On Classical Arabic Stories

I’ve been raving about this one to my girlfriend — it’s so well done. Salma Jayyusi has made something special: a large selection of around eighty short stories, from the pre-Islamic period to some later, undefined point (evidently not the modern), along with a handful of excerpts from longer works. The stories are well chosen and very well translated.

One of the big challenges with this literature is the question of origins and transmission. These stories were rarely regarded as “literature” in the societies that produced them, and only some were written down. The pre-Islamic ones are especially interesting, since they were transmitted orally and recorded only after the coming of Islam — and in being transmitted they were reshaped to suit Muslim audiences. You can feel an overarching theme in that: the characters wrestle with older, largely tribal codes of honor, and Islam (or monotheism more broadly — there are conversion-to-Christianity stories too) offers a way out. It reminds me a little of Corneille’s Le Cid, which praises the centralizing seventeenth-century European monarch for his power to arbitrate disputes.

What’s most interesting about the stories at large is how fluid they are, having passed through so many transformations over their lives that it’s hard to speak of an “authentic original” at all. Sidestepping that problem, Jayyusi wisely organizes them by theme — religion, comedy, romance, and so on. Juha gets his own section; Jayyusi has edited a whole separate collection of Juha stories, which is naturally on deck for me. The excerpts from longer works are well chosen too. They don’t map cleanly onto our modern genres, but there’s enough to taste the tradition, and my favorite was the selection from Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s Kalila wa Dimna — itself a fascinating case study in the transmission of stories from far-off lands, in this case India. For anyone interested in the Arabic literary tradition, this is essential.