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Roger Allen (ed. and trans.): Muhammad al-Muwaylihi: What 'Isa ibn Hisham Told Us or, A Period of Time, Volume One . (Library of Arabic Literature.) xxxvi, 484 pp. New York and London : New York University Press , 2015. $80. ISBN 978 1 4798 1388 9 .
Roger Allen (ed. and trans.): Muhammad al-Muwaylihi: What 'Isa ibn Hisham Told Us or, A Period of Time, Volume Two . (Library of Arabic Literature.) viii, 404 pp. New York and London : New York University Press , 2015. ISBN 978 1 4798 6225 2 .
Reviews: The Near and Middle East
Readers of Arabic literature are likely to be familiar with Muhammad al-Muwaylihi's acknowledged masterpiece of late-nineteenth-century prose and saj' (rhymed prose), What 'Isa ibn Hisham Told Us. The main plot-line concerns the resurrection of an Egyptian Pasha from the reign of Mehmed Ali in the first half of the nineteenth century, in British-occupied Egypt of the 1890s. Upon rising from the grave he encounters the narrator 'Isa ibn Hisham, whose name and propensity for saj' narration are borrowed from the maqamas of Hariri, but who appears in other respects to be a contemporary Egyptian. The Pasha, accompanied by 'Isa, becomes entangled in the newly modernized and chaotic Egyptian legal system, before the pair go on to observe in a more leisurely fashion the various classes and milieux of fin-de-siècle...