Night and Horses and the Desert

by Robert Irwin

  Ibn al-Rumi was a versatile poet. The poem which follows is unusual in that it is a poem about poetry and the inevitability of imperfection in literature.

  Say to whoever finds fault with the poem of his panegyrist:

  Can you not see what a tree is made of?

  It is made of bark, dry wood

  and thorns and in between is the fruit.

  But it should, after all, be so, that what

  the Lord of Lords, not Man, creates is finely made.

  But it was not so but otherwise,

  for a reason Divine Wisdom ordained,

  And God knows better than we what he brings about

  and in everything he resolves there is always good.

  Therefore let people forgive whoever does badly or

  falls short of his aim in poetry; he is [after all only] a human

  being.

  Let them remember that his mind

  is heavily taxed and his thoughts are exhausted in writing his verse.

  His task is like pearl-fishing at the bottom

  of the sea: before the pearls lies danger.

  In pearl-fishing, there is the expensive, the precious

  that the choice accepts, but also what it leaves behind,

  And it is inevitable that the diver bring with him

  what is selected and what is scorned.

  Gregor Schoeler (trans.), in ‘On Ibn ar-Rumi’s Reflective Poetry. His

  Poem about Poetry’, Journal of Arabic Literature 27 (1966), pp. 22–3

  5

  The Wandering Scholars (c. 900–c. 1175)

  The tenth century, which was a great century for Arabic poetry and prose – especially prose – was at the same time the century in which Persian politicians and writers assumed an unprecedented importance in Islamic culture. The Buyids were a clan of Persian mercenaries from the Caspian region. In 945 they established themselves as protectors of the puppet 'Abbasid caliphs and Baghdad became the capital of what was in effect an Iranian monarchy. The heyday of Buyid power and cultural patronage was under 'Adud al-Dawla (reigned 949-83). The Buyids were Shi'ites who governed in the name of a Sunni caliph, and in general they tolerated and employed Sunni Muslims. Although the Buyids were soldiers and of Persian origin, they promoted literature written in Arabic. Hamadhani, Mutanabbi and Tanukhi were among the writers who benefited from their patronage. The government of the caliphate was shared out among members of the Buyid clan in Rayy, Shiraz, Isfahan and Hamadhan.

  The rise of Persian as a literary language effectively began in the ninth century and this rise may be linked to the growing political importance of Persians in government. The Persian Samanid rulers of Transoxania and Khurasan (819–905) sponsored works written in Persian. The most important work to have been commissioned by a Samanid prince was undoubtedly Firdawsi’s Shahnama, an epic poem devoted to Persian legends and history. Although the eastern lands subsequently fell under the domination of the Ghaznavid Turks and later the Seljuk Turks, Persian literature continued to evolve and from the eleventh century onwards important Persian prose works in such genres as history and belles-lettres started to appear. Despite these developments in this period, most Persians with literary or scholarly ambitions still preferred to write in Arabic.

  Although the Buyids controlled the heartlands of the 'Abbasid caliphate, many of the outlying provinces had become covertly or overtly independent. Transoxania and Khurasan, for example, had fallen under the control of the above-mentioned Persian dynasty, the Samanids, and from 969 until 1171 Egypt was ruled by an Arab Shi'ite dynasty, the Fatimids. Although Baghdad remained the most important centre of literary production, cities like Rayy, Hamadhan, Aleppo, Isfahan and Cairo were increasingly prominent as centres of patronage and literary production. As we shall see, the Hamdanid dynasty of Arab princes in Aleppo and Mosul were particularly keen to attract writers to their courts. The dispersal of centres of patronage meant that this was an age of wandering scholars and goliard poets.

  This was a culture of the majlis – of soirées at which the assembled poets, wits and scholars were expected to sparkle in the presence of their wealthy host and patron. In an age before print-runs, royalties and advances were thought of, most writers had to earn their living by saying or writing things that would please someone wealthier than themselves. Patrons enjoyed the panegyrics that were addressed to them. Whether anyone else did is unclear. It was a competitive culture which favoured those who were fast and fluent on their feet and ever ready to produce elegantly turned compliments and insults. One was as good as one’s last riposte or improvised couplet. One also needed a strong head for alcohol. It must have been pretty ghastly.

  The cultural efflorescence in the tenth century in the Near East has been characterized as a ‘Renaissance’ (by Adam Mez, George Makdisi and Joel Kraemer, among others). But Renaissance, as the term has been used by Western historiographers since at least the time of Jacob Burkhardt (1818–97), refers in the strictest sense to a rebirth or revival of classical Antiquity and a rediscovery of the literature and art of Greece and Rome. In medieval Christendom, a return to the ‘humanities’, that is Greek and Latin literature, encouraged the production of writings that were centrally concerned with man rather than God. Now it is true that it is easy to underestimate the degree to which Arabic culture and, more specifically, its literature was the natural heir to the Hellenistic civilization of late Antiquity. It is also true that in the tenth century certain individual Arab and Persian scholars interested themselves in particular Greek thinkers. For example, Miskawayh was strongly influenced by Aristotle and more generally by Greek thought. However, much of the magnificent literature produced in the tenth century has no real precedent in pre-Islamic times, and when we study the golden age of Arabic literature in and around the tenth century, for the most part we are studying not a ‘rebirth’ but a ‘birth’.

  As in the heyday of the 'Abbasids, libraries and bookshops continued to be important as intellectual meeting-places. ‘But when I had returned from abroad to my native town, I happened to be in its public library, the haunt of the literary, and the rendezvous of all, whether residents or travellers, when there came a man in rags, with a short thick beard.’ Thus Harith, one of the protagonists in Hariri’s Maqamat (on which more below), described visiting a public library in Basra. The library, featured in the picaresque narrative, then becomes the setting for a literary debate between Harith’s acquaintance Abu Zayd and a group of learned men. The Suq al-Warraqin, or bookdealers’ market, in tenth-century Baghdad contained one hundred booksellers. Some of these shops doubled as literary salons and, for example, Ibn al-Samh’s bookstore provided a rendezvous for philosophers. Medieval bookdealers often branched out into the manufacture of paper and the copying of manuscripts. Some shops doubled as subscription libraries; a twelfth-century Jewish physician who also ran a bookshop in Cairo kept a notebook in which he recorded, among other things, the loan to one of his clients of a copy of The Thousand and One Nights. The proliferation of subscription libraries lending copies of non-scholarly works to people who could not afford to have their own manuscripts may have been a factor behind the explosion in prose fiction in this period. In comparison with poetry or non-fiction, the status of prose fiction was not high. Fiction in this period tended to be written in relatively simple prose and this was looked down on by connoisseurs of the ‘high style’, with its studied parallelisms, balanced antitheses, rhymed prose and metaphors. Muhammad ibn Ishaq Ibn al-Nadim, the tenth-century bookdealer and cataloguer (who has already been referred to in the previous chapter) seems to have had a grudging attitude towards prose fiction.

  The first section of the eighth part of the eighth chapter of the Fihrist, or ‘Index’, by Ibn al-Nadim gives one an idea of the shape of medieval Arabic popular fiction as perceived by him – this is a tiny section of the whole book.

  The First Section with accounts of those who converse in the evenings and tellers of fables, with the names of the books which
they composed about evening stories and fables.

  Thus saith Muhammad ibn Ishaq [al-Nadim]: The first people to collect stories, devoting books to them and safeguarding them in libraries, some of them being written as though animals were speaking, were the early Persians. Then the Ashkanian kings, the third dynasty of Persian monarchs, took notice of this [literature]. The Sasanian kings in their time adding to it and extending it. The Arabs translated it into the Arabic language and then, when masters of literary style and eloquence became interested, they refined and elaborated it, composing what was similar to it in content.

  The first book to be written with this content was the book Hazar Afsan, which means ‘a thousand stories’. The basis for this [name] was that one of their kings used to marry a woman, spend a night with her, and kill her the next day. Then he married a concubine of royal blood who had intelligence and wit. She was called Shahrazad, and when she came to him she would begin a story, but leave off at the end of the night, which induced the king to spare her, asking her to finish it the night following. This happened to her for a thousand nights, during which time he [the king] had intercourse with her, until because of him she was granted a son, whom she showed to him, informing him of the trick played upon him. Then, appreciating her intelligence, he was well disposed towards her and kept her alive. The king had a head of the household named Dinar Zad who was in league with her in this matter. It is said that this book was composed for Huma’i, the daughter of Bahram, there being also additional information about it.

  Thus saith Muhammad ibn Ishaq [al-Nadim]: The truth is, if Allah so wills, that the first person to enjoy evening stories was Alexander, who had a group [of companions] to make him laugh and tell him stories which he did not seek [only] for amusement but [also he sought] to safeguard and preserve [them]. Thus also the kings who came after him made use of the book Hazar Afsan, which although it was spread over a thousand nights contained less than two hundred tales, because one story might be told during a number of nights. I have seen it in complete form a number of times and it is truly a coarse book, without warmth in the telling.

  Thus saith Muhammad ibn Ishaq [al-Nadim]: Abu 'Abd Allah Muhammad ibn 'Abdus al-Jahshiyari, author of The Book of Viziers, began the compiling of a book in which he was to select a thousand tales from the stories of the Arabs, Persians, Greeks, and others. Each story was separate, not connected with any other. He summoned to his presence the storytellers, from whom he obtained the best things about which they knew and which they did well. He also selected whatever pleased him from books composed of stories and fables. As he was of a superior type, there were collected for him four hundred and eighty nights, each night being a complete story, comprising more or less than fifty pages. Death overtook him before he fulfilled his plan for completing a thousand stories. I saw a number of the sections of this book written in the handwriting of Abu al-Tayyib [ibn Idris], the brother of al-Shafi'i.

  Before that time there was a group of people who composed stories and fables in the speech of humans, birds, and beasts. Among them there were 'Abd Allah ibn al-Muqaffa'; Sahl ibn Harun; 'Ali ibn Da’ud, the secretary of Zubaydah; and others besides them. I have dealt thoroughly with these authors and what they composed in the appropriate places in this book.

  There is the book Kalilah and Dimna about which they have disagreed. It is said to be the work of the Indians (Hindus), information about that being in the first part of the book. It is also said to be the work of the Ashkanian kings to which the Indians made false claims, or of the Persians and falsely claimed by the Indians. One group has said that the man who composed parts of it was Buzurjmihr, the wise man, but it is Allah alone who knows about that.

  There was the book Sindbadh al-Hakim, which is in two transcriptions, one long and one short. They disagreed about it, too, just as they disagreed about Kalilah wa-Dimnah. What is most probable and the closest to the truth is that the Indians composed it.

  The Fihrist by al-Nadim, trans. Bayard Dodge, vol. 2, pp. 712–15

  COMMENTARY

  Ibn al-Nadim refers to fictions as ‘evening stories’ (asmar), as one was not supposed to spend the daylight hours on such idle stuff.

  The Ashkanian dynasty is nowadays more commonly known as the Parthian dynasty. The Parthians ruled over Iran from 249 B.C. until A.D. 224, when they were replaced by the Sasanians. The Sasanian dynasty ruled Iran from c. 224 until the Islamic Arab invasions of 637-51.

  Although Ibn al-Nadim is clearly discussing a Persian prototype of The Thousand and One Nights, there are certain obvious differences. In the Arab version that has come down to us Shahrazad was not a concubine of royal blood, but a vizier’s daughter, while Dinar Zad (Dunyazade) was not the household manager, but Shahrazad’s sister.

  Bahram was the name of five rulers of the Persian dynasty. Probably Ibn al-Nadim intends to refer to Bahram V, also known as Bahram Gur, who ruled from 420 to 438 and to whom many legends and anecdotes were attached. Huma’i was the name of Bahram’s wife, as well as of his daughter.

  In medieval Arabic and Persian literature, Alexander, the Macedonian emperor and would-be world-conqueror (356-323 B.C.), was the hero of all sorts of fantastic adventures. Firdawsi, Persian author of the famous epic poem the Shahnama, even presented Alexander as a Persian emperor.

  It is a matter of conjecture, but in my opinion when Ibn al-Nadim referred to the lack of warmth in Hazar Afsan, he was not referring to lack of emotional warmth, but to lack of stylistic adornment in the prose.

  Jahshiyari (d. 942/3?) was an official of the 'Abbasid court. His History of the Viziers, which has survived, particularly praises the Barmaki viziers. His collection of stories divided into ‘nights’ does not seem to have survived. Most of medieval Arabic literature is lost – and most of what has survived has not been edited, or even looked at for centuries. Ibn al-Nadim’s Fihrist has become for the most part a catalogue of lost books.

  Ibn al-Muqaffa' and his Arabic version of the collection of animal fables known as Kalila and Dimna have been discussed in the previous chapter. Buzurjmihr, also known as Burzoe, was allegedly the sage who brought the animal fables from Persia to India. Burzoe was the vizier of the Persian ruler Chosroes I Anurshirwan (reigned 531-78).

  Sahl ibn Harun (d. 830) wrote under the patronage of Harun al-Rashid and the Barmakis. Among other things, he wrote al-Namir wa’l-Tha'lab (‘The Panther and the Fox’), a collection of animal fables along the lines of Kalila wa-Dimna, which has been translated into French.

  'Ali ibn Da’ud was a contemporary of Sahl ibn Harun. He was famous chiefly for the letters he composed. No animal fables by him have survived. Zubaydah (literally ‘Little Butter-Pat’) was the best known of Harun al-Rashid’s wives.

  On no account should Sindbadh al-Hakim, or ‘Sindbad the Sage’, be confused with Sinbad or Sindbad the Sailor. Ibn al-Nadim is referring to the Book of Sindbad, also known as The Story of Seven Viziers. In this story collection a prince has been wrongly denounced by a wicked stepmother and sentenced to death by his father. However, seven viziers then tell stories in a (successful) attempt to delay the execution and save the prince’s life.

  While we can only guess at the nature of the audience for prose fiction, it is quite clear that much of this fiction was created, or at least assembled, by members of the literary elite (such as the Jahshiyari mentioned above). The tenth century saw a proliferation of storybooks. However, although this was effectively the beginning of Arabic fiction, fiction did not advertise itself as such. Rather, since there was a strong prejudice in pietistic circles against telling stories which were not actually true (what after all was the point of that?), compilers of anthologies usually presented their tales as true narratives about people who had really existed. Collectors were at pains to stress that they had not invented their stories. They also tended to take pride in having collected their material from oral sources. Thus Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani’s anthology about songs, the Kitab al-Aghani, was criticized by a later compiler of anecdotes
because Abu al-Faraj copied things directly from books, whereas the proper method was to collect information from oral sources and present the reader with a chain of transmission from attested authorities: ‘He used to go into the bazaar of the booksellers, when it was flourishing and the shops were filled with books, and he would buy numbers of volumes which he would carry home. And all his narratives were derived from them.’

  Abu 'Ali al-Muhassin al-TANUKHI, the man who delivered that criticism of al-Isfahani, was born in Basra in 940 and died in Baghdad in 994. He was of humble birth, but when he was charged with this, he quoted the riposte of a certain Arab tribesman when taunted for his lowly origin: ‘My family line begins with me; yours ends with you.’ Tanukhi lived and worked for some years as a qadi (judge) in Baghdad and he served various masters on political missions, as well as waiting on his patrons as a courtier and conversationalist. However, he fell out of favour with the Buyid 'Adud al-Dawla in Baghdad and, like so many writers of the period, he was intermittently persecuted for his opinions. His most famous work was an anthology entitled Faraj ba'd al-Shidda (‘Relief after Distress’), a collection of tales about people who win through to wealth or happiness or love after initial difficulties. Although Tanukhi was not the first author to produce a book with this title and theme, his compilation was the most famous work in this genre; he assembled an unprecedentedly large collection of anecdotes. It is easy to imagine how such a topic might have appealed to the pious, with its implicit injunction to bear up and put one’s trust in God, although many of the protagonists who are shown as experiencing ‘relief after distress’ in Tanukhi’s stories were wily rogues, whose relief when it came was really quite undeserved. (The preoccupation with wily rogues pervaded other genres of prose fiction in this period.) Despite Tanukhi’s insistence that he had gathered true stories which had been authenticated by their transmitters, it is perfectly clear that some of these anecdotes were really short stories. The Indian story which follows comes from Faraj ba'd al-Shidda: