Leg Over Leg: Volume One

Foreword

ix Foreword Rebecca C. Johnson While I do not claim to be the first writer in the world to follow this path or thrustapinchofitupthenosesofthosewhopretendtheyaredozing,Idonotice that all the authors in my bookcase are shackled to a single stylistic chain . . . . Once you’ve become familiar with one link of the chain, you feel as though you know all the others, so that each one of them may truly be called a chainman , given that each has followed in the footsteps of the rest and imitated them closely. This being established, know that I have exited the chain, for I am no chain-man and will not form the rump of the line; nor do I have any desire to be at its front, for the latter is an even more calamitous place to be than the former. —Leg over Leg (1.17.10) For most Anglophone readers, this will be their first introduction to the writing of Fāris al-Shidyāq (later Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq, born in 1805 or 1806 and died in 1887), a foundational figure in Arabic literary modernity.1 For, although he is the author of at least four published works of literary prose, ten linguistic studies of Arabic, Turkish, English, and French, over 20,000 lines of poetry, and at least four unpublished manuscripts (not to mention his many translations, journalistic and critical essays, or those works that have been lost), his work has never appearedinEnglishuntilnow.ForspecialistsinArabicliteratureandmanynative readers of Arabic, however, he needs little introduction. As belletrist, poet, travel writer, translator, lexicographer, grammarian, literary historian, essayist, publisher, and newspaper editor, he is known as a pioneer of modern Arabic literature, a reviver of classical forms, the father of Arabic journalism, and no less than a modernizer of the Arabic language itself. His masterwork, Al-Sāq ʿalā l-sāq fī mā huwa al-Fāriyāq (Leg over Leg or the Turtle in the Tree concerning the Fāriyāq, What Manner of Creature Might He Be, 1855), is acknowledged as one of the most distinguished works of the nineteenth century and an inaugural text of Arab modernity. It is also among the most controversial: generically impossible x Foreword to characterize, it is a critical, self-referential, learned, and irreverent book of observations on the lives and manners of “The Arabs and their Non-Arab Peers” that includes scathing attacks on authority, both ecclesiastical and worldly, as well as liberal and libertine discussions of relations between the sexes. Yet, while virtually all studies of Arabic literature acknowledge his central place in literary history, the works of al-Shidyāq, as Nadia Al-Bagdadi writes, have largely been “merely read, but not seriously known” in Arabophone and Anglo-European academies alike.2 Although a growing number of essays on his work has been published in English, no monograph on his work has yet been written, and, although several biographies and studies exist in Arabic, his oeuvre was still so little known in 1995 that an edited volume of his selected works could be published in a series entitled Unknown Works.3 Leg over Leg itself has been seldom reprinted and often abridged (as often for moral as for aesthetic reasons), making a thorough study of its contents difficult. Moreover, it has suffered from more general scholarly neglect, as the nineteenth century has, until recently, remained one of the lesser-studied periods of Arabic literature. Known as the Nahḍah, a term derived from the verb meaning “to rise” or “to stand up,” it is commonly translated as the “awakening” or “revival” of Arabic literary culture —a flowering often attributed to the salutary influence of European culture, for which reason it has also been called the “Arab rediscovery of Europe,” beginning with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798.4 Following a clearly Eurocentric paradigm, scholarship has tended for many years to emphasize the innovative aspects of the period—most notably the introduction of European genres and styles—and to sideline works following classical models, as well as works that fall between the two. Works such as Leg over Leg have been overlooked by those scholars who have seen it as a transitional curiosity between the “intellectually frivolous” and decadent post-classical literary age and the twentieth-century flowering of the modern novel.5 Looking at al-Shidyāq’s complete work, however, helps scholars to re-evaluate this assessment, to engage critically with the Nahḍah and its output, to understand the...