ʾUṣṣit il-Gumguma or 'The Story of the Skull' With Parallel Versions, Translation and Linguistic Analysis of Three 19th-century Judaeo-Arabic Manuscripts from Egypt Supplemented with Arabic Transliteration (original) (raw)

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.