Lena Jayyusi

After this example, I’m keen to find more of these Mamluk-age folk epics or romances in English translation. Such as the one on the historical Mamluk sultan Baybars, or Antar, a poet-hero from before Islam with a father of the noble Arab tribes and a slave Ethiopian mother, or the woman Dhat al-Himma who fights Byzantines alongside her black son. They are called sira/singular sirat and date from the 13th-16th centuries. Sirat is often translated adventures, as in this title or The Adventures of Antar (translated but rare).

The creators of this book hope to entice English readers with the choice of King Sayf, or the Knight of the Yemen. If I may quote from the introduction:

Nowhere in sira literature is the magical and the demonic given such a high profile in the plot. And nowhere else is eroticism, bordering on the explicit, allowed such a prominent place in the narrative. A passage where Sayf is all but seduced by his mother, Qamariyya, when she challenges him to wrestle with her naked, alone in single combat, is almost startling in its explicitness. Its juxtaposition with other passages telling of ascetics, of spiritual discipline, of Prophetic example, and of feats of gallantry and skill in weaponry by male and female combatants apparently reflects the taste and accepted morality of the Mamluk age.

Queen Qamariyya is the villain, and the introduction speculates that she was inspired by the real-life queen of Mamluk Egypt Shajar al-Durr, who likewise didn’t want to hand over the reins once she had them in her hands. The setting is ancient Yemen, with allegiance to Persia and enemies in Ethiopia and the Sudan – but the milieu, so the introduction suggests, is Mamluk, and intriguing.

The women call for comment. This is the old story of a search for a wife or labours to earn her; but Sayf’s story is made complex by his agreements to marry five or six wives in the course of the story. He is assigned an impossible task to win his first – she, Shama, climbs out her window, girds on sword and goes to help him out. There is conflict because he has vowed to wed no woman before Shama, and others he meets resent that: the next, Tama, threatens to swipe heads off any wives ahead of her, while another, insulted, makes seven assassination attempts on Sayf himself. He deals with this with grace and integrity, and things work out in the end... It’s rather wonderful to have a hero-finds-a-wife story with several wives; stretches our English-language minds.

There is, as in the description quoted above, much magic, much religion (Islam ahead of its time, against star-worshippers or more strangely, giants who worship a sheep) and a Great Battle with that old Arab battle poetry which, from the snatches I know, is rarely beat.

We want more.… (meer)