for being away from work for a period of thirty days so that he may recover, God willing.” No formal announcement of permanent closure was made, and there was no comment on the subject from the rest of the press.
This history of the text should be regarded as a much-updated version of the section in my earlier study and translation of the text: Allen, A Period of Time, 32–48.
I must take the opportunity here to express my gratitude to my colleague and friend, Professor Gaber Asfour. While he was serving as Secretary-General to the Supreme Council for Culture in Cairo, I arranged for him to meet (now Dr.) Marie-Claire Boulahbel, at the time a French doctoral student writing a dissertation under my supervision on the works of Ibrāhīm al-Muwayliḥī at INALCO in Paris. He provided her with a CD-ROM of the complete run of issues of Miṣbāḥ al-sharq in the Dār al-Kutub newspaper archive that she subsequently catalogued and of which I now possess a copy. I need to express my gratitude to her as well for making access to the materials that much easier. All my subsequent research on the works of the Muwayliḥīs has been based on the ability to consult the original articles in the newspaper.
While Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq includes examples of the maqāmah genre in his famous work, Al-Sāq ʿalā al-sāq fī-mā huwa al-Fāryāq, al-Muwayliḥī uses the sajʿ style as an opening feature to all his articles. For a virtuoso translation of al-Shidyāq’s work, see Humphrey Davies’s recent translation of al-Shidyāq, Leg Over Leg.
The complete text has been published in Ibrāhīm al-Muwayliḥī, Al-Muʾallafāt al-Kāmilah, 161–202. My English translation of the text has appeared in the journal Middle Eastern Literatures, 15, no. 3 (December 2012): 318–36; 16, no. 3 (December 2013): 1–17. It would seem that the father was willing to subordinate the publication of his own story to that of his son, in that, after publishing an initial three episodes in June–July 1899, he was willing to wait an entire year before publishing the remainder (while his son was traveling to Paris to report on the Exposition universelle).
Al-Muwayliḥī was clearly not enamored of English weather: “To Almighty God is the complaint about London weather! The sun has vanished and the moon is nowhere to be seen. Do you have any information to share with me about the sun or news of the moon? It has been such a long time, and I can only hope that God will compensate me for London weather with better in Paris. Farewell.” Miṣbāḥ al-sharq 112, July 13, 1900.
Where original articles are combined to make a single chapter in the book version, the beginning of the second original article can easily be identified by its opening with a characteristic passage of sajʿ.
While conducting research for my Oxford doctoral thesis in Cairo in 1966, I had occasion to ask many Egyptians for their opinions of Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām. Their reactions were very similar to my own regarding the work of Geoffrey Chaucer, namely that, while it was and is recognized to be a great work, the very fact that it had been a “set text” for important examinations (and thus involved dealing with considerable linguistic complexities at a certain age), had radically affected their views of it.
