INTRODUCTION Geert Jan Van Gelder Franz Rosenthal (Berlin, 31

INTRODUCTION

Geert Jan van Gelder

Franz Rosenthal (Berlin, 31 August, 1914–Branford, CT, USA, 8 April, 2003) was one of the most versatile of scholars. He produced important works on the Aramaic language, but his main contribution is to Arabic and Islamic studies. He is the author of standard works on Muslim his- toriography, epistemology, the Greek tradition in Islam, and the tech- nique of Muslim scholarship. He wrote pioneering books on various aspects of Islamic culture: gambling, hashish, freedom, complaint and hope, and many articles on such diverse topics as autobiography, suicide, sex in Muslim society, being a stranger, the ventilation shaft as a poetic motif, the number nineteen, and Arabic “blurbs”,1 which means that by rights he should have written this introductory and laudatory essay himself. He made a richly annotated three-volume translation of Ibn Khaldūn’s Muqaddimah and contributed two volumes (the opening and the concluding ones) to the translation of al-Ṭabarī’s great History. It seems that a few of these many topics had some connections with his life; I have been informed (but have forgotten the isnād, or supporting chain of authoritative transmitters) that he practised gambling, not to win money but for fun, as a regular pastime, kept well under control. As an emigrant to the United States in 1940 (he had left Germany in 1938) he was familiar with being a “stranger”. The question whether or not he used hashish he himself answered obliquely by saying that he had written on suicide but without practising it. He was a true man of letters, who used his great skills as a philologist and his vast erudition to understand and explain cultures in their intel- lectual, social, and literary aspects. In line with the precept often expressed in mediaeval Arabic literature that a true adīb (literate and erudite person) should judiciously mix seriousness and jesting, he also produced a seminal work on Arabic humour, the re-published volume presently in the reader’s hand. Again, it seems that the topic was not

1 “ ‘Blurbs’ (Taqrîẓ) from Fourteenth-Century Egypt”, Oriens 27–28 (1981) 177–96. For a bibliography of his writings see Oriens 36 (2001), pp. xiii–xxxiv. xii introduction wholly detached from the personality of the author: an obituarist speaks of Rosenthal’s “dry and sometimes cutting humor”.2 It is well known that for the serious study of humour it helps to be a native speaker of German; a Viennese neurologist, Sigmund Freud (d. 1939) wrote a monograph on the joke and its relationship to the unconscious (Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten) and an article “Der Humor”; but this author, perhaps being too obscure, is not quoted by Rosenthal. The tradition has been continued in Arabic studies after Rosenthal, by scholars such as Ulrich Marzolph, especially in his study and inventory of jokes, Arabia ridens,3 Kathrin Müller in her studies of anecdotes and expressions denoting excessive laughter,4 and Ludwig Ammann, in his study of Islamic attitudes towards laughter.5 Rosenthal, for the great benefit of those many unfortunate people who do not know German, wrote most of his works in English. The introduction of Humor in Early Islam, first published in 1956, begins with a survey of the “materials for the study of Muslim humor” and ends with an essay on laughter; but whereas one could imagine both topics (preferably in German) to be the titles of fat books, the chapters, though learned, are short and the bulk of the book is devoted to one person: the greedy and stupid Ashʿab, a singer and entertainer who apparently was alive in Medina in the eighth century, and whose fictional, legendary life long survived him. In due course, however, his fame as the focus of jokes was overshadowed by Juḥā, who, like Ashʿab, is first mentioned by al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 255/868–9) but unlike him is alive and well in modern Arabic and even survives in Sicily (once Arab) as Giufà. Jokes and anecdotes have a habit of jumping like fleas, easily attaching themselves from one person to another and many of the Ashʿab jokes are found in other contexts, attached to Juḥā and others. Thus Juḥā became the prototype for yet another popular figure, Naṣr al-Dīn Khoja or (in his Turkish spelling) Nasreddin Hoca.6 A careful study of the reports about Ashʿab sheds light

2 His colleague Benjamin R. Foster, Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, quoted in an In Memoriam on the website of Yale University, published 15 April 2003 (http:// opac.yale.edu/news/article.aspx?id=3711). 3 Arabia Ridens. Die humoristische Kurzprosa der frühen adab-Literatur im internation- alen Traditionsgeflecht. 2 Bde. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1992. 4 “Und der Kalif lachte, bis er auf den Rücken fiel”. Ein Beitrag zur Phraseologie und Stilkunde des klassische Arabisch, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Philosophisch-historische Klasse / Sitzungsberichte. Jrg. 1993, Heft 2. 5 Vorbild und Vernunft: Die Regelung von Lachen und Scherzen im mittelalterlichen Islam, Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1993. 6 For 666 “true stories” about him, see Ulrich Marzolph’s translation, Nasreddin Hodscha: 666 wahre Geschichten (2nd ed. München: Verlag C. H. Beck, 2002).