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

Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., s.v. “Arabi Pasha”; Landau, Parliaments and Parties in Egypt, 94ff.

      7 Le Figaro (Paris) 331, November 26, 1884.

      8 “Ihdāʾ al-Kitāb,” in all editions of Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām. Al-Shinqīṭī died in Cairo in 1904.

      9 Tarrāzī, Taʾrīkh al-ṣiḥāfah al-ʿarabiyyah, 4:165. ʿĀrif Bey later rose in the Ottoman administration and became governor of Sūriyā (Damascus).

      10 These articles appeared irregularly in Al-Muqaṭṭam between December 8, 1887 and November 19, 1894.

      11 Muḥammad Farīd comments in his unpublished memoirs that the Princess had a penchant for British officers. The setting for these meetings is well described by Sir Ronald Storrs in his Orientations, 87ff. The circle is discussed in greater detail in my “Writings of Members of the Nazli Circle.”

      12 Blunt, My Diaries, 1:14.

      13 Ibid., 1:106. See also Lord Cromer, Abbas II, 7ff.

      14 Published in al-Muqaṭṭam, August 18, 1893.

      15 The Arabic text of this work was (re-)published in Ibrāhīm al-Muwayliḥī, Al-Muʾallafāt al-kāmilah in 2007. My English translation of this work is published as Spies, Scandals, and Sultans.

      16 The former of these two appointments was announced in Le proche Egyptien, December 3, 1895.

      17 The articles are reprinted in al-Manfalūṭī, Mukhtārāt al-Manfalūṭī, 139ff. I discuss both the articles and the accompanying furor in “Poetry and Poetic Criticism at the Turn of the Century.”

      18 Kurd ʿAlī, Memoirs, 89; Mūsā, The Education of Salāma Mūsā, 38.

      19 Miṣbāḥ al-sharq 112, July 12, 1900.

      20 Miṣbāḥ al-sharq beginning August 17, 1900.

      21 Al-Muwayliḥī’s version of the incident is given in “Ḥādithat Darāktūs,” Miṣbāḥ al-sharq 229, November 8, 1902.

      22 Miṣbāḥ al-sharq 230, November 15, 1902.

      23 Ismāʿīl Ṣabrī, Dīwān, 94ff.

      24 Al-Muʾayyad, November 9–30, 1902.

      25 The last issue of the newspaper to appear (August 15, 1903) contains the following announcement: “Apology: the editor of this newspaper has fallen ill and must have a change of air and some relaxation for a while. He asks the esteemed readers of the newspaper to accept his apologies 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.

      26 Tarrāzī, Taʾrīkh al-ṣiḥāfah, 4:185.

      27 For further details of the case, see Al-Kātib 28 (July 1963, 74). For one of the poems on this subject, see Ḥāfiẓ Ibrāhīm, Dīwān, 1:256.

      28 Al-Ẓāhir, August 2–October 3, 1904.

      29 Al-Bishrī, Al-Mukhtār, 1:244ff.; al-ʿAqqād, Rijāl ʿaraftuhum, 79ff.

      30 Storrs, Orientations, 74.

      31 Al-Bishrī, Al-Mukhtār, 1:249.

      32 Al-ʿAqqād, Rijāl ʿaraftuhum, 82–4.

      33 One of the articles by Zakī Mubārak published in al-Risālah (10:995ff.) contains a section called “The Captive of Poverty and Hardship.”

      34 Mubārak, al-Risālah, 10:1049.

      35 Al-Muwayliḥī, ʿIlāj al-nafs.

      36 Al-Muwayliḥī, Al-Muʾallafāt al-kāmilah.

      37 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.

      38 For fuller details on the two men’s involvement in Egyptian and Ottoman politics, see Allen, A Period of Time, 1–14.

      39 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.

      40 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.

      41 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).

      42 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.

      43 Miṣbāḥ al-sharq 116, 117, 118, 121, 123, 126, 130, and 133.

      44 Miṣbāḥ al-sharq 192, February 14, 1902.

      45 Ḥāfiẓ Ibrāhīm, Layālī Saṭīḥ, 29.

      46 Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Maʿārif, 1907.

      47 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.

      48 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.

      49 An exception to this situation is Stewart, “Sajʿ in the Qurʾan: Prosody and Structure.”

      50 Quoted in L. Venuti, Translation Studies Reader, 2004, 49.

      WHAT ʿĪSĀ IBN HISHĀM TOLD US

      Miṣbāḥ Miṣbāḥ al-sharq 21, September 8, 1898¹