Belles lettres and narrative prose
- Key People:
- Ibn al-ʿArabī
- al-Ghazālī
- Ameen Rihani
- Naguib Mahfouz
- Mahmoud Darwish
- Related Topics:
- qaṣīdah
- rāwī
- ghazal
- Arabic literary renaissance
- mas̄navī
As has been the case with many world cultures, the emergence of a tradition of belles lettres in Arabic is closely linked to the bureaucratic class and its quest for professional identity. In the case of Arabic literature, that process finds its beginnings in the Umayyad caliphal court during the 8th century. Earlier “nonpoetic” texts do, of course, exist, but for a number of reasons they are best considered as precedents to the tradition that was to develop.
The revelation of the Qurʾān not only involved a process of recording, compilation, and verification but also established a clear textual boundary; it was neither poetry nor prose but the inimitable Qurʾān. The fact that the Qurʾān showed most of the features of a characteristic form of pre-Islamic discourse known as sajʿ (usually translated as “rhyming prose” but almost certainly a very early form of poetic expression) complicated matters considerably, in that some of the earliest extant Arabic materials consist of the utterances of soothsayers (kuhhān) couched in precisely the same form of discourse. The similarities between the surahs, particularly the earlier ones, of the Qurʾān and these other types of homiletic texts were tactfully ignored for several centuries, leaving the phenomenon of sajʿ in a kind of critical limbo—heavily utilized but historically unanalyzed.
Alongside these earliest examples of “prose,” a number of official documents have also survived in the form of treaties and the like. Also recorded were accounts of the pre-Islamic peninsular tribes and especially of their great battles. These latter accounts, the so-called Ayyām al-ʿArab (“Battle Days of the Arabs”; the term is also applied to the battles themselves), were couched in a particular format that was an indigenous characteristic of the anecdote, the generic title of which is khabar (“report”). The first segment in this format consisted of the isnād (“chain of authority”), which used a variety of verbs to register the type of narrative involved and, most significantly, established the level of the report’s veracity by listing the names of transmitters back to the source. This initial segment was then followed by the matn (“backbone,” or the content of the report). As the community of Muslims set itself to record not only the Qurʾān itself but the deeds and sayings of Muhammad, reports of this kind were collected, categorized, and sifted, thus initiating a vast exercise in history, genealogy, critical analysis, and anthologizing.
The most authentic reports were gathered into collections of Hadith, accounts of the Prophet’s sayings and actions. The best-authenticated reports became part of two collections, both called the Ṣaḥīḥ, compiled by al-Bukhārī and Muslim ibn al-Ḥajjāj, which together are the second most important source of Islamic law and practice after the Qurʾān itself. These reports also became part of the collections of maghāzī (accounts of the Prophet’s raids during his lifetime) and sīrah (biographies of the Prophet). Beyond these specific genres, however, the logical structure of the khabar was replicated in a wide variety of other generic contexts. It is even possible to see the maqāmah genre (see below The concept of adab: Narratives of the imagination) as a pastiche of the khabar’s narrative principles.
The concept of adab
A major feature of premodern prose literature in Arabic was adab, a term that in modern usage is translated as “literature” but that in origin is closely connected with the English concept of “polite letters” and the French term belles-lettres, both of which imply a close linkage between the act of writing and the manners and norms of a community. In the case of Arabic, that community consisted of a number of functionaries of the Islamic court and, especially, bureaucrats and chancery officials. With the elaboration of caliphal and other varieties of court life, the adīb (“litterateur”), the practitioner of adab, joined forces with the nadīm (“boon companion”) and the ẓarīf (“arbiter of taste and fashion”) in providing both enlightenment and entertainment for the ruler. In the particular case of adab, the initial priorities involved the preparation of codes of conduct and practice for the increasingly large secretariat, which was growing in conjunction with the administrative needs of the ever-expanding Islamic dominions, and of useful (and often diverting) materials with which they could fulfill the demands of their profession. A major part of the resulting repertoire of works is a tradition of practical manuals, monographs, and compilations of information of every conceivable type. All these genres combined into the development of a field of study that was to become extremely influential in the educational life of the Muslim community.
Alongside these trends there was also an ongoing process whereby speakers and writers of other languages who became Muslims and worked in the various offices of the court translated works into Arabic. A major early contributor to this process was an 8th-century Persian scholar, Rūzbih, who adopted the Arabic name Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ. He translated from the Persian a collection of animal fables about kingship, the Panchatantra (a work of Indian origin), which he titled in Arabic Kalīlah wa Dimnah (“Kalīlah and Dimnah”); its narrative method and its particular style were among its contributions to the development of a new secretarial mode of composition. He also composed a manual for secretaries, Kitāb ādāb al-kabīr (“The Major Work on Secretarial Etiquette”). At a later date, another translation movement, much encouraged by the Abbasid caliph al-Maʾmūn, rendered much of the Hellenistic heritage from Greek, often via Syriac, into Arabic, the products of which were stored in the great Baghdad library Bayt al-Ḥikmah (“House of Wisdom”). The beginnings of a tradition of epistle composition are associated with ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd, known as al-Kātib (“The Secretary”), who in the 8th century composed a work for the son of one of the Umayyad caliphs on the proper conduct of rulers.
The intellectual issues reflected in the varied compositions of the secretarial class, all of which were vigorously debated within the new multicultural environment of the caliphal court, were to be brought to new levels of sophistication in the 9th century by one of Arabic literature’s greatest figures, ʿAmr ibn Baḥr, whose physical ugliness led him to be forever known by the nickname al-Jāḥiẓ (“The Man with Boggling Eyes”).
Al-Jāḥiẓ and Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī
Al-Jāḥiẓ earned a reputation in his own lifetime as a prodigious polymath, and the breadth of his learning is reflected in the listing of his works. He compiled anthologies of poetry and anecdote about animals (Kitāb al-ḥayawān) and misers (Kitāb al-bukhalāʾ), and he wrote essays (rasā’il) on every conceivable topic (on theological controversies, on race and colour, on envy, on food, on speech, and so on). He also wrote a highly influential work of early criticism, Kitāb al-bayān wa al-tabyīn (“Book of Clarity and Clarification”). Apart from sheer erudition and a delight in controversy, what sets al-Jāḥiẓ’s works apart is, first, his total mastery of a clear and concise Arabic style that reflected the new influences on the Muslim community and, second, a great predilection for digression—a reflection, no doubt, of the apparently limitless nature of his curiosity and memory. The following brief extract illustrates some of these aspects of his craft:
Discourse, just like people, can be subcategorized. It may be serious or trivial, elegant and fine, or else crude and nasty, either amusing or the opposite. It is all Arabic…. As far as I am concerned, no speech on earth is as enjoyable and useful, as elegant and sweet to the ear, as closely linked to sound intellect, as liberating for the tongue, and as beneficial for the improvement of diction as a lengthy process of listening to the way that eloquent, learned, and intelligent Bedouin talk.
Even during al-Jāḥiẓ’s lifetime the extent of his erudition and genius was widely recognized, and his achievements were deemed virtually unattainable. In later generations one prominent figure, Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī, whose turbulent life is an apt reflection of the vicissitudes of court patronage during the 10th and 11th centuries, provides another example of virtuosic prose and breadth of interest. His extreme self-criticism led him to destroy some of his writings, but his renowned anthology of anecdotes, Kitāb al-imtāʾ wa al-muʾānasah (“Book of Enjoyment and Bonhomie”), and his often scurrilous commentary on cultural and political infighting, Kitāb mathālib al-wazīrayn (“Book on the Foibles of the Two Ministers”), provide ample justification for his reputation as one of Arabic’s greatest stylists.