Consorts of the Caliphs. Ibn al-Sa'i
(أبو جز) when it appears to be an error for (الجماز).
This Edition
In preparing this edition, I have had the benefit of access to a high-resolution full-color digital copy of the manuscript.69 This has allowed me to correct some of Jawād’s misreadings and to include material that he missed or omitted. I have also benefited greatly from Jawād’s edition and accordingly signal in the notes when I have adopted his reading or accepted a word he has interpolated to improve the sense. In keeping with LAL practice, I confine the notes to information about editorial choices. I do not provide references to other sources. Thus, in the entry on ʿArīb, for example, Jawād lists other entries and references to her in other works. The only time I do this is when Ibn al-Sāʿī himself quotes another extant work; if the work is not extant, or the quotation undiscovered, I so indicate.
The principles used in establishing the Arabic edition are as follows:
| • | I have abided by the LAL policy of minimal and crucial voweling except in poetry and the Qurʾan. Fatḥah tanwīn is provided where deemed helpful. |
| • | All consonantal shaddahs have been included. |
| • | Waṣlahs only appear on conjoined alifs (e.g. preceded by wa- or fa-), in poetry, and in speech. |
| • | The manuscript has both إصفهان \ الإصفهانيّ and إصبهان \ الإصبهانيّ. I have adopted the latter as the standard forms. |
| • | The only punctuation used are periods at the end of paragraphs/sections and the occasional clarifying colon. |
| • | I have aspired to format, paragraph, and indent consistently and in such a way as to clarify syntax and narrative sequence. Following LAL policy, I have numbered paragraphs. |
| • | The entries themselves are also numbered for ease of reference. |
| • | Following LAL policy, I do not provide in-text references to the manuscript pagination. |
| • | Although I have “corrected” such things as irregular number use (أربع دواليب), these are in fact nothing more than a standard feature of Middle Arabic or at least non-formal Arabic. Other Middle Arabic features include disappearance of case (e.g. يزيد for يزيدا); unusual plurals (e.g. غانيات); avoidance/disappearance of hamzah (e.g. المستضية); agreement with nearest antecedent (e.g. جهات الخلفاء سأتبعهم); repetition of بين; words that are usually separate being written together (e.g. فيماذا); and use of ṣād for sīn (e.g. بالمصير). These are all recorded in the notes. The only silent changes have been the “restoring” of final hamzahs, e.g. in خلفا or عطا, and of alifs, e.g. to القسم. |
| • | In the poetry, I identify only the main meter family, not the particular variant used; these appear also in the Index of Verses. I am grateful to Tahera Qutbuddin for going over these. |
| • | The sigla used in the Arabic footnotes are: م = MS Veliyeddin 2634 and ج = Jawād’s edition. |
In undertaking the edition, I benefited immeasurably from the knowledge, expertise, guidance, advice, and friendship of the project editor, Julia Bray.
Shawkat M. Toorawa
Note on the Translation
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.70 Having successfully published a collaboratively authored book on Arabic autobiography in 2001,71 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. 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.