Arabic Literature in the Post-Classical Period

Drama was not unknown to Arab society when the beys of Tunis and the French expeditionary force brought European theatrical performances to the area in the late eighteenth century. Traditional forms of popular drama continued to exist well after the growth of European dramatic activities in the Arab world and were to provide some inspiration to the emergent modern Arab theatre. Apart from a number of texts of shadow theatre our limited knowledge of this whole genre depends largely upon the accounts of travellers and local chroniclers. The Arab elite excluded Arabic drama from their concept of the realm of literature, because pre-modern theatrical performances were oral, given in colloquial or semi-colloquial, and provided what was regarded as frivolous, impudent and debauched (sukhf wa-mujūn) entertainment.¹ Thus the literary tradition refers to this drama only in casual allusions.

In the nineteenth century most visitors to any town in North Africa, Iraq and the Levant would have seen the ‘ludicrous exhibition of rude jests, bear-fighting, unseemly gestures’, represented in shadow or puppet theatre by two fantastically dressed personages, Karākūz and ‘Īwāẓ.³ They might also have witnessed one of the many groups of itinerant performers of comic improvisatory drama, variously called ḥalqa, bisāṭ, ḥabābẓiya, Awlād Rābiya or sāmir. Shadow theatre (Karākūz or khayāl al-ẓill) portrayed characters reflected as shadows cast by flat, coloured puppets on a white linen screen. The shadow-player frequently used a stand, like the European marionette theatre, with a screen stretched across and illuminated from behind by an oil-lamp or candles. The figures, one to two feet in height, made of fine transparent camel leather or cardboard, were pressed against the screen by means of rods inserted into holes in their limbs and chests. The figures were manipulated by the hidden puppet master (miqaddim or rayyis), who introduced the characters and delivered their dialogues and popular songs, sometimes assisted by associates. On grander occasions he was accompanied by three or four musicians, playing tambourines, a reed flute and a drum. The plays enacted were ‘not far removed from medieval western drama, from the Mysteries and Moralities as well as the Sotties’.⁴ In most Arab countries the shadow play derived its name from that employed for the Turkish shadow play, Karagöz (Black Eye), taken from the name of its chief character. The Arab version in most lands was closely modelled on the Turkish and did not develop as a significantly different strain.

Karākūz and the itinerant actors could be seen as part of the many entertainments accompanying public and religious ceremonies, or domestic festivities, such as circumcision or marriage celebrations. In some countries Karākūz was to be seen only during the first hours of the nights of the fasting month of Ramadan. Such entertainments beguiled crowds on such occasions as ‘Āshūra, the maḥmal ceremony, the anniversary of the birth of the Prophet and the pilgrimages to Muslim saints’ tombs in commemoration of their birthdays (mawlids). The performers’ tent or simple stage attracted spectators in a public place, in the bazaar, outside (or inside) a café or before the private home of the rich. In Cairo Ezbekieh was the preferred rendezvous; in Tunis performances were to be seen in the quarter of Bab Souika in Ḥalfaouine; in the old city of Jerusalem people went to the coffeehouses in Bāb al-Maḥaṭṭa, al-Bāshūra and Bāb al-Maghāriba, and in Baghdad children watched Karākūz in the ‘Azāwī cafe in the main square.⁵ The audience was chiefly the uneducated; the higher class attended shadow plays only occasionally, even during Ramadan when the shows were at their best. Audiences would comment on the play, the figures would improvise rejoinders and carry on conversations with them.⁶

Karākūz represented a kind of grotesque buffoonery, retelling the strange adventures of the two heroes. In Tunisia the character Karākūz knocked down walls, uprooted palm trees and defied ferocious animals. In Egyptian shadow theatre (khayāl al-ẓill) he was a truculent, artful, boastful person, who while displaying popular sagacity, behaved shamefully, annoyed and deceived others, relieving them of their possessions and beating them. Karākūz could be young or old. Often with an ugly countenance and an ungainly bearing, he had an aquiline nose and a huge black beard. He wore the yellow conical cap (ṭurṭūr) of clowns and dervishes, a red kaftan with a wide belt, baggy blue trousers, yellow socks and red shoes with black heels. In Syria he wore a deep red tarboosh and a green kaftan; the compère, his inseparable friend ‘Īwāẓ, was the synonym of an imbecile with a short pointed beard. In Tunisia the same character, called Ḥājj ‘Iwaẓ (in Turkish Hacivat), was a bourgeois type, well educated and conservative.⁷

The performance had various stock characters: in Egypt al-Mu‘allim Sayyid; his servant Farfūr; the effendi (the Europeanized Egyptian), and a dancer (ghāziya); in Morocco the fat man Masāyiḥ and the feeble character Baqshīsh.⁸ In Tunisia there were several recurring characters: the two heroes, a Moroccan and an Arab yokel; an armed Berber; a lady dancer; Rikhim, a grotesque comic figure with an enormous belly and backside; the young dandy Shalbī; the smoker of kief al-Ḥājj Qandīl; the seller of baqlāwa; and a very correct individual, Bayram Agha of Albanian origin.⁹ In Syrian shadow theatre there were a host of other characters: Ghandūr, a youth with a moustache, wearing the latest clothes and European shoes, with a stick in hand; a poor infirm man, wearing a grey coat full of holes, leaning on a thick stick; a number of veiled women wrapped up in woollen wraps, carrying an umbrella or a flower; a pathological character, an opium addict, who chortled through his nose; Qurayṭim, a simple Turk, whose duty it was to preserve order, and a lazy Egyptian.¹⁰

The texts of Karākūz were memorized, not written, a sign of their improvisation. The greater part of the dialogue was sung or recited in dialect. The medium of later performances was popular verse (zajal). In Egypt and Tunisia, shadow and puppet theatre were mainly performed in the Turkish language till the 1820s, then chiefly in colloquial Arabic in the second half of the century, though performances in Turkish could still be seen. Turkish had been for some time the language of the ruling elite in many Arab countries.¹¹

The licentiousness, sexual innuendo, indecent images and vocabulary of these ‘Saturnalia’, performed by puppets or actors, were considered by some European spectators as so gross that they would have shocked an ancient Greek audience accustomed to the plays of Aristophanes.¹² Most Arab spectators did not see any immorality in the obscene language or the liberty with which sexual issues were treated, and even allowed their children to attend. As M M. Badawi has remarked, normal physical functions have always provided the human race with an inexhaustible source of merriment.¹³ Many aspects, such as the prevailing humour, slapstick, the satire of morals and customs, attacks on corruption and the mocking of the gullibility of the common man, were common themes in both Karākūz and the farces, and the forms probably owed a lot to each other. Violence, bastinading and imprisonment inflicted on the unfortunate underdog were common ingredients; the denouement of most pieces was usually violence and frequent beatings for chastisement and correction. This is illustrated in a Syrian performance: Karākūz takes a wife and on the wedding night she gives birth to a handsome son; Karākūz complains of becoming a father in so short a time, and starts menacingly to rock the baby, who presumably meets the unfortunate fate of Punch’s baby.¹⁴ Europeans, other foreigners, and religious and racial minorities, such as Christians and Jews, were often the butt of the piece. This drama scorned the beliefs of Christians and the business customs of Jews and Berbers; Muslims were seldom reviled. In Tunisia the Maltese, a scapegoat for all European Christians, were treated execrably.¹⁵ Among the characters that brought a laugh were those whose pronunciation mutilated the Arabic language: the outlandish accent of the Sudanese and the broken Arabic of new characters, such as the European tourist, the foreign doctor or the ambassador.

Karākūz was composed of short comic dialogues, dances and set-piece scenes, depicting centuries-old stories, historical events, legends and fictional tales, often with the added ingredient of topical allusions and local gossip. The essential humour was often an expression of the contempt for rulers. In their satirical sallies the performances spared neither rank, age nor sex.¹⁶ Karākūz’s jokes were, however, also directed against his own stupidity.

A sort of vox populi, the social and political criticism aired in Karākūz had always annoyed the authorities. To the delight of the populace in Aleppo in the eighteenth century, Karākūz lampooned the Janissaries, who had been discredited in the war of 1786 with Russia. As a result the authorities banned performances. It was silenced again during the French occupation of Egypt,¹⁷ and did not long survive the French occupation of Algeria in 1830. Karākūz in Algiers presented all sorts of insulting buffoonery. At the end of one play a giant Karākūz puts to flight a French military unit, beating the soldiers with the aid of the phallic god of fecundity, briskly handled in the form of a stick. In another play Satan appears in a French uniform. The French authorities’ abhorrence of such satire led to its proscription by the French governor-general in 1843, to ensure that French authority was no longer ridiculed and that the performers did not incite the indigenous population to revolt. In Tripoli in Libya in 1910 the public celebration of the dethronement of ‘Abd al-Ḥamīd Ⅱ and the adoption of the new constitution of 1908 was depicted, leading the authorities to ban all political references.¹⁸ When the French resident-general in Tunis was attacked, it was similarly banned. In Egypt Karākūz was employed as a means to express hatred of the British occupier and of the Greek traders and money-lenders, who had amassed fortunes by grinding down the Egyptian peasant.¹⁹ In twentieth-century Damascus the puppeteer put all sorts of political comments into the mouths of his characters, for which he could easily have been arrested.²⁰

Marionettes were to be found too in different parts of the Arab world. There were many similarities between shadow and puppet theatre. In the marionette theatre the small puppets were poorly made of paper, wood, cloth, plaster, wire, straw, cotton and leather. The booth for the plays, made of cloth that folded easily, was only slightly higher than a man; the facade was a little lower than the other sides. The performer sat inside, moving the primitive glove puppets. Not more than two characters appeared at any one time. Sometimes an assistant would sit with the audience, directing verbal sallies at the puppets.²¹

In Algeria and in the Ḥalfaouine Place in Tunis, Sicilian puppets could be seen, as tall as a man, moved by strings from above. One of their famous pieces was ‘The Play of Ismā‘īl Pasha’ (Lu‘bat Ismā‘īl Bāshā). Ismā‘īl was a warrior, who chops off all the crowned heads of Europe with his yatagan. In this play the puppets depict the heroism of the Ottoman army in the Russian and Balkan wars. Other characters are Ismā‘īl’s beautiful daughter Nīnā, and his squire the Maltese Nīkūlā. In Libya and Morocco Bū Sa‘diyya was a hero of the puppet theatre, a good-natured cheerful young man, wearing a leather mask, a strange felt cap with the beak of a bird, and the tail of a fox, covered in castanets, and over his head a hood made from alfalfa. His beard was made from camel hair. This strange figure had been the King of Mali, who, having lost his throne, moved from town to town, scorned by the populace.²²

In Egypt the Turkish term Arāgūz (Karākūz) was applied to puppet theatre. The central character, Arāgūz, was the ordinary Egyptian, the ibn al-balad. He had a strange-looking head, a huge nose, two protruding lips, a bald head and a broad nape to his neck. Arāgūz was flighty, smart, yet sometimes astonishingly stupid, cunning, with the ability to extricate himself from the tightest corners, and vicious. Like the shadow-player, the presenter gave his voice a shrill tone for the dialogue of this character, by putting a swazzle in his mouth.²³ Other stock characters included a boisterous Turkish soldier with a strange accent, a naive Nubian, an Italian or Greek priest and an impudent beggar. The soldier was a stupid, odious personality, on whom Arāgūz wreaked revenge on behalf of Arab society.²⁴ As well as glove puppets, another variety was presented upon a very narrow stage, which the puppet man could easily carry about. He hid in a wooden box, and could see the stage and the spectators through holes. The figures appeared through holes in the stage, and were controlled by brass wires passing through grooves in the lid of the box. There was a more primitive form of little string puppets, made to dance by the manipulator’s knee. As with Punch and Judy, the puppets began by paying each other compliments, quarrelled by degrees and invariably ended by beating one another.²⁵ As well as the adventures of Arāgūz, puppet theatre in Egypt told stories of such popular heroes as Adham al-Sharqāwī, or the tales of Riyā and Sakīna.²⁶

The Egyptians were often amused by players of low and ridiculous farces, called muḥabbaẓūn, who presented a short comic scene (faṣl muḍḥik), a primitive kind of commedia dell’arte. A large group of artists usually played at weddings at the expense of the bridegroom, performing before the house or in the courtyard, as the chief entertainment for guests during laylat al-ḥanna (the night in which henna is applied to the hands and feet of the bride) and sometimes during the latter half of the preceding day. The actors were men and boys, the part of a woman being always performed by a man or boy in female attire. The players sometimes wore costume, used make-up and perhaps donned masks.²⁷

Taking their subjects from the events of social life, they depicted the misfortunes of the downtrodden masses. The comedies allowed the people to caution the great and rich and thereby aspire to obtain ameliorations and reform, which had frequently been the aim of dramatic art in the Middle Ages. Gérard de Nerval compared them to French proverbes de société (short comedies illustrating a maxim).²⁸ The players’ attacks on corrupt officialdom, the high and mighty ruling classes and excessive taxation appealed to most audiences; even their rich and influential patrons saw it as harmless amusing satire.²⁹ According to the British official John Bowring, those dramas with a religious theme usually introduced a Christian giaour (infidel), upon whom the process of conversion operated in the shape of severe bastinadings, always ending in the triumph of Muslim orthodoxy.³⁰ These short impromptu pieces gave little scope for plot or character development.

Two comedies by such artists were seen at a wedding feast in Shubrā, near Cairo, in 1815. A hajji, wanting to go to Mecca, is tricked by a cameleer, who deceives both him and the camel merchant. The camel that the cameleer acquires is so dreadful that the hajji showers him with blows. The principal character of the second farce is a European traveller acting the role of the buffoon. This Frank visits an Arab, who wants to give the appearance of generosity and wealth. The Arab orders his wife to kill in succession a sheep, four chickens and some pigeons to entertain the traveller; the wife makes various excuses as to why the food is not available. At last the stranger is reduced to eating a more humble diet of curdled milk and sorghum bread, the only provisions of his ‘generous’ host.³¹ A play performed in the 1830s before Muḥammad ‘Alī, the viceroy of Egypt, depicted a fellah, ‘Awaḍ, who owes a thousand piastres in tax. Unable to pay, he is beaten and imprisoned. His wife resorts to various forms of bribery, at last having to sacrifice her body, to get her husband released. This farce was played to open the pasha’s ‘eyes to the conduct of those persons to whom was committed the office of collecting taxes’.³²

The Egyptian farce-player was also known as Ibn Rābiya (the son of Rābiya), and the group as Awlād Rābiya (the sons of Rābiya). What distinguished these players from the muḥabbaẓūn is unclear. Awlā d Rābiya mocked the ruling classes for plundering farms and stealing flocks, and for severe punishments imposed on the peasants: the use of the kirbāj (bastinado), putting a man to death for stealing a paltry sum, or hanging someone because the condemned had angered an official. Those who failed to defend their honour were ridiculed, as were those who put too much trust in servants and slaves.³³ A troupe of such comedians, Muslims, Christians and Jews, gave a performance in 1780 in the courtyard of a house in Cairo; their shabby appearance announced that they made little money. The principal character, a man dressed as a woman, has trouble hiding his long beard. She/he lures one traveller after another into her tent, and after robbing them of their belongings, chases them away with a stick.³⁴

Comedians of this type were to be found in many Arab lands. In Iraq the farce was called ikhbārī, with the standard content of comic dialogue and fisticuffs.³⁵ A troupe of young Arabs, at Jericho in 1851, performed a bedouin burlesque for Easter, portraying Satan fighting and killing his father. After his death, Satan makes a show of despair, pulling the body about in every direction, and bitterly deplores the poverty that leaves him unable to provide for the funeral of the deceased. At last the burial of the father is undertaken by two collections of money from the audience. Satan begrudges spending money on the burial, so he decides to revive his father. He puts a heated stone on his bare ankles. The father instantly revives, and then commences between them a furious and violent dance.³⁶

In 1864 in Algeria, Potter saw the representation of a comedy by Arab actors. Two Arabs leave for the hunt – one is a brave warrior; the other, more down to earth, hopes to find wild beehives in the forest. The first is modestly dressed for the occasion with just a rifle and a yatagan at his side. The other is a walking arsenal, in chainmail, a belt stocked with sabres and pistols, and ten rifles on his back. His companion, with the limited armament, kills a lion, while the latter, assailed by a swarm of angry bees, cowardly flees, taking refuge in the orchestra.³⁷ At a court scene portrayed at a Muslim marriage at Blida the injustice of the law was exposed. A Kabyle and Spaniard enter, looking for a fight and demanding justice. A Mozabite and an old woman appear; the Mozabite demands some clothes that she was sewing for him. The judge rules against the innocent party, the old woman. Then two young orphans appear, demanding the property that they should have inherited from their father and that had been stolen from them.³⁸

The Maghrib countries – Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia – had their own traditional forms of drama, among which were the ḥalqa, bisāṭ and fattāla. Bisāṭ and the fattāla in Tunisia were forms of burlesque. The entertainment in the round (ḥalqa) is still to be seen in public places in Morocco, such as the square of Jāmi῾ al-Fanā’ in Marrakesh; it embraces a plethora of performances to suit public taste: acting, clowning, a dumb show (īmā’), story-telling, acrobatics, music, snake charming and juggling.³⁹ The history of bisāṭ (entertainment) has been traced to Fez. The first performance is said to have been given before Sultan Muḥammad bin ‘Abd Allāh in the eighteenth century. A group of performers went to his palace (Dār al-makhzan), the main actor wearing a mask made from the doum tree, so that he could make fun of the sultan without fear. In the square before the palace the actors performed their entertainments, around the main event – a play making some petition to the sultan. It had various stock characters: al-Bisāṭ representing strength, bravery and the sense of adventure; Ilyāhū, the Jew, representing hypocrisy, greed and sharp-wittedness; Ḥadīdān, distinguished by the purity of his soul and his love of others, and the ghoul, who epitomizes evil.⁴⁰

Sāmir was a popular entertainment with music to amuse folk at weddings in the Egyptian countryside. The troupe, all men, invariably including a transvestite dancer (ghāyish), performed on the threshing floor by torch light. The performance begins with dancing, then the rayyis enters, and attacks the brazen Khalbūṣ (buffoon). The rayyis, the pivot of the performance, utters sincere advice, wise maxims and spiritual counsel on the married state. The two scenes (taqlī‘a) of the evening follow, incorporating jokes about the life and people of the village.⁴¹

Masked performances were to be seen in Muḥarram and during other religious feasts. Actors, buffoons and masqueraders alike smeared their faces black with soot or ashes à la Harlequin, or whitened them with lime or flour and feathers à la Pierrot, or painted their faces or donned masks with demonic features. In 1874 in Tunis one performer, called Qu‘ayyid ‘Āshūrā’, wore a camel skin, and was followed by the riff-raff singing disreputable songs.⁴² At Sidi ‘Oqba near to Biskra men covered themselves with the skins of animals.⁴³ At Ouargla in Algeria on such a feast day people poured out into the streets, their faces disguised in human or animal masks. At the mawlid of Sayyid Aḥmad al-Badawī in Tanta, girls dressed as boys and there was the sight of a European caricatured as an artist seated on an ass, gazing about him for subjects. A qāḍī (judge) and his secretary, also on an ass with his head demeaningly facing towards its tail, conducted imaginary trials of persons guilty of divorcing an undue number of wives.

Wearing fantastic dresses, buffoons, the original type of the professed ‘fools’ of Europe, moved among the saints during the mawlids in Egypt, making strange grimaces and uttering studied absurdities. Some were borne on men’s shoulders, others rode upon camels, while others made their own legs their compasses. Among such entertainers was a character called ‘Alī Kākā, who performed Rabelaisian scenes, wearing a belt from which dangled an instrument shaped like a huge penis.⁴⁴

Such dramatic performances were not the monopoly of itinerant artists; it was not uncommon for boat crews at idle times to entertain themselves and travellers. In February 1847 the crew of a dhahabiyya on the Nile put on a play. One of the crew took office as governor, had taxpayers brought before him and ordered bastinado and imprisonment to be inflicted on the unfortunate debtors.⁴⁵ Another unsophisticated farce, given by sailors on the Nile in the winter of 1874–5, depicted various dignitaries giving or receiving bakhshish.⁴⁶ In April 1877 on board the Egyptian corvette Sinnār off the coast of north-western Arabia the explorer Richard Burton was fêted by ‘a genuine survival of the old Canopic fun’. In the sailors’ ‘fantasia’, one of the sailors ‘made a tolerably pretty girl . . . who danced mincingly Almeh-fashion: she was waited upon by the chief-buffoon, Kara-gyuz’, sporting his tail. The Arnaut (Albanian), perpetually used his stick upon his servant and called all his Muslim brethren by the most opprobrious names. ‘I confess’, said Burton, ‘that the play was very “shocking” and that my sides ached with laughter.’⁴⁷

In Algeria, folkloric sketches, consisting of short improvised mimed or acted comic scenes, were traditionally performed in the open air. The themes were borrowed from folklore, hagiographic legends and daily life, and were often played by the students of the médersas (religious schools). Such scenes voiced social criticism of the immediate realities of daily life. At Sīdī Aḥmad Ibn Yūsuf the citizens saw tableaux satirizing mores, burlesques representing household scenes, bogus qāḍīs, sanctimonious hypocrites with great strings of potatoes ending in a carrot hung around their necks, and Arab peasants diddled by Jewish and Kabyle merchants and left with nothing. Several scenes were portrayed: a cuckolded husband; a satire of the officers of the Arab bureaux, the White Friars, or the decorations and protocol of French generals; an English tourist, pointing his camera at the crowd; negroes returning from the Sudan; Touareg riders from Timbuktu retelling their extraordinary adventures, and a group doing military exercises in a French manner.⁴⁸ A favourite theme of mime scenes was the cameleer and his stubborn camel. An immense furious dragon was put to death by the crowd, who pulled to pieces its skin of straw and rags. A woman, always unsatisfied in love, was a poignant central character of these pieces. Perennially disapproved customs, such as the marriage of an old man to a very young woman, were condemned.⁴⁹

Popular bands of female dancers, ghawāzī, were a familiar entertainment in Egyptian villages. Among their number was the male clown Abū ‘Aggūr (the man with a ‘cucumber’), miming in an exaggerated manner their movements, making rude comments on the dialogue, and holding a long wooden handle in overtly sexual gestures. The dancers, as well as performing dances, presented comic scenes. Khalbūṣ, the male servant of the more respectable bands of female singers (the ‘awālim), also acted the part of the buffoon.⁵⁰ Such a clown, seated upon a donkey with his face to the tail, was the master of ceremonies at a fantasia seen in October 1819 at the village of Zeara on the way to Menouf in Egypt, which was given to celebrate the circumcision of the children. The musical ‘band belonged to some ladies of easy, or no virtue . . . seated on horseback, and bedizened with feathers, grease, necklaces of onions and other attractions’.⁵¹

This brief discussion by no means details in extenso the dramatic activity within Arab society. There were many other varieties of performance and other phenomena that had strong dramatic aspects. The festival of the temporary king in medieval Islam, illustrating the expulsion of winter, found its modern equivalent in the feast of sulṭān al-ṭalaba (the sultan of the students), celebrated in Fez. Many popular dances had a dramatic or mimetic dimension. The story-telling of the rhapsodes (rāwīs, ḥakawātīs and maddāḥūn) often involved mime and impersonation. The commemoration of the events surrounding the death of the Shia martyr al-Ḥusayn (d. 680) frequently involved the enactment of the story in dramatic form in processions or stage performances. Though this passion play is primarily a Persian religious phenomenon, this mourning (ta‘ziya) or simulation (shabīh) of the event is still to be seen amongst Shia populations in Iraq, Bahrain and the Lebanon; in the Lebanon with the conflict against Israel the performance became an impassioned expression of opposition, martyrdom and revolt.

These arts remained popular till the end of the nineteenth century, but did not long survive the First World War. Modern Arabic drama did not gain ground till at least the 1880s or 1890s in Egypt and the Lebanon, and very much later, in the early twentieth century, in Syria, Iraq and the Maghrib. Today the itinerant actors and the shadow play have almost completely disappeared. Even by the first decades of the twentieth century there were few shadow puppeteers left. The capture of the public imagination by the modern Arabic stage, the advent of the gramophone, the radio and finally cinema were some of the many factors that stifled this drama. In the 1880s members of the literary elite, such as the Syrian publicist Jurjī Zaydān and the Egyptian educationalist ‘Alī Pasha Mubārak, were expressing their clear loathing for these traditional dramatic arts. Their views, together with reformist Islamic preaching, bolstered by narrow-minded European observers and officials may have played a part in swaying Arab public opinion away from this tradition. It must be recalled, however, that traditional theatre did not disappear entirely. It was to be commercialized in the early modern Algerian theatre. Many neo-traditional comedians in Egypt, such as Aḥmad Fahīm al-Fār, ‘Alī al-Kassār, Jūrj Dukhūl, Najīb al-Rīḥānī and others, continued to enjoy great popularity alongside the new theatre. Modern Arabic theatre made its first appearance in the crucial decades of the 1840s and 1850s, in which taste for this new European-style theatre captured the imagination of the Arab elite and Arab writers were inspired to imitate the European model. The modernization of the previous decades of the century brought about by the reforms in Tunisia and in Egypt, the activities of the missionaries and others in Syria, and the French occupation of Algeria had led to the waking of the Arab mind to enquiries and efforts of its own.

The seeds of change were being sown among the local population. About 1842, the first European theatre in Tunis, the Théâtre Tapia, was built, named after its proprietor, a Tunisian Jew. The Bosco theatre in Istanbul was taken over in 1844 by two Armenian Christians from Aleppo, Mīkhā’īl Na“ūm Efendi and his brother, under whose sponsorship a succession of Italian plays and operas were staged.⁵² That same year Muḥammad ‘Alī went for the first time to a performance of the opéra-lyrique at the Italian theatre in Cairo.⁵³ Around 1853 an Egyptian pasha ‘bitten with European ideas’ put on in his house an outrageously satirical piece by a local merchant, and at a theatre in 1853–4 in Alexandria an Italian drama was performed, whose heroine was an Egyptian actress.⁵⁴ Had it not been for the fact that, since the return of Muḥammad ‘Alī’s forces from Syria, the coalition of the powers had forced the Egyptian pasha to concentrate on a more reserved circle of action, there might conceivably have been an attempt to create a modern Arabic theatre in Egypt. As it was, Egypt had to wait till 1870.

Arab lands had been bereft of any cultural contact with European theatre and dramatic writing till the beginning of the eighteenth century, when an Algerian Jewish writer, Isaac Ben Joseph Falyadj (or Palache), performed his play in Hebrew, Naḥat ruaḥ (Contentment), before a local audience. This play is indebted to an allegorical drama in Hebrew, Asirei tiqwah (The Prisoners of Hope), (Amsterdam, 1673) by a Dutch Sephardic merchant, Joseph Penço de la Vega.⁵⁵ The first play in Arabic, Nazāhat al-mushtāq wa-ghuṣṣat al-‘ushshāq fī madīnat Ṭiryāq fī’l-‘Irāq (The Pleasure Trip of the Enamoured and the Agony of Lovers in the City of Ṭiryāq in Iraq), was published anonymously in 1847 in Algiers in lithograph. Its author, Abraham Daninos, was a Sephardic Jew, an interpreter in the Civil Court. In his play Daninos tried to give the Arabs the taste for the modern play and for dramatic poetry.⁵⁶ The text of the prologue, the stage directions and part of the dialogue are in colloquial Algerian, with the rest of the play in an idiosyncratic classical Arabic. Some sections are unacknowledged quotations from A Thousand and One Nights and from Kashf al-asrār ‘an ḥikam al-ṭuyūr wa’l-azhār (The Revelation of the Secrets of the Wisdom of Birds and Flowers) by ‘Izz al-Dīn ibn ‘Abd al-Salām al-Muqaddisī (d. 678/1279).⁵⁷ The play builds a bridge between medieval and modern Arabic drama, for it bears the characteristics of conventional medieval Arabic literature, but is divided into acts and scenes according to European convention.⁵⁸

Jews in Algeria controlled the commerce of the land, and thus had long been exposed to European society and culture. Although after the French occupation many Algerian Jews were turning culturally towards France, some were clearly determined to assert their traditional values derived from the Arabic-speaking cultural milieu. Set in an indeterminate era there are two parallel plots in the play: the first is the love story of Ni‘ma, and her paternal cousin, the sea-captain Nu‘mān. The secondary plot is the story of Umanā’, the wife of Captain Damanhūr. The bulk of the piece is a series of lovelorn soliloquies (ghazal) by Nu‘mān, Ni‘ma and Umanā’, occasioned by the lovers’ separation brought about by the pasha sending the sailors on a voyage to collect taxes from the islands of Wāq. When after several months Damanhūr does not return from his voyages, a painful torment (ghuṣṣa) afflicts Umanā’. At the end the lovers are happily reunited. The play depends upon pun, rhyme, proverbial sayings, the music of words and paronomasia, parallelism and the emotional tension dear to Arab taste. Besides the dominant role assigned to fate, these rhetorical devices are what roots this play in medieval Arabic literature and not in the European dramatic heritage.

In 1846 the Beiruti merchant Marūn al-Naqqāsh fell under the spell of Italian theatre and opera, and at the end of 1847 he wrote and produced his play al-Bakhīl inspired by Molière’s L’Avare. Some time before 1855 the Syrian Christian Ḥabīb Ablā Mālaṭī, probably the author of the first Arabic drama in the history of the Damascus theatre, wrote his play, al-Aḥmaq al-basīṭ (The Naive Irascible Person).⁵⁹ The Ottoman Sultan ‘Abd al-Majīd’s encouragement of this new dramatic genre, according to Mālaṭī, provided the catalyst.

The story of traditional indigenous drama would be almost concluded, had it not been for the fact that many modern Arab dramatists and directors – the Egyptians Yūsuf Idrīs and Intiṣar ‘Abd al-Fattāḥ, the Moroccans al-Ṭayyib al-Ṣiddīqī and al-Ṭayyib al-‘Alj, the Lebanese Roger ‘Assāf, the Syrian Sa‘d Allāh Wannūs, and many others – have attempted to move away from the imitation of Western tradition. In their stage performances they have tried to revive parts of this indigenous theatrical, literary and religious patrimony, that has been almost obliterated by time: shadow theatre, sāmir, the maqāma, the dramatic recitation of epic folktales, zār and samāḥ.⁶⁰

¹ Moreh, ‘Shadow-Play’.

² Paul Kahle, Friedrich Kern and Kurt Prüfer have published studies on Egyptian shadow theatre. ‘Ādil Abū Shanab, Salmān Qaṭāya, Ḥijāzī, al-Dhahabī, ‘Abd Allāh, Quedenfeldt, Littmann, O. Spies and E. Saussey have published texts of shadow plays.

³ Anon., ‘An Arabic Punch’. Fārūq Sa‘d has published a weighty encyclopedic work on Arab shadow theatre, Khayāl al-ẓill al-‘arabī. See also Kayyāl, Mu‘jam bābāt masraḥ al-ẓill.

⁴ Badawi, ‘Arabic Drama’, p. 329.

⁵ Th F. M[eysels], ‘Ramadhan Play: Kara Goez, in the Old City’, Palestine Post 1 (13 Ramadan 1362/13 September 1943), in Sa‘d, Khayāl, pp. 438–9.

⁶ Moreh, ‘The Shadow Play’, 54, from Munīr Kayyāl, Ramaḍān wa-taqālīduhu al-dimashqiyya (Damascus, n.d.), p. 128. ‘Abd al-Ḥamīd Yūnis, Khayāl al-ẓill, p. 31.

⁷ Būtistīfā, Alf ‘ām, pp. 87, 96.

⁸ Ibid., p. 77.

⁹ Landau, Studies, p. 24, nn. 71–2; Ben Halima, Un Demi-siècle, pp. 23–4.

¹⁰ Khoueiri, Théâtre, p. 23.

¹¹ Müller, ‘Zür Geschichte des arabischen Schattenspiels’.

¹² Maxime du Camp, Le Nil (Egypte et Nubie) (Paris, 1889), p. 30. Flaubert gives us part of an obscene dialogue, quoted in Francis Steegmüller (ed.), Flaubert in Egypt (London, 1983), pp. 37–8.

¹³ Badawi, Early Arabic Drama, p. 19.

¹⁴ Khoueiri, Théâtre, pp. 24–6 quoting Pietro Perolari-Malmignati, Su e giù per la Siria note e schizzi (Milan, 1878), pp. 74–7.

¹⁵ Landau, Studies, p. 41.

¹⁶ Wilkinson, Modern Egypt, vol. Ⅰ, p. 270.

¹⁷ Būtistīfā, Alf ‘ām, p. 100; Russell, The Natural History, vol. Ⅰ, p. 147.

¹⁸ Roth, Le Théâtre, pp. 14–15, from Prince Pückler-Muskau, Chronique, lettres, journal de voyage, 2 vols. (Paris, 1836–7), vol. Ⅱ, pp. 99–100; Docteur Bernard, L’Algérie qui s’en va (Paris, 1887), pp. 66–7 and L. Piesse, Itinéraire de l’Algérie, de la Tunisie et de Tanger (Paris, 1885), p. 36. Landau, Studies, p. 39; Hoenerbach, Das nordafrikanische Schattentheater, p. 44.

¹⁹ Abul Naga, Les Sources françaises, p. 43.

²⁰ Moreh, ‘The Shadow Play’, 54.

²¹ Qāmūs al-masraḥ, vol. Ⅰ, pp. 60–1: ‘al-Arāgūz’.

²² Būtistīfā, Alf ‘ām, pp. 51, 104; Ben Halima, Un Demi-siècle, pp. 24–5.

²³ Ḥamāda, Khayāl al-ẓill, pp. 73–4; Clot Bey, Aperçu général, vol. Ⅱ, p. 99.

²⁴ Qāmūs al-masraḥ, pp. 60–1.

²⁵ Niebuhr, Travels Through Arabia, vol. Ⅰ, p. 144; de Nerval, Le Voyage, vol. Ⅰ, p. 170.

²⁶ al-Rā‘ī, Funūn al-kūmīdiyā, p. 60.

²⁷ Lane, Manners and Customs, vol. Ⅰ, p. 231 and vol. Ⅱ, pp. 113–14; de Nerval, Le Voyage, vol. Ⅰ, p. 170.

²⁸ de Nerval, Le Voyage, vol. Ⅰ, p. 158.

²⁹ Martineau, Eastern Life, p. 187.

³⁰ Bowring, Report on Egypt and Candia, p. 144.

³¹ Belzoni, Voyages, vol. Ⅰ, pp. 29–31; Landau, Studies, pp. 50–1.

³² Lane, Manners and Customs, vol. Ⅱ, pp. 114–16.

³³ Anon., ‘Farīq al-tamthīl al-‘arabī’, 502.

³⁴ Niebuhr, Travels Through Arabia, vol. Ⅰ, pp. 143–4.

³⁵ al-Zubaydī, al-Masraḥiyya, pp. 26–7, 29.

³⁶ de Saulcy, Narrative of a Journey, vol. Ⅱ, pp. 32–4; Būtistīfā, Alf ‘ām, pp. 110–11, from J. H. Michon, Voyage religieux en Orient, 2 vols. (Paris, 1853), vol. Ⅱ, pp. 361–4.

³⁷ Roth, Le Théâtre, pp. 18–20, from Potter, ‘La Comédie arabe’, Revue de Paris 5 (1864), 155–62.

³⁸ Roth, Le Théâtre, p. 17.

³⁹ al-Rā‘ī, al-Masraḥ, p. 41; and his, al-Kūmīdiyā, pp. 8–9.

⁴⁰ al-Manī‘ī, ‘al-Ḥaraka al-masraḥiyya’, 76; al-Rā‘ī, al-Masraḥ, pp. 42–3.

⁴¹ Ḥusayn et al., ‘Limādhā lam ya‘rif’, 17–18; Abū Zayd, Tamthīliyyāt, pp. 37–8.

⁴² ‘Irsān, al-Zạwāhir al-masraḥiyya, p. 236, quoting al-Ṣādiq al-Rizqī, al-Aghānī al-tūnisiyya (Tunis, 1967), p. 86.

⁴³ Khaznadar, ‘Pour la “recréation”’, pp. 44–5, from Doutté, Magie, pp. 536–7, 540.

⁴⁴ Saint-John, Egypt and Mohammed Ali, vol. Ⅱ, p. 303; Amīn, Qāmūs al-‘ādāt, p. 288.

⁴⁵ Mrs Y’s account to Martineau, Eastern Life, pp. 65, 187.

⁴⁶ Charles D. Warner, My Winter on the Nile among Mummies and Moslems, 18th edn (Boston, 1904), pp. 284–5, in Landau, Studies, p. 51.

⁴⁷ Burton, The Gold-Mines of Midian, pp. 183–4.

⁴⁸ Roth, Le Théâtre, pp. 15–16, from E. Dermenghem, Le Culte des saints dans l’Islam maghrébin (Paris, 1954), p. 229; Doutté, Magie, pp. 496–540.

⁴⁹ Khaznadar, ‘Pour la “recréation”’, pp. 44–5.

⁵⁰ Lane, Manners and Customs, vol. Ⅱ, p. 272; Ṣāliḥ, al-Masraḥ al-‘arabī, p. 41.

⁵¹ Henniker, Notes during a Visit, p. 29.

⁵² And, A History of Theatre, pp. 66–7.

⁵³ Letter from Avoscani to his friend Gazzarrini, dated 20 December 1844 in the Bibliothèque privée de S. M. le Roi, in Tagher, ‘Pietro Avoscani’, 309.

⁵⁴ Regnault, Voyage en Orient, p. 438.

⁵⁵ Schirmann, ‘Evidence’.

⁵⁶ ‘Liste des membres souscripteurs’, JA 4:12 (August 1848), 176, and Jules Mohl, ‘Rapport sur les travaux du Conseil pendant l’année 1847–1848’, JA 4:12 (August 1848), 117–18.

⁵⁷ Les Oiseaux et les fleurs: allégories morales d’Azz-Eddin Elmocaddessi, ed. and tr. M. Carcin de Tassy (Paris, 1821).

⁵⁸ The text has been published in Moreh and Sadgrove, Jewish Contributions.

⁵⁹ Published at Haifa in 1997.

⁶⁰ Zār is a ritual to appease the spirits by which people are possessed; samāḥ is a Syrian dance form derived from Sufi practices.