Framing Narratives in Muṣṭafā al-Kīlānī’s ‘Mayār’ (2017): A Contemporary Tunisian Perspective on Literary Framing Between Theory and Practice

By studying Muṣṭafā al-Kīlānī’s contemporary Tunisian novel Mayār: sarāb al-jamājim thumma māʾ [Mayār: The Mirage of Skulls, then Water] (2017), this contribution seeks to explore, assess, and question the applicability of the narratological division of texts into frame tales and embedded tales to contemporary Arabic literary texts Full reference in Zotero Library.¹This novel has thus far not been translated. Sources will be referenced in full at first mention. In this contribution, I follow the transcription system of the Journal of Arabic Literature (JAL) with the exception of dropping the “h” at the end of female names and terms. I have engaged with this text from a different angle in my PhD thesis, ‘Narratives of Liberation, Emancipation, and Decoloniality in Tunisian Arabic Prose (1987–2017)’ submitted at Freie Universität Berlin on 9 March 2024. Given the overlapping literary historical references to figures and genres, some explanatory footnotes and quotes may draw on the same sources. As such, it focusses on strategies of narrative framing, rather than attempting a close-reading of individual frame tales. Which techniques of narrative framing does this contemporary author employ, and how do they affect the assumed hierarchies between narratives? How does this hierarchy play out when the competing levels of narratives address different temporalities, and refer to previous periods of literary history? In other words, this case study proposes to read modern practices of narrative framing as a concrete, lived interpretation of “temporal communities”. His novel includes three levels of framing, comprising paratextual, intratextual, and metatextual layers. Instead of merely relying on historiographic or referential intertextual means, al-Kīlānī revives and re-enacts individual layers of source texts from the past. By including references to fictional and non-fictional historical events, he ultimately blurs the boundaries between these sources. This enquiry will reveal traces of two referenced sources: the œuvre of the modern Tunisian writer Maḥmūd al-Masʿadī and, reaching back to pre-Islamic times, the accounts relating to the early Arab battles, the ayyām al-ʿarab.

This study is grounded in the assumption that the more frequently used term “narrative framing” is a literary strategy of narrative texts, while the concept of “framing narratives” explored in this curated collection allows for a more flexible understanding of narratives that frame and re-frame each other. In other words, narrative framing describes a technique of embedding stories focussed on the internal structure of texts. The focus of framing narratives as an analytical term, on the other hand, stretches beyond the text itself, thereby allowing for a description of intertextual practices that reach out to multiple temporalities. Applied to the particular novel studied here, it emphasises how modern texts locate themselves within a web of previous texts, literary and historical characters, and tropes. Both of these terms are needed, but the latter shall prove particularly productive for analysing al-Kīlānī’s novel, whose author employs multiple ways of framing, including poetry. Understood in this way, I propose that the former term stresses the narrative nature of framing, while the latter emphasises the process of framing itself, serving as a broader understanding of framing beyond the boundaries of written texts. While the former follows the scheme of the Arabian Nights, which is divided into a frame tale and several embedded tales, to cite the most common example, the latter can be extended to include the implicit and explicit presence of past texts, including non-narrative genres.

Besides relying on paratextual and classical intradiegetic framing, Mayār invites a closer analysis of narrative framing techniques on the meta-textual level. Whereas the reference to Maḥmūd al-Masʿadī’s modern literary works stays implicit, the novel explicitly enters a conversation with the accounts relating to the ayyām al-ʿarab, specifically with the collection Min ayyām al-ʿarab fī al-jāhiliyya (The Early Arab Battles) (Full reference in Zotero Library; Full reference in Zotero Library).²Maḥmūd al-Masʿadī is known as a Tunisian public intellectual, an educational and cultural politician, as well as a literary figure through his editing and writing endeavours. His complete works are available in the four-volume series edited by Maḥmūd Ṭarshūna. When speaking of The Early Arab Battles henceforth, this specific text shall be referenced rather than the larger context of transmission of the account, a multi-dimensional story in itself. By re-narrating one of the latter’s most famous and most referenced embedded tales, or episodes—the Basus War—the novel transgresses the division between narrative frame and embedded tale Full reference in Zotero Library.³In several introductory quotes to his chapters, al-Kīlānī refers to this specific anthology edited by Muḥammad abū al-Faḍl Ibrāhīm, ʿAlī Muḥammad al-Bijāwī, and Muḥammad Aḥmad Jād al-Mūlābik, although al-Kīlānī himself only mentions the former two, not specifying the year of publication. Al-Kīlānī also quotes from Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī, Kitāb al-aghānī [The Book of Songs] and Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih al-Andalusi’s al-ʿIqd al-farīd [The Unique Neckless] who engaged with the same material and are listed as sources in the 1942 publication Full reference in Zotero Library. Regarding the context of transmission, see: Full reference in Zotero Library. Al-Kīlānī takes the former embedded tale and turns its setting, characters, and themes into the focus of his model, in part by rendering the former episode a frame for his novel’s plot.

Al-Kīlānī’s interaction with these two groups of texts, each of which reaches back to different literary historical periods and genres, in fact combines two trends within modern Tunisian Arabic novelistic writing.⁴For more information on these two novelistic trends, the philosophical and the historical novel, see Full reference in Zotero Library. Following its characteristic quest for renewal (tajdīd), he draws together a philosophical outlook and experimental style—represented by al-Masʿadī—with a historiographical element—represented by his references to the ayyām al-ʿarab, at least regarding their later reception as a crucial line of narratives within Arab history and historiography.⁵The concept of renewal, or tajdīd, has been central to Tunisian postcolonial novelistic writing and proposed in Arabic as well as in French contributions. See Full reference in Zotero Library and Full reference in Zotero Library. For the interaction between historiographical writing and the ayyām al-ʿarab, see Full reference in Zotero Library.

Mayār is a surreal novel that leaves its readers wondering which narrative thread to trust. It features five characters lost in the desert, unified in their search for water, Kulayb, al-Muhalhil, Jassās, Jalīla, and Asmāʾ, many of whom carry the echo of previous literary, cultural, and historical narratives.⁶The 1942 anthology outlines gethe following web of relations: Kulayb and al-Muhalhil are brothers and connected with the siblings Jalīla and Jassās through the marriage between Kulayb and Jalīla. Bassūs is the maternal aunt of Jassās; see Full reference in Zotero Library. Their survival depends on their successful attempt to recover their memory in a collective act, slowly revealing the traumatic scenery of a pre-Islamic tribal war, the Basus War, described by Levi Della Vida as the ‘long and bloody war between the two sister-tribes Tag̲h̲lib and Bakr’ Full reference in Zotero Library. This war became a symbol for a senseless cycle of violence. Attempting to save his companions, the poet figure al-Muhalhil leaves the others behind to follow Mayār’s star, which appeared to him in his dreams.

Mayār is a female character representing the personified, aspired kingdom of a ‘New East’—an attempt to question the assumed hierarchies between the so-called East and West. Referencing ancient examples such as the Basus War, al-Kīlānī tells a modern story of Arab solidarity. While explicitly referencing the Arab conquests as a form of colonialism when speaking of the ‘arabised Arabs’ (‘al-ʿarab al-ʿāriba aw rubbamā al-mustaʿriba’), his text implicitly also recalls contemporary examples for the state of chaos which resonates in the referenced ayyām al-ʿarab Full reference in Zotero Library. Besides recalling Palestine as a symbol of solidarity among Arab-speaking countries, Mayār references Yemen, which serves as a spatial reference to the Arabian peninsula, but can be read as a further contemporary example of war between Arab countries (see Full reference in Zotero Library).

Paratextual, intratextual, and metatextual strategies of narrative framing in al-Kīlānī’s Mayār

Al-Kīlānī adopts strategies of narrative framing on three levels comprising paratextual, intratextual, and metatextual elements. Each of these levels add a different facet to concepts of framing narratives, from macro-structural elements to intradiegetic references and to a trans-temporal metatextual conversation with reference texts.

The most visible aspect of narrative framing takes place on the paratextual level, as every chapter of Mayār is introduced by extracts of classical and modern Arabic and non-Arabic literatures. Al-Kīlānī quotes from the ayyām al-ʿarab tradition of narratives, as well as controversial modern sources like T. E. Lawrence, and from Hiob (Ayyūb) within the Old Testament, to name only a few examples of sources mentioned without citing specific editions Full reference in Zotero Library. A quotation that stands out is extracted from an elegy from al-Muhalhil to his brother Kulayb, representing an insight into the poetic transmission of the ayyām al-ʿarab which also represent large parts of the quoted 1942 anthology Full reference in Zotero Library.⁷This particular poem is included in the anthology and framed by a phrase indicating that he recited it in the context of Kulayb’s funeral; see Full reference in Zotero Library. Other classical sources stem from the tradition of dream interpretation (taʿbīr), to which we will return below. His technique of adding quotations into the novel’s paratext opens up an intertextual dialogue before entering the plot, a dialogue comprising echoes of previous texts which, in itself, also acts as a frame for the novel’s narrative thread.

On the intratextual level, the novel adopts the most classical interpretation of narrative framing composed by a frame tale embracing the embedded tale. The frame tale in this case narrates a scene in which Mayār requests a story of al-Muhalhil, by which the subsequent content of the novel is embedded as the tale which al-Muhalhil remembers. This type of framing illustrates that al-Kīlānī, as a contemporary author, does not disregard classical forms of narrative framing, but instead incorporates them into his text, while also introducing other types of framing.

The third level on which al-Kīlānī engages with concepts of narrative framing occurs at the metatextual level, by which he enters a dialogue with two sources of literary references, the œuvre of Maḥmūd al-Masʿadī and accounts around the early Arab battles. The way of realising this dialogue, however, differs regarding these two sources, as the reflections below will show. In fact, they represent a fluid response to the assumed dichotomy of inside and outside, or above and below, that have characterised concepts of narrative framing thus far.

The implicit metatextual dialogue with Maḥmūd al-Masʿadī

Muṣṭafā al-Kīlānī’s novel is implicitly set in the imaginary of Maḥmūd al-Masʿadī’s literary works. This reading of Mayār requires insight into al-Masʿadī’s prose. Three types of references to his works shall serve as examples for this enquiry, namely by the scenery, the figures of Mayār and Asmāʾ, and the complex of philosophical questions posed in this novel.

By drawing a desert setting, al-Kīlānī not only creates a narrative line back to the ayyām al-ʿarab, but also prompts a reader of Tunisian prose to recall al-Masʿadī’s Ḥaddatha Abū Hurayra qāl… [Abū Hurayra is Reported to Have Said… ] (written 1939–1943, published 1973) Full reference in Zotero Library.⁸It was translated into German as Full reference in Zotero Library. I mention the newest translation. This genre-crossing narrative text references the early Islamic tribe setting also referred to in Mayār, and focusses on a figure that is historical and fictional at the same time, namely the transmitter of prophetic accounts Abū Hurayra, who is also the icon of a non-reliable narrator. The Tunisian literary critic Tawfīq Bakkār reads the presence of a ‘historical ground’ (arḍ al-tārīkh) prevalent in this text in line with a ‘sense of resistance’ (rūḥ al-muqāwama) Full reference in Zotero Library, also within the anti-colonial context—a line that al-Kīlānī continues by adding the gruesome detail of skulls to the desert scenery and the novel’s title. The setting of Mayār can be read as a serious, yet surreal counter-image to the humorously told trajectory pursued by the increasingly mad Abū Hurayra, who, at one stage, finds himself alone in the desert. His conviction of being a prophet-like authority is, in turn, a parallel to al-Muhalhil’s interpretation of his poetic visions in Mayār.⁹Al-Muhalhil mirrors the pivotal role of poets as spokespersons in the pre-Islamic period described by Beatrice Gründler as follows: ‘Tribal warfare and peace-making had been accompanied with poetry, and Arab phylarchs had already been patronizing poets in pre-Islamic times’ Full reference in Zotero Library.

The figure of Mayār from al-Kīlānī’s novel references al-Masʿadī’s female character Mayāra from his dramatic novelistic text al-Sudd [The Dam] (written 1939–1940, published 1955).¹⁰Given that most of this author’s texts have not been translated into English yet, I follow Mohamed-Salah Omri’s translations of titles as noted in his bibliography Full reference in Zotero Library. This text was translated into German as Full reference in Zotero Library. Al-Sudd is a symbolically loaded engagement with the human endeavour to progress that, nevertheless, confronts the characters with the challenge of not being able to reach their goals. It tells the story of Ghaylān, an originally hopeful character motivated by the wish to facilitate life in the desert by attempting to create a giant dam, while gradually losing touch with reality. He is counter-acted by Maymūna, his partner and a personified female voice of reason. He leaves Maymūna for his visionary soulmate Mayāra, a female character of dreams with whom, in a tragic finale, he flies to the sky. In contrast, his partner falls into the abyss, which was the result of his failed project.¹¹Glück interprets her as an angel-like female representation of Ghaylān’s ideals Full reference in Zotero Library. Al-Kīlānī’s protagonists reveal in their discussions that the figure of Mayār relates back to the famous figure of Bilqīs, the Queen of Saba Full reference in Zotero Library. Mayār and Mayāra are constructed like sister characters, both inspiring their respective narrative’s protagonists to the extent that both Ghaylān and al-Muhalhil lose sight of what is possible and what is imagined. The female characters, thus, symbolise a vision that might project positive outcomes, confronting their self-centred counterparts with the challenge of being unable to live up to these visions.

This argument further applies to other characters such as Asmāʾ, who is present in al-Masʿadī’s responding narrative to al-Sudd titled Mawlid al-nisyān (1945) [The Birth of Forgetfulness].¹²The text was originally serialised in Al-Mabāḥith in 1945 and first edited as a book in 1974 (see Full reference in Zotero Library). It was translated into German as Full reference in Zotero Library. Its protagonist, the doctor Madyān, feverishly tries to find a way to stop time, thereby defeating death. He is haunted by the ghost of Asmāʾ, his dead lover, while living devoid of hope with Laylā, his new partner, who is, in contrast, an optimistic character in the story. Al-Kīlānī’s Asmāʾ, too, takes on a role that motivates the progress of remembrance despite losing her life during the desert journey. She is the only one who believes in al-Muhalhil’s visions, and when other characters mention singular details of the Basus War, she often recalls more.

These three reference texts engage with questions of life and death, the surreal, and the dialectic between the attempted progress and the limitations inherent in such superhuman endeavours. The symbolic search for water—the central narrative action in Mayār—is present in yet another one of al-Masʿadī’s texts, Min ayyām ʿImrān [Days in the Life of ʿImrān] (1954–1981).¹³The later book was composed by several individual publications, as Tarshūna notes. It was translated into German as Full reference in Zotero Library. The story of ʿImrān and Dānya stages the search as a cycle of finding and loosing each other anew, as they belong to two different spaces. While ʿImrān longs for the depth of the oceans, Dānya is associated with the summits of mountains. Whenever the two of them meet in the middle, they exchange reflections on their relationship to each other, just as on the relationship between mankind, god, and temporality. Whereas the element of water in al-Masʿadī’s text inhabits the danger of drowning, illustrated in ʿImrān’s wish to dive for pearls—a reference to what is considered the first Tunisian Arabic novel in which a character diving for pearls dies—al-Kīlānī depicts it as the unreachable, yet indispensable source of life.¹⁴The novel implicitly referenced here is Ṣalāḥ Swīsī al-Qayrawānī’s al-Haifāʾ wa-Sirāj al-Layl (1906) Full reference in Zotero Library. This symbol also resonates in the second source referenced, The Early Arab Battles, in whose context water is shaped as a cause of the vengeance between the two tribes at war Full reference in Zotero Library.¹⁵This aspect also resonates in the novel itself, see Full reference in Zotero Library. In the 1942 anthology, the war breaks out at a water source Full reference in Zotero Library. It also recurs as the last wish of Jassās before he dies of his own war injuries, as well as culminating in al-Muhalhil’s death by dehydration at the very end of the version told in the 1942 anthology Full reference in Zotero Library. In addition to al-Masʿadī’s trope of the search for meaning and responses, al-Kīlānī’s line of existential questions bears an additional temporal dimension—the search for memories and future visions.

Whereas al-Masʿadī creates a narrative aware of history and classical literary heritage, yet timeless, al-Kīlānī engages with the theme of Arab solidarity in a contemporary setting. Considering the theme of violence as the focus of her analysis, the Tunisian literary scholar Saʿdiyya Bin Sālim describes Mayār as a contemporary story imposed on the past Full reference in Zotero Library. The story of its protagonists is reinforced by their inability to define any point of orientation and perspective, and second, to differentiate whether they find themselves trapped in a real desert or whether they have already transgressed into a life beyond this world. Through its motifs and materials, the novel serves as a non-spatial reading of Pan-Arabism, symbolised in the figure of Mayār. She is presented as a symbol for a new Arab East which, according to the novel, shall move beyond the alleged inferiority of the previous East, particularly regarding its confrontation with the Western world. When al-Muhalhil regrets having left his family behind to seek water, the voice in his mind underlines that the East is only East in relation to a West, and the reverse—thus the only path forward—is one shared by both Full reference in Zotero Library. It is a manifesto for solidarity among countries of the Arab-speaking world, opposing the treason of one Arab people by another—or, symbolically, the treason between the two brother tribes of the Basus War.

In sum, al-Kīlānī’s way of engaging with the literary heritage of Maḥmūd al-Masʿadī can be described as a process of creating his own narration, which is aware of al-Masʿadī’s imaginary, characters, and over-arching themes. Al-Masʿadī’s historically-loaded narrative world is the context within which al-Kīlānī implicitly locates himself, thereby serving as the gate through which the contemporary writer accesses narratives that reach back even further. Put simply, he employs the œuvre of a previous modern author as a way of accessing a past that lies further away—a level of the memory that constitutes “temporal communities” and points beyond the modern context. By choosing a Tunisian author as a gateway to a past long before the constitution of nation-states, al-Kīlānī allows for an antecedent understanding of remembered history.

The explicit re-framing of The Early Arab Battles

Many versions of accounts relating to the ayyām al-ʿarab  have been transmitted and interpreted differently throughout the centuries. Full reference in Zotero Library.¹⁶ Stefan Leder distances himself from the interpretation of these accounts as a ‘model for Arabic historiographic narration’ Full reference in Zotero Library. The collection to which al-Kīlānī explicitly refers in some of the introductory quotations to his chapters is an anthology compiled by Muḥammad Abū al-Faḍl Ibrāhīm, ʿAlī Muḥammad al-Bijāwī, and Muḥammad Aḥmad Jād al-Mūlābik. The editors underline that their anthology comprises several source texts Full reference in Zotero Library. An investigation of which parts of the anthology stem from which source would be a topic for another study. What remains important for the present contribution is an awareness of the multiple narrative threads combined in the source referenced by al-Kīlānī, rendering his own text a contemporary response to the multi-faceted complex of stories from the pre- and early Islamic period.

Whereas al-Masʿadī’s Ḥaddatha Abū Hurayra qāl… playfully engages with the genre of ḥadīth, the transmitted prophetic traditions and accounts, and maqāma, the satirical adventure tale, Mayār is a contemporary example of a text speaking to a khabar (plural: akhbar), a short (historical) narrative account, to tell it anew with contemporary literary means.¹⁷For parallels between Ḥaddatha Abū Hurayra qāl and the maqāma genre, see Full reference in Zotero Library. Stefan Leder and Hilary Kilpatrick note that some classical texts of the akhbār literary tradition use narrative frames. Showing awareness of this literary genealogy, Mayār does not fulfil the two conditions proposed by Leder and Kilpatrick regarding the khabar genre, namely of being a ‘closed narrative unit’ and not ‘mak[ing] mention of the wider historical or textual context’, thereby offering a modern response to these classical narrative genres Full reference in Zotero Library. The relation to the akhbār genre allows for al-Kīlānī to speak to the heritage of the ayyām al-ʿarab by evoking its generic character as a khabar that impacted how history is perceived, told, and reflected upon in Arabic literary texts across different genres.¹⁸See further Full reference in Zotero Library.

In fact, he does not limit the introductory quotations to the Min ayyām al-ʿarab fī al-jāhiliyya anthology, but also references many other texts, some of which share the same literary context as the accounts of The Early Arab Battles, while others stem from different narrative traditions. The example to illustrate the practice of combining these various lines within the Arabic narrative heritage is his crossing between historiography (taʾrīkh), of which the ayyām al-ʿarab came to be part during the later stages of their long literary genealogy, and the interpretation of dreams (taʿbīr). Quotations of ʿAbd al-Ghanī ibn Ismāʿīl al-Nābulusī’s Qāmūs tafsīr al-aḥlām [Dictionary for the Interpretation of Dreams] may serve as an example for the latter, referencing a mystic encyclopaedia of dream interpretations whose author is known for his travels across the Levant, Egypt, and the Arabian Peninsula and the resulting travel accounts, which include poetic and historical aspects (Full reference in Zotero Library; see Full reference in Zotero Library and Full reference in Zotero Library). This shows that although the references to the ayyām al-ʿarab may be the easiest to recognise, Mayār comprises many more layers of Arabic literary history. The poet al-Muhalhil wonders on his own in the desert: ‘Is anything I hear now only an echo of past weddings that stayed alive inside of me?!’ Full reference in Zotero Library. Or, more generally interpreted—is anything he perceives only an echoed memory? Embedded in a collage of quotations from numerous sources that stem from different literary contexts and periods—and embedding them in return—the contemporary novel holds a web of echoes and responses from the level of tropes (such as the dream and the journey as part of the surreal scenery outlined in Mayār) to the crossing between narrative traditions (such as historiography and dream interpretation). The diverse layers of intertext become a framework in which the novel is embedded, and the novel can only be read, or deciphered, with the awareness of prevalent parts of and references to these various intertexts.

Out of the rich collection of referenced narrative works, The Early Arab Battles stand out because the author chooses to focus in detail on one of these (re-)invented battles—or, in narrative terms, into an embedded tale within this frame. Al-Kīlānī’s engagement with this source differs from his way of speaking to al-Masʿadī. Instead of implicitly conversing with it, he explicitly re-frames the ancient embedded tale of the Basus War by re-narrating it.

His re-narration, however, is located within a different temporal context. Whereas The Early Arab Battles are structured into days (ayyām), al-Kīlānī narrates the story in several simultaneous, overlapping time frames. Contrary to the ancient narratives, the author continues to blur the characters’ perception in his own narrative. The first chapter, for example, begins with a phrase intended to confuse any clear perception of time: ‘A night that seems like a day and a day that seems like night’ (‘layl kaʾannahu nahār aw nahār kaʾannahu al-layl’, Full reference in Zotero Library). This phrase confuses the reader in two regards: first by the repeated use of the conjunction ‘as if’ (kaʾanna), and second by the chiasm of two juxtaposed comparisons.¹⁹Once war has broken out, al-Muhalhil recites a poem starting with a verse that I translate as: ‘Oh, our night in Dhī Husum lit up, / for if you ended you would not return.’ The original Arabic verse is commented on by the editors in that Dhī Ḥuzum is a place and in the Syrian desert and that ‘taḥūrī’ is synonymous with tarjaʿī and reads: ‘إذا أنتِ انْقَضَيْتِ فلا تَحُورى’أليلتَنا بذي حُزُم أنيرى ’Full reference in Zotero Library. Al-Kīlānī quotes a different part of this poem Full reference in Zotero Library. Al-Kīlānī’s phrase also evokes further classical verses about the reversal of night and day, for example the following verses 28 and 29 quoted from al-Sūlī’s Akhbār Abī Tammām in Beatrice Gründler’s translation: ‘Twilight of fire with darkness hovering bewildered, and darkness of smoke in a pallid forenoon. From this, the sun rises though it has set, from that, the sun sets, though it has not set’. It reads as follows in the original:‘ ضوءٌ من النار والظلماء عاكفةٌ وظلمة من دخان في ضحىً شَحِب. فالشمس طالعة من ذا وقد أفلتْ والشمس واجبة من ذا لم تجب.’ (See Full reference in Zotero Library) Echoing al-Masʿadī’s reference to the temporal unit of ayyām in Min ayyām ʿImrān, al-Kīlānī thereby writes a novel in line with a central characteristic of postcolonial Arabic prose: the fracture of time and temporality and the renewed interest in classical texts Full reference in Zotero Library.

Regarding the referencing of previous literary characters, al-Kīlānī, indeed, makes use of them, in this case not only by alluding to their names, but rather by re-narrating their story of recovery after the Basus War. He tells their journey in which they feverishly try to recall and, in this way, be liberated from the memories that haunt them day and night. While his references to al-Masʿadī’s characters stay within the fictional space, he re-invents the protagonists relating back to The Early Arab Battles in response to their historical weight. Several of these characters carry a long narrative history, not only the poet al-Muhalhil, who is present as a historical ‘warrior-poet’ and epic literary character, but also Kulayb, the tyrannical tribal leader, who was murdered by the model character of Jassās, his brother-in-law Jassās bin Murra al-Shaybānī.²⁰‘Al-Muhalhil b. Rabfah was a pre-Islamic poet who, according to classical sources, was the first to establish the Qasidah form and who participated in the forty-year war of al-Basūs, between Bakr and Taghlib to revenge the assassination of his brother Kulayb. On the other hand, al-Zīr Sālim Abū Laylā al-Muhalhil, is the protagonist of the folkloric sīrah, whose character is substantially different from his “historical” counterpart, nonetheless they do share the same “historical” setting, events, and characters surrounding them’ Full reference in Zotero Library. See further Full reference in Zotero Library and Full reference in Zotero Library. For a classical Arabic source summarising the roles of Kulayb, Jassās, Jalīla, and al-Muhalhil in this war with many parallels to the version presented in the 1942 anthology, see Full reference in Zotero Library. These layers reverberate in al-Kīlānī’s contemporary novel, while he adds, changes, and adapts previous narratives, a technique which the author himself observed in his study of al-Masʿadī in linguistic and literary terms.²¹In his reading of al-Masʿadī, he emphasises the direct and indirect references to other literary and historical periods, texts, and ideas that reach back and forward Full reference in Zotero Library.

Besides the construction of characters, al-Kīlānī’s conversation with the ancient embedded tale about the forty-year long tribal war further applies to his narration. The following scene shall serve as an example of how his quotations from The Early Arab Battles interact with the novelistic text. The first excerpt quoted by al-Kīlānī concerns a scene in which Kulayb asks his wife who could offer her the best refuge, her response being ‘My two brothers!’

..ثمّ إنّ كُليْب أعاد القول على امرأته فقال: مَنْ أَعَزُّ مِن وائل؟ فقالت: أخواي! فأضمرها على نفسه وأسرّها وسكت، حتّى مرّت به إبل جسّاس وفيها ناقة البسوس، فأنكر الناقة، ثمّ قال: ما هذه الناقة؟ قالوا لِخالة الجسّاس. فقال: أوَ بَلغ من أمْر ابن سَعْديّة أن يُجير عليّ بغيْر إذني؟ اِرْمِ ضِرْع الناقة، فاختلط دمُها بلبنها..²²This paragraph is quoted by al-Kīlānī, Full reference in Zotero Library.

[Once again, Kulayb asked his wife: Who is more precious to you than Wāʾil [me]? And she responded: My two brothers! He kept it to himself and was silent, until the camel foal of Jassās and with it, the she-camel of Basūs, passed by him. He did not recognise the she-camel asked: Whose she-camel is this? They said: It belongs to the maternal aunt of Jassās. He said: How does Saʿdiyya’s son dare to give refuge without my approval? Toss its udder, o young boy. And he [the boy] grabbed his arrow and threw it at the she-camel’s udder. Its milk mixed with blood.]

It is worth noting that Wāʾil, another name of Kulayb’s historical archetype, also connotes refuge Full reference in Zotero Library. By combining refuge with familial support, the scene emphasises the bonds between relatives and their relevance for the narrated tribal identity Full reference in Zotero Library. This scene is interrupted by the act which would later be regarded as the trigger for the Basus War, namely, the appearance of a female camel belonging to Kulayb’s cousin tribe, which he takes as an offence, and to which he responds by eventually injuring the camel.²³J. W. Fück summarises the incident that led to the Basus War as follows: ‘In the legend Kulayb is represented as a tyrant who disregarded the time-honoured customs of the Bedouins and usurped for himself the right of pasture and of hunting in his self-chosen preserves. Once al-Basūs, while staying with her nephew al-D̲j̲assās, Kulayb’s brother-in-law, let her she-camel (var. the she-camel of Saʿd al-Ḏj̲armī, her husband, or according to others, her protégé) graze on Kulayb’s pasture and he killed the camel (var. killed her foal and wounded her in the udder). Outraged by this violation of the host’s rights, al-D̲j̲assās (var. together with his cousin) killed Kulayb and this led to the war between the two tribes’ Full reference in Zotero Library.

In comparison with the referenced version, this extract is preceded by a similar scene in which Jalīla responds more concretely ‘My brothers Jassās and Hammām’ to a slightly different question. In the anthology, Kulayb is already rendered furious by her first response and kills the baby camel that belongs to Bassūs’s female camel before returning to his wife to repeat his question Full reference in Zotero Library.²⁴Ibn al-Athīr narrates how al-Muhalhil and Kulayb fight each other´s families. In his version, Jassās notes that it is their neighbour’s camel, thereby alternating the story included in the anthology Full reference in Zotero Library.

In the further course of his narration, al-Kīlānī adds detail to the quoted legend. While the camel’s name, Sarāb, already appears in an annotation of the 1942 anthology, al-Kīlānī enriches the encounter between the narrator and Bassūs, the aunt of Jassās with an indirect dialogue Full reference in Zotero Library.

He heard her call his name, and when he asked her for hers, she responded that she is Bassūs, the aunt of Jassās and owner of the camel ‘Sarāb’ which was killed by Kulayb after he had claimed that it had broken the eggs of a bird which had come to sit next to it. Full reference in Zotero Library

Al-Kīlānī adds a reason provided by Kulayb for his decision to injure the camel that is not prevalent in the referenced version of the textual collection. As a result, the original source text claims a strong presence on several layers of Kīlānī’s narration. It is even echoed in the novel’s subtitle, which is disguised at first sight, because sarāb here is understood by its original meaning of mirage, and only later connected with both the novel’s plot and the pre-modern narrative.

Conclusion

Muṣṭafā al-Kīlānī’s novel Full reference in Zotero Library [Mayār: The Mirage of Skulls, then Water] (2017) is a literary example of the transmission, recreation, and conversation that forms a “temporal community” of its own, crossing different spatial and temporal contexts, ultimately breaking the boundaries of assumed hierarchies between original narratives and re-narrations. The two sources with which al-Kīlānī engages and which were selected for this study out of many further references are the literary œuvre of Maḥmūd al-Masʿadī and a specific collection of accounts relating to the ayyām al-ʿarab. The analysis revealed that the author engages with these two layers of literary history in different ways. He implicitly bases the contemporary text on the modern model of al-Masʿadī regarding his imaginary, style, and characters, while he explicitly re-narrates, re-frames, and re-creates the ancient source collection. Al-Kīlānī takes the embedded tale as his point of departure from which he develops his own response to the prevalent literary historical heritage—in his novel’s temporal structure, as well as in the re-narration of ancient characters and transmitted narrative threads. In this process, al-Masʿadī serves as a gate to the periods of literary history that reach further back into the past. By drawing on a temporal dimension of framing, or time frames, Muṣṭafā al-Kīlānī creates a space for the past within a contemporary text. His novel represents the fluidity with which “narrative framing” as a technique and “framing narratives” as a broader concept are used to connect literature and literary communities throughout different periods of history.