would have to recite in his ear the Throne Verse and the two apotropaic Surahs, and to utter the spell of Sharāhiyā Marāhiyā. What would he do, stupid? That’s what he would do! (§§ 274–75).
Three of the ecstatic men described in this section are specifically described as “Sufis” (§§ 274, 276, and 284)). One of these Sufis here reacts to the performance of a song with religious overtones, which describes the struggle of the soul to transcend this earthly life: “I’ve abstained from the worldly, but still I desire; desires mixed in with that which I forswear.” This section of ecstatic men can generally be observed to contain something deeper than a catalogue of love poetry. One anecdote, for example, describes a religious philosophical debate at a Sufi retreat (§§ 276-279):
… Or the rapture of Ibn al-Warrāq the grammarian at the singing of Rawḥah, the slave girl of Ibn al-Ruṣāfah when she sang,
I wanted to get over you but found
My heart your champion in spite of me.
So do me worse or lessen your offenses,
for either way is down to God’s Decree.
For you I’ve bowed my head so far I’m shamed
though I’m the sort that’s usually blame-free.
278. [255] Yes good Sir, because of this and similar poems of Ibn al-Aḥnaf, al-Wāsiṭī blamed him and cast aspersions on his religion. These suspicions stuck to him, for these slanders were regarded as believable, and they called him a strayer from the Way, and a roadblock on the path to righteousness. I myself saw this man al-Wāsiṭī at one of the Sufi retreats, when he heard sung this poem of al-ʿAbbās ibn al-Aḥnaf:
So do me worse or lessen your offenses,
for either way is down to God’s Decree.
And he went crazy, crying for help, tearing at his robe, shouting ‘there is no power save in God!’ and begging for divine forgiveness. And he said, ‘People, can’t you see that with al-ʿAbbās ibn al-Aḥnaf, it isn’t enough that he play the libertine, he has to act the infidel as well! Since when were scandals, sins, or shame owing to Divine Decree? How can God have decreed such things must be when He has forbidden them! If He decreed them, then He would have been content with them! But if He were content with them, how could He punish for them? If He decreed these things for his worshipper and then punished him for it, this would be an act of injustice repugnant even for a created being, so how much more so for the Creator? We are God’s! May God curse love poetry when it is tinged with libertinism, and libertinism when it is combined with that which insults religion!’
279. Finally, Abū Ṣāliḥ al-Hāshimī said to him, ‘Slow down there, chief! This isn’t quite what you think! Fate presides over everything, and pertains to everything, and applies to everything and for everything. This is God’s hidden secret, and the Knowledge that encompasses everything. All that can be encompassed in this Knowledge is possible for Divine Decree, and if this is possible, then it is also possible to speak about it in literature! What’s with these tantrums and intolerance? A poet can jest or be serious, be realistic or far-fetched, be right or wrong, but you don’t blame him for it as you would a theologian or a clear-headed scholar!’
This debate begins with the familiar philosophical conundrum posed by the question of fate vs. free will: namely, if God has decreed all of humanity’s actions, then how can we justly be punished for our sins? On these grounds, al-Wāṣiṭī objects to al-Aḥnaf’s poetic claim that God’s decree governs even potentially sinful feelings of love and desire. He specifically attacks mujūn poetry that is tinged with blasphemy (an attack on the Ḥikāyah itself, given its content). This argument is refuted with an appeal to the fullness of the macrocosm, in which Fate, Knowledge, and God’s Decree must contain not only the lofty and good but also the lowly and monstrous. Having thus slyly defended itself and its offensive contents, the Ḥikāyah then, through the mouth of its champion, further suggests that authors of poetry and comic literature should not be held to the same standards as serious theologians. Nevertheless, we can see that this often silly and obscene work of literature contains much more than dirty jokes and frivolity.
The Ḥikāyah High and Low
Because the Ḥikāyah offers a literary microcosm, it holds potential interest for scholars of many different topics. It has most often been used by scholars of material culture, interested in its descriptions of textiles, dishes, and luxury goods.
Most notably Aḥsan, Social Life, Dhū l-Nūn Ṭāhā, “Mujtamaʿ Baghdād”, and Goitein, A Mediterranean Society. It is definitely a rich mine of such information, although as the Literary Banquet argues repeatedly, it should be used with caution for such purposes given the unreliability of the person describing these objects. Through the speech of the drunken, difficult-to-define party-crasher Abū l-Qāsim, the Ḥikāyah discusses other subjects of potential interest to scholars, including horses (§§ 102–30), chess (§§ 313–30),
Reinhard Wieber used this passage as a source for his detailed study of chess in Arabic, Das Schachspiel in der arabischen Literatur. and nautical terminology (§§ 359–63). The brilliant letters of the slave girl Zād Mihr to her master cry out for analysis (§§ 242–54).
One of the authors of the present introduction has recently attempted to show that the study of medicine and magic, fields usually reserved for scholars of the history of science and philosophy, is also fruitfully applied to this banquet text. An understanding of medieval humoral theory allows us to understand some of Abū l-Qāsim’s comments to his fellow guests, especially on the medical benefits of wine.
Selove, “Medicine, Mujūn, and Microcosm”. And full of imagery redolent of paradise, where the blessed drink wine served by beautiful young attendants,
Stetkevych provides a succinct analysis of this trope and its deeper, more spiritual significance in Intoxication and Immortality. banquet texts like the Ḥikāyah are places where the lofty and the lowly intersect, and where hedonistic and even sinful pleasures blend into the rapture of divine transcendence. Maybe because the beautiful, homoerotic young boy holding a goblet of wine embodies this intersection between earthly and paradisiacal pleasures, it is a combination also found in the apparatus of magic spells.
This subject is discussed in Selove, “Literature as Magic, Magic as Literature”. Both in ancient texts and in medieval Arabic texts, we find beautiful young boys with goblets used, for example, in divination. As is well known, magic operates on the principal of “as above, so below”, so the low and earthly relates directly to the high and astral, and the microcosm is in tune with the macrocosm. We cannot study these medieval Islamic traditions of literature, culture, and thought in isolation from one another without speaking across disciplinary boundaries; after all, the traditions themselves revolve around the joining of opposites and the gathering of variations, ambiguities, and differences into a unified whole.
The Manuscript
Ḥikāyat Abī l-Qāsim al-Baghdādī is known through a single manuscript, held in the British Library.
Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London, Add 19913. We worked mostly with a digitalised microfilm. It consists of 132 folios of smooth shiny, thick, pulpy light brown paper with very fine vertical lines (1 mm) and horizontal lines spaced at c. 1.25 cm, evidently trimmed at some point and bound by the British Library. There are fifteen lines in faded ink on every page except the title page, the first text page (16 lines, with at the top the basmalah, the traditional opening formula “In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate”), and fol. 40b (14 lines, with one and a half line in the middle left blank, as if something was meant to be filled in later). The margins (left on recto and right on verso sides) are c. 1.25 cm. A circle with a dot in the middle is often but far from consistently used at the end of a superscript introducing a piece of poetry that starts on a new line. The manuscript is undated; on fol. 83a a marginal note in a different hand, difficult to read as it is written very cursively and partly trimmed, seems to state that the manuscript was read on Sunday morning, the 10th of the month Shawwāl, AH 727, corresponding with the sixth of the month Nasī of the year 1043 in the Coptic “Martyrs’ calendar”, i.e., 29 August, AD 1327.
Not 1347, as wrongly in St. Germain, “al-Azdī’s Ḥikāyat Abī l-Qāsim”, 10, 147 and Selove, Ḥikāyat Abī al-Qāsīm: A Literary Banquet, 4.
... (؟) وكان ذلك بتاريخ ليلة يسفر صباحها عن يوم الأحد عاشر شهر شوال سنة سبع وعشرين وسبعمئة الموافق لسادس شهر النسي سنة ألف وثلثة وأربعين للشهداء وكان ...
The main text is written in naskh, generally legible and rather fully but not completely and somewhat carelessly dotted and with some vowels added. It is obvious that the copyist sometimes did not understand the text: there are many evident errors and some words or phrases are left undotted. The manuscript appears to be complete apart from a lacuna of two folios between fols. 12 and 13.
Al-Shāljī (p. 224) claims that one or more folios are missing between fols. 62 and 63 but we find no evidence of this. The manuscript has Coptic numerals for folio numbers, showing that the manuscript was copied in Egypt.
The title page reads Ḥikāyat Abī l-Qāsim al-Baghdādī al-Tamīmī min al-ʿajāyib wa-l-gharāyib ʿalā mā jamaʿat [or jumiʿat] min al-ḥikāyāt (“The ḥikāyah
On the various meanings of the word ḥikāyah and the problem of its translation, see above, ##. of Abū l-Qāsim al-Baghdādī al-Tamīmī, one of the strange and wondrous things according to the ḥikāyahs therewith collected”). The author is not mentioned on the title page but his name is given at the beginning of the text proper (fol. 1b) as Abū l-Muṭahhar Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-Azdī. He is called there al-shaykh al-adīb, approximately “the learned man of letters”, and the addition raḥmat Allāh ʿalayh, “God’s mercy be on him” means that he has died when the text was written down in this form. The title page has an owner’s inscription in a different hand, stating that the manuscript was once owned by a certain Ṣāliḥ ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Laṭīf. At some stage the manuscript ended up at Sotheby’s; the final folio has a note: “Purchased at Sotheby’s, 3rd Augt 1854. / Lot 708 /”. The auction record of Sotheby’s for that year lists “The Comic Tales and Anecdotes of Abou’l, Kasem of Bagdad”, part of the manuscript collection of John de Whelpdale, Esq., of Armathwaite (d. 1844), auctioned ten years after his death and purchased by the British Library. It is not known how the manuscript came in John de Whelpdale’s possession. By shining a light through a piece of paper taped on the first folio one can read underneath “Ex Libris Theodor Pres/ Coll S S Tri. Cam 1847
The year is difficult to read. Dum Socii”, showing that the manuscript once belonged to Theodore Preston, Lord Almoner’s Professor of Arabic from 1855 to 1871, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge from 1842 to 1882, presumably the year of his death. He is best known for his richly annotated translation of the celebrated Maqāmāt by al-Ḥarīri (d. 516/1122).
Makamat or Rhetorical Anecdotes of Al Hariri of Basra, tr. from the original Arabic with annotations by Theodore Preston, London: James Madden, 1850. It is mentioned that the Rev. Theodore Preston “resided in the East, and has there pursued his Arabic researches”.
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 13 (1852), “Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh Anniversary Meeting, Annual Report, May 1850”, p. ix. We have not been able to establish the relationship, if any, between John de Whelpdale and Theodore Preston and the chronology of the manuscript’s peregrinations before its arrival at the British Library remains unclear.
The Editions
The first editor of the text was the German scholar Adam Mez (b. Freiburg im Breisgau, 1869, d. 1917), who taught Islamic studies and Semitic Languages in Basel, Switzerland. His remarkable erudition and broad knowledge of classical Islamic and Arab culture is manifest in his celebrated book Die Renaissance des Islâms, published after his death, in Heidelberg in 1922; it was translated as The Renaissance of Islam by Salahuddin Khuda Bukhsh and D. S. Margoliouth (London, 1937). It is still useful as a mine of information on almost every aspect of mediaeval Arab-Islamic culture, including material culture, with chapters on government, finance, theology, jurisdiction, ethics, literature, industry, commerce, navigation. It focuses on the tenth century. With his edition of Ḥikāyat Abī l-Qāsim Mez was a brave pioneer; brave not only on account of the difficulty of the text but also because in the academic world of his day the text was frowned upon because of the profusion of obscene poetry and prose it contains. The Dutch Arabist M. J. de Goeje, who published a lengthy and learned review,
Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen, 164:1 (1902), 723–36. did not think much of the literary quality of the work (“Als Kunstwerk steht die Ḥikâya m. E. nicht hoch (. . .) Viel Schmutz, weinig Geist”).
“As a work of art the Ḥikāyah does not rank highly in my opinion . . . Much filth, little esprit”. He adds that “if it really is a representation of the morals of the people of Baghdad in the 4th century [of the Hijra, i.e., the 10th century], then these morals are simply abominable”.
“Falls es wirklich ein Sittenbild der Bagdadenser des 5ten Jahrhunderts ist, so sind diese Sitten einfach abscheulich’” (p. 723). For De Goeje and his colleagues the text was of interest only for lexicological reasons.
Mez’s edition has a German introduction of 22 pages followed by notes on difficult passages and expressions (pp. xxiii–lx) and a glossary of words not found in the dictionaries. The erudite introduction raises many interesting points; maddeningly, he does not provide any information about the manuscript. As Mez was aware, his edition was only a first attempt. His notes are useful but, as De Goeje remarked, inadequate, as still many problematical passages and words were not discussed. De Goeje gave a list of corrections and suggestions. It was more than four decades later that another scholar turned to the book. In 1942 Francesco Gabrieli published a short article in Italian, which also contained a number of corrections.
Gabrieli, “Sulla Ḥikāyat Abī l-Qāsim di Abū al-Muṭahhar al-Azdī”, 33–45.
A second edition, by the Baghdadi lawyer and scholar ʿAbbūd al-Shāljī (b. Baghdad, 1911, d. London, 1996), appeared posthumously in 1997, published in Cologne, Germany, almost a century after the first edition.
Judging by the preface (p. 12), it was finished already in June 1978. He is also the editor of two very important works by the Baghdadi prose writer and lawyer al-Tanūkhī, al-Faraj baʿd al-shiddah (“Relief after Distress”) and Nishwār al-muḥāḍarah (translated by D. S. Margoliouth as “The Table-Talk of a Mesopotamian Judge”), of a dictionary of Baghdadi idioms and allusive expressions,
Mawsūʿat al-kināyāt al-ʿāmmiyyah al-Baghdādiyyah. and a remarkable and voluminous Arabic encyclopaedia of torture.
Mawsūʿat al-ʿadhāb, 7 vols. London: Glebeweald, 1980. As mentioned above, al-Shāljī believed that the obscure Abū l-Muṭahhar al-Azdī was not the real author but merely a name used as a cover by the famous Baghdadi prose writer Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī (c. 315–414/c. 927–1023), to whom the biographers ascribe a work, hitherto deemed lost, entitled al-Risālah al-Baghdādiyyah, “The Baghdad Epistle”.
Yāqūt, Muʿjam al-udabāʾ, xv, 8. Reasons for rejecting this attribution are given above.
Al-Shāljī’s edition is a great improvement on that by Mez, whom he follows in failing to mention or to describe the British Library manuscript (he inserts its page numbers, rather than the folios, in his text as well as the page references to Mez’s edition). He provides copious and generally very useful notes, even though he often does not bother to mention his sources, and he adds indexes of persons, places, and terms. He corrects many textual errors made either by the copyist of the manuscript or by Mez. Hailing from Baghdad himself, he is able to recognise obscure idioms or terms, some of which seem to have survived in the spoken language of his own time; whether his identifications are correct is uncertain. Unfortunately, his editorial method is cavalier. Many of his emendations of words or phrases in the manuscript are obviously correct but he often fails to mention this in the critical apparatus; quite a number of his emendations are clearly incorrect. Although the text is clearly printed and laid out, making it easier to read than Mez’s solid text blocks for the prose, there is very little vowelling, which in a difficult text with lots of poetry is not reader-friendly.
In view of these many and essential shortcomings, it was therefore decided to make a new critical edition, and to accompany this with a new translation. Our edition gives the text of the unique manuscript, but as is customary in modern editions it generally follows modern standard orthography, which means that missing diacritics dots and hamzah signs are tacitly added, forms such as قايم qāyim changed to قائم qāʾim, and that final -ī and final -ā written with yāʾ are distinguished by dotting the former but not the latter. Modern punctuation has been added lightly, avoiding the excessive use of commas that may be found in many modern editions of pre-modern works, including al-Shāljī’s. We have used commas, however, to mark rhymes in prose (sajʿ). Obvious errors of the copyist have been emended, with a footnote giving the manuscript version. Vowel signs have been added very sparingly in the prose parts but far more liberally in the poetry, and Qur’anic quotations are fully vowelled. The text, which in the original has no chapter headings or any other explicit segmentation,
Apart from two occurrences of the word faṣl “section”, on fols. 29b and 32b. has been divided into 487 numbered short sections or paragraphs, used also in the translation and the indexes.
The Translations
There are two complete translations
Shorter translated passages may be found in Gabrieli, “Sulla Ḥikāyat Abl-Qāsim”, 38–45 (in Italian); Moreh, Live Theatre and Dramatic Literature, 98–99; El Outmani, “Anatomies”, 102–6; Balda-Tillier, “Marginalité et éloquence contestoire”; eadem, “ʿUdhrī Love and Mujūn”; and Bin Tyeer, “The Qur’an and the Aesthetics of Adab”, 290–94, 300; some longer excerpts in Selove, Ḥikāyat Abī al-Qāsim: A Literary Banquet, Ch. 1, “A Sampling of the Ḥikāya”, 31–69. of the work prior to ours, one that is readable but extremely loose and negligible for academic purposes, and another that is scholarly and useful. The former is in French, by René R. Khawam (b. Aleppo, 1917, d. Paris, 2004), who produced numerous translations of Classical Arabic literary works, including the Qur’an, parts of the Thousand and One Nights, an anthology of poetry, and some famous erotological texts, al-Nafzāwī’s al-Rawḍ al-ʿāṭir (La Prairie parfumée, known as The Perfumed Garden in English) and al-Tīfāshī’s Nuzhat al-albāb (Les Délices des cœurs). His translation of Ḥikāyat Abī l-Qāsim was published in 1998. The title-page
We have used the reprint, Paris: Phébus, 2008. reads: “Abou-Moutahhar [sic] al-Azdî, 24 Heures de la vie d’une canaille. Édition [sic] établie sur les manuscrits [sic] originaux et traduite de l’arabe”. But it is not an edition, and as is mentioned in the brief introduction, there is of course only one manuscript. It appears he relied on Mez’s edition and did not use that of al-Shāljī, published only one year before. The translation, if one can call it that, is very lightly annotated.
There are less than 160 footnotes, as against some 1,150 in St. Germain’s translation and more than 1,200 in ours. True to the French title, Khawam divides the story, after the introductory chapter by al-Azdī, into twenty-one chapters, from 9 a.m., hour by hour until 4 a.m., then skipping a few hours of sleep and concluding at 9 a.m. the following morning. Although there are no indications of time in the original, it is true that the events described span about a day and a night, a day in the life of the fictional character called Abū l-Qāsim al-Baghdādī.
Khawam paraphrases and expands the original with abandon. This is the beginning of how the protagonist is introduced by the author (§ 11):
كان هذا الرجل المحلّى يعرف بأبي القاسم أحمد بن علي التميميّ البغداديّ شيخاً ...
Kāna hādhā l-rajul al-muḥallā yuʿrafu bi-Abī l-Qāsim Aḥmad ibn ʿAlī al-Tamīmī al-Baghdādī shaykhan . . .
In our translation, this is:
This man of many epithets, Abū l-Qāsim Aḥmad Ibn ʿAlī al-Tamīmī of Baghdad was an old man. . .
In Khawam’s version this becomes:
p. 24.
Le personnage dont il va être question à présent, que l’on s’accordait le plus souvent pour trouver de plaisante compagnie était connu sous le nom de Abou ’l-Qâsim Ibn-ʾAli al-Tamîmî et habitait Baghdâd. C’etait, à l’époque des faits, un homme d’âge, . . .
Apart from the prolixity one notes the erratic transliteration and the omission of “Aḥmad”. One supposes the “pleasant company” derives from the interpretation of the admittedly problematic fourth Arabic word (see our note in the translation), which Khawam apparently took to be from the root ḤLW, “to be sweet, pleasant”. Khawam often guesses wildly. One example of countless instances must suffice: here is his version of a scatological line of poetry (§ 28):
بلْ كاتبٌ خرْيةُ بوّابه
أكتبُ من ذقْن أبي قُرَّهْ
bal kātibun kharyatu bawwābihī | aktabu min dhaqni Abī Qurrah
In our translation this is:
A “secretary” whose bouncer’s shit is a better writer
than the beard of Abū Qurrah . . .
In the French translation this is expanded this into:
p. 35.
Le secrétaire de la colique, en post au portail
de l’évacuation, transcripteur attire
d’une chronique excrémentielle égale en intérêt
à la barbe du caméléon!
Khawam, who clearly did not bother to consider the metre and as a result botched both syntax and sense (he read kātibu kharyatin), found that abū qurrah (perhaps meaning “the cool one”) is one of the several nicknames of the chameleon, an animal not known to have a beard; he did not find that Abū Qurrah was an influential financial administrator (kātib, “writer” or “state secretary”) in the late tenth-century who was known for his beautiful writing.
The second translation is of a wholly different calibre. Mary St. Germain, in her doctoral dissertation on the work at the University of Washington in 2006,
It is accessible online at https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/handle/1773/10839. The translation spans pp. 153–422 of the dissertation.
included a full and annotated translation, which is scholarly and thorough. Unlike Khawam she was able to use al-Shāljī’s edition and notes. We are indebted to her translation in making our own, and in our annotation we have been greatly assisted by her copious notes. Because the text is so difficult in places, due to one’s dependence on only one imperfect manuscript copy and to the nature of the text itself, it is not surprising that we were able to improve on St. Germain’s interpretations from time to time, just as subsequent scholars are bound to find solutions for problems we were not able to solve, or to correct errors of which we are unaware. Partly thanks to the vastly increased on-line accessibility and searchability of pre-modern Arabic sources we were able to identify many hitherto unidentified quotations of poetry and especially poetry.
A main incentive to making yet another translation was not academic or scholarly: we believe the text deserves a rendering that is readable to a general public as a literary masterpiece, a translation that conveys the racy tone of much of the text, which consists almost wholly of strings of dialogue and monologues. Although a large part of the text could be called a “colloquy” of sorts, the language of Ḥikāyat Abī l-Qāsim is not colloquial but Classical Arabic; it was composed at a time when colloquial or vernacular Arabic or the mixed type that is sometimes, confusingly, called “Middle Arabic”,
On this term, see e.g. Versteegh, The Arabic Language, Ch. 8, 114–29, Lentin, “Middle Arabic”. was not yet used in literary works.
St. Germain’s text is part of a doctoral dissertation, a genre in which one is forced to make concessions to scholarly standards and customs; her prose makes frequent use of clarifying parentheses, adding English or transliterated Arabic words, as in the following example:
StG, 180–81 = § 57; she, moreover, provides notes at “trousers”, “Daylamī”, “style”, “sandals”, “ṭirāz”, “sandals”, and “clothes” (but not on “ṭaylasān”).
Abū al-Qāsim looks at him a third time and says, “His trousers, dirt (carefully) brushed off, are of Daylamī style, too. May God inflame my eyes over you, no, rather, the eyes of those who love you. (He is) naked, but on his feet are Indian sandals; hungry, but with ṭirāz on (his) collar, (he is) naked in a ṭaylasān; a hungry (man) but (well) clothed. Sell some of your clothes and satisfy your hunger (. . .)
Our translation:
§ 57; we give notes at “Daylamī” and “shawl” (Arabic ṭaylasān).
Then he would look at him a third time and say, “And those tacky Daylamī over-dyed harem pants! God damn my eyes! Or better yet, the eyes of his loved-ones! Naked in his woven Indian sandals, [74] hungry toying with an entire lamb, naked in a fancy shawl, hungry and picking his teeth! Sell those adornments and put an end to your hunger! (. . .)
It will be clear from this passage that our readings and interpretations differ in a few points. Unlike St. Germain we do not see a reference to ṭirāz (bands of embroidered writing on the hems of cloth)
We read yafuttu kharūf (يفت خروف) where St. Germain, in her note, suggests bi-qazz ḥurūf (بقز حروف). and we read, with al-Shāljī, yatakhallalu (“he picks his teeth with a khilāl, toothpick”)
On this, see above, ##. where she, apparently, read yataḥallalu, believing that this could mean “he is dressed in a ḥullah, robe”. The main difference, however, is the register. Especially in obscene verse, which is often meant to be humorous (modern taste may beg to differ), a racy English works better. Compare St. Germain’s rendering of an anonymous line:
p. 179.
O shit on the gateway of the anus of
A monkey which had washed its face with pee
Your beard in my anus, and likewise the beard of anyone
Who does not say what I say about this
with our version:
§ 53.
Hey shit on the ass of a monkey
who washes his face with pee,
your chin in my ass, or the chin
of whoever might disagree!”
When translating poetry (always strictly metrical and rhymed in the original), we decided to use some kind of metre, however loosely, and generally a form of rhyme, either strict or imperfect (slant rhyme, half-rhyme, assonance). We decided not to clutter the translation with Arabic words and terms in transliteration and to use footnotes for any philological clarification, if needed, or for the explanation of a play on words in the original. We have not attempted to render the many passages in rhymed prose (sajʿ) with rhymed English prose.
Thus our annotated translation is intended to strike a middle course between Khawam and St. Germain (in fact not exactly in the middle, since we feel closer to the latter), attempting to combine the readability of the former with the accuracy of the latter, avoiding the verbosity and amplificatio of the one and the overly learned character and occasional stiffness of the other.
When writing “our” and “we”, we do not mean that our tasks were divided equally in all respects and performed in tandem. The first draft of the translation was made by Emily Selove, who is, after all, a native speaker of American English and who had already made draft translations of parts of the text before we began our collaboration. This explains the presence of some Americanisms (even though, incongruously, we use British spelling). Geert Jan van Gelder, who is more used to British English and who learned some idioms and slang expressions of which he had not been aware, happily accepted all this even though he regretted the choice of American “ass”
It occurs nearly one hundred times in the translation. over the, in his view, far more expressive British “arse”. The draft translation was discussed, bit by bit, in numerous email messages and over some meetings in person, while occasionally Van Gelder suggested corrections or revisions, usually trying to keep closer to the Arabic original. As for poetry, Selove is fond of near-rhyme and assonance (train / name, forth / course, heir / dear, etc.), which is shunned by Van Gelder, who at times was able to persuade Selove to accept his alternative translations. Most of the annotation is by Van Gelder. As for the present Introduction, the first sections were drafted by Selove and the parts on the Arabic manuscript, the editions, and the translations are by Van Gelder. Naturally, we both take responsibility for all parts of the present volume.
A Note on Transliteration
For the transliteration of Arabic and Persian words and names the system of the third edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam is used, with a few minor differences: the Arabic pausal feminine ending is -ah instead of -a; compound personal names with Allāh are not written as one word (ʿAbdallāh, ʿUbaydallāh) but as two (ʿAbd Allāh, ʿUbayd Allāh), as in Arabic orthography. “Ibn” is never shortened to “b.” (which may be partly responsible for the common mispronunciation and mis-spelling “bin”).
British Library MS Add 19913 fol. 1a, showing the title and an owner’s note
British Library MS Add 19913 fol. 1b–2a, showing the beginning of the text, with the author’s name as Abū l-Muṭahhar Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-Azdī on fol. 1b line 2.
British Library MS Add 19913 fol. 58b–59a, showing the passage, § 222 in our edition and translation, where an attempt has been made to erase several female names (fol. 58b line 6); a verse of a song in Persian is shown in line 9.
British Library MS Add 19913 fol. 131b–132a, with the end of the text.
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