I am grateful to the Library of Arabic Literature (LAL) for giving me the opportunity to produce for the first time a version of the sequence of all the episodes of the original series of articles al-Muwayliḥī wrote and published that are introduced by a narrator named ʿĪsā ibn Hishām, whether or not they are part of the series called Fatrah min al-Zaman. That decision on my part, of course, raises some significant questions. Al-Muwayliḥī’s description of his own revision process in converting the original articles into book form clearly indicates an aspiration on his part to turn something that was published in a context that he describes as “ephemeral” into a more permanent form. However the notion of ephemerality that he associates with newspaper publication and invokes to explain his rationale for revision is only part of the story. If we examine the sequence of the original articles closely and follow his lead in omitting entirely the “dry run” set of four articles devoted to the Sudan (and the somewhat curious return to the topic inserted in the initial sequence of Fatrah min al-Zaman), then the series seems to fall into four subseries: the Pāshā’s initial encounter with the Egyptian legal system in which both he and ʿĪsā ibn Hishām are centrally involved in the action; the period spent away so as to avoid the plague and allow the Pāshā to recover, in which there is considerably less action; the series of “assemblies”; and finally the episodes involving the ʿUmdah and his two colleagues—in both these last two sequences ʿĪsā and the Pāshā fade almost completely into the background once the context has been established. Thus, if one is to apply some notions of Western narratological analysis to the resulting book text, one can say that al-Muwayliḥī’s careful reworking of the newspaper articles does provide for a more convincing sequence of “events,” but does little or nothing to affect the varying roles of two of the principal “characters.”
Several Egyptian critics have tried to make of Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām an incipient novel, but I would suggest that an investigation of the work’s origins ties it as closely, if not more so, to the more episodic model of the classical maqāmah genre that is deliberately being invoked by the use of ʿĪsā ibn Hishām as a participant narrator, duly derived from al-Hamadhānī’s tenth-century model. To the episodic nature of the individual articles can be added yet another feature of al-Hamadhānī’s creations, namely their resort to “prosimetrum,” the regular inclusion of lines of poetry within a cursive prose narrative. One might even go on to suggest that, if al-Muwayliḥī’s attempt at producing a more logically sequenced narrative out of the original article series Fatrah min al-Zaman was a reflection of his acquaintance with and understanding of fictional models of that era, then the episodic and even fragmented nature of the story in its article format is a much closer reflection of his “classical” model in al-Hamadhānī’s maqāmāt and may indeed emerge therefrom as almost postmodern.
This translation, the first ever in book form to include all the original articles narrated by a nineteenth-century Egyptian called ʿĪsā ibn Hishām and published in Miṣbāḥ al-sharq at the turn of the nineteenth century, will thus re-establish their author’s text firmly within the political and cultural context within which they were conceived and on which they regularly commented. The availability of different versions of this famous narrative—the original articles of Fatrah min al-Zaman, the collected works of Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī, and the various editions of Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām—will make it possible to examine in detail the role that this “bridge-work” played in linking the pre-modern heritage of Arabic narrative to his lively portrait of a tumultuous and changing present in nineteenth-century Egypt and the ways in which the story has been transformed during a timeframe that now exceeds a century.
NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION
In view of the complex textual history, it should again be made clear that the translation presented here is not based on any published book version of Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī’s Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām. Rather it offers for the first time a translation of the series of articles, entitled Fatrah min al-Zaman, which were originally published over a four-year period (1898–1902) in the al-Muwayliḥī newspaper, Miṣbāḥ al-sharq, and later converted by the author—after significant editing, into the book, Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām, first published in 1907.
It might seem more appropriate to select A Period of Time as a title, that being a literal translation of the original Arabic title for the series of articles. However, since I had already used that title for my published study and translation of the third edition of Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām (1923—originally my doctoral thesis at Oxford submitted in 1968, published originally in microfiche form in 1974 and later in a second edition in 1992), I have decided to use another title, What ʿĪsā ibn Hishām Told Us, my aim being to reflect the fact that the contents of this version involve all the articles that he published in Miṣbāḥ al-sharq that are introduced by a narrator named ʿĪsā ibn Hishām, both those that made their way, albeit in altered form, into the book Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām and those that, for a variety of reasons, were not included.
Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī, through his mostly private education, his travels, his interests, and his research in libraries, was extremely erudite, as indeed was his father, Ibrāhīm al-Muwayliḥī. That much is abundantly clear from the elevated style that characterizes the articles published in their newspaper Miṣbāḥ al-sharq, and thus in the works in which those articles were assembled in book form. Whereas some of their contemporaries—such as Jūrjī Zaydān (1861–1914) and Muṣṭafā Luṭfī al-Manfalūṭī (1876–1924)—may have striven to develop a less elaborate and more accessible style with which to attract a broader readership to their works and especially the newspaper and journals in which they published, such, it would appear, was not a goal of the Muwayliḥīs in their choice of style.
In the particular case of Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī and the text that makes up this translation, we are dealing with a conscious revival of a pre-modern narrative genre (including its narrator by name) and its characteristic stylistic features. Like al-Hamadhānī many centuries earlier, al-Muwayliḥī has a narrator and a main character (the Pāshā) travel to various places where they react to and comment on what they encounter, in this case the Egyptian legal system, the onset of the plague, the wide variety of meeting venues in Cairo, the clash of indigenous and imported values exemplified by the tastes of the ʿUmdah and the “Playboy,” and, at a later stage, the various pavilions of the Paris Exhibition of 1900. Also like his illustrious forebear, al-Muwayliḥī indulges in a variety of pastiches of other forms of discourse: among many possibilities, we might mention the overblown rhetoric of the groomsman’s speech at the wedding (20.10), and the absurdly complex and obscure reasoning of the newspaper article allegedly written by the al-Azhar shaykh (22.14–22.18). But from the point of view of this text and its translation into English, the most prominent feature of the maqāmah genre was its revival of the ancient style known as sajʿ and the resort at the same time to the use of “prosimetrum,” the