with articles in the series Fatrah min al-Zaman does indeed corroborate the author’s description of the conversion process. The wording of individual phrases is changed, and clarifying detail is often added; the major emphasis is on expansion and clarification rather than contraction. For the second edition of 1912, the author adds a glossary at the end of the text. However, what is most striking about the first edition of the book is that it does not include any of the material in which the Sudan situation is the primary topic; secondly, the original sequence of episodes is altered, requiring a good deal of rewriting and reorganization. In the original articles the visit to the wedding hall comes much earlier in the sequence and is followed by visits to the series of assemblies (majālis), whereas in the book version the assemblies come first in the ordering of episodes. Furthermore, completely new material is included about the plague, derived from a factual article, “Al-Akhlāq fī l-Wabāʾ” (“Ethics During the Epidemic”) that was published in Miṣbāḥ al-sharq 221, September 13, 1902. The first edition (and the two subsequent ones, 1912 and 1923) all finish with the expressed desire to add “the second journey” (al-riḥlah al-thāniyah)—the episodes describing the visit to Paris—to the first (al-riḥlah al-ūlā) at some point in the future. Meanwhile the first three editions of Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām were and are only concerned with the Egyptian context. A further addition to the third edition (1923) was that of titles to the newly established “chapters” created either from the contents of the original articles or, more often, by consolidation of articles into larger units.47
At some point in the 1920s, Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām was adopted as a text for secondary school, and al-Muwayliḥī was invited to prepare a new fourth edition, which was published in 1927. I have not thus far found any specific evidence as to instructions that the author may have received regarding expectations for such a school text, but it is clear that the revision process he undertook before publication of this fourth edition radically altered the critical tone of the work—one that had already been somewhat muted by the process of converting the newspaper articles into a book. His now twenty-year-old wish to include the Paris episodes (al-riḥlah al-thāniyah) to the book was also finally fulfilled. Thus the second part of post–4th edition versions of Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām was added to the list of several previously published contributions by Arab visitors to the analysis of European civilization—in the case of Egypt a trend initiated in the nineteenth century by Rifāʿah Rāfiʿ al-Ṭahṭāwī (1801–71) with his Takhlīṣ al-Ibrīz fī Talkhīṣ Bārīz (The Purification of Gold Concerning the Summary of Paris), originally published in 1834. However, along with this addition to the text, some extremely significant omissions were made. Two complete “assemblies,” one devoted to the shaykhs of al-Azhar discussing the heretical sciences of philosophy and geography and the other to the princes of the royal family who were squabbling with each other over expensive racing stallions, were completely omitted, along with a number of uncomplimentary anecdotes about Muḥammad ʿAlī, founder of the dynasty to which the current Egyptian ruler—now called “king”—belonged. One can only surmise about the decision-making process involved in these omissions, and whether they were made on the author’s own initiative or as the result of a “recommendation” from some official channel, possibly because it was now almost thirty years after the time when the original articles had been composed. Indeed the none too subtle criticism in these episodes may have been reckoned inappropriate for the Egyptian teenage minds who would be studying Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām for the secondary-school examinations known as the thānawiyyah ʿāmmah.48
Whatever the case may be, the book version of Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī’s narrative Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām, originally published in 1907 and the one that has become the best known through a number of subsequent editions and reprints, already differs considerably from the original newspaper articles, and its fourth edition of 1927 takes the process of change still further. When I was asked by Professors Gaber Asfour and Sabry Hafez in the 1990s to prepare a new edition of the author’s complete works (and those of his father) for a new series, Ruwwād al-Fann al-Qaṣaṣī (Pioneers of the Narrative Art) to be published by al-Majlis al-Aʿlā li-l-Thaqāfah (Supreme Council for Culture) in Cairo, I was already aware of the differences between the various editions of this work which had long since come to be regarded as a foundational contribution to the development of modern Arabic narrative—looking both forward and backward in time, a genuine “bridge-work.” It was on that basis that I prepared the text for publication, using the resources that I had myself collected—in handwritten form—as part of my Oxford doctoral research in 1966. That work was published in two volumes in 2002. However, with advancements in computer technology and research methods, I have now been able to access the complete archive of the al-Muwayliḥī newspaper, Miṣbāḥ al-sharq, and have discovered that even what I thought was a “complete” edition of the text is in fact not entirely complete.
I am grateful to the Library of Arabic Literature (LAL) for giving me the opportunity to produce for the first time a version of the sequence of all the episodes of the original series of articles al-Muwayliḥī wrote and published that are introduced by a narrator named ʿĪsā ibn Hishām, whether or not they are part of the series called Fatrah min al-Zaman. That decision on my part, of course, raises some significant questions. Al-Muwayliḥī’s description of his own revision process in converting the original articles into book form clearly indicates an aspiration on his part to turn something that was published in a context that he describes as “ephemeral” into a more permanent form. However the notion of ephemerality that he associates with newspaper publication and invokes to explain his rationale for revision is only part of the story. If we examine the sequence of the original articles closely and follow his lead in omitting entirely the “dry run” set of four articles devoted to the Sudan (and the somewhat curious return to the topic inserted in the initial sequence of Fatrah min al-Zaman), then the series seems to fall into four subseries: the Pāshā’s initial encounter with the Egyptian legal system in which both he and ʿĪsā ibn Hishām are centrally involved in the action; the period spent away so as to avoid the plague and allow the Pāshā to recover, in which there is considerably less action; the series of “assemblies”; and finally the episodes involving the ʿUmdah and his two colleagues—in both these last two sequences ʿĪsā and the Pāshā fade almost completely into the background once the context has been established. Thus, if one is to apply some notions of Western narratological analysis to the resulting book text, one can say that al-Muwayliḥī’s careful reworking of the newspaper articles does provide for a more convincing sequence of “events,” but does little or nothing to affect the varying roles of two of the principal “characters.”
Several Egyptian critics have tried to make of Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām an incipient novel, but I would suggest that an investigation of the work’s origins ties it as closely, if not more so, to the more episodic model of the classical maqāmah genre that is deliberately being invoked by the use of ʿĪsā ibn Hishām as a participant narrator, duly derived from al-Hamadhānī’s tenth-century model. To the episodic nature of the individual articles can be added yet another feature of al-Hamadhānī’s creations, namely their resort to “prosimetrum,” the regular inclusion of lines of poetry within a cursive prose narrative. One might even go on to suggest that, if al-Muwayliḥī’s attempt at producing a more logically sequenced narrative out of the original article series Fatrah min al-Zaman was a reflection of his acquaintance with and understanding of fictional models of that era, then the episodic and even fragmented nature of the story in its article format is a much closer reflection of his “classical” model in al-Hamadhānī’s maqāmāt and may indeed emerge therefrom as almost postmodern.
This translation, the first ever in book form to include all the original articles narrated by a nineteenth-century Egyptian called ʿĪsā ibn Hishām and published in Miṣbāḥ al-sharq at the turn of the nineteenth century, will thus re-establish their author’s text firmly within the political and cultural context within which they were conceived and on which they regularly commented. The availability of different
