Voices of Islam (210 page)

Islamic Literatures: Writing in the Shade of the Qur’an
127

blasphemous imitation of the Qur’an, but the charge is no doubt an attempt to disparage this gifted author.

Commentaries on the Qur’an inspired commentaries and super- commentaries in other fields too, such as poetry and grammar. The first major Arabic book after the Qur’an was
al-Kitab
(The Book) of Sibawayhi (d. ca. 795
CE
), a systematic study of Arabic grammar.
42
Countless grammar books followed, culminating in such works as the versified Arabic grammar
al-Alfiyya
(The Thousand-liner) by the Andalusian Ibn Malik (d. 1274
CE
);
al-Ajurumiyya,
the Moroccan Berber Ibn Ajurum’s (d. 1323
CE
) eponymous condensation of all the rules of Arabic grammar; and
Bahth al-matalib
(Discussion of Grammatical Questions) by the Archbishop of Aleppo, Jermanus Farhat (d. 1732
CE
). By virtue of the fact that Arabic was the language of scholarship for much of the Muslim world well into the sixteenth century
CE
, non-Arabic works before that time were, relatively speaking, less common—but this is not to say that they were less important. Indeed, the interplay of Arabic and Persian in particular is of great signifi ce. Persian may have adopted rhyme patterns, for instance, from Arabic, but it gave to Arabic such forms as lyric poetry and the quatrain. Persian was also used in Muslim India, where it remained the language of culture and administration until 1835. The poet-scholar Azad Bilgrami’s (d. 1786
CE
) poetry—his panegyric earned him the title Hassan-i Hind (The Hassan [ibn Thabit] of India), likening him to the Prophet Muhammad’s panegyrist—and his magnum opus
Subhat al-Marjan
(The Coral Rosary), a major historical– biographical–literary critical work, were in Arabic, but he wrote many more works in Persian.
43

The Qur’an, as God’s word, is held by Muslims as the standard of eloquence. It comes as no surprise therefore that it has been frequently drawn upon, thematically, textually, and structurally.
44
Textual recourse to the Qur’an involves quoting, creatively misquoting, or reworking Qur’anic passages. As might be expected, it is widely quoted by characters in novels and stories. One of the most unusual quotations is in the autobiography of ‘Umar ibn Sa‘id (d. 1864
CE
), a West African slave and former minor Islamic scholar from North Carolina who was urged by abolitionists to write an account of his life. He begins this work, which he wrote in Arabic, with the entire text of
Surat al-Mulk
(Qur’an 67, The Dominion).
45
The modern Syro-Lebanese poet Adonis, who was born in a Shiite Muslim family, also uses Qur’anic passages, often recasting the Qur’an’s words and thereby earning the disapproval of pious critics. His most recent work, like the Qur’an resonantly called
al-Kitab
(The Book), has also irked critics.
46

Thematic recourse to the Qur’an has taken many forms. The most well known are modern uses of Qur’anic themes, such as the Algerian novelist Tahir Wattar’s use of the theme of apocalyptic convulsions on Judgment Day in
al-Zilzal
(The Earthquake).
47
This novel is especially interesting for the fact that the protagonist mentions Nobel Prize–winning author Naguib

128
Voices of Art, Beauty, and Science

Mahfouz’s
Awlad haratina
(Children of the Alley), one of the few fi tion works structurally to draw upon the Qur’an.
48
Children of the Alley
is divided into five parts, each corresponding to a character evidently based on Qur’anic and Biblical figures, but is also subdivided into 114 chapters, as is the Qur’an. The novel has been misread (and accordingly banned) as an allegorical com- ment on religion and the death of God. It is, rather, the converse: a reading of modern Egyptian society through the scriptural archetypes. Egyptian play- wright Tawfi al-Hakim’s (d. 1987
CE
)
Ahl al-kahf
(People of the Cave) is about the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus mentioned in
Surat al-Kahf
(18, The Cave) of the Qur’an.
49
Indonesian-born ‘Ali Ahmad Ba-Kathir’s (d. 1969)
Harut wa Marut
is about two faultfi ing angels; Salman Rushdie’s
The Satanic Verses,
like his subsequent
Haroun and the Sea of Stories,
is a thinly veiled critique of contemporary authoritarian Islam (in Britain in the former, in Iran in the latter) through a parody of the Prophet Muhammad and the Angel Gabriel.
50
Whether Rushdie qualifi as a writer of ‘‘Islamic Literature’’ will depend on the pietistic commitments of the person making the decision. Certainly, he merited inclusion in Amin Malak’s recent analyti- cal survey,
Muslim Narratives and the Discourse of English.
51
Other authors in this work illustrate the wide sweep implicit in the notion of postcolonial Islamic literature(s). A partial list includes the Pakistani Ahmed Ali (d. 1994), who was also the translator of a widely available, if only passably good, translation of the Qur’an into English; the Somali Nuruddin Farah; the Tanzanian from Zanzibar Abdulrazak Gurnah; the Tanzanian-Canadian Ismaili writer M.G. Vassanji;
52
and the female authors, the Nigerian Zaynab Alkali and the Malaysian Che Husna Azhari.
53

The colonial-era encounter of Islamic literatures with the West in the nine- teenth century and after, principally (but by no means exclusively) through English, French, and Russian, resulted in the ‘‘importation’’ of the novel and the short story into the Islamic world. The novel in particular started out as a vehicle for nationalist, and sometimes secularist expression, but grew to become a major genre in Islamic literatures. Many novelists chose to write in the colonial language, as the Hashmi anthology and the Malak volume mentioned above record for English. However, prose output thrived in ‘‘Islamic’’ languages too. Suffice to mention here—a survey of this material is certainly a desideratum—some key fi ures. In Arabic, Mahfouz has been one of the most prolific and admired writers; the 1989 Nobel Prize in Liter- ature merely confirmed his status as the dean of Arabic letters.
54
However, he has not eclipsed other great writers in Arabic, such as the Sudanese Tayeb Salih, whose 1969
Mawsim al-hijra ila al-shamal
(Season of Migration to the North) is widely viewed as The Great Arabic Novel and is to be found on every list of postcolonial writing. A riposte to the simultaneously seductive and insidious nature of the colonial venture, it is
inter alia
a sophisticated rereading of Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
and a supple inversion of Shakespeare’s
Othello.
55
It was anticipated in 1961 by the Senegalese writer

Islamic Literatures: Writing in the Shade of the Qur’an
129

Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s French novel
L’aventure ambigu¨e
(The Ambiguous Adventure), which was also about the travel of a protagonist to Europe and the clash of African and Islamic cultures with European culture.
56

The Saudi-Iraqi Abdel Rahman Munif (d. 2004) wrote poignantly in
Mudun al-milh
(Cities of Salt) about the changes wrought by modernity in an unnamed oil nation and about the excesses of politicians and business- men.
57
The Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk has also spoken out against the status quo. His 2002
Kar
(Snow), named one of the 10 best books of 2004 by the
New York Times,
is about the relationship between Westernism and Islamism, both typically espoused with fervor in Turkey. Pamuk came to fame with
Benim Adım Kırmızı
(My Name is Red), which is a murder mys- tery of sorts set in sixteenth-century Ottoman Istanbul.
58
Iran’s most famous prose writer is Sadegh Hedayat (d. 1951). His 1937 morbid and unsettling novella
Buf-e kur
(The Blind Owl) is his masterpiece. Like
L’Etranger
(The Stranger) by Albert Camus—who was, incidentally, a
pied noir,
that is, a Frenchman born in Muslim North Africa, where most of his novels are set—the appearance of
Buf-e kur
forever changed the Iranian and international literary landscapes.
59
Modern Urdu letters boast of a number of important prose writers. Predictably, the partition of India and Pakistan features prominently, allegorically, or explicitly in their writings. Suffi to mention here the female novelist Qurratulain Hyder, whose magnum opus,
Aag Ka Darya
(River of Fire), is a historical sweep that begins before the Common Era. Like Hyder, Ismet Chugtai (d. 1991) was born in Aligarh, India, and was another major female fi e in Urdu letters, but writing in India not Pakistan.
60

As we have seen, many Muslim writers have turned to the Qur’an for inspiration. The Yemeni novelist Zayd Muti‘ Dammaj (d. 2001) was inspired by the Qur’anic account of Yusuf and Zulaykha (Potiphar’s wife) in his novel
al-Rahina
(The Hostage). This novel is about a young man who becomes the object of affection of the sister of the governor in whose palace he is being kept prisoner.
61
The Moroccan novelist Driss Chra¨ıbi takes on the Prophet Muhammad himself and his deeply amorous relationship with his wife Khadija in the daring but reverential
L’homme du livre
(The Man of the Book), a French novel(la) that is principally a first-person account of the thoughts of a fi Muhammad on the eve of the first revelation.
62
Chra¨ıbi includes the mysterious Qur’anic fi of al-Khidr in the novel, combining him with the Syrian monk Bahira, who was said to have seen the mark of prophecy on the young Muhammad. In the title story of his collection
The Mapmakers of Spitalfields,
the U.K.-based Bangladeshi writer Syed Manzurul Islam melds this same al-Khidr into his main character, the itinerant Brother-O Man.
63

One antecedent for accounts about an errant or wandering character, often a rogue, who dupes those around him is the
maqamat
(‘‘Assemblies,’’ or ‘‘Standings’’), a unique literary form in a very ornate, stylized manner, which

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Voices of Art, Beauty, and Science

alternates rhyming prose with poetry. Originated in Arabic by Badi‘ al-Zaman al-Hamadhani (d. 1008
CE
), and expertly taken up by Hariri (d. 1122
CE
),
64
it subsequently inspired the Hebrew
Maqamat
of al-Harizi (d. thirteenth century
CE
) in Andalusia and also the anonymous Spanish pica- resque novel,
Lazarillo de Tormes
(1531).
65
Maqamat
is usually named for a character, a locale, or the item around which the trickery revolves. Mixing prose and poetry (
prosimetrum
) in this genre is not uncommon. It is to be found in scholarly, belletristic, and even popular works such as the medieval
Alf layla wa layla
(The Thousand and One Nights). This is one of the most enduring and recognizable story collections in world literature although it has been criticized in Arabic literature because of its fabulous and salacious content.
66
Other important story cycles in Islamic literature include the fi ntury Malay
Hikayat Hang Tuah
(Tale of Hang Tuah), about the exploits of the eponymous hero and four friends in fi

Malacca; the sixteenth-century Turkish
Book of Dede Korkut;
a 12-story collection of epic and heroic tales of the Turkic Oghuz people; and the medi- eval ‘‘Darangen Epic’’ of the Maranao of the southern Philippines, which is a historical record of events from before the period of Islamization.
67

The Algerian novelist Ass¨ıa Djebar turns to historical chronicles in
Loin de Me´dine
(Far from Medina), an attempt to flesh out the lives of the women around the Prophet Muhammad and the early Muslims. She rereads the historical accounts preserved in such works as Tabari’s monumental
Tarikh al-rusul wa al-muluk
(History of Messengers and Kings), a world history from creation to the mid-tenth century
CE
.
68
One of the many sources used by Tabari was
Kitab Baghdad
(Book of Baghdad) by Ibn Abi Tahir Tayfur (d. 893
CE
). Only one volume of this work survives, but Jorge Luis Borges (d. 1986), one of the many world authors drawing inspiration from Islamic literatures, mentions it in his short story, ‘‘El Tintorero Enmascarado Hakim de Merv’’ (The Masked Dyer Hakim of Merv).
69

Djebar’s and others’ attempts to make sense fictionally of the Prophet Muhammad’s words and deeds mirror early Muslims’ attempts to do so. The corpus of writing that they had available was the Hadith, and they immediately set themselves the task of verifying whether the words they had recorded were authentically transmitted. Thus, the groundwork of the early Hadith collectors, such as Bukhari (d. 870
CE
) and Darimi (d. 869
CE
), and the Hadith transmitters, such as Nawawi (d. 1277
CE
)—who produced a very short pre´cis of the most salient Hadith narratives in
al-Arba‘in al-Nawawiya
(The Nawawi Forty [Hadith])—was accompanied by a vigorous scrutiny of the transmitters themselves.
70
This investigation into the personalities and characters of the men and women involved in the transmission of Prophetic tradition became the basis for a wider activity, namely the writing and compiling of large biographical works, such as Ibn Sa‘d’s (d. 845
CE
) early compendium,
al-Tabaqat al-kubra
(The Great Generations). These bio- graphical works were repositories of information about birth, birthplace,