What 'Isa ibn Hisham Told Us. Muhammad al-Muwaylihi
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In the sections above we have already noted that Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī, through his mostly private education, his travels, his interests, and his research in libraries, was extremely erudite, as indeed was his father, Ibrāhīm al-Muwayliḥī. That much is abundantly clear from the elevated style that characterizes the articles published in their newspaper Miṣbāḥ al-sharq, and thus in the works in which those articles were assembled in book form. Whereas some of their contemporaries—such as Jūrjī Zaydān (1861–1914) and Muṣṭafā Luṭfī al-Manfalūṭī (1876–1924)—may have striven to develop a less elaborate and more accessible style with which to attract a broader readership to their works and especially the newspaper and journals in which they published, such, it would appear, was not a goal of the Muwayliḥīs in their choice of style.
In the particular case of Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī and the text that makes up this edition, we are dealing with a conscious revival of a pre-modern narrative genre (including its narrator by name) and its characteristic stylistic features. Like al-Hamadhānī many centuries earlier, al-Muwayliḥī has a narrator and a main character (the Pāshā) travel to various places where they react to and comment on what they encounter, in this case the Egyptian legal system, the onset of the plague, the wide variety of meeting venues in Cairo, the clash of indigenous and imported values exemplified by the tastes of the ʿUmdah and the “Playboy,” and, at a later stage, the various pavilions of the Paris Exhibition of 1900. Also like his illustrious forebear, al-Muwayliḥī indulges in a variety of pastiches of other forms of discourse: among many possibilities, we might mention the overblown rhetoric of the groomsman’s speech at the Wedding (20.10), and the absurdly complex and obscure reasoning of the newspaper article allegedly written by the al-Azhar shaykh (22.14–22.18). But from the point of view of this text and its translation into English, the most prominent feature of the maqāmah genre was its revival of the ancient style known as sajʿ and the resort at the same time to the use of “prosimetrum,” the inclusion of lines of poetry and sometimes complete poems in what is otherwise considered to be a work of “prose.” A comprehensive history of the stylistic phenomenon of sajʿ within the literary heritage of the Arabs has yet to be written, but the style is certainly to be found during the pre-Islamic era and is the primary characteristic of the Qurʾanic text; indeed in his important study Introduction to Arabic Poetics, the Syro-Lebanese poet and critic Adūnīs (b. 1930) suggests that in the Arabic literary tradition, sajʿ may not be the first manifestation of poetry per se, but is certainly the first manifestation of the poetic. Here is not the place to explore these issues in detail, but merely to point out that the linkage of sajʿ and poetry in Arabic, and in the writings of al-Muwayliḥī with which we are concerned here, can be traced back to the very origins of its literary history.
The articles narrated by ʿĪsā ibn Hishām which al-Muwayliḥī published in Miṣbāḥ al-sharq are characterized by a very elevated style of prose writing, and they also replicate the drama genre to a degree by including lengthy examples of dialogue, still composed of course, in the same elevated style. However, the initial paragraphs of each original article also involve the kind of virtuoso displays of style that are an intrinsic feature of sajʿ. As any learner of Arabic soon discovers, the language is one in which morphological patterns are not only widely prevalent but form the very basis of its lexicography (one might even suggest that the entire process is not a little “algebraic,” algebra being itself a subdivision of mathematics and indeed the term itself being of Arabic origin, al-jabr [contraction]). The sajʿ style exploits this feature to the maximum: not only is there regularly a sequence of phrases with a rhyming syllable at the end (thus replicating the prosodic system of Arabic poetry), but it would also appear that the rhythmic cadence of each phrase also needs to parallel the others in each rhyming sequence (which, when done by a virtuoso composer of maqāmāt such as al-Ḥarīrī [1054–1122], might extend for eight consecutive phrases). An almost axiomatic consequence of these “expectations” of the sajʿ style (one that admittedly has been scantly analyzed by scholars, perhaps because of the presence of the phenomenon in the Qurʾan and the notion of that text’s “inimitability”) is that the same incidents and images are depicted numerous times with different phraseology, allowing the composer not only to display his linguistic virtuosity but also to exploit Arabic’s myriad possibilities in the realms of morphology and synonyms.49 When we add to this al-Muwayliḥī’s acknowledged erudition and wide exposure to both Arabic and European cultural and literary traditions, the challenges that confront the would-be translator of this text seem clear.
Turning now to the translation process itself, I have to acknowledge that, even when faced with the challenges a text such as that of al-Muwayliḥī presents to both the translator and the anticipated reader of the resulting translation, I still find myself resorting to the logic presented by the renowned German theologian, philosopher, and commentator on translation, Friedrich Scheiermacher (1768–1834) when he states:
Either the translator leaves the author in peace as much as possible and moves the reader towards him, or he leaves the reader in peace and moves the author towards him.50
While there are, of course, a number of theoretical and practical issues that any translator has to resolve in the process of “transferring” a text from one culture and reading public to another, I have as a basic principle always much preferred the former of these two possibilities, that of “foreignizing the reader” rather than “domesticating the text.” With that in mind, I should therefore state clearly that, when I have been confronted, for example, at the beginning of each article in this text with a series of phrases in Arabic sajʿ which portray with multiple variations the same image or create a scenario—that being the most usual function of the introductory paragraphs in each article, I have resorted to a process of repetition and a copious use of synonyms which is perhaps not characteristic of English-language discourse, but a clear replication (translation) of the original Arabic text. Meanwhile, the often lengthy passages of cursive Arabic prose have been rendered into what I hope will be regarded as an appropriate level of English discourse. It is only in the marginally more spontaneous sections of dialogue (especially those involving the ʿUmdah and his two companions) that I have made any attempt at a more “conversational” style, but even there the constraints of al-Muwayliḥī’s choice of Arabic language register do not encourage any efforts at producing a series of more spontaneous exchanges.
To conclude, al-Muwayliḥī’s long-acknowledged masterpiece—whether in its original newspaper article form as in this edition or in one of the many and varied book editions of the work—is not only a wonderfully trenchant survey of turn-of-the-century Egypt under British occupation as it was involved in a complex process of cultural assimilation and transition, but also a conscious attempt to link developments in Arabic language and its literary forms during the nineteenth century (a movement generally known as the nahḍah [revival]) to the Arabic heritage of the pre-modern centuries. For that reason I have already characterized here it as being a genuine “bridge-work,” one that adopts a kind of Janus-like posture, looking in two directions simultaneously. It can be argued, and indeed several Egyptian scholars have argued, that the editorial process al-Muwayliḥī undertook before the publication of Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām in 1907 may have been an attempt to turn the text into a kind of “proto-novel.” However, as I have also endeavored to show previously (especially in A Period of Time, 1992, Section III), the revised text is less than successful in meeting even the minimal goals of such a designation. While one may be able to offer different views within that critical generic context, there can be little doubt that the original newspaper articles, published here for the first time in their original format and sequence, are the clearest possible reflection of the political, social, and cultural concerns that were the central focus of both al-Muwayliḥīs in their newspaper. That is, it seems to me, their enduring value, added to which is the fact that the vast majority of the text that was eventually to be published as Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām—with either its “first journey” only (1907, 1912, and 1923) or both journeys (1927 and thereafter)—is present in the current text, albeit in a different sequence.
Given the multiple cultural and cross-cultural references