{"id":15462,"date":"2017-08-05T06:30:59","date_gmt":"2017-08-05T10:30:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=15462"},"modified":"2017-08-05T06:30:59","modified_gmt":"2017-08-05T10:30:59","slug":"on-translating-aishah-al-bauniyyah-perhaps-arabics-most-prolific-premodern-woman-writer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/on-translating-aishah-al-bauniyyah-perhaps-arabics-most-prolific-premodern-woman-writer\/","title":{"rendered":"On Translating \u2018A\u2019ishah al-Ba\u2019uniyyah, Perhaps Arabic\u2019s Most Prolific Premodern Woman\u00a0Writer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Saturday Summer Re-runs by\u00a0MLYNXQUALEY<\/a><\/span><\/span> on<\/em> 0<\/a> )<\/span><\/p>\n

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Th. Emil Homerin, editor-translator of the recently-published <\/i>The Principles of Sufism<\/a>, has long been interested in the work of \u2018A\u2019ishah al-Ba\u2019uniyyah, who is perhaps the most prolific and prominent woman who wrote in Arabic prior to the modern period. Homerin, a professor of religion and former chair of the Department of Religion & Classics at the University of Rochester, previously translated a collection of al-Ba\u2019uniyyah\u2019s poems as\u00a0<\/i>Emanations of Grace, and likens her work to that of the famous Persian poet, Jalal al-Din Rumi.
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\"Emil-Homerin-PhotoS\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Th. Emil Homerin<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

In a Skype interview originally published on the Library of Arabic Literature<\/a>, Homerin talked about how he found al-Ba\u2019uniyyah\u2019s manuscripts\u2014which was like finding \u201ca needle in a haystack\u201d\u2014and what changes when you can read Sufi poetry alongside the author\u2019s own spiritual guidebook.<\/i><\/p>\n

Originally published in 2014, this interview is a re-run for Women in Translation Month (#WITMonth).<\/em><\/p>\n

ArabLit: Before translating\u00a0The Principles of Sufism,\u00a0<\/i>you worked on translating a collection of \u2018A\u2019ishah\u2019s poetry,\u00a0Emanations of Grace.<\/i>\u00a0How did you come to these works?<\/b><\/p>\n

Th. Emil Homerin:\u00a0<\/strong>One of the times I\u2019d gone over to Egypt, I was working on the poetry from the Mamluk period, basically 1250-1517.<\/p>\n

I was looking for all sorts of poets, but part of my concern was to see if I could find women poets. I had read about women poets, I had their names\u2014hers I did not have\u2014but of others. People would say, \u2018Oh, such-and-such a woman wrote poetry,\u2019 but you could never find it. Or you might find one or two poems, or a few verses in a death notice.<\/p>\n

So basically I was spending time at Dar al-Kutub and its manuscript collection in Cairo, and I would just go through the titles list, looking though books of poetry and hoping that I could find one by a woman. It was like trying to find a needle in a haystack.<\/p>\n

Then I saw an elderly gentleman walk over to a wall I hadn\u2019t really noticed before. And there was an old card catalog over there. I went over and asked him, \u2018Sir, what is this?\u201d And he was kind of surprised, here\u2019s this blond kid talking to him in Arabic. He said, \u201cThis is the card catalog from the 1920s.\u201d And I said, \u201cYou don\u2019t use the catalog by title?\u201d And he said, \u201cYes, I use that too, but this one sometimes is better, but I hate to tell you this, it\u2019s by author.\u201d And I just smiled and said, \u201cThank you so much.\u201d<\/p>\n

And then I start writing down women\u2019s names in Arabic.<\/p>\n

And then I went into the card catalog, and after a while, lo and behold, I find \u2018A\u2019ishah. And that led me to the manuscripts.<\/p>\n

AL: You were working with a number of other poets at the time. But you focused on \u2018A\u2019ishah. Why?<\/b><\/p>\n

TEH:\u00a0<\/strong>First of all, I had a collection of poetry by a woman. It still may be one of the only ones by a woman in Arabic. There\u2019s also one by Wallada [bint al-Mustakfi], who was a Muslim in Andalusia who wrote in the eleventh century.<\/p>\n

Then I started reading, and I found out it\u2019s Sufi verse, and that\u2019s my specialty, and I thought, \u201cThis is great.\u201d And then I found her guide book, and I thought, \u201cGood Lord, I\u2019ve got the ability to read what her mystical doctrines are and compare them to her poetry.\u201d Because so many mystical poets never wrote a guidebook, or anything in prose; you\u2019re always trying to tease out what they may or may not believe, or what school of Islamic mysticism they belong to, and so forth, according to their poetry. But here I had sources that told me exactly what she believed.<\/p>\n

AL: What\u2019s sustained your interest in \u2018A\u2019ishah\u2019s work?<\/b><\/p>\n

TEH:\u00a0<\/strong>\u2018A\u2019ishah is one of the very few women mystics in Islam who wrote and spoke for herself prior to the modern period. That gives us some important perspectives from the viewpoint of a woman on her society, on Islamic mysticism, and on Islam in general.<\/p>\n

AL: Do you read \u2018A\u2019ishah\u2019s writing as somehow gendered? Are there particular markers that tell you \u201cthis is a woman\u201d\u2014stylistically, tonally, word choice?<\/b><\/p>\n

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The one exception would be that, in many of her mystical love poems, she assumes the role of a woman with God or the prophet Muhammad as her lover. This is \u201clover\u201d in the sense of her beloved, but not necessarily in any kind of passionate sense. And so she will keep, in her better poems, an ambiguity, so you don\u2019t know if she\u2019s talking about her husband or her Sufi master or Muhammad or God. There\u2019s a nice ambiguity there.<\/strong><\/em><\/h3>\n<\/blockquote>\n

TEH:\u00a0<\/strong>The short answer is: No.<\/p>\n

The one exception would be that, in many of her mystical love poems, she assumes the role of a woman with God or the prophet Muhammad as her lover. This is \u201clover\u201d in the sense of her beloved, but not necessarily in any kind of passionate sense. And so she will keep, in her better poems, an ambiguity, so you don\u2019t know if she\u2019s talking about her husband or her Sufi master or Muhammad or God. There\u2019s a nice ambiguity there.<\/p>\n

In one of the articles that I have written, I took a look at how Aisha was viewed by her contemporaries. And they basically viewed her as they viewed a male Sufi master\u2014using the same epitaphs and so forth, only in the feminine form. And looking at her work, for instance\u00a0The Principles of Sufism,\u00a0<\/i>it is very much in the classical mode of a Sufi guide. And I really can\u2019t say that I see any particular emphasis that I ascribe to gender.<\/p>\n

AL: What about the encouraging positivity in which the book is suffused? Would you find a similar positivity in a work by a male mystic?<\/b><\/p>\n

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The person who I would compare her to is Jalal al-Din Rumi, the great Persian poet.<\/strong><\/em><\/h3>\n<\/blockquote>\n

TEH:\u00a0<\/strong>Sometimes. It depends on the mystic. The person who I would compare her to is Jalal al-Din Rumi, the great Persian poet. He was always an optimist, and he was living in trying times up there in Anatolia in the thirteenth century. He was always confident of God\u2019s mercy, of God\u2019s love, and we see that in \u2018A\u2019ishah\u2019s work as well.<\/p>\n

You can have other male mystics who are not nearly as optimistic, who are maybe a little more droll or concerned with divine chastisement. Although \u2018A\u2019ishah quotes a range of authors, overall though, in the end, she\u2019s got that positive aspect. And I think that\u2019s another thing that made her endearing to me to spend time translating. I\u2019m not one who\u2019d want to translate the blues all the time.<\/p>\n

AL: Is that positivity part of what made her popular in her time?<\/b><\/p>\n

TEH:\u00a0<\/strong>That was probably something that attracted attention to her. Another thing that really attracted attention to her is that she is a very fine poet, and she really understands the Arabic poetic tradition. So in some of her other works, for instance one of her poems called \u201cThe Clear Inspiration,\u201d she quotes or refers to fifty other classical poets. That\u2019s a showing-off, too. But it really shows her skills.<\/p>\n

Her uncle, Ibrahim, was considered one of the best Arab poets of his generation. According to some sources, she studied with him. So I think that her poetic ability, and it comes over into her prose, was very attractive to her contemporaries.<\/p>\n

AL: But, in\u00a0The Principles of Sufism,<\/i>\u00a0there\u2019s really no way to see that she\u2019s a woman. If you didn\u2019t know her name, would there be something about her work that you\u2019d find particularly female?<\/b><\/p>\n

TEH:\u00a0<\/strong>I don\u2019t think I\u2019d know that, no.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s noteworthy about\u00a0The Principles of Sufism\u00a0<\/i>is she\u2019s very careful to quote her sources. Now, this is also rare. Part of it may be that she\u2019s writing a little later than many others who wrote Sufi guidebooks.<\/p>\n

She\u2019s very careful to quote her sources, and almost all of the sources are books by men. There are stories of pious women, but there are no quotations from other women, because this may be the first Sufi guidebook written by a woman.<\/p>\n

AL: Growing up in Damascus in the fifteenth century, would her education have been different from her brothers\u2019?<\/b><\/p>\n

TEH:\u00a0<\/strong>No, her education was not different. We know for a fact it was exactly the same as her five brothers. Her father was the chief judge of Damascus, so this was a very prominent family. That\u2019s oftentimes the trend, when you find learned women\u2014and there are a quite a few of them throughout Islamic history\u2014most of them come from elite families that could afford to give their daughters the same education, or an education, as they did their sons.<\/p>\n

AL: So that wouldn\u2019t have been unusual, to educate a daughter of the family exactly as the sons?<\/b><\/p>\n

TEH:<\/strong> No.<\/p>\n

AL: You wrote elsewhere that it wasn\u2019t usual for women to teach and be scholars in the Mamluk regions, but that they rarely\u2014as \u2018A\u2019ishah did\u2014composed their own original work. Why do you suppose? What is the line?\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

TEH:\u00a0<\/strong>Well, I can only speculate. Did they have the time? Did they have the ambition? \u2018A\u2019ishah comes off as a very strong, very confident person who was not afraid to write and put things down. Again, she came from a family that did that. And we do have some bits and pieces of poetry from other women, but just not complete collections. So we do have poems for sure. And, to be blunt, there could be things out there by other women and we just don\u2019t know it. The manuscript collections are immense.<\/p>\n

AL: Who read \u2018A\u2019ishah\u2019s work during her lifetime? Both men and women? More often men?<\/b><\/p>\n

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Certainly her poems would\u2019ve been recited among men. She exchanged poems with male scholars when she was in Cairo; we have the exchanges. So they\u2019re writing poems back to each other. Oftentimes poems of praise, and they\u2019re being clever with their plays on words and names and so forth. It\u2019s a kind of educated pastime among the elite, sharing poems.<\/strong><\/em><\/h3>\n<\/blockquote>\n

TEH:\u00a0<\/strong>We don\u2019t know that much about what women were doing at this time\u2013this is why she\u2019s very important. But she probably recited these poems to other women, and that could\u2019ve included the sultan\u2019s wife, because they had mutual friends when she was in Egypt.<\/p>\n

Certainly her poems would\u2019ve been recited among men. She exchanged poems with male scholars when she was in Cairo; we have the exchanges. So they\u2019re writing poems back to each other. Oftentimes poems of praise, and they\u2019re being clever with their plays on words and names and so forth. It\u2019s a kind of educated pastime among the elite, sharing poems.<\/p>\n

AL: And there\u2019s no reference to men writing or saying,\u00a0\u2018<\/i>A woman shouldn\u2019t be doing this sort of thing.\u2019<\/b><\/p>\n

TEH:\u00a0<\/strong>Oh no. When she\u2019s in Cairo and she\u2019s having these exchanges, she\u2019s a widow. She\u2019s probably in her fifties. Her son is with her, and he\u2019s working as a secretary for the Sultan, and she\u2019s living in the quarters of a family friend with his wife. Certainly somebody\u2019s going to take exception, you\u2019re always going to have conservative elements, but we don\u2019t know of it.<\/p>\n

AL: So\u00a0The Principles of Sufism,\u00a0<\/i>her guidebook: Do we have a sense of how many people read it and used it and how readers used it?<\/b><\/p>\n

\"Homerin\"<\/a><\/i>TEH:<\/strong>\u00a0<\/i>No. So far, the manuscript I use is the only complete manuscript I know about. There are parts of it in another manuscript in Cairo, but it\u2019s not complete. Because of the civil war in Syria, I haven\u2019t been able to get there to find out what they might have, because she spent most of her life in Damascus. I did look when I was in Istanbul, and they have some books by her father and her uncles, but they don\u2019t have this one either. That\u2019s not totally surprising, because they have more Turkish than Arabic, but for a while they controlled Cairo.<\/p>\n

That might tell you that it wasn\u2019t used that much, because we don\u2019t have that many copies. Whereas her poetry, we have quite a few copies of those. But that could just also be chance.<\/p>\n

AL: But in general, \u2018A\u2019ishah wrote for a broad audience?<\/b><\/p>\n

TEH:<\/strong> I believe so, yes. Literacy was probably fairly high in Cairo and Damascus because of Qu\u2019ran schools and so forth, so that people could read. We know for instance that merchants and artisans could read, not just the scholarly cadre. But also, people would read these things out loud. So that\u2019s another teaching mechanism. So I think she saw herself as having a broad audience.<\/p>\n

AL: In translating the work, were there parts you found particularly challenging?<\/b><\/p>\n

TEH:\u00a0<\/strong>Sometimes the meaning of the words, or she\u2019s using obscure forms. Other times she\u2019s using colloquial elements, which can be fun. That\u2019s where we usually can bring in contractions and more American English to translate. That can be enjoyable.<\/p>\n

AL: It took you around ten years of working on and off on the translation of \u2018A\u2019ishah\u2019s poems,\u00a0Emanations of Grace.\u00a0<\/i>Does translating her poetry take more time that translating \u2018A\u2019ishah\u2019s prose?<\/b><\/p>\n

TEH:\u00a0<\/strong>When I was working on Aisha\u2019s poems, I had to edit them first, because they were still in manuscript. After I translate a poem, I don\u2019t really want to publish it for two years. I want to be able to come back and work it over and think it through.<\/p>\n

So right up until the time of publishing, as it went to the press, I was still tinkering with translations. The prose is more straightforward. It doesn\u2019t mean that there weren\u2019t issues there that I didn\u2019t have to go through and work over. That\u2019s usually less of a problem.<\/p>\n

AL: Beyond specialists, who do you imagine as the audience for this book?<\/b><\/p>\n

TEH:\u00a0<\/strong>I would hope that those interested in feminist literature would read it. We\u2019ve got a number of people who\u2019ve been interested in women in Islam, and \u2018A\u2019ishah\u2019s work is an amazing resource for looking at a woman scholar, and issues regarding women and religion, certainly in classical Islam, but I would also say Islam and religion in general.<\/p>\n

The Principles of Sufism\u00a0<\/i>is important for two additional reasons. One, here we have a woman writer, so you can at least get some idea of what she believed, and what her background and sources were. Secondly, in terms of Islamic mysticism in general,\u00a0Principles of Sufism<\/i>\u00a0is a valuable book for showing us what sources and resources were available. What part of the tradition is she tapping into? Because she quotes her sources, we know that she\u2019s reading the classics of Islamic mysticism, like the epistle by al-Qushayri and reading contemporary poets, or poets who were nearly contemporary with her, and quoting them. So you can see what she\u2019s reading. And I think that\u2019s important for seeing, at least in her case, how that tradition is manifesting and developing itself in Cairo and Syria in a very important time in Islamic history.<\/p>\n

AL: And historians?<\/b><\/p>\n

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Also\u2014she\u2019s interacting with men. We don\u2019t see any sign of anyone being upset about this in the circles in which she operated in Cairo and Damascus.\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/h3>\n<\/blockquote>\n

TEH:\u00a0<\/strong>In terms of history, you have an educated woman, and here\u2019s what she studied, and here\u2019s who she interacted with. Also\u2014she\u2019s interacting with men. We don\u2019t see any sign of anyone being upset about this in the circles in which she operated in Cairo and Damascus. This is telling you something about social relations. She is a singular source, for if you want to understand an educated woman, who are you going to read? You can read men talking about women, and historians have used these. But here you have a woman talking about herself.<\/p>\n

AL: Are there other audiences who would be interested?<\/b><\/p>\n

TEH:\u00a0<\/strong>I would think, too, that you do have a lot of men and women who are looking to their own self-help or spiritual development. And if they\u2019re concerned with Islam, this is an invaluable resource.<\/p>\n

AL: Or even for those who aren\u2019t specifically interested in spiritual guidance, it is certainly uplifting.<\/b><\/p>\n

TEH:\u00a0<\/strong>What I like about the Library of Arabic Literature is that we\u2019re editing and translating the text and it\u2019s in its complete form. We\u2019re not dumbing it down, we\u2019re not editing it out, we\u2019re not eliding certain elements a general readership wouldn\u2019t like or appreciate. And I think that\u2019s very important. Because \u2018A\u2019ishah was a scholar, she is writing for other scholars, but she\u2019s also writing for the spiritual novice who wants to understand what to do in order to let go of selfishness and find grace.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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