Writing and Representation in Medieval Islam: Muslim Horizons.

• Author: Cooperson, Michael
• Position: Book review

Writing and Representation in Medieval Islam: Muslim Horizons. Edited by JULIA BRAY. Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Literatures, 11. London: ROUTLEDGE, 2006. Pp. xiv + 266. $160.

Billed as "an introduction to classical Islamic thought" (p. i), this book is a collection of specialist essays, of which only two out of six seem introductory. Anyone who tried to use this book as a first reference might come away with all sorts of odd ideas. Yet that would be a good thing. Of the recent flood of introductions to one or another department of Arabic and Islamic civilization, even the best perforce flatten their subjects for easier surveying. The present collection, by contrast, is undeterred by rough edges. For readers familiar with the past decade's-worth of anodyne overviews, this quirky little volume will come as a relief.

Robert Irwin's essay revisits the neglected Ibn Zunbul, who wrote a fictionalized account of Mamluk Egypt's fall to the Ottomans in 1517. While admitting that the sixteenth-century author is not the first to embellish a chronicle with invented dialogue, accounts of marvels, and the like, Irwin maintains that his work is "unusual in its readiness to sacrifice factual accuracy to narrative drive" (p. 7). Though he leaves little doubt that the work is unusual, Irwin does not persuade us to join him in calling it an historical novel. (In this regard he follows the not-necessarily-salutary example set by Franz Rosenthal in History of Muslim Historiography [Leiden, 1968] and George Makdisi in The Rise of Humanism [Edinburgh, 1990].) Admittedly, the term is current in studies of Hellenistic fiction. Here, though, it seems less appropriate. For one thing, Ibn Zunbul, unlike his Greek predecessors, speaks throughout of historical figures, even if the things he says about them are made up. Secondly--and this objection applies to the Hellenists' usage as well--the term "novel" should be reserved for the modern genre, which arguably arose in response to, and was itself constitutive of, private experience, as that notion came to be constructed at a specific junction in Western European history. Fredric Jameson (in Social Text 15 [1986]: 65-88, and see the response by Aijaz Ahmad, in Social Text 17 [1987]: 3-25) has further argued that first-world novels still privilege private experience while third-world novels foreground collective--that is, national--concerns. Now if you apply, without discussion, the term "novel" to a premodern, non-Western piece of writing, you sidestep the long and lively debate over whether any of these claims are actually right. As a better term, at least provisionally, one might stick with "romance." Though also a label for a European genre, it at least refers to something that is also premodern and therefore (I think) more readily comparable to whatever it is that Ibn Zunbul was writing. In any event, Irwin has done the field a service by reminding us that the so-called age of decline is full of genre-bending innovations that deserve closer study. For that reason, indeed, one wishes that he had chosen a sample passage or two for translation and analysis.

Robert Hoyland's "History, Fiction, and Authorship in the First Centuries of...