substitution and sacrifice in the classical love story of al-muraqqish al-akbar

Substitution and Sacrifice in the Classical Love Story of Al-Muraqqish Al-AkbarAuthor(s): Ruqayya Yasmine KhanReviewed work(s):Source: History of Religions, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Aug., 1999), pp. 50-64Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3176645 .Accessed: 05/05/2012 06:43

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Historyof Religions.

http://www.jstor.org

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3176645?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

Ruqayya Yasmine Khan SUBSTITUTION AND SACRIFICE IN THE CLASSICAL LOVE STORY OF AL-MURAQQISH AL-AKBAR

If substitution is in fact the key to ... sacrifice, then the only thing that the victim will never stand for is itself .... Seen in these terms, the theory of sacrifice is merely a branch of the more general theory of symbolism, and any and every insightful approach to symbolism will help us understand ... sacrifice (and vice versa). This being so, Freud's Interpretation of Dreams is as important as his Totem and Taboo for the question of sacrifice and substitution. (BRIAN K. SMITH and WENDY DONIGER, 1989)1

So proclaim Brian Smith and Wendy Doniger in an article entitled "Sacrifice and Substitution: Ritual Mystification and Mythical Demystification," which examines sacrifice in ancient Vedic texts. It is precisely this "question of sacrifice and substitution" that is addressed by this essay although the sources considered by it are ancient Arabic rather than Sanskritic texts. Smith and Doniger echo the claims of previous generations of scholars and theorists when they note that "substitution, the use of a 'stand-in' in place of an original which then 'represents' it, is at the very heart of sacrifice."2 They go on to declare, "Whether conceived as a transaction leading to commu- nication between the sacred and profane (Hubert and Mauss), or as a kind of self-death leading to a new birth, or as a violent expression and displacement of hostility toward another (the god/father with Freud, the community

1 Brian K. Smith and Wendy Doniger, "Sacrifice and Substitution: Ritual Mystification and Mythical Demystification," Numen: International Review for the History of Religion 36 (1989): 195-96.

2 Ibid., p. 189.

? 1999 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0018-2710/2000/3901-0003$02.00

History of Religions

and its members with Girard), the general conclusions regarding sacrifice coincide. For all, sacrifice is defined by substitution."3 The significance of substitution in sacrifice has been theorized in two distinct ways. Some critics conceive of sacrifice as a substitution that replaces two entities (as do, e.g., Hubert and Mauss), whereas others (such as Girard) formulate sacrifice as a process entailing two substitutions.4 Hubert and Mauss regarded the sacrificial victim as a substitute for both a divinity and the sacrificer. Like- wise, Claude Levi-Strauss viewed sacrifice as "seek[ing] through substitution to establish continuity between two or more terms that are not related."5 To quote Levi-Strauss himself: "In sacrifice, the series of natural species (continuous and no longer continuous, orientated and no longer re- versible) plays the part of an intermediary between two polar terms, the sacrificer and the deity, between which initially there is no homology nor even any sort of relation. For the object of sacrifice is to establish a relation, not of resemblance but of contiguity, by means of a series of successive identifications."6 Sigmund Freud described the sacrificial victim as a patricidal substitute: the sexual cathexis of the mother leads to castration anx- iety and, therefore, the desire to kill the father. But, as Smith and Doniger note, Freud considered the patricidal surrogate as "doubly representative" because the fear of the father is accompanied by an idealization of him, that is, the surrogate functioned both as an object of hate and an object of love.7

For Rene Girard, who has been influenced by Freud, the very basis of sacrifice is substitution. In contrast to the aforementioned theorists, he formulates sacrifice as a process of double substitution instead of conceiv- ing it as a substitution that replaces two entities.8 In his work Violence and the Sacred, Girard argues that the double substitution is a sophisticated and integral mechanism by which sacrificial violence is displaced onto

3 Ibid., p. 194. 4 I am indebted to Smith and Doniger for pointing out this contrast. They write that

"where Hubert and Mauss and Freud saw the victim as doubly representative (of both sacrificer and god in the first instance, and of the object of both love and hate in the second), Girard speaks of a 'double substitution' in the ritual" (ibid., p. 192).

5 William Beers, Women and Sacrifice: Male Narcissism and the Psychology of Religion (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), p. 35.

6 Claude L6vi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, ed. Julian Pitt-Rivers and Ernest Gellner (London: Weidenfield & Nicholson, 1966), pp. 224-25. Also quoted in Beers, p. 35.

7 Smith and Doniger, p. 192. This "double face" of the father (as perceived by the child) is reminiscent of Girard's assertion regarding "the blending of beneficent and maleficent that characterizes all mythical figures" (Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979], p. 251).

8 An early version of this "double substitution" formulation of sacrifice is considered by the orientalist W. Robertson Smith in his late nineteenth-century work Lectures on the Re- ligion of the Semites. Smith suggests that historically substitution came to be an element of sacrifice because human life came to be regarded as sacrosanct, because human life came to be seen as unique. But Smith's own explication is that this rationale (i.e., that human life is too sacred for sacrifice) was based on a misreading of ritual forms (W. R. Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites [New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1969], pp. 364-65).

51

Substitution and Sacrifice

surrogates.9 Without this double substitution, according to him, there is no sacrifice.

All sacrificial rites are based on two substitutions. The first is provided by generative violence, which substitutes a single victim for all members of the community. The second, the only strictly ritualistic substitution, is that of a victim for the surrogate victim. As we know, it is essential that the victim be drawn from outside the community. The surrogate victim, by contrast, is a member of the community.... The need for some distinction between the original victim and the ritual victims can readily be explained. If the sacrificial victim be- longed to the community (as does the surrogate victim), then his death would promote further violence instead of dispelling it.?1

Girard uses the term "generative violence" to denote the collective violence "which substitutes a single victim for all members of the commu-

nity";1 this single victim is a human victim termed the "surrogate victim." But the victim that actually is killed is an animal or "a ritual victim drawn from outside the community" that substitutes for the "sur-

rogate victim," and it is this second substitution that is "the only strictly ritualistic substitution" according to Girard.

SUBSTITUTION AS CONCEALMENT VERSUS SUBSTITUTION AS

SACRIFICIAL RITUAL

If, as proclaim Smith and Doniger, the theory of sacrifice is indeed a branch of a theory of symbolism, then two intertwined but distinct functions of substitution are discerned: substitution as concealment and substitution as sacrificial ritual. Girard alludes to these two functions by relating the biblical story of how Jacob obtained the blessing of his father Isaac.12 He writes that the slaughtered goats are used in two ways in this

story:13 one, they are made into the "savory meat" that Isaac asks to taste before issuing his blessings and, two, the goats' skins are what Jacob

9 In this article, I am primarily interested in the mechanism of double substitution as formulated by Girard. I refrain from commenting on the merits of other components of his overarching and rather totalizing theory of sacrifice, such as his constructs of "mimetic desire" and the "monstrous double."

10 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 269. l This collective violence is a representative, in Girard's view, of a "'prior event'... a

[prior] collective murder, an act of mob violence" (quoted in Burton Mack, "Introduction: Religion and Ritual," in Violent Origins: Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation, ed. Rob- ert Hamerton-Kelly [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987], p. 8). Here Girard borrows from Freud's thesis of a primal, collective murder, but he places stress in the direction of the surrogate-victim mechanism.

12 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, pp. 5-6. 13 There is some confusion inherent in Girard's interpretation of the biblical story. He

asserts that "in order to receive his father's blessing rather than his curse, Jacob must present to Isaac the freshly slaughtered kids made into a 'savoury meat"' (ibid., p. 5). Yet it is not the presentation of the "savory meat" that prevents Jacob from getting the curse but

52


hides under to make himself resemble Esau when he surreptitiously seeks

blessings from his old father. Jacob, afraid that his father will not be fooled since he is not hairy like his brother Esau, literally has his hands and neck covered with the furry goat skins. The slaughtered goats are used therefore to feed Isaac and to hide Jacob. In both these instances, substitution is occurring, and in both of them animal replaces man: in the first instance, animal is used to feed Isaac so that Jacob receives his blessings; in the second instance, animal conceals Jacob so that he rather than Esau may receive Isaac's blessings, that is, animal conceals man to allow one brother to usurp the place of another.

Isaac's asking for "savory meats" before he can issue blessings can be interpreted as a concealed request for a human offering,14 not so unlike God's request of Abraham for an offering of his son, Isaac (or Isma'il, according to Islamic tradition). The view of sacrifice as an offering to a hungry god, a god who will not grant favors to his propitiators unless he is fed, is found in many ancient myths and stories. To divert from the son, Jacob, the violence that could potentially be directed toward him by his father, an animal-acting as a buffer and ritual victim-is killed and substituted for the son, just as in the Abraham myth, a ram is finally ex- plicitly substituted for Isaac.

But the second instance, that is, the goats' skins being used to conceal Jacob is a different kind of phenomenon. In the earlier example, we have substitution as sacrifice (i.e., animal slaughtered in the place of man), and in this second instance, we have substitution as concealment. An animal corporeally hides a man, and thus literally stands in for him. This phys- ical form of concealment permits another form of concealment-a stratagem-whereby one brother dishonestly usurps the place of another.

This substitution as concealment (exemplified in the two interrelated concealments) has a crucial function with respect to the sacrificial substitution: it both reveals and conceals the displacement of violence from human to animal, from surrogate or original victim to ritual victim. As Gi- rard points out, the stratagem concerning the brothers is the narrative fo- cus of the Jacob story. This ruse or stratagem partly covers up or deflects

rather his hiding in the goat skins. The meat dish is not what would have given him away; instead it is that had he not concealed himself with the goat skins, his father would have discerned the ruse because he, Jacob, was a "smooth" man whereas his brother Esau was a "hairy man."

14 It is interesting that the eating of Esau's venison by Isaac is strongly associated with their filial bond (an association that is somewhat suggestive of the links between consump- tion of animal and human flesh). In the biblical story, when Isaac asks Esau for the meal, he says (Gen. 27:3-4), "Go out to the field and take me some venison; and make me savoury meat, such that I love," and even in 25:28, we find that "Isaac loved Esau, because he did eat of his venison."

53


attention from the substitution occurring in the sacrificial act. But while it covers it up, the other form of concealment-animal corporeally hiding man-half reveals the targeting of a man as the original sacrificial victim. On the level of the narrative's plot and symbolism, the instance of the animal corporeally hiding or standing in for a man signals and underscores that the animal has replaced man in other ways too. Girard notes that "only the first [substitution of one brother for another] receives explicit recognition in the text; however, this first one serves as the screen upon which the shadow of the second [substitution of an animal for a man] is

projected."15 According to him,

[Sacrifice's] vitality as an institution depends on its ability to conceal the displacement upon which the rite is based. It must never lose sight entirely, however, of the original object, or cease to be aware of the act of transference from that object to the ... [ritual] victim; without that awareness no substitution can take place and the sacrifice loses all efficacy. The biblical passage discussed above meets both requirements. The narrative does not refer directly to the strange deception underlying the sacrificial substitution, nor does it allow this deception to pass entirely unnoticed. Rather, it mixes the act of substitution with another act of substitution, permitting us a fleeting, sidelong glimpse of the process. The narrative itself, then, might be said to partake of a sacrificial quality; it claims to reveal one act of substitution while employing this first substitution to half-conceal another.16

I would argue that narratives in which sacrifice figures prominently often contain a ruse or trick or stratagem that is enacted in their plots.17 Such a ruse or stratagem may showcase a substitution. In these narratives, the substitution inherent in this concealment or stratagem is "mixed"- to borrow both Girard's concept and phraseology-with the substitution occurring in the ritual act of sacrifice, and the purpose of this "mixing" is to elliptically signal the displacement of violence from the original (human) object to the ritual (animal) victim that occurs in the sacrificial substitution. I deliberately use a word such as "elliptically" (just as Girard uses the phrase "fleeting, sidelong glimpse") to describe this process because the stratagem or concealment, as I have noted earlier, both hides the sacrificial substitution (it conceals the displacement) and it also reveals it.

Oddly enough, despite the importance of substitution in scholarly anal- yses of sacrifice, it does not seem to have merited the attention it should

15 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 5. 16 Ibid. 17 Among the more well-known examples of this is Hesiod's Promethean myth in which

the Titan substitutes the sacrificial meat for the leftovers (i.e., the bones) and thereby tricks Zeus and the other gods into missing out on the choice parts of the meal (Jean-Pierre Ver- nant, "At Man's Table: Hesiod's Foundation Myth of Sacrifice," in The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks, ed. Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989], p. 23).

54


in criticism of depictions of sacrifice in early Arabic literature. Foremost

among recent critics who have discussed the significance of sacrifice in classical Arabic literature is Suzanne Stetkevych whose illuminating work has demonstrated the relevance of sacrifice as a "category of the rite of passage" to the pre-Islamic ode (qasidah).'8 In this article, I seek to con- tribute to existing scholarship on sacrifice in early Arabic literature through an examination of substitution and its functions in an Arabic love story in which an animal slaughter is centrally framed.

The pre-Islamic love story of the poet al-Muraqqish al-Akbar exem- plifies the paradigm of Girard's double substitution.19 It also illustrates the

intertwining of concealment and sacrifice; in it, the aforementioned narrative quality of mixing an "act of substitution with another act of substitution" is strikingly present. Indeed, the two stories, the Biblical Hebraic story and the classical Arabic narrative, "are mutually revealing."20 Just as goat skins hide (and point toward) Jacob as the original victim in the Hebraic story, a ram's bones point toward (and hide) the original victim in the Arabic tale. Concealments in both stories are characterized by substitutions, and this interplay between concealment and substitution acts to simultaneously obscure and draw attention to the sacrificial substitutions. Moreover, in Genesis, the entity to whom the sacrifice is offered feeds on animal flesh, while in the Arabic story, the sacrificers themselves feed on the meat. While the meat is consumed in both narratives, it is the animal remains-the skins in the Hebraic story and the animal bones in the Arabic story-that are pivotal to the enactment of the ruses embedded in both myths (here reminiscent of Hesiod's Promethean myth).

THE LOVE STORY OF AL-MURAQQISH

The love story of al-Muraqqish begins with the marriage of the beloved and ends with the death of the lover. The nodal event that links these two

18 Suzanne Stetkevych, The Mute Immortals Speak: Pre-Islamic Poetry and the Poetics of Ritual (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), and Reorientations/Arabic and Persian Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). Stetkevych draws on the writing of Hubert Mauss on sacrifice and Arnold Van Gennep's ritual paradigm to demonstrate that sacrifice informs the very core of poetry whose thematics are concerned with blood vengeance (tha'r). I am much indebted to the work of Stetkevych on sacrifice, yet it seems that she has not given due consideration to the crucial role played by substitution in sacrifice. As a consequence, she arrives at a view of blood vengeance as a "subclass of sacrifice"-a view that I would question (Mute Immortals, p. 80). Michael Sells, who also addresses this issue in Stetkevych's analysis, notes that "whatever the validity of Girard's theory [of surrogate-victim] as a whole, the notion that the breakdown of sacrifice leads to a sacrificial crisis fits the qasida exceedingly well." He suggests "seeing blood-vengeance not as the equivalent of sacrifice, but as a dialectical and inverted equivalent that the sacrifice is meant to displace" (Michael Sells, "The Qasida and the West: Self-Reflective Stereotype and Critical Encounter," Al-CArabiyya 20 [1987]: 344).

19 Although this story is purported to be pre-Islamic (dating from the sixth century or so), it appeared in its canonical forms in eighth- and tenth-century compilations.

20 Girard employs this term in Violence and the Sacred (n. 7 above), p. 6.

55


occurrences is the slaughter of a ram. The two renditions of the story on which I rely are recorded in the eighth-century anthology al-Mufad.daliyat and the tenth-century Kitab al-Aghani.21 Both versions of the love story are interspersed, and in fact end, with the poetry of al-Muraqqish.22 The two renditions on which I rely are virtually identical, and where there are important discrepancies I note and discuss them. In addition to these two renditions, there exists a variant narrative in the Kitab al-Aghani that also relates the events surrounding the marriage of Asma'.23 A few interesting similarities are to be found in terms of plot and narrative symbolism between this variant story and the two renditions on which I base my analysis, but I have chosen not to include an examination of the variant in this article primarily because it does not contain an animal slaughter. Below I provide a brief synopsis of the story.

Al-Muraqqish falls in love with Asma3, the paternal cousin with whom he has grown up. When he seeks permission from his uncle to marry her, his uncle CAuf al-Burak tells him he will not agree to the union unless al-Muraqqish shows he has the stature of a chief and has frequented the courts of kings.24 Af- ter being promised a betrothal to Asma' should he succeed in this endeavor, the poet departs and joins the court of a Yemeni king as a panegyrist. In the meantime, according to one version,25 his uncle CAuf faces a year of drought and when a man from Murad proposes marriage to his daughter, Asma', and offers him a hundred camels, CAuf accepts the proposal. Thus, this man from another tribe

departs with Asma' for his home. Soon thereafter, al-Muraqqish returns and his brothers and cousins, feeling both pity and fear about having to inform him of Asma's marriage, announce to him that she has died, and they take him to a

grave, wherein, prior to the poet's return, they have buried the bones of a ram that they have killed and eaten. The poet begins to visit the grave regularly,

21 Abui al-CAbbas al-Mufaddal b. Muhammad al-Dabbi, Diwan al-Mufaddaliyat, Arabic text, ed. Charles Lyall (Beirut: Matbacat al-Aba' al-Yasu'iyin, 1920) (hereafter cited as Mu- fad.daliyat), 1:459-62. Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani, Kitab al-Aghani, 24 vols., ed. Muhammed Abu al-Fadl Ibrahim (Cairo: Al-Hay'ah al-Misriyyah al-'Ammah li al-Kitab, 1992) (hereafter cited as Aghdni), 6:129-33.

22 According to CAmr al-Shaybani, as related in both the Mufaddaliyat and the Aghdni, al-Muraqqish al-Akbar's real name is CAmr ibn Sacd ibn Malik ibn Dubaycah ibn Qays ibn Thaclabah. The Thaclabah were a branch of the tribal confederation of Bakr ibn Wa'il. Both sources also relate that other narrators consider him to be named after his paternal uncle, 'Auf, father of Asma', his beloved. His laqab or nom de plume is the active participle of raqqasha, meaning "to embellish, to adorn" speech or "to dot or rule a page." Al-Mu- raqqish came from a family of poets. His father Sacd was a poet, his nephew, al-Muraqqish al-Asgar (son of his brother Sufyan), was a poet, and this younger al-Muraqqish's nephew was Tarafa ibn al-'Abd, one of the poets of the Mucallaqah. His family was also known for being a warrior family. In the Harb al-Basus, one of his uncles, 'Amr ibn Malik, "was the chief who took Muhalhil, the leader of Taghlib, captive" (Aghani, 6:127-28).

23 Aghdni, 6:133-34. 24 The Aghani account words this as la uzawwijuka hattd tucraf bil-ba's (p. 129). The

Mufaddaliyat story relates lan uzawwijakaha hatta tar'asa (ayy takuna ra'isan) wa ta'tiya al-mulak (p. 459).

25 The other one, the Aghani version, merely relates that "he was stricken with a difficult time" or wa-asaba CAuf zaman shadid (6:129).

56


and one day, while he is dozing off at the gravesite, he overhears his brother's two sons fighting over an ankle bone, each claiming it was his. Al-Muraqqish then hears one boy say to the other, "This is the ankle bone of the ram which

they slaughtered and buried, and told al-Muraqqish that the grave was Asma"'s; father gave it to me."

Hence, al-Muraqqish learns of the whole story from his brother's sons. At this point, the narrative after noting that the poet had become very weak and

sickly, goes on to relate that on hearing that Asma' was still alive, he saddles his camel and, with a slave woman of his and her husband, rides off to find his beloved. But he grows increasingly ill during the journey, and when they arrive in the land of Murad, the slave and her husband take al-Muraqqish to a cave where they lay him down to rest. The slave woman's husband, observing that

al-Muraqqish is on the verge of death, persuades his wife to leave him there, and they both ride off. But not before al-Muraqqish, who has overheard the ex-

change between the two, manages to write a few verses addressed to his brothers on the leather of his saddle. Once the slave couple reaches the tribe, the verses on the saddle reveal their treachery, and the couple is killed by al-Mu-

raqqish's brothers, while one brother sets out to find him. The important conclusion to this story is that al-Muraqqish who is still in the cave, virtually dead after having been attacked by hyenas, is discovered by-lo and behold-the

shepherd of Asma''s husband. The poet, on hearing that the shepherd daily con-

veys goat milk to his mistress, gives him his signet ring to drop in his beloved's

drinking vessel-which the shepherd does. Asma' recognizes her lover's ring and calls her husband, who questions the shepherd. When they learn that al-Muraqqish is lying nearly dead in the cave, they quickly ride toward it and find him still alive.

They bring him back to their home to tend to him, but he is too sick, and he dies there in Asma's presence.

NARRATIVE PLOT: SUBSTITUTION AS CONCEALMENT

In this love story, the ram's bones cover up what has happened to Asma' or conceal Asma's plight only by virtue of the bones themselves being concealed or hidden underground.26 Not only are the ram's bones concealed

through burial, but they are actually dressed or wrapped in a robe or sheet

according to both renditions of the narrative-an exemplification of the "sacrificial preparation" that a victim undergoes in order to become wholly sacrificeable.27 That the ram itself is physically concealed to such a degree just confirms how one of its important functions as a substitute for Asma' is to conceal. In the narrative plot, this stratagem (i.e., the substitution of

26 In Arabic, the verb dafana (used in both texts of the romance) means "to bury" and "to keep a secret."

27 As Girard has pointed out, "Once the victims have been obtained, [ritualistic thought] strives in various ways to make them conform to its own image of the original victim" (Gi- rard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 272). Reminiscent here also is Smith's observation regarding human sacrifices in which the victim, although human, is not from the tribal community that sacrifices him, and hence, "it is considered necessary to make believe that the victim is a tribesman, or even, as in the human sacrifices of the Mexicans, to dress and treat him as the representative of the deity to whom he is to be offered" (Smith [n. 8 above], p. 363).

57


the slaughtered ram for the married woman) works in three different ways to conceal. First, it hides from the poet both the fact of and the conditions surrounding the beloved's marriage to another man. Second, it conceals from him the paternal uncle's deception, that is, the uncle's breach of a solemn promise to the poet that he would wed Asma' to him. Third, it covers up the ruse engaged in by al-Muraqqish's brothers and paternal cousins who, by hiding from the poet-lover these other events and deceptions, become complicit in one themselves.

But if concealment is one function of the ram's bones as substitute for bride, another is revelation. The ram's corpse bears a degree of self- referentiality because only for a time does the burial of the bones conceal the event of the bride's marriage-eventually the animal's ankle bone also points toward or uncovers the story of the wedding.28 On the level of plot, the ram first stands in for (i.e., replaces and, thereby, conceals) the bride and then stands for (i.e., represents or reveals) the bride.

SUBSTITUTION, EXCHANGE, AND SACRIFICE IN THE MARRIAGE

OF ASMA'

The substitution (animal replacing woman) on which is based this stratagem or deception is "mixed" with ritualistic substitutions in the romance narrative. Again, I would maintain that the purpose of this "mixing" is to elliptically signal displacement from human to animal victims that occur in the sacrificial substitutions. As a powerful multivalent symbol, the ram functions as a ritual victim that substitutes for a number of parties: the bride, the husband, the poet-lover's male kin, and the poet-lover himself. Just as Freud views certain key words in a dream as constituting "nodal points" on which a great number of dream thoughts converge, and because

they have several meanings in connection with the interpretation of the dream, likewise the ram, as symbol, is overdetermined in this narrative- that is, "it is represented many times over" in the story.29

The substitution of the ram for the bride, apart from its importance in the plot, also has symbolic value. Symbolically, the substitution renders the ram's sacrifice a narrative retelling of the beloved's marriage. What happens in the narrative plot (i.e., the ram uncovers the story of the wedding) is also true of the narrative symbolism of the story: the ram's sacrifice symbolically retells or reveals the story of how the beloved was married off. That the animal's sacrifice functions as a retelling of the beloved's marriage induces us to ask how sacrifice is associated with her marriage.

28 In both versions of the love story, the Arabic word that is used for ankle bone is kacb. This word also means "die or dice" since, as Charles Lyall notes in the Mufaddaliydt, the Arabs used to cast a sheep's ankle bone like a die in games of chance. How apt a double meaning for a bone that not only reveals the history of what happened to Asma' but also seals al-Muraqqish's fate.

29 Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon, 1967), pp. 317-18.

58


In this love story, an analogy is made between the rituals of animal sacrifice and marriage, not just between animal sacrifice and virgin defloration, as has been discussed by critics such as Suzanne Stetkevych and Adnan Haydar with respect to The MuCallaqah of Imru' l-Qays.30 The distinction between marriage and virgin defloration is important because of the issue of bride wealth, which only arises in the context of matrimony. While the metaphorical links between animal sacrifice and virgin defloration in pre-Islamic poetry and anecdotes have been addressed by some critics, the connections in these sources between animal sacrifice and marriage as a form of "gift exchange" have not received equal attention. The an- thropological idea that marriage is "a most basic form of gift exchange, in which it is women who are the most precious of gifts" is formulated by Levi-Strauss in his Elementary Structures of Kinship, a work that draws on Mauss's idea of "contractual sacrifice" or sacrifice as gift as articulated in his Essay on the Gift.31 Levi-Strauss states that "the total relationship of exchange which constitutes marriage is not established between a man and a woman, but between two groups of men, and the woman figures only as one of the objects in the exchange, not as one of the partners."32

It is precisely through this concept of exchange that sacrifice is associated with the beloved's marriage: to prevent starvation from afflicting the entire community, to prevent the sacrifice of the communal entity, a woman acting as a surrogate victim is traded for a hundred camels. Here, the idea of the bride as a "sacrificial gift" need not oppose the idea of her as a "surrogate victim."33 According to one scholar, "There is a distinct over- lap between sacrifice as substitution and sacrifice as gift ... Sacrifice as gift is equivalent to sacrifice as substitution because the unifying concept in both gift and substitution is that of exchange."34 The symbolism of the drought plays a powerful role in framing the exchange of the daughter/ bride as a sacrifice. Actually, only the rendition in the Mufad.daliyat relates that after having promised Asma' in matrimony to al-Muraqqish, his paternal uncle CAuf faces a year of drought. The Aghani version states that he faced a difficult and severe time. Whatever the nature of the crisis, both versions attempt to establish a causal link between this drought or severe time and the uncle's acceptance of a hundred camels in exchange for his daughter as a bride. Both the drought and the potential fraternal conflict (referred to earlier) are examples, in Girard's terms, of "the generative

30 Stetkevych, Mute Immortals (n. 18 above), chap. 7. 31 Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex," in To-

wards an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), p. 173.

32 Claude Levi-Strauss, Elementary Structures of Kinship, p. 115, quoted in Rubin, p. 174. 33 Indeed, the Arabic word for "gift"-hadiya-also means "bride" or "victim to be

slaughtered in Mecca." It should be mentioned that a hundred camels is also the standard bloodwite according to early Arabic sources.

34 Beers (n. 5 above), p. 27.

59


violence which substitutes a single victim for all members of the community." This generative violence is first displaced into a surrogate human victim and then onto ritual victims such as the ram or the camels. Apposite here is Girard's observation that "the only reality a scapegoat phenomenon can affect is the social climate, and we may assume that mythology is al- ways due to a disturbance of that climate, followed by a scapegoat-induced return to serenity. It does not matter, of course, whether or not the real cause of that disturbance is exterior to the society, whether it is a real epidemic of plague or some bout of internal discord."35 By drawing attention to factors of hunger and the exchange of meat, the drought symbolism implicitly suggests that the bride is, in a sense, communally "eaten" for it is through exchanging her that the clan obtains the meat of the hundred camels. Eating (especially meat eating), as we have inferred from both the Hebraic myth and the ram's role in this story, appears to be an integral component of sacrificial ritual.

The symbolism of the rich stranger-husband makes prominent the importance of bartering in the marriage of Asma3. Both story accounts imply that cupidity was a factor in the uncle's decision to accept the proposal for it is related that a wealthy man from Murad enticed him with the bride wealth, and so he married this man to his daughter, Asma'. The Arabic sentence isfa-arghabahufil-mal, fa-zawwajahu Asma'. Hence, in addition to an alimentary component, there exists an economic dimension to marriage as sacrifice in the classical Arabic love story of al-Muraqqish. Initially, by introducing the specter of the drought, the story suggests that the threat of communal suffering was what induced the paternal uncle to marry his daughter to the stranger-husband. Then the narrative's explicit mention of how the stranger-husband's prosperity lured the uncle into agreeing to marriage foregrounds the pecuniary nature of the marital exchange. Both mythemes-that of the drought and the "benevolent stranger-husband"-are important to the construction of the marriage as a form of sacrificial exchange or barter.

GENDERING THE ANIMAL MALE: THE SACRIFICIAL LOVER

But just why is the animal, in the love story of al-Muraqqish, a ram or a male animal? Why does the narrative suggest the links between the slaughtered animal and married woman and also reveal that the animal is male? One answer is that the ram's use as sacrificial victim in this story

35 Ren6 Girard, "Generative Scapegoating," in Hamerton-Kelly, ed. (n. 11 above), p. 91. W. R. Smith's relevant but antiquated reading is thus: "And conversely, when famine, plague or other disaster shows that the god is no longer active on behalf of his own, it is natural to infer that the bond of kinship with him has been broken or relaxed, and that it is necessary to retie it by a solemn ceremony, in which the sacred life is again distributed to every member of the community" (p. 320).

60


is androgynous. Indeed, W. Robertson Smith has written that in ancient Arabia the sacrificial use of the ram and the ewe was androgynous.36 Even modem practices demonstrate this, as is evident, for example, in the descriptions provided by M. E. Combs-Schilling of Moroccan wedding festivities in which the slaughter animal of choice was the ram, and

yet, the wedding songs sung at the occasion often analogized the ram to the bride rather than the groom.37

Yet another answer is that, here again, we see an instance of the nexus between sacrificial substitution and concealment for while the story's narrative half conceals the fact that the animal functions as a surrogate for a man (through establishing plot-based and symbolic connections between the married woman and slaughtered ram), it also half reveals this

process of surrogation by gendering the animal male. The ram also substitutes for the husband or the male kin, but primarily it functions as a surrogate for the lover himself.

HUSBAND OR MALE KIN AS VICTIMS

In the two versions of the story under consideration, the narrative setting in which the slaughter occurs is as follows: "Then al-Muraqqish returns and his brothers and cousins, feeling both pity and fear for him [ashfaqa Calayhi ] about having to inform him of Asma's marriage, announce to him that she has died and they take him to a grave, wherein, prior to the poet's return, they have buried the bones of a ram they have killed and eaten." The other version relates, "Then al-Muraqqish returns, and his brothers announce: Do not tell him anything except that she has died. So they slaughtered a ram and ate its meat and concealed its bones by wrap- ping them in a sheet and then, they buried them." One argument surmised from these excerpts is that al-Muraqqish's brothers and paternal cousins kill the ram because they are fearful of conflict arising within a number of potential scenarios: violent conflict between the poet and Asma"'s husband, or between the poet and themselves, or even suicide in the case of the poet. To divert from the husband or themselves the violence that could be potentially directed toward them, an animal acting as a buffer and substitute is killed. As Rene Girard has maintained with regard to a

36 Smith, p. 478. 37 Combs-Schilling states that in Moroccan wedding ceremonies, "some groups explic-

itly voice the link between the bride and the sacrificial ram. Among one group, when the women of the groom's household see the bride approaching, they sing out to her, 'Bring a ram with black rings around its eyes, let us sit down with this excellent woman"' (M. E. Combs-Schilling, Sacred Performances: Islam, Sexuality and Sacrifice [New York: Co- lumbia University Press, 1989], p. 206). Another answer to why the ram is male is provided by Combs-Schilling herself: "The ram is not simply male; he is quintessentially male." She maintains that the maleness of the ram is "important to the building of the [Abraham or Ibrahim] myth's implicit assumption of male dominance of communal, cos- mic, and transcendent things" (p. 239).

61


number of biblical and Greek stories, an animal intervenes at the crucial juncture to deflect violence from the designated victim. That the designated victim may have been the husband is further corroborated through the variant narrative in the Kitab al-Aghani in which al-Muraqqish, after discovering that he has been deceived by his kin, rides off in a fury in pursuit of the husband.38

AL-MURAQQISH, THE POET-LOVER, AS VICTIM

A clue that the ram also stands for the story's lover is found in the Arabic word for "ram" used in the text, that is, kabsh, which also means "leader or chief."39 This bit of information takes on significance when we note the language that al-Muraqqish's paternal uncle uses to describe the "test" the poet must pass before he can be rewarded by marriage to his beloved. In one rendition, the uncle states, "I will not marry her to you until you become a chief and frequent kings' courts" (the Arabic phrase used is hatta tar'as, ayy takuna ra'isan), and in the Aghdni text he declares, "I will not marry her to you until you become known for valor and bravery" [hatta tu'rafa bil-ba's]. The test that the young al-Muraqqish is subjected to by the paternal figure is that he become a figure of wealth and rank (i.e., that he become a "ram") before he can be given a bride.

That the ram's sacrifice is also a symbol of the male lover's expendability is made prominent in the story's rendering of what happens to al-Muraqqish once he discovers how he has been deceived. The moment al-Muraqqish hears of the multiple deceptions underlying the ram's slaughter, the story zeroes in on the beginnings of the lover's "self-sacrifice." The narrative states that after he learns of the deceptions, he falls ill and becomes increasingly emaciated; like the ram, he is reduced to "skin and bones." The "victim" cast of the lover's character is further accentuated through the incidents that occur in the cave. According to both renditions, the slave woman and her husband decide to abandon the sickly al-Muraqqish in the cave and head back home; the version in the Mufaddaliyat relates that al-Muraqqish, while in the cave, is repeatedly wounded and bitten (read: eaten) by wild beasts such as hyenas. But it is ultimately through the two important poems that al-Muraqqish composes after he sets out on his quest for his beloved that the lover's self-awareness of being a sacrificial victim is revealed and greatly sentimentalized. In the first poem com- posed by al-Muraqqish while he is sick in the cave in the land of Murad, and which he manages to write on his saddle just before the slave couple

38 This active, menacing al-Muraqqish appears to be in stark contrast to the benumbed, ailing al-Muraqqish in our love story who rides off in search of his beloved.

39 See Stetkevych's discussion of the word kabsh and the sacrificial associations of kabsh al-fida in "Pre-Islamic Panegyric and the Poetics of Redemption," in her Reorienta- tions/Arabic and Persian Poetry (n. 18 above), pp. 13-14.

62


abandons him, we find the following verse: "Who shall inform my people that al-Muraqqish has revealed himself to be a burden to his companions?" In another verse from this same poem, he observes that since his kin are remote from him, he has become the prey of wild beasts who devour him. The metaphor of him as prey is again employed in the second poem, which the poet recites on his deathbed in the presence of Asmai, but just as importantly, the poet alludes to his having been the victim of the deceit enacted by his male kin. "What is the use of my being faithful, when the promise made with me has been violated? What is my case? I am the hunted prey; I hunt not."40 Both poems frame the lover's plight as a case of sacrifice. And given that rendition of the romance in the Mufaddaliyat identifies al-Muraqqish as one of the mutayyimin, that is, one of the leg- endary poets "slain by love," perhaps it is not inappropriate to cite a cou- plet from another poem of the lover (although it is not contained in the text of the love story) in which the sacrificial cast of his character is evoked: "And whenever you hear, wherever it reaches you of a lover who's dead of love or is dying, / Know that that wretch is I without doubt, and weep for one whom Love chained and slew with none to avenge."41 An alternative reading for the last phrase, according to the medieval commentator al-Maqrizi, is "for one slain who shall never be paid for."42 Al- Muraqqish here employs a double conceit through which he depicts himself as being "slain by love" and as "unavenged" ("unavenged" here meaning that he has not been deemed worthy enough by his own kin for them to pursue blood vengeance or demand blood money on his behalf).

CONCLUSION

The question of why concealment and sacrifice are so intimately con- nected in this love story brings us back full circle to the quotation (from the article by Smith and Doniger) with which this essay was launched. In this quotation, the authors assert that a theory of sacrifice is an offshoot of a broader theory of symbolism. The process of substitution in sacrifice, in other words, actually is a symbolic transaction-the purpose of which is to displace and conceal violence. They elaborate: "The proliferation of surrogates in sacrificial rituals ... may be compared to the proliferation of variants (or fragments, or overlapping mythemes) in the myths that so often gloss these sacrifices. In both cases, this fragmenting and proliferation is necessitated by the worshipper's inability to deal with the problem

40 Slight modification of Lyall's translation (Mufaddaliyat [n. 21 above], 2:887-88). 41 Modification of translation by Lyall. Lyall, a modem compiler and commentator, con-

siders these verses to be later interpolations. Here musfad has etymological connections with being chained, but it is also linked with (in the passive IV) "to be given as gift" (Mu- fad.daliyat, 2:365-66).

42 Ibid., p. 366.

63


directly. In the myth, it indicates that one cannot state the problem outright, and hence introduces a series of fragmentary statements. In the ritual, it means that one hesitates to sacrifice oneself or another directly, and hence, interposes a series of intermediaries."43 Whether we are talking about the overdetermination of the ram as symbol (i.e., it functions as a ritual victim that substitutes for a number of parties including the beloved and the poet-lover) or the presence of the various mythemes (e.g., those associated with the symbolism of the drought and marriage), multiplicity and fragmentation permeate the symbolic construction of sacrificial victims and rituals in the love story of al-Muraqqish al-Akbar. The overall argument made in this article-that, in our story, the substitution inherent in concealments or stratagems is "mixed" with the substitution occurring in the sacrifices, and that the purpose of this "mixing" is to conceal/reveal the displacement of violence from the surrogate victim to the ritual victim that occurs in the sacrificial rituals-is ultimately a case, in Smith and Doniger's words, of "not stating the problem outright" or of "hesitating to sacrifice oneself or another directly."

The binary of "myths" versus "sacrificial rituals" that Smith and Doni- ger speak of in the aforecited quotation is not unlike the binary I have con- structed and examined in this article: substitution as concealment versus substitution as sacrifice. "The key notions are concealment (in the case of the myth) and substitution (in the case of the ritual)."44 In the realm of

myth and other narrative forms, the representation of sacrifice is fraught with displacements and suppressions, because if the sacrificial act or ritual itself is a symbolic transaction, then the portrayal of sacrifice in literature lends itself especially to a proliferation of symbols. This mechanism of concealment and suppression in myth operates in a manner similar to the

censorship imposed by resistance in the interplay of displacement, con- densation, and overdetermination in dream construction.45

Swarthmore College

43 Smith and Doniger (n. 1 above), p. 195. 44 Mack goes on to observe that "both notions can be correlated with [Girard's] mi-

metic-desire mechanism: that which myth conceals corresponds to Freud's unconscious, and to Girard's 'nonconscious' level at which mimetic functions; and ritual substitution correlates with certain aspects of Freud's Oedipal drama, and of Girard's mimetic-desire mechanism" (Mack [n. 11 above], pp. 16-17).

45 Freud (n. 29 above), pp. 343-44. Mack has pointed out that for Girard: "The term sacrifice, though it can be used to refer to actual rites, refers ultimately to the structuring mechanism of the hidden level," and "hidden level" here refers to the "'hidden' level of unconscious motivation" (Mack, p. 10).

64

substitution and sacrifice in the classical love story of al-muraqqish al-akbar

Documents