There are many verse forms to which the Egyptian folk singer may resort for narrative purposes. The most demanding is the mawwāl, with its set rhyming patterns and elaborate punning rhymes. At the other extreme is the singing to a repetitive tune of mono-rhyme stanzas usually consisting of three lines, but sometimes stretched to four or five if the performer needs space to round off the information he wants to convey. Each of these stanzas is then followed by a refrain in which the accompanists usually join the soloist.

A slight elaboration of this strophic arrangement is the expansion of the tercets by the addition of a fourth line with a distinctive rhyme shared by the closing line of what are now quatrains, so that the arrangement may be represented as:

bbbA cccA dddA … zzzA

Such a song may (but need not) also have a refrain that shares the binding rhyme.

The resulting pattern is one often encountered in the Andalusian zajal, or even earlier in the musammaṭ with which >Abū-Nuwās (d. 813) and some of his contemporaries experimented and of which the murabba< version has the same rhyme scheme, now a favourite in a great variety of songs.

Yet the trend appears to be for the leading or most ambitious folk singers to turn increasingly to the mawwāl with its elaborate rhyme schemes, and their taste for zahr is such that some try to expand every rhyme to a multi-syllabic paronomasia achieved by distortion of the normal pronunciation.

In the course of the field work which eventually led to the publication of my Ballads, I made it a practice to ask as few leading questions as possible in order to let my informants reveal their own priorities. What emerged was that among the ballad-mongers who did not specialise in the epic cycle of the Hilālīs, by far the most popular themes were accounts of ‘honour crimes’ in which fierce retribution is visited upon women who offend against the strict (if unequal) code of conduct still prevalent among the masses. Closely allied were other feats of bravery and violence, mainly motivated by revenge. Following at some distance were ballads of a religious character, either embroidering a Qur>anic story or recounting the deeds of a holy man.

Not once was I volunteered a song celebrating some national event and reflecting the kind of loyalty to the state that is very much in honour among the educated modernists – what Albert Hourani has defined as ‘territorial nationalism’ to distinguish it from pan-Arabism or pan-Islamism.

One of my informants was Muḥammad Ramaḍān Sayyid Aḥmad, known as Abū Ðrā<, that is, ‘the One-Armed’. He was of peasant stock. His first home had been with his mother and stepfather, but when he was about five years old his father – whom he had not known before – claimed him and took him to Uṭūr in the district of Kafr iš-Šēx near Ṭanṭā in the Delta.

On 3 September 1948, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn (1889–1973) published in al-Ahrām an article titled ‘Šahrazād’. It was one of the regular pieces he contributed to the newspaper even while vacationing in France. It seems to have been occasioned by accounts in the French press of two plays sharing that title. But it is his broader observations which reveal, by what is said or by what is implied, the cultural climate in which he and his contemporaries reacted to Alf Layla. So let me give you the gist of the article in Ṭāhā Ḥusayn's own words:

I was born and grew up in Egypt as a British (colonial) subject. This made me part of the privileged European community which – especially in its largest concentrations in Alexandria and Cairo – could function largely in isolation from Egyptian society. Not so my own family: my father's occupation as a bank official entailed residence in provincial towns where European families were counted by the tens rather than by the thousands, and by disposition both he and even more my mother were open to friendly relations with Egyptians; and as far as I have been able to ascertain they were the very first foreigners to decide that their sons should attend Egyptian schools where Arabic was the medium of instruction.

This did not shatter all barriers. When later I wrote a memoir combining my mother's reminiscences with an account of my own intellectual formation, the title I gave it was Landlocked Islands (American University in Cairo Press, 1999), for my home language and cultural leanings were French, and I was well aware that although we had daily, casual and good-natured contacts with Egyptians, there were unmapped gulfs between us. But what is significant in the present context is that I was at ease with my friends' literary perceptions, and for leisurely reading I turned as comfortably to a book of Arabic fiction as I might to a collection of French poetry.

In 1893, M. Urbain Bouriant, then Director of the French Archaeological Mission in Cairo, published a volume entitled Chansons Populaires Arabes en dialecte du Caire d'après les manuscrits d'un chanteur des rues. The book consists of 160 pages of carefully edited and very well printed texts, with no comment or study of any kind. A note from the publisher, however, refers to the ‘stroke of good fortune’ that brought the manuscripts into M. Bouriant's hands and announces that the selection presented then was only a forerunner of a translation and study to appear later. Sadly, M. Bouriant was struck down by ill-health in 1895, and as far as I have been able to ascertain never fulfilled his intention of following up on a very promising beginning.

More recently, Muḥammad Qandīl al-Baqlī has published a volume which, though he makes reference in it to a ‘booklet’ by Bouriant, he claims to be the result of painstaking independent research and a careful confrontation of texts. The truth is, however, that al-Baqlī has drawn solely on Bouriant's material, which he reproduces almost in its entirety, even to incorporating the Frenchman's conjectural emendations. And without mentioning that this material came from the hands of a street singer (indeed, he speaks vaguely of sources accessible only to the wellinformed), he builds round it what he claims is a survey of ‘dervish’ literature.

>Abū l-Maḥāsin <Abd al-<Azīz ibn Sarāyā l-Ḥillī ṭ-Ṭā>ī s-Sinbisī, known as Ṣafiyy ad-Dīn al-Ḥillī, who was born in Ḥilla in 677/1278 and died in Baghdad probably in 750/1349, is notable for his ventures in the highways and byways of verse composition. He not only had a solid reputation as a poet in the late classical manner, but also initiated the badī<iyya genre with a poem in praise of the Prophet which illustrated every rhetorical device known in his day; he composed a qaṣīda sāsāniyya, which expounds the ways, and uses the jargon, of the underworld of vagabonds, beggars and thieves; and he is the author of one of the earliest and fullest treatises on the so-called ‘Seven Arts’, that is, non-classical verse compositions, mostly in the colloquial.

It is to this last work that we turn our attention here. In it, al-Ḥillī – like many of the scholars of his and of later times – repeatedly displays his admiration for the subtleties of which the non-classical genres are capable; yet he is mildly defensive about his involvement with them, for after a long exposition of the features of zajal based on a meticulous scrutiny of the practice of its pioneers, he prefaces his description of the other varieties with the statement that he had indulged in them a great deal ‘in his youth’ without lending his compositions great weight or troubling to record them, and had retained of them only enough to illustrate the book he had been ‘charged’ to write.

Introduction

Long neglected and indeed despised by the Arabs themselves, literary compositions in colloquial idioms are now beginning to receive serious attention from Arab scholars. Not surprisingly, for the field is vast, so specific a genre as the narrative ballad has been touched on only in the context of broader studies.

The subject is both hedged and criss-crossed with theoretical and technical questions. How distinctively ‘folk’ are these compositions? How do they relate to the better known recorded literature that has so far been called ‘Arabic’ without further qualification? How ancient, how ‘pure’ a tradition do they perpetuate? Into what metrical and musical forms do they fall, and where do these derive from? To what extent do intellectuals contribute to them, or interfere with them? How stable are the texts? How are they composed and transmitted? How reliant are the practitioners on the techniques of oral composition? How local is their art? What conventions do they observe?

There is no scope here to do more than state that I have come across such a variety of forms and techniques as can be fitted into only the most elastic of theories. I have also been impressed by a number of linguistic features: the extent of the vocabulary; the inconsistencies in vocalisation and even in gemination; and the fact that the same performer will sometimes combine features of what are generally held to be different regional dialects.

The Arab elite has often condemned or even more generally ignored folk literature. Even leading modernists like Ṭāhā Ḥusayn (1889–1973) looked upon colloquial forms of Arabic as debased. This in itself made the compositions of the common people unworthy of a serious man's attention except as entertainment. Furthermore, most Arab writers of the twentieth century saw themselves not only as artists but also as agents of cultural and social reform, and shied away from themes that struck them as trivial or reactionary.

The resulting gap is indeed wide between the perceptions of the educated, especially those who have received a Western type of education and have adopted a Western type of dress – the efendis – and the gallabiyya wearers, who form the great majority of the population in the countryside and the poorer quarters of the cities. And nowhere is the gap wider than on the theme of honour crimes.

These account for most of the violence that occurs in an otherwise peaceable society, for its inherited ethos calls out for blood in two situations that brook no compromise. The first is the ṯr, which requires a murder to be avenged by a male member of the victim's family. The second demands that a woman who has departed from the strictest standards of chastity to be slaughtered by a near male relative, usually her father or her brother.

For about a thousand years, perhaps even longer, Arab creativity has found outlets not only in lofty compositions retaining the syn tax (if not always the vocabulary) of the language in which the Qur>ān was revealed, but also in the coining of proverbs, the sing ing of songs, the recitation of poems, the telling of tales and the presentation of rather rudimentary playlets and puppet shows, all in the local dialects. Yet the immensely powerful and constant at tachment of Arab intellectuals to their ‘classical’ language was such that only texts couched in this idiom were deemed worthy of serious attention, and it is these alone that Arab scholars and Orientalists alike habitually call ‘Arabic literature’ without further qualification. Anything expressed in the colloquial, when not openly scorned, was looked upon as mere entertainment; more often than not the text went unrecorded, the artistry unrecognised, the author unremembered. Modern Arabs have altered their attitude to the language quite substantially in some respects, but – perhaps for the very reason that they are caught up in momentous social and intellectual changes – only a handful of scholars among them have begun to give serious attention to this ‘popular literature’, which they are used to treating with more familiarity than respect.

The character of this literature, and above all the lines of demarcation between it and the literature of the educated elite, are not as easy to determine as may seem at first sight.

One of many tantalising passages in al-Bayān wa t-Tabyīn comes in the context of the discussion of the superior eloquence of the Arabs, and proclaims the need to examine ‘how the Arabs came to tailor measured tunes to measured verses, combining measured with measured, whereas non-Arabs distort words – now contracting, now stretching them – in order to fit them into the measure of the tune, so that they combine the measured with the unmeasured’. Alas, the ebullient but undisciplined author never gets round to elaborating or illustrating his statement, and one is left with little more than an indication – scarcely surprising in an age of tumultuous racial and cultural contacts – that a multiplicity of artistic traditions was forcing itself on the attention of the intellectuals. Any resulting cross-fertilisation was presumably resisted by Arab and Arabised intellectuals of al-Jāḥiẓ's temper. It may nevertheless have played a part in the multi-rhyme experiments ascribed to Baššar b. Burd, Abū Nuwās and other poets of renown; it may account for the appearance in Umayyad times of the mutaqārib metre, soon integrated into ‘classical’ prosody; it may even have played a part in the emergence of the xazal genre in poetry. The role of Persians in the development of Arab singing has long been recognised. To what extent the popular literature of Arabic-speaking peoples was an amalgam of different lores and traditions can only be conjectured.

The ‘Other’ in Egyptian Folk Literature

Despite an apparently straightforward title, I have to start with some caveats and reservations, for it is by no means easy to determine what the limits of folk literature are in an Arabic-speaking country. Least of all must it be assumed that it conforms with popular notions of what its European cousins were or are like. Thus, it is only partially true that its compositions are anonymous, or are the creations of illiterate authors, or are confined to the countryside, or are composed and transmitted only orally.

In a book-length study of a single genre in Egyptian folk literature I have argued that the least diffuse of the criteria by which a composition may be judged to be genuinely ‘folk’ is the public to which it is addressed. This public is at the opposite pole from the minority who have acquired a Western type of education and who produce the ‘high’ literature too often assumed to be representative of modern Arab societies. The bulk of this public consists of illiterate villagers, but it also includes millions who reside in the poorer quarters of cities, and possibly also a fair number of those who have had a modicum of traditional Islamic education.

An extreme example that I mentioned in my book is that of a prolific versifier who was city-bred, had an Azhar education, made a living as a clerk in the railway yards in Cairo, never performed in public, but either taught his compositions to others or had them printed in cheap booklets.

The entire field of Arabic folk literature has long been neglected, not least by Arab scholars whose concern until very recently has been almost exclusively with texts composed in the classical language. Understandably, Western Arabists too have largely confined themselves to material they encountered in Arab written sources. Some interest has finally been awakened in humbler aspects of Arab creativity, the most solid work being done mainly on the folk epic cycles, especially the one that is still alive today: the Hilāliyya.

No less important and no less indicative of the perceptions, priorities and artistic potential of the common people (as against the educated elite) are narrative ballads – usually running to about two hundred lines each – many of which are woven round some contemporary occurrences. The favourite theme is in fact the ‘honour crime’, the story of a woman who has deviated from the strict code of sexual ethics and thereby placed on a close male relative – usually her father or her brother – the duty of ‘washing the family's honour’ in her blood. It is three versions of just such a story – the story of Ḥasan and Na<īma – that are presented here. They deal with a crime that took place in 1938, and that differed startlingly from the usual pattern in that it was the man and not the woman involved in the scandal who was killed. And no less startling is the treatment by the folk artists, who for once do not glorify the gory deed but are sympathetic to the lovers – or at least to the male.

The pre-Islamic Arab's strongest loyalty was to a tribe. This was essential to his everyday concerns; but already before Islam he was aware that he and his fellow tribesmen were part of a wider entity. What was the mainstay of this entity? It was not a geographic unit: there is no single word for Arabia in Arabic; instead, one speaks of bilād al-<arab, ‘the settlements (in the plural) of the Arabs’. If not territory, what? Ethnicity, no doubt, as is indicated by the fact that not only tribes but also some tribal groups claimed a common forefather. But I hold the view – which I admit is not widely shared by my colleagues – that, to a larger extent than is true of other peoples, language has been and remains a key constituent of the Arabs' self-view and self-esteem. My evidence is that when they spoke of their ancestry, the Arabs distinguished between the ‘Arabiser’ and the ‘Arabised’ Arabs (al-<arab al-<āribah and al-<arab al-musta<ribah), terms that, when used in conjunction have virtually always been glossed as denoting a linguistic process. Furthermore, most of the commonly used derivatives from the <-r-b root denote expressiveness, even when speech is not involved, as when a woman displaying affection for her husband is said to be <arūb. In contrast <ajam, the word that pre-Islamic Arabs used for ‘foreigners’ or more specifically ‘Persians’, comes from a root the primary sense of which is ‘to chew’, presumably implying that they seem to chew their words, and most of the other derivatives from <-j-m carry the sense of ‘indistinctiveness’, or ‘obscurity’.

When I was collecting Egyptian narrative ballads, mainly in the 1970s and 1980s, by far the most popular were accounts of ‘honour crimes’, so-called because they celebrated violent deeds committed to avenge the murder of a kinsman as in the story of l-Adham iš-Šar>˜āwī, or to punish a woman's offence against sexual ethics as in the many versions of Šafī>˜a w Mitwalli and of Ḥasan u Na<īma. It was these that one performer after another sang, each in his own words. It was these that the folk singers most commonly offered if the choice was left to them. Even national events, including the wars that have wracked the Middle East since 1948, held the folk poets’ attention only for a brief span.

And yet in my collection is a handful of songs that are placed in a contemporary setting, but are of a more universal and less distinctively Egyptian character. They tell at length of dastardly deeds, of the sufferings of their victims and of the eventual triumph of justice, often through the intervention of the police and the courts.

The performers are unquestionably genuine folk singers, the delivery is characteristic of their style and the texts all display, to a greater or lesser extent, their delight in zahr, literally ‘the flower’ which requires rhymes to be inflated into multiple and usually polysyllabic paronomasias achieved by extensive distortion of the normal pronunciation of words.