The heroic deeds of the Banī Hilāl tribe of Bedouin Arabs, as they migrate during the tenth and eleventh centuries from the Arabian Peninsula across the Levant, Egypt, and into North Africa, are preserved throughout the Arabic- and... more
The heroic deeds of the Banī Hilāl tribe of Bedouin Arabs, as they migrate during the tenth and eleventh centuries from the Arabian Peninsula across the Levant, Egypt, and into North Africa, are preserved throughout the Arabic- and Amazigh/Berber-speaking world in a cycle of narratives known as al-Sīrah al-Hilāliyyah. Among several extant Arab epics in written versions from a vast, understudied corpus of manuscripts and cheap folk print editions, only this “Epic of the Bani Hilal Tribe” endures as a living tradition of oral performance by poets and reciters in parts of the Maghreb and Arab East. To this day, performances by epic poets as well as cheap printed books circulate in poetry and prose, written and oral forms. The Hilali epic may be chanted, sung, and spoken with or without the customary accompanying rabāb (spike-fiddle) and ṭār (frame drum).
The heroic deeds of the Banī Hilāl tribe of Bedouin Arabs, as they migrate during the tenth and eleventh centuries from the Arabian Peninsula across the Levant, Egypt, and into North Africa, are preserved throughout the Arabic- and... more
The heroic deeds of the Banī Hilāl tribe of Bedouin Arabs, as they migrate during the tenth and eleventh centuries from the Arabian Peninsula across the Levant, Egypt, and into North Africa, are preserved throughout the Arabic- and Amazigh/Berber-speaking world in a cycle of narratives known as al-Sīrah al-Hilāliyyah. (Chosen in 2017 as ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) in Humanities Open Book (HOB) for outstanding out-of-print books in the humanities. Award is free e-books on ACLS site)
How does an epic begin in performance and in narration? Questions surrounding the beginning of an Arab oral epic performance differ from those surrounding the origins of the text. This essay explores several levels of beginning in the... more
How does an epic begin in performance and in narration? Questions surrounding the beginning of an Arab oral epic performance differ from those surrounding the origins of the text. This essay explores several levels of beginning in the Sīrat Banī Hilāl epic, a cycle of heroic tales recited throughout the Arabic and Amazigh-speaking world, with reference to versions by the oral epic poet ʿAwaḍ Allāh ʿAbd al-Jalīl ʿAlī that I collected in Upper Egypt in the 1980s. By drawing on the writings of Pierre Cachia, a pioneering scholar in the study, transcription, and English translation of vernacular Arabic literature , I ask how the epic poet begins reciting an epic in performance and how the epic hero is born in text, performance, and scholarly histories. Answers may be found both in the history of Egyptian folklore studies and the tradition of praise-poetry (madīḥ) sung or recited by poets and storytellers to initiate oral epic performance.
