Three Shadow Plays by Muhammad Ibn Daniyal.

• Author: Rowson, Everett K.

The appearance at last of this long-awaited volume is an event of considerable significance to students of medieval Arabic literature. The art of the Arabic shadow play, in which articulated cut-out figures, sometimes very elaborate ones, were held against the back of a translucent screen and backlighted so as to produce silhouettes, is known to us from literary references beginning as early as the tenth century; but the fourteenth-century Egyptian plays of Ibn Daniyal, here published in a full and critical edition for the first time, are the only texts of such plays to survive from before the Ottoman period, and arguably constitute a unique example of a high literary adaptation of what was essentially a folk art. Their potential value to students of Arabic poetry, drama, and humor, as well as social history and historical linguistics, is very great indeed.

The existence of these plays has been known of for quite some time, and they have generated a considerable secondary bibliography, despite the lack of an adequate published edition. Georg Jacob was the first to call attention to them, in a series of articles in German published between 1900 and 1925, some of which included translations of selected passages. Jacob's colleague Paul Kahle also published extensively on Ibn Daniyal and shadow plays, in both German and English, and had largely completed the critical editmon of the texts offered here before his death in 1964. In the meantime, Egyptian scholars were showing increased interest in the subject, and in 1963 Ibrahim Hamada published in Cairo a study which included an edition of all three plays - based, however, on only one of the four known manuscripts, and so heavily bowdlerized that at least half the entire text is suppressed. Subsequent scholarship, in both the Middle East and the West, has been largely based on Hamada's edition, despite its shortcomings.

Besides the usual obstacles to scholarly production, including competing interests, war, old age, and death, there are two particular problems that have undoubtedly slowed the appearance of this edition, and that will probably continue to work against the preparation of Western translations and critical textual studies. One of these is the extreme obscenity scattered through all three plays. The first, Tayf al-khayal, is set in the context of a government campaign against vice in Mamluk Cairo, and depicts the fortunes of a rake who decides to bow to the inevitable, settle down and marry; an ode to the joys of anal intercourse is typical of much of its content. In the second, Ajib wa-Gharib, we are offered a parade of street entertainers, charlatans, and other dubious types; here the obscenity quotient is lower, but the lamplighters, in particular, have much to offer in their observations of the morals of the denizens of nocturnal Cairo. The third play, al-Mutayyam, recounts the progress of a homosexual love affair, and concludes with a banquet attended by representatives of every conceivable sexual vice. In addition to the pervasiveness of sexual topics, all three plays also display a considerable interest in scatology.

The other problem is the difficulty of the texts themselves. These plays are in one respect a virtuosic display of Ibn Daniyal's literary versatility, The prose throughout is rhymed, and the poetry (some half of the total text) includes stanzaic and colloquial genres as well as classical forms. Ibn Daniyal's vocabulary ranges from the arcane to the slangy vernacular, and these texts are studded with lexicographical and philological puzzles. We are confronted with the herpetology of snakecharmers and the pharmacology of purveyors of nostrums, as well as the cant of thieves and the baby talk of an obscenity-spewing infant poet. Such difficulties not only daunt the modern scholar; they also challenged the medieval copyists of our extant manuscripts, with the result that variants occur at a rate approaching every other word throughout the text.

Given such obstacles, it is cause for rejoicing that this text is now available to scholars in a critical edition, and it might seem churlish to complain that its preparers have not done more. Their intentions are in fact extremely limited. Kahle's text has been reproduced in the form in which he left it, supplemented by a full critical apparatus (placed separately at the end, alas) prepared by Professor Hopwood. A short note by Kahle on the manuscripts, with a postscript by Hopwood explaining the genesis of the present publication, and a slightly revised version of a previously published article on the plays by Professor Badawi (certainly the best scholarly overview of them available), serve as...