“The Arabic Alphabet” website (written by Michael Beard, illustrated by Houman Mortazavi) – http://alifbatourguide.com/

Ghayn is for ghazal – https://alifbatourguide.com/the-arabic-alphabet/ghazal/

Excerpt:

Shahrazâd’s opening story, the one which initiates the story-telling marathon, famously, keeps replicating itself in miniature. Shahrazâd is telling stories to save her life, but it’s not just her: time after time, in the manner of a fractal, characters in her stories are saved by story-telling too. (There is a beautiful essay by Tzvetan Todorov which says it plainly – that, in the Nights, stories are life. If you’re a character in a fiction, tell a story. What else keeps you alive? The plan is working for Shahrazad.)

In her, by now, familiar opening story, where the merchant, traveling on business, sits down to eat lunch under a tree, it’s familiar ground of traditional story-telling. The self-sufficient individual out alone on the road runs into an obstacle and encounters a challenge. Stories of chivalry in European tradition open that way; they hardly open any other way, with the knight setting off on a quest or perhaps just wandering. The reader is likely to imagine a context where the merchant’s business has taken him to the margin, the غایة , ghâya, limit of human society, a غابة, ghâba, a forest. In that opening scene, when he reaches into his pack, takes out lunch, and eats, innocently throwing the date pits over his shoulder behind him, he is the picture of vulnerability (not a knight out looking for adventure). It suggests (at least for me) a secure world where merchants can travel alone, settling down to غذاء, ghadhâ, food, without fear. When the ‘ifrit appears, huge and menacing, to say the merchant must die, it is enough of a disruption to be horrifying, but it’s funny too, and probably less familiar ground for a traditional story. The monster has a motive for being غضبان, ghad͎bân, angry, though the fact that a flying date pit has killed his son doesn’t register as tragic. We know that sons don’t always resemble their fathers, but an ‘ifrît’s son so fragile that he is killed by a date pit seems an extreme case. (Is this son legitimate?) We also know that we aren’t going to be very frightened by what follows.

The text tells us that everything we’re reading is a spoken story, since we are hearing Shahrzâd’s voice, but the truth is that we are reading it rather than hearing it. This has some advantages. Readers of a story can skip from episode to another, free to speed things up or slow them down. Such is the advantage the alphabet gives us over a listener like King Shahzamân. We can freeze-frame the story, knowing what will happen, and we can be surprised each time we read it (or imagine ourselves surprised, which may be just as good). When the merchant asks for a grace period to settle his affairs and say goodbye to his family, promising to be back at the beginning of the new year, a whole unexpected social world opens up because the‘ifrît accepts, immediately, without an argument. His hyperbolic trust is perhaps as funny as the date pit which kills his son — funny, but it is also, surprisingly, to me, moving. The `ifrît‘s surprising trust is one thing; then when the new year arrives and the merchant actually shows up (thus demonstrating that we can trust him too) we are at the extremes of trust. Exaggeration is funny, but I wonder if it also tells us something about the respect the culture shows for travelers. We expect them to keep their word. It is a world where traveling salesmen are positive figures.

Does everyone know the sequel? While the merchant is waiting to be executed, an old man walks by (the kind of respected mature individual referred to as a shaykh) leading a غزالة, a ghazâla on a chain. (Why just then? Don’t ask. No story, the Chinese proverb says, without a coincidence.) Later there will follow two additional shuyûkh, one with a pair of dogs and one with a she-mule, but it is the ghazâla we remember. In part, of course, the reason is on the surface: a ghazâla is synonymous with beauty.

غزالة is a beautiful word both in its Arabic form and in its guise as a loan word in English, gazelle. In European narrative tradition we are more likely to use the gazelle to characterize elegance of motion, but in Arabic its beauty is in the eyes, which are likely to resemble what Edgar Allan Poe emphasizes when he describes the title character in “Ligeia”: “They were, I must believe, far larger than the ordinary eyes of our own race. They were even fuller than the fullest of the gazelle eyes of the tribe of the valley of Nourjahad.” (In the interest of scrupulous accuracy – Nourjahad doesn’t exist in our world; a note in the edition edited by Hardin Craig notes that the phrase comes from a novel, History of Nourjahad [1767] by Sidney Bidulph, pseudonym of Mrs. Frances Sheridan. Poe almost makes you want to read it.) The esthetic of big eyes is everywhere. Cartoon figures and stuffed animals meant to appeal to our sentiments are often portrayed with oversize eyes. (Over the years Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse evolved eyes which hardly seem to leave room for brains.) I wonder if pandas would still have their reputation of cuteness if they didn’t have those big patches surrounding their eyes, looking as if they were eyes in reality.

New essay: “’Ayn is for Arab” on “The Arabic Alphabet” website (by Michael Beard)

New essay: “Ẓâ is for Ẓarf” on “The Arabic Alphabet” website (by Michael Beard)

New Essay: “Ṭâ Is For Talisman” on The Arabic Alphabet website