https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7261-6563
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ABSTRACT
In Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq’s 1855 semiautobiographical picaresque al-Sāq ʿalā al-sāq (Leg Over Leg), the author’s double, the Fāriyāq, holds a series of jobs that parodically stand in for al-Shidyāq’s own employments. This article addresses the Fāriyāq’s career as an oneiromancer, reading it as an allegory of al-Shidyāq’s work as a Bible translator for European Protestant missionaries. By representing the muʿarrib (translator into Arabic) as the muʿabbir (dream interpreter), I argue, al-Shidyāq places the translator in a genealogy of professional interpreters, inheriting the tradition of early-modern Ottoman court interpreters who wielded the power of expertise against the social and economic power of their patrons. At a moment of historical shift from circuits of scribal patronage to a more horizontal print market, al-Shidyāq removes the oneiromantic tradition from its hierarchical patron economy and parodically reinscribes it in an emergent print culture, initiating an anonymous yet intimate community of laughter.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Dr. Annette Damayanti Lienau and the participants of the 2022 Middle East Beyond Borders workshop at Harvard University for reading earlier drafts of this article, as well as the editors and anonymous peer reviewers at JMEL whose insightful comments shaped the article’s final form.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 I rely on Davies’s 2013–2014 translation for all quotations in English. Citations refer to the Library of Arabic Literature bilingual volumes.
2 I am greatly indebted to Davies’ biographical and interpretive work that he includes in his English translation for clarifying the potential correspondence between the text and its author’s biography. He includes a chronology of events as the two correlate to one another in an appendix to the fourth volume, which draws extensively from archival work done by Geoffrey Roper.
3 Davies notes that Schlienz was hit on the head by a barge-pole while in Egypt in 1838, which “rendered him intermittently insane for the next three or more years” (Leg 4:510n104).
4 Jeffrey Sacks briefly considers the second dream in “Falling to Pieces,” while Brad Fox’s recent article includes a section on these episodes and their correspondence to al-Shidyāq’s translation work, within the context of what he calls “Muslim dreams of completion.” Both readings emphasize the nonsensical nature of the Fāriyāq’s interpretations. While recognizing these scenes as satirical, I have at the same time attempted to take seriously the dreams and their interpretations to see what additional readings they afford.
5 Davies, Leg 3: 357n53.
6 Jubrān, al-Mabnī wa al-uslūb wa al-sukhrīyah.
7 Clergymen, including the Maronites from al-Shidyāq’s native Mount Lebanon who were responsible for his brother Asʿad’s death, the European and American missionaries he worked with throughout his itinerant life, and other Arab and foreign religious authorities, are the most frequent targets of his satirical critique, leading Jurjī Zaydān to suggest that criticizing them was one of the main impulses behind this text (Zaydān, Tarājim mashāhīr 2:81.)
8 Davies, Leg 2:63.
9 al-Jasūs ʿala al-Qamūs, Istanbul: 1299h, 182.
10 Davies, Leg, 3:189.
11 It is recorded in Hadith literature that “when the prophet was returning from the afternoon prayer, he used to say: Has any of you seen a dream last night? And said: After me, no prophecy is left except the righteous dream.” (Villuendas, “Interpreting Islamic Dream Books,” 311).
12 Nile Green writes that the early writers of treatises on ʿilm al-taʿbīr – the science of dream interpretation – built on classical Greek traditions of oneiromancy, viewing this as their own inheritence from the Eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia. (“A Brief World History of Muslim Dreams.”)
13 Niyazioglu, Dreams and Lives in Ottoman Istanbul, 1.
14 Ibid.
15 Şen, Tunç. “A Mirror for Princes, A Fiction for Readers,” 52.
16 Felek, “(Re)Creating Image and Identity,” 265.
17 Şen, “A Mirror for Princes,” 51.
18 Quoted in Felek, “(Re)creating Image and Identity,” 265.
19 Ibid., 259.
20 Felek’s account of the life of Şücāʿ Dede, spiritual advisor and dream interpreter to Sultan Murad III, provides one rare window into the life of a professional interpreter. Reconstructed through Murad’s letters and court financial documents, Şücāʿ Dede’s biography traces his rise from a poor gardener to close advisor to one of the most powerful men of the era, and recipient of a regular salary. Murad wrote down and sent hundreds of his dreams to Şücāʿ Dede for interpretation. (“(Re)creating Image and Identity.”)
21 Personal exchange with Tunç Şen via Zoom, 22 June 2021.
22 Felek, “(Re)creating Image and Identity,” 251.
23 Ayalon, The Arabic Print Revolution.
24 Roper, “Fāris Al-Shidyāq and the Transition from Scribal to Print Culture,” 223.
25 This fear was not unfounded: his brother Asʿad, the first Maronite convert to Protestantism, was imprisoned and tortured by the Maronites. He died in prison, an event that deeply affected al-Shidyāq. Some scholars speculate that al-Shidyāq converted to Protestantism as a result of his anger towards the Maronite Church; others dispute that he ever actually converted (see al-Bagdadi). There is general agreement, however, that he did not embrace Protestantism out of a deeply felt religious fervor.
26 Allen et al. Essays in Arabic Literary Biography, 327.
27 Raḍwā ʿĀshūr argues for al-Sāq’s recognition as the first Arabic novel in al-ḥadāthah al-mumkinah: al-Shidyāq wa al-Sāq ʿalā l-sāq, al-riwāyah al-ulā fī al-adab al-ʿarabī al-ḥadīth; for more on the generic unclassifiability of al-Sāq, see Chapter 5 of Rastegar’s Literary Modernity.
28 Sheehi, Foundations of Modern Arab Identity, 123.
29 Ibid., 124.
30 Ibid.
31 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 210–5.
32 Rana Issa begins her recent article “Walīmat al-araq” with: “Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq usually wrote during insomnia-filled nights” (كان أحمد فارس الشدياق يكتب عادةً في ليالٍ مليئة بالأرق ). She goes on to discuss the “temporality of insomnia” in al-Shidyāq’s writings, including Sirr al-layāl and al-Sāq.
33 Davies, Leg 3:301.
34 Another possible reading is that the oneiromancy scenes are in reference to the work al-Shidyāq did on the Arabic translation of Pilgrim’s Progress, a religious allegorical novel narrated as a series of dream sequences. The translation was published by CMS in 1834 (Agius, “Arabic Under Shidyaq,” 53).
35 Davies, Leg 3:181.
36 See “The Material and Sources of Dreams” in The Interpretation of Dreams. As for the trope of horns signifying cuckoldry, various origins have been ascribed to this association, but it appears in European literature dating back to the 13th century (Onians, The Origins of European Thought, 243).
37 Davies, Leg, 3:181.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid., 3:183.
40 Ibid.
41 Ṣulḥ, Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq, 52.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid.
44 The Library of Arabic Literature edition omits hamzat al-qaṭʿ in keeping with the orthography of al-Shidyāq’s 1855 edition.
45 Davies, Leg, 2:69.
46 Ibid., 3:341.
47 Shiblī, Anṭūnyus (ed.), al-Shidyāq wa al-Yāzijī, 153; quoted in Issa, “Rakākah,” 156.
48 Issa, “Rakākah and the Petit Quarrel of 1871,” 156.
49 Davies, Leg, 3:189.
50 Issa, “Shidyāq-Lee Version,” 315.
51 Kilito, “The Stage Between,” 81.
52 El-Ariss, Trials of Arab Modernity, 81.
53 Davies, Leg, 3:189.
54 Ibid., 3:189.
55 Johnson, “Archive of Errors,” 33–34. Fawwaz Traboulsi’s recent article, “Ahmad Faris Al-Shidyaq (1804–87): The Quest for Another Modernity,” augments Johnson’s reading of al-Shidyāq’s engagement with European cultural production. Traboulsi argues that al-Shidyāq’s writing produced an “Arab modernity” that arose dialectically out of his encounter with European modernity, rather than being iterative or imitative of it.
56 Ibid., 44.
57 Davies, Leg, 3:189.
58 El-Ariss, “On Cooks and Crooks,” 18.
59 Ibid., 26.
60 Davies, Leg, 4:428.
61 El-Ariss, “Cooks and Crooks,” 20.
62 Davies, Leg, 3:195.
63 Rastegar, Literary Modernity, 115–116.
64 Issa, “Scripture as Literature,” 45.
65 Ibid., 29.
66 Rastegar, Literary Modernity, 109.
67 Davies, Leg, 3:199.
68 Traboulsi, “Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq,” 183.
69 ʿĀshūr, al-ḥadāthah al-mumkinah, 57. Al-Shidyāq’s progressive gender politics are also discussed in Tarek El-Ariss’s Trials of Arab Modernity and Junge’s “Doing Things With Lists.”
70 Rastegar, Literary Modernity, 107.
71 Roper, “Fāris Al-Shidyāq and the Transition from Scribal to Print Culture.”
72 Ibid., 223.
73 Davies, Leg, 1:322 n15.
74 Ibid., 19.
75 Ibid., 25.
76 ʿĀshūr, al-ḥadāthah al-mumkinah, 45.
77 In The Arabic Print Revolution, Ayalon discusses al-Shidyāq’s financial precarity as editor of the Istanbul-based newspaper al-Jawāʾib. He complains in his letters of newspaper agents who often delayed their payments, threatening the paper’s viability and his own livelihood (47).