JOURNAL OF ARABIC AND ISLAMIC STUDIES

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Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies 11 (2011)
combination, can occur in texts that mask their fictionality, not for the
purpose of deceit, but to offer an explanation of the world that would not
otherwise be effective. 3 Mimesis in work by al-Jāḥiẓ is based on the
imaginary as well as verisimilitude with reality, and other prose writers
follow him in valorizing the combination of reality and fiction for
literary, philosophical, and ethical ends. 4 Verisimilitude can be
understood as a public consensus on reality. 5 The imaginary dimension
of public consensus is a built-in feature in the real. Stories with historical
characters and events allow the audience to contemplate experience,
historical and contemporary, from different angles, and possibly change
the course of their own experiences in response. 6 Gift exchange stories
thus provide responses to the question of how adab relates to politics. 7
3 Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary
Anthropology, (Baltimore, 1993), p. 12.
4 Ibrahim Geries, “L’adab et le genre narratif fictif” in Stefan Leder, ed.,
Story-telling in the framework of non-fictional Arabic literature (Wiesbaden,
1998) pp. 168–95, pp. 170, 195.
5 Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, tr. Richard Howard (Ithaca, 1977),
p. 82.
6 Similar techniques are used in the configuration of sequences of events in
narratives that are found in texts that are thought of (then and now) as literary
and texts that are thought of as historical (Robert Hoyland, “History, fiction and
authorship in the first centuries of Islam” in Julia Bray, ed., Writing and
Representation in Medieval Islam: Muslim horizons, (London, 2006) pp. 16–
46). Writers craft stories with historical characters and events in a range of
ways. See Julia Bray, “Figures in a Landscape: The Inhabitants of the Silver
Village”, in Leder, ed., Story-telling, pp. 79–93; Julia Bray, “Tanūkhī’s al-
Faraj baʿd al-shidda as a Literary Source”, in Alan Jones, ed., Arabicus Felix:
Luminosus Britannicus (Oxford, 1991, pp. 108-28); Andras Hamori,
“Exemplum, Anecdote, and the Gentle Heart in a Text by al-Jahshiyārī”,
Asiatische Studien 50/2 (1996), pp. 363–70; Andras Hamori, “Tinkering with
the Text: Two Variously Related Stories in the Faraj Baʿd al-Shidda” in Leder,
ed., Story-telling, pp. 61-78; Letizia Osti, “Al-Qāsim b. ʿUbayd Allāh, the
Vizier as Villain: On Classical Arabic Gossip” in James E. Montgomery, ed.,
ʿAbbāsid Studies: Occasional Papers of the School of ʿAbbāsid Studies
(Leuven, 2004, pp. 233–47; Ulrich Marzolph, “Arabische Witze als Quelle für
die materielle Kultur” in Ex Oriente Fabula: Beiträge zur Erforschung der
narrativen Kultur des islamischen Vorderen Orients, 2 vols. (Dortmund, 2005),
1:134–52.
7 Julia Bray poses and discusses this question (Bray, Julia, “ʿAbbasid myth and
the Human Act: Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih and others” in Kennedy, ed., On Fiction and