Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 12 - 18 October 2000 Issue No. 503
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

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The cruellest month?

By Amina Elbendary

October brings memories of the 1973 War -- of pain, sacrifice, heroism, victory. This October, such memories were mixed, on television screens across the nation -- and globe -- with another battle being fought, with more pain, more sacrifice, more heroism, but not necessarily victory. People were glued to their sets watching as Jerusalem and all the Palestinian occupied territories burnt with the rage of its people. History is being made as we write and speak and history is being remembered as Egyptians commemorate the October 1973 War. The echoes are too loud to be ignored.

At Gezira, the Cairo Opera House resumed its cultural salons with a seminar on "National Memory and Popular Folk Epics" held last Wednesday at the Small Hall. The seminar included four participants well-versed in siyar (popular folk epics): Farouk Khurshid, Safwat Kamal, Abdel-Rahman El-Shafei and Ahmed Shamseddin El-Haggagi. A performance by the Sa'idi Abu Tisht group of Qena led by the reciter Antar Hilal followed the seminar.

Both Farouk Khurshid and Abdel-Rahman El-Shafei discussed the role of sira as a form of alternative popular history that counteracts official historiography. In a brief outline of the history of Arab epics, Khurshid traced the relationship between historical developments and their folk inspirations. He showed how wars between the Roman and Persian empires inspired such epics as Antara and Hamza Al-Bahlawan, how the Muslim Byzantine confrontation was the subject of Dhat Al-Himma and how the events of the Mamluk confrontation with the Crusaders and Mongols inspired the epic of Al-Zahir Baybars. He argued that sira is the genre through which ordinary people wrote their alternative history, one different from that of the court historians and court poets, a form of rebellion by those who felt excluded from the making, and writing, of history. Thus Sirat Al-Zahir Baybars also dealt with the need to fight internal corruption and injustice in order to build a strong front to face the external threat of the invading Crusaders. Siyar themselves were used to kindle political emotions as when, in response to the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517, Egyptians took to reciting Sirat Al-Zahir Baybars in defiance. The sira poet therefore represented the moral consciousness of the nation, a phenomenon which has made these tales remain relevant long after their protagonists have gone.

Indeed, as Dwight Reynolds argues in his book Heroic Poets, Poetic Heroes. The Ethnography of Performance in an Arabic Oral Epic Tradition, the epic itself as a literary genre has long been associated with high culture, civilisation and nationalism. Similarly the scholars at the Opera House analysed the various siyar as evidence of the historic heroism of a generic "Arab citizen." These siyar and their historical contexts were woven together to form a coherent narrative leading from pre-Islamic Arabia up to the October 1973 War and even "The Battle for Jerusalem."

Sirat Bani Hilal remains to this day an integral part of popular Egyptian culture. In fact it is the only sira that is still performed as an oral folk tradition. It recounts the 10th century migration of the Bedouin Banu Hilal tribe from the Arabian peninsula through Sinai to Upper Egypt. Later in the 11th century, the Banu Hilal were incited to march to North Africa to punish and fight the ruler of Tunisia who had declared his independence from Cairo. These historical events form the basis of the different cycles of the sira which deal with their migration, their conquest of North Africa and their eventual defeat a hundred years later.

Interestingly enough, as El-Haggagi revealed in the talk he gave at the seminar, there is now a new generation of reciters in Egypt who specialise in the Hilaliya. El-Haggagi drew a link between the popularity of that particular sira and the culture of tha'r or vendetta in Upper Egypt. The sira is built on notions of courage and heroism, of defending honour and revenge, of war and romance. Such images are both mirrored and provoked by the culture of the Sa'id. Issues concerning codes of behaviour, social hierarchies and proper gender roles -- which are still relevant to our society -- are also played out in the sira.

A question that came up repeatedly throughout the evening was why the October 1973 War failed to inspire epic works of arts or literature? Why have there not been great war movies? Would there ever be a sira inspired by the October 1973 War?

The answers put forward by the participants differed. Safwat Kamal argued that popular legends about 1973 heroes are spreading among, even becoming very familiar to, Egyptians of all age groups, but that it takes at least a hundred years for a full sira to develop. Ahmed Shamseddin El-Haggagi, on the other hand, countered that since the sira is no longer the entertainment genre of the age, it follows that it is no longer the medium of non-official historiography. The epics of our age, such as Naguib Mahfouz's trilogy, are literary, written, set down. They belong to and produce a radically different historical mind set from that of the oral tradition to which belongs the Sira, a fluid text where every recitation is also a reconstruction of the epic by both the performer and the audience.

Does that mean that the siyar we inherited will eventually die out? Having been "fixed" into written texts, printed and published have they lost their character as siyar? Would future generations continue to relate to heroes like Abu Zayd El-Hilali and El-Zanati Khalifa with their ideals of honour and courage? Or will they metamorphose into new modern characters?

Academic discussions -- regularly punctuated by a strong dose of Arab nationalist rhetoric partly catalysed by the political predicament in Palestine that formed the backdrop to this evening of tales -- over and done with, El-Haggagi introduced the stars of the evening, the reciter Antar Hilal and the Abu Tisht group, and gave a brief outline of the main cycles of the Bani Hilal epic. He informed us that this would be "a night of war." But, we were asked, did we want to hear the story of the murder of Al-Zanati Khalifa (the ruler of Tunis and one of the heroes of the sira) or of the Hilalis' victory? Murder or victory? What a question. Victory of course -- though, as everyone who knows the good stories by heart can tell you, murder will, with a little time and patience, metamorphose into victory.

It was an October night, with a pleasant breeze roaming the streets of Cairo.

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