The Arabic Beast Fable

Author(s): Robert Irwin

Source: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 55 (1992), pp. 36-50
Published by: The Warburg Institute
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 THE ARABIC BEAST FABLE*
Robert Irwin

dward Gibbon, who was familiar with the Bidpai fables in Greek, Latin and
French versions, found little to admire in them, for 'the intrinsic merit of the
fables of Bilpay is far inferior to the concise elegance of Phaedrus and the
native graces of La Fontaine ... the composition is intricate, the narrative prolix, and
the precept obvious and barren'.' Most modern readers who have dipped into one
or other of the translations or adaptations of the Bidpai fables would probably agree
with Gibbon's strictures, and there may even be some who have found the precepts
of Phaedrus and La Fontaine 'obvious and barren' too. In modern Europe and the
Middle East, animal fables no longer feature prominently as part of an orally trans-
mitted common culture. They are no longer widely read nor, outside academic
circles at least, are they especially esteemed. They have been relegated to the
children's library. Yet in the medieval world the Arabic translation of the Persian
version of the Bidpai fables, Kalila wa-Dimna, was admired by adults and much
imitated. Therefore an examination of the reception of Kalila wa-Dimna, and more
broadly of the functions and readership of fables in Arabic, will have the character
of an essay on the archaeology of literary taste.
During the middle ages a large corpus of beast fables was produced in Arabic or
translated into that language. We may reasonably treat this corpus as a genre. It is
true that there are no important distinctions to be made between beast fables and
fables featuring a combination of beasts and men, or men on their own; but this is a
trivial reservation which would apply equally to the Aesopica and the Fables of La
Fontaine. As we shall see, it may be useful to think of this body of literature in terms
of a high genre and a low genre. But all fable literature followed certain common
conventions, and the medieval reader could open a book of beast fables confident
that his expectations would not be disappointed.
Whether Arab writers and literary theorists were aware of beast fables as
constituting a distinctive genre is much less clear. The modern word for literary
genre, nawc adabi was not used in the middle ages, and there was no other word or
set of words corresponding to the concept. Nor was there a word or phrase that
corresponded closely to our terms 'fable', or 'beast fable'; and whereas other
branches of literature were carefully classified, there was little or no interest in
dividing up prose fiction into sub-genres. The problem is illustrated by Ibn al-
Nadim's treatment of the relevant material in his Fihrist, written in the tenth
century.2 His vast catalogue of all the known literature of his time is devoted mainly
* I am grateful to Dr Patricia Crone for reading an 2 Ibn al-Nadim, Fihrist, 2 vols, tr. B. Dodge, Columbia
earlier version of this paper and making many useful 1970, ii, pp. 715-16. Dodge's translation is to be pre-
suggestions. The errors, however, are my own respons- ferred to G. Fliigel's edition of the Arabic text of the
ibility. Fihrist (2 vols, Leipzig 1871), since the latter was based
1 E. Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, on a single inferior MS.
ed. J. Bury, London 1898, iv, pp. 363-64.

36

Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Volume 55, 1992

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 ARABIC BEAST FABLES 37

to the religious sciences and the ancillary disciplines of history, geography and bio-
graphy, and to poetry. It is true that Ibn al-Nadim did list the titles of various fable
collections, and individual fables, and he did devote special attention to Kalila wa-
Dimna; but the fables he mentioned were listed higgeldy-piggeldy within his categ-
ory of prose fiction, which in turn was part of the larger category of miscellaneous
prose-treatises on farriery, on smells, on coming across objects unexpectedly and
so on. Fables then fell, somewhat randomly, into Ibn al-Nadim's still broader
category of secular entertainment and instruction.
Since a fable is something which is not true, Ibn al-Nadim listed them as
khurdfdt: stories which are deemed to be both pretty and fictitious, and therefore
most suitable to be told in the evenings after work-if they must be told at all.3 Al-
Tawhidi, a late tenth-century author, suggested that khurdfdt were most suitable for
women and children.4 The category included such fictions as the adventures of
Sindbad the Sailor, the love story of Layla wa-Majnun and the fable collection Kalila
wa-Dimna. Al-Mas'idi, writing a little earlier than al-Tawhidi, mentioned a book
called Firza wa-Simds-presumably an earlier version of the fable collection Jalic d
wa-Shimds, which will be discussed later-clearly implying that he considered the
work to be an example of khurdfdt.5 A1-Silli's Awrdq, also of the tenth century, has an
instructive anecdote about the sorts of literature which were considered to be
improving and those which were not. The grandmother of a young 'Abbasid prince,
who was later to become the Caliph al-Radi, sent eunuchs to requisition his books so
that she might censor his reading. When the eunuchs shamefacedly returned the
thoroughly respectable collection of books to the prince, the latter berated them,
saying, 'these are purely learned and useful books on theology, jurisprudence,
poetry, philology, history, and are not what you read-stories of the sea, the history
of Sindbad and the "Fable of the Cat and the Mouse"'.6
Yet even if writers such as al-Masci7di and Ibn al-Nadim did not interest them-
selves in the close classification of fables, or in setting out explicitly the character-
istics of beast fables, nevertheless the mere existence of fable collections, and the
clustering of like with like in the writings of these men, testify perhaps to a tacit
recognition of genre. And later on, in the twelfth century, Ibn Zafar's energetic
defence of the legitimacy and worth specifically of the beast fable implies at the very
least the existence of critics who had picked this out as a reprehensible genre of
literature.7 Of course, Ibn Zafar did not see himself as transmitting khurdftt, and
neither did his even more famous predecessor Ibn al-Muqaffa'. The word they used
for fable was mathal, which can also mean proverb, and also allegory, represen-
tation, similitude, or a parallel of any kind. One 'strikes' or 'coins' a fable, proverb
or piece of exemplary fiction (daraba mathalan). In a ninth-century fragment of the
The Thousand and One Nights, Dunyazfad asks Sheherezade to 'strike' examples of

3 See E. W. Lane, Arabic-English Lexicon, London 1865,
i, pt. 2, p. 726; D. B. MacDonald, 'The Earlier History of
the Arabian Nights', Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society,
1924, pp. 371-76; N. Abbott, 'A Ninth-Century Frag-
ment of the "Thousand and One Nights": New Light on
the Early History of the Arabian Nights', Journal of Near
Eastern Studies, viii, 1949, pp. 157-78.
4 Abbott (as in n. 3), p. 156.
5 Al-Masliidi, Les prairies d'or, ed. and tr. B. de Mey-
nard, Paris 1914, iv, p. 90; cf. A. Shboul, Al-Mascudi and
his World, London 1979, p. 124.
6 A. Mez, The Renaissance of Islam, London 1937, pp. 8,
254.
7 For Ibn Zafar's defence of the fable see below, p. 44.

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 38 ROBERT IRWIN

'the excellencies and shortcomings, the cunning and stupidity, generosity and
avarice, and the courage and cowardice that are in man'.8
There were many external influences on and sources for the development of
the Arabic beast fable, which in the present context need only be listed briefly. In
the Jdhili, or pre-Islamic era, a small body of fables originated in the Arabian
Peninsula, for example, 'The Ostrich and her Eggs'. Some of these were probably
elaborated in attempts to expand and explain pre-Islamic proverbs. But a larger
body of fable material circulating in pre-Islamic Arabia seems to have derived from
the Aesopica.9 In the long run much of this would be ascribed to Luqm-an, a legend-
ary figure who featured as a pre-Islamic sage in the Qur'an. Luqman had many
proverbs foisted upon him in the early centuries of Islam, but it seems to have taken
longer for fables than for proverbs to attach themselves to his name. The oldest
surviving fable collection with the title Amthal Luqmdn is thought to date from the
late thirteenth century. By then, however, Luqman had been assigned the role of an
Arab Aesop, and indeed many of Aesop's fables were attributed to him.10 In general
those he was said to have written are very short (rarely more than half a dozen lines
long), are written in simple Arabic and have an explicit moral appended to them.
In the seventh century the Arabs expanded into Greek and Persian cultural
areas, and more of the Aesopica was translated into Arabic, often via a Syriac inter-
mediary version." As we shall see, the most important influence on the structure
and contents of the Arabic beast fable collections came from Persian literature,
both from fable collections composed by Persians and from Indian fables translated
into Persian. If Kalila wa-Dimna, Jalicdd wa-Shimas and the Marzuban-Ndma had not
been translated from Persian into Arabic, there were would be much less to say
about the role of the beast fable in Arabic literature. Sasanid Persia had possessed a
thriving genre of secular literature written for entertainment. Certainly, this was its
reputation, and tenth-century authors like al-Mas'idi, Hamza al-Isfahani and Ibn al-
Nadim were ready-perhaps sometimes too ready-to ascribe Persian origins to
much of what little prose fiction circulated in Umayyad and early 'Abbasid times.
Middle Persian, or Pahlavi, was also the vehicle for the transmission of materials
from the Indian Panchatantra ('Five Tantras') and the even more compendious
Katha Sarit Sagara. Finally, some Arab fables may have derived from African sources,
transmitted by Berbers and Sudanese slaves. Hasan al-Shami, who has worked on
contemporary Egyptian oral folklore including fables, has found African sources, or
at least analogues, for some of that material.12

8 Abbott (as in n. 3), p. 132-33.
9 R. Blachere, Histoire de la littirature arabe, Paris 1966,
iii, pp. 772-74; C. Brockelmann, 'Fabel und Tiermarch-
en in der alteren Arabischen Literatur', Islamica, ii,
1926, pp. 96-106; H. T. Norris, 'Fables and Legends in
Pre-Islamic and Early Islamic Times' in Arabic Literature
to the End of the Umayyad Period, eds A. F. L. Beeston, T.
M. Johnstone, R. B. Serjeant and G. R. Smith, Cam-
bridge 1983, pp. 374-86, esp. pp. 378-81.
10 Fables de Lokman surnomme Le Sage, ed. and tr. C.
Scheir, Leipzig 1829; S. H. Toy, 'The Lokman Legend',
Journal of the American Oriental Society, xiii 1887, pp. 172-
77; R. Basset, Loqman Berbkre, Paris 1890; V. Chauvin,
Bibliographie des ouvrages arabes ou relatifs aux Arabes, Paris
1898, iii, pp. 1-38; D. Gutas, 'Classical Arabic Wisdom
Literature: Nature and Scope', Journal of the American
Oriental Society, ci, 1981, pp. 57-81; Encyclopedia of Islam,
2nd edn, Leiden 1954- [in progress], s.v. Lukman.
11 On the entry of Aesopic material into Arabic litera-
ture see Chauvin (as in n. 10), iii, pp. 42-43; B. E. Perry,
Aesopica, Urbana 1952, i, p. vii; Norris (as in n. 9), p.
379.
12 H. M. el-Shamy, Folktales of Egypt, Chicago 1980, esp.
pp. 187-203, 287-96.

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 ARABIC BEAST FABLES 39

Most of the stories in Kalila wa-Dimna were taken from the Panchatantra.'3 They
were translated into Pahlavi in the sixth century, and in the mid-eighth century the
Pahlavi was translated into elegant Arabic by Ibn al-Muqaffa', a Persian who worked
as a scribe in the service of relatives of the 'Abbasid Caliph. He wrote letters and
books for exalted patrons, and was murdered in mysterious circumstances, probably
in 758. Kalila wa-Dimna is a series of linked and framed fables mostly, though not
solely, featuring animals. Kalila and Dimna are the names of two jackals who are
protagonists in the early part of the fable collection which bears their name.14 The
predecessor of the work, the Panchatantra, had used the framing device of a sage
instructing a prince in the art of good government to enclose five themes: losing
friends, gaining friends, guile in warfare, loss of gains and ill-considered action.
However, the five-theme structure of the original got a little lost in Ibn al-MuqaffaC's
recension, in which several new chapters were added; and the clarity of the Indian
version was further buried under later additions by various Arab authors. Although
Ibn al-Muqaffa"'s collection of fables continued to offer the predominantly prag-
matic wisdom of its Indian source, this quality became diluted in later collections
through the insertion of precepts of a more ethical and altruistic nature.
Two of Ibn al-MuqaffaC's other works, the Risdla al-Sahaba and the Adab al-Kabir,
are at least in part treatises of the mirror-for-princes type-another literary genre
which was not explicitly recognized by medieval literary theorists. In the Risdla
al-Sahdba ('Letter of the Companions'), Ibn al-Muqaffa' offered the Caliph advice
about preserving the loyalty of the army, recruiting the right sort of intimates and
advisers, and the ruler's right to define and extend religious and legal doctrine. In
the Adab al-Kabir only the first part of the treatise directly addresses the ruler, setting
out his duties and prerogatives. The second and third parts concern the intimates
of the ruler, and the nature and importance of friendship.15 Certain themes in
these two treatises, such as the importance of choosing good advisers, the dangers
faced by a courtier under a capricious despot, and friendship, are equally promin-
ent in Kalila wa-Dimna.
It is natural to ask, since Ibn al-Muqaffa' moved in princely circles and wrote at
least two treatises of the mirror-for-princes type,16 whether his Kalila wa-Dimna was
not a mirror too, in which he should be interpreted as addressing the Caliph or
other members of the ruling clan, offering advice on good government by means of

13 On the Panchatantra see Pantscha tantra: FiinfBiicher
indischer Fabeln, Marchen und Erzahlungen, ed. and tr.
T. Benfey, Leipzig 1859; F. Edgerton, Paiicatantra Recon-
structed, New Haven 1924; A. B. Keith, A History of San-
skrit Literature, Oxford 1928, pp. 242-59.
14 On Ibn al-Muqaffa"'s Kalila wa-Dimna see Chauvin
(as in n. 10), ii, pp. 11-112; F. Gabrieli, 'L'Opera di Ibn
al-Muqaffa"', Rivista degli studi orientali, xiii, 1931-32, pp.
201-07; A. Miquel, 'La Fontaine et la version arabe des
fables de Bidpai', Revue de litterature compar&e, viii, 1964,
pp. 35-50; C. E. Bosworth, 'The Persian Impact on
Arabic Literature', Arabic Literature to the End of the
Ummayad Period (as in n. 9), pp. 487-88; J. D. Latham,
'Ibn al-Muqaffa' and Early 'Abbasid Prose', "Abbasid
belles lettres, eds J. Ashtiany, T. M. Johnstone, J. D.
Latham, R. B. Serjeant and G. Rex Smith, Cambridge
1990, pp. 50-53; Encyclopedia of Islam (as in n. 10), s.v.
Kalila wa-Dimna. No fully critical edition of Ibn al-
Muqaffa 's text exists. The references given below are to
Abd al-Wahhab Azzam's edition of Kitab Kalila wa-Dimna
(henceforth Kalila), which is based on a 13th-century
MS (and translated by A. Miquel as Le livre de Kalila et
Dimna ou Fables de Bidpai, Paris 1957). Azzam's edition is
to be preferred to Cheikho's La version arabe de Kalilah et
Dimnah, Beirut 1905, based on a 14th-century MS.
15 G. Richter, Studien zur Geschichte der ilteren Arabischen
Fiirstenspiegel, Leipzig 1932, pp. 4-10; Gabrieli (as in n.
14, pp. 219-35; E. I. J. Rosenthal, Political Thought in
Medieval Islam, Cambridge 1958, pp. 68-74; A. K. S.
Lambton, State and Government in Medieval Islam, Oxford
1981, pp. 50-55.
16 The ascription to Ibn al-Muqaffa' of a third similar
work, the Adab al-Saghir, has been questioned by mod-
ern scholars. Latham (as in n. 14), p. 57.

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 40 ROBERT IRWIN

wise proverbs and fables.'7 The question is an important one, since the status of a
literary genre may be judged by the status both of its authors and of its readers.
However, it does not seem that Ibn al-Muqaffac and those who directly imitated him
were writing either wholly or mainly for princes. Indeed, the kings of beasts,
whether lions, elephants or eagles, are usually presented in an unflattering light.
The animal kings tend to be capricious and stupid, and when they do act wisely it is
because they have happened to take the advice of some animal wiser than them-
selves. For example, in Kaldla wa-Dimna the lion king of the fable of 'The Lion and
the Bull' does not act wisely or generously.'s And although the lion proceeds with
more justice in the complementary fable 'The Trial of Dimna', in this case the
happy outcome seems almost arbitrary: rather the triumph of a faction of virtuous
courtiers than the result of something the lion has learnt for himself.'1 Elsewhere in
the work there is an explicit attack on kings. In 'The King and the Bird Qubbira',
the talking feathered sage denounces kings as selfish, greedy and capricious. They
are oath-breakers who worship vengeance: 'they regard the satisfaction of their ran-
cour as a sign of their nobility and glory'.2"
In fact, Ibn al-Muqaffac and his literary disciples seem to be directing their good
advice not to princes themselves but to those who stood close to them, such as
viziers, heads of chancery and senior tax officials-the jackals, bears and oxen at
the lion court of the 'Abbasids. Yet Kalila wa-Dimna was and remains one of the two
most highly rated works of medieval Arab prose fiction. The other is the Maqamdt
('Sessions') by al-Hariri of Basra (1054-1122).21 These were the most frequently
illustrated works of medieval Arab fiction, and the illustrations are not crude ones,
which may indicate wealthy readers.22 But whereas al-Hariri deployed a prose that
was complex, allusive, punning and likely to tax as well as entertain the most soph-
isticated reader, Ibn al-Muqaffa"'s style in Kalila wa-Dimna was simple, limpid and
devoid of fireworks. Kaldla wa-Dimna also differed from the Maqdmat in that its text
was not treated with respect by copyists and adaptors. Parts were dropped and
added, and small and large changes made, so that it has so far proved impossible to
reconstruct the exact text written by Ibn al-Muqaffa'.
Knowledge of Kalila wa-Dimna was part of the culture of every educated speaker
of Arabic. In the Fihrist, Ibn al-Nadim made it plain that he admired the work and
its author. It is important to note, however, that Ibn al-Nadim valued the book not at
all for its wisdom, ethical content or seriousness of purpose, but rather for its prose
style and its linguistic virtuosity.23 He disparaged the Samsa wa-Dimn, a work of

17 Kalfla wa-Dimna is discussed as if it were a mirror for
princes in Richter (as in n. 15), pp. 22-32.
18 Kalila (as in n. 14), pp. 43-97.
19 Op. cit., pp. 97-124.
20 Op. cit., pp. 238, 240.
21 Encyclopedia of Islam (as in n. 10), s.v. Hann and
Makama.
22 On illustrated MSS of Kalila wa-Dimna see E.
Blochet, 'Les manuscrits orientaux de la Collection Mar-
teau', Notices et extraits de la Bibliotheque du Roi, xli 1923,
pp. 281-336; B. Gray, 'Fourteenth-Century Illustrations
of the Kalilah and Dimna', Ars Islamica, vii 1940, pp.
134-40; S. Walzer, 'The Mamlfik Illustrated Manuscripts
of Kalila wa-Dimna' in Aus der Welt der Islamischen Kunst:
Festschrift fur Ernst Kiihnel, ed. R. Ettinghausen, Berlin
1959, pp. 195-206; E. Atil, Kalila wa Dimna: Fables from a
Fourteenth-Century Arabic Manuscript, Washington 1981;
R. Ettinghausen and 0. Grabar, The Art and Architecture
of Islam, London 1987, pp. 375-80; J. Raby, 'Between
Sogdia and the Mamluks: A Note on the Earliest Illus-
tration of the Kalila wa Dimna', Oriental Art, 1987-88,
pp. 381-98. Ambiguous hints given in the explanatory
preface and attributed to Ibn al-Muqaffac in the Chei-
kho edition of the text (as in n. 14, pp. 51-52) might
suggest that Ibn al-Muqaffa' himself intended his stories
to be illustrated. However, no such hints appear in the
corresponding preface in Azzam's edition of the work.
23 Fihrist (as in n. 2), i, pp. 259-60, ii, pp. 715-16.

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 ARABIC BEAST FABLES 41

Greek origin with presumably similar content, because it was stylistically 'cold'.24 Ibn
al-Muqaffa' and his followers were esteemed as masters of style and creators of a
scribal culture, adab. Kalda wa-Dimna served as a model for a form of rhetoric par-
ticularly favoured by scribes and most of its earliest imitators and adaptors were
scribes like Ibn al-Muqaffa' himself.
According to Ibn al-Nadim, 'Ali ibn Da'id, a scribe of the mid-eighth century,
was one of the group 'who composed evening stories (asmar) and fictions (khurdfdtt)
in the speech of humans, birds and beasts'.25 Another was Sahl ibn Harun (d.
859/60), director of the 'Abbasid library attached to the Bayt al-Hikmah, whose Al-
Namir wa'l-Thaclab and works like it were designed to form part of the culture of the
state servant. 26 He produced Thadla [sic] wa-cAfra, 'The Vixen (?) and the Gazelles',
which was praised by al-Mas'Iidi but is now lost. However, his Al-Namir wa'l-Tha lab,
'Panther and Fox' has survived. This work owes a great deal to Kalila wa-Dimna,
from which it transcribes whole passages verbatim. The plot is fairly simple-the fox
persuades the wolf to rebel against the panther and, when the revolt fails, the fox
uses cunning and eloquence to avoid paying the penalty due to a failed rebel-and
served as a vehicle for the parading of banal ethical precepts and proverbs.
Additionally, Sahl ibn Haruin's version of the correspondence that passed between
the panther and the wolf allowed the author to display his scribal skills and his
mastery of the tricks of eloquence.
The most popular and influential imitation of Kaldla wa-Dimna was produced in
the twelfth century, by Ibn Zafar, a Sicilian Arab who had lived for some time in
Syria. Ibn Zafar's Sulwan al-Mutaifi cUdwan al-Atbac, (Healing Seashells for a Prince
Faced with Rebellious Subjects) approached Kalila wa-Dimna in popularity, if one is
to judge by the number of surviving manuscripts. 27This work also was occasionally
illustrated. The first edition was dedicated to an unnamed prince threatened by
rebellious subjects, who was possibly Mujir al-Din Abaq, the Burid ruler of
Damascus from 1149 to 1154. But it is more probable that Ibn Zafar wanted to write
a work of the mirror-for-princes type, without having a prince to write for, and so
invoked a fictitious one.28 It is in any case questionable how many princes consulted
their mirrors. The circulation of such works, both with and without beast fables, was
fairly wide, and the fables and maxims contained in them tell us as much about the
art of being ruled as they do about the art of ruling. The beast fable might be used
to make certain rather generalized political points about the need for justice, loyalty
and prudence; but these were issues which concerned secretaries, merchants and
teachers as much as kings. The beast fable was in any case a poor vehicle for
conveying advice on issues of more specific concern to rulers-such as the relation-
ship between secular and spiritual powers, the legitimation of dynasties, the
maintenance of armies and the levying of taxes.

24 Op. cit., ii, p. 718.
25 Op. cit., ii, p. 724.
26 Sahl ibn Hatrfn, Al-Namir wa'l-Thaclab, ed. and tr. A.
Mehiri, Tunis 1973.
27 Ibn Zafar, Solwan el mota: ossiano conforti politici, tr. M.
Amari, Florence 1851. Solwan: or Waters of Comfort, tr. A.
B. I. Percy, 2 vols, London 1852, is a revised and ex-
panded translation of Amari's Italian version and it will
be cited below. On Ibn Zafar and his work see Chauvin
(as in n. 10), ii, pp. 175-87; Encyclopedia of Islam (as in n.
10), s.v. Ibn Zafar.
28 A redrafted version of Sulwan al-Muta& produced by
Ibn Zafar in Sicily was dedicated to one of the island's
Arab notables.

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 42 ROBERT IRWIN

In the fifteenth century, the much travelled Damascan historian and belle-lettriste
Ibn 'Arabshah compiled the Fdkihat al-Khulafdc (Delicacies of the Caliphs), in which
the framing device of a prince talking about the precepts of good government in
order to save his life is used to introduce an elaborately structured collection of
histories and fables, many of them beast fables.29 Although Ibn 'Arabshah was at
pains to conceal it, the Fdkihat al-Khulafdc was an expanded version in Arabic of the
Marzubdn-Ndma, a collection of tales about pre-Islamic Persian kings, and of fables
which employ animals to explore political themes. 30 This work was originally written
in the dialect of Tabaristan by the tenth-century author Marzuban-i Rustam-i
Sharwin. Yet Ibn 'Arabshah's expanded version, despite its title and the weightiness
of the core of its subject matter, does not seem to have been intended as more than
a work of entertainment, albeit edifying entertainment. It was neither dedicated to
a prince nor did it create a new vogue for this sort of literature among the scribes of
the Mamluk administration in Egypt and Syria. By the fifteenth century, scribes
preferred to use as models the letters and diplomas of their more recent
predecessors in the Ayyubid and Mamluk chanceries.
Kaldla wa-Dimna was an exceptionally influential work. It was translated into
Persian and Turkish, it was turned into verse and it spawned imitations. Yet al-
though Ibn al-Muqaffa' had many admirers, there were those who found less worth
in his work. Al-Jahiz, a ninth-century belle-lettriste, wrote an attack on court and ad-
ministrative secretaries, the Dhamm Akhldq al-Kuttab, in which he mocked their
pomposity and the superficiality of their learning. According to al-Jahiz, Kalda wa-
Dimna was the 'secret treasury' of the scribe's wisdom.31 Al-Ma'ari, a famous and
rather waspish eleventh-century poet, was not even prepared to grant that Kalda wa-
Dimna had stylistic merit. The book was only good for foreigners trying to learn
Arabic-an insult which may give us a clue to one of the purposes of fable
literature.32 Fables in written form may indeed have been used to teach the rudi-
ments of Arabic letters to foreigners and children. And even those who imitated the
work were often at pains to improve it. The desire of writers such as Aban ibn 'Abd
al-Hamid (d. 815/6), Ibn al-Habbarriyya (d. 1115/6?) and Ibn al-Mammati (d.
1209), to turn the prose of Ibn al-Muqaffa' into poetry, probably stemmed from the
widespead prejudice that prose was an inferior medium for the expression of
elevated thought.""
Yet fable collections like Kaldla wa-Dimna or Sulwdn al-Mutda were indeed
sophisticated both in style and structure. Moreover, they were compiled by named
authors who were esteemed by their contemporaries and successors. They are
examples of the high genre of fable literature. But low genre collections like the
Amthal Luqmdn were more typical, for most compilations of beast fables were not
put together by named authors, nor was the prose they were written in particularly
distinguished, nor was there in most cases any pretence that they were directed at
princes or chancery officials, and they mostly dispensed with a frame story as well. If

29 Ibn 'Arabshah, Liber Arabicus [Fakiha-t al-Khulafa'
wa-mufakaha-t al-zurafaf'] seu Fructus imperatorum et iocatio
ingeniosorum, ed. G. Freytag, 2 vols, Bonn 1832-52; c.f.
Chauvin (as in n. 10), ii, pp. 188-215.
30 Marzuban ibn Rustam, The Tales of Marzuban, tr. R.
Levy, London 1959.
31 C. Pellat, 'Une charge contre les secretaires d'etat
attribuee a Gah.iz',
32 Mez (as Hesperis,
in n. 6), p. 253. xliii, 1956, pp. 34-35.
33 Richter (as in n. 15), pp. 33-35; Encyclopedia of Islam
(as in n. 10), s.v. Kalfla wa-Dimna.

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 ARABIC BEAST FABLES 43

there was a frame story, it was usually a simple one and the collections were really
just loose bundles of similar material. The bulk of fable literature in Arabic is an-
onymous, hard to date and naive both in content and narrative technique.
Two such collections, which were certainly put together earlier in the middle
ages, were subsequently incorporated into The Thousand and One Nights at some
time between the sixteenth and the end of the eighteenth centuries. The first batch,
a collection of mainly animal fables, has no accepted title.34 For convenience I shall
refer to it as the Ikhwan group, since the values these fables preach-cooperation,
tolerance and honesty-were those propagated by the Ikhwain al-Saff' or 'Brethren
of Purity' in tenth-century Basra, and internal evidence suggests that they were
written down by someone who was sympathetic to the values of this sceptical and
non-doctrinaire brotherhood.35 The second batch, bearing the title Jalihdd wa-
Shimds, is more typical in the values it preaches. Shimafs and his talking beasts
instruct one another with maxims that are pietistic, craven and sententious. 'Do not
be rebellious or seek other than what God has decreed.' 'Trust in God and be con-
tent with your lot.' Jalildd wa-Shimis was probably compiled in the eighth century;
its authors and the sources of its piety were probably eastern Christian. There is a
frame story modelled on that of Syntipas (Sindbad), in which a succession of viziers
compete with the King's wife in telling fables, in the hope of saving or dooming a
young prince. Within this there is a further degree of framing in that animals in
some fables tell fables about other animals.36
We do not know who listened to these and similar fables-unless one counts the
eunuchs in tenth-century Baghdad who read 'The Cat and the Mouse'.37 As we have
seen, some fables were included in the later recensions of The Thousand and One
Nights. But that was at a later stage in the history of their transmission, and they
were probably included as a kind of makeweight to bring the number of 'nights' up
to something closer to the 1001 promised by the title of the collection. Moreover,
the inclusion of fables in The Thousand and One Nights should not lead us to assume
they formed part of the repertoire of professional story-tellers who worked the
market places and later the coffee houses. The banal, pietistic contents of most of
them seem ill-suited for the storyteller's no doubt jaded and demanding clientele.
So little work has been done on the social context of medieval Arab literature that
one can only make guesses about the natural audience for fables.
However, the pietistic values of some fables, such as those in the JaliEdd wa-
Shimds collection, made them suitable material for use in sermons, especially those

34 This group was placed after the saga of 'Umar ibn
al-Nu'man (which also existed as an independent work)
in Alf Layla wa-Layla, ed. W. H. Macnaghten, 4 vols,
Calcutta 1839-42: ii, pp. 716-70. The Thousand Nights
and a Night, tr. R. F. Burton, 10 vols, 'Benares' [in fact
Stoke Newington] 1885, i, pp. 114-64. Neither this nor
the next group of fables to be discussed seem to have
formed part of the original core of stories in the Nights.
Consequently, they do not feature in M. Mahdi's Alf
Layla wa-Layla, 2 vols, Leiden 1984, a painstaking critical
edition of the earliest surviving MS of the Nights.
35 On the Ikhwain al-Safi' generally, see S. M. Stern,
'The Authorship of the Epistles of the Ikhwain al-Saffi",
Islamic Culture, xx, 1946, pp. 367-72; Y. Marquet, La
philosophie des Ihwan al-Safd', Algiers 1973; R. I. Netton,
Muslim Neoplatonists: An Introduction to the Thought of the
Brethren of Purity, London 1983.
36 Alf Layla wa Layla, ed. Macnaghten (as in n. 34), iv,
pp. 366-463; The Thousand Nights and a Night (as in n.
34), ix, pp. 32-134; c.f. Chauvin (as in n. 10), ii, pp.
216-24. For discussion of this cycle and its origin see H.
Zotenberg, 'Histoire de Gal'ad et Chimas, roman
arabe', Journal Asiatique (8th ser.), vii, 1887, pp. 97-123;
B. E. Perry, 'The Origin of the Book of Sindbad',
Fabula, iii, 1959, pp. 23-31, 93-94; S. E. Belcher, 'The
Diffusion of the Book of Sindbad', Fabula, xxviii, 1987,
pp. 45-49.
See above, p. 37.

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 44 ROBERT IRWIN

given by the slightly disreputable qusses, or popular preachers (hedge-priests,

almost)."8 We do not have in Islamic studies any work remotely corresponding to G.
R. Owst's study of the links between the medieval English pulpit and medieval
English literature,39 but one can none the less be confident that fables were used by
preachers. Ibn Zafar, as part of his defence of the beast fable, cited the precedent of
CAli, the Prophet's cousin, who when he was at odds with his audience descended
from the pulpit to them the fable of the lion and the white, red and black bulls. He
also spoke of Nucman ibn Bashir, who gave the Friday sermon in Kufa and who, on
being challenged by his audience on his taxation policy, told them the fable of the
hyena, the fox and the crocodile.40
Animal fables were also part of the teaching repertoire of Sufi sheikhs. The
Mathnawi Discourses of Jalal al-Din al-Rumi (1207-73) made heavy use of traditional
proverbs and fables to propagate Sufi doctrines. Although Ruimi settled in Seljuq
Konya and taught and wrote in Persian, he was steeped in the lore of Ibn al-
Muqaffac's Kalda wa-Dimna and presumably his intended audience was also familiar
with the work. Yet despite its evident influence on his own writing, Rilmi seems to
have been disturbed by the reputation enjoyed by that of Ibn al-Muqaffa', and at
one point in the Mathnawi Discourses he poured scorn on 'the undiscerning' who
gave Kalda wa-Dimna the same status as the Qur'an.41 Elsewhere in the Discourses he
satirized a crudely literalist approach to the stories on the part of some of their
readers, mocking those who would become immersed in discussions as to 'How
should Kalila, having no language, hear words from Dimna, who had no power of
expression? How could any man understand what they were saying? How could
Dimna become the lion's messenger? ... This Kalda and Dimna is entirely fiction, or
else how has the stork a quarrel with the crow?'42 Rhmi's point was that the truth of
the stories lay in their inner meaning, not in their outer form. But whilst attitudes
of the kind he was attacking are easy enough to mock, Ruimi's esoteric interpreta-
tion of the fables of Kalda wa-Dimna seems almost equally questionable. There was a
tendency in his own work for fables to be transformed into allegories. For example,
he treated the fable of the embassy of the Hare to the King of the Elephants as an
allegory of the progress of the soul.43 However, it should be noted that the
popularity of Kalda wa-Dimna gave rise to a number of other rather wilful and
strained readings or reinterpretations: for example, an attempt was even made to
use it as an alchemical allegory.44
Such learned renderings of fable material seem clearly to have been aimed at
adult readers, who found much to interest them in Kalda wa-Dimna and similar
compilations-sometimes more than was probably intended by their authors. Yet it
still seems plausible that, then as now, children were often the intended audience
for beast fables. Modern scholarship has devoted little attention to the culture of
the medieval Arab child, for there are few if any obvious sources on which such a
38 On the early history of Islamic sermons see Mez (as 40 Ibn Zafar/Percy (as in n. 27), i, pp. 127-31.
in n. 6), pp. 317-22; J. Pedersen, 'The Criticism of the 41 Jalal al-Din al-Rfimi, Mathnawi-yi macnawi, ed. and tr.
Islamic Preacher, Die Welt des Islams, n.s., ii, 1953, pp. R. A. Nicholson, London 1925-40, iv, 1. 463.
215-31; Ibn al-Jawzi, Kitab al-Qussas wa'l-Mudhakkirun, 42 Op. cit., ii, 11. 3617-24.
ed. and tr. M. L. Swartz, Beirut 1986; Encyclopedia of Islam 43 Op. cit., iii, 11. 2738-54.
(as in n. 10), s.v. Khutba. 44 See M. Ullmann, Die Natur und Geheimwissenschaften
39 G. R. Owst, Literature and the Pulpit in Medieval im Islam. Handbuch der Orientalistik-Erganzungsband,
England, Cambridge 1933. Leiden 1972, vi, pt. 2, p. 268.

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 ARABIC BEAST FABLES 45

study might be based. As has already been noted, khurdfdt, or fictions, were denig-
rated as being only good for women and children; and Ibn al-Muqaffac explicitly
directed his work at least in part to young men (ahddth), in the hope that his stories,
which combined pleasure with wisdom (ahwan wa-hikma), would bear fruit in the
readers' maturity.45 Illustrations, of course, would make the work even more attract-
ive to the young reader; and the tales were moreover particularly suited to such an
audience in being typically very short, economically told and with no elaboration
(although there were of course exceptions to this rule, such as the fables in Ibn
'Arabshah's Fdkihat al-Khulafdc). The aim of the story or its real-life parallel would
be indicated at the beginning: 'That would be like what befell...', 'If you do that, it
will be with you as was it was with...'. The explicit moral was commonly drawn at the
end, as it was in most of the fables in Amthal Luqmdn-a feature which was again
perhaps intended to cater for ajuvenile audience.
Fables were closely related to proverbs or maxims. The fable illustrated the
proverb; the proverb was a condensation of the fable. For example, in the opening
frame story of The Thousand and One Nights, the vizier, Sheherehzade's father, tells
her the story of 'The Husbandman, the Ox and his Ass', in the hope of dissuading
her from becoming Shahriyar's next bride. But before doing so he quotes some
loosely strung (and rather banal) rhymed maxims, which this fable was intended to
illustrate:

Know that one who lacketh experience in worldly matters readily falleth into misfortune;
and whoso' considereth not the end keepeth not the world to friend, and the vulgar say: I
was lying at my ease: naught but my officiousness bought me unease.46

Not only did fables exemplify proverbs, but in the more sophisticated fable
collections, such as those of Ibn al-Muqaffa' and Ibn Zafar, the fables in turn served
as vehicles for the transmission of more proverbs. The language of the animals
consisted of proverbs, wise saws and maxims, and the animals sometimes offered yet
more proverb-laden fables. Every fox or cockerel could aspire to this sort of elo-
quent sententiousness, and indeed it is a characteristic of the Arabic beast fable
that unworthy narrators often transmit moralizing fables. However, unworthy nar-
rators are not 'unreliable narrators', since their cynical motives for producing fables
or proverbs to justify their own evil deeds, or to persuade other innocent animals to
do foolish things, do not seem intended to undermine the intrinsic worth of the
fables or proverbs quoted. For example, as part of the fable of 'The Fox and the
Crow', in the Ikhwan group, the fox tells the crow the fable of 'The Flea and the
Mouse', which illustrates the value of friendship and cooperation. The fox's reason
for telling the story and seeking the friendship of the crow is purely selfish, but
there is no indication that his low moral status was intended to call into question
the value either of the fable of 'The Flea and the Mouse' or of true friendship.47
Dimna, the treacherous jackal in Kaldla wa-Dimna, is an even more striking example
of an untrustworthy narrator. When Dimna comes up for trial, he is justly accused
of having set enmity between the lion and the bull, and thus engineering the bull's
death. Dimna speaks eloquently and at length in his defence. He warns the lion
45 Kalila (as in n. 14), p. 3. 47 Alf Layla wa-Layla, ed. Macnaghten (as in n. 34), i,
46 Alf Layla wa-Layla, ed. Mahdi (as in n. 34), i, p. 66; pp. 749-55; The Thousand Nights and a Night (as in n.
The Thousand Nights and a Night (as in n. 34), i, p. 15. 34), iii, pp. 150-56.

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 46 ROBERT IRWIN

against the malice of courtiers and praises the solitary, ascetic life at the expense of
that of the court. He observes that the just distribution of rewards to servants is the
noblest of royal qualities. He warns against judgements made on the basis of
hearsay. He speaks against envious courtiers and against the over-hasty execution of
justice. He preaches the need for accurate information before undertaking any
action, and praises self-respect and a proper care for one's survival. And so on.
Dimna, the lying hypocrite talking for his life, is far more eloquent than his
accusers, but there is no sign that Ibn al-Muqaffac was using the jackal's hypocrisy to
comment satirically on the message he delivers.48
This typical disjunction in the Arabic beast fable between story and teller, fable
and frame, is an unfamiliar concept to those schooled in the traditions of European
writing. The story-within-a-story structure was a technique used by, among many
others, Ovid, Apuleius, Boccacio, Cervantes, Maturin and Conrad. But in European
literature this framing device has been used to set a distance between the reader
and the main action, to create a narrative density, to generate suspense, or to com-
ment on and perhaps undermine what is framed.49 With Arabic fables this hardly
seems to be the case, for here the frame stories neither legitimize nor undermine
what is framed. An exception may sometimes be made for the outer frame story
where, as in Kalila wa-Dimna, for example, a famous sage talks to a great king. This
kind of framing can be seen as a sort of boast about what is framed. Thereafter,
however, fables are nested within fables according to no discernible moral hierarchy
or logic. It seems that the framing device was used simply as an organizing
principle, a way of adding stories to stories in a hypotactic structure.
Within this structure, a common setting for the action of the fable was for a
beast in peril-for example, caught in a trap or in rising flood waters-to seek to
persuade another beast to come to its rescue. In such a case the arguments for
altruism or mutual aid might be opposed to arguments for proper caution and the
desirability of looking after one's own affairs. Alternatively, a beast might seek to
lure another beast into a perilous enterprise-for example, to revolt against the
lion king or to steal fruit from a farmer's orchard. In many cases the gain of one
of the beasts will be the loss of another and vice versa. Ferial Ghazoul, in her
structuralist study of the The Thousand and One Nights, refers to this sort of fable,
typically set around two contending animals, as 'a zero-sum game', and comments
that in 'a system like this, there cannot be any room for the development of char-
acters': only 'positional changes' are possible.50 In fact there is very little evidence of
characterization in the fables. After Kalila wa-Dimna, it was rare to find animals even
with personal names; they tend to be identified only by their species name or
species nickname. They had names in the first version of Ibn Zafar's Sulwan al-
Mutdc, in which the fables were probably closer to their Indo-Persian prototypes,
but in the second version, written in Sicily, most of the animals lost them. Neither is

48 Kaldla (as in n. 14), pp. 97-124.
49 There is a vast literature on the use of the frame
story on European literature, but for many insights see
I. Calvino, The Literature Machine, London 1987, esp. pp.
106-07, 115-21, 135-45, 153-54. The adoption of frame
stories by European and Middle Eastern story-tellers has
traditionally been traced to Indian sources, but some
have disputed this. See Perry, 1959 (as in n. 36), pp. 1-
94; S. K. Gittes, 'The Canterbury Tales and the Arabic
Frame Tradition', Proceedings of the Modern Language
Association, xcviii, 1983, pp. 237-51.
50 F. J. Ghazoul, The Arabian Nights: A Structural
Analysis, Cairo 1980, p. 101.

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 ARABIC BEAST FABLES 47

there much effort to classify particular animals according to particular character-

istics. Prior to Kalila wa-Dimna there was no royal court with lion as king, jackals as
viziers and wolves usually as unsuccessful usurpers. In the works which followed, the
lion was customarily linked with rulership, the fox or jackal with cunning, the wolf
with stupidity, the monkey with frivolity. But the classification was crude and
sometimes inconsistent. Unlike Claude L6vi-Strauss's totemic beasts, the animals in
Arabic fables were not 'good to think'-that is, they could not be used in any sort of
consistent logical notation.
Both the competitive structure of so many of the beast fables and the lack of
attention given to the characters of the protagonists are indicative of a predomin-
antly oral culture. As Walter Ong has observed, 'Many, if not all, oral or residually
oral cultures strike literates as extraordinarily agonistic in their verbal perform-
ance'.51 He suggests that 'flat' characters-who live up to the audience's expec-
tations but who are not developed in the course of the plot-derive 'originally from
primary oral narrative, which can provide characters of no other kind'.52 Walter
Benjamin, another commentator, has suggested a practical rationale for this
feature, remarking that, 'There is nothing that commends a story to memory more
effectively than that chaste compactness which precludes psychological analysis'.53
Victory for one or other of the contending animals, more often than not,
depends on eloquence (baldgha), and eloquence in turn seems largely to consist in
the rhetorical deployment of proverbs and fables.54 To talk for one's life-to talk
one's way out of the fox's mouth, or to plead for mercy at the lion king's court-was
a particularly common plot device in beast fables, and could provide the fable
collection with an organizing structure and a degree of narrative tension. Walter
Ong has seen it as further evidence of an agonistic oral culture, commenting that,
'Proverbs and riddles are not used simply to store knowledge but to engage others
in verbal and intellectual combat: utterance of one proverb or riddle challenges
hearers to top it with a more apposite or contradictory one'.55 But the device was
not restricted solely to fable literature: the prince in the Syntipas (Sindbad) cycle
talked for his life, and so, even more famously, did Sheherezade.
Fables allowed the exploration of such themes as the worth and limits of
friendship, the value of cooperation and brotherhood, the importance of the client-
patron relationship and the cunning uses of political rhetoric-themes which have
been seen as of central importance within medieval Arabic societies. In Roy P.
Mottahedeh's Loyalty and Leadership in an Early Islamic Society, a study of tenth-
century Buyid political values, there is no explicit reference to beast fables, fables,
or mirrors-for-princes, yet the sub-headings of his chapters-'Sovereignty and the
Vow', 'Gratitude for Benefit', 'Royal Generosity and Ties of Benefit', 'Patronage',
'Estimating a Man's Worth'-could be used to organize the study of a very large
part of the corpus of Islamic fables.56 However, not all of the tales were directed at
the worldly and the socially ambitious, for sometimes political cunning and the

51 W. J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of
the Word, London 1982, p. 43.
52 Op. cit. p. 151.
53 W. Benjamin, 'The Storyteller', in Illuminations, tr.
H. Zohn, London 1970, p. 91.
54 However, the deployment of fables does not seem to
have been incorporated into the formal tradition of
Arabic rhetoric. On that tradition see Encyclopedia of
Islam (as in n. 10), s.v. baldgha.
55 Ong (as in n. 51), p. 44.
56 Princeton 1980.

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 48 ROBERT IRWIN

devices of social organization were shunned in favour of otherworldly values. This

type of fable tended to preach a cracker-barrel pietism: this world is unstable, but
the next is eternal; resign yourself to fate; submit to God. An exhortation to resign
oneself to fate or to God's will was often the burden of an Arab fable. However, such
fatalism was not necessarily specifically Islamic and some transmitters and con-
sumers of fables were certainly Christians. Jalilad wa-Shimas, for example, shows
signs of a Christian recension in its earliest surviving version.57
It is reasonable to assume that medieval Arab fables in general circulated orally,
only occasionally surfacing in written literature; although inevitably there is little
direct evidence of this. Arab literary and oral cultures overlapped and fed into one
another in ways which were far from straightforward.58 It is worth noting, for
instance, that there was no simple correspondence between literacy and elite social
status. Many medieval Islamic regimes were controlled by mostly illiterate soldiers.
Moreover it was common for folk epics and fables to be written down in order to be
delivered to an audience, rather than to be read in solitary privacy. It seems
probable that in many cases the written versions of medieval stories and fables that
have survived to the present day are really 'prompt texts'. In addition, literate
members of the elite occasionally collected and transcribed stories which were
circulating orally. In the tenth century, for example, al-Jashiyari, a cultivated scribe,
went around collecting and writing down tales and fables from the story-tellers in
the market-place.59 In the thirteenth century the poet, philologist and opthalmolo-
gist Ibn Daniyatl produced play scripts for the shadow theatre which both drew on
and portrayed the low life culture of medieval Cairo.60 In the fourteenth century
the historian Ibn al-Dawitdatri collected tales from Turkish and Arab folklore to
incorporate in his chronicles.61 Stories might be heard, written down, transmitted
from region to region in written form, then re-enter oral culture.
Evidence from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (most of it unfortunately
collected in a rather unsystematic fashion) suggests that the shorter and simpler
beast fables were and still are verbally transmitted in homes, schools and workplaces
in the Middle East. There were also itinerant booksellers. The distinguished
Egyptian man of letters Taha Hussein (1889-1973) recalls how, when he was a child,
book pedlars used to visit his village: 'They used to carry in their bags "The Virtues
of the Pious" and tales of the conquests and raids, the "Story of the Cat and the
Mouse" and the debate between the wire and the engine'.62 In modern times such
chap-books (kutub safra) have helped to keep fables circulating in communities
which are only partially literate. However it seems to have been rare, in this more
modern period at least, for stories from the more sophisticated literary fable
collections to become part of the oral cultural repertoire. Hasan El-Shamy, in his

57 See Zotenberg (as in n. 36), pp. 102-07.
58 See for examples St H. Stephen, 'Palestinian Animal
Stories and Fables', Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society,
iii, 1923, pp. 167-90; I. Bushneaq, Arab Folktales, New
York 1986, esp. pp. 211-14.
59 Norris (as in n. 9), p. 143.
60 C. E. Bosworth, The Medieval Islamic Underworld: The
Banu Sasan in Arabic Society and Literature, Leiden 1976,
pp. 119-31; Encyclopedia of Islam (as in n. 10), s.v. Ibn
Daniyal.
61 U. Haarmann, 'Altun Han und Cingiz Han bei den
figyptischen Mamluken', Der Islam, li, 1974, pp. 1-36;
idem, 'Der Schatz im Haupt des G6tzen' in Die Islamische
Welt zwischen Mittelalter und Neuzeit: Festschrift fiir Hans
Robert Roemer zum 65 Geburtstag, eds U. Haarmann and P.
Bachmann, Beirut and Wiesbaden 1979, pp. 198-229.
62 T. Hussein, An Egyptian Childhood, tr. E. H. Paxton,
London 1981, p. 50.

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 ARABIC BEAST FABLES 49

Folktales of Egypt, remarks that stories 'which appear in books with little or no
circulation in folk communities, such as Kaleelah wa Dimnah, hardly ever circulate as
oral tales'.63 Henri Basset came to a similar conclusion regarding the virtual absence
of tales from Kalila wa-Dimna in the oral culture of the Berbers. 64
As far as literary transmission is concerned, some fables were gathered together
in independent collections such as Amthal Luqmdn and Jalicdd wa-Shimcas. Others
were included in collections of entertaining tales, such as The Thousand and One
Nights, or al-Ibshihi's fifteenth-century literary miscellany the Mustatraf65 Above all,
however, fables survived in works of non-fiction of all kinds, where they served to
adorn a moral or point a tale. Beast fables, although devoid of serious zoological
content, were often cited in zoological treatises, together with miscellaneous lore
drawn from the Qur'an, the Prophetic traditions, poetry and anecdotes.66 One
might have expected to find beast fables also in al-Jahiz's eight-volume treatise the
Kitdb al-Hayawdn (Book of Animals), but despite its title this was not really a
zoological treatise but a wonderfully Shandyesque essay which touches on hand-
writing, the literary tastes of the Manichaeans, how to make eunuchs, what stran-
glers use dogs for, the nature of the atom, and so on-all within the somewhat
specious framework of a debate about the respective merits of a cock and a dog.
One of the few things not to feature significantly in this thoroughly literary confec-
tion was the beast fable, even though al-Jahiz included many anecdotes about
individual animals. 67 However, he was certainly acquainted with fable lore and in
one of his squibs, the Kitdb al-Tarbil wa'l-Tadwir (Book of the Square and the
Round), he made allusive reference to a number of aetiological fables about the
longevity and paternity of certain species of bird and animal.68
In addition, as Carl Brockelmann has shown, beast fables were embedded in the
narratives of such early Islamic historians as al-Tabari and al-Balatdhuri.69 In a later
period, and at a lower literary level, fables can be found in such works as Ibn Sasra's
Al-Durra al-MudPa, a parochial chronicle of events in fourteenth-century Damascus.
Here the fable of 'The Mice and the Cup' is used to expand on and illustrate the
saying that 'The bribe is wise, this world is loved and power in it is sought after';
which in turn is used to comment on the activities of a local politician. In other
parts of the book, however, it is much more difficult to determine the relationship
between a particular fable and the larger purposes of Ibn Sasrfi's history-as when
he relates the fable of 'The Fox, the Wolf and the Hyena'-and one suspects that
the chronicler used fables and other stories simply to break up his political nar-
rative, to make it more entertaining to a relatively unsophisticated audience. 70
In encyclopedias, as might be expected, beast fables were cited in the same
haphazard ways as they were in sermons, zoological treatises and histories. But the

63 El-Shamy (as in n. 12), p. xlix; cf. p. 257, n.
64 H. Basset, Essai sur la litterature des Berberes, Algiers
1920, pp. 206-07.
65 Al-Ibshihi, Mustatraf f! Kull Fann Mustazraf ed. G.
Rat, 2 vols, Paris and Toulon 1899-1902.
66 On this genre see M. V. McDonald, 'Animal Books
as a Genre in Arabic Literature', British Society for Middle
Eastern Studies, xv, 1988, pp. 3-10.
67 Al-Jahiz, Kitdb al-Hayawan, 7 vols, ed. Hrfirn, Cairo
[n.d.].
68 Al-Jihiz, Le Kitdb at-Tarbii- wa-t-Tadwir de Gdhiz, ed. C.
Pellat, Damascus 1955, p. 31.
69 Brockelmann (as in n. 9), pp. 105, 123.
70 Ibn Sasrai, A Chronicle of Damascus 1389-97, ed. and
tr. W. M. Brinner, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1963, i, pp.
59-60, 226-27, ii, pp. 39, 172.

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 50 ROBERT IRWIN

Rasd'il, the epistolary encyclopedia of the Ikhwan al-Saf~', or Brethren of Purity,

deserves particular attention here, for the way the Brethren used fables, modelled
on those of Ibn al-Muqaffa', to advance their arguments.71 Apart from short fables
in which the Rasa'il abounds, one epistle, devoted to the natural hierarchy and its
place in the cosmos, is largely given over to one long story, 'The Case of the
Animals against Men in the Court of the King of the Jinn'.72 This story diverges
from the conventions of earlier and simpler fables, and does not offer a single,
simple moral; yet it may none the less be seen as a fable, in the broader sense in
which Watership Down is one.73 It takes the form of a record of a court case and was
composed by the Ikhwan al-Saf' in the 960s. The animals bring a case against man
for unlawfully enslaving them and the rest of the natural world. In the end they lose
their case, but not before they have made many valid points about man's cruelty
both to man and to animals, and his ecological heedlessness. They also make a case
for treating animals with consideration and recognizing their place in the divine
scheme of things. The choice of the virtuous jackal, Kalila, as one of the animal
barristers arguing against man, indicates that the Ikhwan wanted to pay tribute to
Ibn al-Muqaffa' and to the tolerant values he sought to propagate through his
fables. It has also been argued that the brotherhood took their own name from the
introduction to the fable of 'The Ringdove' in Kaldla wa-Dimna, where the king asks
to be told a tale illustrating the cooperation of pure or sincere brethren-of ikhwan
al-safa'.74 Moreover, what seems to be a simplified variant of 'The Case of the
Animals' appears in the Ikhwan group of stories in The Thousand and One Nights, as
'The Tale of the Birds, the Beasts and the Carpenter'. This version of the tale is
indisputably a fable, in which reservations similar to those in 'The Case of the
Animals' are expressed about man's exploitation of the animal world.75 But 'The
Case of the Animals' has no other parallels in medieval Arab literature. It is a work
which does not fit within other genres, whether explicitly or implicitly defined as
genres, yet it seems to have affinities with more traditional and less sophisticated
beast fables. The activities, values and legacy of that mysterious group of
intellectuals, the Ikhwan al-Safa', surely deserve the attention of future researchers
with an interest in the development of the beast fable and of Arabic literature more
generally.

LONDON

71 Marquet (as in n. 35), pp. 15, 28.
72 The Case of the Animals versus Man before the King of the
finn: A Tenth-Century Ecological Fable of the Pure Brethren of
Basra, tr. L. E. Goodman, Boston 1978. On this work see
Netton (as in n. 35), passim.
73 R. Adams, Watership Down, London 1972. Both the
Ikhwan al-Saffi's story and Adams's novel show the
animals reasoning and speaking like humans, but the
creatures do not stand in for human types, nor are they
simply being used as foils to comment on purely human
issues. Instead, the animals use their brains and voices
to defend their own survival. Also, the stories offer some
realistic zoological details and in this again they differ
from the fables of Aesop or those of Ibn al-Muqaffa'.
74 I. Goldziher, 'Uber die Benennung der Ichwan al-
Safa', Der Islam, i, 1910, pp. 22-26.
75 AlfLayla wa-Layla, ed. Macnaghten (as in n. 34), i,
pp. 716-26; The Thousand Nights and a Night (as in n.
34), iii, pp. 114-25.

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