What 'Isa ibn Hisham Told Us. Muhammad al-Muwaylihi

The articles on topical subjects written by the editor, which had been a hallmark of the earlier issues and had accounted for much of the paper’s popularity, became less frequent and were replaced by long extracts from French newspapers, some of which extended over several issues. Advertisements and announcements were allowed to take an ever-increasing amount of space in a paper which had only four pages to fill. It may have been at this time that Muḥammad decided (or perhaps it was suggested to him) to collect the episodes of Fatrah min al-Zaman into book form, so he closed down the newspapers to allow himself more time to concentrate on his revision of the text. Whatever the cause of closure may have been, Miṣbāḥ al-sharq ceased publication on August 15, 1903.²⁵

The Muwayliḥīs continued to write for other newspapers. Ibrāhīm sent articles to Al-Muʾayyad and Al-Muqaṭṭam, and in 1905 even founded a new newspaper called Al-Mishkāt in the name of his son Khalīl and Ḥamdī Bey Yakan.²⁶ Meanwhile, Muḥammad saw revenge taken on ʿAlī Yūsuf. In 1904 the latter was involved in a scandal when he proposed to Ṣafiyyah al-Sādāt, a woman of high birth, and was refused by her father, although the woman herself had consented to marry him and seemed to want to do so. The woman’s father based his refusal on the fact that ʿAlī Yūsuf was an Upper Egyptian (Ṣaʿīdī) and was not worthy of his daughter because he was not a sharīf. The case was taken to court, and ʿAlī Yūsuf lost both the initial case and the subsequent appeal.²⁷ During all this, the daily newspaper Al-Ẓāhir printed a column with the title “ʿĀm al-Kufʾ” (“The Year of Equality”)—an obvious echo of the series of articles against Muḥammad mentioned above, except that this series continued for thirty-four consecutive issues.²⁸ In poems that appeared in the column, ʿAlī Yūsuf’s suitability for such a marriage was questioned, his claims to be a sharīf were ridiculed, and he was made out to be a person totally unsuitable to take over the supervision of the Ṣūfī waqf properties, a post for which his name had been put forward.

Ibrāhīm al-Muwayliḥī fell ill in December 1905 and died on January 29, 1906. It was also in that year that ʿAbbās the Second decorated Muḥammad with the order of Bey second class (Mutamayyiz), but Muḥammad now appears to have preferred to remain at home as he had done as a boy, reading and holding discussions with his friends. Among the people who used to frequent his house during this period were ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Bishrī and ʿAbbās Maḥmūd al-ʿAqqād, both of whom have left descriptions of the friends who used to come to these discussions—Ḥāfiẓ Ibrāhīm, ʿAbd al-Salām al-Muwayliḥī, Muḥammad Tawfīq al-Bakrī, Muḥammad Bey Rashād, and ʿAlī Yūsuf (with whom Muḥammad appears finally to have been reconciled).²⁹ Muḥammad left his house rarely and wrote very little. The series of articles Fatrah min al-Zaman appeared in book form as Ḥadīth ʿIsā ibn Hishām in 1907. On February 9, 1908, an article entitled “Kalimah Mafrūḍah” (“An Obligatory Word‎”) appeared under his name in Al-Muʾayyad. The occasion of this article’s appearance is described by Sir Ronald Storrs:

The Italians of Alexandria have chosen this juncture for proposing that the Municipality should erect a large statue to Dante, which plan, seeing that Dante placed Muhammad and Ali in hell with the other Schismatics, cleft from chin to tank with their insides hanging out, is meeting with frantic opposition from united Islam.³⁰

Muḥammad’s article was an important contribution to this united Islamic front. He began by quoting in Arabic for the readers of the newspaper exactly what Dante does say about Muḥammad in the Divine Comedy, and from there went on to demand that all Muslims should rally to the cause of their religion instead of sitting back lethargically and watching while it suffered such a gross insult. It is almost certainly significant that a few pages later Storrs records the disgust of Princess Nāzlī herself with what Dante had written. In the following year, Muḥammad allowed himself to be drawn even further out of his seclusion and retirement when he accepted an invitation to attend the opening of the Ḥijāz railway, traveled to Medina and is said to have been one of the anonymous contributors to the series of articles on the railway which appeared in Al-Muʾayyad at the time.³¹

On May 15, 1910, he was appointed Director of the Waqf Administration. Al-ʿAqqād records that al-Muwayliḥī found the work very tedious, and so it is hardly surprising that he resigned from the position four years later, and retired to his home again. He apparently felt that his talents were being wasted and that a man of his standing should not have to work in such a fashion.³²

From now on, he seems to have lived a modest life which at times descended to poverty, but the pride which had prompted him to leave his post in the Waqf Administration apparently helped him to live through such trials with dignity.³³ He ventured into print only once more before his death in 1930. On December 30, 1921, an article of his appeared in the newspaper Al-Ahrām under the title “Ṣawt min al-ʿUzlah” (“Voice from Retirement”) in which he began by giving his reasons for retiring from a life of journalism and then proceeded to express his feelings about the second expulsion of Saʿd Zaghlūl from Egypt. He pointed out that the situation was one which could bring Egyptians together as one nation and that Jamāl al-dīn al-Afghānī would rejoice at the thought. Apart from this article, Muḥammad divided his time during the remaining years of his life between his home and Alexandria with occasional visits to sporting events such as horse racing. In 1925, “the owner of a well-known newspaper” (unfortunately anonymous) is said to have asked him to write two articles expressing a certain point of view on a subject for the sum of eighty pounds, but Muḥammad’s alleged reply sounds typical enough: “Al-Muwayliḥī’s pen is not for sale.”³⁴

In 1927, Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām was published as a textbook by the Ministry of Education for use in secondary schools. Muḥammad undertook an extensive revision of the work before its publication (see more details in the following section). In this process, he excluded many of the book’s most controversial pages and included the episodes from Paris mentioned above as “Al-Riḥlah al-thāniyah” (“The Second Journey”). He also began to work on the production in book form of a set of essays on various philosophical topics, most of which had also appeared on the pages of Miṣbāḥ al-sharq. A few weeks after finishing work on these essays, on February 28, 1930, he died in Ḥulwān, and it was left to his brother Khalīl and his friend Salīm Abū Ḥājib, Princess Nāzlī’s husband, to prepare the book for publication. It appeared as ʿIlāj al-nafs (Cure for the Soul)—also a school text—in 1932.³⁵

      A History of the Text

Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām, Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī’s famous turn-of-the-century narrative, was an instant success when it appeared as a series of articles under the title Fatrah min al-Zaman between 1898 and 1902 in the family’s Cairo newspaper, Miṣbāḥ al-sharq. It became even more successful when it appeared as a book in 1907, now under the title Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām. Multiple editions of the work have been published in the century or so since that first edition—the most recent of which is edited by me—appeared as part of a collection of the author’s complete works in 2002.³⁶ While all these editions of the work may be considered as versions of the text, they are by no means all the same. Behind that fact lies a tale that I would like to relate in this section of the Introduction.³⁷

As noted in the previous section, the Muwayliḥīs—father Ibrāhīm and son Muḥammad—had been vigorous participants in Egyptian political and cultural life beginning in the reign of the Khedive Ismāʿīl (r. 1863–79). The father had held prominent positions, and his son often joined his father in such activities. Both men were acquainted, for example, with the renowned Islamic activist, Jamāl al-dīn al-Afghānī, and his colleague, Muḥammad ʿAbduh, who was to become a major figure in the Islamic reform movement in Egypt.³⁸ As a direct result of the Muwayliḥīs’ involvement in such controversial debates, activities, and intrigues, Ibrāhīm al-Muwayliḥī clearly felt it wise to accept the Khedive Ismāʿīl’s invitation to travel with him when he was exiled