Table Of ContentArabs and the Art of Storytelling
Middle East Literature in Translation
Michael Beard and Adnan Haydar, Series Editors
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Arabs and the
Art of Storytelling
A Strange Familiarity
Abdelfattah Kilito
Translated by
Mbarek Sryfi and Eric Sellin
With a Foreword by Roger Allen
Syracuse University Press
English translation copyright © 2014 by Syracuse University Press
Syracuse, New York 13244-5290
All Rights Reserved
First Edition 2014
14 15 16 17 18 19 6 5 4 3 2 1
Originally published in French as Les Arabes et l’art du réc it: Une ét range familiarité
(Paris: Sindbad/Actes Sud, 2009).
∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
For a listing of books published and distributed by Syracuse University Press, visit
www.SyracuseUniversityPress.syr.edu.
ISBN: 978-0-8156-3371-6 (cloth) 978-0-8156-5286-1 (e-book)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kilito, Abdelfattah, 1945–
[Arabes et l'art du récit. English]
Arabs and the art of storytelling : a strange familiarity / Abdelfattah Kilito ;
translated by Mbarek Sryfi and Eric Sellin ; with a foreword by Roger Allen. —
First edition.
pages cm. — (Middle East literature in translation series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8156-3371-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8156-5286-1 (ebook)
1. Arabic literature—History and criticism. 2. Narration (Rhetoric) I. Sryfi ,
Mbarek, translator. II. Sellin, Eric, 1933– translator. III. Title.
PJ7519.N25K5513 2014
892.7'0923—dc23 2014027337
Manufactured in the United States of America
Contents
Foreword, Roger Allen ❀ vii
Preface ❀ xi
Translators’ Note ❀ xv
1. The Prophetic Pattern ❀ 1
2. How Should We Read Kalila and Dimna? ❀ 18
3. Speaking to the Prince ❀ 30
4. This Verdant Paradise ❀ 49
5. The Exemplary Intruder: Hayy ibn Yaqzān ❀ 55
6. The Hostile Eye ❀ 74
7. Al-Mu‘tamid’s Dahr ❀ 84
8. The Singing of the Jinns ❀ 91
9. Portrait of the Miser as a Hero ❀ 96
10. To Lie Once a Year ❀ 112
11. Is A Thousand and One Nights a Boring Book? ❀ 116
12. The New Dante ❀ 126
13. Perec and al-Harīrī ❀ 131
14. Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of Averroës ❀ 140
Works Cited ❀ 147
Foreword
T
hanks to the initiative of Syracuse University Press, anglo-
phone readers interested in the Arabic literary tradition have
now been able to familiarize themselves with the writings of
Abdelfattah Kilito, one of the most original voices in Arabic
literary criticism and particularly in what may be termed its
“classical” or, if you prefer a more chronological and less
value-laden term, its “premodern” tradition of belles-lettres
(that French term being as close as one can probably get to
the semantic fi elds covered by the Arabic term adab in its
premodern context). This book is in fact the third collection
of his essays to be published in English translation, the pre-
vious two being The Author and His Doubles (2001), which
discusses the status of authorship within the Arabic cultural
milieu, and Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language (2008), a
similarly insightful collection of essays about language and
its translatability.
In the current collection, Kilito is concerned with the
analysis of narratives from the Arabic tradition, and in the
process he casts his net far and wide. However, as is always
the case with his writings, each essay provides evidence of
not merely his own intimate familiarity with the source text,
but also of the sheer breadth of his readings around the text
in its indigenous surroundings and, more often than not,
with respect to other analogous texts from both the Arabic
vii
viii Foreword
❀
and European traditions. In both cases, he invokes premod-
ern and modern illustrative examples. Kilito’s preferred
method always involves questioning the texts, challenging
long-accepted interpretations of them, and even confronting
his own reactions to them (as in his thought-provoking essay
in this collection on his lifetime of exposure to A Thou-
sand and One Nights). The resulting analyses are never less
than insightful, opening up fresh vistas through which to
examine or reexamine the narrative tradition in Arabic and
fascinating avenues of comparison with other examples of
the genres that he selects from contiguous cultures. Thus,
al-Harīrī, the renowned author of maqāmāt, “assemblies”
(an intrinsically Arabic narrative genre that predates the
European emergence of the picaresque), fi nds his verbal acro-
batics juxtaposed with those of the French novelist Georges
Perec (whose novel La disparition is written without using
the letter e); the mind of the equally famous philosopher
Ibn Rushd (known in the Western world as Averroës), is
accessed through an analysis of Jorge Luis Borges’s story
“Averroës’s Search.”
The volume carries its own subtitle: A Strange Familiar-
ity, utilizing an oxymoronic phrase that can be considered
typically Kilitoesque in the richness of its potential. After an
initial chapter in which the motivations for writing, especially
narratives, are discussed, we encounter a series of analyses
devoted to texts that are indeed mostly “familiar,” at least
within what might be called the “canon” of Arabic litera-
ture and its expression in the form of literary histories. Thus,
in addition to the already mentioned al-Harīrī, Ibn Rushd,
and A Thousand and One Nights (which merits two sepa-
rate studies), we have the translation of Kalila and Dimna by
Ibn al-Muqaff a‘ from the Persian tradition of narrative; Ibn
Foreword ix
❀
Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzān; Ibn Hazm’s investigation of love
and its symptoms, Tawq al-hamāmah (The Dove’s Neck-
Ring); and the polymath al-Jāhiz’s renowned compilation of
anecdotes concerning that most curious group within Middle
Eastern society and its notions of hospitality and generosity,
misers (the Kitāb al-bukhala’ [Book of Misers]). The texts
themselves are thus clearly recognized as important land-
marks in the history of Arabic narrative, albeit a history that
has lagged far behind Arabic poetry as a stimulator for crit-
ical studies. But in the present volume at least, what may be
“familiar” about these works is rendered “strange” by the
defamiliarization process that Kilito adopts in his essays.
Rather than making any dramatic revelations here about
the insights to be found in the individual chapters, I leave
it to the reader to delve into them, discover the question-
ing postures that they adopt, and consider the ramifi cations
involved in reinserting the texts into the various phases in
the development of Arabic prose and its narrative tradition.
To provide just one example of the tack that Kilito follows,
are there no circumstances, he wonders, under which the sta-
tus of the miser within Arab-Islamic society, duly described
in al-Jāhiz’s Kitāb al-bukhala’ by means of multiple (and in
some cases sequential) anecdotes, might serve to illustrate the
more positive character trait of “thrift”?
Here then is yet another compilation in English transla-
tion of Kilito’s penetrating essays on Arabic literature and its
genres. Although its primary readership may lie with those
who are already familiar with the texts he has selected, the
refreshingly open posture that he adopts in his critical anal-
yses should also be attractive to a much broader readership
that may one day—in shā’ Allāh, God willing—become
more aware of the riches of the Arabic literary heritage and
