Two Amalgamated Ancient Bird Fables in Classical Arabic Literature and Their Shape in Later Popular Prose Tradition: A Comparative Study and Critical Edition
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3989/alqantara.2018.010Keywords:
“Al-Ṣayyād wa-l-Fakhkh wa-l- ʿUṣfūr” (“The Hunter, the Snare and the Sparrow”), adab, Popular Literature, Thousand and One Nights / Arabian NightsAbstract
This paper deals with a short narrative in Arabic which was quite well-known in a number of popular versions, documented in manuscripts of different origins (from Syria, Egypt and North Africa), beginning in the seventeenth century at the latest. It is a narrative describing how a little sparrow is trapped in a hunter’s snare, and how, through stratagems and wittiness, it manages to escape its awful fate. While the narrative occurs relatively frequently in late circles of popular storytelling, many of its substantive elements in diferrent stylistic features, can be traced in Arabic classical medieval writings of Islamic East and West origins, in most cases as two distinct separate fables. The history of this narrative thus moves between the medieval classical literature and the pre-modern popular one. It even touches on the margins of the fickle history of the Arabian Nights. In a recently published paper, we examined a manuscript dated to the seventeenth century, that presents the entire plot as a colloquial Egyptian mawwāl with rhyme and meter. The present manuscript-based study is dedicated to an analysis of the narrative’s popular adaptation tradition into prose.
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