In doing so, the Nahḍah’s print market forged new alliances, not simply within the imagined community of the nation, but intra-regionally — creating, in effect, something that could for the first time be called a public Arabic print sphere, where “the sounds from Beirut, Cairo, and Alexandria reached other Arab provinces, and educated groups in the towns of Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and even the Hejaz became involved in the new exchange in print across provincial boundaries.”49 Periodicals published in Beirut would advertise or review novels written by Egyptian colleagues, and journals of various affiliations would engage each other in debate about the correct use of Arabic, the relative merits of different literary translators, or editorial policy. The picture that emerges is of an Arabic print sphere that was intricately interlinked, making alliances across provincial borders, confessional boundaries, and even across continents. Early journals and newspapers were sometimes the product of either foreign investment (as was the case with the Franco-Egyptian ventures of L’Echo des Pyramides, 1827, and Al-Tanbīh, founded in 1800) or direct intellectual exchange,50 and featured an international news section often translated from European newspapers and wire services, thanks to the widespread use of the telegraph and the establishment of Reuters’s first office outside Europe, in Alexandria in 1865.51 Their audience, too, was international — composed not just of readers in Beirut or Cairo but also immigrant readers and Orientalists in Europe and, later, in North America.52 An English traveler to the Arabian Peninsula in the 1870s, Charles Montagu Doughty, remarked that al-Shidyāq’s Al-Jawāʾib was “current in all countries of the Arabic speech” and that he had seen it even “in the Nejd merchants’ houses at Bombay.”53
The links established by trade and travel, then, were formed simultaneously in the print sphere, and it was there that they were debated. What was shared in print, perhaps even more than a sense of a bounded national or imperial space, was the Nahḍah reader’s relationship to the world around him, the sense both of being a local actor and participating in global phenomena. Indeed, by the end of the nineteenth century it was possible to see journalists referring an international or even global Nahḍah, consisting of Arab authors or litterateurs who traveled and published abroad.54 The Nahḍah, then, might be understood as an attempt to negotiate Arab modernity, identity, and enlightenment in the context of what authors identified as a new age of technological, social, literary, commercial, and even moral change, which they were joining by virtue of a new sense of global interconnectedness.55 One intellectual project that concerned the writers and thinkers of the Nahḍah, then, was how — and on what terms — to understand their participation in this global process. Debates about modernity, oriented toward the issue of tamaddun (loosely translated as “progress toward civilization”), emerged. Journalistic essays asked, “Who are we?” as a way to seek answers to the larger question of what it means to be Arab (and not necessarily an Egyptian or a Lebanese) and modern, or Arab and enlightened, in the cross-currents of global capitalism, empire, and the trans-regional and potentially global community of the faithful, the umma.56 To do so was to demarcate local specificity within the global, rather than against it. Thus Nahḍah intellectuals did not necessarily seek either to preserve or to abandon authentic traditions in the face of foreign encroachment. The common understanding of the choice intellectuals made, between the position of “reformer” and “reactionary,” might be a false dichotomy. As Shaden Tageldin writes, “For most of the elite Egyptian intellectuals of the Nahḍah, becoming modern was never a question of abandoning Arabic and writing in the languages of their European colonizers — in French or English. The Nahḍah unfolded in translation: it transported French or English into Arabic. Thus it appeared to ‘preserve’ Arabic — all the while translating it.”57 In other words, these intellectuals theorized modernity as a comparative project, as something taking shape alongside Europe.58
One can see this comparative tendency in the title page of Leg over Leg. As its subtitle announces (“Days, Months, and Years spent in Critical Examination of the Arabs and their Non-Arab Peers”), the narrative takes the outward form of a travelogue that follows the Fāriyāq between Europe and the Arab Middle East. In his “critical examination,” he looks outward at a cultural other, but he also reflects inwardly upon his own social background, leaving no society safe from his satirizing gaze. It takes place on the road between cultures; though influenced by Laurence Sterne and François Rabelais, it takes equal interest in the wandering scholars of the classical Arabic tradition, such as Badīʿ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī (d. 398/1008), who — like the Fāriyāq — traveled in search of literary patronage. Though nominally Christian at the time of its publication (he added “Aḥmad” several years later), he invokes Islamic motifs and values that seem to identify him ambivalently as already Muslim.59 And though avowedly a work devoted to linguistic preservation — and indeed taking antiquarian delight in stringing together lists of rare words and in lampooning authors and orators for using incorrect language — he also claims to eschew the dominant rhetorical tendencies of the preceding centuries that produced texts “marinated in the spices of paronomasia and morphological parallelism, of metaphor and metonymy” (1.1.11).
This final contradiction helps to describe the work’s complex prose style. Leg over Leg contains many elaborate displays of linguistic erudition — in the form of its lists of synonyms but also his repeated demonstrations of rhetorical and generic mastery. Al-Shidyāq intersperses his narrative with original verse compositions and sections in rhymed prose (sajʿ), as well as the four maqāmāt he includes, along with other more occasional usages. These passages, combined with his quotations and intertextual references to poets and linguistic scholars, give the reader a full sense of his scholarly abilities and qualifications — he makes clear that he could hold his own with the literary masters of his time. In this sense, we can see Leg over Leg as “a last glance at a fading language,” in which the author is conscious of “the precarious state written classical Arabic reached under the growing impact of European languages and local attempts at reforming the Arab language in the Ottoman world.”60 One cannot help but wonder, however, if this final glance did not contain a glint of irony. In the opening pages, as the reader will see, he preserves classical erudition by recalling over 250 synonyms and euphemisms for “penis,” “vagina,” and “sexual intercourse.” He may have aimed to unseat literary authority even as he claimed it for himself.
In other sections, he renders events in clear and direct language that can approach the style of present-day Arabic novels. He even, on rare occasions, writes in colloquial Arabic — an act that remains controversial even today. For many scholars, the shifting of registers between formal and informal Arabic and between ornate and simple styles, marks Leg over Leg as a text produced during the transition to modernity and is one of the sources of the notorious difficulty in categorizing the work. While its title seems to present it as a travelogue, and its story follows the author’s real-life travels, its characters and events are abstracted and stylized, with rhetorical acrobatics often seeming to take precedence over attempts at ethnographic verisimilitude. Long philosophical and literary digressions frequently interrupt the plot, so that the narrative often takes on the form of a miscellany. As the narrator admits, “I committed myself to writing a book that would be a repository for every idea that appealed to me, relevant or irrelevant, for it seemed to me that what was irrelevant to me might be relevant to someone else, and vice versa” (1.10.6).