{"id":13544,"date":"2015-08-05T07:05:37","date_gmt":"2015-08-05T11:05:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=13544"},"modified":"2015-08-04T08:05:59","modified_gmt":"2015-08-04T12:05:59","slug":"in-the-footsteps-of-powerful-slave-and-free-women-of-baghdad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/in-the-footsteps-of-powerful-slave-and-free-women-of-baghdad\/","title":{"rendered":"In the Footsteps of Powerful Slave and Free Women of\u00a0Baghdad"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"consorts\"<\/a>Via the always excellent Arab Literature (in English):<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

BY MLYNXQUALEY<\/a><\/span><\/span> on<\/em>

\n

Shawkat Toorawa, Associate Professor of Arabic Literature and Islamic Studies at Cornell University and co-executive editor of the Library of Arabic Literature, has worked on collaboratively translating Ibn al-Sa\u2019i\u2019s<\/em> Consorts of the Caliphs, off and on, for more than a decade: first as part of Radical Reassessment of Arabic Arts, Language, and Literature (RRAALL), and later as the editor of the Library of Arabic Literature volume, which was published in 2015:<\/em><\/p>\n

Ibn al-Sa\u2019i\u2019s Consorts collects portraits of 39 women associated with powerful men in the tenth through thirteenth centuries. The women are by turns clever, bold, musical, accomplished poets, beautiful, pious, loyal, and generous.\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>In the\u00a0interview that follows, Toorawa talks about why it\u2019s not so embarrassing for Ibn al-Sa\u2019i to write about the lives of women, how the LAL editors became comfortable translating jariyah<\/em> as \u201cslave,\u201d and ways in which he\u2019d like to teach with this text.<\/p>\n

This is a wonderfully fun book. But wasn\u2019t it a bit of a step down for Ibn al-Sa\u2019i, as a historian, to focus so much on the lives of (mere) women? What would his contemporaries have thought?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

They would not have perceived it that way. One way to think about it is this: In order to be a good historian, you have to be comprehensive. You cover all the bases. These women are interesting to him. He was so interested that he wrote two books about these women, but the one about the women who lived to see their sons became caliph is lost. This means that he is interested in them because of their connection to these people who he believes do<\/em>make history\u2014men.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also the same kind of question people ask about al-Khateeb al-Baghdadi, who writes Ta\u2019reekh Baghdad (The History of Baghdad), <\/em>this amazing fourteen-volume work of anyone important who was ever in Baghdad. There are women in it, but basically it\u2019s about men. Al-Khateeb also writes a book about party crashers [The Art of Party Crashing in Medieval Iraq, <\/em>translated by Emily Selove]. There are different theories about why these authors wrote such books. Sometimes it was to show virtuosity. Sometimes they were practice works\u2014they were practicing their ability to gather disparate material.<\/p>\n

But we mustn\u2019t forget that these guys are real intellectuals, that they\u2019re interested in everything.<\/p>\n

For contemporary readers, there\u2019s something of a supermarket check-out line, \u201c<\/em><\/strong>Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous\u201d appeal to <\/em>Consorts. Who would\u2019ve read it in its time?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Obviously it wouldn\u2019t be sold in supermarkets. Now, was it being sold widely in bookshops the way other things were being sold? I don\u2019t know. Four hundred years earlier it would have been. But at this time, it\u2019s not clear to me who was reading it. He wrote it right before the fall of Baghdad.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s a librarian at a law college. He writes this work and he looks [back] at the Golden Age, and it\u2019s hard to tell if he\u2019s approving or disapproving. He\u2019s not disapproving intellectually of it, but the women he\u2019s celebrating are the latter-day women, the women who are pious. I assume the idea is that the people who choose to marry them make good choices in marrying them.<\/p>\n

How is it the pious women being celebrated? It\u2019s the witty women who are more interesting and fun.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a paradoxical thing, since the book seems to be at cross-purposes. On the one hand, I think he\u2019s saying, there was<\/em> a Golden Age. There was<\/em> a Baghdad when Baghdad was great. And the women from then were witty and well-educated, and that\u2019s something to aspire to\u2014that level of culture.<\/p>\n

By putting them in the same book with these latter-day women who aren\u2019t as accomplished, there\u2019s a sense in which it\u2019s a continuum. We continue, he\u2019s saying, to be a cultured civilization. The paradox of course is that many of the latter-day women are free-born. He doesn\u2019t say that he wants the earlier age to be restored.<\/p>\n

Is there a reason the women\u2019s profiles aren\u2019t in listed in chronological order?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

It may be that he hadn\u2019t quite sorted out how he wanted this book to look. He might\u2019ve still been trying to work through the following question in his mind: What do I think the role of the wives and favorites of the caliphs is, <\/em>both as exemplar and as historical fact?<\/p>\n

Julia Bray\u2019s introduction indicates that Ibn al-Sa\u2019i and others were freer to explore the lives of slaves than they were to explore the lives of free women.\u00a0They were a commodity, and thus more open to our scrutiny?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

I think it\u2019s fair to say, based on the historical record, that we have very little information about the private lives of free-born women, generally, in the Arab-Islamic world, unless there\u2019s some other thing that makes them important. Authors just didn\u2019t record information about the private lives of prominent women. There are countless male authors about whom we don\u2019t know even whether they were married or had children.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s the case that slave women, notably the ones that were connected to caliphs, are people about whom people felt they could write. One of Ibn al-Sa\u2019i\u2019s principal sources regarding slave women, is al-Isfah\u0101n\u012b\u2019s thirty-volume Kit\u0101b al-Agh\u0101n\u012b <\/em>[Book of Songs]. <\/em>He\u2019s a cultural and literary historian, and he\u2019s interested in the fact that the slave women are poets, and that makes it okay to write about them, because the tradition writes about poets.<\/p>\n

We do know about Wallada [bint al-Mustakfi], a free-born woman in Spain. And why do we know about her? She\u2019s a poet. Most of the time, it\u2019s because of their professional or vocational position: women poets, women scholars, women who love djinn<\/em>. Even if it\u2019s marginal like that, it\u2019s a category about which people get interested as a category<\/em>.<\/p>\n

There isn\u2019t a book called The History of the Private Lives of Abbasid Housewives, <\/em>and I think it\u2019s because they didn\u2019t think of them as a category.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not different ideas of privacy?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s also connected to different ideas of privacy, or just ideas of privacy. But I don\u2019t think the Abbasids are that different from us. I don\u2019t think we write about the lives of private women, either. Except for TV shows like Housewives [of Orange County, of New Jersey, of Atlanta]. <\/em>And that\u2019s so <\/em>private, in a way that seems kind of odd. Whereas it\u2019s not so odd if it\u2019s the lives of the rich and famous.<\/p>\n

Have you thought about how you\u2019d teach this text?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

I would love to teach it. I\u2019ve actually suggested it to one of my colleagues, who\u2019s talked about teaching something about free and un-free women. Other books that could go with it: [E.T.] Dailey\u2019s Queens, Consorts, and Concubines, <\/em>about Merovingian elite women. And there\u2019s a book called Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity, <\/em>[by Beverly Bossler], which is about China. I can imagine a course that focuses on medieval Europe, medieval Baghdad, and late-medieval China \u2014 not so much to compare, but to contrast. How does this get recorded by male historians, what matters? The question of fidelity is really interesting. What does that even mean?<\/p>\n

Recently, I taught a medieval travel-narrative class, and the students loved it. For my final assignment, I had them write a narrative of one of the trips they\u2019d taken as kids in the style of any of the authors that we\u2019d read, and several picked either [al-S\u012br\u0101f\u012b\u2019s] Accounts of China and India <\/em>or [Ibn Fa\u1e0dl\u0101n\u2019s] Mission to the Volga<\/em>, both from a LAL book! \u00a0What was good about the exercise is it got them to think about what matters to this author. If I ever taught Consorts of the Caliphs<\/em>, I\u2019d want them to do something similar: I\u2019d have them write biographies of important women in the style of Ibn al-Sa\u2019i.<\/p>\n

The topic of fidelity does recur throughout <\/em><\/strong>Consorts of the Caliphs.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Right. But I don\u2019t know if they would think about it as fidelity.<\/p>\n

In your introduction, you talk about an earlier version of this translation, which you\u2019d worked on with RRAALL, and you described this version as \u201cEnglishing the Arabic.\u201d What\u2019s the space between \u201cEnglishing the Arabic\u201d and a good translation?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Effectively, \u201cEnglishing the Arabic\u201d is what we\u2019ve been calling \u201cIndustry Standard Arabic,\u201d which is the acceptable standard currently.<\/p>\n

You could make the argument that this is often a kind of archaic English. Fine. If you are intentionally making it sound that way, then it\u2019s archaic English. But our initial version of Consorts of the Caliphs<\/em>sounded wooden. We wanted to move away from it sounding wooden. It was okay if it sounded strange, of a certain antiquity, of a different culture, of a different context. But why would we want it to sound wooden? Why would we want to make a librarian and a historian of Arabic literature sound like he wasn\u2019t very smart?<\/p>\n

When I was trying to demonstrate this to my students, I gave them a passage in Industry Standard, to show them that you can actually \u201chear\u201d the Arabic. If you know Arabic, you can hear it. If you can\u2019t hear the Arabic when you read the English, then it\u2019s a successful translation from a LAL perspective.<\/p>\n

This became clear to us in everything we tackled at LAL. When we picked up a translation of Aristotle from Greek, it didn\u2019t sound wooden. It doesn\u2019t sound like you\u2019re reading Greek. It sounds like you\u2019re reading English. Why, then, when we pick up a manual of legal theory in Arabic, does it sound like you\u2019re reading Arabic? Why not find the idiom?<\/p>\n

At the level of lexeme an example I like is sunna. <\/em>I remember asking Joe Lowry, who translated theEpistle on Legal Theory<\/em> for LAL, Why don\u2019t you translate sunna<\/em>? And he said \u201ceveryone knows what it means,\u201d and I said: \u201cWhat does that mean that everyone knows what it means?\u201d The person who buys the book, who\u2019s interested in legal theory, that person is not going to know what sunna <\/em>means. Which reminds me, I just read an article by Kevin Reinhart, which I hadn\u2019t read for many years, and I\u2019d forgotten that he renders sunna<\/em> \u201cnormative acts,\u201d which is actually an excellent English translation.<\/p>\n

Have you gotten pushback from partisans of Industry Standard?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think so, not in print \u2014 but we\u2019re about to.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re working on a translation of the diwan of \u2018Antarah, and when you see some of the choice we made, there are times when it\u2019s difficult to even work out what the relationship is between the line in English and the line in Arabic. Because we\u2019ve done things like translate [a line as] \u201cWarriors. Hold your ground\u201d when the Arabic is some long line about pulling the reins and God knows what else.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s about meaning. What we\u2019re trying to say is: How do we make this mean <\/em>in English? Not how do we make it a poem, but how do we make it mean. <\/em>So we\u2019re going to get a lot of flak when the poetry comes out. With the poetry in Ibn al-Sa\u2019i, we stuck pretty close to the Arabic. A purist can\u2019t get too upset.<\/p>\n

The person who really cares can read the Arabic, and the person who doesn\u2019t know a word of Arabic shouldn\u2019t be worrying about it.\u00a0 As many of us maintain, having the Arabic on the left liberates you.<\/p>\n

In the introduction, you noted that there was a long discussion over the translation of the word \u201cslave\u201d for jariyah.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes, it was a long discussion. It was one of the first things we discussed, because it comes up tight away in the book.<\/p>\n

One potential translation was \u201csinging girl.\u201d A group of editors said: First of all they\u2019re not girls, and anyway it demeans and is inaccurate. Another group said: But we want<\/em> to convey that it\u2019s demeaning. Not everybody agreed.<\/p>\n

People who study Abbasid Baghdad know very well that they were slave women, but think of them as important cultural figures, not as singing girl<\/em>, or slave girl. <\/em>So we thought about \u201cslave woman.\u201d But then someone pointed out that if we\u2019re going to be using the personal pronoun she <\/em>throughout, then it\u2019s going to be clear that they\u2019re women.<\/p>\n

With every rendering, the important question is: Do we go with what it means, or are we worried about conveying in the English something that you can get from the Arabic? \u00a0In the end, we became increasingly comfortable with slave. Someone pointed out, later on: What about the problem of the American imagination, about slave evoking the North Atlantic slave trade? And we said: How does \u201cslave girl\u201d take care of that? It doesn\u2019t. We decided as a group, it does mean slave after all. That\u2019s what it means.<\/p>\n

We also were happy about the fact that if anyone took this seriously from outside the discipline, it could enter the discussion about slavery, as opposed to a kind of precious \u201csinging girl\u201d thing that we keep as a preserve of Arabists who study the singing girls of Baghdad. It\u2019s part of a larger phenomenon of slave-owning.<\/p>\n

Were there other words or concepts that you discussed that extensively?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes, the names. That was a very big question: Do we translate the names of these women [being profiled]? We were excoriated at an early public event in Abu Dhabi by people incensed that we thought it was okay to translate these women\u2019s pet names.\u00a0 This was an audience of expatriate mainly Arabs and Muslims. They weren\u2019t offended, but they were taken aback.<\/p>\n

When we started out as RRAALL, we thought James Bond women names would work. They\u2019re powerful, but they\u2019re sexualized. But we were made to realize, it\u2019s just not that simple.<\/p>\n

\"luscious\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We decided that we that we would translate the names of all those who were slaves, but not of any who were free-born. Someone had raised the issue: Why aren\u2019t we translating the caliph\u2019s regnal title? A couple of us made the case that people don\u2019t think about what those things mean. They can, but they don\u2019t. It\u2019s become a name. And that\u2019s because they\u2019re free-born.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re very happy with what we settled on. We give the actual name in Arabic, then we provide a translation in quotes so that it\u2019s clear that it\u2019s a kind of pet name. And then we use the regular Arabic name again in the context of the anecdote. So we don\u2019t completely fetishize it, but we also don\u2019t protect the English reader from what would\u2019ve been clear to anyone. If you meet someone and their name is Farah. It\u2019s just like if you meet someone whose name is Faith or Hope \u2014 you don\u2019t think about it. But if someone\u2019s name was Treachery, you would notice.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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