Download PDF | Owen Wright_ Professor Keith Howard - Music Theory in Mamluk Cairo _ The ġāyat Al-Maṭlūb Fī 'ilm Al-adwār Wa-'l-ḍurūb by Ibn Kurr-Taylor & Francis Group (2014).
373 Pages
Prelude
The work presented and examined here is the only theoretical text of any substance that can be considered representative of musicological discourse in Cairo during the first half of the fourteenth century CE. Indeed, nothing comparable survives from the whole Mamluk period, which extends from 1260 until the Ottoman invasion and conquest of Egypt in 1516. But its value does not derive merely from its fortuitous isolation: it is important, rather, because of the richness of the information it provides with regard to modal and rhythmic structures, and also because of the way in which the definitions it offers complement – and differ from – those set forth in an interrelated series of major theoretical works in both Arabic and Persian that span the period from the middle of the thirteenth century to the late fifteenth. In many respects these form a monolithic block: in particular, they remain internally consistent with regard to the theoretical armature they employ.
They deal with rhythmic and (if only sporadically) formal structures, but concentrate above all on the analysis of intervals, tetrachord types, and theoretically possible scalar combinations thereof, and it is among these last that definitions of the great majority of the melodic modes they recognize are located. Given the broad continuities these treatises exhibit, and their differing places of origin, it has been assumed hitherto that they reflect an idiom practised and patronized at various courts spread over a vast geographical area, a unitary great tradition that, although inevitably subject to both continuing change and some degree of local variation, for long periods gives an impression of relative stability, maintaining a core set of common rhythmic, formal and modal structures.
The existence of a treatise that in some ways provides a radically different account, despite being written towards the mid-point of the span covered by these texts, thus challenges this rather comfortable assumption and provokes second thoughts about the nature of the regional map, both with regard to the prevailing texture of theoretical discourse and, above all, the consistency of art-music practice and the structures underpinning it.
Pre-modern theoretical literature in Arabic – assuming, rather arbitrarily, that the modern period is ushered in by Mašāqa’s al-risāla al-šihābiyya in the first half of the nineteenth century1 – may conveniently be divided into two main periods of production, with a scatter of lesser contributions between and after. The first stretches from the first half of the ninth century to the first half of the eleventh, while the second covers the period mentioned above, from the mid thirteenth century nearly to the end of the fifteenth. As the first is dominated by the towering figure of al-Fārābī (d. 950),2 flanked by al-Kindī (d. c. 867)3 and Ibn Sīnā (d. 1037),4 it is hardly surprising to find that it is to texts of this period that scholarly attention has primarily been devoted.
The work of these great philosopher-theorists is characterized by its adoption and elaboration of various aspects of Greek thought, encompassing the twin legacies of the Pythagorean and Aristoxenian traditions, and it is perhaps their exploration of the domains of scale and tetrachord structure that has received most attention,5 while latterly their methods of analysing rhythm have come into greater focus.6 Scholarship has also recognized the importance of those writers, such as the tenth-century Iḫwān al-Ṣafā’,7 who follow al-Kindī in giving a prominent place to cosmological speculation, and has in addition attended to slightly later writers such as al-Ḥasan al-Kātib8 and Ibn al-Ṭaḥḥān (d. after 1057),9 whose work reflects more closely the categories and concepts of practising musicians and their audiences.
In addition, considerable attention has been paid to quarrying the rich seams of information offered by more obviously literary texts that, together with historical and biographical works, provide an insight into the cultural world, especially that of the court, within which the more sophisticated musicians operated. Primary among these is the kitāb al-aġānī by al-Iṣbahānī (897–967), which is unrivalled in the extent and quality of its musical coverage,10 and it is the lack of equally informative later writings that, taken together with the decline in theoretical writing after Ibn Sīnā and his pupil Ibn Zayla (d. 1048)11 (or at least in the number and quality of works that survive), has served to make the middle of the eleventh century a seemingly natural cut-off point. Lip service may be paid to the Abbasid caliphate as a chronological entity ending in 1258, but the treatment of musical culture during its two final centuries has tended towards the perfunctory, affected partly by a rather simplistic notion of decline, but more by the relative paucity of sources from which some insight might be gained into the cultural variations resulting from the political complexities of this period.12
As far as scholarship is concerned, the resurgence in the production of theoretical treatises from the thirteenth century on – now in Persian and, later, Turkish as well as Arabic – is reflected in the attention paid to the edition, translation and evaluation of several of the most significant texts of this period. But our knowledge of the production and patronage of the type(s) of music to which these texts relate is at best uneven, and usually sketchy in the extreme, especially given the much greater geographical spread implied by the languages used, for whereas the writers of the early period lived mainly in or near Iraq, and the rich social documentation in the kitāb al-aġānī is above all a window onto musical behaviour in Baghdad at and around the early Abbasid court, we are now confronted with theorists variously based in Iraq, Anatolia, Western Persia and Khorasan, while remaining without any portrayal of musical life at one of the principal courts in this vast area comparable in range and diversity to that presented by the kitāb al-aġānī. 13
It is thus hardly surprising that it has not yet been possible to produce for this period a detailed historical account of patronage, personalities and trends of the same scope as Farmer’s survey of the preceding one.14 But even if the social aspects are disregarded, it is still fair to say that research on the output of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries has been rather lop-sided: it has tended to concentrate on those theorists whose work can be regarded as a continuation and development of aspects of the scientific enterprise carried out by al-Fārābī and Ibn Sīnā. In other words, attention has been focused on writings belonging to what has conventionally been termed the Systematist school,15 and it is only recently that representative texts from outside that tradition, such as the corpus of fifteenth-century Turkish treatises, have begun to receive serious scholarly attention.16
Systematist texts
The series of treatises that constitute the Systematist corpus begins with a highly influential foundation text, the kitāb al-adwār (‘Book of Cycles’) of Ṣafī al-Dīn b. Fāḫir al-Urmawī (d. 1294) (henceforth al-Urmawī), written probably about 1250,17 when he was active in Baghdad at the court of the last Abbasid caliph, alMusta‘ṣim (1242–58). An earlier and significantly different version of this work survives but, however interesting for what it tells us about the development of alUrmawī’s thinking, it is never cited by later theorists, who were doubtless unaware of its existence.18 As any theoretical developments that he may have derived from immediately antecedent texts are unknown, no such texts having survived, the kitāb al-adwār presents what appears as a highly innovative account of the modal and rhythmic language of the day; it was certainly one sufficiently persuasive in its analytical cogency and neatness to become normative, being adopted by most of the major theorists of the following two centuries.
The rhythms are presented in circular format, consonant with the title of the work, with a specification of their internal patterns of attacks, while precise descriptions are given of the intervallic structures of two sets of modes, the more important consisting of 12 modes termed šudūd, 19 the other of six termed āwāzāt. 20 After the sack of Baghdad by Hülegü in 1258 and the termination of the Abbasid caliphate, Iraq was absorbed into the Ilkhanid segment of the Mongol empire and al-Urmawī entered the service of Hülegü’s vizir, Šams al-Dīn al-Juwaynī, as tutor to his sons, dedicating to one of them, Šaraf al-Dīn Hārūn, his second and more extensive treatise, the risāla al-šarafiyya, probably written in 1267.21 This was followed around 1300 by the first great Persian Systematist text, the magisterial chapter on music in the durrat al-tāj, an encyclopaedia by Quṭb al-Dīn Šīrāzī (d. 1311)22 (henceforth Šīrāzī), with a further major contribution being added in the fourteenth century (the Mubārakšāh commentary on the kitāb al-adwār of c. 1375) and others in the fifteenth, for example the various treatises of Marāġī (d. 1435)24 and al-Lāḏiqī (d. 1495).2
East and west
Insofar as al-Urmawī’s treatises reflect practice, it must be assumed to be that of the art-music tradition of Baghdad and also, presumably, of major urban centres close to it. The evidence of Šīrāzī, who grew up in Shiraz and spent the latter part of his life in Tabriz, confirms that at the beginning of the fourteenth century the same idiom predominated in western Iran, and such was probably the case in Khorasan also, although it has been argued, on the basis of a lack of congruity in nomenclature, that there was at least some degree of difference at this stage between these two major regions.26 But several of the later Systematist texts, insofar as they can meaningfully be tied to a particular geographical location, come from Khorasan, and indeed from its northern and eastern fringes.
Thus after the Mubārakšāh commentary, dedicated to Šāh Šujā‘, ruler of Fārs and Kurdistan from 1358 to 1384, the next major works, the treatises of Marāġī, dating from the first decade of the fifteenth century, were written in Samarkand, and later ones come from authors active in Herat,27 while Anatolia also makes a brief, hesitant appearance on the map.28 From the vantage point of its first articulation in Baghdad, therefore, the general impression given by the Systematist corpus is of a constant shift eastwards and northwards, to western Persia, and thence to what is now termed Central Asia, and possibly also to Anatolia.
As there is a singular lack of comparable Systematist treatises written in, say, Syria or Egypt, or even, indeed, in Iraq after al-Urmawī, we are less well informed about the art-music norms prevalent there. Indeed, the nature of the geographical spread of the surviving Systematist corpus does not allow the sure conclusion that the range of modal and formal structures and concepts it presents were also the standard models in the major cities of the eastern Arab world, so that for evidence that might help clarify matters we need to turn elsewhere. The question may be formulated quite simply: what information do we have that might indicate whether the art-music idiom favoured in Mamluk domains (Cairo and Damascus above all) was identical with, or at least closely resembled, that known in Baghdad and further east, rather than being recognizably different, even possibly preserving vestigial links to the style world of North Africa? The extant sources are unfortunately sparse, and need to be approached with caution; and although certainly worth investigating, they present what is essentially background material, and fail to provide a clear answer. The first relevant witness is Ibn al-Ṭaḥḥān, a professional musician at the Fatimid court in Cairo during the middle of the eleventh century, and while his remarks are too early for any conclusions to be drawn from them about the state of affairs in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they serve as a useful starting point nonetheless, as they reveal a clear awareness of differences between local and, especially, Persian practice. Ibn al-Ṭaḥḥān refers in particular to performance techniques and pitch discriminations used by Persian musicians that were not standard features of Cairo practice.29 On the other hand, his remarks on musicians from Baghdad concern only their mannerisms,30 and when trying to track down information about a particular rhythmic cycle it is musicians from Egypt, Syria and Iraq that he consults.31 The implication, therefore, is of a common art-music idiom in the eastern Arab world, but one in some degree different from Persian norms. Ibn al-Ṭaḥḥān has nothing to say about North Africa, but that musical contacts were still maintained late in the twelfth century is suggested by the evidence of Ibn Sanā’ al-Mulk (d. 1212), who was learning muwaššaḥāt from Maghribi informants.32 In the early thirteenth century, on the other hand, it is definitely mentioned as possessing a distinct tradition by a later authority, an older contemporary of al-Urmawī, Aḥmad b. Yūsuf al-Tīfāšī (d. 1253), who was himself from North Africa but both studied in the east and spent the latter part of his life there, first near Mosul and then in Cairo. He draws for us a style map in which al-Andalus and most of North Africa form one block and the Arab east another, with Ifrīqiyā, equivalent to modern Tunisia, transitional between them: Egypt, it is clearly implied, belongs to the eastern block.33 As a general characterization, he regards the west as more conservative, with a more complex melodic style, while in the east the older modal tradition had been supplanted by Persian imports, and although the names he lists differ in certain respects from those cited by al-Urmawī for the 12 šudūd modes, there is sufficient congruence to make it clear that we are dealing with what is essentially the same set.34 This is evidently a highly schematic and reductive account, and given the reference to complexity of style he may have had in mind the idiom of highly-trained performers of the art-music tradition, rather than the simpler melodies of the muwaššaḥāt, which no doubt continued to circulate. But its emphasis is clear: for al-Tīfāšī, Cairo practice has been so deeply influenced by eastern models that the older style has been effaced. A century later we come to Šihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Yaḥyā b. Faḍlallāh al-‘Umarī (1301–49) (henceforth al-‘Umarī), who lived in both Egypt and Syria, and is the one author of the period to provide information about the repertoire of Cairo and Damascus. In his vast compendium referred to here as masālik al-abṣār (the full title being masālik al-abṣār fī mamālik al-amṣār, which might be playfully rendered, aping its conventional internal rhyme, as ‘What the Eye Relates of Sovereign States’), we find that the introduction to volume 10, which deals with the biographies of musicians,35 also discusses the replacement of an older, Arabic modal nomenclature by a recently-imported one that is predominantly Persian, the new terms again being those found in the kitāb al-adwār, and he even supplies equivalences between them, so that in place of, for example, the older Arabic muṭlaq and maḥmūl we now have the Persian rāst and zīlafkand. 36 This appears, then, to be a replay of the process described by al-Tīfāšī, with the implication that the replacement took place rather more gradually, only having being recently completed at the time of writing, and pointing, therefore, towards the first quarter of the fourteenth century as the period by which the change was definitively completed. More important, however, is al-‘Umarī’s insistence that the substitution is a change of terminology, not of substance37 (possibly, then, one to be interpreted as no more than a modish linguistic snobbery), and as it is reasonable to argue that a name would not be applied arbitrarily in Cairo to a modal structure quite unrelated to the one known by the same name in Baghdad, this evidence would appear to point to a measure of uniformity over time as well, the implied earlier existence of common or at least fairly similar modal structures disguised by different labels running counter to al-Tīfāšī’s claim of sweeping change. When al-‘Umarī seeks specialist opinion about these changes in nomenclature, however, the experts he consults are not local musicians but rather ones from Transoxiana,38 which would appear to suggest the existence of a broadly uniform art-music modal idiom in use from Cairo to Samarkand. But since, in that case, local musicians should have been able to serve just as well, there is the further implication that particular prestige attached to eastern authorities, possibly because of what was viewed to be their greater expertise. Accordingly, a slightly different emphasis could be placed on the introduction of the new mode names, suggesting that it was not just a capricious and hence inexplicable matter of fashion but one influenced by an appreciation of superior musicianship. In any event, the additional, if occasional, scraps of literary evidence, which deserve to be taken seriously as disinterested sources, support an earlier rather than later introduction of the Persian mode names. One would expect them to have become current beyond musicological circles later in the fourteenth century, as in a satirical verse quoted by al-Ġuzūlī (d. 1412), where two of the mode names, ‘irāq and iṣfahān, are also to be understood as geographical terms:
qultu iḏ ġannā ‘irāqan laytanā fī iṣfahānī When he sang in ‘irāq I said ‘if only we were in Isfahan’39 but what is decisive is the occurrence of the same names a century earlier in the three shadow-plays by Ibn Dāniyāl (d. 1310–11),40 each one beginning with a song for which the mode is specified: rāst, ‘irāq and iṣbahān. The texts of these plays, which mix high and low registers along with their scurrilous and scatological content, were certainly meant to be understood by the populace at large, so that the references cannot have been esoteric: they indicate that these names were by then not just items of specialist jargon but were well established as part of popular cultural knowledge. Equally, the omission of the earlier Arabic names from such sources suggests that they were already defunct, and that in all probability the process of terminological substitution referred to by al-‘Umarī had already been completed some time before the end of the thirteenth century (which lends his search for equivalences the air of an antiquarian pursuit). When we turn from modes to rhythms, a rather clearer and more straightforward picture might be anticipated, for whereas al-Urmawī nowhere hints at regional differences with regard to the modes, he is quite specific in stating that, with one exception, the rhythmic cycles he describes are those favoured by Arab musicians, while Persians have other preferences.41 On the assumption that they were not just a local phenomenon confined to Baghdad, it would be reasonable to conclude that they would also have been familiar further to the west, Cairo probably included. What complicates matters here, though, is that this reading of the ethnic-geographical divide implied by al-Urmawī’s remarks falters somewhat when account is taken of the rhythmic nomenclature used by al-‘Umarī, for rather than being confined to the cycles listed by al-Urmawī, he cites songs in a rhythmic cycle called turkī (a cycle with this name had earlier been described by Šīrāzī, but not by al-Urmawī),42 while two other cycles are qualified as ḫurāsānī, 43 a term known to neither al-Urmawī nor Šīrāzī. In the early fourteenth-century Cairo repertoire as reflected by al-‘Umarī, al-ṯaqīl al-ḫurāsānī is, in fact, the most common designation, whereas cycles described in the kitāb al-adwār such as ramal and hazaj receive scant mention. While it is doubtless to be expected that certain developments would have taken place during the intervening period of approximately half a century, this documentation appears to imply a transformation difficult to explain away as no more than the natural result of gradual incremental change. Yet alongside regional variation with regard to the cycles themselves, account also has to be taken of the possibility of something as simple as local preferences in nomenclature, and evidence for this may be found in al-‘Umarī’s references to pieces by or transmitted by al-Urmawī, the rhythmic cycle of which is stated to be al-ṯaqīl al-ḫurāsānī. 44 A further complication arises in relation to the diffusion of al-Urmawī’s compositions, and hence of the style they represented. There is some evidence that the repertoire with which he was familiar, and to which he himself made a significant contribution as a composer, was to become known further west in the Arab world, and in particular in Syria and Egypt: we are informed that among the musicians dispersed by the Mongol sack of Baghdad were pupils of his (or pupils of theirs) who travelled westwards to Syria and Egypt.45 One of them, indeed, al-Kutayla (alive in 1330), who had many of al-Urmawī’s compositions in his repertoire, was engaged to teach the singing girls of the Mamluk ruler al-Nāṣir (who reigned, with gaps, from 1293 to 1341).46 But such reports still allow for a considerable latitude of interpretation: could it be that these musicians were well received not because they were superior performers of the idiom also cultivated by their Cairo contemporaries, but because they came with a particular reputation based upon the presumed excellence of Baghdad practice, and because the compositions of al-Urmawī that they performed were similarly surrounded by a particular aura? If so, it would be perfectly possible for them to be using a modal and rhythmic idiom containing features unfamiliar to Cairo audiences, but one sufficiently prestigious for its more unusual aspects to be tolerated and then accepted and integrated alongside local norms, eventually even displacing some of these. However, it should not be expected that a composition by alUrmawī possibly dating back to the middle of the thirteenth century would still be performed in the same way 70 or 80 years later: transmitted by pupils of his pupils,47 they would doubtless have been adjusted to the stylistic norms of the day, and it is equally possible that these would have been influenced by the local preferences of the area to which these itinerant musicians had gone. Systematist texts, though, are of no help here: it is intriguing to note that Šīrāzī spent some time in Cairo in the 1380s on diplomatic missions,48 but however magisterial his account of modal practice, including variations of nomenclature, it contains no reference to regional differences, and certainly not to Cairo practice as in any way distinct from the idiom with which he was familiar.
Non-Systematist texts
Whatever processes of change were affecting modal and rhythmic structures are likely to have been gradual, and evidence to substantiate them, let alone to estimate their rate and extent, is hard to find. Apart from occasional later pointers to regional preferences in nomenclature,49 Systematist texts are silent upon such matters,50 and the literary, historical and biographical texts cited above provide us with material that is open to various interpretations, none, it might be claimed, immediately compelling. At this point, therefore, we need to turn to whatever may be gleaned from Arabic theoretical texts that stand outside the Systematist canon. It has to be said, though, that if Western scholarly attention has tended to concentrate on the Systematists to the detriment of these other texts it is for cogent reasons: set against the combination of intellectual sophistication and precise factual content that characterizes the more substantial Systematist treatises, they are simply less – and sometimes only minimally – informative: they generally avoid theoretical elaboration and restrict themselves to tabulating modes. In short, they tend to name rather than define or describe, and are consequently opaque and difficult to evaluate; further, in some cases they are either by unknown authors or are anonymous, and thus impossible to date and place with any accuracy and thus hard to contextualize. Typologically we may distinguish among them between verse and prose texts, the former consisting of didactic expositions of modal categories and their cosmological affiliations. They are significant in that they demonstrate the continuing centrality of cosmological thought, and are thus a useful corrective supplement to Systematist texts, which tend to give less attention to this aspect or even ignore it completely.51 But it is by no means clear whether the particular modal groupings that have a stable cosmological underpinning and are consequently foregrounded in these texts actually represent categories that were of sufficient importance to practising musicians to affect the performance choices they made, still less whether the modes that traditionally belonged to these groupings all continued to be commonly employed: to investigate this, information has to be sought elsewhere. Rather less equivocal in the latter regard are the prose texts, especially those in which cosmology is a less dominant theme, and where they refer to or describe modal structures that stand outside the traditional cosmologically geared groups of the 12 šudūd and six āwāzāt modes we can have greater confidence in their contemporary relevance – always assuming that their date can be ascertained with any degree of accuracy. One or two texts of this type have been edited and studied, but as they are difficult to place geographically as well as chronologically the relationship of the accounts they give to those of the Systematist canon still awaits evaluation.52 There are, in contrast, two texts, one of which is in verse, precisely datable to the second quarter of the fourteenth century, that is, to within some 30 to 40 years of the composition of Šīrāzī’s chapter on music in the durrat al-tāj. The verse text, the urjūzat al-anġām (‘Rajaz-metre Poem on the Modes’), written in 729/1328–9 by Badr al-Dīn Muḥammad b. ‘Alī al-Ḫaṭīb al-Irbilī (henceforth al-Irbilī),53 not only recognizes different ways of categorizing the modal corpus but also, intriguingly, includes one or two mode names absent from al-Urmawī’s and Šīrāzī’s accounts and also from those of later Systematist theorists, suggesting therefore at least some small degree of regional specificity. The prose text, far more extensive and informative, is the hitherto unedited and generally neglected work to be presented here, one which survives, so far as is known, in a single manuscript now in the British Library. Described more fully in Chapter 8, it probably dates to the fourteenth century, and despite coming from the pen of a somewhat slipshod scribe is a generally sound copy. The treatise it contains is concerned, exceptionally, not just to name but to describe within a particular theoretical framework. Its title, ġāyat al-maṭlūb fī ‘ilm al-anġām wa-’l-ḍurūb (henceforth referred to simply as ġāyat al-maṭlūb), might be 51 loosely rendered as ‘The Enticing Roads to Rhythms and Modes’, and it is, indeed, to a fairly detailed account of the rhythmic cycles and modes in current use that it is devoted. Accordingly, if one disregards the absence of the extensive and sometimes complicated analytical component so characteristic of Systematist treatises (the specification of interval sizes and tetrachord structures, and the tabulation of octave species and their transpositions), its contents provide a close match to those of the kitāb al-adwār and can be compared directly with them; in some respects, indeed, they are even richer.
Ibn Kurr The ġāyat al-maṭlūb was written by Abū ‘Abdallāh Šams al-Dīn Muḥammad b. ‘Īsā b. Ḥasan b. Kurr al-Baġdādī (henceforth Ibn Kurr), and despite the final element of his name it reflects the perceptions not of musicians in Baghdad but of those in Cairo: the misleading al-Baġdādī belongs to his father, by a nice irony not only a contemporary of al-Urmawī but one who lived alongside him in the same city. But whereas al-Urmawī stayed on in Baghdad when Hülegü conquered it in 1258, Ibn Kurr’s father fled, and settled in Cairo. It was there that Ibn Kurr was born, in 1282, and there that he died, in 1357,54 so that the ġāyat al-maṭlūb can reasonably be said to reflect the state of affairs in Cairo during the first half of the fourteenth century. The precise date of its composition is unknown, but there is a reference to it by a personal acquaintance, al-Ṣafadī (1297–1363), demonstrating that at least some of it was already in existence in 1344,55 and there is a further contemporary witness to Ibn Kurr himself, the eminent scholar al-‘Umarī, who also knew him personally and indeed devotes to him the very last of the series of entries on musicians in volume 10 of the masālik al-abṣār. 56 Unfortunately, whereas al- ‘Umarī is content to reproduce the supple prose of his earlier sources, his own notices are for the most part couched in rhyming prose, a by then fashionable linguistic device that unfortunately tends to privilege style over content, so that what he conveys is frequently not very informative. Nevertheless, it is significant that his entry on Ibn Kurr begins by citing his unparalleled knowledge of the science of music, for with other musical figures who were also expert in fields that had greater prestige within Islamic culture, these are mentioned first. The entry on Suhrawardī,57 for example, mentions expertise in Arabic (including memorizing al-Ḥarīrī’s maqāmāt as well as the Qur’ān), but dwells principally on his prowess as a calligrapher before citing his teachers in ḥadīṯ, giving a character sketch, and then, finally, reaching music. The rather briefer notice on Ibn Kurr by al-Ṣafadī has the same unusual emphasis, his pre-eminence in music being mentioned first, but unlike al-‘Umarī, who only makes a passing reference to him residing at a Sufi lodge (zāwiya) near the shrine of al-Ḥusayn, al-Ṣafadī goes on to mention that in addition to the Qur’ān, he committed to memory works on grammar and the religious sciences. In similar vein, the later historian Ibn Taġrībirdī (1410–70) certainly mentions Ibn Kurr’s pre-eminence in music, but gives a prominent place to the religious side: in addition to being a Sufi (again associated with the zāwiya attached to the shrine of al-Ḥusayn) he is given the title of šayḫ and imām, and is said to have studied Qur’ān, ḥadīṯ and fiqh. 58 Possibly echoing Ibn Kurr’s own text, al-‘Umarī (and similarly al-Ṣafadī) later expands on the theme of his musical learning by stating that he found alFārābī to be in error, although we are not told in relation to which particular feature of the theory of music, and that the scholars of the day were reluctantly obliged to concede that his strictures were justified. Whatever the facts of the matter, the motivation behind this passage is clear, and al-‘Umarī also introduces various fanciful and in any case wholly unverifiable claims to his excellence in performance: Ibn Kurr is said to have transmitted the styles of both Isḥāq alMawṣilī and Ibrāhīm b. al-Mahdī, two prominent early Abbasid musicians who represented rival tendencies, the implication thus being of wide-ranging mastery, both in the sense of technical command and in something even more prestigious, a profound knowledge of ancient traditions; and this is reinforced by the absurd assertion that he commanded the whole repertoire of songs – one by now four to five centuries old – mentioned in al-Iṣbahānī’s voluminous kitāb al-aġānī. 59 The ‘emulation of the ancients’ topos is then underlined once more by al-‘Umarī’s claim that he himself had witnessed Ibn Kurr re-enact the anecdote according to which al-Fārābī caused his audience successively to laugh, cry and fall asleep. A further kind of status, that of social and religious respectability, is affirmed by indicating that he was not actually a professional musician, a point that may be linked to an earlier reference to his being of independent means, having inherited a salary awarded to his father. Finally, al-‘Umarī refers to Ibn Kurr the composer by citing one or two of his settings of verse by al-‘Umarī himself, and confirms the personal connection that this implies by characterizing him as an engaging personality who, despite the nearly 20 years difference in their ages, was a personal friend.60 By this period, writings that deal with musicians as social beings are hardly ever concerned with the contemporary: al-‘Umarī’s account is thus quite exceptional, and it is hardly surprising to find that the references to Ibn Kurr that surface in 5 later works fail to add to our knowledge, being essentially parasitic abbreviations. One, though, supplies as an index of his musical mastery an anecdote according to which he was able, on encountering a group of people (qawm) singing, to make his mule step in time to the music.
The ġāyat al-maṭlūb fī ‘ilm al-anġām wa-’l-ḍurūb
Despite the radical differences between them, Ibn Kurr’s treatise can justifiably be compared with the kitāb al-adwār not merely because of the topics it deals with but because it, too, appears to provide an individual approach and a novel set of definitions. Both are unprecedented in the sense that they are without direct antecedents, but whereas the kitāb al-adwār is endlessly quoted in later works, the ġāyat al-maṭlūb was to remain without successor texts to elaborate, comment on (or challenge) its account, and thereby elucidate it. Both texts are also akin in what they omit: neither is concerned with musicians or musical behaviour; neither mentions origins or cosmological associations; and both ignore instruments completely: they concentrate on modes and rhythmic cycles. There is, though, no mention of al-Urmawī in the ġāyat al-maṭlūb, and signally absent from it are any of the precise definitions of pitch relationships underpinning the analysis of species and scales that is such a prominent feature of the kitāb al-adwār. In fact, the one detail Ibn Kurr mentions that is derived – no doubt indirectly – from Systematist theory demonstrates general ignorance of it.62 His awareness of other views is revealed only through his complaints about what he considers obscure and problematic Persian notions, and especially through his directly confrontational approach to Persian modal taxonomy: although he uses without demur the imported mode names to which al-Tīfāšī and al-‘Umarī had referred, he objects to the ways in which the modes are classified and, especially, to the ways they are held to be derived from each other. Ibn Kurr’s own descriptive framework is starkly different to that of the Systematists, and raises a number of fundamental questions about analytical criteria. That there is no trace of the definition of intervals by ratios or string divisions in this treatise is not in itself important, and certainly does not relegate the ġāyat al-maṭlūb to an inferior status. We are dealing with a work written not by a philosopher or theorist with mathematical inclinations but by a practitioner writing for a readership sufficiently well informed for certain basics to be taken for granted. The major points of interest (and, in relation to the kitāb al-adwār, difference) thus include the particular terms used and the theoretical framework within which the material is presented, however tersely or elliptically, as well as the repertoire of modes and rhythmic cycles discussed, the way they are classified, and the nature of the definitions given. Indeed, the resulting accounts of rhythmic and modal structures provide, at first sight, so radical a contrast to their Systematist counterparts that had this treatise been anonymous and of unknown provenance one might have wished to assign it to a later period, especially when it presents a repertoire of rhythmic cycles distinctly at odds with al-Urmawī’s, which is explicitly stated to consist of cycles familiar to an Arab musician. However, these are problems to be confronted, not evaded by chronological displacement: the text clearly names its author, about whom we have reliable biographical information, and its status as a text of the first half of the fourteenth century is not in doubt. Its apparent distance from the Systematist school thus not only provides another perspective on intellectual history and the locus of theoretical frameworks but also, and rather more pressingly, raises interesting questions about the extent of regional variation, difficult to grasp from the rather monolithic Systematist accounts. In addition, and even more radically, Ibn Kurr’s account challenges both the comprehensiveness of the presentation of the rhythmic cycles familiar from al-Urmawī and even the validity of his modal definitions, however normative they were considered to be by the several later theorists who repeated them and commented on them.
Introduction
Rather unusually, the two main sections of the ġāyat al-maṭlūb are both termed muqaddima, which normally refers to an introduction, while the actual introduction that precedes them has no title. Although much briefer than the following sections, and in certain ways highly conventional, it is consciously organized and carefully crafted in order to touch upon a number of significant themes, justify what is to follow, and make it suitable for presentation to an eminent patron, who receives lavish praise, eloquently expressed. Much of it, like other texts of the period, is couched in rhymed prose, saj‘, a standard literary device with paired phrases the second of which, as well as providing the rhyme, is often syntactically parallel to the first and, semantically, a varied restatement that may add further depth, but frequently results in a significant level of redundancy.1 This emphasis on stylistic polish yields, accordingly, a ratio of information to expression that is markedly lower than in plain expository prose, so that here, where the emphasis is on musicological content rather than a probing of literary technique, detailed explication would be excessive: generally a summary of such passages will suffice, and as a result the following commentary, which pursues a conventional linear trajectory through the initial section, will be fairly compressed, while omitting nothing of substance. fol. 1v After the obligatory basmala, invoking the name of God, the standard devotional beginning (taḥmīd) first asks for His forgiveness upon the author, whose name is given in full, upon his parents, and upon Muslims in general, and then proceeds as expected with a routine religious expression that praises God and invokes his blessing upon the Prophet Muhammad and his family and companions. But the formula is invaded by something that is most certainly not routine, a rather striking and complex conceit in rhyming prose that immediately and audaciously confronts the dubious ethical status so persistently attributed to music by invoking God as, in effect, a special kind of patron: He is both Himself expert in listening to the complexities of music and One who unites others in an appreciation of its delightful beauties, including, even, the beauties of its female performers. Although brief, this particular passage, with its syntactic parallelism, chiasmus and initial as well as end rhyme, serves well to illustrate the stylistic effects that Ibn Kurr repeatedly aims for in the introduction:
al-ḥamdu lillāhi sāmi‘i ’l-aṣwāti ‘alā ’ḫtilāfi naġamātihā wa-jāmi‘i ’l-qulūbi ‘alā muṭribāti ’l-maḥāsini wa-maḥāsini muṭribātihā Praise be to God, the Hearer of songs with all their different melodies, and the Conjoiner of hearts at the pleasures that beauty gives and the beauty of those that give pleasure
However, the complexities of such passages are by no means simply formal: the reader is allowed access through morphological associations into wider semantic fields, with sāmi‘, for example, readily invoking samī‘, ‘all-hearing’, one of the attributes of God, in relation to which aṣwāt, sounds embracing also the human voices to which God attends, are only clearly identified as melodies by the following naġamāt. Incorporating them in this way into a wider divinely sanctioned order is to insinuate a justification, the implicit provision of a defence against those who would condemn music. Nor, in a text produced by a writer described as a Sufi, should one ignore the potential relationship between jāmi‘ and jam‘, a stage on the soul’s path to the perception of divine unity.2 But the natural-seeming statement that beauty takes its due place in this inclusive scheme of things is couched with a rhetorical exuberance that suggests yet another cultural dimension, that of the witty and even frivolous, especially when it concludes by mentioning singing girls, allowing a reading that playfully counterbalances the preceding high seriousness. The following reference to His ability to attune people’s hearing to the subtle and wise meanings conveyed by the words calls upon another technique characteristic of such writing, the use of polysemy to enrich – or perhaps, better, saturate – the text with allusions. Here the ‘utterances’ (aqwāl) are not just confined to song texts but may also be understood to have hovering in the background the designation of a particular song form, while the wise sayings they contain are pearls extracted from ‘the seas of the measures of their artifices and attributes’, a clumsily literal rendering of biḥār awzān ṣanā’i‘ihā wa-ṣifātihā, a complex multilayered phrase juxtaposing terms whose semantic tendrils extend to prosody and music (awzān = metres and rhythms, while biḥār may recall an alternative plural, buḥūr, also used in the theory of prosody and music) and even grammar (awzān = conjugations and ṣifāt = adjectives). Such use of language is both consciously crafted and technically playful, but this time there is no trace of frivolity: the tone is sober throughout. Yet it is difficult to know how seriously this remark should be taken. The Sufi inclinations suggested by the biographical sketches of Ibn Kurr are not evident in what follows, and a glance at the verse selected for the contemporary songs recorded by al-‘Umarī will confirm that the majority of the texts sung consisted not of wise sayings but of fairly routine verse of amorous or bacchic content. While they can certainly be understood metaphorically, there is no hint in Ibn Kurr’s fairly brief reference of any need or inclination to do so, and as it is perfectly obvious that such verse-settings would be decidedly objectionable to the pious, who regarded music as an incitement to dissolute behaviour3 and would have rejected any suggestion that the verse itself might be a repository of wisdom, it is likely that Ibn Kurr is, rather, making a further defensive gesture here, particularly when account is taken of the immediate intellectual context provided by the intensified onslaught on the permissibility of music associated with his rigorously austere contemporary Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328),4 in reaction to which any defence would be wise not just to avoid any admission of laxity but actively to stress elements of moral probity, precisely the line of argument that is developed later. Less problematic is the phraseology following the reference to Muhammad, which combines the tropes of wisdom and illumination, and the initial thematic area is rounded off in standard fashion by extending the invocation of God’s blessing to the Prophet’s family and companions. There is then, as we move from fol. 1v to fol. 2r, an abrupt and wholly unexpected transition to cover also the current rulers when faced with critical situations, and although this nearly makes sense as a continuation there is almost certainly a passage missing here, in all probability, indeed, a whole folio.5 In any event, the reference to the current rulers itself forms a conclusion, for it is followed by the formula wa-ba‘d, marking the onset of a new section. What comes next is a eulogy addressed to a patron or potential dedicatee. Despite its relative length, grandiloquence and suitably obsequious nature it does not include a name (another, if incidental, parallel to the kitāb al-adwār, which likewise fails to identify its patron), so that one can merely speculate, on the basis of the qualities to which it gives particular prominence, as to the category of person intended. The passage begins with a reference to high, noble status (almaqām al-šarīf al-‘ālī), but there is almost certainly no musical pun intended in the use of the word maqām here, as it does not form part of Ibn Kurr’s technical vocabulary.6 Rather, there is a constant repetition in what follows of the epithet šarīf (‘noble’), which suggests that the dedicatee might well be a šarīf, one of the descendants of the Prophet, and thus a member of an Arab religious and social élite rather than of the ruling non-Arab military élite, especially as the catalogue of his merits stresses, first, not heroism and martial valour but, endowed by God, virtues and distinction in various branches of knowledge (‘ulūm). With a further accumulation of syntactically parallel and often nearly synonymous phrases, it speaks in very general terms, but emphasizes the intellectual gifts that enable him to comprehend these disciplines, and it then moves on to add other noble attributes for which he is widely known, thus making him the subject of conversation among his companions, and the choice of vocabulary here is perhaps worth noting: they are called summār wa-rifāq, rather than the more usual term associated with a ruler’s circle, nudamā’ – although it could be objected that the choice of rifāq was determined by the exigency of rhyme. These further attributes are sources of pride (mafāḫir, makārim) that relate less to static inherent qualities than to deeds, among which Ibn Kurr predictably singles out for extended treatment acts of generosity. But generosity is a standard attribute of rulers, fol. 2v and he proceeds to yoke together temporal power and intellectual authority (sulṭān fī al-mulk wa-’l-‘ilm) which, combined with his other qualities, are the attributes guaranteeing for him enduring fame (ta’abbudan bi-smih) and ensuring his impact (iṯbāt rasmih). From this conjunction we may reasonably conclude, whatever the obligatory exaggerations, that we are dealing with a man of learning who was also holder of a position of administrative responsibility,7 but perhaps not a member of the Mamluk establishment: it is significant that there is no mention of military exploits. In marked contrast to the dull repetitions and prosaic expression in the main sections of the work, it has to be said that this opening passage is constructed with considerable care and literary craft. Its rhyme schemes are sometimes triple (aaa) rather than the usual double (aa); in one case we even have aabbbcdcdeded, a complex structure that may be perceived as a not too distant echo of the rhyme schemes of the popular stanzaic muwaššaḥ; and it ends with a final rhetorical flourish that cunningly effects a transition, via birdsong, from the world of eulogy to that of the subject matter of the work proper: wa-jūd ḥaqq lil-alsun an tasju‘ bi-madḥih sarmadā wa-an yuġabbir ṭayr ḥamdih fa-mā aḥsan taġrīdah ‘ind wuqū‘ al-nadā Generosity for which tongues should rightly trill praises eternal and the birds that extol him should rightly excel: how splendid their song when the dew falls! Here, the tongues in the first part hark back to a reference made shortly before to the alacrity with which the generous dedicatee provides help8 when tongues mention him; and the verb saja‘, translatable as ‘warble’ or ‘coo’, also means ‘to write saj‘’, rhymed prose. In the second part ḥamd is a standard and rather stale rearrangement of the radical letters of its synonym madḥ in the first, and there is also a partial phonetic overlap of a like nature between the verbs ġabbar and ġarrad; but rather more effective, if also quite conventional, is the concluding appeal to the dew, for in addition to the freshness of birdsong at dawn it references yet again the very generosity with which the first part began, having now become the unstinting generosity of the patron which falls upon those who appeal to him for help.9 The author then declares his intention to endow the wisdom of this unnamed authority with yet further insights though the work on music that he has composed and wishes to present to him, one manifesting a knowledge of the subject not vouchsafed to many of those claiming expertise in it. Not surprisingly, the dedicatee is described as uniquely qualified to appreciate it, but in the course of dwelling on his intellectual qualities Ibn Kurr again alludes to ruler-like status by slipping in the formula ‘may God aid him/grant him victory’ (naşarah allāh). The lack of any previous reference to bravery in battle means that he can hardly be referring to a man of the sword, but if we incorporate the appropriateness of this phrase to rulers we nevertheless approach here the model of the scholar-prince, a type frequently depicted in miniature painting of the period, a ruler who converses with sages and patronizes intellectual enquiry.10 fol. 3r What follows, still consciously fashioned in balanced, rhyming phrases, even if now rather more discursive in tone, is a form of apologia. It begins with a denigration of others in which the author proclaims his intention to deal with a subject that they had found too difficult or daunting, or, when they did venture to tackle it, revealed themselves to be incompetent, and there is then a brief burst of praise for his own achievements in which he proclaims not merely mastery of the main topics to be dealt with, the various rhythmic cycles and melodic modes, but even knowledge of intricacies (daqā’iq) that remain unfathomable to the most penetrating intellects. Previous writings are disdainfully dismissed, their authors being likened, in a damning Qur’anic reference, to cattle,11 and to this may be added not just the anonymity but the very silence to which they are consigned: no text is cited, no passage is commented on, and with the solitary exception of al-Fārābī, no other theorist is even named. However, after a further set of bombastic claims about the merits of his own work there comes a slightly less vague – although certainly no more specific – reference to the literature he has dismissed so comprehensively: he claims to have perused (taṣaffaḥ) what has been transmitted from the non-Arabs (‘ajam), finding in it obscurities (iškālāt) that no one he had consulted was able to elucidate. This passage appears problematic. The term ‘ajam is usually construed as referring to the Persians, but there would be no particular reason for Ibn Kurr to seek out Persian texts or, more precisely, what had been ‘transmitted’ (nuqil) from Persian authorities, as the relatively exiguous earlier Persian literature on the theory of music, with the sole exception of the contribution of Šīrāzī, would have told him hardly anything that he could not have learnt already, if not from his immediate environment then from Arabic sources that one would assume in any case to have been more readily available. Nor would he have encountered in them passages that were puzzlingly obscure (and one might also wonder, given his low estimation of the general level of expertise in the field, why he should have bothered to consult anyone else about them). These anomalies disappear, however, if we consider the reference to be to the Greek theoretical legacy: access to this would have been indirect, thus justifying the expression ‘transmitted from’, and, depending on the sources available, he may well have encountered obscure material that neither he nor his contemporaries could readily construe. Unfortunately, we have no means of knowing what was considered so impenetrable, and the later mention of al-Fārābī’s fallibility likewise fails to identify, let alone elucidate, the particular theoretical issue concerned. There follows a general reference to an earlier interest shown in music as a science related, however, not to such luminaries as al-Fārābī or al-Kindī but to predecessors (salaf) whose merits are confirmed as religious by the attached formula raḍiya allāh ‘anhum, one normally associated with the names of the early caliphs and companions of the Prophet. We thereby shift from the technical to a defence of music situated squarely within the moral domain. Earlier models of this approach include the introductory discussion in the section on music in the early tenth-century al-‘iqd al-farīd, 12 but instead of the somewhat loose collection of justificatory material assembled there, Ibn Kurr concentrates upon the positive attitudes towards music, engagement with it, and knowledge of it, exhibited by a restricted number of respected companions of the Prophet or equally eminent figures of the following generation (tābi‘ūn). There is no reference, as, say, in the risāla on music by the Iḫwān al-Ṣafā’, to the sages of antiquity: the theme is thus neither the intellectual nobility or classical pedigree of musical speculation nor its centrality within the cosmological order but rather, drawing upon a work by a contemporary scholar, Kamāl al-Dīn Ja‘far b. Ṯa‘lab b. Ja‘far al-Adfuwī (1286– 1347), entitled al-imtā‘ fī aḥkām al-samā‘, 13 legitimization by precedents supplied by the early Islamic community. Ibn Kurr quotes a lengthy section from this work, which in turn cites an earlier Šāfi‘ī authority, Abū Manṣūr al-Baġdādī.14 Although nowhere stated explicitly, the line of argument in this passage is clear: whatever the weight of the testimony that conservative legists such as Ibn Taymiyya can seek to draw from ḥadīṯ in order to declare music illicit (since only the most strained of exegeses could extract anything condemnatory from the Qur’ān), it can be countered by citing as witnesses for the defence a brief selection from among the first generations of Muslims, all implied or stated to be of unimpeachable probity. The citations thus simply describe the positive engagement of these witnesses, whether through direct involvement in musical activity or through intellectual understanding of it. fol. 4r First to be mentioned is ‘Abdallāh b. Ja‘far, who is said to have composed and taught songs to his singing-girls and listened to them performing them to the accompaniment of stringed instruments, this at a time when his uncle ‘Alī b. Abī Ṭālib was caliph (655–61). The case made here is bold in the extreme, provocative even, as it presents a striking catalogue of actions and attitudes that one would expect, rather, to be cited by the prosecution as wholly undesirable and inexcusable, the combination of singing girls and stringed instruments being considered particularly noxious. They are, however, legitimized by being associated with such an august figure: ‘Abdallāh b. Ja‘far, it is emphasized, was a Companion, being ten years old when the Prophet died. The second witness, ‘Āmir al-Ša‘bī (d. 728), who comes from the next generation, the Followers, born after the death of the Prophet, was a noted scholar, and is appropriately credited with a technical accomplishment, the ability to distinguish between the rhythms of songs, assigning them correctly to ṯaqīl awwal, ṯaqīl ṯānī, and so on through the other rhythmic cycles (wa-mā ba‘dahā min al-marātib). We are then told that the same ability was displayed by another pious and ascetic Follower, ‘Aṭā’ b. Abī Rabāḥ (d. 732–3), a prominent scholar of tradition (ḥadīṯ) and Qur’anic interpretation. Next, an even more imposing figure is mentioned, the pious caliph ‘Umar b. ‘Abd al-‘Azīz (c. 682–720), cited, on the authority of al-Zubayr b. Bakkār (788–870), a noted historian and genealogist, fol. 4v as the composer of a melody sung by people in Medina. Then, in order, we are told, in a standard rhetorical ploy, not to prolong the discussion unduly, just one more witness is adduced: ‘Abd al-Malik b. ‘Abd al-‘Azīz b. Jurayj (d. 766–7), someone who knew the Qur’ān by heart, a man described as a learned legist uniformly admired for his rectitude,15 but at the same time someone who listened to music and could distinguish between the different song forms basīṭ, našīd and ḫafīf. The terms cited for the rhythmic cycles, ṯaqīl awwal and ṯaqīl ṯānī, are commonplace in early Abbasid theoretical literature, and are generally the first two to be mentioned in any enumeration of the cycles. There is no evidence for their use during the time of the authorities cited, but the point here is less historical precision than the invocation of specialist vocabulary as an indication of technical expertise and hence deep involvement on the part of the authorities cited. The same purpose is served by mention of the terms basīṭ, našīd and ḫafīf: these are possibly even more anachronistic,16 but as they reference contemporary formal categories that Ibn Kurr will discuss later they again emphasize to his reader the specialist knowledge the witnesses cited were deemed to possess. Although not adduced as a further argument in defence of music, the next topic is nevertheless logically related to the previous one. It concerns the superiority of theory over practice, thereby according less importance to the performer, against whom, especially when female, much of the animus of the opponents of music was directed, and more to those who wrote about it in abstract terms, as part of the world of ideas, and whose involvement was therefore unexceptionable. It dismisses the popular view that the musical specialist, mūsīqī, was a simple practitioner (‘āmil) rather than a learned expert (‘ālim), asserting to the contrary that knowledge, or theory (‘ilm), was that on which practice (‘amal) was based and that to which attention should be devoted: the performer relying on practical skill rather than knowledge does no more than provide a simulacrum, an imitation (muḥākī) that corresponds (mumāṯil) to the melodies, the true nature of which, it is implied, is only vouchsafed to the learned. Otherwise, the argument goes, the virtuous soul (al-nafs al-fāḍila) fol. 5r would not continually long to reach the essence (aṣl) of this theoretical domain (‘ilm); and how, according to the concluding rhetorical question, could the uninstructed practitioner emit the kinds of judgement, employ the same technical terms, and possess the same expertise as the ancient learned authorities cited above? Beyond that, the argument fails to break new ground, for the claim that theoretical knowledge is a prerequisite for performance to be other than merely imitative is exemplified by appeal to the rhythmic and formal terminology that had been paraded before. Reverting to rhymed prose for his conclusion, Ibn Kurr states that the purpose of his two muqaddimas is, in effect, to substantiate this claim and to show that, contrary to the views of his contemporaries, theoretical knowledge transcends practice. It is at this juncture that he slips in a completely unsubstantiated dig about there being a deficiency in what al-Fārābī ‘imagined’ (taḫayyal). One could well suppose that this arose out of discussions of a topic transmitted orally and distorted in the process, but there is no textual quotation, or even summary, and we are told nothing further. It is, of course, possibly to take issue with al-Fārābī, but he is not referred to again, and what is abundantly clear is that his musical writings leave no discernible trace in what follows: had Ibn Kurr been able to consult either the kitāb al-mūsīqī al-kabīr or al-Fārābī’s separate and rather more approachable studies on rhythm it is difficult to think that his own exposition would have remained totally unaffected by the encounter, whether or not he found matter to disagree with. It is, in fact, somewhat surprising, even disconcerting, to find in a work proclaiming both the primacy of knowledge and the intention to display it that accusations of deficiency in theoretical matters are levelled at others without the slightest attempt to provide textual evidence. fol. 5b In his final remarks Ibn Kurr reverts, predictably, to a more explicitly religious register. Claiming in self-justification that, despite the usual veneration for the ancients (mutaqaddimūn), a dispassionate observer might accept that God could in fact reveal to one of the moderns (muta’aḫḫirūn) something that many of his predecessors had found difficult to grasp, he asks for His help as he commences the task he has set himself. In the remainder of the ġāyat al-maṭlūb Ibn Kurr abandons rhymed prose, eschews verbal artifice, and lets his linguistic guard down, for there are various deviations from the norms of Classical Arabic (discussed further in Chapter 8) that cannot all be ascribed to scribal negligence. The prose is now plain and expository, yet in providing what is hoped to be a comprehensive survey the approach to the text will proceed as before, that is, a detailed exploration of each topic will be essayed rather than a straight translation. This will have the advantage of avoiding a degree of redundancy – there is a certain amount of needless repetition in the original – but the more important reason is to allow for the inclusion of appropriate discussion of the theoretical and comparative issues raised as well as the several difficulties the text confronts us with. It is these that would in any case make translation a dubious proposition because of its unreliability, since in having to opt for one particular reading or lexical equivalence it would involve not just inevitable if minor distortions but also, in the more problematic passages, the possibility of serious misrepresentation. Preference has therefore been given to providing a detailed commentary, one that omits nothing of the content, occasionally includes plain translation or summary of straightforward passages, but seeks above all to arrive at a coherent interpretation. Some of the conclusions arrived at may well be questionable, but at least the path followed in order to reach them should be clear.
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