Muhammad in the Modern Egyptian Popular Ballad.

• Author: Cachia, Pierre
• Position: Review

By KAMAL ABDEL-MALEK. Studies in Arabic Literature, Supplements to the Journal of Arabic Literature, vol. 19. Leiden: E. J. BRILL, 1995. Pp. xii + 232. HFI 136.50, $88.50.

At the heart of this book is a valiant, extensive, and groundbreaking investigation of the way the Prophet is represented in present-day Egyptian folk literature. In this endeavor, the author has studied the background of the singers who specialize in this theme; from pulp booklets and from live performances, he has collected, transcribed, and translated a substantial and representative number of texts, often tracing the sources of the material in the writings of what used to be an authoritative elite; and he has attempted a characterization of the literature. No less informative are his accounts of the difficulties which he, a Christian, encountered in his field work, and his personal observations of performances as well as of the behavior of participants in a mulid (pp. 42-43).

The mixing of this rich ointment is not without a few flies. There are untested assumptions, such as that a memorized composition is "produced differently each time it is performed" (p. 9) - a matter on which there is contradictory evidence. The translations are often rather loose. More surprising than occasional English solecisms is that words peculiar to the Arab-Islamic heritage are robbed of their precise implications, as when awliya is explained as "friends [of God]" (p. 22), istagar is rendered as "sought help" (p. 52), bayca as "election" (p. 34), kharra sagidan as "fell on his knees" (p. 80), and a milk-brother is mistaken for a step-brother (p. 56). A tangy expression such as mulid wi sahbu ghayib has its sense of "free-for-all" tamely lifted from the dictionary (p. 41), by-passing the imagery of a celebration at which the honoree is ignored.

These approximations may not seriously vitiate the sense, but along with a sprinkling of minor slips and misprints both in the English and in Standard Arabic - e.g., al-haqqu lana sara wadihhan wa galayya (p. 106) - they compromise a valuable by-product of such studies, for a rigorous transcription of oral texts is a gold mine in which other scholars may test and extend our far-from-exhaustive knowledge of the morphology and syntax of the colloquial. But with so much that bespeaks a slipshod approach, how confident can the linguist or the prosodist be that Abdel-Malek's informant actually lengthened or shortened vowels as transcribed? Did the...