SAPIENZA - UNIVERSIT DI ROMA DIPARTIMENTO DI STUDI ORIENTALI

SCRITTI IN ONORE DI BIANCAMARIA SCARCIA AMORETTI

Volume II

A cura di Daniela Bredi - Leonardo Capezzone Wasim Dahmash - Lucia Rostagno

Edizioni Q

Scritti in onore di Biancamaria Scarcia Amoretti

Volume II 2008, Dipartimento di Studi Orientali piazzale Aldo Moro, 5 00185 Roma 2008, Edizioni Q via Nomentum, 37 00131 Roma www.edizioniq.it ISBN 88-900765-2-978-88-900765-7-2 ISBN

In copertina:
Ceramica invetriata e dipinta in blu su bianco, Iran, inizi XVI secolo (Faenza, Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche, inv. n. 6304).

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VARIANTS, LINKS AND QUOTATIONS: CLASSICAL ARABIC TEXTS AS HYPERTEXTS *

Classical Arabic poetry and oral tradition Debate about textual variants and their function in Classical Arabic culture has played a key role in Orientalist studies since the first editions were published in 19th century, in Leiden and elsewhere. The most salient point of controversy was on the complex nature of the pre-Islamic poetic corpus, whose characteristics are inconsistent with current assumptions by Classical and other philologists. In particular, editors of Jhil poetic texts had to cope with an unusually large mass of variant readings, which affect not only most words and phrases in a text, but also the ordering of verses and their absolute number, which in extreme cases can vary hugely between versions. European editors such as Ahlwardt tackled this daunting task from within the tradition of Classical philology which they saw as a model, by trying to identify an archetype together with variant texts bound in a relationship of mu*

E-mail contact: lancioni@uniroma3.it. The research upon which this work is based is partially funded by the Research Program of National Interest (PRIN) Computer Analysis of the Hierarchical Structure of Arabic Lexicon: the Verbal System. ** The original idea for this study came from a talk I was invited to give in 2006 by Biancamaria Scarcia Amoretti within the doctoral program in Islamic Civilization she directed. The theme of the talk was the use of grammatical terms in alchemical texts for dating purposes (developing ideas presented in my 1997 article [Lancioni 1997b]), but the presentation gradually, and rather unexpectedly for myself (as well as for the public, I suppose), evolved toward the idea of representing Medieval Arabic alchemical texts as hypertexts. I think this volume is the best place to present a further developed, written form of those ideas.

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tual dependency. The high extent of variation within these texts was accounted for by the distorting effects of oral transmission, which would help explain such variants as lapses of memory, slips of the tongue and other errors. Logical inadequacies in the texts, together with the freedom that the idea of corruption deriving from oral transmission implies for editors/interpreters, lead scholars as Nldeke to propose large emendations of the texts, including more logical readings not attested by existing variants and reordering of verses for plausibility reasons1. The consensus among Arabists still largely follows the path paved by 19th century Orientalists: the current status of Pre-Islamic texts is regarded as the result of a transmission process roughly analogous to what occurs in written texts. New approaches developed in research on oral tradition, since the seminal work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord, have been adopted relatively late into Arabic studies notably by Monroe (1972) and Zwettler (1978) and received a lukewarm reception from mainstream Arabists (together with single cases of utterly rejection, see e.g. the negative review article of Zwettlers monograph by Schoeler [1981]). What is difficult to deny, and what most scholars outside the specific field of Arabic studies would now routinely accept, is that Pre-Islamic Arabic poetry exhibits oral-formulaic features strongly analogous to those found in texts which can be securely regarded as traditional oral poetry2. However, even such scholars as Monroe and Zwettler would identify those features in Pre-Islamic poetry only. Later poetry from the Islamic period in their opinion belongs to the usual literary genres of poetry. While this view is true in many important respects, including the truism that it was created as written poetry to begin with, a clear-cut separation between pre-Islamic and later poetry brings with it some undesirable, albeit not always explicitly stated consequence:
1 2

See Nldeke (1899-1901). This point is so strong that Schoeler feels compelled to attack the entire Lord-Parry theory with dubious irony (by saying, inter alia, that its supporters would call it the theory tout-court), failing to mention that virtually all scholars in Classical studies today accept it as the most logical explanation for the richness in formulaic features of the Homeric poems. Schoeler cannot take the easier, and much more scholarly, path to demonstrate that pre-Islamic poems are not oral-formulaic simply because they are so by every reasonable standard. The formulaic character of Pre-Islamic poetry has some important consequences for the successive development of Classic Arabic: in Lancioni (in press) I claim that, since the normative definition of the Arabic language by Medieval grammarians has been basically laid down upon a corpus of texts at the heart of which was Jhil poetry, some originally formulaic phenomena found their way through ordinary Arabic prose and were fully grammaticalised, albeit in a somewhat singular way.

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first of all, that poetry from the Omayyad and Abbasid ages implies an entirely different attitude towards the status of textual variants. Monroe and Zwettler themselves are adamant in this respect, since they explicitly try to demonstrate, by formal calculations, that the rate of formulaicity dramatically decreases from Jhiliyya to later periods, which in their opinion is an argument for the oral-formulaic nature of pre-Islamic poetry (since it is much more formulaic than later poetry, it must be formulaic). By consequence, later poetry is regarded as being essentially analogous to modern written poetry: it is a ne varietur recension, it exhibits no formulaic features, variants arise from the familiar process of transmission of a written text. While this position is understandable enough from Monroe and Zwettlers point of view after all, they aim to demonstrate the oral-formulaic nature of pre-Islamic poetry, not to take a positive stance on the issue of the nature of later Arabic poetry it contributes nevertheless to the idea that a fundamental gap exists between the two poetical: basically, a misconception. This idea is so deeply rooted that Schoeler is content to merely hint at the presence of non-standard variants in later poetry (in fact, on the basis of a rather casual remark by Ewald Wagner on Ab Nuws) in order to deny the idea that pre-Islamic poetry is oral-formulaic: since they must be different, the existence of a common feature makes any further refutation superfluous. Of course, different explanations might be considered: Ab Nuwss (or, for that matter, every later poets) production might be partially formulaic, out of imitation of earlier models or simply of similarity of production techniques which I am more inclined to believe in this specific case. Or what I am trying to propose to explain the wider picture variants might simply be an outstanding original feature of Arabic poetry, and of classical Islamic culture as a whole, changing their meaning through time. Why variants? One might legitimately ask why variants should exist at all to begin with. Oral tradition studies have shown by means of many examples and attestations that performance-cum-variation is the basic production engine of oral poetry, which best fits the specific needs of an improvised rendition of a text, which is patternbased, rather than rigidly determined. While this idea gained currency within studies on oral traditions (as most clearly shown by Ongs [1982] overview), the very existence of structural (as opposite to random, or accidental) variants in written texts is generally played down by matter of principle.

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Since classical Arabic-Islamic culture is a written culture by definition in fact, the culture with the widest book circulation before the invention of printing variants are consistently denied any significant role in it. I agree, as far as oral tradition variants are concerned: doubtless, modes of production and performance of poetry (not to mention prose) are too radically different from preIslamic models to reproduce such phenomena if we except stylistic borrowing. This does not amount to say, however, that variants as such do not play a role in classical Islamic texts; on the contrary, I think they play a major role, although their model is not to be found in the past i.e. in the predominantly oral, preIslamic culture but in the future: contemporary hypertexts3. A hypertext-based culture needs variants: since a text is regarded as a field in a continuum of, potentially infinite, cross-references, its form changes constantly: when we quote from a webpage, we are required to record the date we downloaded it which we obviously do not need to do when quoting from a traditional printed book. From this point of view, a hypertext should be regarded as more oral or archaic than a traditional text, which is clearly not the case nor is it for classical Islamic texts. In both cases, the wrong assumption is that the path of progress leads from oral texts rich in variants to written, ne varietur ones. A key feature is often overlooked or forgotten in this respect: the invariability of written texts is more the product of the medium the need to order words in a typographical line than a deliberate choice by writers. Progress, from Tristram Shandy to Marinetti and Apollinaire, is often associated with the violation of linearization constraints rather than with their perfecting. Linearization as rationalization is not a fundamental tenet in the history of culture, but rather a quite exceptional process which happens in particular circumstances in which a need for simplification is strongly felt the terseness in the style of Enlightenment is a reaction to 17th-century style no less than Classical Music is to Baroque.

In what follows I shall not use the term hypertext in the narrow meaning of an electronic text supplemented with links which relate it to other texts, but rather in the wider meaning of a text which is structurally linked to other texts at given selection points, where structurally distinguishes it from other, more traditional texts where links are secondary and optional (e.g., footnotes in academic texts). Although the term hypertext was introduced by Theodor Nelson (1981), the basic concept was already pointed out by Vannevar Bush (1945) who originally conceived the project of a mechanical information retrieval system he called memex which exhibits most properties of hypertexts (e.g., links). For a general discussion of hypertexts and their properties, see Landow (1997).

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Plurality of choice is by no means a feature of a simpler, basically oral culture: what changes across cultures is, rather, the way plurality is organized. In an oral-formulaic culture, plurality is, in Saussurean terms, paradigmatic: several alternatives are available in each choice point, without essentially changing the structure of the system. In a hypertext-based culture, on the other hand, plurality is not paradigmatic, but rather cross-referential: from each choice point the ideal reader4 can jump directly to another text or go on reading. In any case, the link is available as a potential path which may be followed or ignored, but which is anyway a part of the text. Going on with the Saussurean metaphor, the hypertext-based plurality is syntagmatic, because the readers choice does not lie in the selection of different alternatives (e.g. competing formulas) in every choice point, but rather in the decision to follow a link (thus establishing a novel sequence in the text) or to go on reading the rest of the text. Since cross-reference among documents and cross-links are freely available, this structure inherently leads to infinite paths, in the form of cyclic directed graphs (which contain infinite paths by definition). There is a significant difference among the two types of plurality we are talking about: in the first case, we have just a single linear flow (e.g., a poem) which occasionally splits into multiple paths (e.g., two or more competing formulas) which sooner or later finds its way into the main stream. In the second case, there are infinite possible paths among texts which allow mutual jumping. Both approaches are quite distinct from the standard text form of traditional print, but their similarities do not go far beyond this negative common feature. Missing links and other oddities There exist several possibilities to keep a message secret from unauthorized readers: the text can be encrypted, can be written in a secret language, or perhaps covered under a thick cloud of obscure metaphors and allegories. The dubious award for the strangest way to keep strangers from understanding a text should be conceded to the technique usually called dispersion of knowledge (tabdd al-ilm)5. This strategy, typical of alchemic texts and especially of the corpus ascribed to Jbir Ibn ayyn, does not make the message obscure in any
4

I use here the term ideal reader in the sense of Ecos (1979) Lector in fabula: a reader, not necessarily a real one, who is able to capture all the textual and intertextual interplays explicitly and implicitly present in the text, including what the actual (but not the ideal) writer never thought about. See Haq (1994: 6-7).

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direct way, but rather deliberately chooses to divide it into a number of distinct texts, which only the initiated are supposed to be able to read in their entirety6. An excerpt from Jbirs Book of Stones (Kitb al-ajar) illustrates this principle in a very clear way7:
Know, may God protect you, that after attributing a Balance to all things we have enumerated, and after having spoken of the quantitative values which we have mentioned, Blns also made a pronouncement on the letters which is in conformity with what we have [ourselves] taught you in the Book of the Result. Next, he said: When two letters of identical appearance follow each other in one word, only the first is taken into account considering its type and the value characteristic of its Degree. To the second is ascribed a minimal value which does not enter into the computation made with the letters of the alphabet. An example is or b b . By God the Great, this I have already taught you in the Book of the Arena of the Intellect. After that, he said: Let us consider the Arabic language in particular. For it is obvious that the practitioner of Balance need take into account no other language. Then Blns said, as for the First Balance of animals [etc., etc.] here I need not repeat [his words], for what he said is in accordance with, and nothing other than, what I have myself set forth in the Book of Morphology.

If we consider the salient features of this dispersion technique by abstracting away from its purely instrumental function, we get some typical hypertextual processes. First of all, we may choose between a continuous reading of the text which is the only choice available if the books quoted are not accessible, or if we are unauthorized readers and a zigzag-like path jumping to and fro through the corpus. Second, the texts form an open set: in addition to the 500 or so books listed by Ibn al-Nadm or reconstructed by Paul Kraus, infinitely many texts could be added without altering the nature of the whole, which in itself is indefinite8. Third, if you just follow the links, the system is very close to the way contemporary hypertexts work. To stress the similarity, I underlined the links as would happen in a hypertext (without changing colours, to avoid being hated by editors and typographers alike).
6 7

See Lancioni (1997b) for discussion. The attribution of the corpus traditionally ascribed to Jbir Ibn ayyn is the object of much controversy, since its first mention in Ibn al-Nadms Fihrist. Since this matter is not directly relevant to the present discussion, I shall refer by Jbir to whoever is the author (or authors) of the texts of the corpus. The edition and translation of the Kitb al-Ajr I use here is Haq (1994: 118-202). The excerpt quoted here is pp. 165-166 of the translation (p. 122 of the edition). This feature, and the hypertext concept in general, are analogous to Ecos (1976) idea of infinite semiosis.

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Interestingly, some odd features of hypertexts, sometimes regarded as fortuitous, can be found in the Jabirian corpus too. Consider an excerpt:
We have already presented above an illustrative model of the weights [which follow a sexagesimal geometric progression], a model according to which all concrete cases are worked out. In this book of mine, however, I shall set fort the pattern of weights according to the doctrine of Socrates as we have reported it. Now if you wish to follow the ideas of Socrates, go ahead; and if you wish to follow the ideas of Blns, do so, for both of them are the same. But if you wish to follow our opinion, then follow us. Our opinion is different from both of them, for it is a closer approximation [of the truth]9.

Here we clearly have a link to a non-existing text, since no book by Socrates is included in the Jabirian corpus that is available to us, and perhaps Socrates wrote no books at all and things are not much different for Blns, be he Apollonius of Tyana of whoever. Of course, this feature is quite frequent in contemporary hypertexts: it is the missing link which disturbs us during our exploration of the web. This feature, far from being a mere chance, is a structural component of hypertexts. In fact, a missing link can arise from different reasons, all tied to the very nature of hypertexts after all, no missing links would be possible in a traditional book, the closest equivalent being a missing page, which is something quite different: the link may be broken (i.e., the target of the link may have been moved or deleted), the page may not have been written yet, or the page may not exist at all. Following the metaphor of the path, we may go to a dead end, or find a door which is a trompe-lil which does not really lead anywhere. Another feature is highly relevant to this point while being secondary in, if not absent from, both traditional books and oral-formulaic texts: there is no definite process of composition; composition and reading are asynchronous with one another. As I happened to write somewhere else, while analysing some grammatical passages in the Jabirian corpus, the dating of a text or an excerpt does not necessarily say anything about the dating of the whole corpus, or of a subset of it: in the same way, the last modified date of a hypertext does not imply anything about the date of composition of other documents to which it is linked10.
9

See Haq (1994: 178 [translation], 135 [text]). The Arabic uses twice the phrase fa-amal do [that] in reference to what corresponds to a hypertext link (underlined in the text), a phrase which looks very close to the (anachronistic) image of something to click on. 10 See Lancioni (1997b: 93): Therefore, a minimal conclusion is more reasonable: the present formulation of the excerpts on grammar is later than 4th/10th century. In other words, the presence of late grammatical elements does not necessarily imply a late dating of all the parts of the

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When? Since Arabic culture was clearly not hypertext-based in the Pre-Islamic period, while I claim it became so later, a question might legitimately arise concerning when such a transition should have taken place. Even if exact dates for cultural events are difficult to ascertain, in this case there is some evidence to propose a rather reasonable timing. As I have shown elsewhere11, a dramatic change took place in the overall organization of the Arabic-Islamic culture during the 4th/10th century. The amount of shared knowledge became so great that traditional, content-based methods to organize information became obsolete, and new strategies had to be devised which appealed to methods helping users find information through formal taxonomic keys. The landmark of this process is the appearance of alJawhars dictionary, al-i, which first introduced a formal criterium for root organization, so-called bb-fal ordering, which selects the last consonant, then the first one, then the second one (and perhaps other consonants). Several facts show that in this period the body of knowledge of classical Arabic-Islamic culture exceeded a critical mass beyond which traditional strategies no longer worked. The epoch-making catalogue of Ibn al-Nadm, the Fihrist, was completed only a few years before al-Jawhar finished his dictionary: the very existence of such a work shows by itself a deeply felt need to classify information such a universal index could only be needed for a culture that gathered so much information that no one could go through it all. On the other hand, 4th/10th century opened with the publication of the first classical grammatical treatise, Ibn al-Sarrjs Kitb al-Ul, which organized the subject-matter in a clear, orderly fashion that highly contrasts with the unstructured, haphazard style of previous treatises12. Thus, even if no secure dating can be given for such a complex and multifaceted phenomenon, it is indeed during the 4th/10th century that the bases for the hypertext-based organization of Arabic-Islamic culture were laid down. A seemingly inescapable condition for such an organization is doubtless the presence of a way to look up and retrieve information: in absence of modern hypercorpus: only the version which came to us is doubtless later than Kitb al-Ul; this version might, according to the radical opinion, concern all the elements of the text (and therefore the whole corpus would be dated in the 4th/10th century) or, more likely, might be limited to a revision of an older text, which is supplemented with additions and emendations; grammatical sections would unavoidably be part of the latter. 11 Lancioni (1997a). 12 On this key turning point in the history of Arabic grammatical tradition, see Bohas et al. (1990: 8-14, under the heading The codification of grammar in the fourth/tenth century).

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texts virtual links, jumping is not possible without having an organized way to quickly find the target. The importance of the alphabetical order is hard to overestimate even in very distant domains of knowledge, as is the case of the study of biographies of transmitters (ilm al-rijl) which first organized biographical records according to more content-based criteria (e.g., according to the imm to whom the transmitter was related) with alphabetical order playing a secondary role to sort items within a category, while later treaties pervasively adopted the alphabetical order, albeit limited to the first letter (perhaps for practical reasons)13. According to Lotmans (1971) seminal distinction, what takes place in such a setting is the passage from a textual culture type to a generative one, from a culture which sees itself as a given sum of precedents, ways of usage, texts to another culture which represents itself as a set of norms and rules. The peculiar status of Classical Arabic-Islamic culture can be explained as arising from the fact that European culture, according to Foucault (1966), felt the need to choose alphabetical order as the central strategy for sorting information much later, in 17th century. This is an extremely important point because it shows that, at least under some respects, Arabic-Islamic culture reached this degree of complexity centuries before the European Renaissance, without having at its disposal mechanical printing devices. Conclusions If Classical Arabic-Islamic culture at its zenith was indeed a hypertext-based culture, a number of consequences arise from these considerations which are relevant for both the history of culture and the interpretation of Medieval Arabic texts. First of all, at the purely textual level the plausibility of adapting ecdotic techniques originally devised for Western Classical, Medieval and Modern texts to the Arab-Islamic world is highly questionable. Variants in a hypertext-based organization of knowledge are as they are in oral-formulaic cultures, albeit in a very different sense a structural component of the text, and not a random deviation from an original that the careful philologist attempts to reconstruct. More complex representations are necessary, which do not mark differences, additions, changes and omissions with respect to an original text, but instead reproduce the different stages in the production of actual variants, which are

13

See Arioli (1979).

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rather to be regarded as some of the potential versions of the text which have been actualized. A second important consequence is that texts are not stable entities, born from the mind of a writer as Athena from Zeus forehead: they are complex organisms developed through slow accretion14. The proteiform nature of hypertexts prevents, among other things, from using them as absolute dating tools: since hypertexts themselves cannot be properly dated, it is not possible to use them to absolutely date something else15. Last but not least, the often remarked (sometimes in a derogatory sense), lack of development of Classical Arabic-Islamic culture e.g. the fact that texts are notoriously difficult do date, or that later authors anachronistically converse with much earlier ones as if they were contemporaries is rather to be interpreted as a product of a continuous development, albeit a somewhat unconventional one: since earlier works gradually evolved out of interpolation and addition of hypertext features (e.g., links), they are, in a certain sense, contemporary to later works which quote them. The ideas I propose here are a work in progress. However, I think they do have a degree of plausibility, and they might if the hypothesis is tenable significantly alter the way we look at some key features of Classical Arab-Islamic culture.

14

The often-remarked relatively lesser importance of the author in Classical Arabic literature in comparison with Western culture, which has been popularized by Kilitos (1984) essay on The Author and his Doubles, would fit very neatly into this picture. 15 This is analogous to the impossibility to make use of a contemporary hypertext to date something, since what we can establish at most is the date of its last update.

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References
Arioli, G., Introduzione allo studio del Ilm al-ril imamita: le fonti, Cahiers dOnomastique Arabe, Paris, pp. 5189; Bohas et al. (1990): Bohas, G. Guillaume, J.-P. Kouloughli, D. E., The Arabic Linguistic Tradition, London; Eco (1976): Eco, U., A Theory of Semiotics, Bloomington-London; Eco (1979): Eco, U., Lector in Fabula, Milano, (partial English translation in Eco, U., The Role of the Reader, BloomingtonLondon, 1981); Foucault (1966) : Foucault, M., Les mots et les choses, Paris; Haq (1994): Haq, S. N., Names, Natures and Things, The Alchemist Jbir ibn ayyn and his Kitb al-Ajr (Book of Stones), with a foreword by D.E. Pigree, Dordrecht; Kilito (1984): Kilito, A., Lauteur et ses doubles, Essai sur la culture arabe classique, Paris, (English translation by M. Cooperson, with an Introduction by R. Allen, The Author and His Doubles, Essays on Classical Arabic culture, Syracuse, 2001); Lancioni (1997a): Lancioni, G., Sullordinamento dei dizionari arabi classici, in AA.VV., In memoria di Francesco Gabrieli (19041996), supplement no. 2 to Rivista degli Studi Orientali, 71, pp. 113-127; Lancioni (1997b): Lancioni, G., La terminologia grammaticale del corpus giabiriano, Rivista degli Studi Orientali, 71, pp. 83-97; Lancioni (in press): Lancioni, G., Formulaic Models and Formulaicity in Classical and Modern Standard Arabic, in Corrigan, R. Moravcsik, E. Ouali, H. Wheatley K. (eds.), Formulaic Language, Amsterdam; Lotman (1971): Lotman, Ju., Problema obuenija kulture kak e tipologieskaja charakteristika, Trudy po Znakovym Sistemam, 5, pp. 167-176; Monroe (1972): Monroe, J. T., Oral Composition in Pre-Islamic Poetry, Journal of Arabic Literature 3, pp. 1-53; Nldeke (1899-1901): Nldeke, Th., Fnf Moallaqt, Sitzungsberichte der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien, Arioli (1979):

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Ong (1982): Schoeler (1981):

Zwettler (1978):

Philosophisch-historische Klasse, 140, 1899; 142, 1900; 144, 1901; Ong, W. J., Orality and Literacy, The Technologizing of the Word, London; Schoeler, G., Die Anwendung der Oral Poetry-Theorie auf die arabische Literatur, Der Islam, 58, 1981, pp. 205236; Zwettler, M., The Oral Tradition of Classical Arabic Poetry, Its Character and Implications, Columbus (Ohio).