It might not be possible to tease a coherent political doctrine from his work, but al-Shidyāq expressed in his writings values that today would be associated with liberalism. He repeatedly advocated a separation of religious and political life and a respect for “personal freedoms” (so long as they are in the interest of society). Both in his travels and in his observations on life within the Ottoman Empire, he called attention to the need to improve working conditions for farmers and workers, approaching (but never wholly identifying with) some of the socialist ideas being debated in Europe during his sojourn there, chief among them the responsibility of the ruling classes toward the poor and the importance of equality under the law.66 His promotion of the value of equality, in fact, might be considered among his most radical, as he advocated for it not only among religious sects and social classes but also between genders. In Leg over Leg and elsewhere he promotes absolute equality between men and women, advocating — nearly fifty years before Qāsim Amīn’s The Liberation of Women (1899) — for the right of women to be educated. (As he explains in Al-Jawāʾib, “knowledge and education are the light of the mind… and if you cannot entrust this light to woman, then you cannot trust her with any light whatsoever, for fear that she might use it to burn down the house.”)67 Unlike many of his contemporary reformers, however, he did not write of an idealized woman whose education was in the service of a better performance of her domestic duties or the education of a new generation of children. As he writes in Leg over Leg, if one reads him in order to hear about women “possessing peculiar skills in terms of the excellent management of such household tasks as sewing, embroidery, and the like, these are mentioned in many a book and you’ll have to look them up yourselves” (2.16.72). In his book, women appear not as angels of the house but as full and equal participants in society who have a right to work as well as stay at home. “There can be no Nahḍah in the East,” al-Shidyāq is reported to have said, “without a Nahḍah of women.”68
In Leg over Leg, written, as he claims, with so much interest in women and sympathy for them that one might believe his protagonist had been transformed into one, his interest in women’s equality is centered less on female education than on female emotional and sexual fulfillment. Through conversations with the protagonist’s wife, the Fāriyāqiyyah, al-Shidyāq decries sexual double standards, advocating for the right of women to choose their own husbands, to divorce, and to demand sexual pleasure (see Volume Three). These conversations reveal her as a witty social satirist in her own right, or, as al-Shidyāq writes in the preface, one who “argues with theorist and practitioner alike and provides excellent critiques of the political issues and conditions, mundane and spiritual, of the countries she has seen” (0.2.12). Rastegar argues for reading “the Fāriyāqiyyah” not as a name — if it were a feminization of Fāriyāq, it would be Fāriyāqah, as he points out — but as “Fāriyāq-ness,” rendered in the feminine form.69 She might thus be thought of not as a stand-in for a historical personage (al-Shidyāq’s wife, Wardah al-Ṣūlī) but as a second apparition of the self. Writing not simply about women but as if a woman, al-Shidyāq uses gender as another permutation of his thought-experiment in radical difference and belonging. And he reveals that above all, it is an experiment in subjectivity — which does not result in a definition of the self or of something one might call the modern Arab subject, but examines “the ways the self cannot be accommodated by social frameworks the world around.”70 The self, in Leg over Leg, seems always to exceed its narrative frame and multiply. As if to see himself from the inside and out, he appears as the author on the title page (“Fāris al-Shidyāq”) and as his textual doubles: the unnamed narrator (who narrates in the first person), the Fāriyāq, the Fāriyāqiyyah, and the interpolated narrator of the four maqāmāt that appear in the work.
But even the lisping narrator of these maqāmāt, “al-Hāwif ibn Hifām,” has his own textual doubles, in the form of the narrators of the most famous series of maqāmāt, ʿĪsā ibn Hishām and al-Ḥārith ibn Hammām. Indeed, as Humphrey Davies points out, the name in its “lisped” form is no name at all but may be translated as “Masher, son of Pulverizer.” At every turn, al-Shidyāq does violence to the very presumption of verisimilitude; word and thing never correspond neatly, even in the attempt simply to name a character. Instead, he holds up art and artifice as the substance that underlies the world and even constitutes it. To navigate it, one must travel not only through space but through texts; when one reads Leg over Leg one also reads those innumerable authors he quotes or invokes, like the authors of the maqāmāt, al-Hamadhānī and al-Ḥarīrī (“men who have rendered their reputations white by covering pages in black,” 1.1.1), or the English and French authors whom he quotes. It is no wonder that the text begins with eleven synonyms for the command, “be quiet!” (1.1.1), as al-Shidyāq attempts to speak alongside, and often over, the voices that crowd the text.
This multi-register and multi-lingual cacophony sets the stage for many of the travel narrative’s comic scenes, where intercultural encounters are not always entirely fungible. As in Tristram Shandy, its closest English analogue, communication more often leads to misunderstanding and misinterpretation than to understanding. The result can hardly be used as a guide for East — West relations but instead parodies intercultural communication and its institutional forms — chief among them Orientalist scholarship. If this period’s literature was partly looking to the West, what it saw was the West looking at it. Perhaps, then, there was no other way to write about that encounter than as a self-reflexive one. It looks to the West as a way to reflect on itself, not to imitate it but to critique and reformulate it. If we see Leg over Leg as an archive of Arabic literary modernity, we must take this double refraction into account.