The Thirsty Sword: Sirat Antar and the Arabic Popular Epic.

• Author: KRUK, REMKE
• Position: Review

The Thirsty Sword: Sirat [CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]Antar and the Arabic Popular Epic. By PETER HEATH. Salt Lake City: UNIVERSITY OF UTAH PRESS, 1996. Pp. xx + 324. $50.

Since the Sixties, popular sira literature has received an increasing amount of attention from scholars, both in and outside the Arab world. Yet, to quote the book under review, "serious study of Sirat [CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]Antar and other popular siras has barely begun." The number of studies devoted to particular parts and aspects of the siras indeed still remains small--few, given the vast size of the corpus. There are various reasons for this. There is the sheer bulk of many of the cycles; the lack of basic groundwork that has been done; and also the difficulty of finding an approach to these huge and often unwieldy literary works that is likely to yield interesting, and valid, results, while also keeping in focus the work as a whole.

The number of questions to be tackled is indeed large. Editions, manuscripts, versions, dating, composition history, reception, performance context, language, and literary form are among the topics we must study. Among the more recent studies, there is the very interesting work that has been done on the Banu Hilal cycle, especially about its performance context (Connelly, Slyomovics, Reynolds) and, for the Urdu versions of Hamza, there is the work of Frances Pritchett. Yet one feels that the surface has barely been scratched.

Against this background, Peter Heath's book on the Sirat [CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]Antar certainly is a boost to the morale of scholars considering taking up research in this field, and even for those already plodding away in the vast seas of these stories. Heath's work is of reasonable size; it is well written and informative; it gives a good overview of the subject; it tackles a limited number of issues, with satisfactory results, without obscuring how much still remains unexplored. And, not the least important, it makes the subject accessible to non-Arabists, which is certainly basic, given the interest that this material has for students of comparative literature.

In his introduction, Heath presents the book as "a case study upon which future examinations ... can rest" and, as such, the book is certainly successful.

Among the Arabic popular epics, [CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]Antar is by far the best known (to the point that it has inspired Western artists) and the best (but not by a far cry adequately) studied so far. Heath (p. 1) gives a good overview of the work done so far, discussing in detail the two other important books that have appeared on [CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]Antar in this century, those of Heller (1931) and Norris (1980). Goldziher's merits in the field of popular epics are also emphasized. Modern Arabic studies on .the topic are included, with special reference to the various publications of Khurshid. Not included in this overview is Malcolm Lyons' The Arabian Epic (1995), which evidently appeared too late to be taken fully into consideration, although it is included in the bibliography and is referred to in a number of footnotes, and in one instance also in the text. I will come back to this later.

At the center of the book stands the analysis of various narrative aspects of the Sira. As the author announces in his introduction, part of this formed the subject of earlier publications in JAL and Edebiyat. The ideas have, of course, been reworked.

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