JOURNAL OF ARABIC AND ISLAMIC STUDIES

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Jocelyn Sharlet
from the second of the two extant monographs, The Book of Treasures
and Rarities by an anonymous author who lived in the 5th/11th century
in Egypt. 2 It also investigates other stories about characters in the stories
that are the focus of the discussion, and that complement those gift
exchange stories.
As in most narratives in medieval Arabic prose literature, gift
exchange stories are brief and often feature historical characters.
Rhetorical focal points amplified by silence, the motif of communication
at a distance in writing, and the jarring contrast between pleasant gifts
and tense situations within individual stories, as well as the implied
comparison and contrast of gift exchange stories with other stories about
the same characters, enable writers to depict the complexity of characters
and their relationships. In particular, gift exchange stories offer a
diversion from, and a commentary on, a range of social tensions and
conflicts. They complement other stories about the same characters that
also explore these tensions and conflicts. Characters take shape in gift
exchange stories, and in related stories, as figures of these broader social
issues.
Gift exchange stories often involve historical characters with historical
events in the background. The combination of the determinate quality of
reality and the indeterminacy of the imaginary, involving selection and
346/957, for whom they worked as librarians, and to al-Muhallabī and especially
Abū Isḥāq al-Ṣābī 349/960–352/963 (Abū Bakr Muḥammad and Abū ʿUthmān
Saʿīd al-Khālidiyyān, Kitāb al-Tuḥaf wa-l-hadāyā, ed. Sāmī Dahhān, Cairo, Dār almaʿārif,
1956, p. mīm). Patronage is mentioned in the book of gifts, but it is not
clear to whom it was dedicated.
2 The editor of the Dhakhāʾir proposes that the author is the Qāḍī Ibn Zubayr,
who worked for the Buwayhids and then lived in the fifth century in Egypt, based
on a comparison of some passages with the eighth-century adab collection by al-
Ghuzūlī (Kitāb al-Dhakhāʾir wa-l-tuḥaf, ed. Muḥammad Ḥamīd Allāh, Kuwait,
1959, pp. 12–3). The translator argues that this attribution is not convincing because
other passages that are parallel in the two works are attributed to three other
authors. Instead, she explains that internal evidence in the book shows that the
author was probably a Fatimid official who was in Cairo 444/1052-463/1070 (Book
of Gifts and Rarities, tr. Ghāda al-Ḥijjāwī al-Qaddūmī, (Cambridge, Massachusetts,
1996), pp. 12–3). The author uses oral and written sources, but not the Khālidīs’
book, although there are several parallel passages in the two works (Gifts, pp. 17
and 24).
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