Ahmad al-Shidyaq - Leg over Leg - Volumes Three and Four

Imruʾ al-Qays Imruʾ al-Qays ibn Ḥujr (sixth century AD), a pre-Islamic poet, author of one of the muʿallaqāt (“suspended odes”).

ʿĪsā Jesus.

Islāmbūl Istanbul.

Jubārah, Ghubrāʾīl one of a group of Levantines who supported the author financially and morally during his years in Paris and London; on May 1, 1851 he took the author with him from Paris to London for the opening of the Great Exhibition as a translator and guide.

jubbah an open-fronted mantle with wide sleeves.

Kaḥlā, Rāfāʾīl litterateur and collaborator of al-Shidyāq’s in Paris, who paid for the publication of Al-Sāq ʿalā l-sāq and contributed to it a publisher’s introduction (Volume One, 0.3).

Khawājā a title of reverence and address afforded to Christians of substance.

Majnūn Laylā Qays ibn al-Muwallaḥ (first/seventh century), known as Majnūn Laylā, said to have gone insane ( majnūn ) when his childhood love, Laylā, was married off to another; he came to epitomize obsessive devotion to the beloved and its expression in verse.

maqāmah, plural maqāmāt “ short independent prose narrations written in ornamented rhymed prose ( sajʿ ) with verse insertions which share a common plot scheme and two constant protagonists: the narrator and the hero” (Meisami and Starkey, Encyclopedia , 2/507). The thirteenth chapter of each volume of the present work is described by the author as a maqāmah , the plot scheme in these maqāmāt being a debate. See, further, Zakharia: “Aḥmad Fāris al-Šidyāq.”

Maronite of or pertaining to the Maronite Christian community, whose historical roots lie in northern Syria and Lebanon and whose church, while using Syriac as a liturgical language, is in communion with the Roman Catholic church.

Market-men (sūqiyyūn) the author’s term for the Maronite and Roman Catholic clergy, or the Maronite and Roman Catholic churches in general.

mawāliyā a nonclassical (i.e., not monorhymed) verse form that lends itself to both non-colloquial and colloquial varieties of the language.

Mikhallaʿ (al-), Mikhāʾīl one of the group of Levantines who assisted the author financially and morally during his years in Paris and London, and an early convert to Protestantism.

Mountain (the) Mount Lebanon, a mountain range in Lebanon extending for 170 kilometers parallel to the Mediterranean coast and the historical homeland of both the Maronite and Druze Lebanese communities.

Mūsā Moses.

Muṣṭafā Pasha Muṣṭafā Pasha Khāzindār (1817–78), a Greek slave raised at the Tunisian court who married the sister of the ruler Aḥmad I Muṣṭafā and became treasurer ( khāzindār ) and eventually prime minister of the Tunisian state.

Musurus, Prince Kostaki Musurus (1814 or 1815 to 1891) served as Ottoman ambassador to London without interruption from 1851 until 1885; he translated Dante’s Divine Comedy into Turkish and Greek.

Mutanabbī (al-) Abū l-Ṭayyib Aḥmad ibn Ḥusayn al-Mutanabbī (ca. 303–54/915–65), a poet renowned for his virtuosity and innovation, which he often deployed in praise of the rulers of the day.

Nakhaʿī (al-) the name of a number of related Traditionists, of whom the best known is perhaps Ibrāhīm al-Nakhaʿī (AD 666–71).

Perron, Nicolas (1798–1876) French physician, Arabist, and Saint-Simonist. Perron studied medicine and also took courses at the École des langues orientales, especially those given by Caussin de Perceval. Later he became director of the hospital of Abū Zaʿbal, near Cairo, Egypt’s first health facility based on a Western model.

Qāmūs (al-)Al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ ( The Encompassing Ocean ), a dictionary compiled by Muḥammad ibn Yaʿqūb al-Fīrūzābādī (d. 817/1415) that became so influential that qāmūs (“ocean”) eventually came to mean simply “dictionary.” The author later published a study of the Qāmūs entitled Al-jāsūs ʿalā l-Qāmūs ( The Spy on the Qāmūs ).

Rashīd Pasha, Muṣṭafā (ca. 1800–58) Ottoman politician, diplomat, reformer, litterateur, and traveler. Ambassador to Paris and London, then foreign minister and later chief minister, he met al-Shidyāq during his second tenure as ambassador to Paris and was later instrumental in bringing him to Constantinople.

Reinaud, Joseph Toussaint (1795–1867) French Orientalist; Toussaint succeeded to Silvestre de Sacy’s chair at the École des langues orientales on the latter’s death.

Sāmī Pasha, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān an Ottoman reformer, born in the Peloponnese. He entered Egyptian service in 1821, was appointed director in 1828 of the official gazette, al-Waqāʾiʿ al-Miṣriyyah (where al-Shidyāq may have made his acquaintance), and became the Ottoman Empire’s first minister of education in 1856. He wrote prose and verse in Turkish (al-Maṭwī, Aḥmad , 898–99).

Sayyid al-Raḍī (al-) see Sharīf al-Raḍī (al-).

Sharīf al-Raḍī (al-) Muḥammad ibn Abī Ṭāhir al-Ḥusayn ibn Mūsā (359–406/970–1015), poet and syndic of the descendents of ʿAlī ibn Ṭālib at the Buyid court.

Sībawayhi ʿAmr ibn ʿUthmān ibn Qanbar Sībawayhi (second/eighth century), the creator of systematic Arabic grammar.

Silvestre de Sacy, Antoine Isaac (1758–1838) prominent French philologist who wrote grammars of Arabic and edited a number of Arabic texts, including al-Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmāt .

Ṣubḥī Bayk son of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Sāmī Pasha (q.v.) and later himself also Ottoman minister of education and then governor of Syria (al-Maṭwī, Aḥmad , 902).

Sublime State, the the Ottoman Empire.

Sulaymān Solomon.

tanwīn pronunciation of word-final short vowels followed by —n , thus —un, — an, -in ; also called “nunation.”

Tūnusī (al-), Muḥammad ibn al-Sayyid ʿUmar (ibn Sulaymān) an interpreter at the Abū Zaʿbal medical school who wrote an account of his travels in Darfur in the early nineteenth century.

ʿUdhrī pertaining to the Banū ʿUdhra, a Yemeni tribe, and applied to a type of elegiac love poetry that flourished during the Umayyad period.

wird a section of the Qurʾān specified for recitation at a certain time of day or night or for use in private prayer.

Yāzijī (al-), Sheikh Nāṣīf Nāṣīf al-Yāzijī (1800–71), a leading Maronite scholar of Arabic, prolific author and translator, and contemporary of the author, with whom he was later to maintain a celebrated feud over linguistic issues that was inherited by al-Yāzijī’s son Ibrāhīm after his father’s death (see, e.g., Patel, Arab Nahdah , 103ff).

Yūsuf the Prophet Joseph, whose story is told in the Qurʾān ( Sūrah 12) and who is often invoked in verse as the epitome of young male beauty and virtue.

zaqqūm tree a tree mentioned in the Qurʾān as growing in hell and bearing exceedingly bitter fruit.

Abū Nuwās, al-Ḥasan ibn Hāniʾ. Dīwān . Beirut: Dār Ṣādir and Dār Bayrūt, 1962.

Alwan, Mohammed Bakir. Aḥmad Fāris ash-Shidyāq and the West . Unpublished PhD Dissertation. Indiana University, 1970.

Amīn, Aḥmad. Qāmūs al-ʿādāt wa-l-taqālīd wa-l-taʿābīr al-miṣriyyah . Cairo: Lajnat al-Taʾlīf wa-l-Tarjamah wa-l-Nashr, 1953.