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Microhistory in the Middle East: The Case of Ibn Dāniyāl

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2013

Marvin Carlson
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Extract

The recently rediscovered dramatic works of a major thirteenth-century Egyptian author, Muhammad Ibn Dāniyāl, provides a striking example of how the strategies of microhistory can provide an important challenge to, and possible reassessment of, the grand narratives that theatre history has often accepted without serious question. Ibn Dāniyāl is an excellent example of the sort of outsider that has attracted the attention of microhistorians, one of those “peoples who would be left out by other methods.”

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 55 , Issue 1 , January 2014 , pp. 81 - 95
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 2013 

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References

Endnotes

1. Muir, Edward, in Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe, ed. Muir, Edward and Ruggiero, Guido (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991)Google Scholar, xxi; quoted in Iggers, Georg G., Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to Postmodern Challenge (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press [Lebanon, NH: UPNE], 1997), 114Google Scholar.

2. Brockett, Oscar, History of the Theatre (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1968), 8Google Scholar.

3. See, for example, Fudda, Assad, “Sannu, Yacub,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre & Performance, ed. Kennedy, Dennis, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 2:1182Google Scholar.

4. Wickham, Glynne, The Medieval Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), iGoogle Scholar.

5. Nagler, A. M., The Medieval Religious Stage: Shapes and Phantoms (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), xiiGoogle Scholar.

6. There are of course, many studies of the Crusades, almost all of them from a Western perspective. A happy exception to this is Hillenbrand, Carole, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2000)Google Scholar.

7. Saunders, J. J., The History of the Mongol Conquests (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), 106–16Google Scholar.

8. Biographical information on Ibn Dāniyāl has been largely drawn from Li Guo's excellent study, The Performing Arts in Medieval Islam: Shadow Play and Popular Poetry in Ibn Dāniyāl's Mamluk Cairo (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012)Google Scholar.

9. On the rise and reign of Baybars, see Marsot, Afif Lufti Al-Sayyid, A History of Egypt from the Arab Conquest to the Present, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 41–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10. Dāniyāl, Ibn, The Shadow Spirit, in Theatre from Medieval Cairo: The Ibn Dāniyāl Trilogy, ed. and trans. Mahfouz, Safi and Carlson, Marvin (New York: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Publications, 2013), 1–85, at 7Google Scholar.

11. Ibid., 8.

12. Ibid., 10–13.

13. Guo, Performing Arts, 68.

14. Ibn Dāniyāl, Shadow Spirit, 5.

15. Ze'evi, Dror, Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 128Google Scholar.

16. Martinovich, Nikolai N., The Turkish Theatre (New York: Theatre Arts, 1933), 31–2Google Scholar.

17. Kahle, Paul, ed., Three Shadow Plays by Muhammad Ibn Daniyal (Cambridge: Gibb Memorial Trust, 1992)Google Scholar.

18. Professor Francesca Maria Corrao of the Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli translated the three plays in her doctoral thesis “La fantasmagoria delle ombre di Ibn Dāniyāl” (Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza,” 1990), drawing on some of the same manuscripts as Kahle. The plays were also translated into French in 1997 by René R. Khawam as Le Mariage de l'Emir conjonctif, Les Comédiens de la rue, and L'Amoureux et l'orphelin (Paris: L'Esprit des Péninsules).

19. Under the title “The Phantom,” Guo, Performing Arts, 157–220.

20. Dāniyāl, Ibn, The Amazing Preacher and the Stranger, in Theatre from Medieval Cairo, ed. and trans. Mahfouz and Carlson, 89–144, at 96–8Google Scholar.

21. Chambers, E. K., The Medieval Stage, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903), 1:71Google Scholar.

22. Nicoll, Allardyce, Masks, Mimes and Miracles: Studies in Popular Theatre (London: Harrap, 1931)Google Scholar.

23. Gregoras, Nikephoros and Dieten, Jan Louis van, Rhomäische Geschichte, 6 vols. (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1973–2007), 2:58–60Google Scholar. Quotation translation is my own.

24. Ibn Dāniyāl, Amazing Preacher and the Stranger, 105.

25. Ibid., 112.

26. I pursue this aspect of the work in more detail in “Medieval Street Performers Speak,” TDR: The Drama Review 57:4 (T220, Winter 2013), 86-94.

27. See, for example, Overwien, Oliver, “Humor aus der Antike in der mittelalterlichen arabischen Literature,” in Humor in der arabischen Kultur, ed. Tamer, Georges (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), 107–26, at 126Google Scholar.

28. Alphonse Dain, “La survie de Ménandre,” Maia 15 (1963): 278–309, at 299.

29. Marciniak, Przemysław, Greek Drama in Byzantine Times (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 2004), 47Google Scholar.

30. Garland, Lynda, “‘And his bald head shone like a full moon . . .’: An Appreciation of the Byzantine Sense of Humour as Recorded in Historical Sources of the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” Parergon, n.s., 8 (1990): 1–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 4. See also Baldwin, B[arry], “A Talent to Abuse: Some Aspects of Byzantine Satire,” Byzantinische Forschungen 8 (1982): 19–28, at 24Google Scholar; and Marciniak, 50.

31. See Fryde, Edmund, The Early Palaeologan Renaissance, 1261–c. 1360 (Leiden: Brill, 2000)Google Scholar.

32. Amitai, Reuven, The Mongols in the Islamic Lands: (Aldershot, U.K., and Burlington, VT: Ashgate/Variorum, 2007), 364Google Scholar.

33. The possible connection between these two dramatists needs much further exploration than can be gundertaken in this essay, but I have developed it in more detail in my article “The Arab Aristophanes,” Comparative Drama 47.2 (2013): 151–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.