What 'Isa ibn Hisham Told Us. Muhammad al-Muwaylihi
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newspaper articles into a book. His now twenty-year-old wish to include the Paris episodes (al-riḥlah al-thāniyah) to the book was also finally fulfilled. Thus the second part of post–4th edition versions of Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām was added to the list of several previously published contributions by Arab visitors to the analysis of European civilization—in the case of Egypt a trend initiated in the nineteenth century by Rifāʿah Rāfiʿ al-Ṭahṭāwī (1801–71) with his Takhlīṣ al-Ibrīz fī Talkhīṣ Bārīz (The Purification of Gold Concerning the Summary of Paris), originally published in 1834. However, along with this addition to the text, some extremely significant omissions were made. Two complete “assemblies,” one devoted to the shaykhs of al-Azhar discussing the heretical sciences of philosophy and geography and the other to the princes of the royal family who were squabbling with each other over expensive racing stallions, were completely omitted, along with a number of uncomplimentary anecdotes about Muḥammad ʿAlī, founder of the dynasty to which the current Egyptian ruler—now called “king”—belonged. One can only surmise about the decision-making process involved in these omissions, and whether they were made on the author’s own initiative or as the result of a “recommendation” from some official channel, possibly because it was now almost thirty years after the time when the original articles had been composed. Indeed the none too subtle criticism in these episodes may have been reckoned inappropriate for the Egyptian teenage minds who would be studying Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām for the secondary-school examinations known as the thānawiyyah ʿāmmah.48
Whatever the case may be, the book version of Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī’s narrative Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām, originally published in 1907 and the one that has become the best known through a number of subsequent editions and reprints, already differs considerably from the original newspaper articles, and its fourth edition of 1927 takes the process of change still further. When I was asked by Professors Gaber Asfour and Sabry Hafez in the 1990s to prepare a new edition of the author’s complete works (and those of his father) for a new series, Ruwwād al-Fann al-Qaṣaṣī (Pioneers of the Narrative Art) to be published by al-Majlis al-Aʿlā li-l-Thaqāfah (Supreme Council for Culture) in Cairo, I was already aware of the differences between the various editions of this work which had long since come to be regarded as a foundational contribution to the development of modern Arabic narrative—looking both forward and backward in time, a genuine “bridge-work.” It was on that basis that I prepared the text for publication, using the resources that I had myself collected—in handwritten form—as part of my Oxford doctoral research in 1966. That work was published in two volumes in 2002. However, with advancements in computer technology and research methods, I have now been able to access the complete archive of the al-Muwayliḥī newspaper, Miṣbāḥ al-sharq, and have discovered that even what I thought was a “complete” edition of the text is in fact not entirely complete.
It is in that context that the invitation from the Library of Arabic Literature (LAL) to prepare a parallel-text version of what I have titled What ʿĪsā ibn Hishām Told Us is so welcome, in that it gives me the opportunity to produce for the first time in book form an Arabic and English version of the sequence of all the episodes of the original series of articles al-Muwayliḥī wrote and published that are introduced by a narrator named ʿĪsā ibn Hishām, whether or not they are part of the series called Fatrah min al-Zaman. That decision on my part, of course, raises some significant questions. Al-Muwayliḥī’s description of his own revision process in converting the original articles into book form clearly indicates an aspiration on his part to turn something that was published in a context that he describes as “ephemeral” into a more permanent form. However the notion of ephemerality that he associates with newspaper publication and invokes to explain his rationale for revision is only part of the story. If we examine the sequence of the original articles closely and follow his lead in omitting entirely the “dry run” set of four articles devoted to the Sudan (and the somewhat curious return to the topic inserted in the initial sequence of Fatrah min al-Zaman), then the series seems to fall into four subseries: the Pāshā’s initial encounter with the Egyptian legal system in which both he and ʿĪsā ibn Hishām are centrally involved in the action; the period spent away so as to avoid the plague and allow the Pāshā to recover, in which there is considerably less action; the series of “assemblies”; and finally the episodes involving the ʿUmdah and his two colleagues—in both these last two sequences ʿĪsā and the Pāshā fade almost completely into the background once the context has been established. Thus, if one is to apply some notions of Western narratological analysis to the resulting book text, one can say that al-Muwayliḥī’s careful reworking of the newspaper articles does provide for a more convincing sequence of “events,” but does little or nothing to affect the varying roles of two of the principal “characters.”
Several Egyptian critics have tried to make of Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām an incipient novel, but I would suggest that an investigation of the work’s origins ties it as closely, if not more so, to the more episodic model of the classical maqāmah genre that is deliberately being invoked by the use of ʿĪsā ibn Hishām as a participant narrator, duly derived from al-Hamadhānī’s tenth-century model. To the episodic nature of the individual articles can be added yet another feature of al-Hamadhānī’s creations, namely their resort to “prosimetrum,” the regular inclusion of lines of poetry within a cursive prose narrative. One might even go on to suggest that, if al-Muwayliḥī’s attempt at producing a more logically sequenced narrative out of the original article series Fatrah min al-Zaman was a reflection of his acquaintance with and understanding of fictional models of that era, then the episodic and even fragmented nature of the story in its article format is a much closer reflection of his “classical” model in al-Hamadhānī’s maqāmāt and may indeed emerge therefrom as almost postmodern.
This edition, the first ever in book form to include all the original articles narrated by a nineteenth-century Egyptian called ʿĪsā ibn Hishām and published in Miṣbāḥ al-sharq at the turn of the nineteenth century, will thus re-establish their author’s text firmly within the political and cultural context within which they were conceived and on which they regularly commented. The availability of different versions of this famous narrative—the original articles of Fatrah min al-Zaman, the collected works of Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī, and the various editions of Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām—will make it possible to examine in detail the role that this “bridge-work” played in linking the pre-modern heritage of Arabic narrative to his lively portrait of a tumultuous and changing present in nineteenth-century Egypt and the ways in which the story has been transformed during a timeframe that now exceeds a century.
Note on the Text and Translation
In view of the complex textual history, it should again be made clear that the text and translation presented here are not based on any published book version of Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī’s Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām. Rather they offer for the first time the original texts and translation of the series of articles, entitled Fatrah min al-Zaman, which were originally published over a four-year period (1898–1902) in the al-Muwayliḥī newspaper, Miṣbāḥ al-sharq, and later converted by the author—after significant editing, into the book, Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām, first published in 1907. In that connection, it should be noted that the Arabic text presented here is an exact replica of the original newspaper articles, including the printing conventions that the editors chose to follow.
It might seem more appropriate to select A Period of Time as a title for this edition, that being a literal translation of the original Arabic title for the series of articles. However, since I had already used that title for my published study and translation of the third edition of Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām (1923—originally my doctoral thesis at Oxford submitted in 1968, published originally in microfiche form in 1974 and later in a second edition in 1992), I have decided to use another title, What ʿĪsā ibn Hishām Told Us, my aim being to reflect the fact that the contents of this version of al-Muwayliḥī’s text and its translation into English involve all the articles that he published in Miṣbāḥ al-sharq that are