Leg over Leg: Volumes Three and Four

APPENDIX TO THE BOOK IN WHICH ARE STRUNG TOGETHER THE PEARL–LIKE ERRORS MADE BY THE GREAT MASTERS AMONG THE TEACHERS OF ARABIC LANGUAGES

⁶⁷⁰

IN THE

S

CHOOLS OF

P

ARIS

5.3.1

In the opening passage of a book on Persian grammar that he wrote in 1853, Alexandre Chodźko⁶⁷¹ states, “The countries of Europe have long been possessed of everything needed for the study of oriental languages, as they are of libraries and schools and scholars well-qualified to direct them. With regard to the literature of the languages of Asia and their associated philosophy and history, the professors of the Persians, the teachers of the Arabs, and the Brahmans of India now have much to learn from our professors.” I declare this claim to be lies, chicanery, mendacity, fakery, falsehood, forgery, slander, empty boasting, implausibility, injustice, farfetchedness, fallacy, fibbing, fabrication, blarney, hyperbole, hokum, and humbuggery and that its author ought to be listed in the chapter on marvels⁶⁷² among those who delude themselves, for not only does he delude himself but he leads others to do likewise.

5.3.2

Firstly, he — that is, the writer of the essay in question — does not have the knowledge of oriental languages that would justify the witness he bears to the excellence and mastery of these professors and is unaware of the shallowness of their knowledge, for in transferring the letters⁶⁷³ in Persian that he has put into his book, he makes many gross mistakes both of copying and of translation. Among these, on page 198, he writes qāniʿ ṣafṣaf when the original reads qāʿ ṣafṣaf, the quotation being from the words of the Almighty wa-yasʾalūnaka ʿani l-jibāli qul yansifuhā rabbī nasfan fa-yadharuhā qāʿan ṣafṣafan (“They ask you about the mountains. Say, ‘My lord will scatter them as dust and leave the earth level and bare….’”);⁶⁷⁴ being ignorant of the meaning, he has changed qāʿ (“low-lying land”) to qāniʿ (“content”) and translated it into French by saying, in his words, “and he satisfies himself with the sands of the plain.”⁶⁷⁵ How could this scholar permit himself to fill the book with sand and be too proud to ask someone knowledgeable what it meant? Such, however, is his custom and that of his predecessors and professors: when they are in doubt as to the meaning, they resort to patching, botching, and concocting.

5.3.3

Secondly, these professors do not get their knowledge from those who are masters of it, such as Shaykh Muḥammad, Molla Ḥasan, or Üstad Saʿdī.⁶⁷⁶ They acquire it parasitically and pounce upon it randomly. Those who graduate wıth some knowledge of the subject do so at the hands of Priest Ḥanna, Monk Tūmā, and Parson Mattā and then stick their heads into confused dreams, or stick confused dreams into their heads, and imagine that they understand things that they do not. Any of them who teaches an oriental language or translates from one you will find flailing around blindly. Anything they are in doubt about they patch up any way they please and anything that lies between doubt and certainty they conjecture or guess at, giving greater weight to the less weighty and preferring the less preferred. This is because there is nobody at hand to take on the task of pointing out their mistakes and helping them to improve. As Abū l-Ṭayyib⁶⁷⁷ says

If a coward finds himself alone in a land

He calls for war on his own, and for battle.

5.3.4

Because they have invested all their dignity in having people call them by the title of “teacher,” they are content to have the name without the doing and without undertaking what is properly meant by being a teacher. He who occupies this sublime position must be truthful in his transmission, cautious in his narration, careful not to give too much credence to the likelihood of what he favors at the expense of what the author intended, thoughtful as to the material’s context, to the text that precedes it, and to any delimiting attributes or relevant issues connected to it, and he must be steeped in the lexicon, as also in the grammar, syntax, and literature. Where are such qualities among these professors, who distort the author’s manner of expression and impose on it strange meanings unacceptable to both nature and taste, importing, speculatively and recklessly, whatever personal interpretations they fancy? I swear, if they had any shame, they would not occupy these prominent posts and would not make so bold as to produce such patched and faked translations! If, my sandy shaykh,⁶⁷⁸ your words concerning these professors were intended seriously, it would be your duty, after reading the list of their appalling mistakes, to retract your ignorant hogwash and hokum and confess your mendacity in the preamble to some other book you may one day write — on Arabic grammar, God willing! If not, the sin of taking pride in a falsehood will be upon your head.

5.3.5

Or if it was said in jest and you intended to poke fun at those prominent professors and celebrated stars, it would be better if they were to answer you, though I notice that they have said nothing to refute you, and it seems that this ill-judged praise of yours has tickled their fancies. You and they are like that fool who fell in love with a woman and was unable to have her and continued thus until his love for her made him sick and crazed, at which point he became incapable of movement. He was then visited by a crafty man such as you who kept congratulating him on having achieved what he wanted from her. “How can this be,” asked the fool, “when I am besotted with love for her and the more I long and yearn for her, the more she shuns and rejects me?” Said the other, “With my own eyes I saw you embracing her yesterday, after which you left her house, radiant with joy. Many others saw you too, and if you deny it, they are all ready to bear witness against you,” and he stuck to this version of events until he had persuaded him and convinced him to forget about her, and the man recovered from his sickness. Though there is a great difference between you and that crafty man: he used his cunning to do good, while you used yours to do evil. That book of yours may fall into the hands of a statesman who knows nothing of Persian and Arabic and in his ignorance he may think that the shaykhs of Egypt and the professors of Persia need to acquire knowledge from your friends — and when one of those bigwigs nonchalantly grasps the wrong end of the stick, the hoi polloi, as one, nonchalantly grasp it along with him.

5.3.6

Your statement that the Frankish countries have many libraries seems to imply that these contain books that are not to be found in ours, but this is because the representatives of various nations are buying up the most valuable books from our countries. The presence of books is not, however, evidence of the presence of knowledge. Carrying books around does not make one, God guide you, a scholar, for knowledge is in the mind not in the lines. But tell me: how is it that these professors never write a word in the oriental languages? The extent of their production is that one of them translated from our language Lughat al-aṭyār wa-l-azhār (The Language of the Birds and the Flowers),⁶⁷⁹ filling it with guesses and conjectures. Another translated the correspondence of a Jewish broker with an imbecilic merchant.⁶⁸⁰ Another transmogrified the proverbs of Luqmān the Wise into the feeble language used in Algeria⁶⁸¹ and another labored to have printed silly sayings taken from the rabble in Egypt and the Levant,⁶⁸² leaving whatever incorrect and corrupt language he found therein as is and seeking to make excuses for himself by saying “sic,” which he thought would allow him to evade any blame or refutation. What lies behind the craze for translating such books and printing such sayings from our language into French if not the craving of their compilers to join the ranks of authors? And why has none of them gone to the trouble of translating any French books into Arabic to show off his mastery in this area, given that he is supposedly the shaykh of those who study the language and the imam of its imams and when there are very estimable books in French in every field? Even more amazing is the fact that it has occurred to none of them to translate the grammar of their language into ours. Can there be any reason other than their reluctance to expose themselves to verification, refutation, and excoriation? The words of the grammarians and the Arabists would have to be rendered exactly, and it would be no excuse for them in this case to say “sic.” I wish I knew what was the point of one of these professors writing a book in corrupt, mixed style, on the speech of the people of Aleppo,⁶⁸³ calling it a “grammar,” and recording in it words such as anjaq (“barely, scarcely”),⁶⁸⁴ biykaffi (“it’s enough”), ishlōn (“what?”), kēfak (“how are you?”), khayyu (“little brother”), ha l-kitāb (“this book”), and awi ṭayyib (“very good”). Or of another writing in the dialect of the people of Algeria⁶⁸⁵ kān fī wāḥid il-dār ṭūbāt bi-z-zāf il-ṭūbāt kishāfū and kīnākul and rāhī and antīnā and antiyyā and naqjam and khammim bāsh and wāsīt shughl il-mahābil and yiwālim (i.e., yulāʾim, “it suits”) and mājī (i.e., jāʾin, “coming”) and killi (i.e., kaʾannī, “as though I”) and ḥirāmi (i.e., bustānī, “my garden”) and is-sittāsh (i.e., al-sādis, “the sixth”)⁶⁸⁶ and id-dajājah tirjaʿ twallid zūj ʿaẓmāt and similar kinds of laxative.

5.3.7

How is it, my dear professors, that you do not write books in that corrupt language of your own that you call patois, and would you advise an Arab who has taken residence in Marseilles, for example, to talk like the people there or like the people of Paris? If you were to be rational about this activity of yours, you would have to record all the differences and variations present among Arabic speakers, for the people of Damascus use words that the people of Cairo do not and you may extrapolate from that to the rest of the Islamic countries. Indeed, the people of one area may use a variety of different terms. The speech of the Beirutis, for example, is different from that of the people of Mount Lebanon and the speech of the latter is different from that of the people of Damascus. This would lead you into folly and the corruption of this noble language of ours, one of whose distinguishing characteristics is that its rules have remained unchanged and its style fixed in the face of the extinction of all other ancient languages and whose writers of today are in no way inferior to their predecessors who passed away one thousand two hundred years ago. Is it that you envy us this and have been trying to transform the language and bring it into line with your own, in which you cannot understand what was written three hundred years ago?

5.3.8

I would like to know if your authorities would give permission to a man who wanted to open a school for teaching children to do that without taking an examination first. Who, then, examined you and found you qualified for this rank, which is higher than that of a schoolteacher, and who compared what you translated and concocted and botched together with the original? And how did you obtain a license to print it without it first having been checked for correctness? I swear, a teacher who cannot write a single line correctly in the language that he is teaching ought to be sent back to school immediately, despite which some of these professors cannot understand if spoken to, never mind their ignorance of writing, and cannot understand if they read and cannot form the words properly when doing so. I once heard a student reading to his teacher from the Maqāmāt of al-Ḥarīrī, and he was barely able to enunciate clearly a single one of the letters that their language is without—th, ḥ, kh, dh, ṣ, ṭ, ẓ, ʿ, gh, q, and h—and his teacher said nothing because he knew that any correction he might make would be wrong. How can anyone who has not heard the language from its native speakers pronounce it well? How can it not be so when any of them who has written anything on the grammar of our language has based it entirely on false ideas? Thus, they transcribe the letter j of our tongue with the two letters d and j of theirs,⁶⁸⁷ ignoring the fact that there are no compound letters in Arabic such as exist in Greek, since for a word to begin with a double consonant is unacceptable, if not indeed inadmissible, among the Arabs. Likewise, they transcribe th as ts, and dh and ẓ as tz. As for the rest of the letters, ʿ, h, and ḥ are all glottal stops to them, kh is k, ṣ is s, ḍ is d, ṭ is t, and q is k, and they pronounce s preceded by a vowel as z. The preaching metropolitan’s “cut off azbābakum” mentioned earlier is an example.⁶⁸⁸ The glottal stop may occur in their language at the beginnings of words but not in the middle or at the end, and they can only pronounce it as a glide; indeed, most of their writers are unaware that an alif at the start of a word has to be pronounced as a stop.

5.3.9

It is not my intention here to teach them how to pronounce the glottal stop with the proper bite — they are already (back) biters enough — but to demonstrate to this ingratiating, toadying sandman,⁶⁸⁹ in defense of those shaykhs of mine to whom I owe whatever knowledge I may have acquired, that his shaykhs are not to be considered scholars and that not one of the scholars of Cairo, Tunis, the Maghreb, Damascus, the Hejaz, or Baghdad has need of a single letter from them. True, they have a deep knowledge of literary history. They know, for example, that Abū Tammām and al-Buḥturī were contemporaries and that the second took from the first, and that al-Mutanabbī came after them and that al-Ḥarīrī wrote fifty maqāmahs that advanced the badīʿ style and so on. They do not, however, understand the books these people wrote and cannot tell fine language from lame or established usage from invention, or recognize well-executed ideational and verbal devices or fine lexical differences or literary or grammatical jokes or poetical terminology. The most that can be said is that they have acquired a shallow knowledge of the scholarship of the Arabs via books written in French — and would they grant that an Arab who had learned their language from books in his own was the equal of their own scholars, or that they needed to be educated by him?

5.3.10

At the same time, it cannot be denied that Monsieur de Sacy acquired through his own efforts enough skill to be able to understand many of our books and even indeed to write in our language. However, “not everything white is a truffle.”⁶⁹⁰ Despite all of the foregoing he should not, God rest his soul, be placed among the ranks of the most reliable scholars, for he failed to grasp numerous matters in the areas of literature, lexicon, and prosody and I have, I swear, praised his command of the field and lauded his scholarship and merit time and time again. However, when this skill and command of his became a cause of evil — for they it was that emboldened others to take a leading role in teaching our language and seduced this liar into adopting an insolent attitude toward our scholars — I felt it my duty, out of concern for the rights of scholarship and scholars, to delete his name from among those of the shaykhs of the Islamic countries in their entirety as a slap in the face to those who have sheltered behind it and used his scholarship as a cover for false claims and arrogations. Were it not for the monstrous words of this pseudo-erudite blusterer, I would never have taken the time to point out the faults of any of them, as I know that they will never abandon their error and that these words of mine will only make them more arrogant. In contrast, those shaykhs who devote their lives to the pursuit of knowledge hesitate to say what it is that they have achieved, for the more a person’s knowledge increases, the more he becomes cognizant of how little he knows. This book of mine may fall into the hands of a Persian or Indian professor and motivate them to take on the task of pointing out their faults in those two languages too, for I am absolutely certain that they are even more ignorant where those are concerned, since more of them have traveled to the Arab lands than to any others (despite which they have learned nothing from them but lame language and nonsense).

5.3.11

Know, my dear Arab reader, that the only work among all those that they have printed in our language that I have found worthy of close consideration is the Maqāmāt of al-Ḥarīrī⁶⁹¹ and, given the limited time available due to my being about to travel, I was able to look only at the verses in the commentary; I have entrusted to others the task of critiquing the rest just as certain scholars entrusted me with that of critiquing the verses. Subsequently, I came across the travels of the scholar and writer Shaykh Muḥammad ibn al-Sayyid ʿUmar al-Tūnusī⁶⁹² in the form of a lithograph based on a copy in the hand of Monsieur Perron,⁶⁹³ who had freighted the whole book with misspellings and mistakes of a sort for which it would be unreasonable to hold even the least of the aforesaid shaykh’s students responsible. Is it possible that any student, let alone scholar, could say jūduhu nāsikhun li-kulli l-wujūd in place of li-kulli l-jūd or write, more than once, al-ʿaṣā with a y,⁶⁹⁴ or, more than twenty times, aʿlā as an elative with an alif⁶⁹⁵ or najā with a yāʾ⁶⁹⁶ or ataʿmā l-muʿālimūna ʿani l-ḍiyāʾ for ayaʿmā l-ʿālimūna or āminīna muṭmaʾinnīna when these words occur in the nominative⁶⁹⁷ or fallāḥīna Miṣr⁶⁹⁸ or maḥmūdīna l-sīrah⁶⁹⁹ or istawzara l-faqīha Mālik⁷⁰⁰ or lā yaʿṣā⁷⁰¹ or lā arā sū’a raʾyak for lā arā siwā raʾyaka or yataʿaddā raʾyahu⁷⁰² or ithnay ʿashara malik⁷⁰³ or min ḥaythu inna abādīmā wa-l-takaniyāwī mutāʿadilayni lam for min ḥaythu inna abādīmā wa-l-takaniyāwī mutāʿadilayni⁷⁰⁴ fa-lam or tajidu l-rijāla wa-l-nisāʾa ḥisān⁷⁰⁵ or daʿā lanā⁷⁰⁶ or ʿujūbah⁷⁰⁷ or ṣawāḥibatuhā and ṣawāḥibātuhā⁷⁰⁸ or lughatun fīhā ḥamās⁷⁰⁹ or innahumā mutaqāribayi l-maʿnā⁷¹⁰ or ḥattā taʾtiya arbābu l-māshiyati fa-yaqbiḍūn⁷¹¹ or fa-hal iḥdā minkum⁷¹² or yarfaʿūna aṣwātahum bi-dhālika ḥattā yadkhulūn⁷¹³ or māshiyīn⁷¹⁴ or al-musammayayn⁷¹⁵ or ḥattā yashuqqūn⁷¹⁶ or munḥaniyūn⁷¹⁷ or innahum yakūnū⁷¹⁸ or lā-ʿtāḍa⁷¹⁹ or not know the poetic meters, so that he takes kāmil for hazaj, ṭawīl for madīd, and so on?

5.3.12

It is amazing that the aforementioned shaykh quotes the following lines⁷²⁰

abraku l-ayyāmi yawmun qīla lī

hādhihi Ṭībatu hādhī l-Kuthubū

hādhihi rawḍatu Ṭāhā l-muṣṭafā

hādhihi l-Zarqāʾu ladaykum fa-shrabū

(The most blessed of days was that on which it was said to me

“This is Thebes! This is al-Kuthub!⁷²¹

This is the garden of Ṭāhā the Chosen!⁷²²

This, before you, is the Bright One,⁷²³ so drink!”)

explaining in his commentary that “the yāʾ in hādhī is in place of the [second] hāʾ”⁷²⁴ and yet when a student read them to Monsieur Caussin de Perceval, one of the mighty teachers in question, the latter corrected his pronunciation of Ṭāhā to waṭʾ (“treading”), explaining it as meaning “the treading of the foot,” and changed the [second] hāʾ in the words hādhihi l-Zarqāʾu to yāʾ because of the words of the shaykh “the yāʾ in hādhī is in place of the hāʾ,”⁷²⁵ throwing the meter off in the process. He also left al-Zarqāʾu uncorrected (Monsieur Perron having put a hamzah after the alif),⁷²⁶ which again broke the meter. Waṭʾ should properly be written without an alif.⁷²⁷ Observe, then, the copyist and the correcter, and all this confusion, and wonder!