Читать книгу Who Is a Muslim? - Maryam Wasif Khan - Страница 15

The chronotope of the Mahometan develops further in the stories of Sindbad, the famous traveler, and Haroun al-Raschid, the wise caliph, both of whom feature prominently in the Arabian Nights. Like Schahriar and Scheherazade, Sindbad and Haroun give rise to a series of other characters, whose adventures are based on the conditions of itinerancy and masquerade. That is to say, characters such as Aboulfouaris, Sultan Schemzeddin from Nourjahad, and later, Vathek are all constructed around the instability of the Mahometan in both place and person. Itinerancy and masquerade often find themselves hand-in-hand, deception and false identity, as exemplified by Haroun, coming in handy to restless travelers such as Sindbad. Beginning from the Nights, and onward, any number of Mahometan protagonists roam a vast geography armed with a fluid identity that shifts from king to mendicant, merchant to slave, depending on the circumstances. A far cry from the rapacious hordes that stood in for Muslims just a century or so back, the travelers of the oriental tale offered a number of lessons to English readers, including the benefits of virtue, moderation, and a cultivated wit. Sharing some qualities with heroes of chapbooks and local lore, the Mahometan traveler at times demonstrates that “the disadvantage of birth can be overcome by merit.”⁶¹ Successful travelers such as Sindbad and Aboulfouaris “triumph over the chicanery of foreigners” by remaining faithful to English virtues.⁶² Despite this domestication, however, the Mahometan’s inability to claim belonging to a single place, people, or person remains the premise upon which allegory becomes possible.

Versions of the Sindbad story are present in the Bulaq and Calcutta manuscripts of the Alf Layla, their theme consistent as one of hardship during travel followed by comfort and conclusion. Within Galland’s telling, though, the story of Sindbad reads as that of a Mahometan protagonist imagined within European bounds. In the Galland and Grub Street volumes, Sindbad is cast as a shape-shifting adventurer enabled by his association with Islam, but also as a curiously European figure, who has both the spirit (and stories) of Odysseus as well as the commercial instincts of a modern traveler going from West to East. The son of a wealthy merchant, Sindbad is introduced to us as “that famous traveler who has sailed around the world.”⁶³ In an attempt to remake his fortunes after squandering what was left to him when his father dies, the young Sindbad takes up the only profession that male protagonists in the Oriental tale seem to have, and thus joins a group of merchants headed to the East Indies from Persia.

Sindbad’s geographical descriptions of the many strange islands he visits are vague and, on occasion, approximately situated, not surprisingly given that his interests are distinctly European. Over the course of his seven voyages, we come to know that he trades in spices such as “the wood of aloe,” “pepper,” “nutmegs,” “cloves,” “ginger,” “pearls,” and “diamonds.”⁶⁴ His encounter with the one-eyed savage during his third voyage gains much from Odysseus’s encounter with the Cyclops. Presaging the onset of high colonialism, Sindbad too masters the various places he visits, conquering the land and natural geography (as in the case of the rocs and elephants) and overcoming local resistance—the Old Man of the Sea and the apes on the coconut trees from his fifth voyage. He brings technological advancements to the far-away island of his fourth voyage where he teaches the people to ride with stirrups and bridles. By the time of his seventh and final voyage, he is an ambassador, helping forge alliances between the Caliph Haroun Alrashid and the unnamed King of Serendib.

Though Sindbad is in part a fictional archive of French and English trade practices in what is now South India and East Asia, his “Mahometanism” is an essential part of his story. There is no romantic narrative of discovery attached to his travels. Rather, he is a merchant, a profession that as mentioned earlier, recurs in the Nights and the oriental tales that follow. Perhaps the only other—comparatively occasional—vocation available to the Mahometan in the European imagination is that of a tailor, normally one that represents poverty and social marginality. The question of the traveling trader, on the other hand, is an important one that, though explicated in detail in the works of historians such as Sanjay Subrahmaniyam among others, demands some context here as well. During the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, European—particularly English, French, and Dutch—trade with Muslim traders flourished. To quote Gerald MacLean, “trade and travel took Muslims into the Eastern Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, all the way to the China sea.”⁶⁵ Yet Muslim travelers, diplomatic and merchant, were never allowed to establish anything close to the “settlements of Britons in Algiers, Istanbul, Hormuz, and Surat.”⁶⁶ Neither did the English allow or encourage complementary settlements in England itself, choosing to keep Muslim merchants from traveling to Europe. When we read Sindbad in the light of a seemingly secular Europe’s trade history with the Ottoman, Mughal, or Safavid empires, his figure reflects both a European anxiety around Muslim trading communities and Europe’s imperializing attitudes toward foreign territories.

As a “Mahometan,” Sindbad is marked by his nomadism: “think no more of thy own country,” one king tells him, and simultaneously commands him to marry a woman of the island.⁶⁷ The relevant footnote informs readers that Sindbad “was a Mahometan, and they allow polygamy,” thus explaining his changeable identity by way of Mahometanism, or European perceptions of Islam.⁶⁸ At other times, Sindbad maneuvers and manipulates island natives through his knowledge of Arabic, attracting help from the black inhabitants through his prayer to the Almighty. Though Sindbad himself eventually returns to Baghdad, most of the other nomadic Muslim protagonists from tales that follow never return home. The original traveling Muslim, Sindbad, pioneers an entire plotline for the oriental tales—as well as the orientalist scholarship—that were to follow: the inability of the Muslim to claim a single space as his home.

Though Sindbad’s travels inspire a number of other characters, Aboulfouaris, the “Great Traveler” of the Persian Tales, comes to embody the particular problem of Mahometan itinerancy in the oriental tale.⁶⁹ Given that Aboulfouaris’s adventures are centered on the theme of a husband’s fidelity—as the frame tale of the Persian Tales dictates—many of his travels are directed around the quest to earn or return to his wife, Canzada. Like other fictional Mohametans, Aboulfouaris is a merchant from Basra, whose adventures begin when he sets out on a journey to Serendib and Surat. Upon landing in Serendib (modern-day Sri Lanka) and successfully concluding his business, he chances upon a beautiful lady, Canzada. The latter, a “Guebre” or Zoroastrian, though suitable as a mistress cannot be taken as a wife by the Mahometan Aboulfouaris.⁷⁰ Angered by his rejection of her proposal, Canzada decides to punish Aboulfouaris by selling him as a slave to some nobles of Golconda. The ship carrying Aboulfouaris and his new masters to Golconda veers off course, taking its travelers to an unmapped sea, further even from the Philippines and Java, where they are deceived into taking on board a “monstrous” man, who in his appearance, appetites, evil propensities, and physical capabilities presages the Indian Giaour in Beckford’s Gothic tale, Vathek.⁷¹

The cursed crew gets reprieve from this terrible alien when a roc picks up the invader and throws him to his death. Upon their arrival in Golconda, Aboulfouraris’s new master, impressed by his charge, decides to convert to “Mahometanism” and offers his daughter to Aboulfouaris. He soon discovers that the girl is unwilling to marry him, and after rearranging both his and her affairs in Golconda, Aboulfouaris sets off toward Surat with the intent of returning home to Basra. In Surat, he is befriended by a deceitful man who adopts Aboulfouaris, declaring him his heir, much in the style of the sorcerer turned uncle from the story of Aladdin. Keeping with that pattern of mentor, he abandons Aboulfouaris in the pit from which he directed him to draw treasures, announcing that every year a new “Mussulman like thee” comes to die in the pit. Aboulfouaris prays for salvation, and eventually finds his way to a shore where a ship rescues him. Once he escapes from the particular snares of the following island, Aboulfouaris finds himself in Serendib again, only to discover that Canzada had married another man, and upon his sudden death was about to become a sati. Canzada, however, manages to evade her fate as dictated by this “terrible custom,”⁷² and she and Aboulfouaris reunite, escape from Serendib, find their way to Basra, where she converts to the “Doctrine of our Great Prophet,” and marries her faithful lover.⁷³

The second phase of Aboulfouaris’s travels begins after some years of domestic bliss when the need arises, in the wake of his father’s death, to remake the family fortunes. His journey to Golconda is fruitful, but on the return the ship is washed against an unknown island, and this time around, the traveler is taken captive by a group of cursed genies who are marked by their “contempt” of “the Alcoran and Mahomet.”⁷⁴ Later, rescued by a group of good genies amongst whom he is allowed to practice and preach Islam, Aboulfouaris continues his journey homeward on the back of an afrite, a devil-like monster. Diverted on the way to a strange island where he is roped into helping the afrite achieve his dark purposes, Aboulfouaris is trapped in a series of gloomy courts within which lie the corpse of the prophet Solomon; the Dedgeal (or Dajal); a passage of murals recounting all the victories of Islam gained by the prophet Muhammad; a garden with the houris and companions of the prophet, as well as several other prophets, including Elias. Eventually, with the help of the prophet, Kheder, Aboulfouaris returns to Basra only to find his wife, Canzada, married to another man, and himself unrecognizable to all who knew him. After a protracted effort, he is finally identified and Canzada is restored to him. But his end is not a happy one for Canzada remains in love with the man she temporarily married. We find Aboulfouaris telling his story to the king of Damascus while ensconced in his tent during yet another journey.⁷⁵

Sindbad’s journeys in the Nights, in comparison, appear to conclude after his seventh voyage, though his adventures had been recorded in gold letters by the Caliph Haroun al-Rashid as an example for all to behold. Ballaster reads Aboulfouaris’s story as a narrative on India, where Canzada, a “chimerical, protean creature,” is synecdochal of “India for the seventeenth and eighteenth-century European imagination.”⁷⁶ Centered by the performance of sati that occurs in the first half of the tale, Ballaster argues, “Canzada/India is a shape that shifts elusively from the desiring subject … the ‘dream of men awake’ to the immense riches and power offered by the territory of India, but also to a risky alterity that may finally evade the covetous grasp.”⁷⁷ There is no denying the fact that in these early oriental tales, India and associated territories are evoked as dark yet desirable. For the Mahometan protagonists of these tales, however, India becomes an antagonist, often invading the Mahometan Orient through covert practices such as the dark arts, warning the Mahometan against entering its alterity. Aboulfouaris’s story precedes the powerful orientalist reconceptualizations of India by scholars such as William Jones. What this and a set of stories with similar lessons that I discuss directly offer is an early version of the English narrative that India was somehow a geographically distinct orient from that which was imagined as Mahometan. That is to say, despite the fact that much of the Company’s negotiations and battles during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were with Mughal rulers, Company officials continued to refer to them as “Moors,” designating them as foreign and temporary invaders of India.

In Ballaster’s reading, Aboulfouaris’s patience is an allegory for Christian virtue in the face of danger and temptation, a possible example also for Englishmen traveling to India. But the fact that this allegory plays out through a Mahometan figure prompts a reconsideration of the text’s literal meaning. On this most obvious level, Aboulfouaris, the Mahometan protagonist, is born into the profession of a merchant, which, of course, takes him on journeys across the Mahometan orient, as well as into part of India. After overcoming numerous obstacles, physical and spiritual, he returns to the place he believes to be his home. While some Mahometan merchants never return to the place they originally departed from, Aboulfouaris is among those whose return is marked by an uneasy domestic arrangement that augurs no happiness for the weary traveler. While Aboulfouaris’s virtues represent Christianity, his actions and the world around him, particularly its darker elements, are all imagined and appropriated under the label of Mahometanism. More significant, however, is that despite recovering Canzada, not once but twice, Aboulfouaris remains unmoored. Knowing Canzada to be in love with her other husband, Aboulfouaris continues to travel, as is his destiny.

Part of Sindbad’s and Aboulfouaris’s success in their travels depends on their ability to disguise themselves, a Mahometan trait that is embodied by Haroun-al-Rashid, the caliph of Baghdad. Also present in d’Herbelot’s Bibliotheque, where he is recounted as having made the pilgrimage to Mecca on foot, Haroun’s role in the Nights almost always begins with his attempts to traverse his city by night in the disguise of a merchant or beggar. We encounter Haroun early on in the stories of the sisters Zobeide and Amine, and the three calendars, who have traveled from various kingdoms to meet Haroun and avail of his generosity. What is remarkable about this set of stories is that almost every character indulges in disguise, altering their actual identity for various reasons. Beginning with Haroun, who, we are told, was “accustomed to walk in disguise very often by night that he might see with his own eyes if everything was quiet in the city,” to the “calendars,” or wandering mendicants, who used to be princes, to the two bitches that Zobeide whips each night, once her sisters, the entire sequence hints at the Mahometan Orient as a place of unfixed and volatile identities.⁷⁸ The calendars, once princes and heirs to various kingdoms, are distinguished on account of their devotion to Mahometanism—one a famed scholar of the Quran, the other a secret convert in his father’s idol-worshipping kingdom. The very state of being a Mahometan “calendar,” the English appropriation of the Arabic qalandar, whose basic meaning implies one who has abandoned worldly pursuits, becomes implicated with the act of endless travel in the oriental tale.

While the sequence of Zobeide and the calendars attests to Haroun’s generosity, another set of stories in the Nights, those of Ganem and Fetnah, show Haroun as a caliph whose jealousy often misleads him into cruelty. Ganem is the son of a Damascus merchant, whose sudden death leaves the family with a number of brocades destined for Baghdad. Though Ganem’s mother tries to dissuade him from traveling, “an inclination to travel … edged him to set out” toward Baghdad.⁷⁹ Upon reaching Baghdad, Ganem mistakenly finds Fetnah, a slave-girl belonging to Haroun who has been buried alive by Zobeide, his wife, out of jealousy. Ganem saves Fetnah, nurses her back to health, and eventually brings her to his mother’s house, from where she is able to tell Haroun, who believed her to be dead, that she is alive. But Haroun, convinced that Fetnah had been unfaithful to him, has her sentenced to imprisonment in a tower, while Ganem’s house is burnt down and his mother and sister shamed on the streets, taken prisoner, and then finally set free to wander impoverished. Ganem is saved by Fetnah’s warning. Upon realizing Haroun’s intent, she told him to “put on the habit of a slave and daubed him with soot,” thus allowing Ganem to walk away from the house unnoticed when Haroun’s army comes to arrest Fetnah.⁸⁰

It is only when Haroun hears Fetnah reminiscing one evening about Ganem’s honorable treatment of her that he decides to forgive all. Fetnah is freed, Ganem’s mother and sister are recovered, but Ganem’s whereabouts remain unknown. Eventually, Fetnah receives news of a sick man taken in by a jeweler’s syndic who was unable to identify himself to his caretaker. The man is Ganem, who is almost unrecognizable due to his illness, but under the care of Fetnah and his host, he finally comes to himself and is able to relate how, while hiding in small village, he fell ill and finally had to be tied on a camel’s back and brought to Baghdad for treatment. The story resolves by Haroun gifting Fetnah to Ganem, himself marrying Ganem’s sister to punish the jealous Zobeide, while also arranging for his widowed mother to be married to one of his viziers.

Haroun’s other appearances include his encounter with Aboul Cassem, a man known for his generosity and largesse, incidentally a merchant forever displaced from Cairo, the city of his birth. Disguised as a traveler, Haroun avails Cassem’s legendary hospitality, but also helps him in reuniting with Dardane, a well-to-do woman from Damas who had been sold into slavery by her mother. An unstable caliph, sometimes the subject of reform himself, other times helping reform others, Haroun is the ruler who sends Sindbad on his missions, forging diplomatic relations with other kings through this single ambassador. Haroun’s frequent appearances in early and late oriental tales, as well as his well-known historical relations with Charlemagne, make him a stock character of eighteenth-century English fictions and essays. For the most part, Haroun doubles as Mahometan, who also performs the role of an ideal ruler. On the one hand, he stands for the inconstancy, the disguise, and the deception that Mahometan protagonists of the oriental tale invariably practiced, but for English readers, he offers the model of an ideal ruler, an inadvertent instrument of critique of the late Restoration king, James II.

One of Haroun’s enduring reincarnations is the Sultan Schemzeddin of Sheridan’s History of Nourjahad, who sets up an elaborate stage designed to bring his arrogant successor, Nourjahad, to task. When Nourjahad declares to Schemzeddin that he desires worldly pleasures above those of heaven, Schemzeddin decides to test him by offering him riches as well as immortality. Disguised as a heavenly angel, Schemzeddin appears in Nourjahad’s bedroom while Nourjahad sleeps and upon waking him offers him a vial that will grant him his earthly desires. The single condition that the angel imposes on Nourjahad’s immorality is that on occasion he will experience extended episodes of deep slumber. From then on, an elaborate drama plays out in which Nourjahad, believing himself to be the master of limitless wealth, begins to give in to his appetites for wine and women. Knowing Schemzeddin’s displeasure, he is restricted to his estate where he is entertained by a number of servants and slave-girls. At the height of his arrogance and boredom, Nourjahad embarks on “one of the most extravagant projects … that ever entered the imagination of man.”⁸¹

Setting up a masquerade within Schemzeddin’s masquerade, Nourjahad decides to stage an Islamic paradise in his own gardens. His concubines would play the “beautiful virgins that are given to all true believers,” his most beautiful mistress would be Cadiga, the favorite wife of the prophet, and he himself would fulfill the part of “Mohamet.”⁸² But even as the fountains in his garden begin spouting milk in place of water, Nourjahad falls into one of his slumbers and awakens to find his slave-girls aged into old women, his trusted servant, Hasem, dead, and the son borne by his favorite slave, Mandana, disappeared after robbing him of his wealth. Undeterred by these events and failure of his masquerade, Nourjahad becomes “peevish, morose, tyrannical; cruelty took possession of his breast.”⁸³ Finally, after a drunken fit of temper in which he kills his last faithful servant, Cadiga, Nourjahad falls into yet another deep sleep.

Upon waking, he finds a man by his side, who identifies himself as Cozro, the brother of the dead Cadiga, who had made her brother promise to care for her depraved master instead of punishing him. Subsequently, it was Cozro who had begged Schemzeddin for clemency, and now that Nourjahad had awakened, he was ready to depart, leaving Nourjahad “condemned to wander in an unknown land.”⁸⁴ It is at that moment that Nourjahad finally repents. In order to show that he is a changed man, he begins, with Cozro’s help, a widescale effort to distribute alms across the city. His good deeds and changed persona finally lead him to Schemzeddin, who upon forgiving him, reveals that “thy guardian genius was all a deception and a piece of machinery by my contrivance.”⁸⁵ What Nourjahad believed to be a lifetime was, in fact, only the matter of some fourteen months, a masquerade carefully surveilled, directed, and at times, even performed by the Sultan Schemzeddin. Believing Nourjahad’s repentance to be sincere, Schemzeddin makes him the heir to his throne and so the tale ends.

As in the case of many such oriental tales, Nourjahad, too, has been read as a progressive text, Nussbaum suggesting that the tale illustrates the ills of domestic confinement, whereas Aravamudan and Mita Choudhry have read the work as posing a challenge to genre boundaries. My point is quite simple: Nourjahad, a text that is considered literary, even critical of national practices, is constructed around the spatial and temporal conditions of the Mahometan Orient: empire and false time. Though Schemzeddin’s elaborate stage exhibits a scientific sophistry that Haroun’s masquerades do not, the basic premise of the caliph or sultan governing, surveilling, and reforming through disguise remains in place. Other standard elements that I have not chosen to privilege include opulence, lustfulness, and hedonism, though these do not constitute the chronotopic makeup of the oriental tale. Within these varied stories, the evolving chronotope of the Mahometan acquires flesh: the empire-nation tension from the Nights is expanded in the forms of Sindbad and Haroun. The stories of Aboulfouaris and Nourjahad, despite relaying specific English concerns, rest upon the basic elements of earlier oriental tales: masquerade, despotism, and itinerance.