Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq

The essay proposes a critical contextual reading of al-Shidyaq's Leg Over Leg by establishing a fruitful dialogue between the novel and its own cultural and historical context, so that the literary text and the cultural history are both illuminating each other. The method used for such a reading is the metaphor of labyrinth and the essay advances some arguments to support this method, textual evidence that proves the feasibility of this method and concluding critiques of the theory of New Historicism as well as of some scholarly papers about the novel. Although it places the novel in its historical and cultural background, the method of reading proposed here avoids the trap of turning the novel into a "historical document," because this "seems to obscure more than it illuminates," "considering the text's satirical and highly stylized mode of narration" (Johnson, x). It also avoids turning the history into some literary addenda with no other purpose than to support the textual references to the outer world, because it also obscures rather than illuminates, considering the larger social and cultural concerns of the author's time. Therefore, this reading method is a game of revealing and concealing, in which the journey becomes an end in itself. A reading that enriches the knowledge not only of a historical period or of a book, but also of a cultural period known as Nahdah and its ambivalent interpretations, of an intellectual trajectory shaped by travels and translations, of interlaced literary experiments that place Leg over Leg on the same shelf with Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy or James Joyce's Ulysses-such a reading brings forward the metaphor of a labyrinth as the best illustration of this method.

European comparative literature only arrives belated in Africa, where writers have long been analyzing and theorizing their work and its sociopolitical context. While Emily Apter and Aamir Mufti have identified the role of non-European locales in the development of comparative literature, like Istanbul for Leo Spitzer or Eric Auerbach, non-European models of literary circulation remain understudied. This paper turns to North Africa to examine concepts of writing and authority articulated by those who interfaced most publicly with institutions of power: newspaper founders, editors, and writers. Expanding on Ami Ayalon’s recent work on the Arabic press from the Ottoman Levant to Egypt, I situate them at the crossroads of European, Ottoman, and African politics. In particular, their bilingual French/Arabic publications link Francophone and Arabic literatures that have otherwise been understood to emerge respectively in French-ruled territories in the mid-20th century or in the so-called nahḍa (awakening) of Arabic culture around the turn of the 19th century. As official journals and private broadsheets of various ideological dispositions vied over the power to speak authoritatively, writers used newspapers to theorize the relation of language and literature to politics by conceptualizing translation as a mechanism of power relations. I focus on on El Hack (1893-1894), the first Muslim-owned newspaper in French colonial Algeria. In its critique of official translation practices in French courts, (mis)translation appears as the key to literary and political analysis of colonial power. Read alongside theories of writing and authority elaborated by Aḥmed Fāris al-Shidyāq, who founded and edited newspapers in Egypt and Tunisia in the mid-19th century, and by postcolonial Maghrebi writers Assia Djebar and Abdelfattah Kilito, El Hack founds a translational analysis of writing and power well before Western literary studies annexes African writing to a global literary system.

This article discusses the performative function of enumeration in Arabic prose. Bringing together a great variety of word lists from classical to modern prose (including the 1001 Nights, al-Tawḥīdī, al-Suyūṭī, al-Shidyāq, and Darwīsh), it unveils their often neglected importance to literature by drawing from an emerging scholarship on enumeration. Focusing on “enumerative games” (Mainberger), the article does not ask what the enumerated elements mean, but how the act of enumerating produces meaning. In the first part, the article discusses elements central to the poetics of the enumerative (including items, length, arrangement, and frame). In the second part it deals with the politics of enumeration in the example of al-Shidyāq’s al-Sāq ʿalā al-sāq fī mā huwa al-Fāriyāq (1855). The article seeks to provide a basic approach to enumeration and argues that enumerative games in literature perform acts of cultural politics.

This essay studies the Arabic-English Lexicon (1863-1893), a monumental dictionary of classical Arabic created by Edward William Lane (1801-1876), in order to discuss the constitution of Arabic as a cosmopolitan language. And it examines parenthetically the efforts made by novelist and newspaperman Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq (1804-1887) to rejuvenate Arabic as a modern cosmopolitan language. The essay is particularly interested in the temporal dynamic of the cosmopolitan language. Because it is not connected to contemporary usage in a specific region, a cosmopolitan language – like literary Arabic – is able to maintain a dynamic connection between multiple historical eras. Its historical scope is viewed as a weakness by national language ideology, which promotes the mother tongue as the only viable literary language. The essay focuses on the celebration of the historical depth and richness of the cosmopolitan language by its champions and practitioners, like Lane and al-Shidyāq.

Section "Textordnungen":

Al-Sāq ʿalā al-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), published in Paris in 1855 and nowadays the most famous of (Aḥmad) Fāris al-Shidyāq’s works, is a text that resists categorization. Generally considered as one of the founding texts of Arab modernity, it differs, however, in various aspects from most of the pioneering texts of the nahḍa period. This chapter discusses selected elements of al-Sāq ʿalā al-sāq, such as the hardly definable literary genre of this text – travelogue, autobiography, social critique or philological work? – and its resemblances and intertextual references to a wide range of literary texts, both from the Arabic literary tradition (such as al-Jāḥiẓ, anecdotal literature, maqāma) and Western satirical literature (such as Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy). Finally, the chapter explains the author’s seemingly contradictory stance towards ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ as well as simple and ornate style, stating that, compared to other nahḍa authors, al-Shidyāq makes a conscious decision to connect tradition with modernity in a particular way that was often misunderstood and criticized and, more importantly, to develop a modernist attitude from and through references to literary and cultural heritage (turāth).

This paper reads food and body in al-Shidyaq's "al-Saq" from the perspective of soma theories (Richard Shusterman and Hermann Schmitz). It argues that the consumption of food and the body's somatic expression are complex negotiations of nineteenth century Arab and European communities in al-Shidyaq travellogue.