Dwight F. Reynolds

Al-Maqqarī's Ziryāb: The Making of a Myth

Abstract This essay compares al-Maqqarīs well-known seventeenth-century biography of the famous singer Ziryāb with its eleventh-century source text, Kitāb al-Muqtabis, composed by the Andalusian writer Ibn ayyān. Ibn ayyāns text is a complex work with parallel, sometimes contradictory, quotations from seven different sources, all of which were melded into a single narrative voice in al-Maqqarīs text. Close analysis reveals that al-Maqqarī systematically eliminated all passages that shed unflattering light on Ziryāb, including references to rival singers, the achievements of his own children, off-colour jokes of which Ziryāb was the butt, and anecdotes where he was portrayed in an undignified manner. Al-Maqqarī drew heavily on one of the sources quoted by Ibn ayyān, the anonymous Kitāb Akhbār Ziryāb. The essay concludes by offering a theory as to the identity of author of the Kitāb Akhbār Ziryāb and the motivations of that author and al-Maqqarī for their ‘mythification’ of the famous singer.

A Thousand and One Nights: a history of the text and its reception

The book known in English as The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments or A Thousand and One Nights bears the imprint of many different times, places and individuals. The history of its transmission, translation, expurgation and falsification is nearly as fabulous as the tales told by its most famous character, Shahrazād (Scheherezade). The oldest evidence for the work’s existence, curiously enough, only came to light relatively recently. In 1948, Nabia Abbott, the first female faculty member of the Oriental Institute in Chicago, was examining a rare piece of early medieval paper from Syria when she suddenly realized that the text she was reading was familiar. Writing in no less than six different hands covered every available space on both sides of the sheet of paper: the draft of a personal letter, a legal attestation to a contract, a crude drawing of a human figure, a few scattered phrases scribbled in the margins and the now famous passage from A Thousand and One Nights. Abbott’s painstaking analysis led not only to the deciphering of all of these texts but also to a rather precise dating for the fragment to the early ninth century The short passage from the Nights that she had discovered proved to be over 1,100 years old -the earliest physical evidence of Shahrazād’s literary existence. Other than Abbott’s fragment, the oldest pieces of historical evidence are found in two tenth-century Arabic texts. The Baghdadi bookseller Ibn al-Nadīm (d. between 990 and 998) offers an account of the Nights and how it first appeared in Arabic literature in his Fihrist (Catalogue of Books) in the section dealing with ‘Story-tellers and Raconteurs’ (al-musāmirūn wa‘l- mukharrifūn).

The Re-creation of Medieval Arabo-Andalusian Music in Modern Performance

In recent decades more and more musical ensembles have begun performing “historicised” versions of medieval Arabo-Andalusian music. The impulse to produce such re-creations of medieval musical practices has come almost entirely from Western musicians and scholars influenced by the aesthetics of the European Early Music movement, rather than from Arab musicians. The historical resources available as the basis of such performances, however, are very different from those used in the re-creation of European Early Music. This article surveys the extant historical resources, offers a brief history of this new “medieval” style of performance of Arabo-Andalusian music, and provides descriptions and critiques of selected recordings.

The Cambridge Companion to Modern Arab Culture

Chronology Modern Arab culture: introductory remarks Dwight F. Reynolds 1. The question of language Kristen Brustad 2. Religious and ethnic minorities Andrew D. Magnusson 3. Nahda: the Arab project of enlightenment Yoav Di-Capua 4. Law Joseph E. Lowry 5. Poetry Shawkat M. Toorawa 6. Narrative Mushin Al-Musawi 7. Music Scott Marcus 8. Cinema and television Andrew Hammond 9. Theatre Dina Amin 10. Art Nuha N. N. Khoury 11. Architecture Nasser Rabbat 12. Humour Devin Stewart 13. Folklore Dwight F. Reynolds 14. Food and cuisine Juan E. Campo and Magda Campo 15. Migration and diaspora Christina Civantos Glossary Guide to further reading Index.

From the delta to Detroit: Packaging a folk epic for a new folk

This paper provides a narrative account of the making of the video, Tales from Arab Detroit: Abu Zayd Comes to America. It focuses upon the original project which involved bringing Egyptian epic‐singers to Detroit to perform selections from the epic of the Bani Hilâl tribe and their hero, Abu Zayd, in September 1993. The paper offers a brief background to the epic tradition itself, an analysis of two of the Detroit performances, a critique of the portrayal of the singers found in the final version of the video, and concludes with a textual ethnographers thoughts about ethnographic filmmaking.

Song and Punishment

Life close to the center of power in the early Islamic centuries was often precarious, particularly when that power was embodied in the person of a caliph, governor, or other figure whose all-too-human whims and moods could determine the fate of those around him.* This was certainly true for political figures who served capricious superiors, and even for those who made only occasional appearances at court, such as scholars and poets. Singers and musicians, however, constituted a social group that was repeatedly subjected to both collective persecution and individual punishments. As practitioners of an art form that was disapproved of by many religious figures, and which was often associated with social behaviors condemned by conservative groups, singers and musicians were periodically subjected to various forms of disciplinary action. In addition to this general disapprobation, their every performance involved a potentially dangerous choice of material, for each song was in effect an attempt to respond to the current emotional needs and expectations of their patron. Any shortfall in this regard could lead to the patron’s displeasure, verbal reprimands, expulsion from a gathering or court, and even, on some occasions, imprisonment and harsh corporal punishment. Beyond the risky business of the performance also lay the patron’s potential anger at personal (mis-)behaviors on the part of his singers and musicians that displeased him. And all of this took place, I will argue here, within a social space that was charged with eroticism and sexual tension. Not only did many female slave singers (qiyān or jawārī) also serve as sexual partners for their owners, but male singers, whether freedmen or slaves, were to some degree “eroticized” because of their intimate access to a patron’s female slave singers in the roles of teachers, mentors, and co-performers, exposing them to accusations of flirtation and dalliance that not infrequently aroused the jealousy and anger of the women’s owners. The intimate social gathering of a patron, his

New directions in the study of medieval Andalusi music

The study of medieval Arabo‐Andalusian music has recently begun to play a more prominent role in medieval Iberian Studies. New directions have begun to open up and the field is currently moving forward using multiple new approaches. Important medieval texts, previously thought lost, have surfaced in recent decades creating a new body of evidence for scholars to interpret. In addition, a number of already well‐known texts are now being re‐evaluated from a musicological, rather than a purely literary, standpoint and are revealing significant new insights about the musical cultures of medieval Iberia. Painstaking research in a variety of different archives and collections has begun to offer a more detailed sense of the context of medieval musical performances, the lives of performers, their economic and social status, and so forth. And comparative studies across historical time periods and regional traditions are providing radical new interpretations of the history of certain musical structures, modes of transmission, and individual repertories. The present survey offers an overview of recently published research in the field of medieval Arabo‐Andalusian music and sketches out a variety of new lines of research that are currently, or should be, followed by future scholars.