Exposing the Eroticism of Words
How al-Shidyāq Turned a Lexicon into Literature
p. 68-100
Texte intégral
While the predecessors used to be engaged with this noble language, I have loved her passionately. I’ve fallen so ardently in love with [Arabic] that I became her slave; for her I kept my wicks burning and myself awake during the nights, reflecting on her, searching for what is hidden and concealed.
Aḥmad Al-Shidyāq, Sirr al-Layāl fī al-qalb wa-l-ibdāl. Fī ʿilm maʿānī al-alfāẓ al-ʿarabiyya (1867), Bayrūt, Dār al-gharb al-islāmī, 2006, p. 111.
1When the Lebanese-born Fāris al-Shidyāq (d. 1887) published his literary-lexicographical al-Sāq ʿalā al-Sāq (Leg Over Leg) in 1855 in Paris, it provoked a religious and moral scandal. The European press, who were the first to discuss this Arabic work, received it as a corruption of faith and decency, and contemporary Arab intellectuals criticized it as exaggerated licentiousness. At the centre stage of this scandal, there were religious polemics and lexicographical wordlists!
2Born into a Maronite-Catholic family, al-Shidyāq converted to Protestantism and, after the publication of al-Sāq, to Islam, his book is a biting critique of Catholicism and Protestantism.1 Moreover, it contains numerous enumerations of mildly erotic to extremely bawdy words, such as a “bending-bough-like supple woman” or a “vagina that makes sounds when entering.” Far from pornographic sensationalism or sexual advice, these compilations were, as this essay argues, creating an Arabic-language eroticism on the eve of Arab modernity, when both language and eroticism were changing. These wordlists unveil the appeal of the Classical language and emphasize the importance of lexis to refined eroticism. Although he collected most of the words from the popular postclassical lexicon al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ (The Encompassing Ocean) by al-Fīrūzābādī (d. 1415), al-Shidyāq did not compose with al-Sāq a proper lexicon, but turned a lexicon into literature. He integrated lexicographical lists in an auto-fictional travelogue and scathing portrait of manners that is as much about exposing the premodern words as the modern world, the linguistic sign as the bodily self.
3Focusing on words concerning women, this essay discusses the poetics and politics of erotic enumeration in al-Sāq in the context of the postclassical period and the 19th century. It argues for a linguistic eroticism that exposes women and words erotically through a performative foregrounding of their epistemic, aesthetic and affective qualities.
Al-Shidyāq’s Work in Context
4Fāris al-Shidyāq, who adopted the name Aḥmad after his conversion to Islam, was in many regards a dazzling figure of the Arab 19th century.2 He lived and worked in Cairo, Malta, London, Paris, Tunis and Istanbul as a scribe, language teacher, translator, lexicographer and journalist. When he founded al-Jawāʾib (The Traversing News) in Istanbul in 1861, the first widely circulated newspaper in Arabic, he soon became an influential public intellectual famous for his knowledge of Arabic and searing polemics.3 Living most of his life outside the Arabic-speaking world, this man of letters found his homeland in the Arabic language.4
5At the beginning of the 1850s, before his turn to journalism, al-Shidyāq spent around one year and a half in Paris in order to find a suitable position, but obviously failed. In the letters he describes his sojourn as financially and socially precarious, but it seemed intellectually very enriching.5 While working on his etymological dictionary Sirr al-Layāl fī al-qalb wa-l-ibdāl (The Secret of the Nights. On Metathesis and Permutation), published in 1868 in Istanbul, and his lexicographical critique al-Jāsūs ʿalā al-Qāmūs (The Secret Emissary Spying on the Dictionary / al-Qāmūs), published in 1882 in Istanbul,6 he rather quickly composed his literary-lexicographical al-Sāq ʿalā al-Saq fī mā huwa al-Fāriyāq, whose title may be rendered into English as Leg over Leg or the Turtle in the Tree; concerning al-Fāriyāq: What Manner of Creature Might he be,7 published in 1855 in Paris. Infused by echoes of various works in progress, including Sirr and al-Jāsūs, it creates a “unique literary expression if its time.”8
6It basically narrates the autofictional story of al-Fāriyāq, a compound (naḥt) of Fāris al-Shidyāq, who travels from Mount Lebanon to Malta, Egypt, England and France.9 He is obsessed with women and the Classical Arabic language, and marries the illiterate al-Fāriyāqiyya, who soon becomes his female counterpart fighting for women’s rights and appropriating the Arabic language. Into this narrative, the self-conscious narrator frequently intrudes with his satirical remarks on the 19th-century Arab and European modernities, the Arabic language and the writing of this book, i.e. al-Sāq. Within the narration and reflection, the text embeds numerous enumerations of classical Arabic words that are related to the protagonists’ life or the narrator’s remarks and form a huge and integral part of the text. While many literary studies have discussed the text’s genre at length,10 this essay shifts the focus to textual structures and movements; it approaches al-Sāq as a volatile texture of narration, reflection and enumeration.
7In the prefaced “Author’s Notice”, al-Shidyāq states that al-Sāq has two concerns, “to expose (ibrāz) the oddities of the [Arabic] language, including its rare words”11 and “to discuss the praiseworthy and blameworthy qualities of women.”12 The first concern relates to enumeration, the second to narration and reflection, but both concerns are intrinsically tied together when it comes to the “words concerning women”13 (ḥurūf nisāʾiyya). In an iconic moment, the male protagonist confesses to his wife that he is obsessed with words about women and used to memorize every single term that he came across. Driven by the same linguistic obsession, all three characters discuss the qualities of women by enumerating words.
8The outcome is an ambiguous piece of literature already embodied in the sparkling title. Between its many possible interpretations, it refers to the mildly erotic imagery of a “turtle dove on the bough of a tree” cooing for its beloved or the explicitly sexual imagery of a “leg over someone else’s leg” during intercourse.14 Since the text oscillates very often between the male and the female perspective and between seriousness (jidd) and playfulness (hazl), it provides a complex puzzle and sparkling picture of the Arab and European 19th century.15
9Significantly, however, it is both ambiguous and unambiguous since it conveys at times a very outspoken social and cultural criticism and takes unequivocal stands. In regard to eroticism,16 it is scathing of Catholic ascetism, criticizes Protestant puritanism and mocks the British Victorian morals, since they seek, in different ways and with different means, to deform the human body and its essential pleasures. In contrast, al-Sāq formulates a body anthropology that gives preference to sexual pleasure (ladhdha) and desire since “it maintains the human nature.”17 Importantly, both the man and the woman have the right and capacity to experience sexual pleasure, where imagination (taṣawwur) is as significant as the act (wuqūʿ).18
10As for Arabic,19 it ridicules and polemicizes against what it perceives as Christian-Arab ignorance and indifference to the Classical Arabic language, as word mannerism devoid of any meaning favoured by some Arab scholars and poets, as dabblings in Arabic by foreign missionaries, and as the arrogance and incompetence of European Orientalists, since they all undermine, in different ways and with different means, the timely relevance and cultural vigorousness of Classical Arabic. Exposing its beauty and wisdom20 and relating them to contemporary social and cultural debates, it seeks to make the language attractive and accessible for both male and female Arab readers21 and to turn it into a centre stage of refining the Arab civilization.22
11In this framework, al-Sāq offers a digest of Majd al-Dīn al-Fīrūzābādī’s (d. 1415) lexicon al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ (The Encompassing Ocean) by taking nearly all words and definitions from it. The self-conscious narrator, who fashions himself as an author, claims it as the one and only source for al-Sāq, especially since al-Fīrūzābādī
did not fail to record a single word descriptive of women; it is almost as though he knew by divine inspiration that someone would come along after him and dive into his ocean / al-Qāmūs in order to collect such pearls into a single work where they could be so arranged as to lodge more firmly in the mind and become more deeply rooted in the memory.23
12In the postclassical period, al-Qāmūs was the most influential Arabic lexicon.24 Compared to other lexicons, it was relatively exhaustive in lexis while concise in presentation and therefore constituted a fairly handy dictionary due to its small size. It abstained from probative verses (shawāhid) and used numerous abbreviations that make the dictionary at the same time difficult to consult. It became so ubiquitous that qāmūs (ocean) was and still is used for “dictionary” and appeared in several print editions during the 19th century. In the lexicographical tradition, it provoked a huge scholarship expanding critically on al-Qāmūs, including al-Suyūṭī (d. 1505) and al-Fāsī (d. 1756), or providing revised versions, like the Christianized lexicon of Farḥāt or the modernized lexicon of al-Bustānī (d. 1883).25 The most important critic of al-Qāmūs, however, was al-Shidyāq.26 From at least the late 1840s onwards, he worked on al-Jāsūs ʿalā al-Qāmūs, printed in 1882, that scrutinized the shortcomings of al-Qāmūs and the other Arabic dictionaries in order to pave the way for a comprehensive and critical modern dictionary of the Arabic language. Parts of his critique of al-Qāmūs are anticipated in his etymological dictionary Sirr as well as al-Sāq. Therefore, al-Shidyāq is often described as an adversary of al-Fīrūzābādī, but such a description totally neglects his recognition and passion for al-Qāmūs expressed in many of his works.27 In this sense, al-Sāq certainly provides a “best-of” al-Qāmūs that picks out especially its erotic lexis, including words for the appealing ways of walking, forms of full-figured women, qualities of vaginas or varieties of sexual intercourse.
13Though many classical Arabic dictionaries and polythematic thesauri embrace erotic lexis,28 lexicographers like al-Suyūṭī and al-Shidyāq consider al-Qāmūs as particularly rich in this regard,29 what Muḥammad Riḍwān explained as the result of a “medical renaissance” (nahḍa ṭibbiyya) placing the body at centre stage of culture.30 Be this as it may, al-Fīrūzābādī penned two unrecovered monothematic compilations on “lawful sexual intercourse” (nikāḥ) and on “young girls” (ghāda)31 documenting his interest in this lexical field. Thus, discussing al-Qāmūs in al-Sāq is for al-Shidyāq an excellent means for discussing language and eroticism at the same time: language through eroticism and eroticism through language.
Taʿriya as Performative Foregrounding
14Al-Sāq seeks “to expose (ibrāz) the oddities of the [Arabic] language, including its rare words,”32 as al-Shidyāq states in the foreword. The term ibrāz means to “bring out” and to “make visible”. Pushing this notion of exposure a step further, Fawwāz Ṭarābulusī and ʿAzīz al-ʿAẓma describe al-Sāq in a pathbreaking article as “the stripping naked of language” (al-taʿriya li-l-lugha).33 This unveils for them as much the beauty of language as the eroticism of women,34 but likewise strips naked the writer’s self and body, linking taʿriya with words, women and writing the body.35 Wen-chin Ouyang reads this taʿriya as a “laying bare the workings of language and how these show up the relationship between language and thought, language and culture, and language and subject.”36 Emphasizing in contrast the body and affects, Tarek El-Ariss approaches taʿriya as an “exploration of the body and of cultural and political forces affected by its movements and postures.”37 This essay places the expressive notion of taʿriya by Ṭarābulusī and al-ʿAẓma in centre stage and develops it further.38 It discusses with Ouyang the exposed workings of language and with El-Ariss the exposed body and the exposing affect. Moreover, it links taʿriya to enumeration and discusses it with Le Plaisir du texte by Roland Barthes and Mille Plateaux by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. This essay approaches the taʿriya of erotic enumeration as a performative foregrounding of epistemic, aesthetic and affective qualities of words, women and the body. It is performative, because it doesn’t just unveil qualities, but rather takes part in the “making” of these qualities.
15Enumeration is an important, yet mostly neglected device of Arabic literature, although al-Sāq’s eye-catching “enumerative style”, as Mattityahu Peled called it, has captured some attention.39 This essay, however, seeks to shift the focus from a practice of style to a negotiation of language. According to Sabine Mainberger’s seminal approach, enumeration is a practice of radical decontextualization. In order to put words in a succinct list, they have to be cut off from their context. As a result, the decontextualized words of a list have to be re- or neo-contextualized in order to make sense for the reader.40 One illustrative example taken from al-Saq is a brief enumeration of three words: ḍujuʿan mufassilāt manāshīṣ (contrarians, excuse-makers, and bed-deniers),41 e.g. women who deny their husband sex by pretending to be menstruating (mufassilāt), as the lexical gloss explains. Without narrative context, this compilation could be read as a list of deceitful women, sexual abstinence or simply odd words. This list, however, is the turning point of an allegory describing the Protestant schism from the Catholic church. The women refuse to tolerate the clerical tyranny any longer and force their husbands to break with the Catholic church by withholding the sexual privileges, i.e. they act as mufassilāt. Contextualizing the otherwise rarely used words within a narrative or reflection, enumeration is often an “activation of words” (tafʿīl al-mufradāt),42 as El-Ariss calls it, that seeks to facilitate their retention. Besides the exposure of epistemic qualities, erotic enumeration often exposes aesthetic qualities by creating sounds, rhythms and associations activating the senses (tafʿīl al-ḥawāss).43 Listen for instance to this piece on mightily buttocked women and their synonyms: “al-rakrāka al-zakzāka al-wakwāka”.44 Foregrounding epistemic and aesthetic qualities of words are certainly didactic means for language instruction.
16The aesthetic exposure, however, also unfolds “a message of its own sake,”45 as Roman Jacobson has called the poetic function of language. By foregrounding phonetic and graphic structures and lexical synonymity and abundance, enumeration promotes the “palpability of signs” and deepens thereby “the fundamental dichotomy of sign and object.”46 It shifts the attention from the signified to the signifier, from the word content to the word material that becomes, as Roland Barthes puts it, a “lexicographical artifact”.47 Appreciate for instance the unique materiality of letters in the word nikāḥ (marriage and marital sexual intercourse): with its four letters it is in harmony with the four humours, elements and directions; each of its letters are part of the mysterious letters of the Qurʾān; its first two letters nik (fuck!) refers to the second two āḥ (aaaah).48 This enumerative exposure is a performative foregrounding of a unique materiality. Shifting the message from women to words, the text makes the signifier as palpable and erotic as the signified. The reader, therefore, can sense and experience words like a piece of clothing or food, spice or medicine, music or temperature, as the opening poem proudly claims.49
17The erotic enumeration, however, doesn’t privilege the signifier over the signified or the aesthetic quality over the epistemic, but rather moves back and forth between them. Appreciating nikāḥ50 as a lexicographical artefact is according to the narrator a valuable reason for also appreciating “marital sexual intercourse”, i.e. a meaning of nikāḥ highly emphasized by the Islamic scholars, but strictly disregarded by the Arab clergy.51 In turn, matrimony (nikāḥ) is then the pleasures of marital orgasm (āḥ) as a result of intercourse (nik). Exposing words is an erotic back and forth movement.
18This oscillation, however, destabilizes at times the conventional sign and deterritorializes it from the dominant regime of signs as codified in lexicons. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari describe deterritorialization as “the movement by which ‘one’ leaves a territory. It is an operation of the lines of flight.”52 Detached from its context, the deterritorialized sign takes – at least for a while53 – a different direction moving beyond lexical and conventional meaning. By ignoring, mocking, disturbing or exceeding the conventional language, the modern literary writing for Roland Barthes redistributes language; it rearranges, revaluates and reexperiences words in different contexts.54 The aforesaid mufassila (the female sexual “excuse-maker”), for instance, is according to Ibn Manẓūr’s (d. 1311) dictionary Lisān al-ʿarab (The Arabs’ tongue) cursed by God,55 while al-Shidyāq’s al-Sāq neo-contextualizes her as a female Protestant rebel.56 The pejorative deceitful woman, a misogynist topos of classical Arabic literature,57 is now positively revaluated by the allegorical narrative as a woman with political agency and erotic appeal. In al-Sāq, “language falls into pieces,”58 as Jeffrey Sacks puts it, and constantly seeks to find new formations and assemblages.59 Breaking al-Qāmūs into pieces and reassembling them in different enumerations, al-Sāq turns lexicographical enumeration into “the degree zero of writing the modern.”60 Based on decontextualization, a basic movement of enumeration as discussed above, lists tend to deterritorialize words and thereby redistribute language.
19Not only are words on the move, but also is the body. Deleuze and Guattari describe the line of flight as a “passional line”,61 i.e. bodily affected and disposed to change. Affect is “an ability to affect and to be affected,” as Brian Massumi outlines, i.e. “a prepersonal intensity” of the body ignited by an encounter with another body or entity and “implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act.”62 Affects, like fear, joy anger and shame, are therefore “forces of encounter”,63 as Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth conclude, that navigate liminal movements and thoughts before or beyond the cognitive and rational control of the subject.64 In regard to al-Sāq, the protagonists’ bodies are affected by women and words. They are exposed to them, i.e. affected by them. The affect of joy65 is indirectly experienced as somatic movements, intensities and dysfunctions, like excesses, fits or breakdowns, but they are also embodied in the writer’s pen, like it’s slipping away or unruliness. Importantly, Roland Barthes elaborates on the affective loss of self-control as language eroticism, when the comfortable and conventional “pleasure” (plaisir) suddenly turns over in a disturbing and ineffable, yet joyful “bliss” (jouissance) that moves the body along newly emerging lines of flight.66 In regard to al-Sāq, Nadia Bou Ali emphasizes that “al-Shidyaq’s passion for language actually resists its transformation into a pedagogical object,”67 and Jeffrey Sacks traces an affective love to the Arabic language that favours disturbing complexity over pacifying simplification.68 This essay is about the taʿriya of women, words and the body; it discusses their epistemic, aesthetic and affective qualities.
Case Studies: Length, Sound and Relatedness
20Textual movements of taʿriya are triggered by enumerative microstructures like typography, conjunction, frame, length, sound and relatedness. Taking the latter three for an example, this essay approaches them in relation to the three main characters. Therefore, it analyzes the importance of enumerative length for the narrator, enumerative sound for al-Fāriyāq and semantic relatedness for al-Fāriyāqiyya.
21Enumerative length is a crucial topic in al-Sāq, because it links the lexical richness of Arabic with the epistemology, civilization and pride of Arab culture. Right from the beginning, the narrator is very much aware that the long lists of synonyms may be lengthy and wearisome. Nevertheless, he urges the reader to scrutinize them word by word, since the old Bedouin Arabs (al-ʿarab), the mythical founding fathers of Arab culture, assigned to every different word a different meaning that is worthy to be recognized.69 Following classical Arab philologists like Ibn Fāris (d. 1004),70 al-Sāq rejects the existence of total synonyms in Arabic, emphasizing instead their unlimited shades of meaning. These near-synonyms constitute the refined epistemology and sophisticated civilization of both Arabs and Arabic and form a touchstone for the pride in al-ʿarabiyya.
22In the heart of the second book, the narrator discloses in a philological commentary his body anthropology. Besides all human or more precisely male needs, men’s sexual need for women is the strongest, since only women can provide men with the most precious pleasure.71 Referring to classical concepts of pleasure (ladhdha), women provide, even before music, poetry and laughter, a refined “joie de vivre”,72 as Hasan Shuraydi calls it. In order to expose this strong pleasure concerning women, the narrator exposes the many words for “beautiful women”. A man’s desire for women can only be satisfied when he attends a session with
a waḍīʾa a woman who is comely and clean *
and a hayyiʾa a female who is comely of form *
and a mukhbaʾa a secluded girl who has not yet married *
and a dhabʾa a thin, cute, jolly girl *
and a jarbāʾ a cute girl *
and a khidabba a female who is huge *
and a khurʿūb a supple, shapely young woman or a fine-boned, fleshy, stout, soft, white young women * […]73
23This list embraces 219 words referring to classical beauty concepts here decontextualized from poetry.74 Arranged one below the other, al-Sāq uses for the first time in Arabic book history a vertical list instead of a horizontal compilation,75 which makes length more visual and palpable by stretching it over 12 pages in the original edition.76 Providing lexical definitions taken mostly from al-Qāmūs, this list is an epistemic foregrounding of the signified in the right column, i.e. the erotic women.
24But the longer the list gets, the more it foregrounds the signifier in the left column. The repetition of conventional attributes – e.g. “stout” and similar attributes appear 57 times – makes the lexical definitions more and more imprecise and redundant. It emphasizes, in contrast, the uniqueness of the signifier. Khurʿūb, for instance, derived from kharʿab, “a branch or twig, until a year old” and “fresh, juicy, tall”,77 refers therefore to a “supple woman like a bending-bough”.
25Long lists, however, often turn into an “intolerable swarm”,78 as Umberto Eco calls them. Although a patient reader could theoretically read them word by word, they are practically too long to do that. Instead, they rather evoke the subjective sensation of infinity, of a never-ending list.79 Oscillating between signifier and signified, left and right column, the textual movement of taʿriya exposes here the infinity of both erotic women and unique words.
26And then a physical breakdown occurs! At the 219th word, the narrator collapses all of a sudden due to the overabundance of words and promises to finish the list later in the book.80 Enumeration has a performative dimension that exposes the narrator bodily to infinite language. Affected by the exuberance of women and words, he is moved beyond his bodily limits and control. Even after collapsing, he is moved to compile one list after another, after another. “The pen doesn’t obey my command to leave this stimulating spot,”81 he says in an affective bliss leading to 25 lists with some 1300 words over 77 pages.
27This enumerative excess, a passional line of flight, connects lexical fields like “food”, “garden” and “games” with words concerning women: even if a man enjoyed all kinds of food, gardens, games, etc., he would never stop yearning to have a woman. The erotic deterritorialization of these lexical fields connects every word to women. This performative foregrounding makes male pleasure for women the strongest anthropological force. The female pleasure for men, however, is as strong as the male’s, or even stronger, as al-Fāriyāqiyya later argues.82
28Another trigger of taʿriya is sound and especially sajʿ, often translated as “prose rhyme”.83 Sajʿ is a device in mantic speech of pre-Islamic soothsayers and the verses of the Qurʾān, while it later became a rather formulaic device of belletrist and official prose.84 Enumerative sajʿ, i.e. rhyming words in enumeration, is crucial to al-Sāq, because it foregrounds sound shifts, morphological patterns and semantic etymologies of the language. Performing musicality and affectivity, and not to be found in any other language, al-Shidyāq considers the sajʿ as “one particularity of the Arabic language.”85
29In al-Sāq, the enumerative sajʿ is often related to pleasure or bliss.86 One day, the narrator asks al-Fāriyāq how he liked the women of Alexandria, who veil their faces, while the women at home in Mount Lebanon do not. In his answer, al-Fāriyāq expresses his fascination that the veil does not conceal women’s appeal. Quite to the contrary, he claims, the women of Alexandria know how to bewitch the men
bi-ishārāti-hā wa-īmāʾi-hā * wa-raʾrāti-hā wa-ībāʾi-hā * wa-ramzi-hā wa-lamzi-hā * wa-hajli-hā wa-ghamzi-hā * wa-ghunji-hā wa-dalāli-hā * wa-tīhi-hā wa-ʿujbi-hā * wa-zahwi-hā wa-shikli-hā * […]
with her gestures and nods * her eye-rolling and her gestures behind her back * her expressive looks and glances * her come-hither winks and cow eyes * her billings and cooings * her haughtiness and conceit * her vanity and coquetry * […]87
30This enumerative sajʿ consists of sajʿāt (sg. sajʿa, i.e. “a phrase of sajʿ associated with one end rhyme”)88 with the monorhyme -hā (her), the female third person possessive suffix. In addition, one finds several rhymes within the sajʿa (e.g. ramzi-hā wa-lamzi-hā) or between words across the sajʿāt (e.g. ishārāti-hā […] wa-raʿrāti-hā). In an iconic way, each sajʿa is separated by a five-point asterisk, here rendered as (*), making the prose rhyme visible. Containing 166 words for “appealing movements by women”, it maps female eroticism. Since gharīb or odd words89 like kawkawa (to walk quickly and quivering with short steps) and harkala (to walk slowly and artfully),90 however, remain unexplained, the compilation also foregrounds their lexicographical sound artefacts. By bringing kawkawa together with wakwaka (to walk with short steps in a rolling way as if one could not take long strides),91 the text foregrounds a qalb doublet, a metathesis of the letters waw and kāf producing two words with similar yet slightly different meanings. By bringing harkala (to walk slowly and artfully) together with ḥarkala (a way of walking), it exposes an ibdāl doublet, a substitution of the letter hāʾ with ḥāʾ, with a similar yet slightly different meaning. While al-Shidyāq develops with Sirr, published 13 years after al-Sāq, a genuine language theory of qalb and ibdāl,92 al-Sāq is already infused by echoes of this theory. Rather than explaining, al-Sāq is showing it by “writing aloud”,93 a term coined by Roland Barthes. Writing aloud does not seek the “clarity of messages”, the exact lexical meaning and etymological derivation, but rather the “grain of the throat”: “the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony.”94 It seeks the palpability of the signifier as a message of its own sake. It celebrates the unique sound of the Arabic language. The materiality of words, however, refers back to the physiognomy of women; the permuting and substituting movement of letters refer to the gestural and physical movements of women. Here, taʿriya is a back and forth of sexual and linguistic pleasure.
31“Off and away!” is the protagonist taken by affective joy. Every movement of the veiled women becomes an erotic movement. In a subsequent poem on veiled women, he compares the veil of a woman to the sails of a ship. Once the sail is set, the smallest breath of wind (al-hawāʾ) can move the ship; once the woman wears the veil, the smallest shimmer of affection (al-hawā) can move the man.95 With its 166 words, the enumerative description exceeds what the protagonist could possibly have eyewitnessed in Alexandria and maps instead the Arabic words that the protagonist could possibly use to describe erotic movements of women. By adding the female possessive suffix -hāʾ (her) to the words, it feminizes and eroticizes every word; it is an erotic deterritorialization. In this regard, al-Shidyāq proudly claims, al-Sāq embraces “all praiseworthy qualities of women, including their alluring ways of moving and all their various charms, no imaginable form of which I left unmentioned in this book.”96
32A further trigger of taʿriya is semantic relatedness (mutajānis)97 that includes etymological derivation (ishtiqāq) or polysemous homonymy (ishtirāk). The former exposes the semantic relatedness between different meanings of different words, the latter of different meanings of one word. This is a performative foregrounding of hidden shades of meaning. However, it is not only about relatedness in language, but also in culture. Located in discourses of postclassical Arabic lexicography and 19th-century European and Arabic philology, language becomes the blueprint of culture; reading the words of a language is a means of understanding its culture. “If a word exists in language,” as Ouyang describes this thinking of language, “then the practice denoted by this word must be known and experienced and must be open to discussion and not suppressed as taboo.”98
33In this context, al-Fāriyāqiyya’s female reading of the Arabic language is important because it is a protofeminist appropriation of the Arab culture. In one passage, for instance, her spouse announces that he is planning to leave her for a while. She starts to argue with him, because he deprives her of her “marital right”,99 i.e. sexual intercourse. The word rajul (man), she states, is defined by al-Fīruzābādī’s al-Qāmūs as “too well known to require a definition; also, one who has frequent intercourse.”100 If the word rajul brings together these two meanings (man, frequent intercourse), he mustn’t deprive her of sex. Otherwise a wife, created by God with softness and compassion, will not be able to turn down any offer by another man – and this is also embodied in the “etymology and relatedness of the words raḥim (‘womb’) and raḥma (‘mercy’).”101 The polysemic and etymological enumerations are the briefest form of the erotic enumerations discussed here. They suggest a relatedness of “man” and “sex” and likewise of “womb” and “mercy” not only in the Arabic language, but also in the Arab culture. Importantly, al-Fāriyāqiyya’s protofeminist reading derives from the Arabic language the right of sexual pleasure for Arab women. While classical Arabic literature does claim to some degree the importance of female pleasure during intercourse,102 in al-Sāq it is now importantly a woman how raises this claim and even dares to demand it without constraints.
34Struck by a “fit” (ihtiqāʿ),103 as she calls it afterwards, she is carried away from the regime of signs. Following the passional line, she is both exposing the semantic relatedness of words and bodily exposed to their affective relatedness. Her husband contributes further examples for semantic relatedness, like the epithets Abū Adrās (vagina) and Abū Idrīs (penis), differing only in vocals, as if the one is the inversion of the other.104 “God honor our language,” al-Fāriyāqiyya affectively exclaims, “which brings together what is appropriate and related.”105
35This taʿriya develops a rhizomatic relatedness between words that is sometimes playful, but more often earnestly rooted in theories, some of them genuine to al-Shidyāq.106 While al-Sāq often exposes and praises the appropriate relatedness, it also discusses and criticizes what it considers to be inappropriate, like the frequent polysemy between “to crap” and “to fuck”, as in the word raṭaʾa.107 Moreover, it denies the obvious relatedness to homoerotic pleasures, like in the word amrad (beardless),108 an homoerotic epithet for young boys.109 Likewise, it also obscures the semantic relatedness to sexual abstinence, for which Arabic has, according to the protagonist, nearly no words and which is therefore of no cultural importance.110 In this regard, taʿriya is a performative foregrounding that makes heterosexual eroticism a particularity of the Arabic language and the Arab culture.111
Postclassical Lexicography and Eroticism Intertwined
36The conflation of lexicography and eroticism is not an invention of al-Shidyāq, but a practice of Arabic literature from the postclassical Arabic period (around the 13th to the 18th century) dealing with love and eroticism. For instance, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya’s (d. 1350) treatise Rawḍat al-muḥibbīn wa-nuzhat al-mushtāqīn (The Garden of Lovers and the Promenade of Those Who Yearn) starts by compiling some 50 terms for “love” (maḥabba), claiming that the more people are familiar with a subject and the more they love or fear it, the more words they coin for it.112 And the erotic adab compilation al-Rawḍ al-ʿāṭir fī nuzhat al-khāṭir (The Perfumed Garden in the Playing Ground of Pleasure) by al-Nafzāwī (d. 1440) dedicates two whole chapters to penis and vulva, cataloguing in a playful way their various words, epithets and nicknames.113
37The most excessive use of lexicographic enumeration is to be found in Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī’s (d. 1505) erotic adab compilation al-Wishāḥ fī fawāʾid al-nikāḥ (The Female Scarf – On the Virtues of Lawful Sexual Intercourse).114 By compiling knowledge from various fields on marital sex, it performatively foregrounds the virtues of nikāḥ. From the seven hierarchically presented fields, lexicography (lugha) is the second, only preceded by religion (al-Ḥadīth wa-l-athār). Bringing together more than 1500 words for sex, penis and vulva, taken from al-Qāmūs and other dictionaries, he linguistically maps the field of nikāḥ and culturally performs an apology of nikāḥ. In addition, in the fourth chapter on “prose rhymes and poetry”, he provides enumerative asjāʿ, foregrounding the affectivity of erotic words for erotic meanings. Thus, al-Wishāḥ exposes, like al-Sāq, enumerative length and sound, but does not develop rhizomatic semantic associations. These are, however, at centre stage in al-Suyūṭī’s Rashf al-ẓulāl min al-siḥr al-ḥalāl (Sipping Subliminal Signification from Legitimate Fascination), a maqāma collection.115 A group of young men with different professions narrate their wedding nights using the technical words of their professions to describe the intercourse frankly. The lexicographer, therefore, uses the words of dictionary titles to refer to sex and eroticism. Deterritorializing and eroticizing technical terms, they unveil (tajallī) and strip (kashf), to use the mystical terms of the ṣūfī, 116as much the women as the words.
38This conflation of lexicography and eroticism produces a language eroticism that infuses the Arabic lexicographical and literary tradition and appears in various poetical forms and with political functions. In the 18th century, when the concepts of language, women and body were on the move, language eroticism transformed into less corporeal and more transcendent forms.117
Al-Shidyāq’s Scandalous Exposures in the Nineteenth Century
39When Benjamin Duprat (d. 1865), the librarian and publisher of the influential Société Asiatique in Paris, published al-Sāq at the end of April 1855, it provoked in Europe a brief flashing, and in the Arab world a long glimmering, scandal according to the sources discovered so far, some of which are presented here for the first time. The first review of al-Sāq was published by the German Orientalist Emil Rödiger (d. 1874) in 1856 in the Zeitschrift der deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, who received a copy from al-Shidyāq. Rödiger appreciated in al-Sāq the “presentation of linguistic analogies [i.e. qalb and ibdāl words] in almost tabular form, as one could hardly compile them by oneself through reading or even through the lexicon.”118 At the same time, he remarks that many descriptions certainly contain “what offends chastity and morals.”119 H. Ranc (d. unknown), the responsible of the foreign correspondence at the Paris-based Catholic-monarchist L’Ami de la religion, however, was in a flurry of rage. In a report published in 1858, he compared al-Shidyāq to Voltaire (d. 1778), accusing him of a “cynisme en religion, en morale, en politique”120 that corrupts religion, family and society. As consequence, he called on France to immediately stop the distribution of this “poison délétère”121 among the Oriental Christian population.
40From the Arab readership, Fāris al-Shidyāq’s brother Ṭannūs (d. 1861) seems to be the first to insinuate a moral indecency in 1855 or 1856,122 while the Beirut-based litterateur Khalīl al-Khūrī (d. 1907) refers in his satirical novel Way… idhan lastu bi-ifranjī (Alas! So I’m not a foreigner), published in Beirut in 1859, to al-Fāriyāq as a lecherous old man, who’s pen is driven by erotic poetry, “may he be forgiven, if this is possible.”123 Later on, many different writers accuse al-Sāq of indecency and licentiousness,124 but most explicitly the public intellectual Jurjī Zaydān in 1894 in an article for his Cairo-based journal al-Hilāl (The Crescent):
No man of letters could read [al-Sāq] without wishing that [these licentious words] had not come to the mind of our Shaykh [al--Shidyāq] and that he had not enumerated them in his book in order to keep the pens of writers away from what would embarrass a young man, not to mention an innocent girl, upon reading it.125
41The scandal, al-faḍīḥa, is according to Tarek El-Ariss an act of exposing. While faḍaḥa means to “expose a misdeed”, the scandalizer (faḍḍāḥ) in literature is someone who is “making a scene” by “putting something on stage” and “exposing” it. At the same time, a scandalous work often exposes the scandalizer.126 Discussing the scandalous forms of exposing and being exposed, this essay focuses on al-Sāq’s politics of exposing words, women and the body erotically.
42In the eve of modernity, the Arab 19th century embarked on a normative project of civilization and progress while experiencing the seductions and hardships of missions and colonization. In regard to language,127 the intellectual Buṭrus al-Bustānī (d. 1883) delivered in 1859 in Beirut a programmatic speech on “Ādāb al-ʿArab” (The Arts of the Arabs), where he demands a new attitude towards the language. The many synonyms for instance in Arabic for camel are a burden in a time when the camel is being substituted by the railroad and the steamship. Instead of indulging in synonyms and odds words, what he calls “Fīrūzābādiyyāt of al-Fīrūzābādī”,128 one should coin new words as a means for civilization and progress. This break with the pride in the richness of Arabic was immediately noticed and applauded by European Orientalists like the German Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer (d. 1888), who considered the Arabic language as mannerist and outworn.129
43While al-Shidyāq has throughout his life importantly contributed to this modernization of the language by coining new words,130 al-Sāq maps the richness of lexis upholding a certain linguistic taste (dhawq) that derives knowledge and pleasure from these odd words.131 Moreover, by linking archaic words of women to contemporary debates on the “new woman”, he demands for her more rights and greater respect.132 Foregrounding the many words for women, he is celebrating their importance to Arab society: “What is the world if not women!”133 Even misogynist words, like mufassila (excuse-makers), is revaluated in a protofeminist way as a “woman exercising agency”. Contrary to the alleged backwardness, untimeliness and decadence of Arabic, he exposes the possible progressivity, timeliness and vigour of a premodern language for a modern culture to come.
44At the centre stage of the scandal, however, is the taʿriya of words for women. Ranc calls this a corruption of the family and society, and Zaydān is concerned with the embarrassment of the new Arab public sphere which includes women and young readers. In a biting polemical article on “Shawāʾib al-lugha” (The Defaults of Language), published 1893 in the Cairo-based journal al-Muqtaṭaf, the Aleppine author Yūsuf Shulḥut (d. unknown) condemns the rich bawdy lexis that he considers a particularity of Arabic. “The language must conceal [tastur] with its words what a man conceals [yastur] of his body parts and movements.”134 In the context of a puritanization of the Levantine culture by Protestant missionaries,135 a straitlaced culture emerged that condemned the former highly acclaimed linguistic and literary interest in “licentiousness” (mujūn) and “obscenity” (sukhf). As consequence, many of these works do not appear in the 19th century in print, or only in bowdlerized versions,136 a fate that al-Shidyāq obviously feared for his book too.137
45Right at the very beginning, al-Sāq confronts the reader with a list of some 240 words for penis, pudendum and sexual intercourse. There is no harm or dishonour using these words, since many pious men and women use them in public, showing “no trace of either embarrassment’s red or the yellow of dread * On the contrary, their faces would be verdant and cheerful, radiant and joyful*.”138 Foregrounding the words of nikāḥ (marriage, marital sexual intercourse) and defending them against Arab Catholic repudiation is to defend the pleasure of intercourse in matrimony. This is part of a larger body anthropology that appreciates pleasure and desire in sharp contrast to straitlaced cultures of puritanized Arab, Catholic French or Victorian Britons. The pleasure derived from these words foregrounds the pleasure of sex.
46While al-Shidyāq exposes words and women in al-Sāq, he is also exposed by it; al-Sāq is making a scene out of al-Shidyāq. According to Ranc from L’ami de la religion, al-Shidyāq could only succeed in exposing “sa vie scandaleuse, ses divers apostasies, etc.”139 by using a pseudonym and evading the Catholic and Protestant publishers in Beirut, Malta and London, engaging instead an academic publisher in Paris: it is a scandal under the guise of philology. While the autobiographical travelogue was one of the most important genres in 19th-century Arabic literature, most of the authors fashioned themselves as sovereign selves without any religious or sexual ambiguities or scandals.140 In contrast, al-Sāq anticipates its scandals from the beginning and ends by evoking that he might be stoned and crucified.141 It scandalously exposes a self stripped naked of sovereignty, a body out of control. This scandal foregrounds the affectivity of words and women, i.e. their ability to affect a body with joy and bliss.
47In this regard, al-Sāq deliberately seeks the scandal in order to affect the reader. In one passage, for example, after extremely bawdy lists, the narrator claims that his purpose is only “to expose (ibrāz) the beauties of our noble language” and “to awaken a desire”142 in the readers to buy books on language. Eroticism makes lexicography more attractive – and vice versa. When al-Shidyāq’s book arrived in the Levant, Ranc from L’Ami de la religion states, the simple-minded readers hustled to buy it once they saw on the front page that it was published by Duprat from the Societé Asiatique in Paris.143 The philological reputation of French Orientalism helps to spread the sexual scandal. Language and eroticism form in al-Sāq a feedback loop generating shared pleasures and affects.
Towards an Affective Philology
48This essay reads al-Sāq as an erotic digest of al-Qāmūs that turns a lexicon into literature by combining enumeration with narration and reflection. With its literary-lexicographical compilations, it creates a language eroticism that exposes words, women and the body. This taʿriya (stripping naked) in the form of erotic enumeration is a performative foregrounding of epistemic, aesthetic and affective qualities of words, women and the body. It meditates on the lexical meaning of a word or foregrounds its phonetic and morphological material; it moves back and forth between the signified and the signifier, informing each other or moving beyond them by deterritorialization. The erotic enumeration exposes women and words by making them erotic and thereby arousing sexual and linguistic pleasure or affecting joyful bliss. It redistributes language, deconstructs gender and unveils the affectivity of the body on the eve of Arab modernity.
49In a broader sense, al-Sāq argues for an Arab modernity that is not only fascinated by contemporary European ideas and goods, but also inspired by the Classical Arabic language. Exposing its hidden “wisdom” and “beauty” and elaborating its relevance for the 19th century, it creates, in the words of Raḍwā ʿĀshūr, a “possible modernity” (ḥadātha mumkina).144 In my reading, however, this term does not suggest a genuine Arab modernity essentially different to a colonial modernity, but rather a modernity derived from possibilities of the Arabic language. In this regard, al-Shidyāq’s performative foregrounding is not detached from, but situated in contemporary and yet different overlapping discourses. It emphasizes certain possible meanings, like linguistic eroticism in the waning discourse of postclassical lexicography, while it disregards possible others, like the homoeroticism of postclassical poetry. As a result, it produces an exclusively heterosexual language eroticism that is at the same time a product of emerging discourses of the new woman145 and heteronormative sexuality146 that consider women as the “only legitimate object of male desire.”147 In this regard, the exposed premodern word in al-Sāq is an imagined future world. Referring to a now famous 19nth-century debate between Friedrich Nietzsche (d. 1900) and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorf (d. 1931) on the role of historical philology in relation to the contemporary world, it is a “Philology of the future” (Zukunftsphilologie), “an Apollonian and Dionysian work of art”148 that conflates rationality with ecstasy, or, in regard to al-Sāq, criticism with eroticism in order to affect its contemporaries.
50The conflation between lexicographical criticism and sexual eroticism is the point of departure for al-Shidyāq’s etymological dictionary Sirr al-Layāl, where he states:
While the predecessors used to be engaged with this noble language, I have loved her passionately. I’ve fallen so ardently in love with [Arabic] that I became her slave; for her I kept my wicks burning and myself awake during the nights, reflecting on her, searching for what is hidden and concealed.149
51Affected by Arabic, he is moved to expose “what is hidden and concealed” in language. While Sirr presents these secrets fully disclosed, al-Sāq presents them to be disclosed during reading, or not to be fully, even never disclosed.150 In contrast to Sirr, it plays with the eroticism of unveiling and veiling, with the eroticism that our own language and identity is, to a certain degree, foreign to us and thereby fascinating and surprising, but also unsettling and threatening; Arabic is affective in many ways.
52Reading taʿriya in al-Sāq prompts what this essay calls “affective philology”, i.e. a reading of philology that takes into account the affectivity and affectedness of words and the body. Stemming from studies of Ṭarābulusī and al-ʿAẓmah, Ouyang, El-Ariss, Sacks and Bou Ali and developing them further,151 it is not only interested in the linguistic criticism of the Arab 19th century, but also in its corporeal affectivity. In regard to al-Shidyāq’s scandalous word lists of women in the context of a rich language eroticism, this essay focused on positive affects like joy. Affective philology, however, has also to deal with negative affects like rage. In this regard, the polemical lists compiling faults made by European Orientalists at the end of al-Sāq provides a brilliant example for a philology in a rage.152
53In recent years, philology has been revisited and revaluated as a critical means of revealing the “worldliness” of the word,153 deconstructing the Eurocentric 19th-century philology to a “world philology”.154 Shedding light on “philological encounters”,155 as Islam Dayeh calls it, it focuses on interactions between institutions, persons and texts. In this regard, affective philology emphasizes the affective forces of encounters, “the experience of being exposed to and provoked by language,”156 as Werner Hamacher defines a philology attentive to affects.157 It considers affective moments crucial in analyzing their corporeal and cognitive becoming and their epistemic and political impact. Thus, affective philology is about the affected and affecting “knowledge of language” (fiqh al-lugha), as philology is called in Arabic.
Notes de bas de page
1 For the religious critique, see Al-Bagdadi Nadia, “The Cultural Function of Fiction: From the Bible to Libertine Literature. Historical Criticism and Social Critique in Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq”, Arabica 46-3 (1999), p. 375-401; Al-Maṭwī Muḥammad al-Hādī, Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq 1801-1887. Ḥayātu-hu wa-āthāru-hu wa-ārāʾu-hu fī al-nahḍa al-ʿarabiyya al-ḥadītha, Bayrūt, Dār al-gharb al-islāmī, 1989, p. 720-745.
2 For his life and works, see al-Ṣulḥ ʿImād, Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq. Āthāru-hu wa-ʿaṣru-hu, Bayrūt, Sharikat al-maṭbūʿāt li-l-tawzīʿ wa-l-nashr; Ṭarābulusī Fawwāz & al-ʿAẓma ʿAzīz, “Ṣuʿlūk al-nahḍawiyyīn al-ʿarab. Muqaddima”, Silsilat al-aʿmāl al-majhūla. Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq, Fawwāz Ṭarābulusī & ʿAzīz al-ʿAẓma (eds), Riyāḍ al-Rayyis, p. 7-47; Roper Geoffrey, “Fāris, Aḥmad”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, Oxford University Press 2004; Junge Christian, Die Entblößung der Wörter. aš-Šidyāqs literarische Listen als Kultur- und Gesellschaftskritik im 19. Jahrhundert. Mit historischen Paratexten im Anhang, Wiesbaden, Reichert 2019, p. 35-53; Hamarneh Walid, “Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq”, Essays in Literary Arabic Biography, III, 1850-1950, Roger Allen (ed.), Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 2010, p. 317-328; Johnson Rebecca, “Foreword”, Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyaq Leg over Leg, or: The Turtle in the Tree concerning the Fāriyāq What Manner of Creature might he be, 4 vols., transl. and ed. by Humphrey Davies, New York, New York University Press, 2013-14, I, p. ix-xl.
3 Gully Adrian, “Arabic Linguistic Issues and the Controversies of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries”, Journal of Semitic Studies 42, p. 109-115.
4 See Ṭarābulusī & al-ʿAẓma, “Ṣuʿlūk”, p. 24; Tarek El-Ariss, Trials of Arab Modernity. Literary Affects and the New Political, New York, Fordham University Press, p. 85-86.
5 See al-Ṣulḥ, al-Shidyāq, p. 67-73; Al-Maṭwī, al-Shidyāq, p. 116-124.
6 For the manuscripts of al-Jāsūs and Sirr dated to 1850, see Roper Geoffrey, “An Autograph Manuscript of Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq, Prepared by Him for the Press”, Writings and Writing. Investigations in Islamic Text and Script; in Honour of Januarius Justus Witkam, Robert M. Kerr & Thomas Milo (eds.), Cambridge, Archetype, 2013, p. 345-346.
7 See al-Shidyāq Aḥmad Fāris, Leg over Leg, or: The Turtle in the Tree Concerning the Fāriyāq What Manner of Creature Might he be, 4 vols., ed. and transl. by Humphrey Davies, New York, New York University Press, 2013-2014. Translations from al-Sāq are by Humphrey Davies, other translations are mine, exceptions are indicated.
8 Al-Bagdadi, “The Cultural Function of Fiction”, p. 395.
9 For literary studies of al-Sāq, see e.g. Al-Bagdadi, ibid.; Hallaq Boutros, “al-Sāq ʿalā al-Sāq de Aḥmad Fāris al-Šidyāq: Un roman à la Rabelais”, Histoire de la littérature arabe moderne, I, 1800-1945, Boutros Hallaq & Heidi Toelle (eds.), Paris, Sindbad-Actes Sud, 2007, p. 232-260; Rastegar Kamran, Literary Modernity between Middle East and Europe. Textual Transactions in 19th Century Arabic, English and Persian Literatures, London, Routledge, 2007, p. 101-125; Junge Christian, Die Entblößung der Wörter, p. 57-289; Junge Christian, „Food, Body, Society: al-Shidyāq’s Somatic Experience of Nineteenth-Century Communities”, Insatiable Appetite. Food as Cultural Signifier in the Middle East and Beyond, Kirill Dmitriev, Julia Hauser & Bilal Orfali (eds.), Leiden, Brill, 2019, p. 145-161; Junge Christian, “Doing Things with Lists. Enumeration in Arabic Prose”, Journal of Arabic Literature 50-3/4 (2019), p. 289-297; ʿĀshūr Raḍwā, al-Ḥadātha al-mumkina. al-Shidyāq wa-l-Sāq ʿalā al-sāq. al-Riwāya al-ūlā fī al-adab al-ʿarabī al-ḥadīth, al-Qāhira, Dār al-shurūq, 2009; Johnson Rebecca Carol, “Archive of Errors: Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq, Literature, and the World”, Middle Eastern Literatures 20-1 (2017), p. 31-50.
10 For a careful generic reading, see e.g. Hallaq, “al-Sāq”.
11 Al-Shidyāq, Leg, I, p. 9; note modified translation of ibrāz.
12 Al-Shidyāq, Leg, I, p. 15.
13 Al-Shidyāq, Leg, III, p. 319; my translation.
14 See ʿĀshūr, al-Ḥadātha, p. 17-18; Johnson, “Foreword”, p. xxv-xxvi.
15 Winckler Barbara, “Jenseits der Dichotomien. Ein Gründungstext der Arabischen Moderne”, Die Ordnung pluraler Kulturen. Figurationen europäischer Kulturgeschichte, vom Osten her gesehen, Zaal Andronikashvili et al. (eds.), Berlin, Kadmos, 2013, p. 52-64.
16 For eroticism, see e.g. Junge, Die Entblößung der Wörter, p. 163-222; Junge Christian, “Food, Body, Society”, p. 152-159; Al-Maṭwī, al-Shidyāq, p. 679-684; Al-Ṣulḥ, al-Shidyāq, p. 199-207; Ṭarābulusī & al-ʿAẓma, “Ṣuʿlūk”, p. 32-36; Al-Bagdadi, “Eros und Etikette – Reflexionen zum Bann eines zentralen Themas im arabischen 19. Jahrhundert”, Verschleierter Orient – Enschleierter Okzident? (Un-)Sichtbarkeit in Politik, Recht, Kunst und Kultur seit dem 19. Jahrhundert, Bettina Dennerlein, Elke Frietsch & Therese Steffen (eds.), München, Wilhelm Fink, 2012, p. 128-131.
17 Al-Shidyāq, Leg, II, p. 190; my translation.
18 Al-Shidyāq, Leg, IV, p. 44-45.
19 For language in al-Sāq, see e.g. Dāghir Sharbil, al-ʿArabiyya wa-l-tamaddun. Fī ishtibāh al-ʿalāqāt bayn al-nahḍa wa-l-muthāqafa wa-l-ḥadātha, Bayrūt, Dār al-nahār li-l-nashr, 2008, p. 193-243; Sacks Jeffrey, Iterations of Loss. Mutilation and Aesthetic Form, al-Shidyaq to Darwish, New York, Fordham University Press, 2015, p. 91-117; Kilito Abdelfattah, Thou Shalt not Speak my Language, transl. by Waïl S. Hassan. Syracuse, Syracuse University Press, 2008, p. 68-85; Al-ʿĀshūr, al-Ḥadātha, p. 105-110; Bou Ali Nadia, “Collecting the Nation: Lexicography and National Pedagogy in al-Nahda al-ʿarabiyya”, Archives, Museums and Collecting Practices in the Modern Arab World, Sonja Mejcher-Atassi & John Pedro Schwartz (eds.), Farnham, Ashgate, 2012, p. 46-52.
20 Al-Shidyāq, Sirr al-layāl fī al-qalb wa-l-ibdāl. Fī ʿilm maʿānī al-alfāẓ al-ʿarabiyya, ed. by Muḥammad al-Hādī ibn Ṭāhir al-Maṭwī, Bayrūt, Dār al-gharb al-islāmī, 2006, p. 111-114, p. 176.
21 ʿĀshūr, al-Ḥadātha, p. 55.
22 For language as a mean of civilization, see e.g. Dāghir, al-ʿArabiyya; Bou Ali, “Collecting”.
23 Al-Shidyāq, Leg, I, p. 49; note modified translation of qāmūs.
24 For al-Qāmūs, see Baalbaki Ramzi, The Arabic Lexicographical Tradition. From the 2nd/8th to the 12th/18th Century, Leiden, Brill, 2014, p. 391-397; Riḍwān Muḥammad Muṣṭafā, Dirāsāt fī al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ, Bayrūt, Maṭābiʿ al-shurūq, 1973; Strotmann Vivian, Majd al-Dīn al-Fīrūzābādī (1329-1415). A Polymath on the Eve of the Early Modern Period, Leiden, Brill, 2015, p. 66-87; Al-Musawi Muhsin, The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters. Arabic Knowledge Construction, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 2015, p. 89-97.
25 Riḍwān, Dirāsāt, p. 145-168, p. 365-387.
26 For al-Shidyāq’s role in lexicography, see al-Matwī, al-Shidyāq, p. 459-576; Sawāʿī Muḥammad, Azmat al-muṣṭalaḥ al-ʿarabī fī qarn al-tāsiʿ ʿashar. Muqaddima tārikhiyya ʿāmma, Bayrūt, Dār al-gharb al-islāmī, 1999, p. 99-114; Al-Zarkān Muḥammad ʿAlī, Al-Jawānib al-luġawiyya ʿinda Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq, Dimashq, Dār al-fikr, 1988, p. 56-63.
27 See e.g. al-Shidyāq, Leg, I, p. 25; ibid., IV, p. 252; Al-Shidyāq, Sirr, 2006, p. 172-173.
28 For the erotic lexis of Lisān al-ʿarab, see Ḥamza ʿAlī ʿAbd al-Ḥalīm, al-Qāmūs al-jinsī ʿinda al-ʿarab, Bayrūt, Riyāḍ al-Rayyis, 2002.
29 See al-Suyūṭī, al-Wishāḥ fī fawāʾid al-nikāḥ, ed. by Ṭalʿat Ḥasan ʿAbd al-Qawī, Dimashq, Dār al-kitāb al-ʿarabī, n.d., p.108.
30 Riḍwān, Dirāsāt, p. 243-264.
31 Strotmann, al-Fīrūzābādī, p. 198-200; Strotmann translates nikāḥ as “marriage”, but “lawful sexual intercourse” seems more accurate.
32 Al-Shidyāq, Leg, I, p. 9; note modified translation of ibrāz.
33 Ṭarābulusī & al-ʿAẓma, “Suʿlūk”, p. 32.
34 For the “grammar of unveiling” in the Arabic ars erotica, see Al-Bagdadi, “Eros”, p. 122-123.
35 Ṭarābulusī & al-ʿAẓma, “Suʿlūk”, p. 32-34.
36 Ouyang Wen-chin, “Dramas of Encounter: al-Shidyaq on Arab, English and French Women”, Tropes du voyage: les rencontres, Abou Bakr Chraïbi (ed.), Paris, L’Harmattan, 2010, p. 297.
37 El-Ariss, Trials, p. 80.
38 Junge, Die Entblößung der Wörter, p. 292-296.
39 See Peled Mattityahu, “The Enumerative Style in Al-Sâq ʿalā al-sâq”, Journal of Arabic Literature 22-1 (1991), p. 127-145; Junge, “Doing Things With Lists”, p. 289-297; Junge, Die Entblößung der Wörter, p. 90-108; Zakharia Katia, “Aḥmad Fāris al-Šidyāq – auteur de Maqāmāt”, Arabica 52-4 (2005), p. 509-521; El-Ariss, “Review: Leg Over Leg”, Arab Studies Journal 24-1 (2016), p. 286-290.
40 Mainberger Sabine, Die Kunst des Aufzählens. Elemente zu einer Poetik des Enumerativen, Berlin, de Gruyter, 2003, p. 12-13, p. 18-20.
41 Al-Shidyāq, Leg, I, p. 316-317.
42 El-Ariss, “Review”, p. 286.
43 Ibid., p. 288.
44 Al-Shidyāq, Leg, III, p. 150.
45 Jakobson Roman, “Linguistics and Poetics”, Style in Language, Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Cambridge, The Technology Press of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1960, p. 356.
46 Ibid., p. 356.
47 Barthes Roland, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller, New York, Hill and Wang, 1998, p. 27.
48 Al-Shidyāq, Leg, II, p. 188.
49 See ibid., I, p. 24-32.
50 For the term in the Islamic context, see Bouhdiba Abdelwahab, Sexuality in Islam, London, Saqi, 2004, p. 1-100.
51 Al-Shidyāq, Leg, II, p. 186-188.
52 Deleuze Gilles & Guattari Félix, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, London, Bloomsbury, 2016, p. 591, see also p. 129-172.
53 In the terms of Deleuze and Guattari, al-Sāq provides a relative and not an absolute deterritorialization, since it reconnects at some point back to the signifying regime of signs. For this differentiation, see Deleuze & Guattari, Plateaus, p. 591-592.
54 Barthes, Pleasure, 6-7, p. 26-27.
55 Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-ʿarab, 9 vols, al-Qāhira, Dār al-ḥadīth, 2003, VII, p. 103.
56 Al-Shidyāq, Leg, I, p. 316-318.
57 Malti-Douglas Fedwa, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Word. Gender and Discourse in Arabo-Islamic Writing, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1991, p. 29-53.
58 Sacks, Loss, p. 91.
59 For assemblages, see Deleuze & Guattari, Plateaus, p. 585-587.
60 El-Ariss, “Review”, p. 290; see also Ṭarābulusī & al-ʿAẓma, “Ṣuʿlūk”, p. 32.
61 Deleuze & Guattari, Plateaus, p. 149.
62 Brian Massumi, “Translator’s Foreword: Pleasures of Philosophy”, Deleuze & Guattari, Plateaus, 2016, p. v.
63 Gregg Melissa & Seighworth Gregory J., “An Inventory of Shimmers”, The Affect Theory Reader, Melissa Gregg & Gregory J. Seighworth (eds.), Durham, Duke University Press, 2010, p. 2; italics in the original.
64 For Deleuze’s concept of affect and its connection to deterritorialization, see Colman Felicity J., “Affect”, The Deleuze Dictionary, Adrian Parr (ed.), Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2005, p. 11-14. For affect as a “navigation of the body”, see Massumi, Politics of Affect, Cambridge, Polity, 2015, p. 1-46.
65 For the affect of joy, see Massumi, Politics, p. 44-56.
66 Barthes, Pleasure, p. 6-8, p. 20-22.
67 Bou Ali, “Collecting”, p. 51.
68 Sacks, Loss, p. 110-117.
69 Al-Shidyāq, Leg, I, p. 46-48.
70 Bettini Lidia, “Mutarādif”, Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics, III, Kees Versteegh (ed.), Leiden, Brill, 2008, p. 323.
71 Al-Shidyāq, Leg, II, p. 190-290; see also ibid., I, p. 48-50.
72 Shuraydi Hasan, The Raven and the Falcon. Youth versus Old Age in Medieval Arabic Literature, Leiden, Brill, 2014, p. 103; for the classical concepts of pleasure, see ibid., p. 87-140; Junge, Die Entblößung der Wörter, p. 164-177.
73 Al-Shidyāq, Leg, II, p. 195; note modified translation of wa- and asterisks.
74 For beauty concepts in poetry, see al-Munajjid Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn, Jamāl al-marʾa ʿinda al-ʿarab, Bayrūt, Dār al-kitāb al-jadīd, 1969.
75 Pérès Henri, “Les premières manifestations de la Renaissance littéraire arabe en Orient au xixe siècle: Nāṣīf al-Yāziǧī et Fāris aš-Šidyāḳ”, Annales de l’Institut d’études orientales, 1934/35, p. 252-253.
76 Al-Shidyāq, al-Sāq ʿalā al-sāq fī mā huwa al-Fāriyāq, Paris, Benjamin Duprat, 1855, p. 241-252.
77 Lane Edward William, An Arabic-English Lexicon Derived from the Best and Most Copious Eastern Sources, I, Bayrūt, Librairie du Liban, 1968, p. 725.
78 Eco Umberto, The Infinity of Lists, transl. Alastair McEwen, London, Maclehose Press, 2009, p. 18.
79 Ibid., p. 15-18.
80 Al-Shidyāq, Leg, II, p. 218; ibid., IV, p. 234-242.
81 Ibid., II, p. 295.
82 Ibid., III, p. 164.
83 Devin Stewart defines it in his seminal study as “rhyming poetry with accentual metre”; Devin Stewart, “Sajʿ in the Qurʾān: Prosody and Structure”, Journal of Arabic Literature 21-2 (1990), p. 138.
84 See Stewart, 1990, p. 101-113.
85 Al-Shidyāq Aḥmad Fāris, al-Shidyāq al-nāqid. Muqaddimat dīwān Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq, ed. by Muḥammad ʿAlī Shawābika, ʿAmmān, Dār al-bashīr, 1991, p. 98.
86 For a comprehensive discussion of sajʿ in al-Sāq, see Jubran Suleiman, “The Function of Rhyming Prose in al-Sāq ʿalā al-sāq”, Journal of Arabic Literature 20-2 (1989), p. 148-158.
87 Al-Shidyāq, Leg, II, p. 40-41; note asterisks in the translation.
88 Stewart, “Sajʿ”, p. 138.
89 For the function of gharīb words in lexicography, see Baalbaki, Lexicographical Tradition, p. 36-45.
90 Al-Shidyāq, Leg, II, p. 41-42.
91 Ibid.
92 For this theory, see al-Maṭwī, al-Shidyāq, p. 476-508; Al-Zarkān, al-Jawānib, p. 314-325.
93 Barthes, Pleasure, p. 66; italics in the original; see also Peled, “Enumerative Style”, p. 129-130.
94 Barthes, Pleasure, p. 66.
95 Al-Shidyāq, Leg, II, p. 44.
96 Ibid., I, p. 15.
97 Ibid., I, 8.
98 Ouyang, “Dramas of Encounter”, p. 298.
99 Ibid., III, p. 315.
100 Ibid., p. 321.
101 Ibid., p. 317; note modified translation for mujānasa and ishtiqāq.
102 For instance in regard to al-Nafzāwī, see Giffen Lois Anita, “al-Nafzāwī”, Essays in Arabic Literary Biography, II, 1350-1850, Joseph E. Lowry & Devin J. Stewart (eds.), Harrassowitz, 2009, p. 315-316.
103 Al-Shidyāq, Leg, III, p. 324-325.
104 Ibid., p. 317; note corrected reading of Abū Adrās, not Idrās.
105 Ibid.; note modified translation of mutanāsibīn and mutajānisīn.
106 See, for instance, his theory on the imitation of properties (ḥikāyat al-ṣifāt), see al-Shidyāq, Sirr, p. 202-203; Al-Maṭwī, al-Shidyāq, p. 466; Junge, Die Entblößung der Wörter, p. 228-236.
107 Al-Shidyāq, Leg, III, p. 318.
108 Ibid., p. 162, see also p. 164, and ibid., II, p. 108 and ibid., IV, p. 78.
109 See El-Rouayheb Khaled, Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2005, p. 26-32.
110 Al-Shidyāq, Leg, III, p. 318.
111 Ibid., I, p. 156.
112 Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Rawḍat al-muḥibbīn wa-nuzhat al-mushtāqīn, ed. by Muḥammad ʿUzayr Shams, Makka, Dār ʿilm al-fawāʾid, 2010/11, p. 25-26.
113 For these enumerations, see Giffen, “al-Nafzāwī”, p. 316-317.
114 For this work, see Hämeen-Anttila Jaakko, “Al-Suyūṭī and Erotic Literature”, Al-Suyūṭī, a Polymath of the Mamluk Period, Antonella Ghersetti (ed.), Leiden, Brill, 2016, p. 229-230.
115 Ibid., p. 233-234.
116 Ibid., p. 234.
117 See Al-Bagdadi, “Eros”; Massad Joseph, Desiring Arabs, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2008, p. 51-159.
118 Rödiger Emil, “Wissenschaftlicher Jahresbericht über das zweite Halbjahr 1854 und das Jahr 1855”, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 10 (1856), p. 751.
119 Ibid., p. 752.
120 Ranc H., “Terre sainte. Correspondance particulière de L’ami de la religion”, L’Ami de la Religion. Journal et revue ecclésiastique politique et littéraire, 6294 (06/06/1858), p. 32.
121 Ibid.
122 Al-Ṣulḥ, al-Shidyāq, p. 73.
123 Al-Khūrī Khalīl, Way. Idhan lastū bi-ifranjī, ed. by Sayyid al-Baḥrāwī, al-Qāhira, al-Majlis al-aʿlā li-l-thaqāfa, 2007, p. 8.
124 See, for instance, al-Bustānī Najīb & al-Bustānī Sulaymān, “Shidyāq – Shidiac”, Kitāb Dāʾirat al-maʿārif – Encyclopedie arabe, X, Najīb al-Bustānī & Sulaymān al-Bustānī (eds.), al-Qāhira, Maṭbaʿat al-hilāl, 1898, p. 430.
125 Zaydān Jurjī, “al-Shaykh Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq (tābiʿan li-mā qablahu)”, al-Hilāl 15 (1894), p. 455.
126 El-Ariss, “Fiction of Scandal”, Journal of Arabic Literature 43 (2015), p. 518-520.
127 For language in the 19th century, see e.g. Dāghir, al-ʿArabiyya; Bou Ali, “Collecting”; Sawāʿī, Azmat al-muṣṭalaḥ; Abdulrazzak Patel, The Arab Nahḍa. The Making of the Intellectual and Humanist Movement, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2013, p. 12-126.
128 Al-Bustānī Buṭrus, “Khuṭba fī ādāb al-ʿarab”, Mājid Fakhrī, al-Ḥarakāt al-fikriyya wa-ruwwādu-hā al-lubnāniyyūn fī ʿaṣr al-nahḍa. 1800-1922, Bayrūt, Dār al-nahār, 1992, p. 169.
129 In the same year, he translated and commented al-Bustānī’s speech, see Fleischer Heinrich Leberecht, Kleinere Schriften, III, Osnarbrück, Biblio-Verlag, 1968, p. 128-151.
130 See Sawāʿī, Azmat al-muṣṭalaḥ, p. 99-113.
131 For dhawq see al-Maṭwī, al-Shidyāq, p. 829-836.
132 For al-Shidyāq’s protofeminism, see e.g. al-Maṭwī, al-Shidyāq, p. 668-719; Ṭarābulusī & al-ʿAẓma, “Ṣuʿlūk”, p. 32-36; Ṣulḥ, al-Shidyāq, p. 197-207; ʿĀshūr, al-Ḥadātha, p. 55-60; Junge, Die Entblößung der Wörter, p. 109-162.
133 Al-Shidyāq, Leg, III, p. 246.
134 Shulḥut Yūsuf, “Shawāʾib al-lugha al-ʿarabiyya”, al-Muqtaṭaf 17.5 (Feb. 1893), p. 305. In this regard, it is no surprise that he condemns in the same article al-Sāq, ibid., p. 305-306.
135 See Khalaf Samir, Protestant Missionaries in the Levant. Ungodly Puritans, 1820-60, London, Routledge, 2012, p. 63-68 and p. 212-213.
136 See Lagrange Frédéric, “Modern Arabic Literature and the Disappearance of Mujūn: Same Sex Rape as a Case Study”, The Rude, the Bad and the Bawdy. Essays in Honour of Professor Geert Jan van Gelder, Adam Talib, Marlé Hammond & Arie Schippers (eds.), Cambridge, Gibb Memorial Trust, 2014, p. 233-234.
137 Al-Shidyāq, Leg, IV, p. 312.
138 Ibid., I, p. 47. See also Ouyang, “Dramas of Encounter”, p. 298.
139 Ranc, “Terre sainte”, p. 32.
140 For the 19th-century subject, see Sheehi Stephan, Foundations of Modern Arab Identity, Gainsville, University Press of Florida, 2004, p. 15-75.
141 Al-Shidyāq, Leg, IV, p. 406.
142 Ibid., III, p. 343; note modified translation.
143 Ranc, “Terre sainte”, p. 32.
144 ʿĀshūr, al-Ḥadātha, p. 133.
145 See Lagrange, “Disappearance of Mujūn”, p. 233-235.
146 El-Rouayheb, Before Homosexuality, p. 1-2, p. 156-161.
147 See Lagrange, “Disappearance of Mujūn”, p. 235.
148 So the polemical term for Nietzsche’s philology, Von Wilamowitz-Möllendorf Ulrich, Zukunftsphilologie! eine Erwiderung auf Friedrich Nietzsches Geburt der Tragödie, Berlin, Gebrüder Bornträger, 1872, p. 32. For a discussion, see Dayeh Islam, “The Potential of World Philology”, Philological Encounters 1 (2016), p. 401-402.
149 Al-Shidyāq, Sirr, p. 111.
150 For readings of the unintelligibility of Arabic and other languages in al-Sāq, see Johnson, “Errors”, p. 33-34.
151 See also the important studies of Kilito, Thou Shalt not Speak my Language, p. 56-85 and Tageldin Shaden M., Disarming Words. Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2011, p. 1-32 et passim.
152 Al-Shidyāq, Leg, IV, p. 428-482; see also Johnson, “Errors”, p. 43-45 and Gully, “Controversies”, p. 109-115; Junge, Die Entblößung der Wörter, p. 273-287.
153 Said Edward, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, New York, Columbia University Press, 2004, p. 58-60.
154 Dayeh, “World Philology”, p. 401-409.
155 Ibid., p. 410-413.
156 Hamacher Werner, Minima Philologica, trans. Catharine Diehl & Jason Groves, New York, Fordham University Press, 2015, p. 123; italics in the original.
157 Ibid., p. 25-26, p. 123-140.
Auteur
Philipps-Universität, Marburg

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