نصوص أدبيّة: JRL Gaster ar. 268

الوصف

Fragment of a literary narrative in Arabic script. Mentions: a jāriya (meaning either girl or female slave) who nursed or was nursed; someone who "brought her up with the ghulām (meaning either boy or male slave)"; archery (al-ramy bi-l-qaws); a wrestling match (ṣirāʿ) in which the ghulām was victorious, and his fame spread throughout the land; a qāḍī who forbade someone from wrestling; the arrival of a new wrestler (muṣāriʿ) in Baṣra (apparently the setting of the action), a non-Arab (ʿajamī) from Daylam; someone who publicly addresses the Dayl[amīs?] (yā maʿāshir al-Dayl[amiyyīn]!); the speaker declares that "I wrestled him with my own hands"; the time of judgment "between the two"; possibly their horses (khuyūl)—so perhaps there is also horseback wrestling here; and how the Daylamī slapped or struck (laṭama) Abū l-Ḥasan. For artistic representations of wrestling in the Fatimid era, see Ernst J. Grube, "A Drawing of Wrestler in the Cairo Museum of Islamic Art," Quaderni di Studi Arabic 3 (1985), 89–106, and for an overview of literary representations of wrestling in Persian literature (note the connection to Daylam in this fragment), see H. E. Chehabi, "Wrestling in the Shahnameh and Later Persian Epics" in The Layered Heart: Essays on Persian Poetry, ed. A. A. Seyed-Ghorab (2018).