What al-Shidyāq ultimately gives us in Leg over Leg is a theory of world literature — from a particular, Nahḍawī perspective. It imagines and constructs the world anew, through an omnivorous textuality, absorbing texts and literary forms through juxtaposition, quotation, imitation, and parody. Far from holding up Sterne or Lamartine as culturally distinct and inviolable paradigms, he incorporates them into Arabic literary categories, aligning Tristram Shandy with the maqāmāt. Rather than a choice between the two, or a straight line of filiation connecting them, literary history in al-Shidyāq appears as a winding one — modernity is staged on the road and does not always appear in the guise of “progress” (to use the language of modernity’s evil twin, modernization). It sometimes appears to move sideways, to digress.
As an alternative translation of the work’s subtitle allows, al-Faryāq’s travels track the ʿujm, or mistakes, of the Arabs and “non-Arabs” (al-ʾaʿjām can also be translated as “barbarians,” or those whose speech is unintelligible to Arabic-speakers). Traveling along linguistic boundaries, al-Shidyāq pieces together an unruly patchwork of a text whose unity is in danger of disintegration, threatening to dissolve into mere ʿujmah, or “babble.” Leg over Leg thus creates a literary sphere that reminds us that the “world” in world literature is not a given; it must be manufactured. It is not merely “there” to be observed but is itself a dynamic constitutive process. It creates trouble — generic and otherwise — and it is always in danger of collapse. That is, world literature during the Nahḍah age is constructed out of the migrations and cross-fertilizations that define the era. Or, as the Fāriyāq reminds us, it was produced in the time of steamboats and railways, of “connecting the disconnected.”
Rebecca C. Johnson
Northwestern University
NOTES TO THE FRONTMATTER
Al-Shidyāq’s biographers differ as to the date of his birth, with dates ranging from 1801 to 1805. We have used Geoffrey Roper’s calculations, based on al-Shidyāq’s British naturalization record submitted September 26, 1851, which lists his age as 45. Public Record Office, Home Office Papers — Naturalisation, 1278A, 26.9.1851.
1Nadia Al-Bagdadi, “The Cultural Function of Fiction: From the Bible to Libertine Literature. Historical Criticism and Social Critique in Aḥmad Fāris al-Šidyāq,” Arabica, 46, no. 3 (1999): 377.
2ʿAzīz al-ʿAẓmah and Fawwāz Ṭarābulsī, Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq: Silsilat al-aʿmāl al-majhūlah (London: Riad El-Rayyes Books, 1995).
3See Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, The Arab Rediscovery of Europe: A Study in Cultural Encounters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963).
4Examples of this opinion abound; see, for example, M. M. Badawi, A Critical Introduction to Modern Arabic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 25.
5Samah Selim, The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt, 1880–1985 (New York: Routledge, 2004), 90.
6Timothy Mitchell, “The Stage of Modernity,” in Questions of Modernity, edited by Timothy Mitchell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 24; see also Stephen Sheehi, Foundations of Modern Arab Identity (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2004).
7The following biographical information is taken largely from M. B. Alwan, “Aḥmad Fāris ash-Shidyāq and the West” (PhD diss., University of Indiana, 1970) and Geoffrey Roper, “Arabic Printing in Malta 1825–1845: Its History and Its Place in the Development of Print Culture in the Arab Middle East,” supplemented by archival research in the CMS Archives in Birmingham, UK.
8See, e.g., Muḥammad al-Hādī al-Maṭwī, Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq, 1801–1887: Ḥayātuhu wa-āthāruhu wa-ārāʾuhu fī l-nahḍah al-ʿarabiyyah al-ḥadīthah, 2 vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 1989) and ʿImād al-Ṣulḥ, Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq: Āthāruhu wa-ʿaṣruhu (Beirut: Shari-kat al-Maṭbūʿāt li-l-Tawzīʿ wa-l-Nashr, 1987).
9Ussama Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 114. For a complete account of the Asʿad al-Shidyāq affair, see Makdisi, 103–37, Buṭrus al-Bustānī, Qiṣṣat Asʿad al-Shidyāq (1860; Beirut: Dār al-Ḥamrāʾ, 1992) and Isaac Bird, The Martyr of Lebanon (Boston: American Tract Society, 1864).
10Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven, 127.
11Bird, Martyr of Lebanon, 145.
12Jurjī Zaydān, Tārīkh ādāb al-lugha al-ʿarabiyyah, vol. 16 of Muʾallaffāt Jurjī Zaydān al-Kāmilah (Beirut: Dār al-Jīl, 1982), 222. Originally published in 1911–13 by Maṭbaʿat al-Hilāl.
13Christopher Schlienz, letter to Society Secretary, 18 May 1827, Church Missionary Society Archives CMS/CMO 65/1, University of Birmingham Special Collections.
14The matter of al-Shidyāq’s two conversions is difficult to settle using archival sources. Though Theodor Müller writes that he has received a “confession of belief with which [he] was satisfied” from al-Shidyāq in 1832, his colleague, William Krusé, writes three years later that, in his opinion, “Fares… is not yet converted.” Theodor Müller to Christopher Schlienz, April 2, 1832, Church Missionary Society Archives CMS/CMO/65/20; William Krusé to Lay Secretary, January 25, 1835, Church Missionary Society Archives CMS/CMM 5/39. For references to the Fāriyāq’s beliefs, see 1.19.4 and 1.19.5: “[H]e concluded that, in view of his said perseverance and mild manners, the Bag-man must be following the right path and that the metropolitan, with his vehemence and eagerness to do evil, must be among the misguided. (1.19.4) So he said to the Bag-man, ‘Sir, I have heeded everything with which you’ve filled my ears and believe the truth to lie with you alone. I am your partisan, your follower, and the co-carrier of your bag.’” (1.19.5)
15Daniel Temple to William Jowett, July 25, 1828, Church Missionary Society Archives CMS/CMO/ 39/121; emphasis Temple’s.
16Christopher Schlienz to Society Secretary, February 3, 1836, Church Missionary Archives CMO/65/44A; Christopher Schlienz to William Jowett, May 20, 1828, Church Missionary Society Archives CMO/65/4A.
17Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq, Al-Wāsiṭah fī maʿrifat aḥwāl Mālṭa (Beirut: al-Muʾassasah al-ʿArabiyyah li-l-Dirāsāt wa-l-Nashr, 2004), chap. 2.
18Theodor Müller to Christopher Schlienz, June 15, 1830, Church Missionary Society Archives CMS/CMO 73/47.
19Buṭrus Yūsuf Ḥawwā: one of a group of Lebanese merchants living in London, on whom al-Shidyāq depended for financial and moral support during his third sojourn there, between June 1853 and the summer of 1857, during which period he was also visiting Paris to oversee the printing of Al-Sāq; Ḥawwā provided al-Shidyāq with employment as a clerk in his offices.
20See Geoffrey Roper, “Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq and the Libraries of Europe and the Ottoman Empire,” Libraries & Culture 33, no. 3 (Summer 1998), 235. For the names of the scholars with whom al-Shidyāq made contact, see Alwan, 42–45.