Consorts of the Caliphs. Ibn al-Sa'i

principle provided by Shahrazad’s stratagem, thus muting the female storyteller as pictured in the book and omitting the crucial rationale, her ransom tale-telling.

      Consorts of the Caliphs is a work of historical biography, not an anthology of fictions, and it gives voice to the spirited, learned, influential women of the medieval past in the Abbasid empire. It unbinds our ears and eyes to some of what they said and did. The author/compiler Ibn al-Sāʿī was himself a poet and a librarian, and through patient sifting of archival memories, both oral and written, he communicates precious echoes and fragments from a period spanning five hundred years: the earliest woman whose life he sets before us was the wife of Caliph al-Manṣūr (reigned 136–58/754–75), while the latest, Shāhān, died in 652/1254–55. In the entry on Zubaydah, who died in 532/1137–38, Ibn al-Sāʿī’s epitaph is brief: “She was lovely and praised for her beauty.” This is uncharacteristically reticent. For the early years, Ibn al-Sāʿī fills in the blanks with stories he has gathered from chains of sources; for the later period, within living memory, he passes on what he has heard. Women’s words rise from the page in many registers—passionate high poetry, mordant quips and sallies, and prayerful thoughts. The effect is vivid and fleeting, a series of lantern slides within a laconic yet impassioned account that comes across clearly now and again but then breaks up or fades. Slaves, “dependents,” lovers and wives are glimpsed—dazzlingly accomplished individuals in some cases, who survive by their wits, risking all with their tongues; their adopted sobriquets give a flavor of their spiritedness: Ghādir (“Inconstance”), Ghaḍīḍ (“Luscious”), Qurrat al-ʿAyn (“Solace”), Ḍirār (“Damage”), Sarīrah (“Secret”), and even Qabīḥah (“Ugly”).

In other cases, the women, august or beggared, full of years or plucked before their time, pass by in a roll of honor, on a pervasive note of reverence and elegy. Ibn al-Sāʿī’s book conveys their mobility, the complexity of the roles they fulfilled, the variety of their ethnic and religious origins, and their high status. Their circumstances reveal the intermingling of ethnic origins and faiths. The term “slave” itself, used here after careful thought on the part of the translators and their editors, clearly needs more attention from historians, since the term, as habitually used in English, does not capture the ambiguities in the situation of Faḍl, for example, whose raunchy flytings the translators have met with matching boldness:²

       He moaned and groaned and whined all night,

       And creaked just like a door-hinge.

      Some of Ibn al-Sāʿī’s material reads like fabulist literature. Anecdotes and personalities have intermingled with the stories of the Arabian Nights and grown into the stuff of legend: the passion of Maḥbūbah and al-Mutawakkil, for instance, a brief, dramatic tale of mutual dreaming and reconciliation, appears in the complete cycle of the Arabian Nights (as rendered by Malcolm Lyons for Penguin or Jamel Eddine Bencheikh and André Miquel for the Pléiade). Hārūn al-Rashīd and the Barmakids, including the vizier Jaʿfar, have become mythic as well as historical heroes. However, the historically-minded author of Consorts of the Caliphs is also an accountant, and the enormous prices paid (one hundred thousand gold dinars to the slave ʿArīb for her own slave Bidʿah, for example) or spent on wedding gifts (thousands of pearls and heavy candles of ambergris for Būrān) are entered admiringly into the record. Munificence of this princely order occurs in the Arabian Nights, but it is rarely bestowed by powerful women, as we see here: even women who are slaves, if in favor, can dispose of treasure as they wish. This contradiction is one of myriad social details that raise further questions about the nature of women’s subjugation in the oriental, and specifically Abbasid, past.

      This volume is the sixteenth title in the Library of Arabic Literature, and a most valuable addition to an invaluable series that is revolutionizing access to the corpus for non-Arabic readers like myself as well as establishing meticulous editions for those who can read the works in the original language. Ibn al-Sāʿī’s gallery of women poets, wits, singers, chess players, teachers, benefactors, and builders (of waterways, libraries, and law schools) transcends the collective, stereotypical character of great ladies as femmes fatales, wives, mothers, or concubines; his report lifts a veil of silence and allows us to overhear the hum of lyric, argument, wit, and elegy from women’s voices in the past. Its rich retrievals will prove marvelously inspiring, both for scholarship and for other creative work. One might dream of a new opera—about ʿInān? about Faḍl? about Būrān?—to do justice to the women who sing out from Ibn al-Sāʿī’s revelatory and enjoyable archive.

      Marina Warner

      Oxford

      Preface

Nine of us, namely the editorial board of the Library of Arabic Literature (LAL)—Julia Bray, Michael Cooperson, Philip Kennedy, Joseph Lowry, James Montgomery, Tahera Qutbuddin, Devin Stewart, and Shawkat Toowara—and LAL managing editor Chip Rossetti, intensively and collaboratively workshopped the translation of Consorts of the Caliphs over the course of three editorial meetings, two in Abu Dhabi and one in New York.³ I was tasked by the group with editing the Arabic and with putting the volume together, and Julia Bray was designated the project editor, that is, the editor from the LAL board chosen to work closely with the editor. Given her expertise, she was also asked to write the introduction.

      In 2010, when we first told colleagues how LAL would work—numerous stages and levels of close editorial scrutiny, the assigning of in-house project editors to each and every volume, master classes in editing and translating, and collaborative, workshopped translations—most, if not all, were skeptical. We hope that this volume, which was produced according to these principles and norms, will help alleviate any doubts about the possibility, viability, and desirability of such an enterprise, and that it will come to be seen as one model for how things can be done and—such is our hope—done well.

      Shawkat M. Toowara

      Ithaca

      Acknowledgments

      The editorial board is grateful to the members of the collaborative academic alliance Radical Reassessment of Arabic Arts, Language, and Literature (RRAALL) for passing the Consorts of the Caliphs translation project on to the Library of Arabic Literature (LAL), and in particular to Joseph Lowry, the project’s spiritus auctor, who has been tirelessly committed to it.

      We would like to thank Ian Stevens for early encouragement; Muhammet Günaydın of Istanbul University for obtaining a copy of the manuscript; and Gila Waels, along with Nora Yousif, Manal Demaghlatrous, Antoine El Khayat, and Farhana Goha, for cheerful and expert assistance in Abu Dhabi. The feedback we received from audience members at the public panel discussion “Caliphs and their Consorts: Translating Anecdotes and Poetry in Ibn al-Sāʿī’s Nisāʾ al-Khulafāʾ” in December 2012 in Abu Dhabi was immensely helpful—especially as we were reminded how important it is to translate for readers, not just for ourselves. The expert feedback of Richard Sieburth was invaluable, as were the participation of Maurice Pomerantz and Justin Stearns in an intensive translation workshop in Abu Dhabi in December 2013. Everyone at NYU Abu Dhabi and at NYU Press has been unfailingly supportive of us and of LAL.

      *

      I am grateful to RRAALL for nurturing in me a love of collaboration in scholarship and to Philip Kennedy for turning the fantasy of the Library of Arabic Literature into reality and including me in that fantasy/reality. I know I must have done something right for so much of my “work” now to involve spending time in the superlative company of Philip Kennedy and James Montgomery. When you add Devin Stewart, Tahera Qutbuddin, Joseph Lowry, Michael Cooperson, and Julia Bray to the mix, the company becomes unmatchable.

      I must single out Julia. Not only did she save me from all manner of goofs and gaffes as I prepared the Arabic edition, and not only did her meticulous attention to every single word in this volume make it vastly superior—she also provided me with the opportunity to collaborate, on a daily basis, with a consummate scholar and a dear friend. For this I am truly grateful.

      It is also an honor to work with the outstanding scholar-translator-manager-editor-gentleman Chip Rossetti, the wonderful and resourceful