JOURNAL OF ARABIC AND ISLAMIC STUDIES

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Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies 11 (2011)
noting that there are other stories about the event. 91 The aloe perfume
story does not appear in major historical accounts of al-Mutawakkil –
perhaps it is one of those other stories.
In these longer gift exchange stories, about Fayḍ and Aḥmad, Umm
Salama and ʿUmāra, Hārūn and Jaʿfar, and al-Mutawakkil and ʿUbayd
Allāh b. Yaḥyā, writers investigate the emotional experience that weaves
together material delights and political crisis. These stories relinquish
moral authority in favor of manners, while also commenting on much
more serious business.
Gift exchange stories may offer an indirect commentary on social
issues through the themes of the wrong rhetoric, relationship problems,
social tensions, and political crisis. They take a step away from serious
social issues to offer an oblique angle for interpretation of them. The
incongruence of fine gifts and tense situations, and the use of rhetorical
focal points, silence, and communication at a distance provide implied
perspectives on the inner life and emotional experiences of characters.
Families of texts about a particular character amplify and modify these
perspectives on inner life and political crisis. In adab literature in
general, and in gift exchange stories in particular, major historical events
and serious moral inquiry undergo a kind of “ababification” that makes
them less serious, though no less significant. Manners become a kind of
mannerism, feeding off of more serious discourse, and also feeding back
into it.
91 Al-Masʿūdī, Murūj al-Dhahab, 4:139.