Types of the Folktale in the Arab World: A Demographically Oriented Tale-Type Index

Types of the Folktale in the Arab World: A Demographically Oriented Tale-Type Index. By Hasan M. El-Shamy. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Pp. xxviii + 1255, acknowledgments, introduction, bibliographies, indices, addendum. $75.00 cloth) Hasan El-Shamy, Professor of Folklore, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, and African Studies at Indiana University, is the foremost authority on Arab folktale in the western hemisphere. He has previously authored important studies on this subject (1995, 1999), but his newest book, Types of the Folktale in the Arab World: A Demographically Onented Tale-Type Index (DOTTI-A), is surely his crowning achievement. In an era when typological and indexing studies often take a back seat to idiosyncratic musings that pass for theorizing, this meaty work-1255 pages in small type-is an important and rare achievement. Both the author and the publisher deserve high praise for undertaking the project. As interest in Islam and the Arab world grows in the west, not only students of Middle Eastern folklore, but also comparative folklorists and students of cross-cultural studies, will greatly benefit from this contribution. Although Professor El-Shamy has adopted the Aarne-Thompson classification system (A-T), he goes beyond the work of his predecessors in providing a great deal of data following each of his entries. He does not simply list the occurrence of various tale types in some undifferentiated entity called "the Arab world," but breaks down this category into its ethnic, geographical, and national components, telling the reader in exactly which parts of the Arab world a certain tale-type occurs. In addition to its valuable demographic data, the Index provides information about certain tale-types presumed to have been absent among the Arabs (xii-xiii). Many archives and sources that were either never consulted for a book in English before, or were inadequately utilized, have been put to good use here. Every tale type is presented according to a scheme that provides reference to the tale's literary sources, its type number, and information about its narrator and collector (xx-xxiv). Not only does DOTTI-A present a preliminary analysis of folktales of the Arab world and of the various ethnic groups that flourish among the Arabs, it also provides parallels from the cultural areas that border on Arab lands (Turkish, Persian, Israeli, sub-Saharan African). The author lists cross-references to related typologies (Arewa 1980, Eberhard and Boratav 1953, Jason 1965 and 1988, Klipple 1992, Marzolph 1984 and 1992, Nowak 1969), placing his text in a broad regional context while making the task of comparative study of Arab folktale easier (xiv-xv, xvii). One of his most important improvements upon other tale-type indices is the copious data he provides about narrators. The reader can find out in one glance if the narrator was male or female, educated or illiterate, young or old, religious or secular, married or single, what he or she did for a living-and, more importantly, where the narrator acquired the story. Unlike many other indices that simply list the taletype and its motifs, DOTTI-A's narrators are humanized, and the reader is reminded that stories do not appear out of thin air but are told by human beings with specific characteristics. Naturally, all of this information is important in analytical investigations of Arab folktales because it helps the investigator to assess the narratives in terms of their meaning, function, and importance among those who tell them (ix). Whereas A-T provides the plot of its tales by a fixed sequence of episodes that are marked as I, II, III, and so forth, El-Shamy points out that such an approach is not practical or realistic because the sequence of any given tale-type's motifs is neither fixed nor stable and that there is no reason to arbitrarily choose the specific sequence of one version and impose upon the whole tale-type as the sequence. …