Some textual and linguistic peculiarities of the Berlin manuscript we. 643 of the Sirat Sayf ibn Di Yazan cycle. In: Au-delá de l´arabe standard moyen arabe et arabe mixte dans les sources médiévales, modernes et contemporaines. - ISBN 88-901340-4-6. - Firenze : Universitá di Firenze, 2012. (original) (raw)
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REMARKS ON ARAB SCHOLARSHIP IN THE ARABIC POPULAR SÍRA AND THE SÍRAT SAYF IBN DI YAZAN
The subject, which is going to be discussed here, represents a brief description of the general direc tion of 20th century research in the field of Arab popular epic and the SIrat Sayf ibn Di Yazan conducted by Arab scholars and literary critics. Despite the fact that some of the studies which are mentioned in the following pages are out of date, discussing them is still profitable because they offer a complex review of the gradual development of scholarly opinion on the Arabic popular sira, which was marked until recently by many misconceptions and methodological confusion.
Osiris Reborn: The Arabic Epic of Sīrat Sayf Ibn Dhī Yazan and the Prophetic Königsnovelle
The Epic World, 2024
This chapter explores the intertextual relationship between Sīrat al-Malik Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan (The Adventures of King Sayf ibn Dhi Yazan), a medieval Egyptian popular epic, and the “Prophetic Königsnovelle” (Prophetic “Kings novel”), an Egyptian “discourse” dating to the Greco-Roman period. Through a comparative reading of two particular variants of Sīrat Sayf and the Prophetic Königsnovelle, I argue that, just as the Prophetic Königsnovelle is a response to the cultural trauma inflicted by external threats and foreign rule in ancient Egyptian times, the story of the foundation of Egypt in both Sīrat Sayf variants can be read as a veiled reworking of the history of the Arab conquest of Egypt in 639–642 CE. Furthermore, despite being separated by centuries, all three texts express the fears surrounding the loss of integrity of the socio-cultural unit through a shared conceptualization of kingship and power. The two Sayf variants branch out to follow quite different plots in their later stages, but the intertextual echoes of the Prophetic Königsnovelle that can be traced within them lend them subtextual thematic conformity, and indicate that the worldview expressed in the older Prophetic Königsnovelle lives on in this late-medieval epic.
This study presents parallel versions with a translation and a linguistic analysis of selected features in three 19th-century Judaeo-Arabic manuscripts from Egypt, containing the story ʾUṣṣit il-Gumguma (in Standard Arabic, Qiṣṣat al-Jumjuma), ‘The Story of the Skull’. The manuscripts are Judaeo-Arabic adaptations of an Arabic version of the story Qiṣṣat al-Jumjuma maʿ Nabī Allāh ʿĪsā ʿAlayhi s-Salām ‘The Story of the Skull and Jesus the Prophet of Allāh, May Peace Be upon Him’. A printed version of this story can be found in the collection al-Munājāh al-Kubrā li-Sayyidnā Mūsā ʿAlayhi ṣ-Ṣalāh wa-s-Salām ‘Our Master Moses’ Great Intimate Conversation, Peace and Blessings Be upon Him’. It was composed by ʿAbdallāh al-Kafīf in the late 17th century. Nevertheless, as we shall see, the story’s vorlage stems from early-Islamic times and has probably been transmitted orally among people in the Arabic-speaking world for as long as one millennium. It is a story about Jesus reviving the skull of a deceased person that he finds when walking in Syria. The skull tells Jesus about his life as a sinful ruler, who suddenly becomes ill one day and passes away. As the skull explains, the Angel of Death had appeared at his deathbed and sentenced him to a painful purgatory for his sinful behavior on earth. The story continues by describing in detail the punishments that he must suffer in preparation for being thrown into hell. The content of the story is reminiscent of the Qiṣaṣ al-ʾAnbiyāʾ ‘Stories of the Prophets’ genre, which presents the pre-Islamic prophets from a popular Islamic perspective, and of the so-called ʾIsrāʾīliyyāt ‘Tales of the Israelites’, a term which is probably best explained as Islamic adaptions of Jewish lore. It is a result of oral transmission of extracanonical material over time, and the long-preserved tradition of Judaeo-Arabic writing. The Judaeo-Arabic versions exhibit both Islamic and Jewish influence, in terms of narrative as well as linguistic content, and are thus evidence of somewhat harmonious relations between Jewish and Muslim social and religious thought periodically before and during Egypt in the 19th century. In order to limit the scope of this book, the discussions will focus mostly on presenting a descriptive and structural analysis of the linguistic content. In future publications, I wish to elaborate more on the language history, sociolinguistics and the story genre embodied in this kind of material. As the attentive reader probably will notice, there are still numerous untreated linguistic issues in the material. Further findings, analysis and conclusions (which is based on a larger corpus than the present) will hopefully be presented in my doctoral dissertation, to be completed in 2018. The manuscripts reveal a wide spectrum of interesting written and spoken language variety features in 19th-century Egypt. These are predominantly of a Standard and/or an Egyptian Arabic nature, but also evident are more specific non-Standard and Jewish Egyptian Arabic traits and the linguistically mixed language of Middle Arabic with its various pseudo-corrected2 features. Special attention is paid to signs of linguistic divergence from the widespread Standard Arabic and Egyptian Arabic varieties, thus emphasizing the dichotomy between today’s standardized written and spoken varieties and the occasional non-standard usage appearing in the 19th-century manuscripts.
New Readings in Arabic Historiography from Late Medieval Egypt and Syria: Proceedings of the themed day of the Fifth Conference of the School of Mamluk Studies , 2021
While the historiography of late medieval Egypt and Syria is exceptionally well documented and many, if not most, of its major sources have by now been edited and studied, manuscript repositories still contain several historical texts that have received little to no attention from scholars. This essay will present one such unpublished and mostly unstudied excerpt of a historical biography devoted to Sultan al-Nāṣir Muḥammad (r. 693-4/1293-4, 698-708/1299-1309, 709-41/1309-41) preserved in the manuscript Arabe 1705, held by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. It will be argued that its author can be identified as Shāfiʿ b. ʿAlī (d. 730/1330), who also wrote two well-known historical biographies of the sultans Baybars (r. 658-76/1260-77) and Qalāwūn (r. 678-89/1281-90). Using this particular text as a case study, I will discuss how the concept of "Literarisierung," first applied to Mamluk historiography by Ulrich Haarmann almost half a century ago, may still be used fruitfully to think about how historiography and literary modes of expression interacted. In a famous article published in 1971, Ulrich Haarmann argued that historiography in late medieval Egypt and Syria underwent a particular innovation, which he defined as a "Literarisierung der inneren Form," or "literarization of the inner form." According to Haarmann, the chronicles and biographical dictionaries produced between the 7th/13th and early 10th/16th centuries should not be considered as innovative in their formal, outer form, as they generally adhered to characteristics set by earlier precedents. There was, however, something distinctive about their inner form (i.e., on the level of individual segments within the larger works). At this level, one would come across a much higher attestation of literary elements, that is, anecdotes, topoi, colloquialisms, and especially miraculous stories, ʿajāʾib wa-gharāʾib pervading the annalistic historical narratives.1 This argument and related observations from Haarmann's dissertation, Quellenstudien zur frühen Mamlukenzeit, sparked a
In response to the Western writers on Sīrah, the nineteenth and twentieth century Muslim Sīrah writers realized, on the one hand, that most of the classical Sīrah-source materials contained both authentic and otherwise narratives which have made it easy for the Western orientalists to paint the moral and spiritual life of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) according to their desired colours, and to reexamine such materials, on the other hand, they deemed it necessary to set forth the criteria that could be acceptable to both the orientalists and Muslims. To this end, the modern Muslim scholars, to some extent under the influence of modern scientific/rationalistic critical methods, began to take Sīrah-writing into account with a new trend and produced a good deal of literature which may be divided into the following three categories: 1) The books in which authors have restricted themselves to the Qur'┐n, the upmost authentic source of Islam. 2) The books in which authors have also consulted, besides the Qur'┐n, those ╒adīth collections which they deemed authentic. 3) The books in which writers have attempted to consult, along with the Qur'┐n and authentic ╒adīth collections, all the available classical materials including books on history, biography, 'ilm al rij┐l, genealogy, geography, literature, poetry, and Islamic law, etc., but not without filtering them. To evaluate such efforts with respect to Sīrah-writing, 'All┐mah Shiblī Nu'm┐nī from the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent and Professor Dr. Akram ╕iy┐' al-'Umarī from the Arab world, have been selected in this paper for several reasons, top of which being their thorough study of and comprehensive approach to the subject and their remarkable works in the field.
in Jo Van Steenbergen and Maya Termonia (eds.), New Readings in Arabic Historiography from Late Medieval Egypt and Syria (Leiden, Boston: Brill), 2021
Introduction: Trends of "Literarization" ("adabization") in Mamluk Historiography* Speaking of a "literarization" of history writing during the Mamluk period, Ulrich Haarmann referred mainly to the increasing use of elements drawn from the literature of adab and folk romance (Volksroman), such as anecdotes or story-like reports, dialogues with direct speech, colloquial language, digressions, popular motifs, occult materials, and other adab-like elements (such as mirabilia-marvels or exotic stories [ʿajāʾib wa-gharāʾib]) in the historical narrative (ḥawādith) in chronicles written mostly by Egyptian chroniclers related to the military institution (Ibn al-Dawādārī [d. after 736/1335] being the most notable example) but to a lesser degree also found in the chronicle of the Syrian religious scholar al-Jazarī (d. 739/1338). This process was underlied by a desire to entertain the readers and "popularize" historical writing.1 The more popular elements, and especially those drawn from the Volksroman, may be seen as elements of adab "in its 'lower' form,"2 thus the process of "literarization" described by Haarmann may be seen as a process of "adabization." After Haarmann, much attention has been given to Egyptian historians related to the military institution considered to have written "highly literarized" (or * I would like to thank my friend and colleague Almog Kasher for reading a draft of this paper and making some very useful comments on issues related to Arabic grammar. 1 For a convenient summary of Haarmann's ideas, see Haarmann, Review of Weltgeschichte 134-5; Auflösung 55-7; Guo, Mamluk 33-6; Hirschler, Studying 168; Rabbat, Perception 164-5; Mauder, Gelehrte 23-5; Irwin, Ibn Zunbul 6; Parry, Review 148; Little, al-Ṣafadī 194. For a detailed discussion, see Haarmann, Quellenstudien 119-83 (esp. 159-83). On the process of the "popularization" of reading practices, see Hirschler, Written. 2 Guo, Mamluk 39.
Abant İzzet Baysal Üniversitesi İlahiyat Fakültesi Dergisi, 2019
This article discusses Qutb's literary approach to the Qur'an in the context of his analysis of some early Meccan sûrahs. First of all, it is clear that Qutb analyzes the sûrahs as whole units. In addition, the mufassir supports his interpretations via thematic and stylistic relations among sûrahs. Moreover, the following three literary features highlighted by Qutb have been revealed: Firstly, he draws attention to the interrelations between theme and style while analyzing a sûrah. Secondly, Qutb usually presents the oath-clusters as a feature which enhances the literary quality. Thirdly, he has the opinion that some certain words having phonetically-stressed tones are particularly preferred to contribute to convey the meaning better. As a result, it has emerged that Qutb prioritizes a "literary" and "holistic" approach over the "historical" and "atomistic" one preferred by the Western scholars of his time.