I’ve been raving about this book to my girlfriend, it’s so well done, and it’s Salma Jayyusi who did something really special here. This collection is a large selection of around 80 short stories from the pre-Islamic period to some later, undefined time (although evidently not “modern”). In addition, there are a handful of selections from larger works. The stories were well chosen, and very well translated.
One of the big challenges with this sort of literature is the question of origins and transmission. These stories were rarely considered to be “literature” in the societies that produced them, and only some were written down. The pre-Islamic stories, especially, are interesting, given that they were orally transmitted and only really recorded after the coming of Islam. As part of their transmission, these stories changed to be more palatable to Muslim audiences, and there are some overarching themes here–the characters really struggle with older, largely tribal, codes of honor, and Islam (or monotheism more generally–there are stories about conversion to Christianity, too) offered a way out. This reminds me a bit of Corneille’s Le Cid, which extols centralizing tendencies among seventeenth century European monarchs for their ability to arbitrate disputes.
What’s perhaps most interesting about these stories more largely is that they’re all fluid, having undergone various transformations over the course of their life–it’s hard to refer to the “authentic original” when looking back at the context in which they were produced. Avoiding this discussion, Jayyusi wisely organizes the stories by major theme: religion, comedy, romance, and more. Juha gets his own section, and Jayyusi has edited another collection consisting entirely of Juha stories (which, as you can imagine, is on-deck for me).
The selections of longer works were also well-chosen. They don’t fit clearly into our modern understandings of genre, and there’s enough here to get a taste of the literary tradition. Of those works, my absolute favorite were the selections from Ibn al-MuqaffaÊ¿’s Kalila wa Dimna (which is itself a fascinating case study in the transmission of stories from far-away lands–in this case, from India).
All this is to say: it’s a must-read for those interested in the Arabic literary tradition. It’s so good!