Textual Silences and Literary Choices in al-Kisāʾī’s Account of the Annunciation and the Birth of Jesus

The story of the Annunciation to Mary and the birth of Jesus in the Qurʾān and the Bible has been the subject of several recent literary studies that bring up the use of textual silences, and the significance of speech and speechlessness as themes in the text. This paper focuses on three recensions of the story available to us in printed editions of al-Kisāʾī’s Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ in similar vein, through intertextual comparison of these accounts with Mary stories as told in the Qurʾān, premodern qiṣaṣ collections, and Islamic historiographical sources. By comparing al-Kisāʾī’s accounts of the Annunciation with those told in the Qurʾān and the wider Islamic Mary corpus it is possible to gain insight into the author’s literary agenda, and also into the ways in which he draws on the wider narrative pool for his material, makes reference to the Qurʾān, and manipulates theme and characterisation

‘And The Light in his Eyes Grew Dark’: The Representation of Anger in Arabic Popular Epic

Sīrat Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan is a late-medieval Egyptian popular epic that tells the story of the foundation of Egypt and conquest of the world by its hero, the Yemeni king Sayf. It is one of a group of narratives known as the siyar shaʿbiyya, Arabic popular epics or romances. As a genre, their core concerns are issues of identity, the collective anxieties of the social unit, and that unit’s struggle to maintain its integrity. Sīrat Sayf explores these issues in large part through the thematic use of gender, according to which the male, patriarchal forces of order are in tension with the female forces of chaos in an unstable and perpetually shifting balance that must be kept in equilibrium. In this context, open displays of strong emotions by its main protagonists can take on a particularly threatening aspect in the text. This article investigates the representation of anger in Sīrat Sayf, focusing first on the extent to which it can be described as gendered, and the significance of this for an understanding of both how male and female anger are conceptualised in the text and their respective roles in its textual dynamics. It then explores the part played by anger in an episode in which King Sayf offers the choice of conversion to Islam or death to a defeated enemy. In this small but key extract, the normally formulaic ‘conversion narrative’ becomes a highly emotionally charged encounter, during which characters are driven by anger to break with narrative conventions and behave in unexpected ways. This ‘emotional manipulation’ of literary conventions, which is achieved partly through the manipulation of gendered emotional codes, is one of the ways in which the narrative is able to give voice to the tensions surrounding issues of self and other, and communal identity, but also has implications for our understanding of the social codes depicted in the text

Solomon Legends in Sīrat Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan

Sīrat Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan is a premodern popular epic set in legendary prehistory that tells the story of how the Yemenite king Sayf leads his people on an exodus to the (then unpopulated) lands of Egypt, where he diverts the river Nile and founds a proto-Islamic Egyptian kingdom, then embarks on a military campaign to conquer the realms of humans and jinn in the name of Islam. As with much Arabic popular literature, this sīrah uses intertextual reference to other stories as a device through which to convey characterization, theme, and meaning, and reference to the legends of the prophets plays a key role. Intertextual references to the prophet Solomon and his relationship with Bilqīs, the Queen of Sheba, occur throughout the text in the form of various heroic heirlooms, tales related by various characters within the sīrah, motifs, and structural and thematic material. This article explores some of the associations that audience familiarity with various Solomon pretexts brings to Sīrat Sayf. By focusing primarily on two particular episodes in which the Solomon intertext plays a key role, it discusses how the sīrah uses intertextual reference to this Islamic legend corpus as a device to inform its own plot and thematic subtext, and to what end

The evolution and uses of the stories of the Prophets

This is a stable archival PDF of an open-access, peer-reviewed journal volume originally published at www.mizanproject.org/journal

Osiris Reborn: The Arabic Epic of Sirat Sayf Ibn Dhi Yazan and the Prophetic Königsnovelle

This chapter explores the intertextual relationship between Sīrat al-Malik Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan (The Adventures of King Sayf ibn Dhi Yazan), a medieval Egyptian popular epic, and the “Prophetic Königsnovelle” (Prophetic “Kings novel”), an Egyptian “discourse” dating to the Greco-Roman period. Through a comparative reading of two particular variants of Sīrat Sayf and the Prophetic Königsnovelle, I argue that, just as the Prophetic Königsnovelle is a response to the cultural trauma inflicted by external threats and foreign rule in ancient Egyptian times, the story of the foundation of Egypt in both Sīrat Sayf variants can be read as a veiled reworking of the history of the Arab conquest of Egypt in 639–642 CE. Furthermore, despite being separated by centuries, all three texts express the fears surrounding the loss of integrity of the socio-cultural unit through a shared conceptualization of kingship and power. The two Sayf variants branch out to follow quite different plots in their later stages, but the intertextual echoes of the Prophetic Königsnovelle that can be traced within them lend them subtextual thematic conformity, and indicate that the worldview expressed in the older Prophetic Königsnovelle lives on in this late-medieval epic