What to read after What ʿĪsā Ibn Hishām Told Us?

Readers of Arabic literature are likely to be familiar with Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī's acknowledged masterpiece of late-nineteenth-century prose and sajʿ (rhymed prose), What ʿĪsā ibn Hishām Told Us. The main plot-line concerns the resurrection of an Egyptian Pasha from the reign of Mehmed Ali in the first half of the nineteenth century, in British-occupied Egypt of the 1890s. Upon rising from the grave he encounters the narrator ʿĪsā ibn Hishām, whose name and propensity for sajʿ narration are borrowed from the maqāmas of Ḥarīrī, but who appears in other respects to be a contemporary Egyptian. The Pasha, accompanied by ʿĪsā, becomes entangled in the newly modernized and chaotic Egyptian legal system, before the pair go on to observe in a more leisurely fashion the various classes and milieux of fin-de-siècle Cairene society. The work is written in episodes, again recalling the maqāma form, and in a carefully crafted literary language. The device of a revived figure from the past serves to expose the contrasts between the professed beliefs of contemporary Egyptians, including their claims both to Western-inspired modernity and to Islamic authenticity, and their actual conduct, which is shown to be almost totally lacking in rational judgement and moral direction. This deeply ironic social critique is accompanied by frequent jabs at the Egyptians' British colonial overlords, as well as other Europeans with pretensions to superiority over the East.These features will be known to readers of the many Arabic editions of the work and of Roger Allen's previous English translation of the third book edition (A Period of Time, Reading, 1992). For the present parallel-text edition and translation for the Library of Arabic Literature, however, Allen has restored all the original episodes introduced by the narrator ʿĪsā ibn Hishām which were serialized in the magazine run by Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī and his father Ibrāhīm, in 1898-1902. In addition to the major plot-line, it includes a series of preliminary episodes concerning the British-Egyptian war against the Mahdi in the Sudan; the "Second Journey" in which the Pasha and ʿĪsā, after their experiences of Cairene society, travel to Paris to observe the Exposition Universelle of 1900 and the French political system (some of which was republished in later book editions); and parts of the main story which were suppressed from later book editions due to their harsh mockery of the Egyptian royal princes and religious scholars, or the British. This decision to include parts which the author himself suppressed in his book versions (probably under the pressure of censorship as well as classical literary norms) is to be applauded, especially as it makes available material that was previously buried deep in the files of the Muwayliḥīs' magazine. We are offered a rawer, more bitingly satirical, and far more topical version of Muwayliḥī's classic narrative. It emerges as a text thoroughly embroiled in international as well as Egyptian events: the Mahdist War, the Boxer Rebellion in China, and the controversies around the Exposition Universelle.There are a number of faults in the execution of the edition-translation, however. On the more topical aspects of the narrative, the critical apparatus is surprisingly thin. In particular, the succession of events in the Sudan - the French expeditions, the wars, the Fashoda incident, the raising of the British and Egyptian flags - and their reverberations in Egyptian politics, are left somewhat mysterious. One understands, of course, an editor's reluctance to submerge his text in a sea of annotations. But the current endnotes trace almost all the literary quotations and allusions, which could hardly all have been familiar to Muwayliḥī's contemporary readers, while neglecting to point out more ephemeral facts which the latter were clearly expected to know - even where Muwayliḥī's comedy utterly depends on this knowledge (for instance, Fakhrī Pasha's horror at the mention of "flags", 1: 5; or the two French expeditions which the Minister of War confuses, 1: 17). The decision to follow the serialized text exactly as printed has also led to the omission of the chapter headings later added to the book edition: a compromise on this point would have made the text considerably easier to navigate. In addition, the translation is marred by a number of misreadings of the Arabic (for instance, qawmiyya for qawīma, 2: 185; ẓālim for maẓlūm, 2: 199; sharq for gharb, 2: 261). The Arabic text, on the other hand, seems largely free of typographical errors - although in one place, three lines of the English, spoken by ʿĪsā, appear with no equivalent in the Arabic (1: 299; cf Muwayliḥī's Complete Works [al-Aʿmāl al-kāmila, ed. Roger Allen, Cairo, 2002], 1: 233). Such slips are especially unfortunate in a project which is in other ways excellent, and in a series which has begun to set new standards for editions and translations of Arabic literature. The editor-translator, and the editors of the Library of Arabic Literature, are nonetheless to be congratulated for making Muwayliḥī's masterpiece available in its original, and perhaps its most striking, form.