The Queen of Sorcerers and Thirteen Anonymous Tales on Love

With Presenter Enass Khansa, Asst. Professor & Chair of Dept. of Arabic and Near Eastern Languages, American University of Beirut

And Discussant Julia Bray, AS AlBabtain-Laudian Professor of Arabic Emerita St. John’s College, Oxford

Abstract: The topic of this talk is an anonymous collection of fourteen tales which survived in a single manuscript, written in Middle Arabic, in Maghribī script. The collection is preserved under the title Kitāb fīhi ḥadīth Ziyād B. Āmir al-Kinānī (A Book with the tale of Ziyād Son of ‘Āmir al-Kinānī), a series of adventures on kingship, magic and love, the collection has been framed within the Iberian Chivalric Romances (12th-13th c.), and the court of the Umayyad Chancellor Almanzor in Córdoba (late 10th c.). I will locate reverberations of The Hundred and One Nights, The Thousand and One Nights, in the tales, as well as a particular story recorded by Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, before unveiling close affinity with a North-African sīra that circulated in Egypt in the late 14th century.