Codes of Emotion in Ninth- and Tenth-Century Baghdad: Slave Concubines in Literature and Life-Writing

Abstract

Much Arabic writing in ninth- and tenth-century Iraq, the cultural hub of the Islamic empire, centres on the emotions. It is tempting to take it as evidence, either direct and documentary or passive, for lived emotions, and to forget that it is shaped by imagination and argument, the more so as the culture makes no distinction between literary narratives and life writing. This article contextualizes, translates or summarizes three stories about jāriyas, women slave artistes and concubines, who are a frequent focus of writing about the emotions in this period. The stories which, typically, are presented as biography or autobiography, are variations on a common tale type, which they develop and explore in different ways, all of which, however, combine verisimilitude with a degree of idealisation that is not always apparent. I argue that, by virtue of this combination, the stories should be seen as exercises in the imaginative exploration of emotions, not as attempts to document them, and that the clash between realism and implausibility provides modern readers with the means of problematizing them and grasping their cultural functions. More generally, by arguing with themselves, writings of this sort provide modern readers with the tools of interrogation needed to write a history of thinking about (as against ‘doing’) emotions.