The Tale of al-Barrāq Son of Rawḥān and Laylā the Chaste: A bilingual edition and study
Marlé Hammond
This book is a bilingual edition and study of a lengthy specimen of pre-modern Arabic storytelling. The tale's origins are unknown but it probably dates from the seventeenth century. As a sustained fairy tale of the knight-in-shining-armour-rescues-damsel-in-distress variety, it reads as fiction and was probably intended as such. However, scholars in the Arab renaissance or Nahḍa received the text as history. Its pre-Islamic protagonists, ever emoting in verse, were thus celebrated as some of the earliest Arabic poets. The Arabic text featured in the monograph is sourced from five manuscripts ... More
This book is a bilingual edition and study of a lengthy specimen of pre-modern Arabic storytelling. The tale's origins are unknown but it probably dates from the seventeenth century. As a sustained fairy tale of the knight-in-shining-armour-rescues-damsel-in-distress variety, it reads as fiction and was probably intended as such. However, scholars in the Arab renaissance or Nahḍa received the text as history. Its pre-Islamic protagonists, ever emoting in verse, were thus celebrated as some of the earliest Arabic poets. The Arabic text featured in the monograph is sourced from five manuscripts and three published editions, and it is modelled on what I call the 'Christian' branch of the tale, or that version of the tale which identifies its hero as a Christian and which was promulgated by Christian scholars and literati in the nineteenth century. Two analytical chapters frame the tale: an introductory chapter which charts the evolution of the narrative and its cultural import through to the end of the twentieth century, and a concluding chapter that breaks the story down into its components and compares its structure to both the ʿUdhrī love tale and the popular epic or sīra, thereby situating the text as a hybrid precursor to the modern novel.
Keywords: Al-Barrāq, Laylā the Chaste, Nahḍa, sīra, ʿUdhrī love, novel, fairy tale
Marlé Hammond, author
Professor of History, SOAS University of London
18th-century Literature
A British Academy Monograph
A Note on Transliteration and Terminology
A Note on the Manuscripts and Published Editions
A Note on the Attribution of the Text to ʿUmar b. Shabba
1 From Fiction to History and Back: The Tale, Its Versions and Its Afterlives
2 The Tale of al-Barrāq Son of Rawḥān and Laylā the Chaste: A Translation
3 The Narrative, Its Components and Its 'Novelisation'
Appendix: The Arabic Text