Gardens for the sleeves.(Review)

In A.D. 751, not quite thirty years after the Prophet Muhammad had made his epochal flight, or hijrah, from Mecca to Medina, and less than twenty years after his death, the conquering Muslim armies in the East defeated the Chinese governor Kao Sienchih with his Turkish troops at Talas, in what is now Kazakhstan. The victory was momentous not only because it checked Chinese expansion in Central Asia but also because the spoils of war included Chinese paper-makers. As the great Islamicist and historian S. D. Goitein used to remark, "The Arabs learned how to make paper from the Chinese, and they haven't stopped covering it since." This jocular remark is an understatement; the profusion and variety of Arabic literature are mind-boggling. The standard history by the German scholar Carl Brockelmann (known to his colleagues as der Zettelpascha or "the index-card Pasha" because of his brimming files) consists of five massive volumes of exceedingly fine type; this is now being supplemented by the continuing history (it has reached ten volumes, with more to come) of the Turkish historian Fuat Sezgin.

Classical Arabic literature is a learned literature, in this similar to such traditions as the Sanskrit or the Hebrew; it was not uncommon for an adib, or litterateur, to master several disciplines and to write authoritative treatises in each. In addition to such displays of erudition it went without saying that a scribe or scholar, a katib or an `alim, would not only have hundreds or thousands of verses by heart, but would be an accomplished poet and calligrapher as well. Even in periods considered "decadent" a polymath like the Egyptian Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti, who died in 1505, could produce over 336 separate works, many of them compendious, multivolume treatises. Of course, adab, the word for "literature" in Arabic, also denotes "refinement" and "cultivation." The term is conceived broadly and comprises not only poetry and belles-lettres, but also fables, proverbs and jokes, history (tribal and dynastic), genealogy and geography, popular philosophy and ethics, oratory and table talk, not to mention several sciences of language, from phonetics through grammar, prosody, and rhetoric to philology proper; in short, all that an eighth- or ninth-century sophisticate was expected to know. Given such abundance, how can an interested outsider even gain a toehold in such a tradition? The difficulty is compounded by the fact that most translations from Classical Arabic, and especially of poetry, are stilted, prolix, bombastic, fusty and often inadvertently hilarious to read--when not simply unreadable. There are exceptions but they are few; indeed, if a new Stuffed Owl were to be compiled of bad translations from the Arabic, it would run to several plump, and hooting, volumes.

The English novelist and Arabist Robert Irwin has now ventured intrepidly into this forbidding terrain and produced an ambitious and surprisingly enjoyable anthology, drawn from all periods of Arabic literature and accompanied by his own elegant commentary.(1) As might be expected from the author of the wonderful The Arabian Nights: A Companion or the elegant erotic novel Prayer-cushions of the Flesh--a small masterpiece--the results are charming, even for those numbed by the bizarre and often incoherent effusions of previous editor-translators. Irwin writes with wit and precision; his introductions and comments are marvels of apposite annotation, and he enlivens them with funny or pungent or scabrous anecdotes and citations by a huge array of Arabic authors from the sixth century to the sixteenth (Irwin concludes with his own superb translation of the little-known Mamluk author Ibn Zunbul). For example, Irwin notes that the Christian Arab poet al-Akhtal, who died sometime around 710, "described the effect of wine in these terms: `It creeps through the frame like ants crawling through drifted sand'" Or that the magnificent ninth-century prose writer al-Jahiz (his name means "the goggle-eyed") "used to pay the owners of bookshops to be locked up in their premises at night so that he could read the stock. It is reported that he was killed when an avalanche of books collapsed on top of him." (A fate that befell Orientalists as well: the prolific nineteenth-century German poet and translator of Arabic and Persian Friedrich Ruckert met his end in his ninetieth year when his bookshelves toppled over onto him as he was perusing an Ethiopic grammar.) Sometimes the passing citations are splendid, as in the remarks on the ocean attributed to the conqueror of Egypt, the great general `Amr ibn al-`As, and which reflect the desert-dweller's perennial dread of the sea:

 
   The sea is a boundless expanse, whereon great ships look tiny specks; 
   nought but the heavens above and waters beneath; when calm the sailor's 
   heart is broken; when tempestuous, his senses reel. Trust it little, fear 
   it much. Man at sea is an insect on a splinter, now engulfed, now scared to 
   death. 

An astute eye for the felicitous quotation is also much in evidence in Irwin's selections from existing translations. He ferrets out quite pleasing passages even from otherwise unpalatable versions; indeed, the value of his anthology lies as much in his judicious assortment of translations as in his own keen comments. This is a tacit virtue, perhaps best appreciated by those who have had to slog through the existing translations. Rather slyly, using quotations as a kind of medicinal honey to sweeten his sometimes astringent facts (as an Arab author might have said), Irwin situates his literary figures firmly within their own times; because of this, his anthology also serves as a succinct running history of medieval Islam. At moments history and literature converge, as in Irwin's compact account of al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, the draconian Umayyad governor of Iraq. Irwin points out that this bloodthirsty governor began his career as a grammar-school teacher, a fact he wittily uses to explain al-Hajjaj's ruthlessness, in matters of state as of grammar (al-Hajjaj is credited with inventing the diacritical signs that denote vowels in Arabic script and which brought greater precision to the written language). The speech al-Hajjaj delivered upon first arriving, in disguise, as governor in the mutinous city of al-Kufah became a set piece anthologized repeatedly for its murderous eloquence. Al-Hajjaj ascended the minbar, or pulpit, drew back his head-covering and delivered a harangue which begins:

 
   O people of al-Kufah! I see before me heads ripe for the harvest and the 
   reaper; and verily I am the man to do it. Already I see the blood between 
   the turbans and the beards.... You Iraquis are rebels and traitors, the 
   dregs of dregs! I am not a man to be frightened by an inflated bag of skin, 
   nor need anyone think to squeeze me like dry figs! ... Therefore, beware, 
   for it is in my power to strip you like bark from the tree, ... to beat you 
   as we beat camels which wander away from the caravans, and grind you to 
   powder as one grinds wheat between mill stones! ... I am Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, 
   a man who keeps his promises, and when I shave I cut the skin! 

The tirade, laced with such inflammatory expletives as "you sons of whores!," continues at some length and in much the same vein; it has lost none of its force for Arab readers some 1300 years after the event (indeed, al-Hajjaj's imprecations might be useful for Colin Powell to recite when next he deals with Saddam Hussein).