Wonderful literature and Arab fabrication .. Why did the leadership of "imaginative supernatural" went to the West?

Aref Hamza-Hamburg

In Western criticism, the term "miraculous" and "fantasy" is commonly used to describe tales that bear wonder, wonder, supernatural, and unrealistic imagination. In the Arab context, many Arab writers, writers and critics pose an justified question about attaching the leadership of fantasy or miraculous literature to the West, and why have the Arabs been ignored in this context? Is there in the Arab narrative what is a race for Western narration in that? 

Is this failure due to scholars and Arab critics themselves? Or to the investigators of the manuscripts, many of which remain in Western museums? Or is this due to the failure of the governments of Arab countries to support research and studies?

Perhaps each of these questions needs a special research, but there is a question that always revolves within the space of "conspiracy", which is: Did the colonial West contribute to preventing the Arabs from this leadership, among its tireless work in looting, transferring and hiding many manuscripts?

Manuscripts for watching
Many critics worked in this context, not the last of which was the Syrian critic Kamal Abu Deeb who recently achieved the "Book of Greatness" for the ancient historian Abu Sheikh al-Asbhani (died 369 AH / 979 AD), and Abu Deeb included it in his book "Wonderful Literature and the Exotic World" .  

Exploration of the primacy of Arabs in miraculous literature is related to research in ancient manuscripts. There is an enormous amount of Arabic manuscripts that have not been studied, including more than seven hundred thousand Arab and Islamic manuscripts distributed between Turkey (250 thousand manuscripts) and Iran (200 thousand manuscripts) and India (55 thousand manuscripts) ) Germany (40 thousand manuscripts), Britain (15 thousand manuscripts), France (more than 7 thousand manuscripts and papers), Spain (10,000 manuscripts), America (24 thousand manuscripts) and Israel (30 thousand books and manuscripts).

This is in addition to what is unknown from the manuscripts, and what was burned and destroyed during the many wars that destroyed entire cities, which made many rivers flowing with blood at times, and with ink at other times.

“Fantastic” or imaginative creativity
The French-Bulgarian philosopher Tzvetan Todorov (1939-2017) called the term fantastic “imaginative creativity,” and “attributed its appearance at random to the eighteenth century in Europe,” says Syrian critic Kamal Abu Deeb, who believes that it is time to study The great Arab heritage in this literary classification.

Abu Deeb believes that Arabic texts "such as the book of greatness, dreams of Al-Wahrani, a thousand and one nights, strange tales and strange anecdotes, (perhaps intended by strange tales and strange news, Hans Fire investigation), and exquisite biographies such as the biography of the crescent moon and Saif bin Dhi Yazan, between the treasures Enchanting writing in the world is a rare example in the space of imaginative and imaginative creativity. " 

Abu Deeb continues that the time has come to study this great heritage with the effort, knowledge and time it deserves.

Slanderism and Ignorance
Abu Deeb draws attention to the term “slander”, which was invoked by the great writer Badi al-Zaman al-Hamdhani, as one of the narration techniques in the Arab fabricator.

Al-Hamdhani (969-1007 AH / 969-1007 A.D.), the inventor of the art of maqamah, presented to “classical Arabic literature the first fictional work that was narrated on the tongues of people and not on the tongues of animals,” said Lebanese-American researcher Widad al-Qadi.

Al-Hamdhani used poetry and prose, with their rhetorical, and often ironic, forms to describe the adventures of his beggar hero, Abi al-Fath al-Iskandariya. 

Unlike the shrines of Al-Hamdhani, the book “One Thousand and One Nights” - whose ancient Arabic name is “Asmar Al-Layali for the Arabs, which includes humor and inherits the rapture” - which Todorov himself has passed with much admiration, and which influenced the maps of writing in the world, cannot be ignored, and many creations cannot be ignored either. It accumulated on this broad imaginary style.

Tales of the book - many of which have been extracted from Persian or Babylonian myths - include stories such as: "Aladdin and the Magic Lamp", "Ali Baba and the Forty Thief", and "The Seven Seas of Sinbad's Trip"

Even in ancient Arabic poetry, high-level imagination and miraculous writing was found that could not be ignored, as well as in tales that mixed realism, fiction and satire and used masks, as in the writings of Al-Jahiz for example, and many writers whose manuscripts are found in remote and unknown locations.  

The novel
linked Todorov, and others, fantasy with the art of the novel, more broadly than the story, and many Arab critics still consider the first Arabic novel in this literary art to be "good consequences" for the Lebanese novelist Zainab Fawaz, which was published in 1899, while neglecting, for example, a novel. Hay ibn Yaqdhan by Ibn Tufayl (494-581 AH / 1100-1185 AD), which contains a lot of imagination and unreality. 

Although there are many manuscripts that are still unrealized, but they may not be inclined to lead to the Arab side, especially with the very slow Arab criticism of its Western counterparts, who acknowledge the great influence of Arab Islamic books, but they consider all writing schools to be their leadership. 

The Arab heritage, as Kamal Abu Deeb says, has much of the essence of "transcendence, ambition, and breaking the familiar, limited, logical, historical, and realistic", which makes it the first of this literary and miraculous literary writing to it and not to others.

Achieving a manuscript does not only mean publishing it, but it also means changes in critical opinions and non-deserving critical postulates, including the pioneering of writing in this field.