Telling tales, performing justice: the political subject of the Ḥikāya

Abstract

If Arabic drama and Greek theatre shared the same beginnings (both emerging from ceremonies of fertility), then why have the Greek traditions of theatre, tragedy and comedy been read as political but the Arabic traditions dismissed as ‘folkloric’? Consider three texts: an eighth century theatrical script called Mu ākkamat al- hulafā' (‘Trial of the Caliphs’), a thirteenth century shadow-play titled al-‘Ajīb wa al- harīb (‘The Bemusing and The Strange’) and an oral tale told among the women of Tetoun in Morocco (who trace their ancestry to al-’Andulus in Spain) titled ‘Ali wa Ya hzil? (‘Ali, and a Spinner Too?’). All three texts illustrate Arabic dramatic traditions from different times and places and each constitutes a genre of ikāya (Arabic for tale, pl. akāya or ikāyāt). Can these akāya articulate a way of being political that has remained non-articulable within western political thought? To begin to answer such a question, the article first offers an account of a subject that has been recognised as political that of the public spheres. Through the telling of three akāya, the article aims to put into tension this recognisable political subject of public spheres with a subject that positions itself differently in relation to justice and rights. Do the political subjectivities uncovered through this tension operate within existing understandings of the political or do they uncover the limits of such understandings and make possible new interpretations?