Live Theatre and Dramatic Literature in the Medieval Arabic World.

• Author: Rowson, Everrett K.

The standard view that modern Arabic imaginative literature is essentially an import from the West has rarely been questioned in the case of drama. While narrative fiction may claim some sort of antecedents in Arabic folk literature such as the 1001 Nights and in such high literary forms as the maqama, it has generally been maintained that pre-modern Arabic literature is entirely innocent of dramatic genres. This circumstance, moreover, has often been regarded as cause for either criticism or embarrassment by historians and critics determined to assess the Arabic literary tradition, or to prove its value, in Western terms, assumed in some way to be universal. Much of the recent interest in the medieval Arabic shadow play, as exemplified by the three preserved thirteenth-century "scripts" (if such they are) by Ibn Diniyal, has been spurred by the desire to fill this perceived "gap"; virtually no one, however, has ventured to claim that there actually existed a pre-modern Arabic live theater.

That is, however, precisely the thesis argued in Professor Moreh's stimulating book. Focusing his inquiry on the long stretch of time between the Hellenistic theater in the eastern Mediterranean of antiquity and the arrival of European theater in the nineteenth century, he asks whether the area could have been "entirely devoid" of theater during the intervening two millennia, and replies in the negative. "The Muslim world," he claims, "had a well-established tradition of live theatre, if only at a popular level." Why it remained at this level, without developing into "high art," is a question for further research, he says; but in the present book he marshals evidence from an impressive range of sources to show that some sort of drama did exist, and in so doing both considerably advances our knowledge of medieval Arabic culture and furnishes rich material for future investigation.

This book is essentially a philological study of terms. Culling his citations from a great variety of literary and historical works, Professor Moreh has identified a group of words that imply phenomena of considerably more concreteness and precision than has heretofore been appreciated. After a preliminary survey of pre-lslamic Jewish, Christian, and pagan sources on the theater of late antiquity, which suggest its survival mostly in the degraded form of popular mimes, he divides his Islamic evidence from Arabic sources into two categories, terms associated with actors and entertainers and terms referring directly to live theater and dramatic literature. In the first category he includes laab ("player"), mukhannath (literally, "effeminate"), kurraj ("hobby-horse")...