The Book of Strangers: Mediaeval Arabic Graffiti on the Theme of Nostalgia, Attributed to Abu ’l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī

201 Pages·2000·34.93 MB·English

by  Patricia Crone and Shmuel Moreh

PRINCETON SERIES ON THE MIDDLE EAST
Bernard Lewis and Andras Hamori, Editors
The Book of
Strangers
Mediaeval Arabic Graffiti on the Theme of Nostalgia
Mediaeval Arabic Graffiti
on the Theme of Nostalgia
ATTRIBUTED TO
ABU 'L-FARAJ AL-ISFAHAN1
TRANSLATED BY
COPYRIGHT © 2000 BY PATRICIA CRONE AND SHMUEL MOREH
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRODUCED
OR TRANSMITTED IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY MEANS, ELECTRONIC
OR MECHANICAL, INCLUDING PHOTOCOPYING, RECORDING,
OR BY ANY INFORMATION STORAGE OR RETRIEVAL SYSTEM,
WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE COPYRIGHT OWNERS.
FOR INFORMATION WRITE TO: MARKUS WIENER PUBLISHERS
231 NASSAU STREET, PRINCETON, NJ 08542
MAPS ON PAGES 93-94 BY TSERING WANGYAL SHAWA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
ADAB AL-GHURABA'. ENGLISH.
THE BOOK OF STRANGERS: MEDIAEVAL ARABIC GRAFFITI ON THE THEME OF
NOSTALGIA/ATTRIBUTED TO ABU 'L-FARAJ AL-ISFAHANI; TRANSLATED WITH
COMMENTARY BY PATRICIA CRONE AND SHMUEL MOREH.
(PRINCETON SERIES ON THE MIDDLE EAST)
INCLUDES BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES AND INDEX.
ISBN 1-55876-214-0 HARDCOVER
ISBN 1-55876-215-9 PAPER
1. ARABIC POETRY-750-1258. 2. NOSTALGIA-POETRY.
3. ABU AL-FARAJ AL-ISBAHANI, 897 OR 8-967-AUTHORSHIP.
4. NOSTALGIA IN LITERATURE. 5. ARABIC POETRY-750-1258-HISTORY
AND CRITICISM. 6. GRAFFITI-ISLAMIC EMPIRE-THEMES, MOTIVES.
I. ABU AL-FARAJ AL-ISBAHANI, 897 OR 8-967. II. CRONE, PATRICIA.
v.
III. MOREH, SHMUEL. IV. TITLE. SERIES.
PJ7653.A3313 1999
892.7'1308-Dc21 99-16658 CIP
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CONTENTS
PREFACE ............................... 1
NOTES FOR THE NON-SPECIALIST READER ...... 3
•
I. Introduction ..................... 7
II. Translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
III. Commentary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 91
IV. The Authorship of the GhurabiP ... 127
V. The Place of the GhurabcP in
Arabic Literature .............. 145
•
MAPS
BAGHDAD ........................... 92
IRAQ AND KHUZISTAN .................. 93
THE MIDDLE EAST IN THE TENTH CENTURY .. 94
SOURCES ............................. 183
INDEX ............................... 191
Buyid silk,
1 Oth-11 th centuries
PREFACE
The translation is joint, but Crone takes responsibility for the final
wording and also for the rest of the book. We are greatly indebted to
Dr. H. Kilpatrick, with whom Crone corresponded about the
Ghurabii' in 1991-92, and many of whose suggestions have been
incorporated in the commentary with due acknowledgement. We
should also like to thank Nabil Fayyad, Avraham Hakim, and Joseph
Sadan for invaluable help with xeroxes and bibliographical refer
ences, Christian Habicht, Corey Brennan, Sebastian Brock, and
Michael Macdonald for expert guidance in the field of pre-Islamic
inscriptions, Robert Hoyland, Robert Irwin, and Andras Hamori for
specialist comments on the typescript, John Davey for the reaction of
a general (if untypically well-informed) reader, and Oleg Grabar,
Cynthia Robinson, Cynthia Villagomez, and Jeff Spurr for help with
illustrations. Having accumulated a very large debt of gratitude over
a very small book, we can only hope that we have made proper use
of the advice so freely given.
PC and SM

NOTES FOR THE
NON--SPECIALIST READER
This book is designed to be accessible not only to lslamicists, but
also to general readers with an interest in travel, the Middle East, and
the Middle Ages. General readers may find chapter 4 and the first part
(or the whole) of chapter 5 too specialist in nature for their taste: if
so, they should simply skip them. But they should not find them dif
ficult to follow if they choose to read them. However little or much
they decide to read, they may find the following information helpful.
Years
When dates are given in the form 345/956f, the first number refers
to the year of the Muslim calendar and the second to the correspond
ing year of the Christian calendar. Since Muslim years are lunar, they
rarely correspond to a single Christian year: 345 began in April 956
and ended in April 957, and which of the two years is involved can
only be determined when the precise date, or at least the month, of
the event is known. We use 956f as a short form for 956-57. But in
chapter 4, where dates are the issue, we soon take to using Muslim
dates alone because one cannot actually think in terms of both at the
same time.
Names
Arabic names have several components, any one or all of which
may be used in the sources at a particular time. In §19, for example,
3
4 THE BOOK OF STRANGERS
the reader will encounter Abii '1-I:Iasan 'Ali ibn Mazyad al-Asadi.
Here four components are used. The complete version would have
had five.
(1) Abii '1-I:Iasan: "father of al-I:Iasan". This is the kunya, which
identifies a person in terms of his or her offspring, usually the oldest
son. The corresponding female form is Umm al-I:Iasan, "mother of
al-I:Iasan". The sources usually, but not always, give the kunya first.
(2) 'Ali: the man's personal name (ism).
(3) ibn Mazyad: "son of Mazyad".
(4) al-Asadi: this is the nisba, which identifies a man in terms of
the group to which he belongs, here "member of (the tribe of) Asad".
People might be known by many nisbas, some referring to their tribe
or family, others to their geographical origin (al-Baghdadi), religious
affiliation (al-Shi'i) and the like. The "al-" is the definite article.
(5) The last component of a name would be the laqab, an honorif
ic name or nickname such as al-rashld (the rightly-guided), adopted
by the 'Abbasid caliph Ha.run, or al-a'war, the one-eyed, al-ash'ath,
the dishevelled, al-jiil:zi?, the goggle-eyed, or any other epithet sin
gling out one person from another.
The sources will happily refer to a man as "Abii '1-I:Iasan" in one
context and "Ali" or "'Ali ibn Mazyad" or "Ibn Mazyad" or "al
Asadi" or something else again in others. If lay readers of translations
find this confusing, they should take comfort from the fact that it is
confusing even to specialists. But in fact, the classical Arabic naming
system is extremely informative. It relates a man to his immediate
ancestors, his immediate descendants, and his wider group of rela
tives, neighbours, co-religionists and/or other support groups, so that
his name encapsulates all crucial information about him.
Pronunciation
Most people like to have an idea of how to sound a name even if
they are not going to say it aloud. One cannot learn Arabic pronunci
ation from a paragraph of written instruction, but one can arrive at
something recognizable by observing the following rules.
NOTES FOR THE NON-SPECIALIST READER 5
Vowels: a, i, and u are short vowels pronounced roughly as in
English "pat", "pit", "put". Bars indicate that the vowels are long,
which generally means that they should be stressed. (One does not
however stress the final f in nisbas, any more than one does in
Anglicized versions such as "Baghdadi" or "Iraqi".) In older translit
eration f and ii were often reproduced as ee and oo (Rasheed,
Mahmood), which correctly captures the sound.
Consonants: kh is pronounced like ch in German ach or Scottish
loch. Gh is prounounced like the German, French or Israeli guttural
r, whereas r stands for the rolled equivalent. Dh, th, and sh are pro
nounced as in English "the", "thorn", and "shoe" unless there is a dot
under one of the letters or both. In "Fat}:l" and "Is}:laq", for example,
the two consonants are sounded separately, as in "hothead" and
"mishap" (dh can stand for separate consonants without warning, but
does not actually do so in any name in this book). All dotted conso
nants are pronounced differently from undotted ones, and reproduce
quite different Arabic characters, but the dots can be ignored by lay
readers in all cases except for the};, which should always be sound
ed, if only as an English h (it grates when English speakers say
"Barayn" for Ba}:lrayn). The hamza, written ' as in al-Ma'miin or
Ghuraba!, is a glottal stop pronounced much as the stop in the
Cockney version of "bottle" or that between the vowels in German
"ge-antwortet". The 'ayn, written ' as in Ja'far or 'Isa, is a more force
ful guttural, produced by a constriction lower down in the throat, but
a glottal stop would do. For purposes of recognition it is more impor
tant to pronounce them in the middle of words that at the beginning
or the end.
People and Places
Both are identified in the commentary. We have also supplied sev
eral maps.
Conventions
=
Where references are given in the form 89 53, the former figure