Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq - Leg over Leg: Volumes One and Two

LEG OVER LEG

Volumes One and Two

LIBRARY OF ARABIC LITERATURE

EDITORIAL BOARD

GENERAL EDITOR

Philip F. Kennedy, New York University

EXECUTIVE EDITORS

James E. Montgomery, University of Cambridge

Shawkat M. Toorawa, Cornell University

EDITORS

Julia Bray, University of Oxford

Michael Cooperson, University of California, Los Angeles

Joseph E. Lowry, University of Pennsylvania

Tahera Qutbuddin, University of Chicago

Devin J. Stewart, Emory University

MANAGING EDITOR

Chip Rossetti

DIGITAL PRODUCTION MANAGER

Stuart Brown

ASSISTANT EDITOR

Gemma Juan-Sim

The Library of Arabic Literature series offers Arabic editions and English translations of significant works of Arabic literature, with an emphasis on the seventh to nineteenth centuries. The Library of Arabic Literature thus includes texts from the pre-Islamic era to the cusp of the modern period, and encompasses a wide range of genres, including poetry, poetics, fiction, religion, philosophy, law, science, history, and historiography.

Books in the series are edited and translated by internationally recognized scholars and are published in parallel-text format with Arabic and English on facing pages, and are also made available as English-only paperbacks.

The Library encourages scholars to produce authoritative, though not necessarily critical, Arabic editions, accompanied by modern, lucid English translations. Its ultimate goal is to introduce the rich, largely untapped Arabic literary heritage to both a general audience of readers as well as to scholars and students.

The Library of Arabic Literature is supported by a grant from the New York University Abu Dhabi Institute and is published by NYU Press.

Philip F. Kennedy

General Editor, Library of Arabic Literature

This paperback edition differs in a few respects from its dual-language hard-cover predecessor. Because of the compact trim size the pagination has changed, but paragraph numbering has been retained to facilitate cross-referencing with the hardcover. Material that referred to the Arabic edition has been updated to reflect the English-only format, and other material has been corrected and updated where appropriate. For information about the Arabic edition on which this English translation is based and about how the LAL Arabic text was established, readers are referred to the hardcover.

Volumes One and Two

BY

Amad Fris al-Shidyq

TRANSLATED BY

Humphrey Davies

FOREWORD BY

Rebecca C.Johnson

VOLUME EDITOR

Michael Cooperson

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York and London

Copyright 2015 by New York University

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Shidyaq, Ahmad Faris, 1804?-1887.

Leg over leg or The turtle in the tree concerning the Fariyaq : what manner of creature might he be / by Faris al-Shidyaq ; edited and translated by Humphrey Davies.

volume cm (Library of Arabic literature)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4798-0072-8 (vols. 1-2 : ppk : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4798-1329-2 (vols. 34 : ppk : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4798-3288-0 (ebook) ISBN 978-1-4798-8881-8 (ebook)

1. Shidyaq, Ahmad Faris, 1804?-1887. 2. Shidyaq, Ahmad Faris, 1804?-1887TravelMiddle East. 3. Arabic languageLexicography. 4. Middle EastDescription and travel. I. Davies, Humphrey T. (Humphrey Taman) translator, editor. II. Shidyaq, Ahmad Faris, 1804?-1887. Saq ala al-saq. III. Shidyaq, Ahmad Faris, 1804?-1887. Saq ala al-saq. English. IV. Title. V. Title: Turtle in the tree.

PJ7862.H48S213 2015

892.78503dc23 2015021915

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.

Series design and composition by Nicole Hayward

Typeset in Adobe Text

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

REBECCA C. JOHNSON

While I do not claim to be the first writer in the world to follow this path or thrust a pinch of it up the noses of those who pretend they are dozing, I do notice that all the authors in my bookcase are shackled to a single stylistic chain.... Once youve become familiar with one link of the chain, you feel as though you know all the others, so that each one of them may truly be called a chain-man, given that each has followed in the footsteps of the rest and imitated them closely. This being established, know that I have exited the chain, for I am no chain-man and will not form the rump of the line; nor do I have any desire to be at its front, for the latter is an even more calamitous place to be than the former.

Leg over Leg (1.17.10)

For most Anglophone readers, this will be their first introduction to the writing of Fris al-Shidyq (later Amad Fris al-Shidyq, born in 1805 or 1806 and died in 1887), a foundational figure in Arabic literary modernity.however, he needs little introduction. As belletrist, poet, travel writer, translator, lexicographer, grammarian, literary historian, essayist, publisher, and newspaper editor, he is known as a pioneer of modern Arabic literature, a reviver of classical forms, the father of Arabic journalism, and no less than a modernizer of the Arabic language itself. His masterwork, Al-Sq al l-sq f m huwa al-Friyq (Leg over Leg or the Turtle in the Tree concerning the Friyq, What Manner of Creature Might He Be, 1855), is acknowledged as one of the most distinguished works of the nineteenth century and an inaugural text of Arab modernity. It is also among the most controversial: generically impossible to characterize, it is a critical, self-referential, learned, and irreverent book of observations on the lives and manners of The Arabs and their Non-Arab Peers that includes scathing attacks on authority, both ecclesiastical and worldly, as well as liberal and libertine discussions of relations between the sexes.

Yet, while virtually all studies of Arabic literature acknowledge his central place in literary history, the works of al-Shidyq, as Nadia Al-Bagdadi writes, have largely been merely read, but not seriously known in Arabophone and Anglo-European academies alike.

Looking at al-Shidyqs complete work, however, helps scholars to re-evaluate this assessment, to engage critically with the Nahah and its output, to understand the importance of both translation and philology to modern Arabic literature, and to reconceptualize global frameworks of literature and Arabics place in them. As al-Shidyq writes, he is no chain-man and does not seek to replicate the style of those authors who have come before him. Yet he has as much distaste for appearing at the front of the chain as he does for appearing at its rear. For this reason, Leg over Leg can be seen as a portrait in miniature of Arabic literary modernity, if we understand that modernity as it has been described more recently in scholarship: a contested category marked by self-interrogation and a constant reworking of the meaning of community through language, created not by being imported from the West, but through interaction with Europe.