This study traces a centuries-long development in, transformation of, and argues for a variegated rapport between a group of disparate texts, some historiographical, some fictitious. Classical historiographies recounting the Barmakid debacle (al-Ṭabarī through Ibn Khallikān), late medieval and pre-modern popular accounts of the Barmakid tragedy, tales that accompany these accounts, and others in the Arabian Nights that mention Jaʿfar the Barmakid and related ones that do not, are all analyzed by appealing to Aristotle’s concept of anagnorisis (recognition or discovery). Anagnorisis makes narrative and historiography read like fiction and is a structuring device in these texts, a window into narrative hermeneutics, and specifically, the feature that indicates significantly that these various texts are of a piece, according to both conscious and subliminal design. Anagnorisis reverberates with calamitous recognition built into the Barmakid story — one which unveils hard and tragic truths, and just as importantly preserves malignant secrecy, a secrecy that the Arabian Nights unconsciously transforms into felicity.
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ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Sharqāwī Alf layla 1835 Cairo Būlāq
Macnaghten W. H. The Alif Laila or Book of the Thousand and One Nights 1839-42 Calcutta
Mahdi Muhsin Alf layla wa-layla/The Thousand and One Nights 1984-94 3 vols Leiden Brill
Habicht M. & Fleischer M. H. L. Tausend und Eine Nacht, Arabisch. Nach einer Handschrift herausgegeben 1825-43 12 vols Breslau Josef Max & Co.
Haddawy Husain The Arabian Nights 1990 New York Vintage [based on a Fourteenth-Century Syrian Manuscript edited by Muhsin Mahdi]
Burton R. F. The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night 1886 10 vols London The Burton Club
The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night: rendered into English from the literal [sic] and complete French translation of Dr J.C. Mardrus by Powys Mathers 1972 New York Routledge (reprint)
Gurgānī Vis and Ramin, translated from the Persian of Fakhr ud-Dīn Gurgānī by George Morrison 1972 New York Columbia University Press
Ibn Khaldūn Rosenthal Franz The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History 1989 Princeton Princeton University Press (reprint)
Ibn Khallikān Wafayāt al-aʿyān 1948 Cairo
Ibn Khallikān De Slane M. 1843 4 vols Paris Printed for the Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland
al-Jahshiyārī al-Saqqā M. et al. Kitāb al-Wuzarāʾ wa-l-kitāb 1980 Cairo Muṣṭafā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī (second printing)
al-Masʿūdī Pellat Charles Murūj al-dhahab wa-maʿādin al-jawhar 1965-79 4 vols Beirut al-Jāmiʿa al-Lubnāniyya
al-Masʿūdī Lunde Paul & Stone Caroline The Meadows of Gold: The Abbasids 1989 London & New York Kegan Paul International
Milner H. Barmecide; or, the fatal offspring. A dramatick romance. In three acts . . . 1818 London R. White
al-Ṭabarī Muḥammad Faḍl Ibrāhīm Tārīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk 1960-77 Cairo Dār al-Maʿārif
al-Ṭabarī Bosworth C. E. The Abbasid Caliphate in Equilibrium 1989 vol. 30 Albany The State University of New York The History of al-Ṭabarī
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Allen Roger Savory Roger M. & Agius Dionisius A. An Analysis of the “Tale of the Three Apples” from The Thousand and One Nights, Logos Islamikos: Studia islamica in honorem Michaelis Wickens 1984 6 Toronto Pontifical School of Mediaeval Studies = Papers in Mediaeval Studies 51 60
Barthold W./D. Sourdel al-Barāmika Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition 1954-2005 13 vols Leiden Brill 1033 1036 i
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Bencheikh J. E. Marzolph Ulrich Historical and Mythical Baghdad in the Tale of ʿAlī b. Bakkār and Shams al-Nahār, or the Resurgence of the Imaginary The Arabian Nights Reader 2006 Detroit Wayne State University Press 249 264
Bouvat L. Les Barmécides d’après les historiens arabes et persans 1912 Paris Ernest Leroux
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Chauvin Victor Bibliographie des ouvrages arabes ou relatifs aux Arabes publiés dans l’Europe chrétienne de 1810 à 1885 1892 Liège H. Vaillant-Carmanne
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El-Hibri Tayeb Reinterpreting Islamic Historiography 1999 Cambridge Cambridge University Press
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Hamori Andras Comic Romance from The Thousand and One Nights: The Tale of the Two Viziers Arabica 1983 30 38 56
Hamori Andras Going Down in Style: The Pseudo-Ibn Qutayba’s Story of the Fall of the Barmakids Princeton Papers in Near Eastern 1994 Studies 3 89 125
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Larzul Sylvette Les Traductions françaises des Mille et une Nuits 1996 , Paris L’Harmattan
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Meisami J. S. Masʿūdī on Love and the Fall of the Barmakids Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 1989 252 277
Miquel André Sept contes des Mille et Une Nuits 1981 Paris Sindbad
Miquel André Nûr ad-Dîn, Chams ad-Dîn son frère et Badr ad-Dîn son fils Sept contes 193 284 Miquel
Nawas John Abdallah Toward Fresh Directions in Historical Research: An Experiment in Methodology Using the Putative “Absolutism” of Hârûn al-Rashîd as a Test Case Der Islam 1993 70 1 1 51
Netton Ian Richard Cameron Keith The Passion of the Barmakids. Myth or reality? The Literary Portrayal of Passion Through the Ages. An Interdisciplinary View 1996 Lampeter The Edwin Mellen Press
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Popper W. Data for Dating a Tale in the Nights Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 1926 1 14
Sadan Joseph Leder Stefan Death of a Princess: Episodes of the Barmakid Legend in its Late Evolution Story-Telling in the Framework of non-Fictional Arabic Literature 1998 Wiesbaden Harrassowitz Verlag 130 157
Sadan Joseph The “Nomad versus Sedentary” Framework in Arabic Literature Fabula 1974 15 1 59 86
Zaydān Jurjī al-ʿAbbāsa ukht al-Rashīd aw Nakbat al-Barāmika 1965 Beirut
Cf. Miquel, Sept contes des Mille et Une Nuits, 193-295; see also esp. Popper, Data for dating a tale in the Nights. Miquel, Sept contes, 193, suggests the final version of the tale to have been written between 1416 and 1427 ce in Egypt.
Barthold/Sourdel, al-Barāmika, 1034.
Cf. Abbott, Two Queens of Baghdad, 195-196. Bosworth in fact overstates the credence Abbott lends the episode, for she states only: “The nucleus of this version of the tragic story of Jaʿfar and ʿAbbāsa is found in some of the earliest as in some of the most authoritative histories of Islam. It was not long, however, before the major tragedy had caught the imagination of men of literary fancy, who enlarged upon it, embellishing it here and there until, alas for the royal honor of the ʿAbbāsids, it soon came to be one of the most widely known tales in Moslem lands. No less a historian than the famous Ibn Khaldūn (Tārīkh, i, 126) tried to kill the story by removing it, in its entirety, from the realm of authentic history into the pale of questionable fiction. But he failed. The tale continued to grow and thrive and still promises to be as immortal as the very name of Barmak, on the one hand, and Hārūn al-Rashīd, on the other.”
Ibid., 262 n. 24.
Ibid., 491.
Ibid., 206.
Ibid., 207 ff.
Ibid., 210-211.
Khawam, Ruses, 27-30. I have thus far had access to this unpublished Arabic text in Khawam’s French translation.
Ibid., 43-45.
Ibid., 53-65.
Ibid., 81-105.
Ibid., 135-136.
Ibid., 60.
Ibid., 519-521.
El-Hibri, Reinterpreting Islamic Historiography, 54. It is striking that El-Hibri discusses al-Rashīd’s death scene after his treatment of a tropology in the treatment of the Barmakids.
Ibid., 512.
Ibid., 518.
Ibid., 21.
Ibid., 23.
Ibid., 24.
Ibid., 198.
Ibid., 198-199.
Ibid., 201.
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This study traces a centuries-long development in, transformation of, and argues for a variegated rapport between a group of disparate texts, some historiographical, some fictitious. Classical historiographies recounting the Barmakid debacle (al-Ṭabarī through Ibn Khallikān), late medieval and pre-modern popular accounts of the Barmakid tragedy, tales that accompany these accounts, and others in the Arabian Nights that mention Jaʿfar the Barmakid and related ones that do not, are all analyzed by appealing to Aristotle’s concept of anagnorisis (recognition or discovery). Anagnorisis makes narrative and historiography read like fiction and is a structuring device in these texts, a window into narrative hermeneutics, and specifically, the feature that indicates significantly that these various texts are of a piece, according to both conscious and subliminal design. Anagnorisis reverberates with calamitous recognition built into the Barmakid story — one which unveils hard and tragic truths, and just as importantly preserves malignant secrecy, a secrecy that the Arabian Nights unconsciously transforms into felicity.
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 2063 | 142 | 6 |
Full Text Views | 494 | 8 | 0 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 715 | 27 | 0 |