CHAPTER 15
OTHER SĪRAS AND POPULAR NARRATIVES
The Arabic tradition of popular literature produced a significant number of sīras other than the well-known Sīrat ῾Antar and Sīrat Banī Hilāl (both of which are discussed in separate contributions to this volume, Chapters 13 and 14). Similar to these two works, the other sīras are works of heroic adventure and romance primarily concerned with depicting the personal prowess, military exploits, innate virtue and incomparable nobility of their heroes. These narratives are pseudo-historical in tone and setting. They base many of their central and secondary characters on actual historical figures, and frame their events within the general context of the historical periods that they presume to represent. Nonetheless, details of history are regularly enhanced by the imaginative improvements of fiction, with the result that history is usually reflected only along general levels of character identity, setting, atmosphere and tone. The importance of this pseudo-historical frame for both composers and audience remains a significant aspect of these works, since it plays an essential role in both their aesthetic and their didactic dimensions. However, at heart these are works of entertainment whose intent is to delight and morally instruct their audiences by presenting larger-than-life deeds and emotions as played out through idealized codes of action.
The written versions of popular sīras tend to be composed in either straightforward prose or, more usually, a style that relies substantially on rhymed prose (saj‘) interspersed with poetry. In general these narratives are exceedingly long, often taking a year or more to narrate fully in oral form. In their longest manuscript and printed versions they run to between two and six thousand pages, depending upon page and script size. A full inventory of these works as found in manuscript or oral form is still a desideratum, as is an examination of their relationship with many shorter Arabic heroic narratives, such as Qiṣṣat Miqdād, that also exist in Arabic popular literature and oral traditions.1 Nevertheless, the general outlines of the corpus of longer works appears to be clear, and it is these narratives that form the basis of this survey.
Tracing the history of the development of popular sīras is possible in its broad configuration, but it is more difficult to ascertain when dealing with specifics. It seems probable that the genre began to develop in the early centuries of the Islamic empire. One of the major tasks of early elite historiographers, such as al-Wāqidī, al-Balādhurī and al-Ṭabarī, was to separate fact from fiction in the accounts of pre- and early Islamic history. These so-called ‘erroneous’ accounts may have been due to faulty or partisan interpretations of events, yet it seems equally likely that they also stemmed from the fictional elaborations and ‘improvements’ suggested by the imaginations of popular story-tellers (sing. qāṣṣ). These story-tellers no doubt at first emphasized the particularistic traditions of tribal narration that one finds in the Ayyām al-῾Arab (Battle Days of the Arabs) accounts, which focus on the heroic and martial deeds of individual tribes. However, as the tribal structure of pre-Islamic Arabia broke down in the early Islamic centuries and new heroes arose from the context of the victories of Muslim conquest, first in Arabia and then in the new Islamic empire, the focus of story-tellers and their audiences broadened to reflect these new interests. Pre-Islamic tribal heroes, such as ῾Antar ibn Shaddād, were still attractive to the extent that their stories could be reworked to offer a more universalist appeal. Nevertheless, such early tribal characters became just one of a number of different topical possibilities. Added to them were major figures of early Islam, such as the Prophet Muḥammad, ῾Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib and the other early caliphs, and such early companions to the Prophet as Ḥamza ibn ῾Abd al-Muṭṭalib and Khālid ibn al-Walīd. Topics for new epics continued to be found over the centuries. The existence of epics set in later Islamic historical periods, from Umayyad times to the rule of the Mamluks, testifies to the continued willingness of story-tellers to expand and update their repertoire. Finally, the existence of several narratives that employ pre-Islamic Iran as their narrative context demonstrates a continued interest in this cultural milieu and historical era as well.
Despite the probable existence of heroic story-telling in the first few Islamic centuries, as yet no specific references to the existence of popular sīras from that time have been discovered. In fact, Ibn al-Nadīm’s bibliographical compendium al-Fihrist, written in the latter part of the fourth/tenth century and the major source of our knowledge of the popular literature of the time, makes no mention of such works, which strongly suggests that popular sīras either were not yet widespread, at least in Mesopotamia, or did not yet exist in written form. If they were prevalent, it seems unlikely that they would have escaped the comprehensive view of the learned Baghdadi bookseller.
The first certain corroboration of the written existence of popular sīras occurs a century and a half later, in the middle of the sixth/twelfth century. The Baghdadi physician and mathematician Samaw’al ibn Yaḥyā al-Maghribī (d. c. 575–6/1180), a Jewish convert to Islam, mentions in his autobiographical account of his conversion that as a boy (between the ages of ten and thirteen), he was infatuated with reading all kinds of stories and tales, among his favourites being the stories of ῾Antar, Dhāt al-Himma and Alexander the Great. Mention of sīras thereafter is not common in elite sources, but frequent enough to attest to their general existence. There is one citation that places the recitation of Dhāt al-Himma in Cairo during the reign of al-Ḥākim bi-Amr Allāh (disappeared 411/1021), who himself became the protagonist of a sīra, but the veracity of this report cannot be confirmed.2 At any rate, it is clear that by the sixth/twelfth century, written copies of popular sīras had become common, and that the oral and written traditions attained sufficient popularity that new figures – such as the Fatimid caliph al-Ḥākim and the Mamluk sultan al-Malik al-Ẓāhir Baybars (d. 676/1277) – could become protagonists of their own epics. Despite such scattered testimonies to the existence of sīras, no detailed descriptions of their contents or their styles of narration appear before the nineteenth century. Hence, it is difficult to trace the development of individual narratives, and even to know exactly how, where or when this lengthy form of narrative began and evolved.
Understanding the nature of the relationship between oral and written versions of these works requires careful consideration. The formulaic character of the rhymed prose of many sīras, the episodic structure of their storylines, their continual repetition of a limited number of narrative patterns and motifs, the lack of any identifiable authors and their great length all indicate that these narratives originated and developed within a flourishing tradition of oral compositional public story-telling. Nonetheless, evidence such as Lane’s account of the public recitation of sīras points to the fact that more than one style of oral recitation has existed. Some story-tellers used musical accompaniment while they sang or chanted parts of the epic (as is currently the case in Egypt with the Banī Hilāl cycle), while others accompanied themselves with rhythmic instruments such as the tambourine. Sometimes they would use simple narration with little rhymed prose or poetry, while at other times they read from a written account of the story.
In general, individual manuscript versions of sīras may reflect any of these tendencies, but it is relatively rare that one encounters more than one such tendency in the written tradition of any particular narrative. Despite the general level of illiteracy among the lower classes, writing was hardly a rarity in pre-modern Middle Eastern societies. The fact that so many manuscripts of these very long narratives have survived testifies to the existence of sufficient numbers of literate story-tellers willing to write down their tales, or perhaps of story-tellers or audience members who were wealthy enough to have the sīras transcribed for them by professional scribes. However this transcription occurred, thereafter versions of these stories appear to work much like any other manuscript tradition. Later texts are generally copied from early ones, although with a greater leeway for minor variants than the manuscript tradition of an elite canonic work might display. The earliest manuscripts date from the early ninth/fifteenth century; most stem from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although such late provenance may attest less to the lateness of the creative tradition than to the fact that earlier manuscripts became worn out and were then replaced. Some of these manuscripts are in excellent condition, others obviously stem from a more impoverished class of society. The many volumes that comprise a single narrative, for example, can come in different sizes, with poor script and paper quality, and changes of scribal hands occurring in mid-page. More investigation into this subject is required before one can offer more specific information.
In general, it appears that oral and written versions of popular sīras could be stable in some areas while remaining open to change or innovation in others. The art of pleasing audiences with stories requires, after all, a fair measure of stability, but it must also be intermixed with the innovations of story-tellers whose artistic gifts could modify or even transform some aspect of the genre. One reason that new stories were created was no doubt due to the desire to meet audience demands for variation, even while older stories continued to exist for centuries, albeit at varying levels of popularity at particular points in time and place. The simultaneous existence of stories in writing and orality was probably common. That a sīra was transcribed did not mean that it was no longer narrated in oral form. Although it appears that longer sīras, such as῾Antar and Dhāt al-Himma, were transcribed only once, written versions of shorter works, such as segments of Sīrat Banī Hilāl, for example, exhibit different modes of oral narrative style.
In the twentieth century, the Arabic traditions of oral and written story-telling underwent considerable change. Due to competition from modern entertainment technology, the numbers of oral story-tellers declined significantly. Nonetheless, modern formats also created new opportunities. The commercial publishing of manuscript versions of written sīras and the relative increase in literacy in Arab countries exposed written texts of the sīras to larger audiences than ever before. Although most of these printed versions were first published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they continue to be reprinted at regular intervals. Similarly, some of these stories have been appropriated by new media to become the subject matter of radio dramas, television series, films, and modernized books and storybooks.
Further research may establish some idea of the historical development of the genre of popular sīra. At present, however, it is more practical to list them in the chronological order of their subject matter. From this perspective, they can be organized as dealing with characters from pre-Islamic Persian history, pre-Islamic Arabian history, early Islamic history, and finally characters and plots drawn from later dynasties in Islamic history.
There are three sīras that take early Persian history as their subject matter: Sīrat Fīrūz-Shāh, whose protagonist is the son of the Achaemenid king Darius Ⅱ; Sīrat Iskandar, whose central focus is the deeds of Alexander the Great; and the Story of Bahrām Gūr, whose main character is the Sassanian shah Bahrām.
Pre-Islamic south Arabian history forms the backdrop for Sīrat al-Malik Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan, while pre-Islamic north Arabian history is dealt with in Sīrat ῾Antar, as well as in the story of al-Zīr Sālim and other accounts of tribal battles, such as the War of Basūs between the tribes of Bakr and Taghlib.
Many sīras combine elements of both Iranian and pre-Islamic Arabic history. Sīrat Amīr Ḥamza, for example, narrates the adventures of Ḥamza ibn ῾Abdallāh, an Arab warrior who becomes a major player in Iranian court politics and military affairs. Similarly, the geste of Alexander, while ostensibly dealing with Iranian history, is Arabized by having events presented from the perspective of an Arab hero.
Another group of narratives dealing with early Islamic history takes as its protagonist ῾Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib. These narratives can from one perspective be considered as forming a part of an associated genre of maghāzī narratives, which relate the accounts of the battles and raids that the Prophet Muḥammad ordered or engaged in (early popular versions of which have been collected and analysed by R. Paret).3 Nonetheless, longer examples of these narratives, which clearly contain fictional and fantastic elements, can also be considered as being so close to sīra narrative structures and patterns as to be clearly a part of the same type of story-telling tradition. Such works as ῾Alī’s raid against Ra’s Ghūl or the long work known as Ghazwat al-Arqat, in which ῾Alī plays a central role, should be analysed within the same general framework as popular sīras.
The best known sīra after ῾Antar and the Banī Hilāl is Sīrat al-Amīra Dhāt al-Himma, which deals with the tribal feuds and holy wars of the Umayyad and early Abbasid caliphates; another narrative reflecting this time period and the theme of the spread of Islam is Sīrat al-Badr Nār, which exists only in manuscript and is as yet unstudied.
Fatimid and Mamluk history are treated in Sīrat al-Ḥākim bi-Amr Allāh and Sīrat al-Malik al-Ẓāhir Baybars, respectively. Related in time period to these latter works are the stories of rogues (῾ayyarūn), typified by the cycles of Aḥmad al-Danaf and ῾Alī Zaybaq. These characters are not martial heroes, although they are brave and capable enough when it comes to a fight, but trickster figures who rely on craft, deceit and guile to achieve their aims.
There are significant differences in style, content and historical origin among members of the genre. Sīrat Fīrūz-Shāh, for example, is Persian in origin, while Sīrat al-Zīr Sālim is based on pre-Islamic Ayyām al-῾Arab sources. Sīrat al-Malik Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan is full of sorcery and demons, while Dhāt al-Himma is generally devoid of magic. Sīrat al-Malik al-Ẓāhir Baybars tends towards unadorned prose, while other sīras rely heavily on rhymed prose and poetry. Nevertheless, these works form a cohesive genre by reason of their shared emphasis on heroes and heroic deeds of battle, their pseudo-historical tone and setting, and their indefatigable drive towards cyclic expansion: one event leads to another, one battle to another, one war to another, and so on for hundreds and thousands of pages.
Viewed from a wider cultural perspective, these popular epics are Arabic examples of a larger body of vibrant popular literature that existed in most parts of the Islamic world. Pre-modern Persian and Turkish literatures also developed strong traditions of popular epic, and there is convincing evidence that despite their linguistic differences neighbouring traditions of popular story-telling borrowed and translated from and mutually influenced one another. Sīrat ῾Antar, for example, exists in an Ottoman Turkish translation, and many of these epics exist in multiple versions across disparate linguistic borders. Renditions of Sīrat Amīr Ḥamza, for instance, exist in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Georgian, Urdu and Malay, while versions of the Alexander story (Sīrat Iskandar) are even more widely disseminated in Eastern and Western literature.
Arabic and other Islamic popular epics, moreover, constitute only one portion of a vast tradition of multilingual Islamic popular literatures that also encompasses non-epic pseudo-historical narratives (maghāzī and futūḥāt), religious literature of various types (popular biographies of the Prophet Muḥammad and his companions, saints’ legends, accounts of miracles, etc.), numerous genres of popular poetry, song, proverb and humour, and tales of wonder and fantasy, the best known being the compilation known as Alf layla wa-layla (A Thousand and One Nights), discussed by Reynolds in Chapter 12. The history and nature of this large corpus of literature are still largely uncharted, as are the ways in which different genres, whether within single linguistic traditions or across them, influenced or impacted one another. Nevertheless, no single example of these popular literatures should be considered without at least an awareness of the existence of this larger literary and social context.
Sīras rely on a relatively limited number of characters, plots, narrative structures and themes to create their stories. Such limitations are typical of popular narrative in all cultures and do not deserve the culturally biased aspersions that elite scholars and critics often cast on them. Popular literature is formulaic, but the existence of numerous repetitions of these formulas in members of a genre is in the nature of things, and certainly exists as much or even more in the popular art of contemporary cultures – given the proliferation of forms that modern entertainment media have created – as it has ever done in the past. Given their apparent perpetual attraction and lasting popularity, stories based on victorious struggle in battle and personal success and fulfilment in romance appear to meet certain innate human needs.
Sīras use a limited number of character types. The most important of these is the hero, who embodies the irresistible martial prowess and the innate nobility and generosity of soul that make him or her worthy of admiration and affection. The protagonist – Amir Ḥamza, Dhāt al-Himma, Fīrūz-Shāh – is the major representative of this character type, yet he/she is so only as a matter of degree. Sīras are filled with secondary heroes, many of them opponents whom their protagonists have fought, defeated, captured and then won over as friends and allies. As the narrative progresses, and as more characters are introduced, the protagonist often becomes the centre-point of a large group of warriors who serve as the main hero’s associates and entourage. Yet each of these secondary heroes also has his or her own career, filled with battles, love affairs, moments of capture and defeat as well as victory, and sometimes of demise. If the protagonist is ever-victorious in the end, sometimes he or she must pause to mourn or avenge a fallen comrade.
One important character category is the female warrior. Some are warriors who can also become love interests for a male hero, or someone who is predominantly a love interest, like ῾Ayn al-Ḥayāt in Fīrūz-Shāh, who can also, when necessary, take up arms to defend herself or her beloved. In Sīrat Dhāt al-Himma, of course, the eponymous female hero is the protagonist of the narrative as a whole. Another important variant is the black hero, central to ῾Antar, the Banī Hilāl and Dhāt al-Himma, but found in most other sīras as well.
Heroes have helpers. Sometimes these are fellow warriors, but quite often they are individuals from a lower social class who devote themselves to the service of the protagonist. As with Sancho Panza’s relationship to Don Quixote (an elite parody of these character types, which also existed in European Renaissance epic), this helper character is the voice of common sense and practical reason in the face of the hero’s impetuosity and instinctive reliance on the force of arms. More important in the case of Arabic sīra, the helper is also a rogue and trickster who in his own way is just as courageous as the hero, but who is more prepared to resort to stealth and guile to achieve his aims. As such, he becomes the scout and go-between. In such works as Aḥmad al-Danaf and ῾Alī Zaybaq, the urban trickster (῾ayyār) who moves on both sides of the law – sometimes a gangster, sometimes an officer of the law – assumes centre stage and completely displaces the military hero to become narrative protagonist in his own right. Female rogues, such as Dalīla the Trickster, also exist in ῾ayyār narratives, but in sīras this function, when positive, is usually played by a maid who acts as helper and go-between for her mistress or, when the character is negative, by a sorceress or by a treacherous old woman whose trickeries the hero, helper or beloved must detect and overcome.
Heroes serve rulers, who form their own class of characters. In general, heroes never rule and rulers never fight. Even when a protagonist is a prince, as in Sīrat Fīrūz-Shāh, he rarely ascends the throne, since if he did so he would have to give up fighting. In this sense, the hero is a necessary accoutrement of rule for a king or emperor, since the latter needs him to fight his battles and wage his wars. The other necessary counterpart for the king is the vizier, his chief minister and adviser. These characters represent the intelligence, personal insight and political wisdom necessary for successful rule. Often a king in a sīra will have two viziers, a noble one who protects the interests of the hero and works for justice, and an evil one who strives to destroy the hero and is willing to undermine the interests of the kingdom to further his own selfish ambitions.
Finally, there is the romantic love interest, the beautiful maiden whose hand the male hero wishes to win. Love is always mutual in sīras, and female beloveds frequently work actively to further the love affair by arranging love trysts. Personal courage and skill in battle are major requirements for the male lover. Female warriors typically demand their future spouse be able to defeat them on the battlefield while more sedate maidens first notice the male hero through some outstanding feat of arms. Physical beauty is a seemingly natural point of attraction for both parties. Essential as well is virtue and nobility. Many female love interests in sīras immediately reject suitors who are strong and handsome but insufficiently good-hearted and noble.
Male heroes tend to have a major love interest, around whom much of the action of the story revolves. Nevertheless, there is always room for secondary love affairs, especially as a hero’s adventures become geographically far-flung. Rarely do these secondary love interests meet the approval of the central beloved, so usually the new paramour remains with her family after the affair ends or the new marriage is consecrated.
Love affairs produce offspring. These children, male or female, tend to become heroes in their own right and usually encounter their absent parent once they grow up and emerge as powerful warriors. At times, father and son meet in battle and only barely avoid killing each other. Somehow, their identities are revealed and the son usually joins the heroic retinue of the protagonist.
A prominent character in the love story is the romantic rival. This person can be another powerful warrior or ruler, whom the hero must defeat in battle; an evil vizier, whose secret machinations are much more difficult for the hero to overcome but who in the end meets his just deserts; or a weaker member of a powerful family, a vain and silly fop whom the story-teller can ridicule but who perseveres because of the help he receives from powerful family members.
Fathers are frequently reluctant to marry their daughters to the hero, whom they generally regard as a social inferior and stranger. Fathers therefore often elicit the help of a rival warrior to forestall the marriage, or they send the hero on what they hope to be an impossible mission for a presumably unattainable object in pursuit of which the hero will likely perish. Of course, the hero always returns victorious, and is then dispatched again on another seemingly impossible quest.
With regard to narrative structure, sīras are episodic. Each episode is potentially discrete and independent, and yet is usually linked to others through more general plot concerns for which the individual episode becomes one of a series of steps towards a larger narrative goal. The impetuses for episodic narrative action are two. One is founded on the concept of defence. Hence, an episode revolves around the hero protecting him or herself, or some other entity, such as a weak and defenceless individual, tribe, group of companions or military allies, from external attack. The other main impetus is based on a quest, to retrieve a captured lover or friend, to win a dowry, to defeat an enemy of one’s king and some similar task. These two concerns are often intermixed; for example, the hero can be on a quest and on the way rescue a defenceless group under attack.
Larger concerns that bind episodes together are the hero’s love affair, the consummation of which may take the major part of the sīra, or defence of one’s tribe or monarch, as attacked by not one but a series of increasingly distant enemies. As a result of these interests, individual battles are transformed into large-scale campaigns that are waged over increasingly greater geographical distances. Here the hero can move south, into southern Arabia and eastern Africa; south-west into Egypt, North Africa and even Spain; north-west into Anatolia, the Byzantine empire and Italy; or east, towards India and China. Hence, the full range of the civilized world, as known to pre-modern Arabs, becomes the site of the hero’s activities. In each of these places, social structure is uniform. Politics are centred around the rule of kings, helped by their viziers and defended by their warlords. The code of action and ethics is also uniform. In a sense, sīras normalize the world for their audiences by representing it as politically and ethically homogeneous. Rulers and political regimes may differ in regard to ethnicity, religion and individual moral character, but not in their political and social structure or their expected norms of behaviour.
Popular sīras are also united as a genre by their common representation of certain governing themes. The first is the possibility of the success of individual action. Heroes often have to overcome social barriers that would hamper the careers of lesser beings. They always have to overcome superior odds in each of their battles. They never win the hands of their beloveds easily. Yet despite all of these hindrances, they never lose their self-confidence or resolution, and they never give up. This ideal of individuals solving their own problems by means of determined action against impossible odds gives these narratives much of their attraction.
Second, ideal romantic love is always presented as a matter of mutual attraction and choice. Marriage is the result of individual inclination against social odds rather than one of social norms dictating marital results. The only love stories that sīras tell are those of successful, mutually agreeable romantic relationships, in which men and women are portrayed as emotional equals and full partners.
Third, the religious world of sīras is intrinsically monotheistic and usually Islamic, even anachronistically so. In narratives dealing with pre-Islamic subjects, positive characters are monotheists by personal predilection, while negative characters are polytheists or Magians. In a more or less explicit sense, these are worlds awaiting the arrival of Muḥammad and the revelation of the Koran. The noble and insightful inhabitants of these worlds are already instinctively Muslims, in belief at least if not yet in formal affiliation. In sīras whose action transpires after the revelation of Islam, religion plays an even more important role. Heroes promote the faith against its rivals and enemies: paganism, Magianism, Christianity and Judaism. The concerns and social attitudes of the age of the Crusades are clearly represented in such works as Sīrat Dhāt al-Himma and Sīrat al-Malik al-Ẓāhir Baybars. Villains are Christians in disguise who treacherously plot against heroes and the well-being of the Muslim community. Conversion to Islam is the natural way for formerly non-Muslim opponents or love interests to redeem themselves and enter into proper relationships with the heroes of the sīras. Modern Western scholars have sometimes expressed reservations about the seemingly ‘fanatic’ tone displayed in these latter narratives, and admittedly there is at times an ethical coarseness involved. It is offensive to the modern secular mind when differences of religion are used as a justification for outright murder, as occasionally happens in sīras. Nevertheless, in general such sentiments probably reflect audience attitudes of these historical periods, which in fact differ little from the pro-Christian sentiments expressed in contemporaneous European epics.
Although a large number of examples of pre-modern Arabic popular epics have survived, as a genre they remain comparatively little studied, despite the noteworthy efforts of a few scholars in each generation. They have become much better known than even a few decades ago. Much scholarly study of this fascinating body of literature is still needed.