military campaign, the jāriyahs keep them short and light.55 What is poignant about their poetry is its ephemerality: it captures and belongs to the moment. And what is especially moving about it is that (in the eyes of Ibn al-Sāʿī, who simplifes but does not traduce the complex vision of Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī) it is identical with the woman who composes it and her precarious situation. As Ibn al-Sāʿī tells it, the poetry of the slave consorts is an act of personal daring and moral agency, which finds its reward in the love of the caliph and sometimes even in marriage.56 This is something considerable, contained in the small compass of the anecdote format.
There have not been many attempts, in modern scholarship, to make distinctions between the jāriyahs as poets and cultural agents, on the one hand, and as romantic heroines and objects of erotic and ethical fantasy, on the other. There are basic surveys of the sources;57 there is a pioneering study of the world of Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī’s Book of Songs;58 and, most recently, there is an exploration of the values underlying the competition between jāriyahs and free male poets and musicians.59 Medieval contemporaries were alive to the social paradox of the woman slave performer as a leader of fashion but also a commodity, an extravagance but also an investment for her owners, able to some extent to turn her status as a chattel to her own profit by manipulating her clients—and they satirized it unsympathetically.60 By comparison, modern reflection on female slavery and its place in medieval Islamic societies is unsophisticated.61 The time span of Consorts of the Caliphs is wider than that of the mid-Abbasid classics which have been the focus of modern scholarship until now, and the life stories it presents of female slaves bring together a greater range of backgrounds and situations and open up more complex perspectives.
Ibn al-Sāʿī’s special contribution to the subject is his seriousness and sympathy, the multiplicity of roles within the dynasty that he identifies for consorts, and his systematic, and challenging, idealization of the woman over the slave.
Julia Bray
MAPS
1. The Abbasid Caliphate
2. Early Baghdad
3. Later Baghdad
4. Later East Baghdad
Note: The maps of Baghdad are based principally on Le Strange, Baghdad (1900), Jawād and Sūsah, Dalīl (1958), Makdisi, “Topography” (1959), Lassner, Topography (1970), and Ahola and Osti, “Baghdad.” In cases where precise locations are not known, the aim has been to give readers of Consorts an idea of the relationships between different places topographically. Outright conjectures are followed by a question mark.
NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION
SHAWKAT M. TOORAWA
The project of translating Ibn al-Sāʿī’s Consorts of the Caliphs was first suggested by Joseph Lowry to the academic alliance Radical Reassessment of Arabic Arts, Language, and Literature (RRAALL), of which he and three other Library of Arabic Literature editors are members—Michael Cooperson, Devin Stewart, and myself, Shawkat Toorawa.62 Having successfully published a collaboratively authored book on Arabic autobiography in 2001,63 RRAALL was looking for a follow-up project. Lowry made the case that Consorts of the Caliphs captured our various and varied interests (the Abbasids, art and archaeology, ethnomusicology, gender, history, language, law, literature, the Saljūqs), that it was short, that it was divided into manageable parts, and that it was of inherent interest.64 By 2008, eight of us had translated consecutive portions and we had a complete if uneven working translation. In 2009, Lowry, Stewart, and I met in Philadelphia to even out the translation and subsequently dispatched it to Cooperson, who made many changes and suggestions. Then the project went quiet.
In 2009, when Philip Kennedy asked me what kinds of works I thought one might include in a “library of Arabic literature”—then still only an idea—I mentioned, among other works, Ibn al-Sāʿī’s little book. I even told him a “draft translation” was available. Later, when the Library of Arabic Literature (LAL) had become a reality, Kennedy (now the LAL’s General Editor), who hadn’t forgotten Ibn al-Sāʿī, mentioned the book to the board. In 2011, Julia Bray suggested that it was an ideal candidate for a collaborative LAL project and so, one morning in New York City, we resolved to take it on, with the blessings of RRAALL and of the LAL board. We realized—as we had been realizing and discovering with other LAL books that we had already edited—that the “draft translation,” in spite of the effort that had been put into it, was less a translation than it was an “Englished” version of the Arabic, in a prose that we have come to think of unflatteringly as “industry standard.”
PROCESS
Our first act was to appoint a project editor from our own LAL editorial board, as we do with all our projects. We chose Julia Bray, who went through the “draft translation” and wrote a report describing what needed to be done to bring it up to LAL standard—something we require for all potential LAL projects. At the same time, we showed it to the distinguished translator Richard Sieburth. With Bray’s and Sieburth’s positive but critical feedback, we decided that it was best to start from scratch. We divided the book into five parts and assigned each part to a team of two; the ten people involved were the eight LAL board members, the managing editor, and Richard Sieburth. After our first workshop we presented our preliminary thoughts and samples of our work at a public event in Abu Dhabi. For the next workshop, we invited Justin Stearns and Maurice Pomerantz (both of New York University Abu Dhabi) to join us and we shuffled around the teams. After these teams had done their translations and conferred among themselves and with one another, I then collated their material, made the various parts consistent based on the principles and choices that we had agreed upon, and e-mailed the material to everyone to read through and ponder.
We held a final workshop during our May 2014 editorial meeting in New York City, where we projected the translation onto a screen and went through it all together, comparing it to the manuscript. At the end of three half-day sessions, we had thrashed out many issues, which involved, among other things, reversing course on certain key decisions. Then, in a final daylong session, Julia Bray (the designated project editor) and I (the designated editor of the book) spent a most genial day going through it all again line by line, establishing new principles, establishing consistency where it was not yet present, and deciding on shape and format. Julia then returned to Oxford and I to Ithaca.
I then went through the entire translation again, implementing all of our decisions, and when I was satisfied I sent it back to Julia Bray to vet carefully. I also sent it to Joseph Lowry for his feedback. After I had incorporated Joe’s feedback and intervened stylistically again myself, we sent the translation to Marina Warner, who very graciously agreed to write a foreword. Julia then sent me further detailed comments and annotations, which I addressed and incorporated, and she proceeded to write her introduction.
At that point, I set about producing fuller notes to the translation. I also prepared preliminary glossaries. LAL policy is to have one unified glossary of names, places, and terms, but in this case we felt that separate glossaries of the authorities (authors and transmitters cited) and the characters featured in the anecdotes, of place names, and of realia would be far more useful to
