Читать книгу Who Is a Muslim? - Maryam Wasif Khan - Страница 14

The publication and wild success of Antoine Galland’s Mille et Une Nuits in France and, soon after, the anonymously translated Arabian Nights’ Entertainments in England have long been lauded as a singular moment, described by Sari Makdisi and Nussbaum as inaugurating “a genuinely open-minded obsession with the East.”²⁹ Arguing that “European writers embraced the new world opened up to them by the Nights with unreserved enthusiasm,” Makdisi and Nussbaum draw up a hopeful picture of East-West exchange, and of an English canon forever altered for the influence of the Nights.³⁰ Makdisi, Nussbaum, and other major scholars of the eighteenth century, including Aravamudan, and Ballaster, have repeatedly argued for seeing the moment of the oriental tale as a uniquely positive event in the longer history of Europe’s relations and perceptions of the Muslim East.

The optimistic rhetoric of newness that accompanies laudatory studies of the oriental tale suggests that works such as the Arabian Nights or Persian Tales somehow opened up alternate ways of imagining the Muslim East, giving English and French readers different perspectives, and indeed, knowledge, of the various peoples and practices from Islamic societies in the East and North Africa. Yet, if we examine works such as the Nights and the many fictions it spawned within a mere decade or so of its publication, what we find is not newness or a refreshing orientation of its Muslim subjects but rather a rearrangement of the popular and literary perceptions around Islam that were endemic to the Renaissance and that continued to gain impetus in Tudor and Jacobean England.³¹ What the oriental tale actually marked, we can say, was the domestication of the Mahometan from a barbarous, genuinely feared antagonist of Europe and Christianity to an exotic other, reduced in military might and at a safe physical distance from England’s and France’s borders. The formation of the chronotope of the Mahometan is a function of this domestication: The rapacious, intractable Tamerlaine of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great (1587) progresses into Schahriar, or Hasikin of the Turkish Tales, monarchs who can be tamed by fictions and tutored in governance by their subjects. Likewise, characters within the unfolding stories of these collections play out both their own foreignness as well as English concerns.

Muslims had long occupied a place in the popular English imagination, as Samuel C. Chew’s excellent study The Crescent and the Rose (1937) tells us. By the height of the Tudor period, an Englishman

of average education and intelligence had in mind the conquests of Tamburlaine and his humiliation of Sultan Bajazet; the heroic resistance of Scanderbeg; the fall of Constantinople and the ruthless cruelty of Mahometan the Conqueror; the alternatively advancing and retreating tides of Turkish forces in the Balkans and Danube country (these aggressions and recessions confusedly remembered); the overrunning of Greece and the islands of the Aegan …³²

The list continues, concluding with the fact that “history merged into legend and romance,” the roving Turks somehow representing all Muslim pasts and people.³³ If by the beginning of the seventeenth century, Shakespeare popularized the Turk as a traitor and liar, mainstreaming idioms such as “turning Turk” and “or else, I am a Turk,” then by the end, John Dryden had rewritten Muslim rulers across history as drowned in lust, unable to rule over their own kingdoms. Dryden’s plays, particularly Aureng-zebe: A Tragedy (1676) and The Conquest of Granada (1672) reflect also the receding threat of the Ottomans to Europeans that finally came to a head in 1683 at the Battle of Vienna, a victory for the Hapsburgs.³⁴

Thus, when Antoine Galland claimed that he had translated the Mille et Une Nuits from an original Syrian manuscript, he was no longer presenting his audiences with stories of their dark conquests or the specter of Europe’s own vulnerability to Ottoman armies. In telling the story of Schahriar and the thousand stories that conquered his barbarism, he was giving his readers a Mahometan, who though inherently foreign and still master of his properties, was no longer a threat. The sources and ur-texts of the Nights have been debated for some time now, but Muhsin Mahdi, a leading historian of the text, has rejected the idea that Galland’s French text was a translation in any sense of the word.³⁵ Madeleine Dobie, Marina Warner, and Aravamudan, on the other hand, approach Galland’s work as a “familiarizing translation,” asking contemporary audiences to read the French translation as a moment of intercultural contact and exchange that flowed from East to West.³⁶ Horta’s recent intervention in this debate recasts the Nights as a collaboration between Galland and a young Syrian man, Hanna Diyab, who had traveled to Paris from Syria, suggesting that the Nights had emerged from “networks of transcultural creativity.”³⁷

The scope and detail of these debates are commendable but obscure the moment that the Nights and its spawn inaugurate in England. The moment of the oriental tale is distinguished by its orientation toward the Muslim East or the Mahometan Orient as the site of “pleasant and diverting stories,” a seemingly far cry from the violence and darkness that marked earlier fictions.³⁸ This moment is marked by a new trend in French and British orientalisms, where narratives and stories from the “Orient” or the “East” are “discovered” or unearthed from their original locations, translated by a single orientalist, and brought to Europe. In the case of English readers and writers, Galland’s introduction to the Nights emphasized its moral utility, making it consistent with other contemporary works. It is ironic, at the very least, that contemporary editions—most noticeably Robert L. Mack’s 1995 edition that apparently offers the entire “original version of the Nights”—leave out the preface contained in the early French and subsequent Grub Street editions. I suggest, then, that we turn to the prefaces and frame tales of the Nights and other volumes in order to understand the terms under which this genre comprehended the Mahometan, terms that rearrange a longstanding antagonism into oppositional parts: nation and empire, domesticity and itinerance, truth and deception, reason and superstition, excess and moderation.³⁹ The chronotope of the Mahometan is constituted by the latter category of each set.

Galland’s “Translator’s Preface” sets up the oriental tale as both fact and fiction. In introducing his audiences to a “prodigious quantity” of stories “whose variety is surprizing” and “whose connection is so wonderful,” he offers a Muslim East made up of “Persians, Tartars, and Indians,” authored by the Arabs, and whose “customs and manners” included “as well Pagans as Mohametans.”⁴⁰ Stripped of the Ottomans, or Turks (even the Turkish Tales are not about an Ottoman sultan), the Mahometan Orient, “from the sovereign to the meanest subject,” can now “speak” and “act” for English and French readers in a fashion that is “pleasing.”⁴¹ Though the Turk himself almost rarely enters the oriental tale, cities from the Ottoman empire—Damascus, Baghdad, and Basra—are an integral part of the Mahometan Orient’s geography. The author of the Nights, “an anonymous Arab” whose very existence Galland throws into doubt, is blurred between fact and fiction in a manner synonymous to the stories that are to follow.⁴² As the new master of the text, having rendered it from “Arabick” into the “niceness of the French tongue,” Galland is no longer imagining the Mahometan Orient in the manner of his predecessors; rather, we can say he is converting it from its previous antagonism into a compliant otherness, open to new meanings in the wake of altered relations.⁴³

The territories of Schahriar, the infamous sultan of the frame tale, extend from Persia as far as China. Though generally a well-loved and fair ruler, the infidelities of his sister-in-law and his wife “persuaded” him “that no woman was chaste,” and in the wake of his betrayal, he decides nightly to take a wife and daily to kill her.⁴⁴ In his “unparalleled barbarity,” Schahriar is one of many Mahometan sultans, caliphs, and rulers of the Mahometan Orient whose laws have to be met with “blind obedience” from his subjects.⁴⁵ The frame tale of the Nights is the story of this sultan’s conversion from the classic Mahometan traits of barbarism and savagery to a docility induced by the brave Scheherazade, the daughter of Schahriar’s grand vizier.

A close look at Scheherazade, as she appears in both the English and French texts, reveals a character constructed in accordance with Enlightenment mores, rather than those fitting an oriental queen. Not only is she beautiful, but she is described by the narrator as possessing “courage, wit and penetration, infinitely above her sex.”⁴⁶ Her education, however, sets her apart from oriental women and their European counterparts, for she is well-versed in “philosophy, physic, history, and liberal arts,” in addition to being a poet par excellence.⁴⁷ When she announces to her father her plan to marry the sultan, she does so with the knowledge that, should she die, “my death will be glorious,” and in the case of success, “I will do my country an important piece of service.”⁴⁸ Over the course of the thousand or so nights that Scheherazade passes with Schahriar, the Oriental despot will be tamed by the strategic fictions of a character trained in a distinctly European curriculum of liberal arts and sciences. Unlike a typical Oriental subject who at this time was believed to have lyric skill but little other learning, Scheherazade has a European intellect as well as a poetic talent.⁴⁹

More enduring is the other oppositional quality Scheherazade possesses. Unlike Schahriar, the sultan, she is of a place and people. She sees herself as part of a country, the word Galland uses is patrie, fatherland, a place to which one filiatively belongs.⁵⁰ She exists under the sign of the indigenous, while Schahriar remains foreign, a Mahometan sultan.⁵¹ Schahriar, the master of many domains, belongs to no place in particular, and though he possesses many countries or cities, none possess him. His adulterous queen, likewise, defies any domestic ties by participating in orgies with black slaves, though her particular lover, Masoud, enters and exits the palace by climbing through the trees that surround it. Schahriar and his household, in their distinctly non-national orientation, thus, establish the chronotope of the Mahometan that I have suggested is critical to the formation of the oriental tale.

The frame tale of the Nights, though literally the story of a heroic young woman, is also the story of how Enlightenment ideals can overcome the savageries and barbarities that lie outside of it. A simpler example of this occurs in La Croix’s Persian Tales, translated into English by Ambrose Philips, the poet and politician, who dedicates the volume to the Duchess of Gondolphin, a lady “allied with two glorious patriots,” the one who brought England glory against the French, while the other led it to economic prosperity.⁵² Describing the tales that lie within as “designed” to “reduce a young princess to reason,” Philips simultaneously also likens them to “little epic poems,” in which the “characters and the passions … are taken from nature.”⁵³ Though many eighteenth-century poets and novelists were obsessed with the idea of epics, Philips himself preferred the pastoral form, arguing that forms such as the epic “by the vehemency of their emotions, raise the spirits into a ferment.”⁵⁴ Formally, too, Philips hints, the oriental tale was a reflection of its Mahometan subjects who, over the course of the narrative, are to be contained by the superior ideals of reason and rationality.

Considerably simpler than the frame of the Nights, the Persian Tales begins with the story of the Princess Farrukhnaz, the daughter of the king of “Cashmire,” whose famed beauty has attracted the princes of all the neighboring domains. Just before the princes arrive to compete for her hand, Farrukhnaz dreams of herself as a doe being abandoned by a stag she has just saved from death. Interpreting this dream as being sent by “Kefaya,” who we are told in a footnote was “an idol formerly worshipped in Cashmire,” she refuses to marry any of her suitors. The task of converting her from her irrational state falls upon her nurse, Sutlememe, who “weans” her young charge from her dreams through the “Reason” of entertaining stories.⁵⁵ Though the people of Cashmire are described as idol worshippers, Farrukhnaz eventually settles on marrying the Persian prince, Farrukhschad, aided and abetted by a number of rather rational dervishes, religious figures generally associated with Islam in the oriental tale. The conversion of the oriental through “reason” or science finds even fuller elaboration in Sheridan’s History of Nourjahad, in which the Sultan Schemzeddin humbles his successor, the arrogant Nourjahad, through an elaborate, scientifically organized set of illusions intended to reform a subject drowned in his desire for wealth and immortality.

It is in the Turkish Tales that the subject of the Turk enters the oriental tale, though only briefly for the frame tale and the stories that follow are located as part of Persian chronicles. The anonymous translator’s introduction to the stories alludes constantly to the degraded “character” of the Turks. The point of the stories is to cure a prince “too much addicted to women.”⁵⁶ Turkish women, the supposed undoing of Turkish men, have no care for “Menaces of Mahomet, and his Alcoran,” a breed not unlike Schahriar’s unnamed adulterous queen.⁵⁷ The Turk is no longer a violent, deceitful conqueror but is recast in terms of his blind attachment to women, while the women themselves are a faithless, unrooted breed. Thus, the frame tale of the Turkish Tales is the story of the Persian queen, Canzada, who begins to lust after her stepson, the Prince Nourgehan. The Prince, like Scheherazade, is distinguished by his learning in both letters and athletics, as well as his spirituality. One day, just as he has begun a forty-day pledge of silence, Canzada throws herself at him, promising that once his father is dead, she will marry the young prince. Angered by his refusal, Canzada goes to the sultan, accusing his beloved son and successor of trying to ravage her. Believing the queen against his son, whose vow of silence is a secret, the Sultan Hasikin decides to kill his son. His viziers, suspicious of the queen, begin to delay Nourgehan’s execution through a series of stories about the infidelity of women. Canzada, however, often interrupts with stories that belie the lessons of the vizier’s tales and instead tell of violent sons.

As in the case of earlier works, the preface and frame tale of the Turkish Tales emerge out of and further make the chronotope of the Mahometan Orient. Titled and supposedly told by the Turks, the stories unfold from the events taking place at Hasikin, the Persian sultan’s palace, while his son’s spiritual teacher, Aboumaschar, an astrologist, retreats to a subterranean cave. The makeup of the frame tale betrays an unreal geography that extends outward in terms of empire, for Hasikin rules “all Asia,” but also upward to the sky and downward into the earth, as symbolized by the astrologer.⁵⁸ While we can read this, on the one hand, as symbolizing the seemingly endless territories within the Mahometan Orient, it also gestures to the instability of the characters who populate these territories. Though a later tale, William Beckford’s Vathek (1786) likens astrology to the desire of conquering even the heavens, an interest that eventually leads to the undoing of the Caliph Vathek. But the narrative structure itself, a tussle between the viziers, who stand for the Prince Nourgehan’s innocence, and Canzada, whose duplicity may be revealed should the prince live, exemplifies the tussle between falsehood and truth that plays out in the oriental tale. Truth, here, is contained in the worldly figure of Prince Nourgehan, who, like Scheherazade, is “skilled in the Characters of several languages,” “excelled in drawing the Bow,” and was the “Master” of almost all known “Sciences,” while Canzada, with her uncontrollable passions, and the naive Hasikin embody the power of falsehood.⁵⁹

Collectively, these volumes, among others, became critical in establishing the Mahometan Orient as a spatial imaginary, an amalgamation of various Islamic empires, Persian, Ottoman, and Mughal, but also one that appears to exist in false time. The Mahometan is thus conceptualized by James Beattie as an “Eastern Prince [who] happens to be idle … and at a loss for expedients to kill the time, he commands his Grand Visier or his favorite to tell him stories.”⁶⁰ Imagined as existing against ancient or civilizational time, and subsequently excluded from trajectories of progress that defined Enlightenment thought, the non-national Mahometan’s time itself is a fiction, the last an obvious condition of the oriental tale.