Journal of Arabic Literature 46 (2015) 68-92

brill.com/jal

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/1570064x-12341293

“Blame These Days, Don’t Blame Me!”: Rewriting Medieval Arabic in Maghrebi National Literature and Drama

Samuel EnglandUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison

sengland2@wisc.edu

Abstract

This article examines two crucial moments of literary adaptation in twentieth-century North Africa, when Classical Arabic prose takes on a central but rarely acknowledged position in emerging national arts. Maḥmūd al-Masʿadī and al-Ṭayyib al-Ṣiddīqī destabi-lize the accepted critical account of Arabic literature’s modernization. Whereas literary historians have argued that writers eschewed restrictive Classical forms and Arabized Western genres, al-Masʿadī and al-Ṣiddīqī directly apply Prophetic ḥadīth and humor-ous maqāmāt to the novel and drama. Their gesture toward medieval prose gives them an ethical master key, allowing them to engage pious Islamic discourse and shift abruptly to the disingenuous, pragmatic world of the maqāmāt. However, in the charged field of national literature, their maneuvers provide them substantially less comfort than they seek. Presenting their ambitious modern prose as Classical, they force a broad variety of genres into a single continuum of Arab-Islamic identity. Such a historiography requires that we parse the categories that al-Masʿadī and al-Ṣiddīqī conjoin, a challenge largely unmet amidst the accolades they have received over the past five decades. Al-Masʿadī and al-Ṣiddīqī deepen the anxiety of form that they assiduously attempt to relieve. The Arabic novel and drama, although portrayed in criticism as the iconoclast tools of modernity, drive these authors deep into torturous examinations of the literary past. Maghrebi literature exposes the enduring rifts between centuries-old narrative traditions and the urgent task of forming national canons during an era of political independence.

Keywords

Classical Arabic – North Africa – Arabic Novel – Theatre – Education – unesco –Maḥmūd al-Masʿadī – al-Ṭayyib al-Ṣiddīqī

69“Blame These Days, Don’t Blame Me!”

Journal of Arabic Literature 46 (2015) 68-92

Since their emergence in the tenth century, the irreverent, fictional anecdotes known as maqāmāt have offered extraordinary opportunities for writers to play with language, ethics, social issues, and literary form. Badīʿ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī’s (968-1008) pioneering collection of stories reframed the ethi-cal questions of piety, veracity, linguistic skill, and social responsibility, all of which Classical prose had long sought to authoritatively answer. In many respects, medieval and early modern maqāmāt served as an ethical coun-terweight to prophetic ḥadīth: although their structure was effectively the same, the maqāmāt could upend ḥadīth’s righteous ethical telos while taking refuge in their fictional status.1 In late modernity al-Hamadhānī’s project has remained as crucial as ever. Reconfigured in drama and novels, the medi-eval language spoke to such material historical conditions as the rise of mass media, increased literacy, the two World Wars, and European colonialism. Among the most famous and ambitious writers to take on this project are the Tunisian intellectual Maḥmūd al-Masʿadī (1911-2004) and the Moroccan play-wright al-Ṭayyib al-Ṣiddīqī (1939-), making Classical narrative respond not only to modernity but also to its own centuries-long legacy of mixing fiction with definitive truth claims. Their attempts to influence Arabic forms produced mixed results, as will be shown here. Despite that, there is no doubt of their success in the market and in the official, national institutions with which they affiliated. Al-Masʿadī rose to great prominence in the 1940s, al-Ṣiddīqī in the 1960s, which is to say that their early careers bookend the emergence of both Tunisia and Morocco as independent states in the mid-1950s. After their

1  Al-Hamadhānī’s traditionally agreed-upon and extant maqāmāt number fifty-two, although that figure is by no means stable. Medieval anthologists have claimed that he wrote 400 of them but that number is probably not to be taken literally. After al-Hamadhānī, the maqāmāt’s second known iteration is the collection by his fellow ʿAbbāsid, Abū Muḥammad al-Ḥarīrī (1054-1122). By the eleventh century the form had achieved great popularity, its short pica-resque episodes refashioned by writers of a broad variety of Middle Eastern and Romance languages. They tend to retain al-Hamadhānī’s basic formulation, in which a scruffy traveler extols with great eloquence a story about himself and/or his comrade seeking petty gains such as free meals, clothes, money, and acclaim from everyday people. On questions of com-piling and numbering al-Hamadhānī’s works see A.F.L. Beeston, “Al-Hamadhānī, al-Ḥarīrī and the Maqāmāt Genre,” in ʿAbbāsid Belles-Lettres, ed. Julia Ashtiany, T.M. Johnstone, et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 127; and Bilal Orfali and Maurice Pomerantz, “A Lost Maqāma of Badīʿ al-Zamān al-Hamad̠ānī?” Arabica 60 (2013): 246-49. On the relationship between maqāmāt and ḥadīth see Abd El-Fattah Kilito, “Le genre ‘Séance’: une introduction,” Studia Islamica 43 (1976): 38-44; and James Monroe, The Art of Badīʿ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī as Picaresque Narrative (Beirut: American University of Beirut Press, 1983), 20-21. Jaakko Hāmeen-Anttila, Maqama: A History of a Genre (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 2002).