Aziz and Aziza in love with Daphnis and Chloe

The story of Aziz and Aziza from the Arabian Nights outrageously re-arranges the romance of Daphnis and Chloe from an ancient Greek novel.  The lovers Chloe and Daphnis present a pastoral ideal of love in a wholesome, rustic world.  Through the narrative, Daphnis and Chloe’s faithful love for each other repels outside threats, receives an education in natural sexual skills, and is consummated in marriage.  The story of Aziz and Aziza occurs within the well-established social conventions and interests of an urban, cultured civilization.  It splits the love of Chloe and Daphnis into an ethereal literary ideal and animalistic physical desire.  The story of Aziz and Aziza ends in emasculation and death.[1]

Daphnis the goatherd moves to join Chloe the shepherd

Daphnis and Chloe are young neighbors living in a remote agricultural area.  They fall in love suddenly as adolescents working next to each other as a goatherd and shepherd, respectively.  Love happens to them and bewilders them.  They frequently weep.  They consciously understand the fullness of love only through the course of the third-person narrative that ends with a wedding-night consummation.

Aziz and Aziza are young cousins in a large, wealthy city.  From their early childhood their fathers agree that they would marry.  They grow up in the same house and sleep together without consciousness of love.  As soon as they reach adulthood, their parents draw up a wedding contract and prepare a wedding feast for them.  Aziz, the narrator of the story, makes no mention of love between them as they sleep together right up to the date of their wedding.  Love, with much weeping, becomes a theme of Aziz and Aziza’s story only with the aborting of their wedding.

Chloe and Daphnis are far more similar than are Aziz and Aziza.  While Daphnis and Chloe retain distinct sexual identities, neither dominates the other in virtue, knowledge, or authority.  They behave similarly in love with each other.  In that sense their love is sexually symmetric.[2]  The similarity of Aziz and Aziza’s names and their early arranged marriage contrasts with stark dissimilarity in person.  Aziz observes at their story’s beginning that Aziza is “better informed and more knowledgeable” than he.[3]  A high Victorian Orientalist judged more severely: “Azizah, despite her wearisome weeping, is a girl of high intelligence and Aziz is a vicious zany, weak as water and willful as wind.”[4] Other than both frequently weeping, Aziz and Aziza behave much differently in love.

Aziza loves Aziz with love misplaced from literature like A Pastoral Story of Daphnis and Chloe.  As their love develops, Chloe and Daphnis are not satisfied with swearing oaths merely of fidelity to each other.  Chloe implores Daphnis:

Swear to me, by this herd of goats and the she-goat that suckled you, not to abandon Chloe as long as she remains faithful to you.  But if she does wrong to you, and to the Nymphs, avoid her, hate her, and kill her like a wolf.

Daphnis, pleased with Chloe’s request, swears the oath with a reflexive re-interpretation of Chloe’s claim to self-sacrifice:

Standing in the middle of the herd, holding a she-goat with one hand and a he-goat with the other, he swore to love Chloe while she loved him.  And if she ever preferred another man to Daphnis, he swore to kill himself instead of her. [5]

Aziz is struck lovesick for another on the very day of his and Aziza’s wedding.  He neglects to appear while the officials and guests are gathered for the wedding feast.  Aziza, later weeping in hearing from Aziz why he did not arrive for their long-arranged marriage, recites verses:

If someone says: “Love starts with choice,” tell them:
‘That is a lie; it all comes from necessity.”
Necessity is not followed by shame,
A point whose truth is shown by histories. [6]

That literary claim vibrates with uninterpretable irony as Aziza goes on to interpret for Aziz obscure signs from his new beloved.  Aziza, who as a woman in an Islamic society cannot freely leave her home, laments with a figure of a mighty God: “were I able to come and go, it would not take me long to bring you {Aziz and his new beloved} together and shelter the two of you under my wing.”[7] The story of Daphnis and Chloe, created to “cure the sick, comfort the distressed, stir the memory of those who have loved, and educate those who haven’t,” itself contains love stories.  Aziza similarly tells Aziz love stories to console him.[8]  Chloe first feels love for Daphnis when she bathes him.  Aziza expresses selfless love in bathing Aziz:

my cousin {Aziza} got up, heated water for me and bathed me, after which she dressed me in my clothes.  “Go to her,” she said, “and may God fulfill your need and allow you to get what you want from your beloved.” [9]

Misinterpreting Aziza to be mocking him with her selfless prayer for his sexual fulfillment with his new beloved, Aziz kicks Aziza and gives her a bloody head wound.  This flow of blood recalls with maiden-headly symbolism loss of virginity.  A virgin’s flow of blood is a natural fact that checks Daphnis’ sexual initiative with Chloe.[10]  After Aziza has successfully united Aziz with his new beloved, Aziza dies.  She dies faithfully in love with Aziz and seeking his good.  Her love, like that of Daphnis and Chloe, is a literary ideal.

Natural models of sexual love comically point to harmony in the charmed primal world of Chloe and Daphnis and to human degradation in the civilization of Aziz and Aziza.  Seeking to express physically his love for her, Daphnis asks Chloe to lie naked with him and let him do “What the rams do to the ewes and the he-goats to the she-goats.”  Chloe points out that rams and he-goats mount the sheep and she-goats while standing.  Daphnis and Chloe unsuccessfully attempt this sexual position.[11]  In a parody of such pastoral comedy, Aziz is instructed by the woman who kidnapped him and made him her husband: “All I want you to do with me is what the cock does.”  Within the urban setting of the story, Aziz, who is consistently duller than the women in the story, doesn’t understand:

“What is it that the cock does?” I asked.  She clapped her hands and laughed so much that she fell over backwards.  Then she sat up, smiled and said: “Light of my eyes, do you really not know what the cock does?”  “No, by God, I don’t,” I replied.  “His business is eating, drinking and copulating.” she said.  I was embarrassed by this and said: “Is that really so?” “Yes,” she replied, “and I want you to gird yourself, strengthen your resolve and copulate as hard as you can.” [12]

Aziz never needs to learn how to copulate urbanely.  He does it successfully and repeatedly.[13]  Eventually, however, another woman, with the help of her slave girls, pulls off his testicles and slices off his penis because of his infidelity.  For Daphnis and Chloe, animal sexual desire instructs human desire within natural harmony between humans and animals.  In the story of Aziz and Aziza, animal sexual desire is associated with human degradation.  It points to brutalization and emasculation.

The stories of Aziz and Aziza and Daphnis and Chloe are both highly conscious of love’s forms.  Scholars regard the story of Chloe and Daphnis as sophisticated literature of third-century Greek culture.  The story of Aziz and Aziza is associated with folk literature from the Arabic world.  It has a sure pedigree traced no earlier than the early nineteenth century.  Across wide and uncertain spans of space, time, and genre, communication happens.[14]  These two stories are meant for each other.  They belong together.

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Notes:

[1] The story of Aziz and Aziza fills nights 111-128 of the Macnaghten edition (Calcutta II) of the Arabian Nights.  Richard Burton’s English translation (1885) is available online.  Lyon (2008) is a good, recent English translation from the Arabic.  The Galland Syrian manuscript of the Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights) doesn’t include the story of Aziz and Aziza.  Longus’ Greek novel of Daphnis and Chloe has been titled Daphnis and Chloe.  However, some advanced classics scholars now prefer the title Chloe and Daphnis and suggest that Longus, like George Eliot, was actually the name of a woman author.  Gill (1989) is a good recent English translation and the source for the relevant quotations above.

[2] Chloe is primarily associated with sheep and the Nymphs, while Daphnis is primarily associated with goats and Pan.  Their work and spirits are thus gender-typed.  Daphnis and Chloe do not seek sexually symmetric love as if they were political functionaries striving to make their politics personal.  Nonetheless, relative to other important literature depicting intimate relationships, Chloe and Daphnis’ relationship is distinctively symmetric.  See Konstan (1994).

[3] Night 112, trans. Lyons (2008) p. 489.

[4] Richard Burton‘s footnote 482.  In this footnote, Burton continues:

The phenomenon (not rare in life) is explained by the couplet:—

I love my love with an S—
Because he is stupid and not intellectual.

This fond affection of clever women for fools can be explained only by the law of unlikeness which mostly governs sexual unions in physical matters

The class of men that Burton considered stupid may have been similar to those that fellow Victorian Henry Mayhew regarded as low brutes.

[5] Daphnis and Cloe 2.39, trans. Gill (1989) pp. 317-8.

[6] Night 113, trans. Lyons (2008) pp. 491-2.  The poem’s author, like Longus, seems to be mocking historians.  On Longus’ treatment of Thucydides, see Trzaskoma (2005).

[7] Night 113, trans. Lyons (2008) p. 492.  Cf. Psalms 36:7-8, 57:1-3, Matthew 23:37.

[8] Prologue, trans. Gill (1989) p. 289; Night 114, trans. Lyons (2008) p. 494.  The generation of stories is a key structural element in the Thousand and One Nights. On the generation of story in Daphnis and Chloe, see MacQueen (1990).

[9] Id. p. 495.  As Aziz pines in love, similar intimate imagery prefigures his emasculation:

So I spent the days sitting at home, neither going out nor coming in and neither eating nor drinking.  I put my head in my cousin’s {Aziza’s} lap and she kept consoling me and telling me to be determined, resolute and of good heart.

Night 113, id. p. 493.

[10] Night 114, id. p. 495; Daphnis and Chloe 3.19-20.

[11] Id. 3.14.

[12] Night 123, trans. Lyons (2008) p. 515.

[13] Aziz describes his first experience of sex thus:

She came to me, clasped me to her breast and kissed me.  I kissed her and, when she sucked my lower lip, I kissed her lower lip.  I stretched out my hand to her waist and squeezed it and we both came to the ground at the same time.  She undid her drawers, which slipped down to her anklets.  We started our love play , with embraces, coquetry, soft words, bites, twining of legs, and a circumambulation of the House and its corners.

Aziz summarized the night in a four-line poem that concludes:

I kept my eyelids from their sleep
And joined the girl's earring to her anklet.

Night 118, trans. Lyons (2008) p. 505.

[14] Grunebaum described the Greek romance pattern as “wanderings of a loving couple, persecuted by fate” and perceives this pattern in nine stories from the Arabian Nights.  Grunebaum (1942), pp. 281-2.  He also described as having a common source Plautus’ Miles Gloriosus and the Arabian Nights story of Qamar al-Zaman and the jeweler’s wife (nights 964-978). Grunebaum (1953), pp. 296-7. , Hamori identified a verse Aziza’s recites “ma halla qattu qalba nadhlin waghdi” (“{love} Never alighting in the heart of a base man,” from her first poetic lines, night 113, trans. Lyons (2008) p. 492) with “al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore” (“love always seeks to dwell in the noble heart”). Hamori (1976), p. 80.  The latter Latin text is from the Italian poet Guido Guinizzelli’s poem from the second half of the thirteenth century.  Guinizzelli was an important influence on Dante and appears in Dante’s Comedia.  More generally, Islamic literature influenced Dante’s Comedia.

References:

Gill, Christopher, trans. 1989. Longus.  Daphnis and Chloe.  Pp. 285-348 in Reardon, Bryan P. , ed.  Collected ancient Greek novels. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Grunebaum, Gustave E. von. 1942.  “Greek Form Elements in the Arabian Nights.” Journal of the American Oriental Society. 62 (4): 277-292 DOI: 10.2307/594031

Grunebaum, Gustave E. von. 1953. Medieval Islam: a study in cultural orientation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hamori, Andras. 1976. “Notes on Two Love Stories from the Thousand and One Nights.”  Studia Islamica. 1976 (43): 65-80.

Konstan, David. 1994. Sexual symmetry: love in the ancient novel and related genres. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Lyons, Malcolm C. 2008. The Arabian nights: tales of 1001 nights. vols. 1-3. London: Penguin.

MacQueen, Bruce D. 1990. Myth, rhetoric, and fiction: a reading of Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Trzaskoma, Stephen M. 2005. “A Novelist Writing “History”: Longus’ Thucydides Again.” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies. 45 (1): 75-90.

COB-75: bureaucratic leisure

Bureaucrats who are able to leave the office in the evening or on a weekend typically have to spend time washing their working sets of blue shirts and brown pants (suits are usually reserved for Power-Point presentation days).  But if a bureaucrat manages to find a few hours of leisure, she is likely to spend it reading a book with “cubicle” in the title. Cubicle Warfare, Pimp my Cubicle,  Another Day in Cubicle Paradise,  Quilts in My Cubicle, and The Cubicle are all worth reading (Escape from Cubicle Nation is inferior literature, suitable only for the ignorant, and not recommended).  Recently Jay Giess’ Death By Cubicle has been named a finalist for the prestigious Putzer Prize.  Giess’ novel is the first book with “cubicle” in the title to become a finalist for a Putzer.

Death By Cubicle is a romantic comedic murder mystery thriller.  At the bureaucratic level, it represents the progress from six sigma bureaucratic business management strategy to seven sigma, and from 360-degree bureaucratic performance reviews to 720-degree (a highly experienced bureaucrat in the book explored 1080-degree reviews, but recommended against them).  The Carnival of Bureaucrats’ literature reviewer declared that she felt profound personal anagnorisis from this passage in Death By Cubicle:

I turned on my computer and let my fingers go through the log-in process.  They had done it enough times that they didn’t need me, but it didn’t work.  I watched them as they went through it a second time.  Everything was just right, but I couldn’t log in.

Automatic somatic performance and disassociation of sensibility profoundly unmask habitus of bureaucrats, our literature reviewer explained.  Our assistant sub-editor said that this passage describes a recurring nightmare he has.  I’ve got nightmares like that, too, said our associate managing editor. The only fate more horrifying than being terminated from your bureaucratic job is being terminated without going through the proper Human Resources Department protocol.  You just can’t log in.  Your access badge stops working.  Nightmare!  Possible psychiatric treatment: stay logged in, and don’t leave the office.  But if you ever leave the office and have some leisure time, you would enjoy reading Jay Geiss’ excellent Death By Cubicle.

In other important bureaucratic news, this month is the 75th anniversary of the Carnival of Bureaucrats.  According to the useful “Anniversary Color List for 1st to 75th Anniversary Party Themes,” the official color for this anniversary is diamond white.  Each employee of the Carnival of Bureaucrats has accordingly received a diamond white service pin.

Bureaucratese is becoming an active scholarly field in the humanities.  Recent research has discovered that the popular phrase “throw the bums out” originated with bureaucrats.  U.S. Railway Post Office Mail Clerks (USPOMC) developed this and other now fashionable language:

The clerks adopted a fascinating shorthand language for their work, including the term “nixie” for an unsortable or misaddressed letter and “bum” for a damaged or empty mail sack. Before leaving the station, one clerk might yell “throw the bums out,” meaning to toss out the empty mailbags.  Another could yell, “Seventy-six in the house,” noting that the mail from Trail #76 was on board. Since there was no time to read an entire mail label, clerks shortened them into nonsense phrases. Thus, the announcement of mail from the “New York and Pittsburgh Train 11, two, from Madison Square Station, New York, New York,” transformed into the cry “From the Madhouse with a two!”

To be on the forefront of linguistic fashion, mimic the modern-day descendants of USPOMC.

Recently we here at the Carnival of Bureaucrats have been studying “37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong.”  Correctness is important to bureaucrats.  Moreover, a list with 37 items is bureaucratically impressive.  But the intellectual program of Less Wrong has serious weaknesses.  In addition to its apparent low standards, it doesn’t respect established practice.  “We’ve always done it this way” is key to identifying what will be regarded as correct.  Analysis that doesn’t appreciate this fact isn’t empirically credible.

That’s all for this month’s Carnival of Bureaucrats.  Enjoy previous bureaucratic carnivals here.  Nominations of posts to be considered for inclusion in next month’s carnival should be submitted using Form 376: Application for Bureaucratic Recognition.

broader prisoner communications market benefits everyone

The Oregon Department of Corrections’ new prisoner communications service contract with Telmate significantly broadens the market for communicating with prisoners.  In most U.S. prisons today, communication between prisoners and their friends and family outside of prison consists of in-person visits, paper mail, and telephone calls. In Oregon, prisoners’ approved family and friends can purchase additional communication services:

  • online remote video visit with prisoner  (66 cents a minute, with a 30-minute maximum)
  • send text messages to the prisoner (44 cents per message, with discounts for multiple messages)
  • send photographs to prisoner (60 cents per photo)
  • leave voice mail message for prisoner (16 cents per minute, with three minute maximum)

In order to be able to receive text messages and photos, the prisoner must purchase a prison-approved MP3 player for $120 (4 Gig memory) or $140 (8 Gig memory).  With the MP3 player, a prisoner can also download prison-approved songs for $1.75 per song.

This broader communication service market benefits everyone: prisoners and their family and friends, prison officials, prisoner communication service providers, and the general public.  More communication between prisoners and law-abiding, caring persons outside of prison helps prisoners to re-integrate into law-abiding society when they are released.  Everyone benefits from the associated reduction in crime.  More communication between prisoners and their family and friends helps to keep prisoners busy and engaged in orderly life within prisons.  That makes prison officials’ jobs easier.  Moreover, email and video visits are more secure and provide better forensic resources than paper mail and in-person visits.  That improves public safety.  Prisoner communications service providers benefit from having a broader scope for their business.  Since prisons typically receive a share of prisoner communication service providers’ revenue, improving the prisoner communications business generates more revenue for prisons.

Oregon’s expansion of the prisoner communications market is a good model for other state prison systems to follow.

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Notes:

The above description of communications service offerings in Oregon prisons is based on the newspaper article, “New technology helps Oregon inmates stay connected,” Oregon Live, published Sept. 12, 2012.  According to that article, the Oregon Department of Corrections (DOC) receives $3 million in commissions per year from the communications contract.  According to an Oregon DOC webpage, domestic telephone calls with prisoners cost 16 cents per minute (for both collect and prepaid), with a 30-minute maximum call time.  International calls cost 50 cents a minute (for both collect and prepaid), also with a 30-minute maximum call time.  Telephone rates and commissions vary widely across state prison systems.  The Prison Phone Justice website offers excellent documentation of telephone rates and commissions in state prisons.

Marian aretalogy of an impious Christian physician to Abbasid caliphs

Aretalogy was common in the ancient world.  An aretalogy, broadly understood, is a series of anecdotes or claims centered on a single character and intended to praise virtue, instruct in virtue, or inspire to virtue.  An aretalogy isn’t necessarily factual and need not include the birth, death, or any other aspect of the character’s biography.  Accounts of the lives and acts of Christian apostles are examples of aretalogies that have survived from the second to the fifth centuries.[1]

An aretalogical fragment from the early Abbasid caliphate features the Christian physician Yūhannā ibn Māsawayhi.  He was born in Baghdad in 777 as the son of an illiterate Syrian orphan and a Slavonic slave girl.  Before moving to Baghdad, his father rose to work as a pharmacist for the illustrious physicians at the academy of Jundishapur in Persia and to acquire considerable skill as a physician.  Yūhannā ibn Māsawayhi himself became an eminent scholar and personal physician to four caliphs.  Caliph Harun al-Rashīd assigned to ibn Māsawayhi the task of translating ancient books found in the Byzantine cities that Muslim armies captured.[2]  Ibn Māsawayhi also served as a teacher to Hunayn ibn Ishaq, who played a major role in the transmission of Greek scientific literature into the Islamic world.  Ibn Māsawayhi thus read Greek well and was familiar with Greek literature.

In addition to being a Christian, an eminent physician, and a prolific scholarly author, ibn Māsawayhi was also known for caustic and sacrilegious repartee.  To a Christian priest who stated that he had already tried all of ibn Māsawayhi’s treatments for indigestion, ibn Māsawayhi angrily declared:

If you want to get better, convert to Islam, for Islam is good for the stomach!

To man who complained that he could not bear to abstain from certain foods in order to treat stomach scabs, ibn Māsawayhi exclaimed:

If this is so, go on eating them and scratching your belly, for if the Messiah came for you alone, you would not have benefited from his gospel, according to your own description of your evil soul.

Ibn Māsawayhi castigated another patient:

You spend most of your time telling lies, and your lies lie at the roots of your sickness. How can you recover from a prolonged illness, while you yourself nurture it most of the time with lies that aggravate. Stick to the truth for three days, and I shall renounce my Savior if you do not recover before these three days are over. [3]

Ubn Māsawayhi had multiple wives, which was contrary to Christian teaching, and he addressed monks with the epithet “sons of fornication.”  Māsawayhi was thus known for being crude and impious.

Nonetheless, ibn Māsawayhi seems to have been the subject of an aretalogy.  Only a frament containing two stories apparently has survived.  As is common for Islamic sayings, the stories begin with a chain of authorities accounting for their transmission.  The stories are more detailed and less universally expressed than gnomes.  They come from the same source and are formally related.  They use the low-status activity of fishing as an occasion for instructing the caliph:

Yūsuf tells that Ahmad ibn Hārūn al-Sharābī told him in Egypt that, during the Caliphate of al-Wāthiq, al-Mutawakkil had recalled that Yūhannā ibn Māsawayhi once accompanied al-Wāthiq to a bench he had on the Tigris. Al-Wāthiq had a fishing rod with a hook which he cast into the Tigris but did not come up with a catch. He turned to Yūhannā who was on his right, and said: “O inauspicious man, get away from my right side.” Yūhannā replied: “O Emir of the Faithful, do not talk like that about the station of Yūhannā ibn Māssawayhi from Khuzistān, whose mother was Risālah the Slave, bought for eight hundred dirhams. This man was raised by good fortune to be the fellow drinker of caliphs, their night discourser, and close companion. This man was overwhelmed with the riches of this world, which he obtained beyond all his dreams. The owner of this great fortune cannot be inauspicious. But if the Emir of the Faithful wishes, I can tell him who is really an inauspicious person.” Al-Wāthiq asked to be told, and Yūhannā said: “This is the man who is the descendant of four caliphs, who received the Caliphate from God, but left it with its palaces and gardens to sit on a common twenty-foot bench in the middle of the Tigris, unprotected from the storm which might drown him, and to resemble the poorest and worst in the world, namely the fisherman.” Al-Mutawakkil then noticed that this speech was effective, although al-Wāthiq remained in his place.

Yūsuf reports, again in the name of Ahmad ibn Hārūn, that on the same day and on the same bench, al-Wāthiq said to Yūhannā: “O Yūhannā, does not this irregularity not astonish you?” Yūhannā asked: “What irregularity? and al-Wāthiq replied: “The fisherman waits for about an hour and catches fish to the value of about one dinar, and I sit here from morning to night and do not catch fish even for one dirham.” Said Yūhannā: “O Emir of the Faithful, your reasoning is faulty, for Allāh gives the fisherman his living through the fish, for this is the food for their families; the Emir of the Faithful, however, lives off his Caliphate, and is not in need of any fish. Were his living dependent on fishing, the fish would come to him the way it comes to the fisherman.” [4]

The impious Christian physician Yūhannā ibn Māsawayhi seems to be teaching the caliph from the text of the Canticle of Mary:

Allāh has put down the mighty from their thrones,
and exalted those of low degree;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty. [5]

Mary, the mother of Jesus, is an important figure in the Qur’an.  The caliph was the commander of the (Muslim) faithful.  These stories are respectful of the caliph’s authority.  But they use the caliph as a foil to make general claims of God’s favor for the lowly.

The scorn of the mighty for the lowly was a commonplace in the ancient Greco-Roman world.  Men of virtue warned against such scorn. The Letter of James urges:

My brethren, show no partiality as you hold the faith of your Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory. For if a man with gold rings and in fine clothing comes into your assembly, and a poor man in shabby clothing also comes in, and you pay attention to the one who wears the fine clothing and say, “Have a seat here, please,” while you say to the poor man, “Stand there,” or, “Sit at my feet,” have you not made distinctions among yourself and become judges with evil thoughts? [6]

The Story of Apollonius King of Tyre, a text which probably originated in the second or third century, includes similar teaching.  Apollonius scorns the greeting of his lowly subject Hellenicus.  Hellenicus nonetheless provides Apollonius with potentially life-saving information. Recognizing the value of that favor, Apollonius seeks to reward Hellenicus with money.  Hellenicus refuses to take the money and declares, “Among men of goodwill, friendship is not bought and sold.”[7]  That such instruction in virtue could work with even the impious Christian physician Yūhannā ibn Māsawayhi in the ancient Islamic world indicates the power of the aretalogical literary form.

aretalogy exemplum

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Notes:

[1]  Whether aretalogy was a literary genre and, if so, what characterized an aretalogy, is contentious in the scholarly literature.  Kee (1973) reviews the issues.  The broad definition above largely sidesteps the contentious issues by including disparate forms.  Chreiai were valued in the ancient Greco-Roman world and the ancient Islamic world.  Aretalogy can be broadly understood as a thematic aggregation of chreiai.  This broad definition encompasses examples such as the Isis aretalogies, the Life of Apollonius of Tyana (who was well-known in the ancient Islamic world), and lives and acts of Christian apostles.

[2] HP pp. 328-35 (biography of Yūhannā ibn Māsawayhi’s father, Māsawayhi Abū Yūhannā), p. 340 (translation assignment).  Citing scholarly authorities on sleep and writing in Hebrew in Spain about 1200, physician Yosef ibn Zabara in his Book of Delight quotes “saintly Hippocrates,” then Aristotle and Galen, and then Yuhanna ibn Masawayhi (Jahja ibn Maseweih):

And finally the wise Jahja ibn Maseweih said, “Sleep in season brings the body to healthfulness.”

Trans.  Hadas (1932) p. 47.  The personal physician to caliph al-Mu’tasim harshly criticized ibn Masawayhi, probably as a result of professional rivalry.

[3] HP pp. 337-8, 342-3.

[4] HP pp. 339-40. Yūsuf refers to Yūsuf ibn Ibrāhīm ibn al-Dayā.  He was one of Yūhannā’s contemporaries.  See note [1].  Al-Mutawakkil was al-Wāthiq’s brother and became caliph after al-Wāthiq died.  Al-Mutawakkil’s role as a transmitter and observer suggests that he appreciated these stories.  The virtue that Māsawayhi displays is faith in the power and goodness of Allāh, who cares for the lowly.

[5] Luke 1:52-3 (RSV translation adapted non-substantially).

[6] James 2:1-4.  See also Luke 16:14-31 (the parable of the rich man and Lazarus) and Luke 20:45-21:4 (haughty scribes and the lowly widow).

[7] Apollonius 8, trans. Sandy (1989) pp. 741-2. Archibald (1991) p. 94 notes that Hellenicus’ rebuke of Apollonius for his rudeness attracted a marginal mark in some manuscripts, including a twelfth-century Latin manuscript.

References:

Archibald, Elizabeth. 1991. Apollonius of Tyre: medieval and Renaissance themes and variations: including the text of the Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri with an English translation. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer.

Hadas, Moses, trans. 1932. Joseph ben Meir ibn Zabara. The book of delight {Sefer Sha’ashu’im}. New York: Columbia University Press.

HP: Ibn Abi Usaybi’ah, Ahmad ibn al-Qasim. English translation of History of Physicians (4 v.) Translated by Lothar Kopf. 1971. Located in: Modern Manuscripts Collection, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD; MS C 294. Online transcription.

Kee, Howard C. Kee. 1973.  “Aretalogy and Gospel.”  Journal of Biblical Literature, 92 (3), 402-422 DOI: 10.2307/3263581

Sandy, Gerald N., trans. 1989. Anonymous.  The Story of Apollonius King of Tyre.  Pp. 736-72 in Reardon, Bryan P. , ed.  Collected ancient Greek novels. Berkeley: University of California Press.