Seers, Saints and Sinners: The Oral Tradition of Upper Egypt 9780755623563, 9781780760537

Citation preview

This book is dedicated to the poets, Awad’ullah cAbd al-Jalīl and cAmm Rizq Būlos, who introduced me to the fantasy world of Egyptian tales, and to Jamāl Zakī al-Dīn al-Hajājī, friend, transcriber and interpreter, who helped me to unravel their secrets c

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List of Illustrations

Fig. 1 Portrait of cAwad’ullah cAbd al-Jalīl in Luxor, 1982

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Fig. 2 Bed of Osiris illustrating the crop of grain emerging from the body of the dead Osiris

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Fig. 3 Seth spearing the serpent of darkness ‘whose coils support the heaven’ from the Papyrus of Her-Uben B, Cairo Museum Fig. 54. From Piankoff, Alexandre. Mythological Papyri (edited with a chapter on the symbolism of the papyri by N. Rambova) published by the Bollingen Foundation, New York: Pantheon, 1957, p. 75

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Fig. 4 Apap (or Apophis), to the left, speared by a woman, and Horus, on the right, spearing the captive depicted swimming in the water (provenance unstated). Wilkinson, Sir Gardner. Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians (ed. Samuel Birch), Vol III, Plate XXXIV, 1878

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Fig. 5 The winged and falcon-headed god Set killing the Apophis snake; from the Late Period temple of Hibis, built by Darius (521–486 bc), Nectanebo (358–340 bc) and other Ptolemies in the Kharga oasis, Western Desert, Egypt (photograph by the author)

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Fig. 6 Cippus illustrating Horus with sidelock, symbol of youth, clasped by the god Bes and trampling on crocodiles. Wilkinson. Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, Vol. III, Plate XXXIII

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Fig. 7 Representation of Horus as St. George spearing the crocodile; in the Musée du Louvre. Paris. As photographed by Max Siedel in ‘L’Art Copte’. L’Art dans le Monde. du Bourguet, Pierre. Paris: Editions Albin Michel, 1968

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Fig. 8 ‘Hestia, full of blessing’ or Hestia Polyolbos, the Greek goddess of blessing, depicted wearing long, dangling earrings and a crown of pomegranates on the Egyptian Coptic period tapestry (c. sixth c. ad) from the Dumbarton Oaks collection 24:1, first cited by Clermont-Ganneau in the Revue Archéologique. 1876. Wikipedia

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Fig. 9 Sculptural relief of men carrying a crocodile (perhaps in illustration of this story?) from the Coptic period. ClermontGanneau. Revue Archéologique, 1876. p. 124

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Fig. 10 Representations of ancient Egyptian goddesses with cobra heads and diadems: from the left, the goddesses Rannu, Tentris and Bak, with one indicative text: ‘Rannu, mistress of the supplies of all gods’. From Wilkinson. Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, Vol III, Plate XLV

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Fig. 11 Photograph of cAmm Rizq Būlos; from For Those Who Sail to Heaven (produced and directed by the author, 1990). Distribution by Icarus Films, NYC, USA

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Fig. 12 Cobra headdress or ‘uraeus’ worn by the goddess Isis; from Wilkinson. Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, 113, No. 528

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Fig. 13 Theodore, the Warrior Saint (tawdros al-muHārib), spearing Diocletian; in the church of St. Anthony, the Eastern desert, as photographed by Max Siedel, in du Bourguet, Pierre. ‘L’Art Copte’. L’Art dans le Monde

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Key to Arabic Transliteration

Vowels ā ē ī ō ū

long ‘a’ as in English ‘bat’ long ‘e’ as in English ‘bake’ long ‘i’ as in English ‘week’ long ‘o’ as in English ‘O’ long ‘u’ as in English ‘moon’

(Other vowels a/e/i/o/u/ represent half the value of the equivalent long vowels) Consonants š c g_ h H h

(‘shīn’) pronounced ‘sh’ pharangeal consonant (letter pronounced ‘caīn’) (g_ ēn) a rolled ‘r’ like the French ‘r’ (ha) ‘kh’ as in German ‘ich’ (Ha) strongly aspirated ‘h’ (ha) less aspirated ‘h’

Emphatic consonants D S T Z

(Dal) Emphatic ‘d’ (SaD) Emphatic ‘s’ (Ta) Emphatic ‘t’ (Za) Emphatic ‘z’

I am very grateful to Jamāl Zakī al-Dīn al-Hajājī for the transcriptions into Arabic of the five oral performances. The transliterations are intended to reflect Upper Egyptian pronunciation of the tales as performed.

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introduction

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Introduction

Ancient Egyptian poetry and tales may be known to Egyptologists and a few aficionados, but the rich oral narrative tradition of Upper Egypt is little known in the West. Over the last two centuries, various compendia of Egyptian folktales have been published in English1 and French2 translations. However, the stories they contain have often been rewritten or summarised, and as a result, the imaginative flavour, drama and dynamic rhythm of the original performances have been lost. This book tries to create the vivacity and wit of Egyptian oral narrative in English translation via five tales recorded live in the 1980s in Luxor: two from the orally performed Egyptian epic known as the sīrat banī hilāl, sung and chanted by the famous rāwī (epic poet) and maddāH (praise singer) c Awad’ullah cAbd al-Jalīl from Edfu, and two from the Coptic folk religious repertoire by cAmm Rizq Būlos, who lived in the ancient Coptic settlement of Nagada near Luxor. To my knowledge, no versions of ‘cAzīza and Yūnis’ or stories performed by cAmm Rizq Būlos have been published to date in English.3 The two episodes from the famous sīrat banī hilāl, ‘The Tale of cAzīza and Yūnis’ and ‘Khadra al-Sharīfa and the Miraculous Conception of Abu Zayd al-Hilālī’ are not heroic tales or battle episodes. Rather, they are tales of two famous women from Egyptian folk history: the flamboyant cAzīza, daughter of the Sultan of  Tunis, and her encounter with the young and handsome Yūnis (nephew of the hero); and Khadra al-Sharīfa, mother of the hero, Abu Zayd al-Hilālī, and the tale of his miraculous conception.4 The two Coptic tales included in the text are familiar from Judaeo-Christian tradition but refreshingly and subtly different. cAmm Rizq, the self-styled hagiographer, recounts two tales – the story of St. George and the Dragon (qiSSit marī jirjis) and Adam and Eve (qissit ‘ādam wa Hawa) – from his repertoire of ‘histories of the saints (al-qaddisīn), the prophets (al-‘anbiyā’) and the apostles (irrusūl )’ like the mediaeval historiographer, al-Thaclabī.5 Highly skilled at punning and moulding his text to a specific audience, the epic poet cAwad’ullah composes his tale in rhymed quatrains, singing

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and chanting to the accompaniment of a broad frame drum called a ‘Tār’. Through his verbal art and particular use of the trope known as jinās, or paronomasia, he is able to create an imaginative atmosphere of irony and ambivalence, and in this way his compositions move beyond pure epic recitation to a higher philosophical and creative plane. cAmm Rizq, unlike c Awad’ullah, narrates mainly in prose, but integrates rhyming stanzas known as sajc into his composition to add pace and emotional verve to his recitation. Part I presents two distinctly different episodes from the Egyptian epic sīrat banī hilāl. The romance of cAzīza and Yūnis, often regarded by purists as outside the purview of the epic proper, is an alluring and extravagantly sensuous fantasy tale in which cAzīza, beautiful daughter of the Sultan of Tunis, attempts to seduce and capture the handsome Yūnis, paragon of innocence and virtue, and nephew of the hero, Abu Zayd al-Hilālī. As the scene opens, Abu Zayd, the hero, and his three nephews are disguised as poor dervishes, or maddāHīn, who wander the streets singing praise poems to the Prophet (and at this moment, the voice of the poet, cAwad’ullah, renowned as a praise singer, melds with that of the hero and his nephews, and their voices become as one). The stage for the tale is then set for the dramatic encounter by the disclosure of a fabulous necklace whose jewels resemble the fruits of the female body. At this point, the story diverges from the tone and frame of epic and, through the device of the necklace, moves into the realm of fantasy in which the dramatic confrontation of Yūnis by the voluptuous and powerful heroine, cAzīza, takes place. The motif of the female seductress is far from alien to the Near Eastern tradition and in many facets this erotic tale mirrors the seduction tale of Yusuf and Zuleikha, which was immortalised in the Old Testament and the Qur’an, and transformed in the Middle Ages into a popular Persian romance of the same name. In the famous fifteenth-century tract by al-Ghazālī, women were declared to be inclined ‘to provocation, incitement (fitna) and unrestrained sexual desire’,6 and as if to incarnate this vision, the ‘signature’ motif of the tale of cAzīza and Yūnis is the sensual description of the female body – in particular, its allusions to budding and ripening lemons, pomegranates and figs. In this tale, which unfolds in four parts, Yūnis must ascend to cAzīza’s palace, penetrating a series of gates and then climbing the ‘stairs’ to where she waits. As the tale reaches its climax, Yūnis must fend off a disrobed cAzīza, who describes her body in a string of erotic similes that bear a significant resemblance to famous epithets from the Songs of Solomon, cult songs to a Canaanite goddess and ancient Egyptian love poetry. And though this may seem out of context in the conservative atmosphere of Upper Egypt, these allusions still feature strongly in Upper Egyptian wedding ditties sung to the bride at the often raucous all-women celebrations on the lēlit al-Hinna (the ‘Night of Henna’), just prior to the wedding.

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introduction

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In his analysis of Hellenistic romance, Mikhail Bakhtin postulated a theory which pivoted around the concept of ‘the adventure chronotope’, a narrative creation in which perceptions of time and space elide. This theory is explored in the paper, but as cAwad’ullah’s exploration of issues of gender stereotypes, morality and critique of false piety imbues it with contemporary interest and depth beyond the political consequences of the event (the incarceration of a male hero), it can be argued that the poet seeks to frame the tale as ‘antiromance’. Herein lies its attraction and significance. Accompanying this particular essay is a second section, entitled ‘Towards an Ethnopoetics of Performance’, which features an analysis and elaboration of cAwad’ullah’s composition and performance style. Chapter 2 presents the tale of Khadra al-Sharīfa and the miraculous conception of her son, the hero Abu Zayd, from the Egyptian epic, a rarely performed tale from the sīrat banī hilāl but one that establishes the hero as an exceptional character born from the union of human and supernatural forces. The story begins as the Arab tribe known as the Banī Hilāl is encamped in the Wadi Hama. The prince Rizq, son of Nayil, wishes to marry, and as a result it is proposed that he marry the daughter of Girda, the Sharīf of Mecca, a descendant of the Prophet. In its assiduous detail, almost an ethnographic portrait of Najd desert culture in twelfth-century Saudi Arabia, cAwad’ullah chronicles the story of Khadra al-Sharīfa, her father’s extravagant requests for dowry and the nuptial rites of the Bedouin tribe. He also tells the tale of a woman whose happiness is destroyed by her inability to bear a son. After many tears and lamentations, Khadra, accompanied by maidens of the Banī Hilāl, make a pilgrimage to the confluence of four rivers, where Khadra spies a black raven and makes an impassioned plea to the Lord to ‘give her a son like that black bird’. After a litany of prayers to the Lord in what seems to be a remarkable invocation of ancient Judaeo-Christian praise poetry, this wish culminates in the mystical conception of the hero, Abu Zayd. Part II, ‘Coptic Tales’, features the legend of St. George and the Dragon (or the tale of Mārī Jirjis) and the story of Adam and Eve. The first, more like a folk tale than a saint’s legend, seems to embody the essence of Egyptian oral narrative – a fusion of fantasy and historical elements with an ancient Egyptian leitmotif at its core. This well-known dragon-slaying tale is ostensibly set in Beirut but the river blocked by the dragon is explicitly like the river of ‘Egypt’ (maSr), and the dragon slain with the harpoon of the famous saint is not unlike his Egyptian predecessor, Horus, who in the Roman period was depicted in Roman military armour spearing a crocodile-like dragon. Once the dragon is slain, the ‘princess’ who was to be devoured is rescued by the warrior-saint, but when she suggests they marry, the saint announces that ‘his bride (the Virgin Mary) is innocent and pure’, and he must remain

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celibate. She is named as the ‘daughter of Khadra’ (the Green Lady), a name not only familiar from the tale of Khadra al-Sharīfa, but one that reverberates throughout Egyptian mythological history. In view of the long mythological history of dragon-slaying in Egypt, a period of several millennia, it is not surprising that cAmm Rizq’s version of the St. George dragon-slaying tale bears distinct traces of ancient Egyptian images and themes, with only minor influences from later variants. The pluckiness of the princess-heroine seems startling (she asks him to marry her), but this reversal of norms occurs in several Upper Egyptian legends, and her serpentine crown, featured in the tale’s intriguing and unusual coda (in effect, a dragon headdress), suggests a metaphorical link to the ancient Egyptian uraeus or serpent diadem, symbol of royal power in ancient Egypt, and by extension to the ‘Green Goddess’ Buto in her earliest mythic incarnation. In the second prose story, the creation of Adam and Eve, a familiar tale in an unfamiliar guise, cAmm Rizq highlights the naiveté and flesh and blood fallibility of Adam and Eve (who, in Arabic, is called Hawa). Hoodwinked by a jealous archangel, who falls dramatically from grace and is transformed into an ‘arch-devil’ who assumes the guise of a serpent, Eve is persuaded to eat the fruit of the sacred tree after being lured to do so by the vengeful Devil. She relents because she seeks knowledge, a sin apparently more the consequence of Eve’s desire to rise above a state of ignorance than evidence of a significant moral lapse. Though told as a ‘Coptic’ tale, Rizq’s original version differs profoundly from earlier accounts of the creation of Adam found in the early Nagc Hammādi gospels of the Gnostics (c. second century ad) or the Coptic martyrdom tales (c. fourth century ad) in its perspective on patrimony and nemesis. This is a classic tale, but in its subtle coda Rizq’s tale reveals an intrinsically sanguine view of the future for mankind in the Egyptian agricultural universe. In Part III, Egyptian Conversion Tales, two contrasting tales are presented: ‘The Story of Maimūna, the slave girl’, performed by cAwad’ullah, and the evangelistic tale of ‘Theodore, the Warrior Saint’ and his encounter with Diocletian, told to me by cAmm Rizq and presented here only in summary. In the first, Maimūna becomes ‘enamoured with the Prophet’ and is crucified by her master for her beliefs. She is saved by a vision of the Prophet Muhammad, a miracle that persuades her evil owner to convert to Islam. In this story, as in the previous one, the moment of conversion is shaped as the triumphant epilogue. The Conclusion follows. The texts of the stories in transliteration, with thematic analyses of the stories according to the Hymesean model of verse analysis, are contained in the Appendix.

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the tale of cazĪza and yŪnis

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1

The Tale of cAzĪza and YŪnis

Introduction The story of cAzīza and Yūnis, as performed by cAwad’ullah cAbd al-Jalīl, was composed in four parts and recorded in two different venues in successive years: the first in 1982 and the second in 1983 in Luxor. cAzīza was the first episode I ever heard performed by the poet cAwad’ullah, and from his enthusiasm then and his subsequent delight in the tale, I would construe that it was his choice of episode for a foreign female audience. About a year later, at my instigation, the poet came from his village near Edfu, 60 kilometres to the south, and sang it again for me at two sessions in the company of a small, somewhat atypical audience of Egyptian friends from the West bank: Jamāl Zakī al-Dīn al-Hajājī, my Luxor colleague, and two women friends. There is no copy of the qissit cAzīza in the manuscript versions of the sīrat banī hilāl, possibly because it is not regarded as integral to the story,1 or because the erotic language of the tale could not have been transcribed properly. This may well reflect the prudery of the age. An erotic manuscript known for its explicit seduction scenes and extravagant chains of waSf or serial descriptions of the body, both male and female, was allegedly written down for the Bey of Tunis. Its existence would suggest that erotic episodes were indeed performed, but that such texts were only inscribed for select and influential patrons as a way of avoiding any threat of scandal and possible social and political repercussions. This narrative describes the story of cAzīza, daughter of the Sultan of Tunis, and her attempt to seduce and capture a handsome and innocent paragon of virtue, Yūnis, nephew of the hero Abu Zayd al-Hilālī, not only for pleasure but also for political gain. All classic epic performances begin with a ballad (mawwāl) and praise poem (madīH), and this one is no exception. In Part A, cAzīza describes her unrequited passion for Yūnis in the opening ballad and this is followed by the ritual madīH, or ‘Praise to the Prophet’. As the scene opens, the poet introduces the protagonists: the hero Abu Zayd and his nephews, disguised as wandering dervishes in Tunis. They form an

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alliance with a local leader, al-cAllam, and the scene moves to a garden where the four recline under the shade of lotus blossom (nabq, or ziziphus) and dūm palm. (The lotus blossom tree is the famous tree from which Eve took her famous ‘bite’ in the Qur’anic version, and, according to Homer’s account of the story of Ulysses, a bite from the fruit of this sacred tree would result in the banishment of all memories of wives and family as if an intoxicant or hallucinogen.) As they have eaten nothing for three days, Yūnis produces a dazzling necklace from his pocket, which he says he will sell for food. However, Abu Zayd warns him that a man of his ilk, so handsome and virtuous, should beware of the female sex. He goes off, ‘like a stalk of sugar-cane’ (an image known from women’s wedding songs to be associated with a young man’s sexual initiation), but women of ill-repute gather in his path, trying to tear off his clothes and seduce him. One appears to succeed, but this is left deliberately ambiguous in the text. Yūnis then proceeds to the dallāl, or wheeler-dealer, who will act as a go-between and purveyor of the necklace. The dallāl insults him but is forced to apologise when he sees the beauty of the necklace. Part B begins with an erotic panegyric in the form of a mawwāl about a dervish who despite his rags is handsome and alluring like Yūnis. The dallāl arrives outside the palace of the Sultan and meets the beautiful Sucda. When she is shown the necklace, she is overwhelmed. The dallāl and Yūnis then bicker over the necklace but finally it is to be presented to cAzīza, daughter of the Sultan. Mayy, Yūnis’ old nurse who now lives in the castle and has been separated from the tribe for years, sees the necklace and recognises Yūnis as its owner. She weeps as she realises that he will come to cAzīza. In Part C, the poet, as if Yūnis, expresses his fear of seduction and death, lamenting his destiny from the Eye, which he says, ‘like the Devil, haunts human beings like their spiritual doubles or soul-mates’.2 cAzīza then comes upon Mayy and elicits from her a description of the possessor of the necklace. She says Yūnis is ‘like the full moon [of the Islamic month] of al-Ša cbān’3 and his mouth like ‘the seal of Solomon’. Realising that Yūnis is the owner of the necklace, cAzīza lays plans to kidnap him. But Yūnis suspects the connivings of the dallāl will come to nought, and goes in search of the necklace. He is solicited by women in the bazaar and eventually succumbs to one of them. Arriving then at the ‘castle of pillars’ where cAzīza lives, he ascends the first staircase to the first door. Sensing betrayal, he continues to penetrate door upon door, coming closer and closer to cAzīza. He moves up the staircase, the saliva drying in his throat. cAzīza stands naked at the top of the stairs and suggests that he should remove his rags and don brocade. At the eighth4 door, Yūnis meets cAzīza, who assigns a soldier to stand guard at the door, thus incarcerating him in her castle.

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The poet begins Part D with a lyrical reflection on the virtue of restraint in the face of provocation, and asserts that ‘men are inured to bitterness’. c Azīza then entices Yūnis as he ascends the ‘staircase’ of her body, ‘made of oil, cut from glass’, announces her love for him and coyly suggests, ‘If you were to cast eyes on ripe grapes which sting when picked…’. Yūnis weeps and asks for water to perform his ablutions for prayer. She asks, ‘Has your sanity escaped you? Has a mosque been erected in this place?’ She suggests that they enter ‘the bath’ but he declines, saying that he has a lock on his trousers for which the key is in the Najd desert! She says, ‘That trying lock shall be cracked’ and summons a houseboat for them ‘to sail the briny sea’ and ‘see on which shore they alight’. She urges him to make love to her, and then, in the midst of cAzīza’s lavish descriptions of her own body, the poet abruptly leaves the scene and goes back to the garden where Abu Zayd and his nephews still sit under the lotus blossom. They perform geomancy in the sand and Marceī spies a vision of Yūnis in the heart of the sailing vessel, set adrift. Realising that he is a captive, Abu Zayd resolves to declare war on the Zinati to release Yūnis from the clutches of their avowed enemy. On this heroic and bellicose note, the poet concludes.

Fig. 1  Portrait of cAwad’ullah cAbd al-Jalīl in Luxor, 1982

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The Tale of cAzīza and Yūnis (qiSSit cazīza wi yūnis) by cAwad’ullah cAbd al-Jalīl { = paronomasia or double meaning [ = Comments by the audience] [A.A. = Response by cAwad’ullah]

Key





Part A

Mawwāl Ia) O Night O Night O Nighti You bear witness, O Night If I were to drowse off in you Whiling away the night, far from dear friends, well, you would hate me [‘Oh my!’] b) O Night O Night O Night O Night {O pitiful one {O Eyeii O Night You bear witness If were to drowse off in you Whiling away the night, far from dear friends, well, you would despise me c) You took away the ones I loved, O Eye But my heart was unyielding. You took away the ones I loved, pity me, O Eye But my heart was unyielding i ii

Traditional formulaic opening to mawwāl / mawwāwīl (ballads) which suggests that the recitation is implicitly addressed to the liminal forces of the night. The second traditional formula evoked in mawwāl – ‘yā caīn! ’ – is usually not regarded as being addressed explicitly to ‘the Eye’, but in this case, as one of the overriding themes of this tale is ‘the Eye’ as arbiter of fate, it would seem appropriate to translate it as such here.

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It deprived me of sleep all my life during you [‘Excellent! You have created light’]

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Azīza ‘sighed’… ‘Ahh’ Azīza ‘sighed’… ‘Ahh’ ‘It’s just that love swept me away’ cAzīza’ sighed… ‘Ahh’ It’s just that love swept me away My breasts blossomed … ripened … bore figs and {pomegranates {And it swept me away

IIa)

c

b)

What have I done?! What have I done? {Tears flowed {Mayy left … and he cast me aside

c

c) They weighed heavy on me, O Yūnis Did they come from me, the words {which reached you? {of your tryst? They weighed heavy on me on me on me They weighed heavy on me weighed heavy on me, O Eye, O Night d)

Why did they weigh heavy on me? Was it from me that word of {your arrival came? {your lineage

e)

You are Yūnis whose father was Sirhān You are Yūnis whose father was Sirhān But I know … your family origins I told him of my desire … he spurned me and cast me aside

‘MadīH’: Praise poetry IIIa)

Pray to the Beloved! Before we pray to the Beloved To whom prayers are like grapes to my heart Multiply in my heart my prayers to One God To our beloved Prophet and the great Ahmad

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b)

I long for and pray to our Prophet Praying to the Prophet of the Faithful one is beautiful If it were not for the Beloved, we could not have remained Nor would the litter of the Prophet have been pulled along

Introduction to ‘Epic’ recitation and story IVa)

It was the fate you wreaked, O Eye! The poor thing! O Eye! It was the fate you ordained, O Eye! And this is what it was –

b)

Would a long-suffering man weep over his good fortune? Listen to the chronicle of the Arabs And the reasons for Yūnis’s migration West

c)

They set off, the Arabs, monarchs of the Hilāl Yahya, Marceī and the elegant Yūnis They were three – as radiant as lights Arabs so handsome, [from envy] their pupils could be snatched from their eyesiii

Va) When the Arabs came passing by Al-cAllām met them and he said, ‘Who are you?’ They said to him, ‘We are poets and praise-singers Who accept gifts the miserly begrudge us’ b) He said, ‘You men! Do not deceive me with weasel words Your words have ripped my innards in two There was one who was the colour of his slave, Abu Zayd And you three must be the sons of his sister c)

That youth whose reputation is unsullied Around whom no scandal lurks, You must be Yūnis, Yahya and Marceī And you must be their uncle, ‘Salāma’, the protector’

iii

That is, from the envy that would be cast on them for their handsome appearance, their pupils might be robbed from their eyes. This combines the notion of envy with another proverb which suggests that the three are very vulnerable to attack.

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the tale of cazĪza and yŪnis

VIa)

He greeted them: ‘Salāmāt’,iv O family of barakāt v You whose life and alliances lie in your hands Go into war in this blessed state of weakness And in the bazaar call out your appeals for divine grace’

b)

‘I am aware of the event and the day it took place It was on a blessed Thursday And this man had brought Durgham as his guest Your tribal chiefs had come in large numbers’

c)

‘You sat with the tribal chiefs and in the zawīyas of the devoteesvi With you were Yahya, Marceī and Yūnis Coming from the wadi of the Eastern desert Going towards the coast of Tunis’

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VIIa) Abu Zayd said to him, ‘O faithful seer  cAllam A man who calls to mind our duties Without you our sufferings would multiply! We are poets, actually … strangers here’ b) ‘Ahh… Ahh… Ahh… Yes, I know you and know your wily schemes You are the one who can twist your words around From the East you come with your wiles, Salāma of the Ethiopians,vii I know you c) ‘Al-cAllām… Al-cAllām when he fancied himself a philosopher And regaled Abu Zayd with a burnooseviii He said to him, ‘Topple the West and press hard Seek the counsel of the diwānix and go to them iv

Pursuing the associations of Salāma, the poet extends the assonance to a traditional greeting: salāmāt. v Blessings. vi A zawīya is defined as the ‘precincts of a sheikh’. It is a small village retreat or lodge often used for zikr by local Sufi religious orders, and in Upper Egypt is the site for the resolution of judicial matters by elders of the community. vii Abu Zayd, the hero, is often called an Ethiopian (Habaši) because of his dark skin colour. viii An allusion to the bestowing of a mantle-like cope (burnus) on the shoulders of a hero as a tribute to his honour, a rhyme on the metathesis, fanfūs from falsūf (philosopher) and the same act which ennobles Khadra in the tale of Mārī Jirjis. ix The council of elders.

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d)

‘Seek the counsel of the diwān, you tyrant with dimpled cheeks! You with the spotless turban But be wary of that oppressor The conniving Zinati Khalifa!’

VIIIa) Ahh… Ahh… they formed a pact, Abu Zayd and the al-cAllam And attended the diwān of the great men I swear by the Merciful God There, my friends, in the midst of the men b)

When the courageous ones departed The three of them with their uncle at their side But they sat down in the shade of the garden Under the lotus blossom and dūm palms they took shade

c)

O my! The poor things sat down in the shade of the gardens Handsome Arabs – May God guide them! In their disguise, like four mendicants Anyone who could see them would be amazed!

IXa) When they sat down in the shade of the trees Yahya and Marceī and the handsome Yūnis Marceī said to him… Marceī said to him, ‘It’s a strange thing, uncle, Three days have passed and we have not tasted food’ b)

He said to him, ‘Son of my sister, we have not tasted food But in these foreign lands do not disgrace me! Here is my white turban, and here is my shirt Whoever shall bring lunch should sell them’

c) He gave up his shirt and his clean turban ‘Where are our countrymen? Where are our countrymen? Where are our countrymen? I crave their companionship

I have in my possession a necklace from Shīha’s marriage More magnificent than the treasury of the West in its splendour’

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Xa)

He said, ‘Let me see it, O son of Sirhān O Yūnis, my dear bosom friend’ He grabbed the necklace and a single tear fell For the judgement of time and cruel fate

b)

Abu Zayd said to him, ‘Yūnis’ Abu Zayd says to him, ‘Yūnis, You whose turban slopes from the crown… When you enter the pavilions of Tunis Be wary of women with kohled eyes’

c)

Abu Zayd said to him, ‘Yūnis, You whose virtue is without blemish When you stroll through the shops of Tunis I warn you, by my honoured mother, Sharīfax

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d) ‘I do warn you, you born of Sirhān Be wary of the female sex In the time of Lord Solomon They outwitted the evil jannxi and imprisoned them [‘Amazing … you are great!’] e)

‘The young maidens – be on your guard from them The young maidens – be on your guard from them They make lovers weep by forcing shut their eyes Those poor men who pray with them are to be pitied Poor thing! Your mind will go blank!’

f ) ‘Ahh… I warn you, handsome Yūnis I warn you handsome Yūnis Be wary of the female sex They will come to you wringing handkerchiefs Your poor mind will go blank!’ XIa) ‘Ahh…’ Yūnis ‘sighed’… Yūnis ‘sighed’… ‘Advise me, O uncle Make me long-suffering for what will befall me’ x xi

His mother, Khadra al-Sharīfa. jann is the brand of evil and powerful jinn that are viewed as particularly sinister within the elaborated cosmology of subterranean spirits.

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b) Despite what may be written on the {eyelids {shrouds The ‘Eye’ will not die before reaping its spoils ‘Whatever is inscribed on the forehead will be seen’ c)

‘O one who is dear to me, O you whose mind is free from cares Leave the sale to the dallāl, that wheeler-dealerxii And if that’s too much for you, let your father arrange the deal’

XIIa)

But the young man … how he was handsome! The darling Yūnis – how he was handsome With his black eyes and glowing cheeks The darling of the Hilālī tribe – the handsome Yūnis loped off Striding off to the sūq of Tunis and entering in…

b)

Yūnis strode off like a stalk of sugar-canexiii and left them behind The handsome youth strode off like a stalk of sugar-cane and passed them by His headscarf wrapped in four elegant folds And in the bazaar of the Zinati, they abandoned the paths And the buying and selling – they were transfixed!



c) When a Bedouin girl passed him by, [she whispered] ‘How handsome My, oh my! Eyes like honey’ The maiden was veiled The men wrapped their white turbans tight when they laid eyes on him XIIIa)

All the Christians came up to Yūnis Even the merchants of the town approached Frowns etched across the haughty faces Like hot bread in the bazaar, they groped at himxiv

[‘Wow!’]

xii A dallāl is a trader or purveyor of goods but in the sense of an intermediary who sells anything for profit by hawking, and thus a ‘wheeler-dealer’. xiii This epithet (gasaba – a stick of sugar-cane) is typically used to describe the vigour and grace of youth in wedding songs, often with explicitly sexual connotations. xiv The pervasive shortages of bread in the markets is particularly evocative in the context of Egypt. As soon as hot bread appears at the oven, it is quickly snatched up.

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b) The virtuous one [Yūnis] says, ‘What has happened to me? Well, this naughty creature has blocked my way! Hey, where did this guy come from? Like funerary cakes at the tombs, from where can I get one?’xv [‘Fantastic, you poet!’] c)

Yūnis entered into the narrow lane There were those who touched him and those who shied away Young girls of ill repute… Who would take pleasure in a stranger in the house

d)

Why shouldn’t they take pleasure in a stranger in the house? How complicated a rendezvous of lovers is The dashing Yūnis is strutting along And their skin turned green when they caught sight of him

XIVa) There is one who says to him ‘Greetings, stranger! Hey you with the tender, melting eyes! No one in this house is very virtuous Someone will take you in and lie you down in cushions’ b)

Another says to him, ‘Come with us to our house’ He couldn’t tell whether it was his fault or theirs ‘A man like you, gorgeous one, I have never seen… A man so handsome, such a paragon of beauty…’

c) One woman says to him, ‘Come with us to our house [‘Oh my! Oh my! Step right in!’] Gorgeous man, sweetest of the sweet! This man is like the quarry at the hunt Like a stroke of luck in a game of chance, why you’re the winning lot’ XVa)

He said, ‘To your house, I will not go Lest there be something to regret! I have five pounds with which to buy oil’ And he swore he would not sleep except in an inn

xv

Funerary cakes are doled out customarily at cemeteries to poor passers-by. The poet suggests that they are groping at him as if snatching kaHk at a cemetery.

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b)

‘In an inn, there will be bedbugs on your sheets And your flesh will be bitten on all sides But the bedbugs in here I have exterminated!

c) ‘By the pathway to salvation, I swear If my mouth were sealed up to my molars To this stranger no harm shall come’ [‘O master of poetry, tell us more… go on…’] [A.A. ‘Ahh… really?’] XVIa) ‘Ahh… Ahh… Ahh…’ Truly the brave hero of his generation {went on in {that afternoon Eyes so black and cheeks of honey The maidens were veiled For two hours {they were not seen {they sealed themselves in [‘Oh my! Beautiful!] b)

Oh my! – the obligations of the late afternoon The handsome youth entered into the ‘obligations’ of the afternoon Eyes so black and eyebrows curved Indeed, she was a houri, like a nymph from heaven She said she knew how to attract that kind of a lad

c)

He left the inn He left the inn and found a shop He slung a drape of broadcloth over his kaftan (The owner of the inn was a seller of linen) When the elegant Yūnis stopped At the herbalist’s emporium they groped at him

XVIIa) Yūnis called out to the dallāl A polite voice answered him, ‘Yes? What do you want, elegant young man? What is it that in the bazaars of Tunis you would wish to sell?’ b)

‘Something along your line, O dallāl… But before you put to me a single question, I have a necklace here of priceless value That neither your father nor grandfather could have laid hands on before’

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c)

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He said, ‘Terribly sorry, my dashing young man, You have a handsome face … yet what you ask disfigures you Take for that necklace of yours two fat cents! Calamity strikes those servants who don’t take what they are given’

XVIIIa) That was the day the dallāl  became entangled in the scheme With the man whose mother was Shīha and uncle, Abu Zayd [Yūnis] drew the necklace from his pocket And the whole bazaar glowed with its radiance b)

The Arabs rose to their feet dumbfounded Praised be the Prophet, you listeners! ‘You wheeler-dealer! You miserable pig! Your life is a misery and I will now relieve you of it!’

c) Now it is preferable that we say, ‘To Him let us pray’ [‘May God grant you light, Sheikh cAwad’ullah!’] [A.A. ‘Well, it was just this fantastic tape recorder’]

Part II Ia) O Night, O Night, O Night O Night, O Eye, O Night O Night A thin man wears a robe over his body and may look elegantxvi b) O Night, O Eye, O Night O Night, O Night Over his body which is naked

A thin man wears a robe over his body and may look elegant That virgin stalk of sugar-cane left [‘Oh my!’] When did he leave to serve his uncle?xvii And green tattoos on the cheeks are marks of beauty, beauty [‘Hey, beautiful!’] marks!xviii

xvi

Prelude to a complex set of puns embedded in two homonyms on the theme of deceptive appearances and the oppositions of rags and physical beauty. The poet implies a subtle reference to one’s ‘derriere’. A pun on what tattoos are and how they are perceived to be ‘beauty’ marks.

xvii xviii

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c)

A thin man wears a robe over his body {which is naked {and may look elegant The virgin stalk set off When did he set off to {reap the ‘fruit’ of his own good looks? {and serve his uncle?



Green tattoos on the cheeks are marks of beauty They make you look beautiful deep into your ‘cheeks’ [‘O master of poetry!’] IIa)

Indeed, how I rejoiced, O Eye, Indeed, indeed, O Father of Solomon I rejoiced – For that afternoon, I said ‘I shall achieve my goal’

b)

‘May it be acceptable to your laws O you who wield the balance of love O judge, quench the passion of the young man And {make my uncle familiar with it’ {fill my emptiness’

IIIa)

Before we pray to the Great One Muhammad, most beloved of those we cherish Like sailing ships on a shimmering wavexix The noble dromedaries travelled towards Muhammad

b)

And sing praises to the Hashemitexx Muhammad whose cheeks are radiant, Who led the priests of prophecy to pray And built from the churches, mosques

c)

And sing praise to the Prophet of Greatness, For whom baby camels stretched out their trail Like sailing ships on a shimmering wave May miracles accrue to Him, the Taha ‘Who comes without warning’ xxi

xix xx xxi

A familiar epithet for the esteemed camel in Arabic poetry. The Prophet Muhammad. The ‘pure one’, an epithet for God.

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d)

If the Prophet had not struggled in his trek Nor had the camels not carried the Prophet From Saudi Arabia to the terrain of the Christians In pilgrimage to the Taha, our Prophet

e)

Muhammad of perfect Light Sing praise with your heart aflame to Him For whom the houris of heaven reclined Praise to the Taha of the blessed

IVa)

And it hurt you – the machinations and the talk I shall sing out to my comrades, the Bedouin I shall intone verses and words To those men who were Bedouin

b)

To those men who were heroes Arabs, men of God – May the Lord God direct them! The moment they encircled the Great One, They bent forward and abandoned their return

c)

How marvellous the praise to the Prophet can be How marvellous it is to sing praise to the Prophet Muhammad, whose eyes were ‘kohled ’ without kohl xxii I shall compose poems and evoke sympathies For the handsome one raised by the Hilālī tribe

d)

And recite from memory the abduction of Sirhān To the turrets of the ‘high castle’ See Yūnis, son of Sirhān – The handsome one, he with her, she with him, the young maiden

e)

The Arabs of Tunis The Arabs of Tunis [were] clustered all around Praise to the Prophet, O listeners, See whom the necklace shall honour To the daughter of the Zinati it shall be taken!

xxii

This is an allusion to the belief in the miraculous ‘kohling’ of the Prophet’s eyes ‘without kohl’ as described by the poet. The image conjures up visions of ancient Egyptian masks and the portrayal of kings whose eyes are lined with kohl.

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Va) Jacfar, the dallāl, set out… He was a ‘wheeler-dealer’ who keeps a sharp eye on his commissions… For the castle mounted on pillars… And came upon the slaves of the gardens b) Slaves belonging to the Khalifa – there were scores Why counting them – around a hundred and eighty! ‘Hey dallāl ! Who brought you here? Your life is a misery and now I shall relieve you of it!’ c) The slave’s name was Mamirjān And his earrings tinkled from his ears ‘Hey Sucda, speak to the dallāl Your father’s slaves have come across him outside’ [‘What have we here?’] VIa) Sucda leant down from the window O Eye! O Night! O Night! O Night! O My Night! O Night! le li le li le li le’xxiii b) Sucda leant down from the window Disdaining anyone who didn’t marvel at her The dallāl caught sight of her and was struck dumb By God’s ordinance, he forgot what he prayed for c) Sucda descended the stairs Her eyes were black and her cheeks were radiant On her right leg, her ankle bracelets clinked as she walked To be exact – on her thigh, her halahil xxiv clinked And any upstanding man would be tormented in his sleep VIIa) Sucda said ‘O dallāl…’ Sucda said, ‘O dallāl, your coming here must have a motive What have you in your possession? What have you in your possession? xxiii xxiv

A refrain which has no translation. Lit. ‘ankle bracelets’ but the word is inserted in the text to suggest the onomatopoeia of the line.

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What have you in your possession. . . That in the turrets of this castle you would wish to sell?’ b)

He addressed her, ‘O loveliest of women Beautiful creature with long tresses In my possession is a priceless necklace And this fine necklace shall be yours’

c) Sucda wept tears from her eyes ‘Oh, the ways of the world and the vagaries of time! My father has so little money The price of this necklace… How could I acquire it?’ VIIIa) ‘Mere beggars came and brought it – A man whose turban sloped gently from the crown A man like the Khalifa, a daunting young man One who would cause the golden gates to be opened’ b)

‘And there was another, in fact, who clapped his palm And sang divine praises throughout the bazaar In his hand were a flute and a lance And with his artistry to the Taha sang loud his praisesxxv

c)

‘The bazaar acclaimed him and he was fortunate, This one with the spotless turban Those in the bazaar gathered round him, the brave stallion, That valiant man whose name was Khalifa’

d)

‘That valiant man who was so daunting The one to whom my words are directed Like coals that twinkled in the fire His strategy was to raze whole houses’

e)

‘But only in a state of war By the living path to salvation I swear

xxv The maddāH’s intent, according to the poet, was to solicit money from the singing of panegyric to the Prophet Muhammad. He, cAwad’ullah, himself a maddāH and an epic poet, constantly refers to himself as tājir al-fann, ‘merchant or purveyor of art’. He is a praise singer like the disguised nephews of the hero, Abu Zayd, and involved in the same type of negotiation with an audience for remuneration.

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Only when they have been landed in a dire state of grief Would they open wide the gates of remorse’

IXa) And that was how Sucda became party to the scheme The dallāl thrust his hand in his pocket And you might have thought that the radiant moon had burst suddenly through the gloom Though no lantern in the darkness had been lit [‘O Sheikh cAwad’ullah!’] b) My imagination ran away with you, o Tār xxvi You whose taut skin I admire for its words (Hassan,xxvii stretch tight this Tār for me Even this Tār of mine understands what I am saying) c)

‘Ahh,’ Sucda sighs, ‘This precious object must not be scorned The fame of this necklace, in fact, has not yet been revealed As has been written,xxviii “a garden of grapes and lemons Ripe pomegranates which jostle against each other”

d)

‘As has been written: a garden of a hundred feddānsxxix With grapes that dangle from the trellises, Truly, if you were to take a treasure chest of money’ {Each pound superior to the other {Each garden more lavish than the next

e)

He said to her, ‘O daughter of the father of Mihran, By the life of the One Whose Light is seen…’ The man with the treasure gestured, ‘If you wish to bargain for it, suggest a price!’

Xa) The dallāl put his trust in God and left Indeed how the passing of years can create marvels xxvi The poet’s shallow frame drum, his source of rhythm and percussion. xxvii Hassan is one of the men in the audience. xxviii This disembodied marker, lit. ‘he wrote’, seems intended to add credence to his description. He invokes the more culturally esteemed mode, the written word, to add authority to her evaluations. As in other kinds of authoritative discourse (for example, proverbs that occur in the text) this dictum preceded the phrase ‘he wrote’ by a reference to ancestors having coined the words in a previous epoch (cf. Pt II, XIII (b)). xxix A feddān is an Egyptian unit of land measurement, roughly equivalent to an acre.

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Such that Yūnis was there, son of Sirhān In the midst of the kings of the Arabs

b)

Around him were the Himyarites Men of great wisdom The one sitting down was the son of Sirhān And all of them raised by the Hilālī

c)

He called out, ‘O elegant one I shall not mince my words with you Your necklace is exquisite – its jewels superb Every young girl will bargain with you to get it’

d)

So he said, ‘How much will they offer for it? Do not bother mincing words with me’ He said to him, ‘A treasure chest of money {Each pound superior to the other {Each garden more verdant than the next

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e) ‘A garden stretching to a hundred feddāns Where the grapes dangle from the trellises With peaches and pomegranates, Ripe pomegranates no gardener has yet plucked’ XIa) Yūnis said, ‘Why, O why?’ He said to him, ‘Why try to bedazzle me with words? This talk has made me tear my clothes in grief Have I a legacy in Tunis, or not? Let us wait until we have “plucked” the grapes’ [‘O master of poetry, you are great!’] b) ‘O dallāl, fetch my necklace! You people from the town – come to my aid! By the life of my father, my sword and my two arms, In the arena of deadly combat, I shall destroy you’ c)

He said to him, ‘Your words are more tangled than the sycamorexxx Why not leave the necklace with your protegé?

xxx

Lit. ‘Your words are like the sycamore’. The descriptor ‘more tangled than’ is inserted so as to convey the sense and image of the tree as a tangled and dense web of branches.

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Let your necklace adorn cAzīza! To the beautiful daughter of Macbad al-Sultān, it shall be taken!’ [‘Poor thing, we feel sorry for you!’] XIIa) The dallāl put his faith in God and left Pray to Him Whose Light Has Been Seen Oh dear, there was a tap-tapping at the gates And the sad Mayy came upon him b)

Mayy said, ‘O dallāl ! I shall not mince my words with you It has been many days now Since to cAzīza’s castle you have come’

c)

He said, ‘O loveliest of women I shall not mince my words with you In my possession is a necklace of priceless value One which surpasses the wealth of the West in its splendour’

XIIIa) ‘Ahh… Ahh… Ahh…’ O Time! Time, O Eye, has only contempt for the ‘lion’ and [breeds] suffering What can I do in the face of time, the oppressor? This will suffice – all of this! b) We have heard a proverb that has been handed down to us from our ancestors We have heard a proverb that has been handed down to us from our ancestors ‘The one to whom you grant a favour will eat from your food’ [‘You have created light, Sheikh cAwad’ullah!’] c)

‘Ahh… Ahh… Ahh… the dallāl brought out the necklace… To everything there is a time… She saw the necklace, this lady of favours And in the lee of the castle, she shrieked ‘Woe is me!’xxxi

XIVa) But as she cried, a tear dropped down Mayy cried xxxi

bu is a word shouted out to the sky in lamentations for the dead and therefore, an evocation of grief, probably Coptic in origin.

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Mayy cried tears The daughter of Jacfar, From the Arabs of the Najd Servant of Yūnis Nurse to Shīha Beautiful daughter of the Garamantesxxxii Servant to Shīha Her name was Mayy b)

She cried tears which are flowing down ‘To everything there is a cause What can I do in the face of time, the oppressor? How cruel you are, O separator of loved ones!’

c)

She weeps and a tear drops down ‘By Him who wears earrings, By Him who possesses all understanding Necklace, who brought you here? Was it that rapacious Hassan al-Hilālī?’

d)

‘Was it that rapacious Hassan, born of Sirhān?’ The tears welling from her eye flowed down ‘Your enemies in Geminixxxiii are well acquainted with money {Are you [disguised] as beggars? {Have you become impoverished, you monarchs of the Hilāl?’

e)

‘O necklace, who brought you here? O necklace… O necklace… truly, truly, who brought you? Mayy said, ‘This shall be my vow Was it that rapacious leader of the Sultans?’

f )

‘If so, then the Hilālī’s coming is an act of aggression Their coming must arise from the crisis in Najd They may have even brought him here to the West, to Tunis Truly, this child who once straddled a baby camel Truly, the darling Yūnis must have brought it here!’

xxxii Of the tribe of the Garamantes from the south of Libya. xxxiii jōzīyya (which I translate as the constellation Gemini) is obscure but may refer to the position of that constellation in the sky as a malevolent influence.

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XVa) Mayy wept ‘A camel that has strayed the days will re-unite xxxiv A camel that has strayed A camel that has strayed A camel that has strayed Indeed… indeed… indeed The camel that has strayed, the days will re-unite’ b) ‘And by the one with flawless cheeks Tell me – where is that carefree man? Whose father was Rizq and his mother Sharīfa?’ For cAzīza Mayy shall mourn XVIa) ‘Good Grief… What has happened just now? This person in front of me cannot be you You silly girl… what has happened to you? A tear is trickling down your cheek!’ b)

‘Beautiful girl who normally speaks so wisely Why are you crying? Tell me for whom? Tell me what thing has happened! I am asking you again’

XVIIa) ‘O cAzīza, leave me alone By the living path to salvation I swear The anxiety I feel has been thrust upon me from God Dear friends whom I love have come back here’ b)

‘What has come to us here is the necklace of the elegant one (When shall my words be revealed?) The necklace of Yūnis, born of Sirhān Has arrived to us within the castle’

c) And to Him let us pray! [‘You have created light!’] [A.A. ‘Welcome!’]

xxxiv This line is interpreted (as was the previous: ‘Mayy wept’) to suggest the mood of a typical funerary lament, since in Upper Egypt the young man who has died is often mourned as a ‘camel’.

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Part C Mawwāl Ia)

How sweet the invocations to God’s gracexxxv {How sweet the mouths [that utter] invocations to God’s grace! {In the Name of the Lord, the Merciful and the Compassionate How sweet the invocations to God’s grace!

b) O my Night, my Night, O Night O Night, O Night, O Night How sweet {the invocations of Sufi brotherhoods in times of trial {the mouths that trace their pathways with difficulty The moment he spied me, he placed his hand {on my ‘vitals  {with difficulty c) O Night, O Night How sweet {the invocations to God’s grace that link the faiths in times of trial {the mouths that link these pathways to the ‘eye’ The moment he spied me, he placed his hand on ‘my virtue’ and exposed me! IIa) A poor dervish greeted me who lived by the grace of God To me, he looked handsome, that poor suffering man He greeted me – he was handsome He greeted me – that poor suffering man That frail creature! May God grant him succour! b) He drew out his ivory kohlstick and inscribed on every eye an impression He drew out his ivory kohlstick And {inscribed on every eye an impression {giving to every ‘eye’ a ‘clay vessel’xxxvi

xxxv

mabāsim refers simultaneously to bismala (pl.) – the frequent uttering of the epithet ‘b’ismillah al-raHmān al-raHīm’ (‘In the name of God the Merciful the Compassionate’) – and ‘mouths’ (pl.) from basama to smile and mabsim (mabāsim) mouths. xxxvi The allusion to jurra (a large clay pot used for water), in this case a synonym of zīr (also a clay vessel with a pointed bottom), is designed to conceal a reference to the female vagina, with the meaning that the Lord has given to every man a female lover.

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c)

My tears flow down, O Eye! And pour into { the hollow of my eye {as if into a clay vessel’ Like the story-tellers of the government do, I irrigate my plot [with tears] {And trace the impression… {Continue to chercher la femmexxxvii Only once when I looked down did I find the earth  {but only barely {with my eyes IIIa) The ailing one swore that destiny was doomed The Pleiades of Iblīsxxxviii are to living creatures like their soulmates,xxxix O Eye The ‘irrigated ground’ of Satan clings to living creatures like their soulmates, O Eye You made the Garden of Eden that was doomed yet inhabited For us, O God? For whom? Only us (The epic resumes) IVa) ‘Ahh… Ahh…’ c Azīza sighed, ‘O lady of great favours, Why do you cry and your tears flow down? Who is it you are in love with? Is it the dallāl? Shall I bring the justice of the peace to write the marriage contract?’ b)

She said, ‘ cAzīza, leave me alone! This is the body which has loved so few! Even if my empty days were to grow long I would never forget my affection for those I love’

xxxvii Lit. ‘pursue the clay vessel’. xxxviii The appearance of the constellation of the Pleiades (tarīyya) alluded to here was traditionally the sign that the Nile would rise in its annual inundation. Through allusion to irrigated ground (tarī) and, implicitly, the inundation, he suggests that his tears are regenerative of life, even on this ‘doomed’ earth. xxxix qarīn/qarīna or uht, the soul double which accompanies all human beings from birth to death.

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c)

She said, ‘ cAzīza, leave me alone! I weep because of what has transpired For those days and the necklace of the beloved I do not know whom among the Arabs will have seized it!’

Va)

c

27

Azīza swears to the dallāl Azīza swears to the dallāl ‘By the life of the Prophet whose beauty is captivating The one who possesses the necklace… Of all the Arabs, whom does he resemble? Of those who are in Tunis, whom does he resemble?’

c



b) ‘He looks like the Khalifa, truly the al-cAllām Truly, the al-cAllām Truly, the al-cAllām Truly, like Macbad al-Sultān Truly, his descendants were born of Maharān And in the hamlet of Tunis he was washed’ c)

He said to her, ‘O loveliest of women, I shall not mince my words with you… The owner of the necklace is a dashing young man Whom no woman in creation could have given birth to’

VIa) ‘How could they… How could they have captured it? – The full moon of al-Sacbānxl Created and fashioned by the Rahmān?’xli b) ‘And his mouth – what does it resemble?’ ‘The Seal of Solomon Created by the Lord in his great wisdom’ c) And then cAzīza spoke (and her words were sweet) ‘Why, that is the very image of Yūnis the Hilālī! O dallāl! That describes his beauty and his features The owner of that necklace – bring him here to me at once!’ xl

xli

al-Šacbān is the Islamic month that precedes the holy month of Ramadan. The full moon of this month is particularly venerated in saints’ festivals in Upper Egypt as it is believed that on this sacred night (NuSS al-Šacbān), the night of the full moon, the fate of every living soul will be determined for the coming year. Lit. ‘The Merciful (God)’, an epithet included in the text to convey the assonance of the original.

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VIIa) Yūnis leaned back Yūnis leaned back Yūnis leaned back first to the right And then to the left…xlii b) ‘They have found me a man who is a wheeler-dealer This dallāl is a poor man, not blessed with much wealth One not to be entrusted with the counting of money, Nor to be left to the counting of our gold!’ c) Yūnis offers his opinion and says, ‘When will the hour of fate be propitious?’ ‘If you remain in the pocket of Sirhān Your beautiful necklace will be consumed, and you, handsome one, you will be too!’ VIIIa) Yūnis, ready for battle, rose and sallied off Teasing his sharp sword with his fingers All the young women said, ‘Be my guest!’ Men and women on all sides surrounded him b)

And when he entered the narrow lane There were those who touched him And those who shied away ‘Beautiful creatures’ he cried out, ‘That’s not a nice thing to do!’ But they grasped at the sleeves of his kaftan and ripped it open

c)

The handsome Yūnis rose up and sallied off He passed the Zināti and came to the street of young virginsxliii And when he came close to the staircases Yūnis wept and his tears fell in his wake

IXa) Yūnis is climbing up Yūnis is climbing up, right up to the gate The handsome man climbed up to the love wafting down from the gate He said, ‘O World! Is there any rhyme or reason in you? xlii xliii

Tape turned while recitation still in progress, so missing a few lines. Mabakīr is derived from bikr – virgin.

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If I were to go up and our Lord gave his consent, The naked of Tunis would bow their heads’

b) The ‘naked’ Yūnis climbs up through the first … and the second [gate]… c Azīza said, {‘My husband is coming to me’ {‘A taste of him is what I fancy’ Yūnis said, ‘These are the words of my betrayers and my uncle, Whatever lies beneath the trees should be left in shade’ c)

Yūnis climbs up to the third gate Azīza has divested herself of her clothes She cried out She cried out and said, To Mayy she said, ‘The gate he has entered through, bolt it fast!’

c

d) ‘To Yūnis we shall bolt the gates! Yūnis with the clanking sword… Shall not see his loved ones again! Nor will he ever (Don’t tell him!) Nor will he ever see his pavilion again!’ e)

Yūnis climbs up to the fourth gate In his anxiety, he gnaws his fingers The scent of musk and incense is in the air ‘Young woman,’ he said, ‘my mind has become a void’

Xa) Oh my! at the fifth gate Yūnis climbs up Yūnis climbs up Yūnis climbs up to the fifth gate His voice and his saliva have dried up in his throat From the nightmares this Arab is suffering This brave young man’s forehead is soaked with sweat b)

Despair came at the sixth gate He felt reason flee from his brain c Azīza said, ‘Your clothes are hanging in shreds! We shall dress you in silk brocade!’

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c) Yūnis climbs up to the seventh gate Mayy and cAzīza Mayy and cAzīza Mayy and cAzīza Clasped him under the arm The three of them collapsed in a joint embrace They collapsed, in truth, clinging as if drunk! Azīza grew tense In the castle, indeed, she cried out: ‘Away, slave girl, from here! The fire of passion has filled me with desire’

XIa)

c

b)

‘He who is oppressed, love shall join together I have loved Yūnis from our words and it is said, “The one who has been lost the days will bring together Restraint is only sweet to the one who derives pleasure from it”’

c)

Yūnis climbs to the seventh gate By the eighth gate, cAzīza in Yūnis has lost trust ‘I need a soldier in whom I have confidence A sentinel at the gate… Let one be stationed!’

XIIa) The first staircase… O Lord, grant us peace! The first staircase…xliv

Part D Ia)

I invoke the present living God My Lord who willed our creation, Endowed the ants and worms with a source of livelihood And through his grace made the fields fertile

b)

Again I invoke the present Living God There is but One – there is no other He raised up the firmament without pillars Created me and made my tongue fluent

xliv

This ends rather abruptly because of unforeseen circumstances: the tape has ended before the poet concludes, cutting off two or three lines.

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Again I invoke my present Lord There is but One – there is no other He raised up the firmament without pillars May the faithful praise Him – He created me!

IIa) Ahh… Ahh… Ahh…. Ahh… Ayy… Poor man, the poor manxlv Patience is the ideal b)

How true it is that restraint is the ideal But how is it that restraint can make a human being suffer, And still be endured? Those who endorse restraint are good for those reject it

c) {Restraint overwhelmed him and his burdens vanished {He climbed aboard restraint Ships of restraint {with their sails unfurled There is nothing better than restraint… Only better than restraint Is the restraint of the unrestrained IIIa)

Ahh… Ahh…. Ehh… You lovers, you who love God, pray to the Great One! How I have longed to see the Taha our prophet Like sailing vessels from a star that descend to the pupil And circle round to see the Kacaba [of Mecca] and Medina

b) How men are inured to bitterness How indeed, my friends, Indeed, O my friends How we are inured to bitterness c)

And they drank of the forbidden nectar Is this how constraint clasps them round? Let us praise God despite the circumstance

IVa) ‘Ahh… Ahh… Ahh… Ahh… Poor man! Restraint is the best ‘healer’ xlv

Ya caīnī… ya caīnī….

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Pray to the Merciful Lord of Islam After my praise to you, O protector, I shall compose verses to the Banī Hilāl

b)

I shall compose verses to the Banī Durayd Handsome Arabs… May God direct them! Recurrent encounters have made them anxious And these warriors brandish spears!

c)

These warriors are heroes! Men with spotless turbans As radiant as lights Their leader – the only son of Sharīfaxlvi

d)

Their leader’s name was Abu Zayd The one whose turban slopes from the crown Like the Nile when the foam risesxlvii A warrior from the plateaux of the Najd desert, From the tribe of Hilālī

e)

Salāma, a warrior of courage And by the living path to salvation He said, ‘My nights of pleasure shall return News of calamity shall not be ignored’

Va) The second stair The second stair is fashioned of oil! Her castle was more sumptuous than any house! c Azīza said, ‘O Yūnis, if you were to cast eyes on… To see the ripe grapes that sting when picked’ b) The third stair The fourth stair They are made of glass! And anyone who tripped over them would think himself in the Hejaz!

xlvi xlvii

Khadra al-Sharīfa. i.e. during the season of inundation.

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‘Am I more beautiful or is it Jāz?’xlviii And her words from above the ‘turrets’ propelled him on

c) The fifth stair is fashioned of silver Yūnis wept and uttered a groan Yūnis wept Yūnis wept and uttered a groan c Azīza, fetch a jug of water for my ablutions ‘  This tenet of God’s law I shall fulfil’ VIa)

‘Have you lost your sanity? What is wrong with me and what importance is God’s law? Listen to me, O Son of Sirhān Has a mosque been erected in this place?’

b)

She says to him, ‘O Son of Sirhān Come with me and let us enter the baths You shall cast eyes on my lovely body My breasts peeking through my chemise And my breath, like molten sugar’

c) He said, ‘cAzīza, your words simply will not do In prayer I shall kneel down and perform the required duties And even if you were to summon soldiers with a cannon What you desire of me I shall not do!’ [A.A. ‘He’s not willing; that is, he’s saying, be patient’] VIIa) ‘O Yūnis whose father was Sirhān I have come to love you from the words we have exchanged’ And she says, ‘Come with me … we shall enter the baths My desire to make love to you I shall fulfil’ b)

He said to her, ‘O loveliest of women This is a lie the Merciful Lord shall not witness! On my sirwāl there is a lock The key is in the Najd desert and I have left it there!’xlix

xlviii

A reference to the other powerful heroine of the sīrat banī hilāl, Jāzīyya, in her short form, ‘Jāz’. Yūnis wears a chastity belt.

xlix

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c) ‘Ahh… Ahh… Ahh Ahh… Ahh… Ahh… O my nights!’

She said to him, ‘O Yūnis, you whose father is Sirhān, Those who are oppressed, love shall join together {That ‘dew’ in the West of Saturnl is burning That trying lock shall be cracked!’

VIIIa) ‘O cAzīza, please leave me alone! I am Yūnis who has excelled at many deeds My uncle, Abu Zayd, will learn of this now And your father’s castle will be razed’ b)

That day cAzīza said, ‘Yūnis, O handsome one You who have ignited my heart with fire If in the precious sand, your vision shall appear That sand of Abu Zayd’s I shall destroy!’

Azīza says to him, Azīza called out to the sailors… And that day there came to her, huge numbers – in the hundreds ‘I want a dahabiyyali right now… Which will hold a man of his size’… c)

c

c

IXa) cAzīza said… And on that day she was still a virgin And her beauty was stunning and seductive To the castle she brought him with sole intent She brought the handsome one and with him, his guards And she says: ‘We shall sail the briny sea’ Azīza said ‘Yūnis, my sweet, I shall be the barque and you, the captain Let us sail the briny sea – let us rock and twist And we shall see on which shore we shall anchor’

b)

c

l li

A possible sexual reference, obscured in metaphor to observe propriety. Lit. ‘a houseboat with a cabin’ like the Pharaonic funerary barques and the dahabiyya discovered near the Pyramid of Khufu at Giza.

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c)

Yūnis wept and his tears flow down There are reasons for {the way the world is {and the passions of love The one who is lost, the days shall re-unite O how painful is the parting of loved ones

d)

The darling one wept on to the ‘turrets’lii Yūnis wept from atop the ‘turrets’ He said, ‘The fates have prevailed against me’

e)

He weeps and a tear wells up, ‘May all goodness be with you, Shīha, The fate of the Duraydi has conspired against me’

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Xa) The lyrics of my song are sad Indeed, poor Hassan Il Duraydi Mayy weeps sadly in grief b)

She weeps and a tear drops down The one whose eyes are lined in kohl The one who is lost the years will re-unite How painful to be in exile from the tribe

c)

How painful to be exiled from those we love… By the living path to salvation My tale returns to the free and easy [hero] And calls into action the dark-skinned Salāma, Abu Zayd

XIa)

c

b)

‘Give shape to my pomegranates and figs Valiant one, leader of the tribes I have fallen in love with you, Yūnis, handsome one! So handsome…’ and her words go on…

c)

c

lii

Through paronomasia, an allusion to cAzīza’s breasts.

Azīza calls out, ‘O Yūnis Fate has thrust me upon you Come closer to me, O Yūnis, And give shape to my ripe pomegranates’

Azīza calls out, ‘O Yūnis, The cruel fates have prevailed against me and made you suffer

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Come closer to me, O Yūnis Select from my ripening lemons’

d) My story returns to the Emir, Abu Zayd Salāma of dark complexion Conqueror of the Zogba tribe and the Duraydliii Father of Rayya, long-suffering against calamity XIIa) Abu Zayd calls out, ‘O Marceī! O poet, I am in a pitiable state A fire of injustice [burns] in the pit of Marceī’s stomach Let us see where Yūnis resides’ [‘Lovely! Lovely! You are great!’] [A.A. ‘With your blessing, my brother’] b)

Abu Zayd said, ‘O Lord of the universe of two worlds O Lord, Master of the universe of two worldsliv Lead me down to the garden of the Zināti’ (O friends, to whom can I complain of my pain?)

c)

‘Let my vision go speedily to the three The handsome Yūnis born of Sirhān, The one in shimmering robes Above the castle and its pillars To the place of the wandering princess, cAzīza’

XIIIa) ‘Conjure in the sand, handsome one’ Abu Zayd addresses Marceī, ‘You handsome one, raised by the Hilālī I see Yūnis in the midst of the young virgins Set to be exiled from the Hilayil’ b) Marceī says to him ‘O Uncle!’ Marceī, lamenting, cries out to him ‘O Uncle! Valiant one, O leader of the Hilālī! I have tasted vinegar and bitterslv Yūnis is in the heart of a sailing vessel

liii liv lv

Two tribes of the Bedouin Arabs. The two worlds are ‘the seen’ and ‘the unseen’. A familiar folk epithet denoting profound sorrow.

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‘My uncle, I promise you By the life of the Overseer, our Prophet Yūnis is in the heart of a sailing vessel On which bank he is moored I cannot see!’

XIVa) Abu Zayd said, ‘What shall we do?’ Abu Zayd said, ‘What shall we do? They shall detain him for the Zināti and by the unsheathing of my sword, I swear, I shall wreak vengeance against the Zināti’ b)

Abu Zayd said to him, ‘What shall we do? I shall trample these terrifying lands O my son, I shall give birth to the sword! And seek my fate with the Khalifa who shall suffer!’

c)

‘I shall soon know my fate with the son of this man O you whose voice echoes through the castle You whose kohled eyes are open as wide as if pumped by a bellows You’ve been abandoned to your fate with a young maiden’

d)

‘He has been left to his ultimate fate with whom?’ ‘By the living path to salvation My Lord of the universe of two worlds…’ He wept since his plight was a pitiable one

XVa)

Abu Zayd laments, ‘O child! Child, stand up and unsheathe your sword! Advance to Tunis and its fine buildings Find the place of the young Yūnis, In whose mansions he resides’

b)

Yahya speaks to him, ‘O Uncle! Restraint has never hurt a living soul Uncle, try to be reasonable And weigh your options with an open mind’

c) ‘Child, calm down’ ‘Uncle, you calm down!’ ‘Calm down!’ ‘It transpires that Yūnis… …has appeared in a distant place’

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XVIa) Abu Zayd said to him, ‘O nephew I shall not mince words with you… Son of my uncle, your soul is dear to me, A man as dear and close to me as my beloved drawstring Yūnis has been captured by the maiden cAzīza And will not emerge except in bloody battle’ b)

‘He will not emerge unless we raise our battle staves Ahh… O you whose turban slopes from the crown O charming youth, born of Sirhān I shall take vengeance for the tribes’

c)

‘O uncle’, restraint is the best healerlvi Let us pray to the Prophet Whose Light Has Been Seen For it is preferable that we say: ‘To Him let us pray!’ [May God grant you light!] [A.A. ‘You are welcome, welcome!’]

lvi

Here ‘iSSabr Tabīb’ – ‘Restraint is the healer’ – a variant on the more usual maxim, iSSabr Tayyib, ‘Patience is good’.

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Egyptian erotica: ancient precursors and Bakhtin’s concept of the adventure chronotope In the first part of this essay, I shall examine the interweaving of plot structure and imagery into every facet of the tale, in particular the use of allegory and strings of erotic similes to describe both the jewels of a necklace and the female body (a technique known formally in Arabic literary criticism as waSf ); and in the second part, the ethnopoetics of performance, the framing elements (panegyric or madīH, and ballads, mawwāl (s) mawwāwīl (pl)), structural signifiers, end-rhyme and the performative devices used by the poet.

Anti-romance or folktale? The issue of genre and what might constitute ‘romance’ in the Egyptian oral tradition is interesting to explore. cAzīza wa Yūnis is a popular story which may be performed either by an epic singer (rāwī) or a singer of mawwāwīl (ballads) who is not a professional epic reciter. This anomaly suggests that its origins as a tale lie outside the epic proper. The tale of the attempted seduction of a very handsome man by a powerful woman has several famous antecedents in Egyptian and Near Eastern narrative. The story corresponds remarkably closely to that of Joseph/ Yusuf (a name not dissimilar to Yūnis) and Zuleikha, wife of the Egyptian pharaoh Potiphar in the famous biblical and Qur’anic tale. Moreover, in that adulterous story (which incidentally transpires in Egypt), Zuleikha tries to seduce Yusuf, who is similarly a paragon of male beauty (Genesis 39: 1–20). As yet another variant, the Egyptian qiSSit cazīza wa yūnis closely resembles the popular ‘romance’ of Yusuf and Zuleikha, which was performed for audiences in the fifteenth century in Persia, both from the perspective of plot structure and the integration of strings of similes known as waSf. In Egyptian oral tradition, the legend of Sidi Ahmad al-Badawi and Fatima Bint-Birry also features a tale of attempted seduction, this time of the hallowed sheikh, patron of Tanta, by the brazen warrior, Fatima, on the battlefield.5 Yet the earliest known prototype of the female seduction tale may be the XIXth Dynasty The ‘Story of Two Brothers’ transcribed for posterity around 1225 bc. This mythological folktale features two brothers, Anubis and Bata (named after two Egyptian gods), and like the tale of cAzīza centres around the attempted seduction of Bata by his conniving sister-in-law who, after being rejected, accuses him of trying to seduce her.6 In Arabic literary history, romance and the language of love have traditionally been identified with _gazal, a genre of love poetry that was first

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written down in seventh-century Arabia and subsequently penetrated many diverse literary traditions from Farsi to Urdu. The _gazal genre is also typically used by Sufis to express the ecstasy of divine love and has been integrated into the panegyric for the Prophet (madīH), as we see in this performance. To emphasise the erotic nature of the tale, the poet exploits the _g azal tradition to the full, integrating highly sensual metaphors into the opening praise poems and interposing cAzīza’s voice describing her body as if it were a fecund tree which ‘blossomed and bore figs and pomegranates’. Though the voice of c Azīza is disembodied and de-contextualised, it acts as an evocative prelude. The term waSf in Arabic (lit. ‘description’) is used most commonly to denote the detailed picture of the physical features of a man or woman, often progressing from head to navel, usually in a string of similes or metaphors, as in the ‘Song of Songs’ compendium, the famous panegyric to sensuality. Perhaps once a collection of ancient epithalamia or songs written and sung for the bride at her wedding from the first millennium bc, (before being subjected to allegorical interpretation by Christian zealots), the Songs of Solomon also provide an intriguing record of epithets to which cAzīza’s description bears an uncanny resemblance: Let my beloved come into his garden (the woman says to the man) and eat his pleasant fruits (v. 16, Ch. 4)

Let us see if the vine flourish Whether the tender grape appear The pomegranate bud forth (v. 12, Ch. 7)

The Sumerian scholar Samuel Kramer suggested that some of the love songs in the ‘Song of Songs’ may have been cultic in origin and once sung during the heiros gamos, or sacred marriage between a king and a votary of the Canaanite goddess of love and procreation, Astarte, whom Solomon worshipped and adored.7 The goddess Astarte (the Greek form of Ashtart, and in Hebrew, Astarot) was worshipped as a goddess of sexual love in Ugarit from the Late Bronze Age, but also in Egypt as a goddess of fertility. She was often portrayed as a warrior goddess, however.8 This type of ‘presentational’ as opposed to ‘representational’ imagery is also found in excerpts of Egyptian love poetry. This New Kingdom example shows how the sacred fruit-bearing persea tree9 is given voice to praise the physical attributes of the beloved in its own image:



The persea tree moves his mouth and says: My pits resemble her teeth My fruits resemble her breasts

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I am the foremost tree of the orchard I remain through every season which the sister spends with her brother While drunk with wine of grape and pomegranate and bathed in moringa oil and balm10

This allegorical representation of a woman’s body may be compared to pictorial representation in ancient Egyptian tomb iconography and, as becomes clear later, love poetry. In tomb representations from the XVIIIth Dynasty, the Egyptian goddess Isis emerges from the thicket of sycamore branches, her breast a ripe fruit to be suckled by the deceased Pharaoh. This figurative image is well entrenched in women’s expressive genres, even in contemporary funerary lament. For example, the Coptic lamenter Balabil wishes for the mother to be re-incarnated as a tree: ‘May she cast shadow, fan breezes and bring forth lemons/pomegranates’. In a contemporary wedding song from the same village, women sing, O sprouting shoot of clover so green Why not sprout and recline me down in the fields? Say, dear lady, do show me, On your bosom, let me gaze

I told him, Away with you, poor thing, My breasts are blossoming pomegranates11

As the story progresses, the climax occurs when Yūnis ascends the stairs, penetrates a succession of doors and then ascends the staircases to cAzīza. He is stripped of his clothes and she performs her own striptease, such that by the time he reaches her, she is already naked. One of the earliest literary accounts of ritualised progressive ‘striptease’ is found in the Sumerian text from the third millennium bc in which the goddess Inanna descends to the Nether World. The goddess Inanna prepares to meet her death and garbs herself in the diadems and regalia of a queen. However, on meeting Neti, the male gatekeeper of the Nether World, she is compelled to penetrate seven gates, one after the other (as Yūnis does in our tale) and, despite her protestations, is divested of one item of jewellery or her vestments at each gate: Upon her entering the first gate The crown of the ‘plain’ of her head was removed What, pray, is this?

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Extraordinarily, O Inanna, have the decrees of the nether world been perfected O Inanna, do not question the rites of the nether world

And so on, starting at her head and descending to below her breast, she must remove ‘the rod of lapis lazuli’, ‘small lapis lazuli stones on her neck’, ‘sparkling stones on her breast’, ‘a gold ring on her hand’, ‘the … breastplate of her breast’ and finally ‘all the garments of ladyship on her body’. As she removes her accoutrements, this text indicates a verbatim repetition of the same litany-like and rather stilted stanza above.12 The stylistic use of repetition and parallelism common to oral performance tradition, the use of question/ answer dialogue between gatekeeper and Inanna, the serial progression and penetration of each door or gate, and the description of the divestiture of her regalia from the head downwards are all elements that feature, albeit with some permutations, in the contemporary tale of cAzīza. The Mesopotamian myth of the ‘Descent of Ishtar to the Nether World’ is a more elaborate version of this encounter recorded 2,000 years later, and it, too, preserves some of the same structural and formulaic features. In this version, the goddess Ishtar is similarly required to enter a series of seven gates. She must relinquish her crown, her earring pendants, neck chains, pectoral ornaments, girdle of birthstones, ‘clasps round her hands and feet’, bracelets and ‘the breechcloth around her body’, a process of divestiture that starts at her head and proceeds downwards. On her departure, this process is reversed: one of these ornaments is given back at each of the seven gates. As a consequence of this, she is resplendent on her re-entry into the natural world. This serial reversal is a facet of the tale which provokes the suggestion that she has entered and emerged from a phenomenological domain in some ways parallel to the fantasy world of cAzīza’s castle, and one that evokes the impression of cyclicality noted by Bakhtin as a characteristic of the Hellenistic genre. Though there is no removal of jewellery, a progressive and linear penetration of the ‘doors’ and ‘ascent of the staircases of the body’ is at the crux of the cAzīza story. The princess relinquishes her clothes to Yūnis, target of her affections, without provocation in the tale after a series of waSfs are inserted which describe the beauty and sensuality of both the male and the female body. These are not peculiar to this episode but occur in other episodes of the sīra (the story known as qiSSit HanDal, for example). Moreover, the same trope of serial self-description is at the semantic core of wedding songs sung by village girls on the West Bank of Luxor to the prospective bride in the 1980s. Here is one wedding ditty that is similarly serial and incremental, in that any girl in the group singing may compose and add on more verses:

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‘Ali ‘Ali, you must be patient! ‘Ali ‘Ali, why not gaze at my bosom? ‘Ali ‘Ali, why not recline me on my back? ‘Ali ‘Ali, you must be patient! ‘Ali ‘Ali, why not gaze at my hair? ‘Ali ‘Ali, why not recline me on my back? ‘Ali ‘Ali, why not boost my dowry? ‘Ali ‘Ali, you must be patient!

‘Ali ‘Ali, why not see my coiffed bangs rolled into curls! ‘Ali ‘Ali – you must be patient…13

Mikhail Bakhtin postulated a theory of romance that pivots around the relationship between time and place, a concept he called ‘the adventure chronotope’.14 While the tale of cAzīza does not fit the tight abstract and monologic chronotope of Hellenistic romance as postulated by Bakhtin, many of the same qualities of abstraction appear. In fact, the interplay of fantasy and abstraction in this tale and the texture and meaning of the moral conflicts posed by the poet in this oral performance suggest that this tale could be described more appropriately as anti-romance than romance. Eroticism is the first unique quality of the tale. From the singing of the first madīH and the opening ballad, we are plunged into the arena of sensuality. The poet’s prayers to God are ‘like grapes to the heart’; the Prophet himself is ‘He of radiant cheeks’; while cAzīza describes herself: ‘My breasts blossomed, bore figs and pomegranates’, not unlike the phrase ‘the fig tree putteth forth her green figs’ from the Song of Solomon (v. 13, Ch. 2). The sensual appeal of cAzīza to Yūnis is insinuated into the madīH and ballads, sandwiched between stanzas of formal praise poetry. It thus diverges from the traditional epic, conveying the message that sensuality is the leitmotif of the tale. The various mawwāwīl foreground the emotional quandaries involved in illicit love, and cAwad’ullah also suggests an ironic twist to the tale by infusing the preface with framing elements of the text – not only with erotic _g azal but also sometimes ‘double entendres’ (well known in the oral tradition to suggest sexual dalliance). These presage the events to take place.15 Still, as the meanings are left inexplicit, the poet’s intent in performance remains cloaked in ambiguity. The subsequent recurrence of increasingly effusive and sensuous imagery ascribed first to the jewelled necklace (as a prelude), and then to the female body, confirms that it is also the semantic core and focal point of the text. Moreover, by introducing personal perspectives into the ballad section,

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suggesting male and female voices and portraying the increasingly charged sexual confrontations in direct dialogue, the poet endeavours to provoke the identification of the audience with the principals such that quandaries of conscience become insignificant. The story is set in the tenth or eleventh century, reputedly in the city of Tunis. Tunis is referred to as tūnis al-haDra or ‘Tunis the Green’, and constitutes an exotic and foreign site for encounters in the ‘castle of pillars’ and conversations under the lotus blossom and dūm palm. An illusion of historical and geographical veracity is created through the epic frame, but in effect the metaphorical Tunis provides a liminal and abstract setting for this tale. The overarching structure of the plot in the context of the epic is set when an alliance is established with the al-cAllam by the three Arabs and their uncle, the hero, disguised as maddāHīn (praise singers). As the poet cAwad’ullah also once performed as a praise singer and maddāH, this is convenient. For the purposes of performance, his identity may become fused with that of the hero and his nephews, and in poetic terms the poet and Abu Zayd may speak as one voice. The forces of destiny and the Eye (in this case, both the Evil Eye and the arbiter of fate) are supreme in this tale. These are Arabs so handsome ‘their pupils could be snatched from their eyes’. The poet stresses constantly the ineluctable nature of fate, and even Yūnis’s seduction in the bazaar is prefaced by warnings that ‘he should beware of women with “kohled” eyes’. The hero and his cohorts ensconce themselves under the lotus and dūm palm and remain there, with the exception of Yūnis, who only leaves to explore his surroundings under the pretext of selling the necklace. We can conclude, therefore, that the symbolic entry into the more abstract realm of the romance occurs with their entry into the garden. The eventual return to the garden of the lotus is the point at which the story is reintegrated into the main frame of the epic and the hero Abu Zayd becomes pre-eminent. In the intervening time, a state of suspension of disbelief reigns. Bakhtin postulated that Hellenistic romance was typified by the ‘random contingency of events’; however, in this story, the turn of events is prefigured in the opening prelude and the story unfolds in traditional narrative style to its climax. The necklace is the conduit for the unravelling of the narrative, and, in a series of disclosures of its dazzling beauty, the poet creates a buildup of suspense prior to the disclosure of ‘the body’ as the necklace is exposed in lavish detail to the three female protagonists: Sucda, Mayy (Yūnis’s nurse) and then cAzīza. Bakhtin also suggested that Hellenistic romance ends in the ‘restoration of the whole’, in a cyclical pattern that shatters nothing. In this story, the kidnapping of Yūnis provokes a war between the Hilālī tribe and the Zināti,

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an element known to the audience and one that creates an ironic undercurrent to cAzīza’s protestations of love. An illusion of cyclicality is created in the first part of the tale, however, because of the iterative movement of characters between two sparsely described and static locations: the ‘castle of pillars’ and ‘the garden in the shade of the lotus blossom’. The extravagant descriptions of the necklace as it is unveiled reverberate and culminate in the unveiling of c Azīza’s body. Similarly, the attempted (and evidently successful) seduction of Yūnis by a ‘woman of ill repute’ as he cavorts through the bazaar acts as a somewhat illogical but perhaps inevitable prelude to the climax: his would-be seduction by cAzīza. The cyclical rhythm of the romance is shattered by the end, however, when Abu Zayd re-engages with the rhetoric of an aggressive epic warrior and pledges revenge. The fact that the mawwāl in Part A is actually the epilogue, and reflects recriminations by cAzīza on her unrequited passion, contributes to the impression of cyclicality. But it is important to note that the disclosure of the outcome of a tale even before the story begins is a common feature of Egyptian epic recitation.16 Moreover, in this tale most events seem to happen as a consequence of fate and are prefigured in the performance, either by dreams or prophecies, divinations or warnings, as in a folktale. As Vladimir Propp concluded in his analysis of the narrative elements which characterise that genre, the plot follows a classic sequence of ‘absentation’ (the hero leaves a familiar environment), interdiction, violation of interdiction, and reconnaissance, leading to the capture of Yūnis by cAzīza.17 Is this the realm of ‘anti-romance’? Bakhtin has suggested that isolated, single and unique instances of description create abstraction. In this tale, the loci of action acquire a mythic and transcendental quality because of the sparse metonymic phrases used to describe them: the garden of the lotus blossom tree (nabq), the ethereal and corporeal ‘castle of pillars’ as well as its fabled ‘stairs of glass and silver’. Time in this romance is never measured or alluded to and in this way a sense of timeless space is achieved. Yūnis must first climb up and then penetrate the increasing limits or laminations of space (the eight gates) into cAzīza’s inner sanctum. The illusion of infinite, giddy space is achieved in cAzīza’s own evocative description of Yūnis’s ascent of the glimmering, translucent staircases of polished silver and glass to a paradise similar to ‘the Hejaz’ (Saudi Arabia), the site of holy Mecca and Medina. In a well-known circumcision song from Upper Egypt, a similar image evokes the sense of terror and slippage a young boy feels as he traces his way up the steps to the upper room to endure a painful operation, symbolic of his attainment of manhood: The threshold is made of glass al-cataba gazāz wissillim nīlu nīlu yā wād And the stairs (like) nylon, nylon, my boy

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Comparisons of the serial description of the imagery of the body in versions of cAzīza and Yūnis reveal varying degrees of emphasis, though this poet’s desire to embellish each part of the body in succession would seem to create a metaphoric distance from the object while enhancing its image.18 c Awad’ullah’s account of cAzīza’s self-description to Yūnis is quite conservative when compared to other versions. In the Luxor poet al-Nādī’s version of the story, cAzīza describes her body to Yūnis in a series of thirteen similes starting with her plaited hair ‘like camel ropes’, eyebrows ‘like a dove that flees behind mountains’, kohl-lined eyes ‘lined without a kohl-stick’, nose like ‘a well-rounded date’, a mouth ‘like the seal of Solomon’, teeth ‘like coral’, lips ‘as smooth as an [antique] Maria Theresa dollar’, a neck ‘like a silver tankard made by a drunken craftsman’, breasts ‘like two female date palms’, a belly ‘silky and smooth beyond belief ’ and a navel ‘contoured like the base of a glass’.19 In cAwad’ullah’s tale, cAzīza’s breasts implicitly become the turrets of the ‘castle’ on which Yūnis leans and gradually ‘ascends’, but otherwise the poet is quite circumspect, while al-Nādī elaborates: the ascent of the ‘staircases’ and penetration of the succession of doors is the metaphorical ‘ascent’ of cAzīza’s body. The first ‘stair’ is ‘the rounded thigh which props up the ‘castle’; the second, made of glass; the fifth, bathed in oil; the sixth, embellished with coral; the seventh, of whale bone; the eighth, of fishbone; the ninth, of silver; and finally, her inner ‘fringe’,20 ‘so delicately placed’.21 An explicitly sensual description of Yūnis also forms part of the narrative in the versions sung by al-Nādī,22 al-cAzab and cAlī Jirimānī, two other rāwīs, also from Luxor. In these examples, the description of Yūnis’s pristine body stretches to twenty similes, also starting from the head and working down to the navel, and includes allusions to Yūnis as a virgin gazelle (a trope first noted in the epic of Gilgamesh). In cAwad’ullah’s version, this section is seemingly curtailed and the whole encounter is left in suspense: when Yūnis refuses her advances, she takes them both on a dahabiyya set adrift in timeless space. He is only glimpsed later in a vision after the miraculous conjuring by Marceī in the sand. In this fantasy realm, images act as the conduit to imaginative reveries. The seeds of eroticism are planted early in the narrative as the necklace, first revealed, is described in highly sensual terms: Like a garden of grapes and lemons, Ripe pomegranates which jostle against each other A garden of a hundred acres With grapes that dangle from the trellises

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And then: A garden more fertile than any other With peaches and pomegranates Ripe pomegranates no gardener has yet plucked Linking this description to that of its value in monetary terms implies sumptuous wealth as well as ripe fertility, while the imagery of pomegranates and grapes immediately suggests the voluptuous tropes of Egyptian wedding songs in which the ‘fruits’ of the body are extolled as being at the point of ‘ripeness’. The erotic climax to this vein of imagery comes in the seduction scene, when cAzīza says:

O Yūnis, if you were to cast eyes on… To see the ripe grapes that sting when picked…

And later when she asks Yūnis:

Give shape to my ripe pomegranates Give shape to my pomegranates and figs Select from my ripening lemons

Azīza plays on the oppositions between rumānī: ramānī (‘pomegranates: it swept me away’) and lamūnī: li’mūnī (‘my lemons: he oppressed me’) but to no avail. Yūnis is silent. While this brazen woman thrusts upon him her own forbidden fruit, Yūnis, paragon of male beauty, declares himself not only unwilling but bound by external constraints (a ‘lock’ on his sirwāl) as well as overpowered by moral and religious qualms. The lock appears to be the male counterpart of the mediaeval chastity belt and, though decidedly comic, not an idiosyncratic addition by cAwad’ullah. How it fits with the earlier lovemaking session with the young prostitute ‘who was veiled’ is uncertain, but in this instance, Yūnis is portrayed as a victim of circumstance, and thus his behaviour is given a certain ironic twist. In Sa cīdī society, the man (husband and father) is dominant and master of his wife and daughters in public life. Yet in the sīrat banī hilāl, the inversion of this norm – sexual conquests at female instigation for the acquisition of political power – occurs more than once. I would suggest that it conveys the not-so-foreign idea that women are powerful sexual creatures who may exert pressure on men to respond to their desires. The heroine in this anti-romance is depicted as a conniver, seducer and kidnapper, while the hero is almost divinely beautiful and an unsullied, ‘god-like’ creature. Yūnis represents c

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the inverse of male machismo and yet, like cAzīza, represents fecundity, but fecundity contained. In fact, from the beginning, the theme of this tale is the body as erotic object, though the message is often cloaked in other guises. The titillating descriptions of the contours of cAzīza’s body that issue from her mouth are signs for the taboo ‘signified’: female (and in some cases, male) sexuality. The description of the necklace as succulent fruit acts as a prelude to the climactic castle seduction scene, but not in all poets’ versions.23 cAwad’ullah’s skill is to create a matrix of images of fertility and opulence – the female body as a fruit-bearing tree, the fruits as jewels and the jewels as wealth and fertile gardens – an interface of metaphors that reverberates throughout the epic performance. Like the inanimate necklace that is redefined metaphorically so as to resemble the female body, the characters are defined through the poet’s chosen mode of description. cAzīza describes her own body in the first person, perhaps a technique designed to arouse the emotions of the male audience, and yet a form of self-representation equally intended to evoke sensual pleasure in the female audience. Yūnis is always described in the third person. Yūnis embodies the ‘stalk of sugar-cane’ and is later referred to as ‘the virgin stalk’; his physical attributes including a mouth rounded like ‘the seal of Solomon’ and a face like ‘the full moon of the Islamic month of al-Šacbān’. Yūnis may therefore be considered a mere abstraction of the male ideal since he is distanced by the third-person description of his physical attributes, while cAzīza is a sentient and vocal being. She weeps when smitten by love, initiates all dialogue and is never ‘described’ except by herself in concrete and voluptuous terms. The gratuitously erotic description of Sucda (described as someone ‘whose ankle bracelets clink from her thighs’) and the description of Yūnis moving through the bazaar (where women clutch and tear at his clothes) pander to male fantasy and contribute to the general leitmotif of unbridled sexuality. A moralist might wish to interpret this tale in terms of sets of oppositions that pit obedience to religious law against desire and overt sexuality, or to invoke the gender issue – the moral restraint of men when confronted by overt and illicit overtures to love by immoral females. These are placed in diametric opposition to each other: Yūnis asks to perform ablutions for prayer at the same moment as cAzīza confronts his nakedness. However, the whole seduction scene is charged with the undercurrent of betrayal. There is an intrinsic irony here that undermines the temptation to suggest easy oppositions. As the poet pointed out, mankind is already doomed as a result of original sin in the Garden of Eden. The garden is defiled. This is no naive romance pitting good against evil, temptation against desire. And the revelling in the erotic for sheer pleasure of self-gratification would seem to take precedence over any moralising note, for several reasons, including the tone of the praise poetry

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and the wealth of puns. The poet is deliberately equivocal. He, the poet or Yūnis, asks in the religious prelude to Part C (madīH ):

Why is restraint the ideal? How could restraint make a human being suffer And still be the ideal?

Though it could be argued that this sentiment is contradicted in a later panegyric, he also says it again twice, as if to interpolate the personal voice: ‘How [we] men are inured to bitterness’. The personal ambivalence of the poet (which the audience is invited to feel) is also reflected in the innuendo created by the continual use of paronomasia (in Arabic, jinās or taškīl) from the opening mawāwīl until the end. Through the deliberate repetition of a previous line in a different context, the poet embeds a line, redolent with ‘double entendre’, into the praise poem preface, as if to suggest a conventional and innocent beginning to the dramatic conclusion of the story:

How sweet {the invocations of Sufi brotherhoods in times of trial {the mouths that utter invocations to God’s grace How sweet the invocations to God’s grace {in the name of the Lord, the Merciful and the Compassionate

But then he repeats the opening line, How sweet {the invocations of Sufi brotherhoods in times of trial {the mouths that link these pathways to the ‘eye’… continuing with a sentence possibly spoken by cAzīza:

The moment he spied me, he placed his hand {on my ‘virtue’ {with difficulty

and in a third,



How sweet {the invocations to God’s grace that link the faiths in times of trial {the mouths that link these pathways to the ‘eye’ The moment he spied me, he placed his hand on my ‘virtue’ and exposed me!

The initial puns are dependent on two possible interpretations of the Arabic phrase Hilwa ilmabāsim, ‘How beautiful/sweet are the mouths’ and ‘How

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beautiful are the bismillāhs’ (‘the prayers uttered in the name of God’) here translated as ‘invocations to God’s grace’. The poet shows how he uses the submerged but consciously ambiguous juxtapositions of madīH and sensual description to encourage his audience to contemplate this moral ambivalence and break down the simple ‘good’ versus ‘evil’ question into more complex issues. cAwad’ullah is determined to address the quandary of sexual desire and moral probity. The poet exploits these puns and the shifting perspectives to suggest overtly sexual allusions that are never concretised but create the general undercurrent of sexuality in this complex tale. Allusions to the incontrovertible hand of fate, expressed in terms of proverbs, also serve to reinforce the fatalistic and recursive aspect of the plot. For example, as Yūnis sets off with the necklace, Abu Zayd warns him never to trust women: Whatever may be written on the eyelids/shrouds The Eye shall not die without reaping its spoils Whatever is inscribed on the forehead will be seen And it transpires in that fashion. At the end, Yūnis reiterates the proverb that has been recited already by Mayy: ‘The camel who has strayed, the days will reunite’, meaning that Yūnis has been reunited with Mayy. He has strayed but will not be separated from those he loves.

Conclusion The ‘tale’ of cAzīza and Yūnis (qiSSit cazīza wa yūnis) assumes a different trajectory from that of chivalric romance in the European tradition, in which a male hero pursues a heroine. Because of the oppositions that underpin and exploit the erotic tension of the tale – the concealment and disclosure of jewels and the body, and the conflict that unfolds between sexual passion and suppression of desire – this multivalent tale (possibly as a consequence of its antecedents in oral tradition) would seem to belong more to the genre of erotic fantasy than romance or epic. A different type of abstraction appears to have been created in this tale, one that conjures up a realm in which erotic fantasy can flourish. In his performance, cAwad’ullah has created a version of the abstract chronotope characterised by minimalised description, an abstract sense of time, and place and characters in which Yūnis is the cipher and cAzīza dominant and flamboyant. A current of eroticism penetrates the narrative at all levels of discourse. In the enactment of the seduction scene, abstract allusions to the necklace as fruits of the body become concretised. This romance is an erotic fantasy about an idealised male hero and an unreal ‘Superwoman’-like female

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protagonist, played out in abstract time and place in such a way as to create identification by the male audience with Yūnis and, perhaps consciously, the female with the temptress cAzīza. The pursuit of Yūnis by cAzīza is nevertheless contextualised within the broader frame of the epic. To disentangle it from this story frame would risk the loss of its wider political ramifications to the fate of the heroes and their tribe. The seduction plot is not based solely on an impetuous and passionate infatuation but hatched as a plot to kidnap the nephew of the hero, Abu Zayd al-Hilālī. This motif of the female seductress is not alien to the Near Eastern tradition and constitutes a reversal of the paradigm of mediaeval European ‘romance’, where hero pursues heroine. It is also qualitatively different from the tale of idealised romantic love in the male imagination in Egyptian ballads, such as the story of Leila and Majnun. Another powerful heroine, Jazīyya, frequently uses the weapon of seduction elsewhere within the sīrat banī hilāl as a means of gaining political advantage for her tribe. This tale should be seen in another light as it deals with what have become unruly and taboo themes – namely, feminine desire and the female psyche. What is the construct of sexuality presented in this tale? In the famous tract by al-Ghazālī written in the fifteenth century, provocations, incitement ( fitna) and unrestrained sexual desire were declared to be the propensity of women. Women’s desires were to be contained through circumcision and strict laws governing their social interaction, whereas men, according to al-Ghazālī, were naturally more moral, more rational and more religious in nature than women.24 Although these ideas stem from a decidedly anachronistic source, the concern for propriety and honour has imprinted them on the code of gender-ordered social behaviour in Upper Egyptian village life and they are often reiterated in everyday parlance. How do the perceived gender roles reinforce or contradict the stereotypes of male and female behaviour? On the surface of the tale, the stereotypes of male and female behaviour would appear to be reinforced. After all, Abu Zayd’s admonition to beware of the wiles of women, who have even ‘outwitted the jann’, or evil fire spirits, proves only too true. Yūnis’s locked ‘chastity belt’ absolves him of the necessity to exert moral restraint, and the morality of his position becomes obscured. At the same time, cAzīza is clearly the aggressor, the powerful strategist. Yūnis is by comparison weak and powerless. He is the victim and she, the captor. In the heroic and male context of the sīra, the hero is vanquished and the heroine victorious. Other women in the sīra have not been averse to using their sexual wiles for political gain, notably Jāzīyya. In fact, it is almost a convention of the sīrat banī hilāl that such explicitly devious behaviour is acceptable and ‘heroic’. Does this suggest that feminine heroines in the sīra embody a positive ideal of women as wily and courageous ‘provocateuses’ (on a par with men in the

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political arena) but a negative one in social terms? In wedding songs, the bride-to-be is frequently the sensual and alluring seductress who entreats the groom to come to her, but not without ulterior motive – in some cases, as a ploy to increase her dowry or merely for pleasure. Perhaps as appropriate dress is de rigueur in village life to maintain public honour, intimacy and female sexuality are most successfully relegated to the masked and private world of lyric fantasy. After all, in the domain of romance, the realm of dreams and wish fulfilment, representations of reality cannot be juxtaposed to societal and behavioural norms and easily analysed as either inversions or depictions of ‘real life’. In this tale, events unfold in the ‘tale world’, which begins in the garden and culminates in the castle of pillars, two distinct realms of fantasy, unembroidered by further detail. 25 From the moment the dervishes, disguised warriors of the Hilālī tribe, sit beneath the lotus blossom and dūm palm, the story is wrapped in a surrealistic cloud. After all, they are ‘not themselves’. Yūnis, like the others, is clad in rags, disguised as a praise singer who roams the streets and yet ‘naked under his clothes’. In fact, as the extravagant fantasy develops, even the turrets of the castle and the staircases leading to it are deprived of their material existence and become the transcendental realms of c Azīza’s body. What Paul Hernadi described as the desire for self-gratification and communication of this desire (in this case, by the poet to the audience) may well have been a more critical factor in the analysis of this particular performance than the behaviour of the protagonists.26 If romance is a mental journey to gratification of an erotic dream, then the suggestion that the tale is a fantasy episode which diverges from the heroic discourse of the epic, and then is reined back in, is justified. In reverting sharply to the heroic male tone of bravado at the end, the poet abruptly leaves behind cAzīza’s seductive realm as if it were a world apart. Yūnis is relegated to a vision in the sand, as if he and the ship ‘on the briny sea’ were but a dream in which the fantasy was encapsulated; the moral tensions are suddenly allowed to evaporate and Abu Zayd’s voice calls stridently for war and vengeance. Some poets claim that the tale of cAzīza wa Yūnis is not part of the true sīra and the poets who sing it are ‘not true poets’: ‘It is too frivolous – not heroic enough’, they argue.27 However, as the tale was clearly integral to c Awad’ullah’s repertoire and one frequently performed for me on other occasions, I consider that in this instance the poet chose to perform the tale to make a personal statement about female eroticism and power to the audience of foreign women with whom he was confronted.28 On the day of the recording, a group of us asked him to perform for payment, a traditional form of patronage. After a certain amount of negotiation, he agreed, apparently relishing the opportunity to perform for an audience of women. By bandying around potentially scandalous sexual puns, the poet may even have indulged his own fantasies about seductive women at our expense. He

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may even have assumed that we would not understand his allusions and was endeavouring to subvert in a subtle way the poet–patron relationship we had established. And though the poet might have wished to disarm and embarrass us with this erotic tale, from examination of the text it could be argued that his sympathies did lie with cAzīza as powerful and triumphant. Certain stereotypic gender roles described by al-Ghazālī are reinforced in the tale, but the underlying moral – which could be characterised as ‘restraint in the face of sexual provocation’ – is undermined in the telling, perhaps by the poet’s own fantasies of female sexuality and his own ambivalence. The interpolation and exaggeration of erotic elements throughout the text challenge the voice of restraint. In according cAzīza a voice in which she describes her own body (a ploy that makes the physical descriptions of it more erotic), the poet empowers her and elevates her above Yūnis as principal protagonist. Yūnis strides off into the bazaar to sell his necklace but is easily seduced and then becomes a passive agent who merely reacts to cAzīza’s whims. The poet’s clear choice to revel in cAzīza’s sexuality and downplay Yūnis’s stunning beauty (which in more than one version may stretch to twenty similes) suggests that cAwad’ullah may have chosen to reveal his own personal predilections in the telling.29 Whatever the consequences for the valiant heroes of the epic, it seems that, on this occasion at least, the erotic dream has been allowed to triumph.

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Towards an ethnopoetics of Egyptian sīra performance Awad’ullah, the poet and reciter (rāwī) of the Egyptian epic who performed this tale for me and a coterie of female friends, was a native of the small town of al-Hājis al-BaHrī near Edfu in Upper Egypt. He was no novice to epic performance and once recorded ‘the entire epic’ at the behest of an Egyptian scholar in 110 two-hour tapes. As a former maddāH and performer of the sīrat banī hilāl Arabic epic, cAwad’ullah was a master of the Tār tradition. He composed and performed his tales using his broad-frame drum or Tār to set the rhythmic pulse,30 while modulating his voice to express a range of emotional intensity and to emulate the voices of his characters. cAwad’ullah did not recite in prose as other exponents of the tradition would sometimes do.31 Rather, he composed and performed entirely in the poetic language known as sajc, rhymed prose created through the manipulation and permutation of words, accentuated stress and end-rhyme clusters. In the 1980s in Upper Egypt, the sīrat banī hilāl epic performance tradition was still very much alive, even though the main time for recitation had been reduced as a result of the construction of the Aswan High Dam and the cessation of the annual flood. Its recitation was confined to events such as weddings and boys’ circumcisions. In that same period, enthusiasm for the sīra did not flag among the Upper Egyptian community in Cairo, who listened to the recitations by various famous rāwīs on Cairo radio, particularly through long Ramadan nights. The word sajc in Arabic, which means ‘the cooing of a pigeon or turtledove’ and has been applied to the long and monotonous movement of a camel because of the smooth succession of rhythms and euphonious sound, is characterised, according to Towfic Fahd, by its ‘strange and archaic turn of phrase, rhythmic balanced cadences and use of metaphoric language’.32 Upper Egyptians would have understood the deep meaning of the epic poetry, but educated Caireans, unfamiliar with the epic narrative and archaic and highly poetic language of the sīra, would have been hard-pressed to understand the quatrains composed in sajc. This genre was popular in the mediaeval period and has since been used for the recitation of Islamic conversion tales and saints’ legends, as chapbook versions of these tales attest. Sajc has traditionally been used for recitation of the sīrat banī hilāl and in Coptic hagiography, and so constitutes a core stylistic trait and form intrinsic to Egyptian oral narrative tradition. Before the time of the Prophet Muhammad in ancient Arabia, sajc was the sacred language of the ‘priests’ (kāhin, kuhanā’ ) used for revelations, oracles, imprecations and charms as well as trance prophecy uttered in a state of ecstasy. As Ibn Khaldun observed, sajc was a ‘cadence of words [that would] c

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contribute to the nourishment of the sensibility and imagination in aiding a man to detach himself from the human and retain it in his brief vision of the spiritual world’.33 After the birth of Muhammad, the sajc tradition was retained by the quSāS (story-tellers) whose profession was to recite religious parables and tales derived from the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Despite the Prophet’s invective against its use, sajc was regarded as the most effective mode of rhetoric for the conversion of the populace to Islam because it was believed to invoke the divine. cAwad’ullah ironically uses this same rhythmic form to praise the Prophet in Part B of the story (IIIb): And sing praises to the Hashemite wi maddāH filHašimī ‘illī Muhammad whose cheeks are radiant, muHammad hidūdak luwāmc Who led the priests of prophecy to pray wi hālī ilkuhanā tiSallī And built of the churches, mosques wi bana ilkanāyis jiwāmc Awad’ullah believed that his own calling to recite was divinely inspired. When asked how he had started to sing the sīra, he replied that he had had a vision in a dream in which he was told to ‘yigra’ (lit. ‘Read!), a verb also used to mean ‘intone or recite the Qur’an’. This he interpreted as a sign that recitation was his divine calling.

c

The aesthetics of sīra performance Awad’ullah is able to create a succession of rhymed vowel cadences in recitation, a stylistic quality that in many ways embodies the sajc aesthetic described by Ibn Khaldun. Even without comprehending the sense of the words, one would be struck by the consonances, assonances and configuration of rhymed sounds that recur in the performance of the text. c Awad’ullah performs his tale in quatrains (murabb cāt) based on a stanzaic model of 3+1, interspersed with occasional paired triplets or interlocking couplets (abab). To escape from the constraining stress and rhythm pattern, he constantly varies the length of stanzas and introduces a variety of pauses and acoustic devices to punctuate the tale. In this way, he is able to create a vibrant counterpoint between the syntactic units, the meaning of the lines and their assonance. As fillers, cAwad’ullah frames his quatrains with particles wi (‘and’) lamma (‘when’) and yāk (a general interrogative particle in Sacīdī dialect meaning, ‘Is it true that…?), or exclamations such as yā salām! (Oh my!) and verbs such c

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as šufū! (See!) as well as quoted speech: gāl, gālit, gāllu (‘he/she/they said’). And perhaps as the result of his professional life as a maddāH or praise singer, this poet is a master of acoustic and percussive devices. He invokes drums as a cadence or as an accompaniment through the verse and may introduce a syncopated beat to offset the precise rigour of the stressed line. He may also break the rhythm and invoke silence, drop his drum suddenly, clap his hands or emulate a female voice using high pitch or falsetto. He may moan, shout, adopt unnatural intonation or create unnatural stress, break into a singsong melody, shift the timbre of his voice and speed of recitation, or invoke melisma to highlight the affective response he is seeking. All these acoustic devices are open to manipulation in performance, as are the words. Because of the tripartite root system of the Arabic language, any root may be expanded into a multiplicity of forms (as many as twelve in some cases). Variations in ‘root’ meaning are accomplished through a matrix of transformations (often themselves incremental) and it would seem that poetic variations within the prescribed rules, as found in sajc, are a natural extension of the semantic and syntactic potentialities of the Arabic language. The poet also interposes a multi-layered set of external rhythms on the internal rhythms of line and word stress, both in synchrony and in counterpoint to them. The ‘lines’ appear to ‘break’ at pauses usually signalled by a drum riff or cadence or simply a pause for breath, and at the penultimate line of a quatrain or murabbc, cAwad’ullah signals closure by suppressing the natural pause at the end of the line and proceeding without breath to the final and concluding line of a stanza. The lines, therefore, are relatively fluid, varying in stress and syllable length (from 2 to 4), and, at times, designed to foreground a climax. The stanzas of sīra recitation vary in length from 3 to 5 lines (the longer verses signalling emotional ‘peaks’), with an end-rhyme in which the ‘u’ vowel predominates. This could be described as the structural matrix upon which cAwad’ullah composes his tale. The poet is able to achieve a consistent configuration of end rhyme, either as part of a chain of successive end-rhymed verses, or broken up as a series of interlocking couplets in this way. Chaining stanzas together through repetition of a key line is one of the strategies used by the poet to link events and create narrative coherence. Reiteration of an endrhyme is also the key signal that a pun is intended. Nevertheless, cAwad’ullah’s most notable composition technique is the creation of ‘lines’ that modify the normal syntactical flow of colloquial Sacīdī Arabic. He moulds the shape and syntax of a line in performance, inverting subject and verb (so emulating the Classical Arabic koiné) or deploying other devices to devise a more poetic line. The poet’s intent seems to be to construct a patterned end-rhyme to which the syntax must conform. As a result, the meaning of a line is clustered at the end (a poetic inversion of the natural order of verb and subject) and only becomes intelligible on the utterance of the crucial final syllables.

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The ‘Frame’: ballads and praise poetry End-rhyme appears to be the main structuring principle of the opening ballads (mawāwīl) and the praise poetry or madīH, traditional preludes to sīra recitation. Syntactically, the three ballads act as preludes to the moral and emotional quandaries encountered by the two main characters in the tale, and cAwad’ullah is able to develop salient puns through a configuration of end-rhymes as well as ‘lopped-off’ rhymes – for example, hāl fīh = hālfī – which reinforce the theme. Māwāwīl are conventionally sung in free rhythm and composed as pairs of triplets around a consistent end-rhyme, rich in potential variants. The ‘double entendres’ suggested in these multivalent lines cleverly transform and shift the overt meaning of these ballads, and in this way the ambivalence and moral conflicts to be revealed in the plot are encapsulated in linguistic form and sexual innuendo. The first mawwāl or ballad in Part A clearly establishes the substance of this tale: ‘lascivious deeds’ are consigned to the darkness of the night, even though the performance (perhaps incongruously and unusually) is taking place by day. In the second, the recurrence of the word ramānī in several contexts, the configuration of sounds acquiring more reverberative power with each repetition, suggests both the passion of love that ‘sweeps’ cAzīza away, the ‘ripe pomegranates’(rumānī) of her body and the fact that Yūnis has cast her aside. Sexual passion and resistance to it – the themes of this tale – become encapsulated in this series of homophones and, in fact, the second mawwāl in Part A (cAzīza’s recriminations) constitutes both prelude and epilogue. The third mawwāl of this group also pivots around a set of homophonic oppositions: waSl (tryst or sexual union), aSl (family origins or lineage) and the verb, waSSal (‘reached out to you’), a conjunction of words and meanings that highlights why such passion may never be consummated between them: cAzīza and Yūnis come from opposing tribes. Kinship terms are constantly invoked by the poet in the sīra, both as structuring devices for rhyme, reminders of ‘who’s who’, and to reinforce the fact that such conflicts are inevitable. Nevertheless, the fact that these two elements are repeated in the opening ballads in opposition indicates that this issue should be taken into account when assessing the implications of cAzīza’s passions. In Part B, the opening mawwāl dwells on the disparity between clothed and naked, physical beauty and outward decrepitude. The preponderant dialectic at the root of this tale is embodied in the ‘disclosure’ of the necklace and the clothed body of Yūnis which (as the poet points out) is ‘naked’ beneath. The jewels, like the fruits of the body, will be disclosed three times, in fact, and each time the poet revels in its sensuality. Were it not for the poet’s use of

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paronomasia, which highlights the moral dilemmas posed by sexual desire and nakedness, this praise poem might otherwise resemble a Sufi song in which the inward beauty of the holy man or dervish is contrasted with his outward rags. In this case, though, the poet stresses Yūnis’s vulnerability to temptation, both as an attractive man, ‘stalk of sugar-cane’ and a starving mendicant. These key words configured as kernels of complex meaning are similar to what Albert Lord called ‘acoustic semes’.34 In these mawāwīl, each homophony or ‘double entendre’ draws meaning from the thematic context in which it is framed. The poet sometimes repeats the word, making a distinction in pronunciation to underline the meaning he is particularising in it; for example, hāl fīh (‘empty/naked in it’) and hālfī (‘behind it’ or ‘other than it’ in Sacīdī).35 In other cases, he pronounces the line almost without change, to leave the audience to deduce its meaning. In this way, cAwad’ullah creates a form of acoustic patterning. In the opening ballad of Part C, the poet starts with a pious first line ‘How sweet the invocations to God’s grace’ (alluding to the performance of zikr by the Turuq Sufīyya or Sufi brotherhoods, particularly at the festivals of sheikhs, known as mūlids) but then embarks on more sexually charged puns. The invocation of fate – in this case, the Eye, and its linkage to the images of ‘mouth’ and ‘eye’ (the latter traditionally understood as a euphemism for ‘phallus’) – are clear examples of this.36 In the cluster of stanzas II, the poet affects the voice of cAzīza in reflecting on the poor but handsome dervish who is Yūnis, and linking his fate to the tracing by God with ‘his ivory kohlstick’ on each human eye, a poetic variant on the popular Egyptian conception that destiny is etched ‘on the forehead’ and will be seen. cAwad’ullah weeps tears ‘to “irrigate” his plot’. In a covert sexual pun, he expands this to mean that to every ‘eye’ there is a ‘zīr’, a reference to the hero of another Egyptian epic, IZZīr Sālim, who was an ardent womaniser.37 He then confesses that he laces or ‘irrigates’ his plot with tears, and as a man pursues the ‘zīr’ (chases women) following his inclination. In the final mawwāl, the poet alludes to the ancient notion that the appearance of the Pleiades in the sky is the harbinger of the annual Nile flood that once irrigated the fields. In the Egyptian conception, our soulmates or soul doubles (qarīn/qarīna) are present with us throughout life. They influence our fates, he reminds us, just as the temptations of the Devil haunt us throughout existence. Yet, we are doomed, since our fate as human beings in the Garden of Eden was also predetermined. We have no recourse but to suffer. In the concluding Part D, the poet praises God the creator, exalts the noble ideals of patience and constraint, but queries the virtues of restraint if it makes human beings suffer. He seems to imagine Yūnis casting aside

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his qualms and ‘climbing aboard a ship with its sails unfurled’, but then suggests that restraint is opportune if only for the unconstrained. Perhaps to expiate his own ambivalent thoughts on sin, he sings of his yearning to make a pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina and circle round the Kacaba, something that he, cAwad’ullah, had never been able to achieve in his lifetime. Observing how men are inured to bitterness, he suggests that the lovers did drink ‘from the forbidden goblet’. He concludes by urging us to ‘praise God in his sublime state’ and transforms the well-known proverb, iSSabr Tayyib – ‘Restraint is the right thing to do’ – into iSSabr Tabīb – ‘Restraint is [the best] healer’. The mawāwīl in cAwad’ullah’s recitation therefore play a critical and distinctive role. They prefigure and highlight the issues at stake in the tale: the ‘ripening’ of the fruits of the body in passion, and the physical beauty that leads human beings to dalliance in a world where God and fate have predetermined the actions of human beings. In this tale, cAwad’ullah’s intricate end-rhymes (the style of paronomasia traditionally associated with mawāwīl) seem calculated to embody the fundamental oppositions in Upper Egyptian society: what should be seen and said – propriety – and what should be concealed – sexual desire. The epic scholar Bridget Connolly noted that a dialectical metaphor within the Chadian version of the sīra narrative functioned as a way of moving ‘from the awareness of oppositions towards their resolutions’.38 I would argue that in this erotic tale the poet makes no attempt at resolution; rather, he strives to maintain the dialectic of oppositions. This is not a romance in which hero pursues heroine and everyone lives happily ever after. In this imperfect world, there is no resolution.

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2

The Tale of Khadra al-SharĪfa and the Miraculous Conception of Abu Zayd al-Hilālī

Introduction Awad’ullah’s story is set in the archaic ambiance of seventh-century Arabia in the Najd desert, before the exodus of the Hilālī tribe to Egypt and North Africa. It comprises not only the story of the marriage of Khadra al-Sharīfa to Rizq al-Hilālī and the fabled conception of the hero, Abu Zayd, as a result of divine intervention, but also an ethnographic account of the ancient marriage customs of the tribes of the Najd in rich and intriguing detail. The madīH sets the historical context of the tale. In 622 ad, the Prophet Muhammad, called by the poet,  Ahmad (the superlative derived from the name Muhammad meaning ‘praiseworthy’ – and in this case, ‘the most praiseworthy’) was living in the town of Yathribi (Yasrebī in Egyptian dialect), the original name of the town of Medina. This tale, by pure association, is set close to that oasis. In the tradition of Sufi poets, cAwad’ullah begins with madīH suffused with _g azal. Declaring his love for the Prophet, ‘victor over the oppressed’, he relates how ‘a cloud came’ and the divine revelation in the form of the Holy Qur’an was received by Muhammad from the archangel Gabriel ( Jibrīl, in Arabic) ‘on the night of the 27th of the holy month of Rajeb’. On that sacred night, his divine message was revealed and the Prophet Muhammad is believed to have ascended to heaven (an event known in Arabic as mircāj). The poet introduces what he calls his ‘art’ – ‘as intelligent minds consider it to be’ – and in the next line expands his madiH to the Prophet to praise his mother. This unusual transitional line sets the stage for the tale. c

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The Tale of Khadra al-Sharīfa (qiSSit haDra al-šarīfa) by cAwad’ullah cAbd al-Jalīl I

O he is your helper! You who pray to the Prophet Ahmad Muhammad lives in the town of Yasrebi My livelihood comes from ‘Him whose eyes are “kohled”’ (without kohl)

II

I love the beauty of the Prophet Whoever wishes peace be upon Him I love his beauty… I love the beauty of the Prophet… To Whom we say, ‘On you be peace!’

III

You, supporter of the oppressed! Over whom so ever shall oppress! I sing praise to the Prophet whose light is pure and perfect Muhammad of the tribe of cAdnan A cloud came and enshrouded him

IV

Those are my words My words about the Prophet are apt Ahmad will see Gabriel, on the Great Night of the sacred month of Rajeb

V

I shall begin and ‘perform my art’ about the hero of the Arabs That is, art – only intelligent minds consider it so Art – only those of fine intelligence consider it so

VI

His mother, [mother] of our Hashemite Prophet, On Her be peace!

VII

Said the hero, Rizq son of Nayil, prince of men ‘I wish to marry, leaders of the Hilālī. I wish to marry as I am mature Maybe I could have a daughter Or a son?’

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VIII

Said the heroes, brave men of the Hilālī tribe, ‘The daughter of Sharīf Qirda, king of the Hama tribe The daughter of Sharīf Qirda is from one of the best families She hails from the lineage of our Prophet, the Mustafa, On whom be praise’

IX

The courageous knights of the Hilāl were determined They set off for the Sharīf of Mecca and directed themselves to him For he was a noble man and the Sharīf And they left for his place together

X

They were princes… Princes endowed with the good fortune of generations When he saw them, he pointed them to the diwān



The pride of the tribe, a camel, fattened for the feast Their grandeur on display but it was their food that was generous

XI

At the Sharīf ’s house congratulations and best wishes were exchanged Said Sharīf Qirda, ‘Welcome O Arabs! Whatever you have requested of us, Allah shall provide! Whatever you have requested, we shall accord you the maximum! And we shall call our negotiator’ XII And thus, they were all present, Those from both near and far Said Rizq of the Hilālī, ‘I have come to you with one desire Because of our close relations, and your reception, You whose succour allows the animals to thrive This feast given to us, you who nourish your guests, Your friendly welcome swells the honour on both sides’ Rizq, son of Nayil, the Hilālī said XIII

Sharīf Qirda said: ‘I want four thousand and five hundred male camels and two hundred young she-camels Five hundred of the best stallions And four hundred more we can use to bear loads These and those, O you of fine intellect’

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XIV

All this because of greed... greed for slaves and servants All this because of greed for slaves And oh, what lamentations there were Over the dowry of the noble Khadra until he declared himself content

XV

‘And a hundred Ethiopian slave girls shall come from the land of Upper Egypt And a hundred Mameluke slaves shall come to us here These hundred Mameluke slaves shall come to satisfy our request To serve the elite princes of high rank And all of this in the aim, O Hilālī, of binding our lineages more closely’



XVI

And the wealth of Khadra’s dowry, they stored away together Khadra’s dowry of gold in a strongbox was stored They sent her to the harim and the elders of the Arabs enquired: ‘If it were your intent, O Hilālī, to link our lineages in marriage Then shall the night of consummation take place after evening prayer’ (The night of consummation – truly, it was his duty to provide the feast)

XVII

(The Sharīf said:) ‘From the dowry of Khadra, born from my very flesh and blood, If she were to bring forth a male heir who would grow up and be strong. He would be a young lad who would deceive [his] enemies He would be a young lad fated to reign over men From the lineage from our Prophet, the Mustafa On whom be peace!’

XVIII

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The Hilālī Rizq, prince of men, said, ‘If you’d said any more, I should’ve said, “God shall provide!” If you’d said any more, I’d have had to say, “This is my obligation!”’

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XIX

For him they brought the ma’zūni And counted up the gold At the appointed time, the women brought her forward and she became his wife The daughter of the Sherif, Qirda, became his wife The honourable Khadra, her chastity intact In an elegant palanquin of kings she was propelled along

XX

On top of the high embankment, festooned at its summit On top of ‘the high embankment’ built with a wide girth She whiles away the night with him, saying ‘How I enjoy your company, my love’

XXI

The white chemise is spotted with a droplet of blood ‘Ahh, O night…!’ The white chemise swimming in blood From the lineage of our Prophet, the Mustafa, On whom be peace!

XXII

For one year, the noble Khadra remained in good health And then she gave birth She brought forth Shīha Through the will of God Muhammad, on whom be praise!

XXIII

Pray to Him, to the Pure One To whom his Lord gave happiness and receptivity to divine grace Say I, a praise singer who recounts the saga of the Prophet With artful words intelligent minds consider clever

XXIV

Khadra gave birth She gave birth to a daughter, Shīha, with great joy And she remained there with Rizq, the Hilālī in marital bliss

XXV And after that, she remained for eleven years Barrenii Yet true to her promise that God shall be the judge, Barren Yet true to her promise that the generous Lord shall rule: i ii

He who performs the wedding ceremony. Lit. ‘misshapen, handicapped’.

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‘My womb is subject to the will of Him who passes judgement Be it favourable or harsh’

[And then one day] They called for their mounts… Rizq, prince of the Hilālī,

He finds the princes, the other horsemen, rushing round together! He finds the horsemen of the Banī Hilāl Their sons accompanying them XXVII

The Arabs are seated in the diwān Why, from happiness and pride, they were singing Their children on the carpets playing Celebrating the birth feast in the open airiii Like leopards in the expanse of open desert air And their fathers clapped with joy and happiness

XXVIII

Rizq the Hilālī saw them and the sight cut deep into his ‘wound’ Returning to his tent, his tears started to flow His tears flow down again inside the sanctuary of his tent He weeps and they soak his cheek, and his handkerchief

XXIX

The honourable Khadra departs, her tears flowing like a veil As beautiful as she was, her glow vanished in the breeze As great as was her love, by God, it was strange She weeps and mourns for things wished for but not received

XXX

‘Tell me, why do your tears flow, my love? O Rizq, why do you weep, why? What do you intend by your tears? Rizq, why do you weep? You man of great dignity Your tears flow down [your] cheeks and your anxieties are bared’

XXXI

He said to her, ‘O Khadra, I had a wish when I came… In so much as there is no horseman alive who is not courageous There is not one who would not imagine his own son playing with him

iii

As a sequence to the preceding image of the children playing like young leopards, this line is punned and can also be translated as ‘Like lions but in the open expanses’.

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No horseman who would not imagine his own son playing with him on the carpets I looked around and saw my daughters, only them and no others’ XXXII

The tears of the noble Khadra flowed down and then vanished In his rage, Rizq, son of Nayil, left her, distraught Rizq, the son of Nayil, in his rage, left her with no response

XXXIII

Now Khadra was intelligent She had a brain in her head which would have abandoned her Were not for Shema, daughter of al-Hasab A woman of esteemed lineage

XXXIV Khadra tugged at her clothes Her rosy cheeks wiped of dew The roses on her cheeks as crimson red as a prostitute’s rouge, wiped of dew Shema goes inside and finds Khadra weeping, despairing XXXV

Said she, ‘O honourable lady, why are you weeping? No one is lost to you, my cousin and no one has wandered off and not returned No loved one has been lost to you from this good land Khadra, why do you weep? Why do your tears flow down?’

XXXVI She said to her, ‘O Shema, I am distraught My heart has been ripped open at its core and my innards are melting My heart has been ripped open and my tears flow in a torrent My tears spill on to the carpet, have you seen?’ XXXVII ‘If I were to complain, If I were to complain, Ahh… O my nights! If I complained to the mountain, for whom would I lament? If I complained to the sea, would its waters cease to flow? I admit that I grieve for myself, and my tears… My tears spill on to the carpet, O Shema And they have soaked my cheeks’

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XXXVIII ‘O cousin Khadra, Your Lord is compassionate and wreaks miracles Whoever abandons her desire shall live bereft Whoever asks a favour from God, it shall be granted XXXIX ‘My Lord chooses who shall receive his divine grace How does He decide who shall be blessed? Through prayer The person who prays and says “O Lord!” stands out by dint of prayer The one who beseeches Him, [saying] “He who shall be glorified, He who shall be manifest” ’ XL She said to her, ‘O Khadra, stand up and leave behind your cares Tomorrow, we shall go to the river And we shall gaze at its pure brilliance Tomorrow, we shall proceed, you draped in gold For you we shall find water which shimmers as it flows’ XLI

With the one hundred and ninety maidens from the Banī Hilāl tribe Why, if you had seen the poise of Khadra together with them all But then see how Khadra responds when they come to the confluence of four rivers They discover a waterfall with birds flocking all around

XLII

Yet amongst them, one bird, O beauty! A black bird circling round Most of the birds had flown off apart from one – a kite The flock of birds had flown, all but this one, its cheeks exposed Dark-brown in countenance and dark in all its features

XLIII

Shema says, ‘Maidens, beseech the Lord who creates his slaves, the jinn – Those who without eyes can see, Those who without eyes can see, Those who without eyes can see The Lord creates his servant spirits in a state of awakening

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He comprehends the world from the trail of ants and a droplet of dew’ XLIV Khadra says, ‘Give me a young child like that bird there Black like that bird To reign over Tunis and the Wadi Hama! Let him reign over Tunis through the blade of a sword! And let them say that she gave birth to a son From Rizq al-Hilālī, their esteemed leader! XLV

‘O You who healed Jobiv and saved him from misfortune! O You who healed Jonah and saved him from the whale! O You who liberated Jacob from his blind ignorance! O You who raised Idris (Elijah) to the heights of heaven! O You to whom Lord Moses prayed: “My Lord, O my Lord!”

XLVI

‘When Pharaoh came, his army at his flank When Pharaoh came, his army enraged He hurled his stick into the wide expanse of ocean And it parted…

XLVII

‘My Lord is generous Otherwise no companion would you have… Nor son Only through you, Omniscient One who makes the water flow Only through you, my Lord, who knows what flows through the mind You who excite the breeze and propel the clouds and rain I ask of you, O Light of glimmering beauty…

XLVIII ‘I love the beauty of the Prophet Praise be upon him!’ And here the tale ends.

iv

He says a word which sounds like jūna and therefore the poet may have made a mistake: in Arabic, Job is ‘ayyūb.

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Epic as ethnography: gender and rites of passage among the Banī Hilāl Unlike the tale of cAzīza and Yūnis, the story of Khadra al-Sharīfa (haDra alširīfa) and the mystical conception of the hero Abu Zayd in the Najd desert is an integral part of the sīrat banī hilāl and one that establishes the hero as a strong character born from the union of human and supernatural forces.1 In the story, the Arab tribe known as the Banī Hilāl are encamped in the Wadi Hama, not far from the home of the Sharīf (or Sheriff ) of Mecca. Prince Rizq, son of Nayil, wishes to marry and so it is proposed that he marry the daughter of the Sherif of Mecca, Qirda, King of the Hama, and a descendant of the Prophet. As is customary amongst the Bedouin, the envoys are greeted with a feast of a fattened camel and exchange of mujammalāt – ritually performed compliments – as a prelude to negotiations over bride price. The Arabs celebrate the Night of the Henna, and the poet reproduces the eulogistic comments that characterise reciprocal exchange. However, the Sherif of Mecca is greedy and demands thousands of camels and hundreds of horses for his entourage, at which point the poet stops to critique the greed of the rich and the feigned lamentations of the father over the departure of his daughter. The Sherif requires a bevy of 100 Ethiopian slave girls and Mameluke slaves from Upper Egypt to ‘serve’ the princes and bind their two lineages together. This invokes memories of the Middle Ages in Egypt during the time of the Mamelukes and the notorious trade in nubile Ethiopian women for slaves. The dowry of gold is presented in a strongbox and the night of consummation (lēlit al-duhla) is to be celebrated that night after evening prayers. In a prophetic speech, the Sherif of Mecca prefigures the birth of the conquering hero Abu Zayd, speaking of the ‘fruit’ of their union as ‘a child who would grow up to be strong … a suitable young lad who could deceive his enemies … a young lad fated to rule over men’, a wish that will eventually be fulfilled. The ma’zūn, or justice of the peace, performs the wedding ceremony after the counting of the gold, and the Harīm drapes the bride in wedding finery. At this point, the bride, whose virtue is intact, is named for the first time as Khadra, ‘the feminine Green One’. Garbed in the traditional Hulalīyya veil, she is propelled along on a regal palanquin to meet her husband. The bride and bridegroom consummate their marriage. Her white shift is ‘spotted with a droplet of blood’, the traditional proof of the bride’s virginity and later is ‘swimming in blood’. One year later, a baby girl, Shīha, is born. A despondent Khadra acknowledges the fact that the fruit of her womb is dependent on God and fate. She remains childless for a further eleven years and then one day, Rizq sees children playing at an exultant sibūc or seventhday birth celebration (a tradition that remains wholly Egyptian in character).

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Children are playing and men from his tribe are cavorting about on horseback; elders, seated in the tribal council or diwān, have begun to sing. Rizq wishes he could celebrate the birth of his son, laments his lack of a male heir and breaks down in tears. Khadra, too, becomes enveloped in tears and laments that she has brought him only one girl child. Rizq becomes enraged and leaves her. In desperation, Khadra goes to Shema, her cousin, doubtful that anything could help her. Shema suggests that Khadra, accompanied by 190 virgins of the Banī Hilāl, must perform a visit to the place where four rivers intersect. They must ask God to invoke the ‘servants of God’, the jinn who ‘without eyes can see’, to help her. On spying a singular black kite of striking appearance and brown countenance, Khadra is moved to make her request. She prays,

Give me a young child like that bird there Black like that bird To reign over Tunis and the Wadi Hama! Let him reign over Tunis through the blade of a sword! And let them say that she gave birth to a son From Rizq al-Hilālī, their esteemed leader!

In that way, her ignominy will end. She prays to be saved like Prophets before her, reciting a litany invoking the memory of many of the miracles the Lord has wreaked in the past:

O You who healed Job and saved him from misfortune! O You who healed Jonah and saved him from the whale! O You who liberated Jacob from his blind ignorance! O You who raised Idris (Elijah) to the heights of heaven! O You to whom Lord Moses prayed: ‘My Lord, O my Lord!’



When Pharaoh came, his army at his flank When Pharaoh came, his army enraged He hurled his stick into the wide expanse of ocean And it parted…

By invoking memories of early prophets from Judaeo-Christian history, the poet adds another rich layer of allusion to the historicity of this narrative. Khadra prays to ‘Him who makes the water flow’ (the divine propulsion of water above and underground being the core at the heart of healing spells):

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My Lord is generous Otherwise no companion would you have… Nor son Only through you, Omniscient One who makes the water flow Only through you, my Lord, who knows what flows through the mind You who excite the breeze and propel the clouds and rain I ask of you, O Light of glimmering beauty…



‘I love the beauty of the Prophet Praise be upon him!’

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The story is left dangling at this point. We (the audience) know, however, that a male child, who is black, is born to Khadra soon afterwards. The son who will become the hero, Abu Zayd, is black, yet both parents are white. This becomes a scandal, aspersions are cast on Khadra’s virtue, and Khadra and her son are spurned by the tribe.

Rites of passage and the woman’s voice In this rich, ethnographic landscape of tribal Arabia, enhanced by the inclusion of Sacīdī rites of passage, marriages are arranged and consummated, guests are feasted by their Bedouin hosts on a freshly slaughtered animal and seemingly outrageous demands for dowry are negotiated. The wedding rituals (the lēlit al-Hinna or ‘Night of Henna’ (preceding the marriage) and lēlit al-duhla, the ‘Night of Entry’ or night of consummation) follow the traditional Upper Egyptian model, with the ritual dressing of the bride in an Upper Egyptian garment called Habara, described by Edward Lane in the nineteenth century as a ‘wide piece of dark brown wool’2 and the procession of the bride in her hawdāj to the bridegroom for the ritual consummation. Faithful to the tradition of the West Bank of Luxor, in this story, the bride wears a white chemise. In the traditional funerary laments of Upper Egypt – known as cidīd – the deceased husband and, implicitly, his virility, is sometimes alluded to as my ‘high river bank’ or ‘embankment’ that is not razed in the rising waters (in that case, in the annual inundation). At the breaking of the hymen, droplets of blood emerge, the proof of the bride’s virginity required to seal the nuptial bond.3 A girl child is born, but after eleven years during which no male child is born to Khadra, on the occasion of a sibūc, the traditional Egyptian seventhday birth feast, the men of the tribe celebrate the birth of a new male heir. According to the tale, Bedouin tribesmen canter around the encampment

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and male elders sing joyously in the tribal council, and the climax of the story occurs. As he watches the celebration, Prince Rizq realises that he has no male heir and breaks down in tears. Khadra weeps for her fate through evocative lamentations but then contacts Shema to help her, realising that she cannot resolve her dilemma alone and despairing that even the traditional spirits of the mountains and springs, when invoked, might not intervene on her behalf. As many Upper Egyptian women have felt compelled to do in similar circumstances, Khadra is persuaded to seek intercession from supernatural forces. Shema suggests that she invokes the ‘servants of the Lord’, the jinn who have the capacity to ‘see without eyes’, to give her grace. They proceed, along with a bevy of young virgins, to the sacred confluence of four rivers. There, the jinn dwell. Khadra espies a singular black kite and makes sudden imprecations to the Lord to give her a male child in its image, a decision that leads to the birth of Abu Zayd as well as to her own demise. In cAwad’ullah’s performance, the imaginative elaborations of what could be termed the woman’s voice are indicative of the poet’s sensitivity to his mainly female audience. In his desire to attract our interest and address what he imagines might be our concerns, he interweaves fragments of a particularly expressive women’s genre, the funerary laments known as cidīd, into the fabric of his tale to express Khadra’s sense of sorrow and regret. He accentuates the despair caused by the ineluctable hand of fate, since the lack of a male offspring for a woman can signal disaster and wreak havoc on a marriage union. He broaches the issue of infertility: contacts with the jinn – usually through a sheikh (šēh) or sheikha (šēha) – that is, a visionary or intermediary. Khadra’s prayer echoes ancient beliefs, once prevalent in the tribes of Arabia, among which is the notion that jinn inhabit certain sacred sites (mountains and the confluences of rivers) and are empowered to convey fertility. By skilfully integrating the legends of the Prophets Job, Jonah, Jacob and Moses (reverberations from ancient Judaeo-Christian chronicles) into Khadra’s prayer, the poet signals the fact the epic is still firmly anchored in the tradition of heterogeneous historic and religious narrative. In this particular case, cAwad’ullah shows with consummate skill how a bare plot can be embellished within an expansive imaginative frame by interpolating vivid archaisms, other tropes including lament, and fragments of folk practice into the crux of the action, and in so doing creates a unique and engaging version of the tale.

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3

The Tale of St. George and the Dragon

This legend was recorded in Luxor in November 1982 with cAmm Rizq Būlos, a Copt and weaver from the Coptic town of Naqada, renowned within the community for his ability to recite the stories and religious legends of the saints.1 He states his expertise as follows, echoing the phrase used by alThaclabī, the mediaeval chronicler of Islamic saints and prophets:

I do not know the history of Luxor I know the history of the saints (al-qaddisīn) the prophets (alanbīya’) and the apostles (al-rusūl )2

Anchoring his tale firmly in the annals of Coptic ecclesiastical history, Rizq first describes the martyrdoms of the early Coptic saints under the Roman emperor, Diocletian, who worshipped idols.3 He then foregrounds his tale by describing the ritual exorcism that is witnessed in the annual mūlid of Mārī Jirjis4 (as St. George is known in Egypt) which takes place at the monastery of Dimuqrat in Upper Egypt.5 As in the ancient Egyptian and Graeco-Roman pilgrimage tradition known as incubation,6 whereby pilgrims would spend the night in a temple or holy place in the hope of seeing a vision of the deity, a tradition has evolved in which the sick and mentally ill from the region come to sleep in the monastic church throughout the mūlid, in the hope of being cured.7 …There is given to the Christian, a sign (išāra) And given to the Muslim, a sign… If he is Muslim, a crescent shape will blot his clothing, If he is Christian, a cross of blood will blot his clothing The crescent of blood which blots on him is the sign of his healing8 Amm Rizq equates the vision of the saint spearing a dragon with the piercing of devils and their expulsion from the afflicted. The saint uses his power to exorcise devils, and in this way the tale resembles the version recorded by de Voragine in the fourteenth century.

c

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The Tale of St. George and the Dragon (qiSSit marī jirjis) by cAmm Rizq Būlos I

I begin in the name of our Lord God From my mind and the conscience of my heart



I summon the words from within me There is pride among the brave



What have I to do with the world? My heart loved you, O Roman



O you with the thundering voice You are my treasure and my resource

II

O listeners to the story, you people of pride In Beirut… [A.R.: ‘This is the first story – I shall tell you his first story about the serpent, his major exploit’]



You listening to the story, people of pride In Beirut there was a river flowing down Beirut which is part of Lebanon Like the river of the city of Egypt It brings water to the farmers in their fields

III

In the river, living there, was a dragon [E.W.: ‘caūn?’] [A.R.: ‘It’s like a huge serpent but one which blocks up the river with its presence’]

… living there a dragon He came and lived there, the accursed one The accursed one; that is, the Devil

He lived there, the accursed one Iblīs who opposed the faiths

IV

He comes to them on the first day of the month Making them feel depressed, making them feel oppressed

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He blocks up the water with his tongue And people cower in front of him And people are terrified by his bulk And by his shrieking in the dried-up river beds

V

He demands a bride every year They must adorn her They must dress her in her trousseau And make her ready And lead her down to him by the river

VI

He takes the bride Fondles her for a while And after he ‘plays’ with her He ravishesi her And abandons her And the next year he comes to them again

VII

The people of the town cast lots Every year in the same fashion they cast lots Until the last lot falls to the daughter of the king himself That is, the king of Beirut

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VIII The lot came to the daughter of the king They went to him, the viziers They said to him, ‘Rise, go to your daughter and dress her With those proud heroines acquaint her Outside the town let her be seated So that he may cast eyes on her, the serpent’ IX He (the king) said, ‘My daughter is dear to me How shall I thrust her out beyond the wall? So that he may seize her from me, that treacherous beast! I have in the world no other heirs Neither daughters nor sons’

i

lit. ‘eats’ her.

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X

They said to him, ‘O King – See where the daughters of King Yaghuthii finished up! Where are the daughters of servants of the bahamūt? Where are the daughters of the priests of graven idols? Where are the daughters of those who furnish the diwān? Where are the daughters of the keepers of the garden? Where are the daughters of your servants – your viziers? Their grave is the belly of the serpent’ XI He said, ‘Rise, daughter, and get dressed To the “bridegroom” let her be led Let him ravish her in front of my eyes’ XII

‘O mother, spear me with a lance! (This is her mother) O mother, spear me with a lance! And you, father, strike hard the blow! I would rather see the dust of the tomb That is, the grave Than the fang of the serpent’

XIII He said, ‘O my daughter, why so distressed? You pierce my heart with such words I grieve for my daughter That I should lead her down to the serpent’ XIV

They locked to her the doors And draped on her two hundred amulets And wept for her, her loved ones Both for her family and her neighbours



They unplaited their hair, the women And dressed in black and the garb of mourning They went, all of them, to the Sultan To mourn her plight, O my brothers

ii

Yaghuth, meaning ‘He who helps’, was the name of an idol referred to in the Qur’ān that was extant during the time of the Prophet Noah. The name may have been inserted to lend an archaic note to this rhymed litany.

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XV He said to her, ‘O mother, rise and bring me the crown of my kingdom No one for my daughter shall weep For my daughter I shall sacrifice my kingdom I have entrusted all to the Roman’ That is, Mārī Jirjis XVI

‘Rise and bring me earrings with tinkling bells Earrings to adorn her ears, encrusted with pearl and coral Rise and bring me bracelets for her hands, those of alabaster And whoever should see her, O listeners, would be intoxicated By her beauty, O my brothers’



They wrapped her in a Habara They were accustomed to dressing the bride in a Habara And led her down to the serpent

XVII

She peered with her innocent eyes The young girl peered with her eyes Into the heart of the wilderness And espied a young man in glittering gold That is, Mārī Jirjis Swathed, ‘dripping’ in silk He has come to her side out of duty

XVIII She said to him, ‘O my beloved, go and leave me here! Leave me in peace and abandon me! I fear for you, O my soul! The serpent, I fear, may take you away from me’ XIX He said to her, ‘I have come to meet the serpent out of duty It is He who has sent me I shall kill him in the dried-up river beds’ XX

After a while, there appeared the dragon It opened wide its mouth, O listeners And parched the grass of the fields with its fire

XXI

The girl began to tremble To this creature she had fallen victim

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By this dragon she was being stalked And her heart took flight, O my brothers

XXII He raised her to her feet, the hero, with his hand He said to her, ‘Rise up, my treasure!’ He said to it, ‘Welcome, O Sheikh of the Dragons! You have given us the pleasure of your company, O serpent! You have “honoured” us, O Satan

There she is – she has come to you regaled! From her castle she has been compelled to Why, O Sheikh, this dilly-dallying? Seduce her and leave in peace!’

XXIII It said to him, ‘How shall I “take” her when you are standing guard? So that you can spear me, O knight? Why, do you think I am anxious to die? I shall keep far, far away And not come again to these parts Nor to the shores of Sham’ XXIV He said to it, ‘What do I care what your intentions are? Am I keeping you from your evil deeds? The girl stands in wait for you Take her and leave in peace! Take her and leave, O heathen! And I shall leap on to my mare and ride off! And you shall remain in the dried-up river beds’ XXV He said to you, ‘Jirjis came to him out of duty Jirjis speared him in the pupil of his eye The accursed one screamed and the wadi quaked At the wounding in the eye {of the accursed oneiii The blood flowed and formed a cross And the river rose up and overflowed the banks’ iii

This is a pun on ‘eye’ (al-cain) and accursed (l cain), so both meanings are included.

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XXVI The people of the town said to him, ‘What a terrifying thing! That is the blood of the Sultan’s daughter! He has taken the young girl, that terrifying beast And look – he has come and will come again next year That is, he’ll come here again next year and do the same thing again!’ XXVII He said to her, ‘Stand up my treasure! Strut with pride in the dried up wadis! Tell your father and mother He has killed him, the Roman hero!’ XXVIII Someone said to him, ‘That is your daughter prancing around! On her head is a green burnoose He has placed it over her head, the Roman’ XXIX

They went and found the dragon in the ‘sea’iv It had blocked the ‘sea’

XXX The people of the town gathered round to lift up the dragon They cannot – they cannot lift it out of the ‘sea’ XXXI

He went and pierced it with his lance And lifted it on to the head of the young girl And went down with her to the town

XXXII He, Mārī Jirjis himself, came to her again… She said to him, ‘Uhh… you know… I would like to marry you, Seeing the sort of man you are’ XXXIII He said, ‘Keep your distance! I am the Roman hero! My “bride” is innocent and pure iv

baHr (lit. ‘sea’) is used in Egypt to denote the Nile.

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And it is she to whom I have entrusted my deeds all my life, all my time It is she who helped me in the slaying of the serpent’



And who helped him? The Virgin Mary is the one who helped him It was she who helped him!

XXXIV He said, ‘I do not marry, that is… I don’t… People like me do not get married So that we can receive the crown (of martyrdom)’ XXXV The moment her mother saw her The serpent on top of her head (Coiled) like a water pipe As high as a pigeon-cote The mother said, ‘O, what a terrible thing! And as high as a mountain! How could you have lifted it?’ XXXVI She said to her, ‘Sing ululations to him, O Khadra [Her mother’s name was Khadra] He killed him, the Roman hero!’ XXXVII Her father said, ‘I have placed my faith in God Jirjis, the Roman’ He smashed the idols – all of them And then, what did he do? He converted to the Christian religion [Response of Luxor colleague: ‘True!’]

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The Egyptian St. George: intertextuality and etiological myth in an Upper Egyptian saint’s tale This tale is set in Beirut where the ‘dragon’ blocks the river with its presence. This river is ‘like the river of maSr’ (Cairo/Egypt): ‘it flows’ and ‘gives drink’ to the fellāHīn in the fields. The landscape of the tale is both alien and familiar. In the river is a creature he calls caūn (which has been glossed by another scholar to mean ‘guardian’)9 but when the meaning of the word is queried, cAmm Rizq explains it as ‘a large snake that blocks up the river with his presence’.10 His use of the word (and other glosses) suggest, however, that the ‘dragon’ may have been perceived as a ‘guardian’ of the subterranean waters at Aswan, as the ancient Egyptians once believed: both a protector and liberator of the annual flood. Rizq calls the beast a variety of names seemingly derived from Christian hagiographic legends: Iblīs, ‘the Devil’; aš-šitān, ‘Satan’; tannīn, ‘dragon’; and ti cbān, ‘serpent’. This dragon is also ‘the accursed one’ (al-mal cūn), an epithet the historian, al-Thaclabī uses to denigrate the pagan god Aflun (Apollo),11 kāfir (‘an atheist’) and ‘he who opposes religions’. This tale is formulated as a conflict between Christianity and atheism; good versus evil. Every year, the dragon/devil blocks the water with his tongue, terrifying the populace and shrieking from the dried-up river beds (wadīyān), demanding a ‘bride’. They must choose one, adorn her and lead her to him at the river, where he will fondle her, rape her and eat her. And the next year, he will come to them again. This dragon is voracious and unrelenting. Appeasement of a deity, in particular, the god of the Nile, through the gift of a young virgin is a motif that resonates through post-Pharaonic Egyptian history. The sacrifice of a virgin to the rising waters of the Nile was an act of propitiation celebrated in Cairo in pre-Islamic times at the feast of Wafā’ al-Nīl (a name that literally means the ‘fulfilment of the Nile’s promise’).12 On the specific day of the rise of the Nile, prior to the opening of the flood gates, a virgin would be hurled into the water and sacrificed to the Nile ‘deity’ to ensure a good flood.13 This rite continued until the advent of the Arab conqueror, cAmr ibn al-cĀs, in the seventh century ad who proscribed this barbaric practice. There is no mention of this sacrificial rite occurring earlier in ancient Egyptian historical records, so it must have been introduced later, further evidence that Rizq’s story would seem to be set in Egypt in the time of the Romans, rather than in ‘the tale world’14 of Sham, as he asserts at the beginning. The ritual persisted in subsequent epochs but in various symbolic forms: a doll ‘bride’ or carūsa, made of wood and dressed in bridal clothes, would be hurled into the Nile and, as Edward Lane reported in the nineteenth

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century, a clay effigy representing ‘the bride’ would also be ‘submerged’ into the rising waters, at which point the ‘marriage’ of the earthen bride with the inundation would take place: a conical pillar of earth [would be] raised in front of the dam,15 with a flat top on which maize or millet was planted… As the water rose, ‘the Aaroosah (‘bride’) would be washed away before the river reached its crest’.16 This tradition has its origins in the phenomenon known as the ‘Osiris bed’, an earth bed that was planted with seeds (Fig. 2). Once irrigated, this artefact was considered a symbol of the rebirth of Osiris.17 At some point, this ancient Egyptian tradition of the Osirian bed was transformed from a symbolic rite into a brutal ritual, with gruesome consequences for the young victims.

Fig. 2  Bed of Osiris illustrating the crop of grain emerging from the body of the dead Osiris

This particularly barbaric aspect of the tale, the sacrifice of a virgin to a serpent deity, is not an isolated motif in the Upper Egyptian context. As in the story, in one particular mūlid, a local ‘virgin’ would be presented to the serpent sheikh every year so that he could consummate a ritual ‘wedding’ on the occasion of his annual birth feast. It was believed that the ‘persona’ or living spirit of the sheikh known as Sheikh al-Haridi at Tahta in Upper Egypt had metamorphosed into that of an agatho-daemon, a serpent whose role was to guard the rocky escarpment on the East bank of the Nile. This is

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a tradition that may have continued in this small enclave until the early part of the twentieth century, according to travellers’ accounts. The concept of divine consummation on the day of a saint’s rebirth was not only linked to the observance of this particular mūlid. A similar act of mystical consummation was believed by some to happen annually in Luxor on the occasion of the mūlid of Sīdī Abu’l Hajjāj. This would take place between the sheikh, who arrived in the thirteenth century and became its patron, and the legendary abbess and matriarch of Luxor, Sitt Tarzah, who reigned over Luxor prior to its conquest by the sheikh. Their bodies are imagined to repose in nuptial harmony in their adjacent graves above the first pylon of Luxor temple.18 In the New Kingdom in Luxor, the actual Pharaoh and his consort would re-enact the ‘mystical’ consummation of the god (Amun-Rec) and the ‘god’s wife’ (Mut) in the ‘birth room’ of Luxor temple, a sacred chamber located a stone’s throw away from the shrine of Abu’l Hajjāj. This act, by which the lifeforce and power of the king could be regenerated and renewed, was regarded as the culmination of this ancient festival celebrating the gods of the Theban triad and at one point in its long history, the key to the arrival of the lifegiving inundation. It could be argued that popular belief in the regenerative power of the divine spirit of the sheikh still lingers in the minds of devotees during the present day mūlid or ‘birth-feast’. In Rizq’s story, the dragon’s demand for a bride was also cyclical. Every year, the dragon would arrive in the dried up wadi, having blocked up the river with his tongue. He would then shriek and tyrannically claim his bride. This time, when the lots are cast, fate has it that it must fall to the king. Like Jephtha in the Old Testament Book of Judges, he has no other offspring and must sacrifice his only child.19 In the English fairy-tale entitled ‘St. George of Merrie England’, the king is called Ptolemy, the name of the Graeco-Roman emperor of Egypt, c. 323–283 bc, a perfectly apt title for the king in Rizq’s tale, who is otherwise known as the ‘king of Beirut’ or ‘the Sultan’. Despite the loss of his only offspring, the viziers do not support the king in his desire to renege but demand that he sacrifice his daughter, just as the other daughters of the Jahīlī court have done: ‘The daughters of King Yaghuth (a name possibly derived from the title of the pre-Islamic god and idol),20 ‘the daughters of servants of the bahamūt, daughters of priests … keepers of the garden, those who furbish the diwān’, they have all ‘found their grave in the belly of the serpent’, a phrase reminiscent of the metaphor used to describe the voraciousness of King Nebuchadnezzar: ‘he has filled his belly with delicates … swallowed me up like a dragon’ (tannīn)’.21 cAmm Rizq offers no cogent explanation as to what bahamūt refers. ‘Yagūt/bahamūt’, is a convenient end-rhyme. Yet any conception that bahamūt, the giant fish from mediaeval cosmology which supports the bull upholding the earth might be

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intended by the narrator seems not entirely justified.22 Yet an allusion to the ‘behemoth’ or bahamūt (a water-horse/hippopotamus) in the Book of Job (cAyyub): Behold Behemoth which I made as I made thee … the first of the works of God lends support to the claims that an Egyptian counterpart might have existed.23 And while some linguistic historians have postulated that an ancient Egyptian animal with a name like bahamūt might have existed (‘p-ih-mw’ or ‘pehemu’ ), others contend that ‘no firm textual evidence for proposing this exists’.24 The contemporary Egyptian word meaning ‘animal’ nevertheless does exist (ba-he-ma’), and is most commonly used in Upper Egyptian dialect in the plural (bahīm). The occurrence of this word in Rizq’s story does not constitute by any criterion an ‘ancient’ textual example, but its inclusion does point to the existence of a word approximating to ‘p/b-ih-mu’ in the CopticEgyptian lexicon. If a hippopotamus had been meant, then it might have been in the tradition of a sacred or deified animal ministered to by hudām (‘servants’). During the Ptolemaic period in Egypt, as Herodotus observed, hippopotami were kept as sacred beasts. Moreover, during the Hyksos occupation of the Egyptian delta during the reign of King Seqenen Rec Tao in the Second Intermediate period in Upper Egypt c. 1640–1550 bc, the Thebans revived the symbolic and ritual harpooning of hippopotami in a pool or canal as a patriotic gesture intended ‘to guarantee the safety of the Egyptian monarchy’.25 This gesture reputedly offended the Hyksos king, who was called Apophis (apparently named after the Egyptian god of chaos), resident in the north of Egypt at the time, and may even have induced a conflict.

Ancient Egyptian dragon-slayers The slaying of a serpent/monster/dragon has been a recurrent iconographic motif throughout Egyptian mythological history. Narrative tradition also highlights a succession of tales which concern a dragon that controls the flow of Nile water and involve a succession of attempts by deities to slay it. In one of the earliest stories, the ‘eye’ of the god Rec fights the dragon known as the god Apep/Apap in Egyptian (Apophis in Greek), the embodiment of primeval chaos, evil and darkness.26 With his victory, the blocked-up water is liberated and flows freely.27 From as early as the First Dynasty, the inchoate monster of these narratives is transformed into a hippopotamus and depicted as such in tomb representations. In these mythological representations, the king is seen

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harpooning a hippopotamus in order to defeat what is described as ‘enemies and demons which were believed to roam abroad in the period prior to the inundation’, to ensure the flow of the Nile. Many later representations show the Egyptian god, Horus, brandishing the harpoon, but in earlier sketches, the god Set, the evil brother of Horus, is depicted as slaying the monster known as Apophis, as part of a daily ritual (Fig. 3). At that time, it was believed that Apep/Apophis, the serpent monster, would regenerate after death as the forces of evil could not be defeated for ever. Apep represented an immortal primeval force, the embodiment of darkness, in constant conflict with the sun-god, and one associated with a terrifying roar, the swallowing up of water in the underworld and the instigation of frightening, natural events (including earthquakes). This succession of motifs corresponds almost exactly to Rizq’s description of the Nile-swallowing

Fig. 3  Seth spearing the serpent of darkness ‘whose coils support the heaven’

dragon in our tale. Over the millennia, the two ancient Egyptian gods, Set and his brother Horus, engaged in many battles, which became known as ‘The Contendings of Horus and Set’. Horus’s attempts to harpoon Set in his disguise as a hippopotamus did not succeed but finally, Horus triumphed by plunging the harpoon directly into the eye of Set. The puncturing of the ‘eye’ seemed to have been essential if the source of evil was to be obliterated for ever. Ancient Egyptian dragon-slaying deities were not always male, however. The goddess Isis, too, was reputed to have slain the god Apap/Apophis at night when he was coiled around the Tree of Life and Light. The woman shown piercing a rearing serpent with a harpoon in the accompanying illustration (Fig. 4) is not identified, however.28 According to Samuel Kramer, the Sumerian goddess, Inanna, may have been the first female in mythology to slay the serpent dragon Kur, another monster in a different context that was said to live in the depths of  ‘the great

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Fig. 4 Apap (or Apophis), to the left, speared by a woman, and Horus, on the right, spearing the captive depicted swimming in the water

below’ and check the flow of ‘primeval waters’. The Semitic goddess, Ishtar, a thousand years later, was also reputed to have slain a dragon, an act from which we may conclude that not only were Middle Eastern dragon slayers in antiquity not necessarily male: they may have been predominantly female.29 In that particular Sumerian dragon-slaying myth attributed to Inanna (which dates to the third millennium bc) the chronology of the Egyptian tale is reversed, with startling implications: the land becomes devastated by famine after the slaying of the dragon. From that point onwards, the primeval waters are no longer contained and no fresh water reaches the land. It is almost as if the dragon were required to maintain the ecological balance by holding back the waters and releasing them at the required time, certainly a model that would have been replicated in the Egyptian context. This mythical variant reflects the ambiguity surrounding the act of dragon-slaying, though it was mainly interpreted as a propitious act and one that required a cyclical regulation, both in Sumer and in Egypt. During the Late Period in Egypt, several millennia later, the conventions of iconography changed and the gods began to take on a more distinctly human appearance. In Fig. 4, a falcon-headed man, possibly a god, is shown astride a fishing skiff, spearing Apep with his pronged lance, seemingly a re-enactment of the Horus-Set spearing incident, yet in this representation, the monster has been anthropomorphised: he is an open-eyed human captive, immersed in the Nile waters with his arms and legs bound and yet seemingly alive. By the fifth century ad, after the defeat of Diocletian and the beginning of ‘the proto-Coptic era’, when the number of adherents to Christianity had grown substantially, a fusion of folk tale and Roman imperial iconography appears to have taken place. A representation of a falcon-headed god complete

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Fig. 5 The winged and falcon-headed god Set killing the Apophis snake

with wings in a temple at Bahnasa in the Kharga oasis shows Horus’ rival, the Egyptian god of chaos, brandishing the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt (Fig. 5). Wearing the uraeus and a Roman kilt, he is depicted in the act of spearing the serpent, which appears to be writhing on the ground, in emulation of Horus. A cippus30 from the Late Period showing the naked god Horus grasping serpents in both hands and trampling on two overlapping crocodiles, as if to herald his supremacy over the reptilian world, exposes us to yet another variant of Horus and the dragon-turned-crocodile story in the mythological realm of ancient Egyptian deities (Fig. 6).

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Fig. 6 Cippus illustrating Horus with sidelock, a symbol of youth, clasped by the god Bes and trampling on crocodiles

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A subsequent variant shows a falcon-headed horseman in Roman armour plunging his pointed lance into the head of a crocodile lying between his horse’s legs (Fig. 7 ).31 In this representation, the bulbous hippopotamus, symbolic of the god Apophis who would swallow or block the Nile, has been replaced by a slim-line crocodile, perhaps more commonly found than the hippo in the marshes of the Nile by that epoch. This image of an equestrian hero is the iconographic precursor to the dragon-slaying icon of Mārī Jirjis. Just as the representation of the dragon-slayer evolved over time in response to new imperial and aesthetic influences, oral variants of the dragon-slaying tale may equally well have been transformed and revitalised by successive narrators to respond to contemporary taste and audience preferences.

Fig. 7 Representation of Horus as St. George spearing the crocodile

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In Rizq’s legend, the tragic figure is the virgin who is to be sacrificed to the tyrannical monster. The princess seeks to retain her reputation and begs to be speared with a lance rather than by the euphemistic ‘fang’ of the serpent. Her deflowering is at stake (as it would have been for the virgin in the mūlid of Sheikh al-Harīdī), as is her death, and both are mourned with equal passion. Accordingly, she is dispatched with full lamentations and tears, bedecked in earrings of pearl and coral mounted with tinkling bells (bijaras rannān) – perhaps not unlike the Coptic textile image of the goddess Hestia with her long earrings (see Fig. 8) – and wrapped in a black, all-encompassing Habara. The allusion to the musical earrings suggests a sistrum-like bell, which, when rung, would produce music pleasurable to the gods, in particular the goddess Hathor (once described as ‘mistress of jingling necklaces’) while at the same time dispersing evil spirits.32 The king, though still a heathen, in a spectacular burst of foreshadowing, nevertheless claims that his faith ‘lies in Mārī Jirjis’ and his daughter is led down to the serpent. Here she spies the saint, dressed like a prince in shimmering gold armour and at the same time ‘draped, dripping (lit. drowned’) in silk’, so stunningly clad as to be an incandescent vision.

Fig. 8 ‘Hestia, full of blessing’ or Hestia Polyolbos, the Greek goddess of blessing, depicted wearing long, dangling earrings and a crown of pomegranates.

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She nobly entreats him to leave, lest he be eaten. But the saint replies that he has been sent to perform his duty and must remain. At this point, the dragon surfaces and parches the fields with fire from his mouth, like the dragon from the Epic of Gilgamesh … whose ‘mouth [was] fire’ and ‘his breath … death’.33 The princess swoons and the saint begins to engage the dragon in crossbanter. He mocks him: Sheikh il cawān: ‘most venerable of dragons’ and accuses him of dilly-dallying, a euphemism for impotence. The dragon appears threatened and swears that he will never return, at which point the saint, having urged him to ‘take’ the princess, abruptly leaps on to his horse. In a sudden attack, Jirjis spears the dragon in the pupil of the eye. Water spurts forth, the efflux which is the flood, recalling ‘the Great Flood emanating from the eye of Rec’.34 The eye of the dragon becomes the source of the life-giving ‘flood’ and fertility.35 Its blood congeals and as in the mystical rites of exorcism when the devil is expelled, forms a stigmata shape. At the same, a violent earthquake rocks the land and a tidal wave is unleashed. The Christian message of the tale is now paramount: the blood of the dragon forms the scarlet cross, the enduring emblem of St. George. At this point, the tale continues beyond the point where other versions have stopped, similar to what Jauss called a careful ‘succession of sequels’ and is distinguished by a coda that appears appended to the dragon-slaying episode.36 The townspeople misinterpret the signs as the normal resurgence of the river waters after the deflowering and devouring of the virgin. Consequently, they are surprised to see the princess strutting around in jubilation, a green burnus (a hooded cloak that is the liturgical dress of the Coptic Church) on her head. There is still a problem, however. In what seems an illogical recapitulation of events, it appears that the dragon’s bulk is still blocking the river. The people cluster around the dragon and try to lift it out of the ‘sea’ (baHr). They cannot. This early Coptic sculpture of men carrying a crocodile may be an illustration of the removal of the dragon from the Nile (Fig. 9). The saint is compelled to plunge his harpoon-like lance into the dragon again, and at this point, the story invokes parallels with the slaying of the great ‘serpent’, Leviathan, by Jehovah in the Old Testament.37 Mārī Jirjis then pulls its gargantuan hulk from the water and lifts it on to the head of the virgin. Just as Ishtar said in the epic of Gilgamesh: Come Gilgamesh, be thou my consort … Be thou my husband and I will be thy wife,

she brazenly asks him to marry her.38 However, the saint recoils, saying that his ‘bride is innocent and pure’. His ability to slay the dragon emanates from

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Fig. 9 Sculptural relief of men carrying a crocodile

the Virgin Mary. In order to receive the ‘iklīl ’, or crown of martyrdom, he must remain celibate. Rebuked, the princess returns home to her mother, who is introduced as Khadra, lit. ‘The Green One’ (f ), the name of the famous heroine of the sīrat banī hilāl.39 The virgin is, at this point, not only ‘the daughter of the king’ but also identified as the daughter of Khadra. Khadra, her mother, sees the dragon on her daughter’s head, looped round like a water-pipe, towering high above her head ‘like a tower’ (in Upper Egypt, the word denoting ‘pigeon cote’).40 She asks how she could lift it up to which she replied, ‘Ululate to him. It was he who killed him, the Roman hero, Mārī Jirjis’.

The persona of Khadra The name, Khadra: haDra – lit. ‘the Green One (f )’ – and the masculine form, Khadr/Khidr (haDr/hiDr), are particularly significant in the context of Mārī Jirjis and folk beliefs surrounding the saint’s capacity to exorcise the devils that possess human beings. In the folk conception, Mārī Jirjis is acknowledged to be akin to, if not equivalent in power to, the famous Islamic saint, Sayyidna al-Khidr (in phonetic transcription, al-hiDr), ‘Our Lord, the Green One’, source of fertility and rushing water and one of the aqTab or ‘arch-pillars’ of the cosmos. At one of the most famous mūlids to Mārī Jirjis near Mansoura in the Egyptian delta, the pilgrims celebrate not only the

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festival of the Coptic saint but also that of his doppelganger, Sayyidna alKhidr. Exorcisms are performed in both their names. Significant to this linkage is that when the saint pierces the dragon with his harpoon-like lance, water rushes from his eye. According to legend, the male saint, Sayyidna al-Khidr becomes green by diving into the spring of life. This Coptic tale rekindles the image of the rushing water identified so closely with Sayyidna al-Khidr. As the water of inundation is released, the virgin saved from the clutches of the dragon is suddenly named as the daughter of Khadra, the feminine of al-Khidr. She is clad in green, honoured by the saint with a green cope or burnus at the resurgence of subterranean water.41 In effect, she (the daughter) has become the female ‘Green One’, his feminine counterpart.

The Green Goddess in Egyptian mythology A ‘Green Goddess’ once existed in pre-Dynastic Egypt. In around 3300 bc, the goddess Wadjet was known as the ‘Green Goddess’. Conventionally depicted as an iconic green stem and symbolically ‘cloaked’ in papyrus, she was the deity of an area of papyrus swamp in the Nile Delta. Three millennia later, the Greeks renamed her as the goddess Buto, regarding her as both patron and protector of the Nile Delta and originator of the celebrated uraeus symbol.42 The first uraeus (as it was called in Greek) was styled as a rearing cobra and included the serpent’s raised-up head (as is normally visible in iconographic depiction of gods in profile) and its trailing body.43 (This is particularly noticeable on King Tutankhamun’s coffin lid where elegant serpentine bodies, fashioned in solid gold, slither down the back of the king’s headdress). The ‘Green’ goddess Wadjet/Buto was first depicted with the head of a cobra, but later as a woman wearing the uraeus as a diadem. In the constellation of ancient Egyptian deities, several goddesses were associated with diadems of serpents (Fig. 10).44 Though she never lost ‘ownership’ of the uraeus symbol, over the dynasties, this was adopted by successive male Pharaohs as the emblem of regal power. It seems conceivable, therefore, that a story celebrating the defeat of the dragon, Apophis, by the goddess Wadjet and her crowning with the insignia of conquest, the serpentine diadem, might once have been at the etiological heart of this tale. The liberated ‘daughter of Khadra’ is crowned with the spoils of victory by the saint and instructed to strut through the streets with the dragon’s carcass coiled round her head like a water pipe. It would be difficult to imagine such an image were it not for the astonishing representation of the serpent Apep in the Hieratic Papyrus recorded by Wilkinson, coiled like the hose of a narghile or water pipe (Fig. 10). Embedded in this tale of Mārī Jirjis may therefore be two etiological myths: the story of the slaying of the

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Fig. 10 Representations of ancient Egyptian goddesses with cobra heads and diadems: from the left, the goddesses Rannu, Tentris and Bak

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serpent/dragon and the conquest of evil by the forces of good, and the origin of the uraeus diadem.45

Conclusion This tale exhibits many of the traditional qualities associated with mediaeval epic romance, but it is undeniable that the dragon-slaying motif at the heart of the world in Rizq’s Mārī Jirjis legend harks back to its Egyptian roots. The ambiguities remain: the rapacious serpent dragon is both the cause of the drought and the source of the life-giving flood, an issue that remains unresolved in the coda. The dragon story is set in Egypt, while the traditional Coptic tale (at least, according to earlier manuscript versions) is required to be set in Sham. The deliberate parallels drawn by the cAmm Rizq between the river of Beirut and the river of maSr (Egypt), plus his decision to call the river called baHr (as the Nile in Egypt is conventionally called in Arabic, rather than the contextually neutral nahr) reveal the narrator’s true intent. The saint appears like a palpable vision such as might be seen by the possessed at the moment of exorcism. He wears glittering, gold-plated armour, a motif also noted in early Coptic tales, and yet is lavishly ‘draped, drowned in silk’. Addressing him as ‘my love’, the young virgin begs him to leave in her first burst of self-sacrifice, and then, after the dragon is slain, asks him outright to marry her, an echo of one element of the mediaeval English fairy-tale (known as ‘St. George of Merrie England’) in which the saint falls in love with Sabia, the ‘Egyptian princess, daughter of the Sultan’, and marries her. The dragon talks in this tale: he banters with the saint but to no avail: he is slain by the hero, empowered by the Virgin Mary. The tale of Mārī Jirjis is different from a Coptic martyrdom tale; it does not resemble the mediaeval tale of St. George: jirjēs calēh wissalām (‘Jirgis on whom be peace’) from al-Thaclabī’s early compendium, which is illustrative of the ecumenist view of saints, apostles and prophets prevalent in the Middle Ages.46 In this gruesome tale, St. George is martyred after suffering torture and persecution at the hands of the Roman emperor, Diocletian. Rizq’s tale is qualitatively different and, ironically, his narrative would appear to have more in common with the classic European dragon-slaying tale of the saint, set in ‘Sylene’ in Libya (perhaps Cyrene, known in Arabic as Shāhhāt or aljebel al-ahdar : ‘The Green Mountain’?), as recorded by de Voragine,47 and the English fairy-tale version, than with any Middle Eastern Christian precursor. Another, not dissimilar but more evangelical, version of this legend was recorded with a Coptic poet, Malti Bekhit, in the town of Banī Swaif (Middle Egypt) by Ernst Bannerth in 1967. Bannerth observes that this version (which he calls a ‘romance’ and was performed in colloquial Arabic

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but without the elegance and metre of sajc) does not appear in the older Synaxarium Alexandrinum.48 It has since been incorporated, and in this version, St. George is now named as Captain of the Roman army.49 What is significant, however, is the way that Bekhit’s legend differs from this version. Most significantly, it is not a conversion tale, as the king in the story is already convinced of the power of Mārī Jirjis, and at the dragon’s spearing, a cross rises above the town. Myriad Coptic saints, from St. George (Mārī Jirjis) to St. Mercurius (Abu Sēfēn: ‘He of two swords’) and St. Theodore, ‘the warrior saint’ (Tawdros almuHārib) have been portrayed on steeds with lances and venerated in saints’ festivals throughout Egypt, ample proof of the gamut of equestrian saints in the Coptic pantheon. While drawing on this elaborate iconographic tradition for inspiration, this lively tale of St. George seems to draw on a much broader constellation of allusions from ancient Egyptian mythology and folk motifs than merely the Coptic hagiographic tradition.50

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4

The Tale of Adam and Eve

Archetypes, religious heroes or primogenitors in traditional societies are often epitomised as epic heroes or heroines, or enshrined in etiological myths and tales of the miraculous. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, the story of Adam and Eve from Genesis is well known, but this Egyptian story of Adam and Eve was told to me one day by the Coptic story-teller from Luxor, cAmm Rizq Būlos.1 The precinct of Luxor in Upper Egypt became a predominantly Coptic Christian stronghold after the ancient Egyptian temple complex and Roman garrison had collapsed into ruins. Churches and later mosques were built on these ancient structures and what is remarkable is that the inhabitants lived in this ancient landscape until the mid twentieth century. I was surprised to hear this tale from a Coptic story-teller there, since I knew, as the mother of a young son called Adam (a name not normally used in Upper Egypt), that this was regarded as ‘an Islamic name’. I had frequently engaged in discussions about Adam and Eve in the course of conversation with both men and women, and most men I had met immediately invoked the connotation of patriarchy inherent in the name: He was our father, Adam … the first human being, you know… (da ‘abūna da, ‘āwwil banī ādam, t carifī) banī ādam (‘human being’) means, literally, ‘son of Adam’ and therefore Adam, the first ‘son of Adam’, is a paradox. As ‘umm adam’, ‘Mother of Adam’ as I was known (the polite mode of address for a woman with a child), I was the mother of the ‘father of man’, seemingly a contradiction. Eve (Hawa in Arabic) was less often mentioned, though many people did say to me, ‘Well, you have Adam, why don’t you now have Hawa?’, as if they constituted a natural pair. Whereas Adam was clearly the archetypal ‘first man’ in the men’s conception, Eve was much less the archetypal woman and was never alluded to in the same way. In fact, one woman told me that I should now give birth to ‘Adma’ – her way of feminising the name Adam, and a name unknown in Arabic tradition.2

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The Tale of Adam and Eve (qiSSit ‘ādam wa Hawa) by cAmm Rizq Būlos I

Our Lord… When he began to create the world… There was in it neither heaven nor earth And the whole world was water

II

There was neither night nor day No sun and no moon No stars and no lights There was nothing

III

And then God went back home and hovered above the face of the waters And afterwards it came to him ‘Let me create for myself a human being In whom I shall see my image and my likeness’



His inner soul says, ‘Trace a form’ That is, he tells his inner soul to trace a form





And so he said, ‘I shall go down and fashion it I shall go down and fashion it’



And that was through the descent of Christ the Lord

IV

So, of course, The first thing God did was to separate out… God named them the heavens and the earth



And the waters became seas And God separated the heavens from the earth He divided the waters into seas

V

And He spit on … that is, he created the first great lights The greater light to govern the day The lesser light to govern the night



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He created the sun and the moon And created the angels before a single human being

VI After He had created the angels Well, he spit on the shale and fashioned from the shale Clay

Then He breathed on to it And found it to be Adam

VII

And He said, ‘I shall create for him a female companion, so to speak, in the world’ So he cast him into a deep sleep And withdrew a rib from his ribs And in its place put flesh And found it to be Eve

VIII

Adam awoke from his sleep And found a female beside him He knew her



He said, ‘O my Lord She is, truly, flesh of my flesh And bone of my bones’

IX

And He said to him, ‘Adam, do not defy me’ So He brought him and Eve And entered them into heaven

X

And He said to him, ‘Come, All the fruit-bearing trees present in this heaven Eat from them Do not eat from the tree whose name is the Hant tree (the tree of eternity)’



[E.W.: ‘What’s that? [A.R.: It is like an apple tree … only its name is the Hant tree. We don’t have it here. It was the one in the Garden of Eden’] He said to him, ‘Do not eat from this tree planted in the midst of this garden

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If you bite from this, Adam A sure death you will die’ He cautioned him

XI

It happened after that, of course That he was favoured Adam was favoured above all the other angels



And then, of course, The angels began to fancy themselves And the one who was the archangel of angels began to think he was something great

XII So our Lord made him fall And in his fall, what did he become? Satan He became the ‘king’ of devils The arch-devil of devils XIII

When… when he began to get above himself, and fell He became a devil Turned out of heaven When he was turned out of heaven Adam became the only one left in heaven



He wanted to devise some scheme to get Adam turned out of heaven Just as he had been thrown out

XIV

So to whom did he go? He went to Eve



He went to Eve, This same devil

XV He entered inside the serpent And caused the serpent to speak And say to Eve, ‘All of these fruit trees our Lord cautioned you about, Eat from them…

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Why not bite this one? This is the one that will open up your vision And this is the one that will show you the world in its true colours And this is the one that will do this and the one that will do that…’ And he went on and on counselling Eve…

XVI

So Eve ate The serpent plucked it and gave it to Eve And Eve bit into it and swallowed [A.R.: ‘That’s why Eve doesn’t have this’] [Rizq touches his Adam’s apple] She doesn’t have this [E.W: ‘What do you call it?’] [A.R.: ‘The swallowed one’ ] [E.W.: ‘We call it the Adam’s apple’] [A.R.: ‘It really is an apple but in medical terminology, we say, “the swallowed one”’]i





XVII XVIII

And she took a bite She plucked it And went and took it to whom? To Adam She took it to Adam

XIX

And he was covered in a luminous cuticle all over his body Like the nails on the hands and feet It coated his entire body

Adam bites into it He remembers the warning Our Lord had given him It started to stick in his throat He couldn’t swallow it It got stuck

So when he ate from the tree It peeled from the skin of his body

i

Also ‘pharynx’.

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Leaving behind only the nails on his hands and feet He found himself naked as he stood He became miserable and naked

XX He (the Lord) said to him, ‘Adam, O Adam, where art thou?’ He said to Him, ‘O my Lord When I heard your voice, I hid myself For I was naked And I felt ashamed’ XXI

He said to him, ‘What made you think you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree I cautioned you against?’

XXII

He said, ‘This accursed female you gave to me She is the one who prevailed on me, It was Eve’

XXIII

‘Go, Adam By the sweat of your brow you shall eat your bread And the land will sprout cactus and thorns for you For ever

XXIV

And go, Eve You shall conceive in delight And give birth in pain

XXV

And go, serpent You shall creep on your stomach And eat from the dust of the earth





And the son of Adam shall strike you on your head And a sure death you shall die



And you shall bite him on his Achilles tendon And a sure death he shall die





And there shall be enmity between you and the sons of Adam For ever’



And so the serpent became the enemy of human beings For ever

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XXVI And of course, Whom did he turn out? Adam, from heaven XXVII And he began to plant and reap harvest ‘The land you were created from, Adam You shall eat from The land you were created from You shall eat from’ XXVIII And he became a cultivator Our Lord gave him eight grains They are called the eight {grains of blessing {‘nigella’ seeds XXIX He said to him, ‘Plant them and harvest’ He took the eight grains And Adam began to cultivate XXX He began by the sweat of his brow to eat his bread And this was the final end to our father, Adam

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Egyptian tales of Adam and Eve: gender, original sin and the logic of redemption

Fig. 11 Photograph of cAmm Rizq

As cAmm Rizq (Fig. 11) describes it, the story is deemed to be not that of the creation of the world but of Adam and Eve. Before the creation of Adam, the world consisted of nothing but water, a vision reminiscent of the primeval ocean known in Egyptian mythology as Nun. Perhaps as a result of this conception, the storyteller omits the creation of animals and vegetation from his tale altogether. In this version, the burgeoning of green plants and vegetation would seem to emanate from Adam’s cultivation after the fall. From the primeval waters that epitomised chaos, God creates earth and causes the separation of the earth from the waters. Rizq recites verses similar to those in Genesis, but no ‘firmament’ is mentioned. In another Egyptian watery tale of creation, Atum’s eye wept for joy, and from these tears, men grew, again from water, though in this case divinely generated salty water like the sea. God then creates the sun and the moon, as in Genesis, but there is no homily: ‘And God saw that it was good’. In Genesis, the creation of moisture appears to take place as a natural event: ‘a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground’, while in this tale, God spits. In Rizq’s version, Adam is created from a fusion of God’s spittle (tāfil cala) and

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clay/shale (tifla) a deliberate homology in Arabic which suggests that shale, moulded with spit, is fashioned into earth (Tīnan). The divine spittle of God seeds the earth with life. In the King James version of the creation story, God ‘breathes’ life into Adam, whereas in the Egyptian version, he ‘puffs’ life on to the clay figure (nafah calēh). This is an energetic gesture that requires the blowing of breath into the lifeless form of Adam. Again, the extruding of ‘divine air’ by a healer is regarded as a traditional healing technique in Upper Egypt. At this point, the ‘earth made flesh’ is honed first into the figure of Adam, the male, and then from his rib, Eve. She has no independent source of existence. On waking, Adam unites with Eve as one flesh, motivated apparently by a subconscious desire to discover the identity of the creature beside him and reunite with his human twin, an act which appears entirely logical and admits to no hint of shame. In contrast, the Genesis account introduces the institutionalisation of wedlock at an early point in the narrative: man shall leave his father and mother and shall cleave unto his wife and they shall be one flesh. And they were both naked and were not ashamed… (Gen 2: 24–25) Reference to the ordination of marriage of man and woman seems alien to the ethos of this Egyptian tale, where motivation for the sexual act is described only as Adam’s desire to confirm the identity of the strange female creature beside him. The recognition of the innate sexual nature of Adam is not regarded in this tale as an ethical issue. The serpent’s argument to Eve, in persuading her to eat the apple, is one encouraging the development of knowledge, not the perpetration of an immoral act. In fact, the state of innocence implies the absence of knowledge. Divine grace appears to be equated with ignorance of the knowledge of life and death, of mortality. In this story, though, Adam has more moral fibre than Eve. He chokes, whereas she swallows, though the literal meaning of the word ilbal cuma: ‘the swallowed one’ indicates that he has, in fact, swallowed the fruit. Involuntarily (or as the narrator would have it, voluntarily), the bite of fruit has become stuck. Adam loses his protective cuticle on eating the fruit, and from the nakedness that ensues, he recognises he is naked and feels ashamed. In the Islamic account of the story of Adam and Eve, both Adam and Eve are culpable. In this version, however, as in Genesis, Eve is regarded as the more culpable, and while Adam blames Eve for the commission of the sin and calls her the ‘accursed woman’, parallel doses of justice are meted out to them both. References to the subjugation of Eve, and the condemnatory tone of Genesis, stand in stark contrast to the rather light-hearted Egyptian variant of the tale of Adam and Eve. The story-teller shows that Adam and Eve are

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condemned but makes no proclamations as to how either should behave in the socio-cultural universe. Whereas there is no rationale for the serpent’s behaviour in Genesis, in the various Coptic Egyptian accounts, envy and the desire to cause Adam, a fellow angel, to fall from heaven are presented as the devil’s distinct motive. The transformation of archangel into arch-devil, the incarnation of evil, plays a powerful role in bringing about the catastrophic fall of Adam from the Garden of Eden. In Gnostic and Coptic texts, the palpable force of evil is seen in the creation and presence of the Angel of Death.3 This negative oppositional force is created, nevertheless, by God. In a polarised universe, this was the manifestation in the cosmos of opposition to divine wisdom, which is known as gnosis. The fate of Eve in the Egyptian tale is defined as the following:

You shall conceive in delight And give birth in pain

Pain is the physiological manifestation of God’s ordinance, but so is sexual ecstacy. In the second version of the tale in Genesis, Eve is told that she must suffer eternal ‘sorrow’, emotional pain, to which is coupled the sentence: ‘and thy desire should be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee’.4 Moreover, it decrees that ‘there shall be enmity between man and woman’. This determination is notably absent from the Egyptian account, as are any references to woman’s subjugation to the will of her husband after conjugal union. In Rizq’s Egyptian tale, instead of the condemnatory phrase in Genesis (and in the Coptic martyrdom tale that describes ‘the Angel of Death’), ‘For dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return’,5 which highlights the suddenly acquired mortality of Adam and Eve, God appears to order Adam to survive:

From the land you were created from, you shall eat from

In Genesis, this same edict is formulated as a form of banishment: ‘The Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken’ (3:24), and ‘in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life’ (3:17). In this tale, cAmm Rizq follows this proclamation with the epilogue, shaped as an incremental series of events:

And he became a cultivator Our Lord gave him eight grains They are called ‘the eight grains of blessing’

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(The narrator uses the words, ‘Habbit al-baraka’ which means, literally, seeds of blessing, but also ‘nigella’ or black cumin.) He said to him, Plant them and harvest He took the eight grains And Adam began to cultivate He began by the sweat of his brow to eat his bread And this was the final end to our father, Adam In the Coptic Egyptian tale, as Rizq tells the tale, there appears to have been some logic to creation. God facilitates Adam’s task of cultivation through the blessing of holy seeds, imbued with the capacity to heal and make whole. In doing so, he ordains a more sanguine future for humankind in the agricultural universe than was envisioned in Genesis. Whereas there is no mention in Rizq’s tale of the earth as a fertile and burgeoning place, it is only after Adam begins to cultivate that the earth brings forth green plants through the gift of the eight seeds of blessing or ‘nigella’. An amphora of nigella oil was found in the tomb of Tutankhamun, who was lame and known to have been suffering from malaria. Evidently, its healing and life-giving properties were known to the ancient Egyptians as they are still throughout the Islamic world.

Performance style As a talented story-teller, cAmm Rizq naturally uses various ploys to enhance the dramatic and human interest of the narrative, in view of the familiarity of the plot to his listeners. Initially, he describes the world in an eloquent sequence of negative oppositions. God then addresses himself in the formal tones of Classical Arabic, a strictly rhythmic sajc . He will create a human being in his own likeness, said in a tone and manner that appears somewhat self-aggrandising and selfish:

Let me create for myself a human being In whom I shall see my image and my likeness6

Despite performing the act, God’s mode of discovering Adam’s creation is bewildering: like any human being, unused to the divine mysteries, God creates something but seems not to know its identity. He then ‘finds it to be’ Adam and then Eve, as if it were not entirely known beforehand. Similarly, Adam ‘discovers’ Eve by making love to her; as a result of this, he realises that she is ‘flesh of his flesh and bone of his bones’, in this context a more credible

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statement than its counterpart in Genesis. Eve is formed from Adam’s rib, from which she is cloned and mysteriously made flesh. On consummating their relationship, Adam is surprised to discover that Eve is formed from him, though he is aware that she is female and appears physically different. The illogicality is left without explanation. Ironically, the act that prompts the realisation of nakedness, the rush of shame and the shrinking of the luminous cuticle with which Adam is symbolically clothed, is not the consummation of love but the consequence of biting into the fruit of the mysterious sajarit al-Hant, or Hant tree. When I asked Rizq about it during the performance, he defined it as ‘a tree like an apple tree, but one called the Hant tree, of which there are none in Egypt’. I found one allusion to a Hant tree in the Lane Lexicon: ‘a tree of the kind called “rimth” which as it matures, its leaves become white’ attributed to the mediaeval Arabic encyclopaedia ‘Kamous’ c. 729–816 Hejira, and another ‘one with … dust-coloured fruit’ (not unlike a dūm palm) from ‘Taj al-Aroos’.7 A tree called ‘hann.t with a palm-tree like determinative like a dūm palm, possibly resembling the African Borassus flabellifer fan or Borassus palm8 was recorded in the XVIIIth Dynasty. A Semitic and Akkadian word meaning ‘wood, tree’ is written in phonetics as ht,9 but neither of these is a conclusive match. Most convincing is the fact that the word Hant appears close to the Arabic root meaning ‘to stuff, to embalm’ (H-n-T ), from which the nouns taHannuT and taHnīT meaning ‘embalming’ derive, while HinTa (with Ta) from the same root means ‘wheat’. Could this create any further connection? As we know from ancient Egyptian depictions of this ritual, and from its prominent place in the Cairo Museum, a life-size coffin ‘bed’ meant to represent the body of Osiris was made up every year during the month of Khoiak for celebration of the Osirian mysteries. In addition, moulds made of mulberry wood and shaped as an Osiris figure were stuffed with earth and planted with wheat. These would sprout after being watered to represent the resurrected god Osiris restored to life in the tomb, an event in many ways analogous to the creation of life from the seeds of blessing planted by Adam in the life-giving soil. Could there be any connection of the Hant tree to ‘the tree of knowledge of life and death’? If this were its derivation, it could justifiably be called ‘an Osiris tree’ or ‘an embalming tree’, an effigy in wood from which life emerged. Rizq does not elaborate on the fruit, but after I add that the protrusion in a man’s throat is known as ‘an Adam’s apple’, Rizq adds, by way of explanation: ‘We call it “the swallowed one” (al-bal cūma) but actually it is an apple.’ Eve is entirely culpable but Adam only partially so since he reneges in mid-bite. Nevertheless, Eve is condemned in this tale by Adam as the ‘cursed’ sinner, beguiled by the serpent to eat the forbidden fruit, in a quest for greater knowledge of the ways of the world. Adam claims that he has merely

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emulated Eve, but unlike Eve, refrains at the last instant from swallowing the sacred pulp. In this way, he salvages his morality and is marked with an eternal emblem of his change of heart, the Adam’s apple. Eve is doomed to suffer in childbirth but may enjoy sexual pleasures, unlike in Genesis, where she must experience only sorrow in conception and subjugation in marriage. The serpent, only a guise or body for Satan, acts against Adam through Eve out of a very human emotion: jealousy. In this case, Rizq quotes almost verbatim from the Coptic text in which the arch-devil says: ‘I will cause them to be turned out from Paradise for I myself was turned out.’10 Via the lively use of colloquial idiom, the narrator suggests that the moral tale has recognisably human actors who behave not as an omniscient God or angels, but human beings. This subtle device develops our ability to recognise the motives of the actors and empathise with them, as in any soap opera, and thus translates the moral tale into a more credible story of human fallibility.

Coptic tales of creation Many versions of the tale of Adam and Eve can be found in Coptic texts, an indication that different moral issues were at stake in discussions of the entangled fates of Adam and Eve. When searching for earlier variants of Adam and references to his all-enveloping cuticle, I discovered a tale entitled On the Origin of the World, a Gnostic text of the early Copts, dated to approximately the second century ad, found buried in clay pots at Nagc Hammādi about 100 kms from Luxor in Upper Egypt. In this Coptic manuscript, Adam is referred to (in translation) as ‘the luminous man of blood’; that is, a fusion of luminosity or divinity, and blood, a symbol of his mortality.11 In the modern tale, the image of his cuticle (Hula nuranīyya), which was luminous and deemed to be like a halo, is a similar but vexing one. In one of the tales of al-Kis’ai, The Prostration of Angels before Adam, Adam appears before the angels. They see ‘that he was of glistening silver’;12 that is, luminous because of his armour of shining metal. In the Gnostic texts, however, Adam was merely luminous: no cuticle or halo is directly mentioned, though his luminosity emanated perhaps from the shimmering light that enveloped him and signalled his spiritual incandescence. The cuticle has no mention in Genesis but does appear in the Jewish Haggadeh, a collection of stories from the early oral tradition of the Jews, some of which may be traced to the sixth century b.c. In one of these tales, Adam’s and Eve’s bodies were said to have been overlaid with ‘a horny skin’, (interpreted by some scholars as reptilian in nature) and enveloped with a cloud of glory. But ‘no sooner had they violated the command given them that the cloud of glory and the horny skin dropped from them’.13 In old Rabbinical legends too, his skin was described as being ‘as bright as daylight’,

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covering his body ‘like a luminous garment’.14 The literal resemblance of this skin to a cuticle (as cAmm Rizq, the story-teller, gesticulated to me in an aside to the narrative) also appears in the Midrash recorded in the first century ad by Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanos of Palestine. He describes Adam’s skin as being ‘as smooth as the cuticle of a fingernail’, qualitatively different but similar.15 In the Gnostic texts, Adam was believed to have been created from earth and is designated in translation as the ‘holy adamas’, (from the original meaning of the word ‘adam’ in the feminine, denoting ‘fecund earth’ [cf NW Semitic/Hebrew ‘adhama’, ‘arable soil with water and plants’, fem.; Aramaic: adhmetha, ‘arable soil’ fem.; and SWS Arabian: ‘adamat’, fem. ‘soil without stones’]16, ‘upon which it (her light) spread’. This indicated that Sophia, the female personification of wisdom, had conferred her blessing on it, rendering it both luminous and holy. The Gnostic text then continues, ‘Since that day, all the authorities have honoured the blood of the virgin and the earth was purified on account of the blood of the virgin’.17 Sanction had been found within Gnostic theology for the use of impure earth in the creation of Adam. This was accomplished through purification by the blood of the virgin, the feminine and physiological source of divine life. In the second century in Egypt, the Judaeo-Christian paradigms of patrimony, procreation and nemesis were clearly being challenged by the Gnostics, as evinced by the conflicting interpretations of the Gospels in the Nagc Hammādi texts and other Coptic tales. The absence of Woman or any element of the female from the act of procreation of Adam seems to have been a particularly significant problem to the Gnostic theologians, one resolved by invocation to the purifying blood of the virgin, shed at the birth of Christ. In the Dynastic period in Egypt, and for many centuries afterwards, the blood of the goddess Isis had constantly been invoked in fetish objects and spells for its prophylactic powers.18 To the Gnostics and later Copts, the blood of Mary the Virgin, mother of Jesus (in Coptic terms, the true personification of God in man, not Adam) constituted an even more significant purifying force. While the feminine purification of the earth was considered by the Gnostics to be essential, the composition of the earth itself used in the creation of Adam was also a subject of lingering debate. Two hundred years later, in the fourth-century Discourse on Abbaton or Apollyon by Timothy, Archbishop of Alexandria (c. 385 ad), a transformation of the story of creation involving the Angel of Death (the fallen angel who takes the living to their destiny in Coptic and Islamic mythology), it appears that ‘virgin earth’ was to be brought in order to create Adam.19 However, the earth rejected itself for this purpose. In another Coptic tale of a later epoch, the earth similarly rejected itself as a medium for the creation of Adam for fear that it would be forever defiled,

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rendered unholy by the sins of Adam. Clearly, the question of how the holy earth could first be sanctified and then used as a medium for the creation of mortal man was a difficult one for the theologians. Whereas the Nagc Hammādi scholars saw the earth as purified by the blood of the virgin, the later theologians saw the earth as holy and undefilable, a distinct reversal of the previous concept. The prevalent folk belief in Luxor is that the earth is a holy place, inhabited by jinn – servants of God or angels. It is imperative that one should not offend the all-powerful spirits of the earth. If one does commit an infringement by falling on the earth, one must seek redemption and forgiveness through prayers to the offended spirits. Thus, whereas man is mortal, the earth is of a qualitatively different nature, eternally fecund and in essence, divine. In the modern tale, via an anachronistic but apparently vital Christian justification for God’s act of creation, cAmm Rizq equates God’s decision to descend to earth and create Adam with the subsequent ‘descent’ of ‘Christ the Lord’. In some ways, therefore, Adam is intended to embody the person of Christ. He is man in God’s image:





His inner soul says, trace a form That is, he tells his inner soul to trace a form And so he said, I shall go down and fashion it… And this is through the descent of Christ the Lord

Amm Rizq specifically inserts Christian motifs into the story. But what is peculiarly Egyptian about the tale?

c

Ancient Egyptian intertextualities First, God creates Adam from a fusion of shale, divine spittle and the breath of God. In Genesis, Adam is formed from the dust of the ground, infused with divine breath. What distinguishes the Coptic variant is the fact that Adam is formed from shale (tifla), transposed by spittle into earth (Tīnan) and vitalised with divine breath (nafah calēh), an intertextual image that conjures up ancient Egyptian divinatory tales and the healing spittle of sheikhs known from folk healing practices.20 This version of the act of creation also echoes an ancient Egyptian cosmogonic myth in which the god Atum, the creator, spits and from this act, the gods Shu (air) and Tefnut (moisture) are created.21 The god’s name, Tefnut, literally, ‘the spitter’ is, in fact, a pun on the act of spitting as it derives from the ancient Egyptian word for spit (taff ), which is retained in modern Arabic. The enabling and enlivening force provided by the creator’s

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spittle is found in the ancient myth as in the contemporary tale. Unlike its fundamental place in the Hebrew text, the Semitic word meaning ‘earth; soil’ (adamu) is not mentioned. In Rizq’s story, God ‘traces the form’ of Adam in the earth and it becomes a living substance, an action that invokes the image of the ancient Egyptian ram-headed god Khnum, known as ‘the fashioner’ and ‘the potter’. This god would create life from clay and gives birth to children through spitting: ‘As his mouth spat out, they were born straight away.’22 On the walls of the temple of Deir al-Bahri, the god is asked to: ‘Mould clay upon your wheel, potter who forms the bodies of mankind and make my daughter Hapsetsut.’ Moreover, as ‘god of the potter’s wheel’, Khnum-Rec is heralded as he who exudes not only breath but also moisture:

Who settled this land by his handiwork Who joins in secret Who builds soundly Who nourishes the nestlings by the breath of his mouth Who drenches this land with Nun While round seas and oceans surround him He has fashioned gods and men23

The ram-headed Khnum is the same god who, it was believed, guided the Nile to rise beneath the island of Elephantine in the ‘secret caverns of Hapi’, so spawning a cult perpetuated through the first millennium bc and observed in the Roman period temple at Esna, about 50km south of Luxor. A complementary story is also told in which the goddess Isis emulates this same act of creation by creating the first cobra from the spittle of the god Rec and clay (Fig. 12). This unique combination of materials was that from which a living entity was formed. Second, the identity of the Hant tree, in other contexts described as ‘the tree of the knowledge of life and death’, seems linked to the concept of mortality and eternal life. Following the theme of the tree as a derivative of the verb meaning ‘to embalm’, and by extension, to preserve life (and Rizq’s claim that this tree did not grow in Egypt), it would seem important to consider the practice of embalming in ancient Egypt and the materials used. Oils used in embalming were derived from juniper and cedar wood imported from abroad, but wood from the indigenous tamarisk tree, called saosis in the Egyptian language – ‘a tree in which life and death are enclosed’ – was used to make coffins in ancient Egypt.24 Yet the coffin of Osiris, who was the god of resurrection and death, was believed to have been made of willow (Salix subserrata). The revered sycamore fig was also associated with visions of eternity, but identification of the Hant tree remains a mystery.25

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Fig. 12 Cobra headdress or ‘uraeus’ worn by the goddess Isis

Third, in Rizq’s tale, Adam’s apprehension of nakedness comes only after the luminous cuticle with which he was endowed as an angel evaporates. The inclusion of the cuticle in the tale provides a rationale for the origin of nails, still believed in Upper Egypt to be a divine and immortal substance. Because they continue to grow after death as if still attached to a living body, they may be deployed in witchcraft.

Egyptian ironies In addition to clear borrowings from Egyptian motifs, there are unique ironies of the human condition highlighted in this tale. First, the ultimate

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fate of human beings is profoundly ironic: despite the fall of Adam and Eve, the earth becomes fecund. The seeds are given to Adam as a way of enabling him to live and prosper. In this Egyptian tale, the earth becomes green as a result of the fall of Adam. (In Genesis, the creation of herbs and grasses is all over by the third day.) As the earth created Adam and his offspring, it will create his nourishment:

‘The land you were created from, Adam, you shall eat from’

The ‘holy adamas’ of the Gnostics (or fecund earth), source for the creation of Adam, will provide the living nourishment for his earthly body. That is to say, the mortal body (a fusion of clay, divine spittle and breath) will be nurtured by the same living substance. Adam shall toil but Eve shall bear children, albeit in pain. Cultivation of the fertile soil will be imperilled and made more difficult by the abundance of cactus in the land, but man shall eat his bread through labour. The eating of ‘the apple’ thus results in a significant symbolic inversion: whereas Adam was formed from clay, from the same clay Adam shall live; whereas before the fruits of the earth nourished Adam and Eve (fruit ‘whose seed was in itself ’ (Gen. 1:12)), from the seeds of blessing planted in the earth, Adam shall live. However, no inherent enmity between man and woman is created because of their shared sin. Moreover, the physiological changes wreaked by the eating of the apple fuel the logic and truth of the tale to the Egyptian folk sensibility: men are endowed with Adam’s apples, Adam’s cuticle is reduced to the nails on the hands and feet, and the serpent becomes supine in order to be more vulnerable to man’s blows. What is not mentioned in Rizq’s story is Eve’s cuticle, a fact which would have entitled her to luminosity and semi-divinity before the fall, but this inconsistency is overlooked.

Conclusion Conflicting accounts in the second century in Egypt of the birth of Adam show how paradigms of patrimony, procreation and nemesis were clearly shifting under the impact of Gnostic philosophy. In the ancient as well as the modern tales, issues such as the nature of the Devil and the incarnation of Adam were significant. In the Gnostic texts, Adam was made from earth ‘purified by the blood of the virgin’. In the contemporary tale, Adam’s birth is more akin to creation myths documented in ancient Egyptian texts: his flesh is formed from clay, transformed by God’s spittle and a waft of divine breath. Hawa (Eve) is formed from his rib as his ‘companion’, ‘flesh of his flesh and bones of his bones’. They form a unity. Eve bites the apple and swallows. Adam bites and chokes, so acquiring his ‘Adam’s apple’. His luminous, divine

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cuticle shrinks to the nails on his hands and feet. But, unlike the account in Genesis, the archetypal Man and Woman are not condemned to eternal enmity. Instead, the storyteller proposes a different understanding of the creation myth: ‘the soil you were created from, you shall eat from’. God is beneficent, not vindictive.26 He provides Adam with ‘eight seeds of blessing/ eight nigella seeds’ with which he can cultivate ‘by the sweat of his brow’. With this coda, the storyteller defines the lot of humankind in the Upper Egyptian mythological world: people sin because the Devil is a potent force, but they are empowered by God to work for their betterment. Ultimately, the modern Copt’s tale of Adam and Eve appears to be a variant of the Judaeo-Christian story, though it conjures up a different ethos from the one we recognise in Genesis. It advocates a different morality and mode of relations between the sexes; one not based on the subjugation of woman. Though Eve is held responsible for original sin and Adam is an innocent, beguiled into sin by a vicious fallen angel who had become his rival (in the guise of a serpent), there is less of a condemnatory conclusion to the tale. Is the eating of the apple the only sin? It is not the sexual knowledge acquired by Adam and Eve, nor the eating of the sacred fruit from the embalming tree, the tree of immortality. Eve, in a quest for greater knowledge and understanding of the world, is seduced into tasting the fruit. There is no hint here that she is forever condemned as cursed. She is gullible but not evil. Adam is similarly tempted by her into doing the same, but refrains at the last minute from swallowing the sacred pulp. It is jammed in his throat, for evermore visible as what we term the Adam’s apple, ironically and inappropriately called ‘the swallowed one’ in Arabic. How can this modern parable of ancient events and ancient nemesis be interpreted in the light of the behavioural norms of contemporary Luxor? I propose that this tale of creation and male/female relations suggests a different mode of conjugal relations, and one that places Upper Egyptians firmly in the heart of an agricultural universe. It also conjures up images of women searching for knowledge and a breakaway from the cloister … the dawn of an era where men are condemned to toil and produce harvest from the soil, despite the cactus; in sum, a more sympathetic and humanistic conclusion than in the counterpart tale in Genesis, in which Adam and Eve are denounced and given skins to clothe their shameful, naked bodies. One of the functions of comparative tale analysis is to reveal the larger field of knowledge and spectrum of beliefs at the root of trans-cultural behavioural models and gender archetypes. In this tale, there is a clear psychological rationale provided for understanding the behaviour of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and a more sympathetic and humanistic interpretation of their fate at God’s hand. In the context of repressive Upper Egyptian social mores, which traditionally have inhibited the rights of women to learn and

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to participate in society, it is revelatory of an underlying attitude to women by men and society that may be regarded at heart as more tolerant and less patriarchal than otherwise supposed. Evidence of transformations in the earlier Coptic tracts and the contemporary tale about the origins of man indicates that the shifting balance of gender roles was, and still is, of prime importance. Gender role models for male and female behaviour will once again come under scrutiny in the modern world as the desire for knowledge and prosperity gains momentum. Perhaps, at that point, the story of Adam and Eve will undergo further transformation.

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5

‘Ancient Contexts, Reversions and Conversions’: Messianic Tales of the Miraculous

The tale of Maimūna, the slave girl Two contrasting tales from two different narrative traditions: the conversion tale of Maimūna, a slave girl of Mecca, and the tale of St. Theodore, the Warrior Saint, serve to reveal other aspects of the genre we could call Upper Egyptian saint’s tale or legend. The tale of Maimūna, the slave girl, or ‘Maimūna’s Praise Poem’ (madīHit maīmūna) was performed for me in Luxor by cAwad’ullah cAbd al-Jalīl, and like the tale of Mārī Jirjis, was set in the context of a mūlid or saint’s festival of Sīdī Abu’l Hajjāj. cAwad’ullah started to sing his prelude to a tale of heroic deeds from the epic sīrat banī hilāl with a pun on ‘gone’ ( fana) and art ( fann):

Oh Arabs of handsome mien O you who have suffered long The healer of love’s wounds has gone Where, O healer of wounds, is my art?

But he was dissuaded from his purpose by zealots in the audience who wanted to hear praise poems to the Prophet Muhammad. To appease them, he was compelled to switch from sīra to a narrative praise poem (madīH). Nevertheless, despite the last-minute switch, cAwad’ullah still managed to allude in the prologue to the restorative vision of the Prophet Muhammad, seen by the slave girl, Maimūna, at her hour of death:

I shall sing praise to the Prophet So that my eye may see the Prophet…

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This praise poem continued for another fifty lines1 and then he sang the tale of Maimūna’s persecution and conversion, a possible allusion to the context in which he was performing: the celebration of the Islamic saint’s mūlid and, at its symbolic heart, the conversion of Sitt Tarzah, the ancient Coptic matriarch of Luxor, to Islam.

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The Praise Poem of Maimūna (madīHit maimūna) I

There was a Jew of Mecca who, for his wellbeing Kept slaves and servants and had plenty of lucre

II

He also had a slave girl, one he trusted Who for her goodness was called ‘Maimūna’ [‘the One in whom we have faith’]

III

With love of the Prophet she was enamoured She was in love with the Prophet and, moreover, with the faith ‘Singing praise to the Prophet for me is my resource!’

IV

When we pray to Muhammad, the One we love The One we love, the Prophet, he whom we worship Whoever may make the pilgrimage to you, O Prophet May he find succour this day as is his wish

V VI

I came travelling from the pilgrimages In my possession, neither money nor food I urged him, ‘Sing praise to the Prophet The praise singer said he honours He who is of the light!



The praise singer honours Him who is righteous Our master, the Prophet, whose eyes are “kohled” without “kohl” And for whom [at the equinox], the moon cracked into two halves All for the love of the Prophet of God’

VII

The Jew overwhelmed her He sprang upon Maimūna to make her confess He fetched her veil and leather hide And took her back to the slave-broker, the dallāl

VIII

He said to him, ‘O dallāl ! Speak out! Speak to me! O you who earn money from money There is a fatal flaw in her – a failing She’s in love with the Prophet and blinded by passion She loves the Prophet, his eyes “kohled” without “kohl” The light of the Prophet, eyes “kohled’ without “kohl”’

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IX

There was another Jew who lived beside him A marketeer and wheeler-dealer So he bought Maimūna with a weight of coins And gave her a ring once inside the house

X

The heathen bought her with dirhams and unveiled her He fashioned her a robe – a sheath of broadcloth – to wear inside the house And hung on her the pendant earring of the heathens

XI

The Jew went and took her to a Muslim praise singer At the door, he sang praises and made the beloved listen He sang ‘Praise to the Prophet’ and as he composed the verses He sang and chanted poems to the Almighty

XII He sang praise songs, and when the clan of Jews came He burst forth and spoke from within: ‘O you who sing praises to those we worship Delight to my eyes, my Prophet Muhammad Take from me what I give to you as succour For the love of the Prophet of the sons of cAdnan’ XIII

Maimūna heard his words She emerged as one transformed: ‘O you who sing praise to the Prophet Sing and make those who are present hear



O you who sing praise to the One we worship Take from me the pledge of help All for the love of the (tribe of ) cAdnan All for the love of the Prophet’

XIV

He composed verse upon verse And when the slave owner came back The accursed man came back from his wheeler-dealings The children of his clan came to seek him out

XV

His children said to him: ‘O father, a Muslim praise singer came to us here Singing praises that let Maimūna hear He sang poetry to the Prophet And at the same time, insulted you with his calumnies’

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XVI

His children said they would not lie – They had to speak out –

XVII

He set up two high poles within the house He bound Maimūna around her legs And shouldered her up, my good people

XVIII

The evil man crucified her on the poles He lashed her with his whip unfurled Greased with the fat of a black elder

125

XIX He swung her round from side to side She cried out, ‘O grandfather of Hassanein’ I shall not forget the favours of Him who is great How could I forget? How could I forget? How could I forget the generosity of the Great One? If you flay me with a whip, you tribe of oppressors A curse upon you shall be laid XX

The evil man began to attack her From his waist he whipped out a dagger ‘Maimūna, stretch out your hands!’

XXI XXII

‘You for whom my words will cleave your insides Here is my love for your Prophet Your only hope now is to seek the conjuring of a sorceress!’

XXIII

The first hand she stretched out was her right hand She said, ‘O Ahmad, in you I have faith! Apart from you, O Ahmad, whom could I wish for? Have mercy upon me on the crowded Day of Judgement!’

XXIV

With the first blow he sliced off her hands And then the evil man struck her eyes Never will he be saved from the sufferings of Hell!

Maimūna stretches out her first hand How she intones her belief in one God… How she intones her belief in one God… In remembrance of the Prophet, beautiful and long A thousand prayers to Him, the Chosen One

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XXV

He wrapped her inside her veil And between the tombs he hurled her Maimūna was to meet her Master

XXVI The generous Lord – May he wreak justice for the slave! Maimūna said, ‘May I have patience to endure O God, give me patience!’ Maimūna said, ‘May I have patience! XXVII

O Lord who governs all things I grow faint at the name of Sayyidna Omar And Our Prophet and cAly Kiwwar May his grace become manifest – madad! O God! O living God!’

XXVIII

The evil man struck her eyes Never will he be saved from the sufferings of Hell! He wrapped her in her veil Maimūna shall meet her Master O God, Have mercy on your slaves!

XXIX

The Prophet and His Companions Appeared at the tomb They found Maimūna in a perilous state They cried out Her limbs were dismembered and her body still ‘May you see a vision of the beloved ordained by the Prophet Whose eyes become “kohled” at His wish!’

XXX

He healed her wound with His spittle He was victorious, He and His Companions Through the grace of the ‘Knower of All Secrets’

XXXI

He healed her hands – he just touched them! He healed her legs – they could walk! He healed her eyes – they could see!

XXXII

She saw the Prophet, beloved of the cAdnan The Prophet said, ‘O my lady! You have been cured!’ The beloved Ahmad said, ‘O my lady! You have been cured! The House of the Great Teacher has come to you again

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The coming of the Eternal One has redeemed you And I am your protection against the sufferings of Hell’

XXXIII Maimūna emerged running Overjoyed with the clan of ‘He Who Comes Without Warning’ XXXIV The heathen goes out in the early morning And finds her deep within the house XXXV He says, ‘Come Maimūna O you of whose love I am convinced And because of you, Of the love of God, I am also convinced Who healed you and brought you here?’ XXXVI

She said to him, ‘My love, for you I feel no rancour!’ She drew from the Jew’s waist his dagger He stood up at once and she sliced off his turban He became a Muslim at the hands of the Ten The Prophet, cAli and Othman

XXXVII

How the glory of the Prophet resounds with light! A miracle, O people – To you, be all goodness – Our Prophet whose eyes are ‘kohled’ without ‘kohl’

This tale of conversion and martyrdom, embellished by g_ azal, seems to have been composed to affirm belief as well as to entertain, as the poet cleverly intersperses madīH at the beginning of the tale and throughout.2 He begins: Sing praise to the Prophets The singer of praises honours Him of the light The singer of praises honours Him who is righteous Him for whom the moon split into two halves3 All from love for the Prophet of God… In honour of the Prophet Muhammad, I was told by cAwad’ullah that God ordained two miracles: an equinox during which the moon split in two halves, one dark and one light; and the kohling of the eyelids of the Prophet, miraculously, ‘without kohl’. After this proclamation, within the hearing of the Jewish overlord, Maimūna proclaims her belief, an affirmation echoed

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in the voice of the maddāH she encounters and in her own words as she is tortured and sent to the grave. Maimūna is almost martyred for ‘love’ of the Prophet, but hers is a passionate and ecstatic love (cašq), reminiscent of g_ azal and Sufi tradition. She is dragged over stones, crucified, her hands slashed and her eyes put out. She is either dead or on the point of death when she sees a vision of the Prophet Muhammad. He and His Companions rescue her from burial and she returns to her Jewish persecutor who, on seeing her, converts to Islam. He makes a declaration of faith replete with amatory overtones to which Maimūna does not demur: ‘O my love, for you I feel no rancour.’ Again, in this praise poem, the noblest figure is Maimūna. It is striking that in all these stories the female figures capture the limelight as heroines, while the male ‘heroes’ in the tales of Mārī Jirjis and Maimūna remain ethereal intercessors. To sound the cadence, the story concludes as it began, with madīH to the Prophet ‘kuHīl al-cain’ – that is, whose eyes are ‘kohled  without kohl  ’.

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The Tale of Theodore, the Warrior Saint (qiSSit tawdros al-muHārib) by cAmm Rizq Būlos

Fig. 13 Theodore, the Warrior Saint (tawdros al-muHārib), spearing Diocletian

The story of Theodore, the Warrior Saint or tawdros al-muHārib, and his encounter with Diocletian (Dagladiyanos, in Coptic), told by cAmm Rizq, provides a distinguished example of an Egyptian religious legend, inspired by historical record. This long, free-verse saga is set in a temporal frame, which appears simultaneously to be Byzantine, early Roman and ancient Egyptian. The first episode pits brother against brother as they quarrel over who should become king. The evil Diocletian is cast as a shepherd from Akhmim, possessed by Satan. He arrives in front of the queen of Byzantium and charms her by playing his flute. She invites him to marry her and become King of Byzantium. He agrees. They are crowned by ‘Hyksos’ priests, as if the words Hyk sos actually meant ‘Shepherd Kings’ (as scholars originally believed this ancient Egyptian phrase to mean) but then the story descends into a tale of bloody conflict: butchery of the faithful by Diocletian and revenge by the warrior saint, Theodore, against the ‘heathens’. Thousands are killed. Diocletian converts to Christianity, then abjures the faith and returns to worshipping gazelle-headed idols. Theodore asks for his harpoon (like St. George) and they exchange a volley of insults. The tale ends with a determined re-espousal of Christianity and a vow to defend the faith against the Devil and idol worshippers.

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This overtly Christian tale of conversion, betrayal and revenge at the recanting of the faith concerns the massacre of Christians at the hands of Diocletian, an incident of historical record, expressed in a folk idiom. Unlike the tale of St. George, however, this story is told with messianic intent. The allusion to a devil ‘shepherd’ who originates from Akhmim at the time of the Hyksos conquerors of Egypt, and who later becomes king, is intriguing but without verifiable historical validity. In summary, therefore, it appears that both of these conversion tales were performed in order to affirm the faith. But, as with St. George and the Dragon, in each case, it is the narrator’s ability to blend elements of folk-tale with religious legend that enables him to infuse history and religious doctrine with vitality and at the same time to engage audiences in the miraculous worlds of heroes and heroines.

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Conclusion

In this collection of religious legends, epic and myths, the secular and profane become entangled in genres that defy absolute classification. These Egyptian tales relate to the eternal struggle between good and evil, and feature human beings as perpetual innocents, buffeted by evil forces and ‘more sinned against than sinning’. The moral tenure of these tales appears to challenge preconceptions of patriarchy and moral righteousness, and expose the hypocrisy and self-interest that motivates both human and divine entities. There shall be enmity between man and snakes, according to cAmm Rizq, not between man and woman. Moreover, there is no ‘from dust thou art, to dust thou shalt become’. Man shall cultivate as his penance, and from this blessed earth he shall eat his bread.

Heroines The pre-eminence of heroines and their brazen acts of seduction and proposals of marriage emerge in these stories as central and recurring motifs. The seduction scene in which the voluptuous cAzīza entices Yūnis is the most famous feature of the cAzīza and Yūnis romance from the sīrat banī hilāl. The proposal of marriage proffered by Sitt Tarzah in her encounter with Abu’l Hajjāj in Luxor is another well-known example from folk legend.1 In both orally-performed tales, and in the chapbook conversion tale of Khadra and Sayyid al-Badawi, the heroes are divine and evanescent intercessors who retreat to heaven, whereas the ‘daughter of Khadra’, Maimūna and Khadra alSharīfa are all dynamic, and in the case of Maimūna, brave and unflinching, even to death. How folk heroes and heroines choose to comport themselves, both valiantly and less heroically at times, reveals their relative positions of dominance. In at least two of the tales, the narrator tends to leave behind the male hero and embellish the role of a would-be heroine. After the dragon is slain, the princess, daughter of Khadra, ‘The Green Lady’ appears to steal the limelight

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from her staid but valiant saviour, Mārī Jirjis, and triumphantly parades the dragon on her head through the town. In the epic tale of the birth of Abu Zayd, while her husband weeps and laments his lack of male progeny, the brave Khadra takes the initiative to solve her problem of barrenness, advancing with her confidante, Shema and a bevy of Banī Hilāl maidens to the place where the jinn are believed to congregate – the confluence of rivers. There she breaks with convention and makes a bizarre wish to give birth to a child like a black kite, seemingly on impulse, invoking the jinn to intercede on her behalf, an act which results in the birth of the black-skinned hero and her banishment from the tribe in disgrace. In the tale of cAzīza and Yūnis, the almost divinely handsome Yūnis shows himself to be a hypocritical dandy who dallies with local prostitutes en route to her castle, but then pretends to be chaste and pious when pursued by c Azīza. From her position of strength and acuity of strategy, she then assumes the role of the ‘quasi-heroine’. And her only ‘crime’ in this seduction tale is to confront this handsome Bedouin with her feminine wiles and kidnap him for political advantage, a seemingly logical course of action in view of his apparent susceptibility to flattery and temptation. As the Coptic tale of Adam and Eve reveals, God and divine forces do intervene to save us from a worse fate. As human beings, we are manipulated by forces beyond our control. When we implore the divine forces to intercede, in the case of Khadra al-Sharīfa, to be saved from the ignominy of barrenness and the threat of divorce, the Lord, his company of saints and divinely inspired ‘helpers’ may act as saviours of the faithful. At the same time, through a vision of Mārī Jirjis, unwitting sinners may be relieved of possession by devils and restored to a state of innocence or, as in the tale of Maimūna, revived after torture and crucifixion at the point of death through faith in the power of the Prophet Muhammad to intercede.

The ‘succession of sequels’ A striking feature of the Coptic tales, in particular, is the literary phenomenon described as ‘the succession of sequels’. In Adam and Eve, for example, when starting to narrate the tale with a consolidated rhythm and gravitas as if to recount the Biblical story, in effect, Rizq expands the scenario as if to reflect local concerns about the outcome and interpretation of events. An examination of the corpus of ancient Egyptian tales reveals that narrators then also used this trope to extend the tale and engage their listeners. Two ancient Egyptian tales (which coincidentally deal with adulterous women) also feature elaborately intertwined plots. ‘The Story of Khufu and the Magicians’ from the Westcar papyrus, presumably from an earlier Dynasty but dated to

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the Second Intermediate Period (1500 bc), is set in the context of adultery perpetrated by the King’s wife, while the famous Tale of Two Brothers from the reign of the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Seti I (c. 1200–1194 bc) tells of yet another illicit seduction attempt by a woman. The wife of Anubis tries to seduce her husband’s brother, Bata, but is refused. The perpetrator reverses the story and pretends that Bata has attempted to seduce her, so setting one brother against another. In the end, Anubis kills his wife and Bata is resurrected in the Valley of the Cedar. There, the ram-headed god Khnum (believed to fashion human beings from clay on his potter’s wheel) moulds for him a new wife. However, she is taken from him by the Pharaoh who is attracted to her. Bata dies, but his wife asks that the tree in which his heart lies should be cut down. Anubis finds the heart and, having been told by Bata that ‘should his cup of beer froth, he could be resurrected’, Anubis restores Bata to life. At the end, Bata’s blood gives birth to two persea trees from which a splinter impregnates his divinely-created wife. The son to whom she gives birth becomes a crown prince – in effect, heir to the resurrected Bata – and at the end he reigns in harmony with his brother, Anubis. This apparent story of fratricide and betrayal involves a series of misdeeds and transgressions yet remains a tale about the flux in fortunes and the trajectory of death and resurrection of the young Bata. If stripped down to its essential theme, this story plays with the constant flux of forms and transformation of sentient beings from death to life again. In the heart and blood of the deceased, souls may remain vital yet dormant; human souls may be born and impregnated from trees; human blood may give birth to trees, and resurrection to life may stem from a single seed. The same mythic resonances of creation occur in another story – known as the ancient Egyptian Cinderella – ‘Rhodopis’, recorded by Strabo. In that tale, human beings are also created by the fashioner god, Khnum, from clay, and trees sprout from a single drop of blood.2 In another ancient Egyptian story, Neferkeptah is enticed by the prospect of learning the secrets of the gods from reading the ‘Book of Thoth’. Like Adam and Eve, he is punished for this desire to attain the same pinnacle of knowledge as the gods (in this story, his son and his wife are both summarily drowned), but what is important is that the narrative is again propelled by dramatic plot shifts and sequences of events that transform the outcomes of previous transgressions (as in the Tale of Adam and Eve) and lead to a ‘succession of sequels’. In Adam and Eve, Rizq does not end his story with God’s definitive condemnation of the serpent and Adam and Eve. Rather, he extends the tale to a more sanguine and palatable conclusion: the salvation of human beings. Similarly, Mārī Jirjis ends not with a paean to the saint but with a conclusion stressing that the tale does not end simply with the slaying of a dragon: it leads to the crowning of a princess with the head of a vanquished

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serpent and the smashing of idols, a prelude to conversion. The folk universe of the Coptic tales revolves around an intrinsic set of beliefs which underpin and contextualise the telling. The triumphant tale of Mārī Jirjis, for example, is embedded in the idea that the saint is a healer of illness caused by the possession of evil spirits. It celebrates the notion of exorcism as a way of alleviating sin and malevolent possession. The dragon, identified as the devil incarnate, is slain and the event revisited in the act of exorcism at Mārī Jirjis’s annual mūlid or birth feast. This view of the nature of sin as a consequence of demonic possession differs profoundly from the notion of ‘original sin’ of which Adam and Eve were believed to be guilty. And in Rizq’s version of Adam and Eve, the serpent is the embodiment of the arch-devil who fell from grace. The first man and woman are innocents who disobey the orders of the Almighty because of their human-like frailty and naiveté. The serpent’s fate, to be trounced in perpetuity by the heel of Man, stems from the fact that he is the arch-devil. Yet there is the lingering and indisputable factor of Eve’s disobedience and her luring of Adam to eat of the fruit of the Hant tree. cAzīza is similarly culpable as she kidnaps the hero, but what is interesting is that her attempted seduction and disrobing of Yūnis is an inverse of the humiliation suffered by Inanna when she descended to the underworld. Moreover, cAzīza is seemingly empowered by virtue of her position as daughter of the Sultan. She is an omnipotent and ruthless tyrant, and yet our sympathies lie with her. Her potency and seductive ploys suggest a re-incarnation in the Tunisian court of the character of the Egyptian princess, Zuleikha, whose sexual desires and duplicity were incarnated for posterity in both the Hebrew Bible and the Qur’an. But what is exceptional about this story is that cAwad’ullah has created a tale that coheres around the allegory of the female body as the ripe fruits of a tree, and the necklace as its embodiment. Few Luxor poets have achieved this coherence or sequence of interwoven metaphors in their renderings of the Egyptian epic. The malleability of the genre known as sīra is evident in the two sīrat banī hilāl episodes. In cAzīza, cAwad’ullah enhances and extends descriptive passages (waSf ) to create ‘peaks’ of emphasis, but also modulates the rhythm and pace of the story so that it divides into four episodes of varying length and complexity. The tale pivots around the underlying leitmotif of the necklace and the female body. Yet, in his version of the tale of Khadra, plot and political intrigue are paramount. The episode of Khadra is more lyrical and emotional in tone and performance, and replete with lamentation, as if cAwad’ullah had fine-tuned his tale to accentuate audience responses to Khadra’s plight, while the cAzīza tale hovers in a mist of unreality. The Coptic tales similarly invest their heroines with power and dignity. The tales of Mārī Jirjis and Maimūna are both hagiographic legends, but in their telling the heroines emerge as pre-eminent. The ‘daughter of Khadra’

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stands triumphant and empowered, while Mārī Jirjis, the divine intercessor rather than warrior, retreats. The princess’s stature is clear in that she feels empowered to ask the saint to marry her, an act usually only attributed to a goddess or queen. Ironically, in the mediaeval English version of the St. George legend, believed to have been brought back to England from Palestine by the Crusaders, St. George marries ‘the princess’ while Rizq’s version retreats into political correctness. In sum, Rizq’s ‘historical’ tale of the dragon-slayer appears to be an amalgam of foreign and indigenous motifs, some ancient Egyptian and others known from the Graeco-Roman period. Mārī Jirjis himself is ‘the Roman’, and the young virgin is cloaked in the green burnus, more common in that era than a papyrus sheath, but at the mythological level, she still is the virginal ‘Green One’ and duly honoured. Certain motifs, such as the spearing of the dragon which triggers an earthquake and tidal wave, and the symbolic placement of the serpent on the brow of the heroine, appear to be intrinsically Egyptian, while the Behemot of Jewish legend is qualitatively different from the dragon that swallows the Nile flood. That bovine beast has an unquenchable thirst. The dragon of this tale breathes fire and exudes water through his eye, so saving the populace, dependent on a sole river, from drought and starvation. c Amm Rizq frames his legend of Mārī Jirjis as a hagiographic tale but then calls it qiSSa (‘story’) as if to suggest a more imaginative account. He recites homilies, but at the outset diverges into a more vernacular tone and then invokes Christian symbolism to reinforce its proselytising theme. In contrast, c Awad’ullah sings an exhortative praise poem to tell the story of Maimūna. He starts with homilies and the characters erupt in praise, accentuating the story’s theme, and for this reason, the story of Maimūna, the true believer who adheres to her faith despite torture and near death, seems more akin to tales of persecution and martyrdom (as found in al-Thaclabī’s mediaeval anthology and the Coptic Synaxarium) than to Egyptian folk tradition.3 Both tales have recourse to a vision: the miraculous vision of Muhammad and his Companions at the grave of Maimūna, and the ‘vision’ of the saint revived for pilgrims at his festival during the ritual telling of the dragonslaying by Mārī Jirjis. Both act as deus ex-machina saviours of the oppressed. The fact that the tale of Maimūna also suggests a ‘wakening’ of the dead, evocative of the tales of the multiple martyrdoms of Coptic saints, would also seem to reflect a fusion of genres. Coptic and Islamic saints’ legends, conversion tales and rhymed praise poetry in Sa cīdī tradition would seem to be constituted, therefore, as ‘fusion tales’. The designation of a tale as sīra, qiSSa or madīH seems to a large extent to be determined by the context in which the narrator decides to tell his tale: a wedding or saint’s festival (mūlid ), its intrinsic ‘message’ and most important, the intention of the narrator to entertain or to preach. When the historical and cosmological dimensions of

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these stories are scrutinised, the degree to which the oral performance of tales has stimulated the imagination of poets and audiences in Egypt over the millennia becomes clear. Some vestiges of ancient Egyptian, Sumerian, Babylonian and Judaeo-Christian stories appear to resurge into prominence when tale types and motifs are compared – and in some cases, transposed into new frames of meaning – while others remain the same. This study has undertaken to analyse and explore the cultural paradigms and belief systems upon which these stories are crafted in the knowledge of the extraordinary richness of the ancient Egyptian, Sumerian and Babylonian narrative and iconographic legacy. Through the perception of similarities and differences, the paradigmatic forms of human behaviour appear in a new light. What stands out in these Egyptian tales is an indelible faith in humanity and its ability to survive. From the earliest times, as we learn from these tales, Egyptians have been favoured by God to sustain life and endure, even when confronted by death. Both of the poets, cAwad’ullah and cAmm Rizq, are now dead. However, by continuing to regale listeners with these stories of ancestors and divine intercessors during their lifetimes, it would appear that they remained convinced of their vocation and their ability to sustain hope in the capacity of human beings to overcome the forces of fate and evil. We mourn their passing. The performance of oral literature is diminishing and yet, at the same time, is being boosted by televised episodes of the sīra. How new poets will tell their stories in the twenty-first century remains to be discovered. May they be as eloquent.

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Notes

Introduction 1 al-Shamy, Hasan. Folktales of Egypt. 1980. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 2 Gaston Maspero published Contes Populaires de l’Egypte Ancienne in 1882 in Paris with J. Maisonneuve publishers. It was subsequently translated and published in English as Popular Stories of Ancient Egypt. 1915. New York: G.P. Putnam and Sons; London: H. Grevel. A new edition, edited by Hasan al-Shamy, was republished in 2009 by Cornell University Library in Ithaca, NY from the scanned English original. Georges Legrain published Louxor Sans les Pharaons in 1914 in Bruxelles with Vromant Press, in French only. 3 Several of these tales have been presented previously as academic papers: ‘The Egyptian Romance of Azīza and Yūnis and Bakhtin’s Concept of the Adventure Chronotope’, Paper presented at the American Folklore Society conference. 1985. Cincinnati; and in some cases, published in conference proceedings by the author as follows: ‘Egyptian Tales of Adam and Eve: Gender, Original Sin and the Logic of Redemption’. 1995. International Congress on Folk Narrative Research. Mysore, India; ‘The Seduction Tale of cAzīza and Yūnis from the Egyptian epic sīrat banī hilāl ’, 1989. International Congress of Folk Narrative Research. Budapest; and ‘The Egyptian Tale of St. George and the Dragon: Coptic ‘madīH ’ (praise poetry) and the ‘sīra’ tradition’. 1985. Conference on Popular Arabic Epic. Cairo University with the Centre for Mediterranean Civilisations. Egypt. 4 Several performances of the Egyptian sīrat banī hilāl have also been published in English translation: one entire episode recorded with cAwad’ullah cAbd al-Jalīl by Susan Slyomovics in Merchant of Art, An Egyptian Hilālī Oral Poet in Performance. 1988. Berkeley: University of California Press; another by my colleague, Dwight F. Reynolds from the University of Pennsylvania: Heroic Poets, Poetic Heroes: The Ethnography of Performance in an Arab Oral Epic Tradition. 1995. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, based on recordings of the epic with a Hilālī poet from the village of Bakatush in the Egyptian delta. Susan Slyomovics subsequently published two essays analysing her transcribed version of cAwad’ullah’s story of Khadra al-Sharīfa within the set entitled ‘The Birth of Abu Zayd’ in the compendium, Oral Epics from Africa. Ed. John William Johnson, T. Hale and S.P. Belcher. 1997. Berkeley: University of California Press. 5 In his famous Ara’is al-majalis... qissas al-anbiya. n.d. more commonly known as a compendium of ‘Tales of the Prophets’ written in the eleventh century, the famous Qur’ānic scholar, Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Thaclabī described himself in the same vein. 6 From the translation of al-Ghazālī by Madeleine Farah in Marriage and Sexuality in Islam. 1984. Salt Lake City, Utah: University of Utah Press.

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1: The Tale of cAzīza and Yūnis 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Scholars are not agreed and the controversy rages on as to whether this story is integral to, or extraneous to, the ‘true’ sīrat banī hilāl. A reference to an Upper Egyptian belief in the existence of the qarīn/qarīna soul-doubles born with each person and believed to remain as soul companions throughout life. The full moon that is believed to be the most radiant and most propitious as it occurs in the month preceding the holy month of Ramadan. Unlike its ritual precursors in Sumerian and Babylonian mythology, Egyptian poets extend the number of doors beyond the ritual seven to eight, and sometimes nine. See al-Shamy, Hasan. ‘The Story of al-Sayyid Ahmad al-Badawi with Fatima Bint-Birry: an Introduction’. Folklore Forum. Vol. 9. 1976. pp 139–64; Vol. 10. 1977. John A. Wilson’s translation of ‘The Story of Two Brothers’ from the Papyrus D’ Orbiney (British Museum 10183) dated to 1225 bc in The Ancient Near East Vol. I: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures. Pritchard, James B. (ed.) 1958. Princeton, NY: Princeton University Press. pp 12–16. From Kramer, Samual Noah. ‘The Biblical Song of Songs and the Sumerian Love Songs’. Expedition. Vol. 5. No. 1. 1962. p. 25. Susan Ackerman, in the Jewish Women’s Encyclopaedia. http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/ astarte-bible. According to C. Schroeder of the University of California, Los Angeles, the persea tree of the ancient Egyptians is the species Mimosops schimperu of genus Sapotaceae, a tree unique to Egypt and Ethiopia, and characterised by ‘fruit like a pear’, with ‘a stone like a plum’. It was also considered sacred. Schroeder, C. California Avocado Society, 1977. Vol. 61. pp. 59–63. As translated by White, John B. in A Study of the Language of Love in the Song of Songs and Ancient Egyptian Poetry. 1978. Missoula, Montana: Scholars’ Press for the Society of Biblical Literature. Both song and lament were recorded in the village of al-cAiyaiyša, Qus (near Luxor) in 1980. Kramer, Samuel Noah. Sumerian Mythology: A study of Spiritual and Literary Achievement. 2007. Charleston, South Carolina: Forgotten Books. pp 130–2. Recorded on the West Bank of Luxor, al-Baycarat, 1981. Emerson, Caryl and Holmquist, Michael. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by Bakhtin. 1981. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. c Awad’ullah, who was a rāwī and once a maddāH, would sing praise poetry laced with gazal in other contexts as well, as in this excerpt of madīH: ‘Sing praise with your heart _  aflame to Him; For Whom the houris [of heaven] reclined...’. Oral communication by epic scholar and poet, cAbdelrahman al-cAbnūdi. Propp, Vladimir. The Morphology of the Folktale. 1984. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press. Fox, Michael. The Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian Love Songs. 1985. Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press. p. 329. A translation of the full text by the poet, al-Nādī, is included below: ‘She said to him, Look at my hair, Plaits like camel ropes falling on my shoulders O Yūnis, see my forehead and swear you will say, it is radiant with light A creation in the image of the Merciful Lord Come closer and look at my eyebrows Like a dove that flees behind the mountains

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Yūnis, look at my eyes Kohl-lined without a guiding stick! O Yūnis look at my nose A well-rounded date, its origins in Sham Come closer and see my mouth As rounded as the seal of Solomon O Yūnis, look at my teeth One coral followed by another Come closer and see my lips Smoother than a Maria Theresa coin there are none that have existed Yūnis see my neck A tankard of silver fashioned by one who must have been drunk Come closer and see my breasts Two female date palms from... Come closer and see my belly Silky and smooth beyond belief Come closer and see my navel [Contoured] like the bevelling of a glass O Yūnis, travelling down my back Why, anyone like you would shut up and fall asleep! 20 ‘al-guSSa marSūsa ruSSa’ is an excerpt from a Sa cīdī wedding song recorded in the 1980s and an intentional pun on the word guSSa meaning ‘knot of hair placed under the scarf ’ (mandīl ) as decoration and covertly, a woman’s sex. 21 ‘He entered the first staircase The rounded thigh which props up the ‘castle’ She says, ‘to a Pasha its use has been consigned’ The second staircase is made of glass Whoever would tread on it would think it the Hejāz Am I better or is it Jaz? [namely, Jāzīyya, another heroine of the epic] Whose words in the Najd would exert more influence? For whom would weeping find no constraint? And she ripped open her gown against her nipples But she feels intense desire and her mind flies off The fifth is bathed in oil O Yūnis you have graced this house with your presence O ‘Miss’... I have seen and glanced at the ripe pomegranates And around them have I meandered The sixth is embellished with coral Come... I shall tell the al-cAllam about you Ninety horses lie sleep under the castle You with the radiant cheeks no one has seen the like of before The seventh is of whalebone Your father-in-law, Yūnis, is going to die The eighth is of fishbone The ninth is of silver Yūnis leaned over and gave a groan ‘Bring me a vessel so that I may make my ablutions’ Yūnis come and let us ‘make hay’ I shall be the ship and you, the captain... Come closer and see my inner ‘dangling fringe’

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On my forehead so delicately placed Azīza said, ‘O Yūnis... You with the lash-fringed eyes...’ 22 In this stanza, the notion of cAzīza’s body as a castle takes shape: ‘Neither a Khalifa nor an al-cAllam... nor Macbad al-Sultān And even in a horse race, his hair would not leave his body If you saw his face endowed with all its qualities You would say that your ‘castle’ would be drenched If you were to see him, you would abandon your virtue’ 23 This is an aspect not initially replicated in al-Nādī’s version, in which he likens the necklace initially to the ‘full moon of al-Šacbān’ (the epithet cAwad’ullah uses to describe Yūnis himself ) yet when Sucda sees and describes it, al-Nādī also invokes grapes and pomegranates. This is an example of the creativity accorded to poets and, at the same time, evidence of the repertoire of formulas and descriptors available to the epic singers. 24 See the translation of al-Ghazālī’s tract by Madeleine Farah in Marriage and Sexuality in Islam. 1984. Salt Lake City, Utah: University of Utah Press. 25 I am indebted to Katharine Young for her insightful comments on earlier versions of this book and her coining of the term, ‘tale world’. 26 Hernadi, Paul. ‘The Erotics of Retrospection: History Telling, Audience Response, and the Strategies of Desire’. In New Literary History. Vol. 12. 1981. pp. 243–52. 27 Oral communication, Dwight F. Reynolds, colleague, Arabist and folklorist, who conducted research among epic poets from the town of al-Bakatush in the Egyptian Delta and whose full text of the sīrat banī hilāl has now been placed online at http://www. siratbanihilal.ucsb.edu/start. 28 On my first ever meeting with cAwad’ullah, he picked up his Tār and sang this episode spontaneously to me, apparently to celebrate my arrival. On another occasion, he sang a different section from the same tale of cAzīza, also without being prompted. Perhaps as a result of his persistent desire to connect me with the tale, I became more interested in the story and cAwad’ullah’s perceptions of it than in any other episode from the sīra. 29 As found in the commercial cassette version of the sīrat banī hilāl recorded by cAli alJirimani and in the version by al-cAzab recorded in Asmant, West Bank of Luxor, by the author. 30 The sīrat banī hilāl in Upper Egypt may be recited to the accompaniment of a rubāba (a single-stringed spike fiddle) or a broad-framed drum known as a Tār. 31 cAbd al-Salām is one Luxor epic poet who performed entirely in prose with no accompaniment. 32 Fahd, Towfic. La Divination Arabe. 1966. Leiden: Brill. p. 65. 33 Quoted from Ibn Khaldun in the Muqaddama in Fahd, Towfic. La Divination Arabe. 1966. Leiden: Brill. p. 46. 34 See Albert B. Lord (eds. Stephen Mitchell and G. Nagy). The Singer of Tales. 2nd edn. 2000. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 35 Some of the puns may allude to homosexual encounters as well as illicit encounters between cAzīza and Yūnis. An earlier study of a taped performance by the Delta poet, Scad IŠŠacīr by Susan Slyomovics revealed that this set of puns on hāl fīh is well known and, consequently, it is possible that a more ‘typical’ audience (not the one present at these recordings, mainly two women and the transcriber, Jamāl Zakī al-Dīn al-Hajājī) would have understood the plethora of connotations. 36 Dundes, Alan. ‘The Wet and the Dry, the Evil Eye, an Essay in Indo-European and Semitic Worldview’. In The Evil Eye, A Casebook. 1992. Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press.

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37 The female sexual organ. 38 Connolly, Bridget. ‘The Structure of Four Banī Hilāl Tales: Prolegomena to the Study of Sira Literature’. Journal of Arabic Literature. 1973. Vol. IV. p. 45. 2: The Tale of Khadra al-Sharīfa and the Miraculous Conception of Abu Zayd al-Hilālī 1

2 3

This tale was transcribed by Jamāl Zakī al-Dīn al-Hajājī, who gave me the transcript in Luxor in the 1990s. I was not present at the recording of this performance. Susan Slyomovics recorded and transcribed a version of this same episode with cAwad’ullah c Abd al-Jalīl in Gurna in 1983, which was published in ‘The Birth of Abu Zayd’ in the compendium, Oral Epics from Africa. ed. John William Johnson, T. Hale and S.P. Belcher. 1997. University of California Press, pp. 54–68. Her recording is among the tales told by c Awad’ullah, deposited for posterity in the Folklore Institute archive in Tewfiqiyya in Cairo. Lane, Edward. An Arabic-English Lexicon. Pts 1–8. 1968 (1863–1893). Pt. 1, p. 69. Beirut: Librairie du Liban. This garment was still known and recorded in lament texts composed and performed in the 1980s in Upper Egypt. Often the hymen of the bride is ruptured by a faithful aunt who supervises the proceedings and ensures that a correct result is obtained. 3: The Tale of St. George and the Dragon

1 2 3

A town on the West Bank of Luxor, about 15 kilometres north of Gurna. Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Thaclabī, author of Ara’is al-Majalis fi Qisas al-Anbiya’, written in the tenth century in Cairo but of no recorded date. ‘In the era of Mārī Jirjis Whose martyring was at the hand of Diocletian Diocletian himself! All were martyred at the hands of Diocletian himself All of them He was the one who was king and possessor of the idols...

We have seven monasteries here in Nagada Abu Sēfēn, property of Nagada Mari Boktor (St. Victor) Monastery of the Cross, property of Nagada Monastery of Abuna Santa’us, property of Nagada From Nagada to Qamula And in the same place, there are five churches as well’. 4 mārī from the Syriac. 5 This mūlid takes place near cAsfūn al Matcana on the West bank of the Nile. 6 Prof. Betsy Bryan has suggested in a recent lecture at the American Research Center in Cairo that during the festival of drunkenness celebrated in the temple dedicated to the goddess Sekhmet at Karnak, devotees similarly may have come and slept in the temple for the purpose of seeing a vision of the goddess. 7 cAmm Rizq describes how pilgrims observe the feast. Some, for example, interpret the sight of pigeons fluttering overhead as a sign of the visitation of the holy spirit: ‘They see pigeons flying at night... Three white pigeons...

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Pigeons like holy spirits Fluttering... Circling round the monastery... And afterwards they fly over all the tents ‘Spraying water’ on the people sitting in their tents Or in the monastery They spray all over those who are present They hover over the people 8

Some [of those present] chant litanies (tag_anīm): Like ‘Ya baTTal! ya baTTal! [O hero! O hero] Others say prayers And there are those who recite the ancient poems (iššc’ūr ilgadīm) Which are intoned for the saints... And to Mārī Jirjis we say...’ (and at this point, he starts to perform his tale). The story teller describes the scene as follows: ‘When the crescent appears on him, The sick man shouts and kicks his hands and feet Until he relents He abandons his kicking and his struggling and stands up And says, ‘It happened like this... and this... and this... The exorcism (camalīyya) was like this... It happened like this...’

If the man had been possessed ‘in his mind’ He would also tell his story... What he saw... He might say, for example, ‘I saw Mārī Jirjis getting down from his horse And in his hand was a lance And with him was another saint, ‘Abu Sēfēn’ (‘he of the double-edged sword’, St. Mercurius) who comes from a monastery near Sūs (He’s the one who rides with him and usually appears with Mārī Jirjis...)

When there’s a šiTān (devil) in someone... The one who grabs hold of it is Mārī Jirjis And the one who slays it is Mārī Jirjis

‘Abu Sēfēn’ is there with him at the ceremony He’s the one who performs the exorcism And makes the devil appear (iZZāhir)...’ 9 In a similar version of the tale of Mārī Jirjis recorded by Ernst Bannerth about 20 years prior to this one and translated and transliterated in ‘Une Romance de Haute Egypte sur St.

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Georges’. Extrait di MIDEO (Melanges de l’Institut Dominicain d’Etudes Orientales) Tome 9. 1967. pp 133–41, the narrator glosses the same word caūn (used in cAmm Rizq’s text to denote the dragon) as ‘guardian’. 10 cAbdelrahman al-cAbnūdi said that caūn was the name of ‘the King of the Jinn’ (pers. comm.) while Edward Lane glosses it as something ‘said of a woman and a cow’. cawan, a word that also appears in our tale, is similar defined: ‘a beast of the bovine kind, or cow or anything ... or a woman and a beast’ (both in Lane, Edward. Arabic-English Lexicon. 1863. London: Willams and Norgate. pp. 2203–4. 11 al-Thaclabī. Qisas al’Anbiya’. 12 Translation by Hasan al-Shamy in Folktales of Egypt. 1980. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. p. 159. 13 al-Shamy, Hasan, Folktales. 1980. al-Shamy also cited this rite in relation to a tale of Mārī Jirjis found in the Cairo Folklore Archive. 14 Katharine Young elaborated the phrase ‘tale world’ in Young, Katharine (ed.). Bodylore. 1993. Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press and the American Folklore Society. 15 In this case, a small embankment. 16 Richard Dorson in the Foreword to Folktales (al-Shamy. 1980), pp. xxxi, xxxii, quoted from Edward Lane in Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. 1973 [1860]. New York: Dover. 17 One such full-length Osiris bed is still visible in the Cairo Museum. 18 This union is laughed about by some but often denied by others: some members of the al-Hajajiyya clan insist that Abu’l Hajjāj was ‘already married’ (and therefore would not ‘marry’ again) while others say that Sitt Tarzah was an abbess, celibate like Mārī Jirjis, and, therefore, unable to engage in secular marriage. Some even go so far as to say that in order to remain virginal, she was buried standing up. See Elizabeth Wickett. ‘Archaeological Memory, the Leitmotifs of Ancient Egyptian Festival Tradition, and Cultural Legacy in the Festival Tradition of Luxor: The mūlid of Sīdī Abu’l Hajjāj al-Uqsori and the Ancient Egyptian ‘Feast of Opet’. Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt. 2009. Vol. 45. pp. 403–27. 19 Judges. Chapter 11. v. 35–39. 20 This god, Yaghuth, was one of the graven images of Semitic religion mentioned in the Qur’ān as having existed in the era of the Prophet Noah and carried in battle. From Robertson-Smith, W. The Religion of the Semites. 1972. New York: Schocken (reprint of the 1887 edition), p. 55. It is presumed that this Jahili king, as with the Hyksos king, Apophis, was named after the deity in his honour. 21 Jeremiah 51:34. 22 As Lane describes it, ‘... an Angel was sent to support the seven earths but had no support for its feet so god created a rock of ruby for him to stand on yet there was no support for the rock so ‘Kuyoota’, the bull was created. As there was no support for the bull God created an enormous fish that no one could look upon on account of its vast size and the flashing of its eyes and their greatness, for it is said that if all the seas were placed in one of its nostrils, they would appear like a grain of mustard seen in the midst of a desert and God, Whose name be exalted, commanded the fish to be a support to the feet of the bull. The name of this fish is Bahamut. He placed as its support, water, and under the water, darkness and the knowledge of mankind fails as what is under the darkness ... According to El Wardee ... he takes a breath once a day – when he exhales, the sea flows and when he inhales, it ebbs. Many of the Arabs attribute earthquakes to the shaking of this bull’. From Ed-Demeeree from Wahib Ibn Munebbih, quoted by al-Ishaqee ‘loco laudato’ in Lane, Edward. A Thousand and One Nights. 1840. Vol. 1. p. 22.

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23 Job. Chapter 40. v. 15. The behemoth was also believed to be ‘a giant fish with great eyes’ in mediaeval Islamic cosmology as well as a ‘thirsty monster’ (cf. Book of Enoch). This beast is thirsty but clearly of a different ilk, as this text illustrates: ‘All the water that flows through the bed of the Jordan suffices him for one gulp’ and, consequently, they ‘give’ him an entire stream. Ginsberg, Louis. Legends of the Jews. Philologos Religious Online Books: http://philologos.org/_eb-lotj/. The prophet Job in the Old Testament was said to have had a ‘behemoth’/behemūt (or bahamūt) (similarly pronounced in Hebrew), an animal imagined to resemble a hippopotamus. 24 T.C. Mitchell in New Bible Dictionary (ed. J.D. Douglas). 1962. Downers Grove, Ill.: Intervarsity Press. 3rd edition. p. 127. 25 This is according to the Papyrus Sallier I. These ‘rulers of foreign lands’ (as the word Hyksos is now presumed to mean), or more popularly, ‘the Shepherd Kings’, dominated Egypt from the XIIth Dynasty to the second Intermediate Period, as discussed by Gunn, Battiscombe and Gardiner. New Renderings of Egyptian Texts. II. ‘The Expulsion of the Hyksos’. Journal of Egyptian Archaeology. Vol. 5. No. 1. pp. 36–56, 1918. London: Egypt Exploration Society. 26 This motif was catalogued by Stith Thompson (The Folktale, New York, 1946) in his Motif Index as ‘B 11.7.1’. It therefore constitutes a prominent universal motif as well as one with a plethora of Egyptian variants. Other related motifs include B 11.10 ‘Sacrifice of a human being to a dragon’ and S 263.3 ‘Person sacrificed to water spirit to secure water supply’. 27 Budge, Ernest A. Wallis. Facsimiles of Egyptian Hieratic Papyri in the British Museum. 1910. London: Trustees of the British Museum. 28 Wilkinson, Sir Gardner and Birch, Samuel. Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians. 1797–1885.Vol. III. Plate XXXIV. p. 155. London: J. Murray. 29 Kramer, Samuel Noah. Sumerian Mythology: A Study of Spiritual and Literary Achievement. 2007. Charleston, SC: Forgotten Books. p. 115. 30 A type of stela (small pillar, either square or round) designed to heal and protect, often with an inscription. 31 Clermont-Ganneau, ‘Horus et St. Georges’, Revue Archéologique t. xxxii. 1876. pp. 196xii. Pl XVII (now in the Louvre in Paris). This icon is of unknown provenance. 32 Mariette, Auguste. Denderah: Description Generale du Grand Temple de cette ville. 1870. G. Olms Verlag. 33 Tablet II, Epic of Gilgamesh, http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/mesopotamian/ gilgamesh/tab2.html. 34 This was also known as the magical fluid sa; that is, the image of the Eye of Rec and the Great Flood from Recs Sound Eye. From Allen, Thomas George. The Egyptian Book of the Dead. 1960. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Spell 17, p. 27. 35 In one of several ancient Egyptian creation myths, the efflux from the eye of Rec (i.e. his tears) was the source of mankind and the ‘ejaculation’ from the ‘eye’ regarded as equivalent to semen discharge (as argued by Dundes, Alan in ‘The Wet and the Dry, the Evil Eye, an Essay in Indo-European and Semitic Worldview’ in The Evil Eye, A Casebook. 1992. Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press. p. 42. 36 A phrase coined by Jauss, Hans Robert in Towards an Aesthetic of Reception (trans. Timothy Bahti) 1982. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota. p. 190. 37 ‘In that day, the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword [Harba] shall punish Leviathan, the piercing serpent, even Leviathan, that crooked serpent and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea’. Jehovah uses the same weapon (Harba) deployed by Mārī Jirjis, to slay his dragon. Isaiah 27:1.

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38 Heidel, Alexander. Epic of Gilgamesh and Old Testament Parallels. 1963 (1946, 1949). Tablet VI (trans. Friedrich). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 39 According to Hasan al-Shamy, the legend of St. George and the Dragon is associated with the Hilālī cycle as performed in southern Algeria and Tunisia (al-Shamy. Folktales. 1980). 40 Pigeon cotes in Upper Egypt are towers made from pots, phallic in shape and plastered over with mud. 41 burnus, a word derived from Greek birros and the Late Latin birrus, is a cloak more normally worn in Morocco, Algeria and Libya by men. 42 The name of the goddess, Wadjet, means ‘the papyrus-coloured one’ or blue/green. In the ancient Egyptian myth about Wadjet and of the origins of the uraeus, Wadjet is described as the daughter of the first god of the universe, Atum, the creator, designated as his ‘eye’. In the tale, she is asked to search for his two lost sons, Tefnut (god of moisture/ spittle) and Shu (god of wind), and when she finds them, Atum is so happy, he cries and those tears produce human beings. Atum then places Wadjet on his head in the form of a cobra as his eye. According to the annals, she was worshipped in Per-Wadjet, later known as Buto in the northern Delta, initially as protectress of Lower Egypt but after unification, patron of Upper Egypt as well. As this story illustrates, the eye and the cobra are fused into a single symbolic entity, both a fearful icon and the powerful eye of the creator ‘god’. The reason for the form of the cobra or her headdress is not documented in ancient Egyptian narrative or history. 43 The word for uraeus, in ancient Egyptian, iaret, in fact meant ‘she who rears up’. Isis, the foremost of Egyptian goddesses, first grasped power by fashioning a uraeus out of clay in a contest with the god Rec. Empowered by it, she was able to discover his secret name and ensure the ascendancy of Horus to the throne of Egypt. 44 Another named as Taur or Tauris is similarly crowned and a long, serpentine (?) headdress (substituted on occasion by a cobra head or cobra diadem) cascades down her back like a rampant crocodile. She is described in somewhat baffling cosmological terms as a deity ‘resident in the pure waters belonging to the abyssal heights of heaven, regent of gods’ (recorded in Wilkinson). 45 Khadra was not only a prominent figure in the sīrat banī hilāl epic as the mother of the hero, Abu Zayd al-Hilālī, and mother of the heroine of the St. George legend. The persona of Khadra is almost an archetype of the ideal heroine. In Sudanese ‘zar’ exorcism rituals, probably similar to those practised in Egypt (as the practice of zar is believed to be of Sudanese origin), Khadra is featured as one of the constellation of spirits who possess women. In order to appease and exorcise this ‘green clad spirit’ at the zar, the woman seeking to be exorcised must be wrapped in an elegant Habara, perhaps to emulate Khadra al-Sharīfa on her wedding day. Bolstered through her name and its literal and symbolic connotations, Khadra has assumed the status of a transcendental figure, sometimes a noble virgin and sometimes the mother of a hero or heroine, depending on her role and function. In the domain of folk literature, Khadra (‘the Green One’) is also the name of another virginal heroine, the Princess Khadra, in ‘The tale of Princess Khadra al-Sharīfa’ or ‘Khadra, the Noble’ and the story of what befell her in the lands of the NaSarā, and the miracle of al-Sayyid al-Badawi, ‘when he came to her’. This nineteenth-century chapbook tale of the heroine Khadra al-Sharīfa in her encounter with al-Sayyid Ahmad al-Badawi, the Islamic saint and patron of the city of Tanta in the Delta, features many of the same structural elements and motifs of the Mārī Jirjis legend, transposed to a different religious context. In this tale, which is transcribed in sajc and may have been performed as poetry, the virginal Khadra is captured by a cursed and rapacious kāfir or heathen (in this case, a NaSrānī or Christian) and fated to be ‘sacrificed’. As in Rizq’s tale, she is similarly draped in jewels as a ‘bride’, wrapped in an identical Habara (black silk cloak) and a lament is

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sung for the loss of her virginity, as it was for the daughter of the Sultan: ‘They wept laments that would split the innards Their faces became like ashes And they went to their houses in a state of weeping’ In this tale, as in the episode of Khadra at the confluence of four rivers, the saint Ahmad al-Badawi mobilises a contingent of divine helpers or ‘servants’ to intervene and save her. In this way, the story mirrors aspects of the Mārī Jirjis tale and the story of Maīmūna, even though the intercessor is a saviour from a different religious tradition. 46 al-Thaclabi. n.d. 47 Jacobus de Voragine recounts the story of St. George in all its variants, the version set in Libya and the tales of martyrdom of the fabled George in Legenda Aurea (The Golden Legend) c. 1275, first published in 1470 and translated into English (and published) by William Caxton in 1473. 48 In Bannerth (1967) quoted from Corpus scriptorium christianorum orientalium. Vol. 90.II Latin version, p. 85. Leuven: Peeters Publishers. 49 Ibid., quoted from Butler, A.J. The Ancient Coptic Churches of Egypt. 1884. Oxford. Vol. 2. p. 365. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 50 In the fourteenth century in Egypt, there were 42 churches dedicated to St. George, 32 dedicated to St. Mercurius (Abu Sēfēn or ‘He of two swords’), plus many others to lesser saints, Menas and Theodore (Taudros al-muHārib), all represented in equestrian form with lances according to al-Armani, Abu Salih in ‘The Churches and Monasteries of Egypt’ as translated by B.T.A. Evetts and A.J. Butler. Gorgias Press. 2001. pp. 47–8.

4. The Tale of Adam and Eve 1

2

3 4 5 6 7 8

Copts are members of the Coptic church which flourished in Egypt between the first and third centuries ad and was deemed a heresy of Christianity by the Roman church. The Middle Eastern sect was based on adherents’ beliefs in spiritual knowledge or gnosis (knowledge) referred to as Gnosticism, largely uncomprehended until significant and previously untranslated texts defining Gnostic ideas on the origins of the world and other theological issues were found wrapped in earthenware jars in an excavation at Nagc Hammādi in Upper Egypt in the 1970s. This name was also intriguing. The name ‘Adma’ has no specific mythological antecedents in Egyptian history but the god Amun had a feminine counterpart in ancient Egypt known as Amaunet. Other major gods such as Nun, as well as lesser gods such as Heh had similar female counterparts (Naunet and Hauhet). Unaware of this, the woman coined the name ‘Adma’ as the feminine of Adam in an ancient Egyptian form. ‘The Angel of Death, King of All Mankind’ from the Coptic text (British Museum MS Oriental 2025) edited by Budge, Sir E.A. Wallis. Coptic Martyrdoms in the Dialect of Upper Egypt. 1914. London: British Museum, pp. 195–200. Genesis 3:15–16. ‘For earth thou art and to earth thou shalt return’ quoted in Budge, Sir E.A. Wallis in Egyptian Tales and Romances, Pagan, Christian and Muslim’. 1931. (1935). London: Thornton Butterworth Ltd. The verb nihlug in Sacīdī dialect (‘Let me create’) could also be translated as ‘Let us create’ but in the context of the tale, I have chosen the singular. Edward Lane. An Arabic–English Lexicon (Pts 1–8). 1968. Beirut: Librairie du Liban. (First published 1863–93). Takacs, Gábor. Etymological Dictionary of Ancient Egyptian. 1999. Leiden: Brill. p. 161.

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9 Takacs. Gábor. Etymological Dictionary. 1999. Leiden: Brill. p. 167. 10 From ‘The Angel of Death’, ed. Budge in Coptic martyrdoms. 1914. p. 200. London: British Museum. 11 From Robinson, J.M. (ed.). The Nagc Hammādi Library. 1977. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Vol. II, 5. 12 Thackston, Wheeler. The Tales of the Prophets of al-Kisa’i. 1978. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, p. 27. 13 Boulay, R.A. Flying Serpents and Dragons: The Story of Mankind’s Reptilian Past. 1999. Escondido, Calif.: The Book Tree. p. 26. 14 Boulay. Flying Serpents. ibid. 15 The full text is as follows: ‘Adam wondered at Eve’s nakedness because her glorious outer skin, a sheet of light, smooth as a fingernail had fallen away. He tasted the fruit and the outer skin of light fell away’ (translation by Boulay, R.A. in Flying Serpents, p. 122). 16 Tyloch, Witold. ‘The Evidence of the Proto-Lexicon for the Cultural Background of the Semitic Peoples’ in Hamito-Semitica (eds James and Theodora Bynon). 1975. The Hague: Mouton. 17 Robinson. The Nagc Hammādi Library. 1977. San Francisco: Harper & Row. 18 Girdles and symbolic belts of jasper and carnelian were encased in burial wrappings, worn by the dead to emulate and invoke the protective blood of Isis for the deceased. 19 Budge. Coptic Martyrdoms. 1914. p. 485. London: British Museum. 20 The cult of sheikhs in Luxor is further elaborated in ‘A Spirit in the Body’ by Elizabeth Wickett in Bodylore (ed. Katharine Young), a joint publication of the American Folklore Society and the University of Tennessee Press. 1993. 21 Another variant of this myth describes the act as masturbation. 22 Lichtheim, Miriam. Ancient Egyptian Literature. The Late Period. Vol. III. 1980. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press. p. 113. 23 Translation by Lichtheim in Ancient Egyptian Literature. 1980. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press. p. 112. 24 Lucas, Arthur. Ancient Egyptian Materials and Industries. (4th edn). 1962. London: E. Arnold and Co. p. 357. Juniper berries were also found placed in a coffin as late as the fifth century ad in Nagc al-Deir in Upper Egypt. 25 This majestic tree, as depicted in its hieroglyph, was believed to stand under the canopy of heaven beside the rising and setting of the sun, emblematic of its permanence. Moreover, its shade was said to be of use to both the living and the dead, and in ancient Egyptian iconography it is possible to see peasants making offerings to this tree. Iconographic convention also suggests that the sycamore fig may have been the origin of the ‘apple’ myth, since painters for centuries believed that the fruit consumed by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden was a fig. Thus, the leaves used to hide Adam’s and Eve’s nakedness were traditionally depicted as fig leaves. But in this story, figs are not mentioned. 26 In contrast, the King James Bible version of Genesis 3:17 text reads: ‘in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life’. 5: ‘Ancient Contexts, Reversions and Conversions’: Messianic Tales of the Miraculous 1

Part of cAwad’ullah’s performance is documented in the film of the mūlid of Sīdī Abu’l Hajjāj, For Those Who Sail to Heaven (1990) directed and produced by the author. 2 In Arabic, _g azal. As Nicholson noted, Sufis or mystics apply erotic imagery and symbolism of the ghazal to the description of ecstacy of divine love. In Nicholson,

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3

Reynold A. Studies in Islamic Mysticism. 1921. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 163–4. This cosmological event took place ‘at the equinox’ and was declared a miracle. This formula linking the ‘kohling’ of the eyes with the bifurcation of the moon is also invoked by cAwad’ullah in other tales. Conclusion

1 Legrain, Georges. Louxor Sans les Pharaons. 1914. Bruxelles: Vromant. 2 Egyptian Cinderella – ‘Rhodopis’ by Sherry Climo. 1989. New York: HarperCollins. 3 al-Thaclabī, cAra’is al-Majalis. n.d.

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Index

Abu Zayd al-Hilālī xiii, xiv, 19, 51, 76 Adam and Eve, Tale of xvi, 99, 100, 106, 107–111, 132, 133, 134, 203, 209 Adam’s ‘apple’, origin of 103, 110, 111, 116, 117, 209, 211 versions of 106, 118 adamas /adhama /adamath /adhemtha (earth) 112, 116 aesthetics 55, 91 Akhmim 129, 130 analysis, structural 39, 56, 165 thematic Adam and Eve, Tale of 209 cAzīza and Yūnis, Tale of 165 Khadra al-Sharīfa, Tale of 187 St. George and the Dragon, Tale of 198 Angel of Death 108, 112 anti-romance 39, 43, 45, 47 Apep, Apophis, ancient Egyptian god/ monster ix, 86–88, 91, 95 c arūsa /aaroosah doll 83, 84 Atum, (ancient Egyptian god) 106 c Azīza, heroine xiii, xiv, 4, 39, 40, 44–49, 51–53, 57–58, 131–132, 134 al-Badawi, Sīdī/Sayyid Ahmad 39, 139 Bahnasa, Kharga oasis 89 Bakhtin, Mikhail xv, 39–45 Banī Hilāl 32, 65, 67, 69, 70, 132, 189 sīrat banī hilāl epic vi, vii, xiii, xiv, xv, 3, 33, 47, 51, 54, 64, 94, 121, 131, 189, 190 Bannerth, Ernst 97 Bata (Story of Two Brothers) 39, 133 behemoth (bahamūt) 86 Beirut, river of xv, 76–77, 83, 85, 97, 200

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Bible, Hebrew 99, 134 St. James 107 Bint-Birri, Fatima 39 Būlos, cAmm Rizq xiii, 75–76, 99, 100, 129 burnoose ix, 81, 201 burnus (hooded cloak) ix, 93, 95, 135, 170 Copt/Coptic x, xiii, xv, xvi, 22, 41, 54, 75, 86, 88, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 99, 108, 109, 111, 112, 113, 118, 122, 129, 132, 134, 135 Angel of Death 108, 112 creation tales 16, 106, 108, 109, 111, 112, 113, 114, 116, 117, 133, 209 martyrdom tales 16 Tale of Adam and Eve 111–115 Connolly, Bridget 59 conversion viii, xvi, 54, 55, 98, 119, 121, 122, 127, 130, 131, 134, 135, 189, 199, 200 Maimūna, Tale of xvi, 121–123, 128 St. Theodore, Tale of 129–130 crocodile ix, x, xv, 89, 90, 91, 94 cumin, black (nigella) 109, 210 cuticle 103, 107, 110–112, 115, 116, 211 dallāl /wheeler-dealer 4, 12, 14, 15, 18, 20, 21, 22, 26, 27, 28, 123, 166, 167, 171, 173, 174, 176 Diocletian (Gr. Dagladiyanos) x, xvi, 75, 88, 97, 129–130 dragon vii, xiii, xv, xvii, 75, 76, 82, 83, 93, 96, 97, 98, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 191, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202 agatho-daemon 84 caūn (pl. cawan) 76, 83, 191

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dragon (continued ) Kur (serpent dragon) 87 tannīn 83, 85, 194, 196 dragon-slayers 96, 91, 135 Inanna 41, 42, 87, 88, 134 Isis x, 41, 87, 114, 115 St. George/Mārī Jirjis vii, ix, xv, xvi, 76, 95, 97–98, 129, 130, 135, 191, 198 dūm (palm) 4, 10, 44, 52, 110, 170 Eden, Garden of 26, 48, 58, 101, 108, 117, 175 Edfu xiii, 3, 54 Egyptian epic (sīrat banī hilāl) vi, vii, xiii, xiv, xv, 3, 33, 47, 51, 54, 64, 94, 121, 131, 189, 190 cAwad’ullah cAbd al-Jalīl (poet) ix, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, 3, 5, 6, 19, 43, 46, 48, 50, 52, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 72, 121, 127, 134, 135, 136, 170, 187, 189, 190 Egypt, Upper vii, xiii, xiv, xvi, 9, 24, 27, 45, 51, 54, 59, 63, 69, 71, 72, 75, 83, 84, 86, 94, 99, 107, 111, 115, 117, 121 wedding songs xiv, 4, 12, 42, 47, 51 Elephantine, isle of 114 erotica, Egyptian vi, xiv, 3, 4, 39, 40, 43, 46, 47, 48, 50, 52, 53, 59 Esna 114 ethnopoetics vi, xv, 39, 54 ‘Eye’ (fate) 4, 6, 7, 8, 12, 15, 16, 18, 22, 26, 44, 50, 58, 165, 169, 171, 172, 174 For Those Who Sail to Heaven (film) x, 190 Garamantes (tribe of Libya) 23, 151 _gazal 39, 40, 43, 60, 127, 128 gender vi, 48, 51, 69, 106, 117, 118 stereotypes xv, 53 Genesis, Book of 39, 99, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110–111, 113, 116, 117 Gilgamesh, epic of 46, 93 goddesses Babylonian 136 Canaanite (Astarte) 40 Egyptian, with cobra diadems Bak x, 96 Isis x, 115

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Rannu 96 Taur/Tauris 96 Tentris 96 Wadjet 95 Greek (Hestia Polyolbos) x, 40, 92 Mesopotamian (Ishtar) 42, 88, 93 Sumerian (Inanna) 40, 41, 42, 87, 88, 134 gnosis/Gnosticism xvi, 108, 111, 112, 116 ‘Green Goddess’ (Wadjet) xvi, 95 ‘Green Lady’ (Khadra) xvi, 131 ‘Green Man’ (Sayyidna al-Khidr) 94, 95 Habbit al-baraka (nigella) 105, 109, 117, 210, 212 Haggadeh 111 al-Hajājī, Jamal Zakī al-Dīn iii al-Hājis al BaHri (Edfu) 54 Harba 193, 196 harpoon xv, 86, 87, 93, 95, 129 Hant (tree) 101, 110, 114, 134, 204, 209, 211 Hawa (Eve) xiii, xvi, 99, 100, 116, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207 headdress x, xvi, 95, 115, 200 cobra (uraeus) x, xvi, 89, 95, 115 Hejaz (Saudi Arabia) 32, 45 Hernadi, Paul 52 heroines 51, 77, 99, 128, 130, 131–132, 134, 135 pre-eminence of 131 Hestia, Greek goddess of blessing x, 92 al-Hilālī, Abu Zayd see Abu Zayd al-Hilālī hippopotamus 86, 87, 91 homophony 49, 58 Horus (ancient Egyptian god) ix, xv, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91 Hyksos 86, 129, 130 Hymes, Dell i, xvi, 137, 199 Ibn Khaldun 54, 55 imagery 39, 40, 43, 46, 47 Inanna (ancient Sumerian goddess) 41, 42, 87, 88, 134 intertextuality vii, 83 Ishtar, Descent of 42, 88, 93 Isis, blood of 122 jann 11, 51 jinn 11, 67, 70, 72, 113, 132

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index Job Book of 86 prophet 68, 70, 72, 95, 97, 98 Judaeo-Christian tradition xiii, xv, 55, 70, 72, 99, 112, 117, 136 Judges, Book of 85 Khadra ‘The Green One’ (in Tale of Mārī Jirjis) 82, 94, 95, 131, 135, 200, 202 Khadra al-Sharīfa vii, viii, xiii, xv, xvi, 11, 32, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69–72, 113, 131, 132, 135, 180, 187, 188, 189 al-Khidr, Sayyidna 94, 95 Khnum/Khnum-Rec (ancient Egyptian god) 114, 133 Khoiak (month of ) 110 Kramer, Samuel 40, 87 Lane, Edward 71, 83, 110 Late Period ix, 88, 89 legends xvi, 54, 72, 75, 83, 111, 131, 134, 135 Rabbinical 111 of saints’ 54 lēlit al-duhla (Night of Consummation) 69, 71 lēlit al-Hinna (Night of Henna) xiv, 71 Leviathan 93 Lord, Albert 58 Luxor i, xiii, 3, 5, 42, 46, 71, 75, 85, 99, 111, 113, 114, 117, 121, 122, 131, 134, 189 Coptic 99 Roman garrison 99 madīH (praise poetry) 3, 7, 39, 40, 43, 49, 50, 57, 60, 121, 127, 128, 135, 138, 165, 166, 167, 168, 173, 177, 179 Mārī Jirjis xv, 75, 79, 80, 81, 82, 91, 98, 121, 128, 132, 133, 134, 135, 198, 200, 201, 202, 209 see also St. George and the Dragon, Tale of maSr (Egypt) xv, 83, 97 mawwāl (mawāwīl) (ballads) 3, 4, 6, 25, 39, 45, 49, 57, 58, 59, 165, 167, 168, 169, 172, 175, 177 Mecca, Sharīf of xv, 69, 188 mūlid (festival) 58, 75, 84, 85, 94, 121, 122, 134, 135, 189

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of Mārī Jirjis 94, 134 of Sayyidna al-Khidr 94 of Sheikh al-Harīdī 84, 92 of Sīdī Abu’l Hajjāj 121, 122, 189 Mut (ancient Egyptian goddess) 85 myth vii, xvi, 39, 42, 45, 83, 86, 87, 88, 89, 95, 98, 99 ancient Egyptian 106, 112, 113, 114, 116, 117, 131, 133, 135 dragon-slaying xvi, 88, 91, 97 etiological vii, 83, 95 nabq (ziziphus/lotus blossom tree) 4, 5, 10, 44, 45, 52, 170 Nagc Hammādī gospels xvi, 111, 112, 113 Najd desert xv, 5, 23, 32, 33, 60, 69 Nebuchadnezzar 85 New Kingdom 40, 85 nigella (Habbit al-baraka) 105, 109, 117, 210, 212 Nile, the 26, 32, 58, 81, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88, 91, 95, 97, 114, 135, 200 Nun, the primeval ocean 106, 114 Osiris (ancient Egyptian god) ix, 84, 111 grain bed of 84, 110 palm Borassus 110 dum 4, 10, 44, 52, 110, 170 panegyric (madīH) 4, 19, 39, 40, 49, 173 paronomasia (jinās /taškīl ) xiv, 6, 35, 49, 58, 59 Piankoff, Alexandre ix Pleiades, constellation of 26, 58, 175 poetry ancient Egyptian 40–41 Songs of Solomon 40, 43 wedding songs 42, 43 prophets, xiii, 70, 72, 75, 97, 127, 189 Elijah (Idris) 68, 70 Jacob 68, 70, 72 Job (cAyyūb) 68, 70, 72, 86 Jonah 68, 70, 72 Moses 68, 70, 72 Potiphar 39 Propp, Vladimir 45 Ptolemy (Graeco-Roman emperor/king) 85 purification 112

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quatrains (murubb cāt) xiii, 54, 55, 209 Qur’ān xiv, 4, 39, 55, 60, 78 quTb (aqTab) 94 rāwī (performer of Egyptian epic) xiii, 54, 55, 209 Rec (ancient Egyptian god) 86, 87 rites of passage circumcision (male) 45, 54 consummation 63, 69, 71, 85, 110 lēlit al-duhla 69, 71 lēlit al-Hinna xiv, 71 mujammalāt (ritual compliments) 69 romance (genre) xiv, xv, 39, 43, 44, 45, 48, 50, 51, 52, 59 chivalric 50 Hellenistic xv, 42, 43, 44 mediaeval European 51 Persian (Yusuf and Zuleikha) xiv, 39 al-Šacbān, Islamic month of 27, 48 Sacīdī (Upper Egyptian dialect) 55, 56, 58, 71 saints, Coptic Christian St. George (Mārī Jirjis) vii, viii, ix, xiii, xvi, 75, 76, 85, 91, 93, 97, 98, 129, 130, 135, 191, 198 St. Mercurius (Abu Sēfēn) 98 St. Theodore (tawdrōs al-muHārib) x, 98, 129 Saudi Arabia 15, 45, 173 Seqenen Rec Tao (ancient Egyptian king) 86 sequels 93, 132, 133, 210 serpent (ticbān) ix, xvi, 76, 78, 79, 80, 82, 84, 86 87, 89, 92, 93, 95, 97, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 108, 110, 111, 116, 117, 133, 134, 135, 198, 200, 201, 210, 211, 212 Set/Seth (ancient Egyptian god) ix, 87, 89 Sham 80, 83, 97 Sheikh al-Harīdī (in Tahta) 84, 92 Shepherd Kings 129, 130 see also Hyksos Shu (ancient Egyptian goddess) 113 sibūc 69 sin, original vii, 48, 106, 117, 134 sīrat banī hilāl (Egyptian epic) vii, xiii, xiv, xv, 3, 33, 47, 51, 54, 69, 94, 121, 131, 134, 189, 190

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Song of Solomon/Song of Songs xiv, 4, 40, 43 songs, wedding xiv, 4, 12, 42, 47, 51 St. George and the Dragon, Tale of vi, 15, 75–76, 98, 130, 191, 198 St. Theodore (tawdrōs al-muHārib) x, 98, 129 Strabo 133 Sufism 9, 25, 40, 49, 58, 60, 128, 167 Sufi brotherhoods (Turuq Sufīyya) 58 Sumer 40, 41, 87, 88, 136 Sylene (Libya) 97 Synaxarium, Coptic 97, 135 ‘tale world’ 52, 83, 97, 130 tales, ancient Egyptian vii, 39, 97 ‘Cinderella’ Rhodopis 133 Coptic vii, xiii, xv, xvi, 73, 97, 99, 108, 111, 112, 113, 118, 132, 134, 135 Khufu and the Magician 132, 134 Tale of Two Brothers 39, 133 Tefnut (ancient Egyptian god) 113 al-Thaclabī xiii, 75, 83, 97, 135 tradition xiii, 39, 55, 60, 71, 72, 75, 84, 86, 97, 98, 121, 128, 135, 190 dowry 15, 43, 52, 63, 69, 71 epic 43, 44, 54, 190 European 50 hagiographic 83, 98, 134, 135 Judaeo-Christian xiii, 55, 99, 111 Near Eastern xiv, 6, 40, 42, 51 wedding xiv, 4, 12, 40, 41, 42, 47, 51, 54, 64, 69, 71, 84, 135, 187 transliteration (key to) xi tree Hant 101, 110, 114, 134, 204, 209, 211 ‘Tree of knowledge of life and death’ 110 ‘Tree of life and light’ 87 tribes Durayd 32, 35, 36 Garamantes (jaramān) 23, 151 Hama xv, 62, 68, 69, 70 Zinātī 5, 10, 12, 17, 28, 36, 37, 45 Tunis (tūnis al-HaDra) xiii, xiv, 3, 9, 11, 12, 14, 17, 21, 23, 24, 29, 37, 44, 68, 70, 134, 166, 170, 171, 173 Tutankhamun (ancient Egyptian king) 95, 109

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index Ugarit 40 Ulysses 4 uraeus see headdress, cobra Virgin Mary xv, 82, 93, 97, 200, 201 de Voragine, Jacobus 75, 97 Wadjet (ancient Egyptian goddess of Buto) 95 Wafā’ al-Nīl (Feast of the Nile) 83 waSf (Arabic term for description) 3, 39, 40, 42, 134, 166, 168, 173, 174 West Bank (of Luxor) iii, 42, 71

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Wilkinson, Sir Gardner ix, x, 95 Yaghuth (pre-Islamic god) 78, 85, 199 Yūnis (nephew of Abu Zayd) xiii, xiv, 3, 4, 5, 39, 41–53, 57, 58, 59, 131, 132, 134, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 179 Yūsuf and Zuleikha, Tale of xiv, 39, 134 zawīya 9 zikr 9, 58 Zinātī Khalīfa see tribes, Zinātī ziziphus tree see nabq Zuleikha xiv, 39, 134

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