SALIH SUWAYSI'S BACKGROUND

The edition of Suwaysi's maqāmāt published in 1978 (in a collection that also contained the first publication of his novel in book form) includes a narrative sketch (“Tarjamat al-Muʾallif bi-Qalamihi”) he wrote of his life (including his limited formal education), which helps elucidate the autobiographical nature of the maqāmāt.Footnote ⁸ He was born in Qayrawan in 1871 and lived in the city for five years before his father moved the family to Tunis, where the young Salih completed his reading of the Qurʾan in a kuttāb (Muslim primary school). He lived in the capital from 1876 to 1886, at which time he returned with his sick mother to Qayrawan; his father returned and died within that year. Though intellectually gifted, Suwaysi did not pursue advanced studies at either of the prominent institutions of higher learning in the capital city. The Zaytuna mosque–university, which was founded in the early centuries of Islam, historically offered studies in the Islamic sciences and added secular disciplines under the modernizing reforms of the precolonial 19th century. The Sadiqi College, established in 1875, taught Islamic topics along with mathematics, science, and modern languages, inspired by French curricula. Despite not having attended either of these institutions, Suwaysi identified himself, as would his students and later scholars, as a Muslim intellectual and an Islamic reformer who schooled himself in the writings of leading thinkers from the east, especially Egypt.

After his father died, Suwaysi sought an intellectual mentor, which he found in the person of Shaykh Muhammad al-Nakhli, a recognized member of the Tunis-based ʿulamaʾ and mentor to other important Islamic reformers of the period.Footnote ⁹ Like Suwaysi, al-Nakhli had begun his education at a Qayrawan kuttāb, but unlike his future student he then went to Tunis to continue his higher education in religious studies, which he completed in 1889, the same year that Suwaysi returned to Qayrawan from the capital city. Al-Nakhli began teaching in 1890 and continued almost until his death in 1924. He was greatly influenced by reformers (rijāl al-iṣlāḥ) in the Mashriq and the Maghrib, including Mahmud Qabadu, Khayr al-Din, al-Afghani, and ʿAbduh. Their calls for reform and for the “liberation of Islamic thought from tradition [taqlīd]” embraced science and the reasonable emulation of the advances made by European nations as means for improving the affairs and lives of Muslims in the modern era.Footnote ¹⁰ Suwaysi had none of al-Nakhli's educational advantages, but he benefited from the shaykh's teachings when the latter spent time in Qayrawan. Like Suwaysi, al-Nakhli was quite attached to the city, as is evident in his memoir.Footnote ¹¹

Inspired by reformers such as al-Afghani and ʿAbduh, who called on Muslim writers to alert their countrymen to the dangers of European encroachment, Suwaysi wrote as a means of resisting French colonialism and promoting Islam while addressing other societal ills, such as the precarious status of orphans. He contributed first to the Tunisian newspaper al-Zahra, then other periodicals, before delving into a variety of literary genres: poetry, a khiṭaṭ-style guidebook, short stories, maqāmāt, and a novel. Indeed, Suwaysi is known as the first novelist in modern Tunisian history. While the maqāmāt convey Suwaysi's interpretation of the role of Islam in his society, his novel offers a more sustained exploration of problems related to the “loss of religion.”

None of the early Tunisian intellectuals who studied Suwaysi's writings, including his own students, refers to his maqāmāt. A work by Ahmad bin ʿAbdallah published in 2000 seems to be the first study by a Tunisian scholar to mention the maqāmāt, though even it gives them scant treatment. Bin ʿAbdallah makes no reference to possible dates of authorship of the maqāmāt but notes that both they and the novel were found after Suwaysi's death in 1941 in a notebook belonging to the author. Suwaysi's novel, however, had been serialized in newspapers in the 1910s and again in the 1920s. It explores the issue of Islamic reform through the story of a young boy orphaned by his father whose mother sends him to Cairo to study with a great shaykh, no doubt meant to represent Muhammad ʿAbduh. The second serialization of the novel in the 1920s was altered to make al-Nakhli the great shaykh figure of the narrative.Footnote ¹²

Suwaysi's extensive writing likely led to his political activity, which ultimately caused him difficulties with the French authorities. His mentor experienced similar troubles; Shaykh al-Nakhli was accused of “disgracing the French language, which the government sought to spread” widely and of being an “insurmountable obstacle in the path of the French authorities.”Footnote ¹³ A secret (almost certainly French colonial) document, referred to in an annotation in al-Nakhli's memoir, implicates Suwaysi as well. The editor of al-Nakhli's autobiography states that Suwaysi's name appears in the secret file as having “participated in organizing politics in Qayrawan.”Footnote ¹⁴ Suwaysi recounted that in 1895 he was accused of sedition against the government; the charge may have been based on his reformist ideas, which by then had been published in Tunisian and Egyptian newspapers.Footnote ¹⁵ He was tried in the Mahkamat al-Kitaba al-ʿAmma (the state court), part of the Tunisian central administration (and firmly under the control of French officials); he defended himself successfully and was released.Footnote ¹⁶

Suwaysi's legal troubles resurfaced in 1897 and may have ended up fueling his later political engagement. According to his account, he was slandered by people who “sold their religion for worldly things” (bāʿū dīnahum bi-dunyāhim) and charged with conspiracy. On these charges Suwaysi was sentenced to a three-month exile in Tozeur, near Tunisia's southwestern border with Algeria.Footnote ¹⁷ Suwaysi participated in local politics in Qayrawan, joining the Dustur Party when a branch was established in the city in 1921. By the following year, he was serving as assistant deputy secretary of the branch, and the city's French police chief had named him one of the party's most important leaders.Footnote ¹⁸ His political participation during the period around 1911, the likely year for the composition of the maqāmāt, is less well documented.

The characters in the maqāmāt represent Suwaysi's sense of place and his love for his home city and often tackle the question of Islam's role in Tunisian social reform. They do not appear as directly political actors; rather, they face the weight of the political and legal system as it is transformed by the French colonial powers. The maqāmāt excel in describing Tunisia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as it underwent reforms in administration, state finances, and the justice system; changes in education and landownership; the introduction of new modes of travel and transportation; and the development of port cities.Footnote ¹⁹ They also demonstrate the author's romanticized, nostalgic view of Qayrawan and of the authenticity of the desert, however endangered these might be by the onslaught of modernity.Footnote ²⁰ Indeed, the historical dignity of these two locations is only highlighted by their disgrace in the present.

The significance of Qayrawan to Suwaysi inspired his 1911 publication of Dalil Qayrawan (Guide to Qayrawan). It was not a travel guide for tourists but rather aimed to educate Tunisians about their history, their religion, and the historical figures that illuminate Qayrawan's importance to early Islamic history.Footnote ²¹ Though scholars of Tunisia have largely overlooked Suwaysi's interest in urban space, 21st-century Tunisian policymakers saw fit to capitalize on it by republishing his Dalil for the Tunisian tourism industry in 2006.Footnote ²²

QAYRAWAN

The city's early history helps explain its significance for Tunisians. Moving swiftly across a large swath of territory, Muslim armies reached North Africa by the mid-7th century and conquered it by the century's end. Qayrawan, meaning camp, served as a garrison town for the Muslim conquerors. Away from the center of Islamic government, Muslims settling across North Africa needed institutions and places of worship. They began to build great monuments in the territories that came under their control. Qayrawan bears the distinction of housing the first mosque built in North Africa.Footnote ²³ As the town of Qayrawan changed and expanded, so did the mosque. In the city that Suwaysi calls “holy” in his maqāmāt, rulers restored and added to the mosque over the centuries, both when Muslims ruled Ifriqiyya (modern-day Tunisia) from Qayrawan and when Tunisian dynasties began ruling from Tunis in the 13th century.Footnote ²⁴ Maintaining the mosque was a continuous concern of Tunisian rulers, including the Zirids in the 11th century, the Hafsids from the 13th to 15th centuries, the Muradids in the 17th century, and the Husaynid beys in the 19th century.

In his maqāmāt, Suwaysi's images of Qayrawan emerge forcefully and hark back to the early Islamic period, when the city boasted a thriving intellectual life and witnessed the building of spectacular monuments. The author's protonationalistic territorial sentiments about Qayrawan weave together his longing for an imagined past, when Islam dominated public life and people's behavior, with his disdain for the venality in Tunisian cities during his time. In the maqāmāt, Qayrawan is the original Arab-Islamic city as it is imagined to have existed before it was corrupted, “denuded of the clothes of the salafiyyīn,” as the character Abu al-ʿIbar laments in the Tunis maqāma.Footnote ²⁵ Throughout Suwaysi's maqāmāt, the salafiyyīn represent Muslims who lived during a period when Islam was pure and uncorrupted.Footnote ²⁶ The author's use of this term, and the related al-salaf al-ṣāliḥ, does not necessarily link him to “Salafism” in any of the various ways it is currently understood. Although some writers, including Rashid Rida, used the word al-salafiyya to refer to aspects of the 20th-century Islamic reform movement, it does not appear in Suwaysi's writing as connected to a movement.Footnote ²⁷ Instead, the pious ancestors are invoked as models for correct behavior. The term is not disconnected from the various trends of Islamic modernism at the time, such as those of ʿAbduh, and Suwaysi does recognize an Islamic movement that represents the Islamic values he holds—this he refers to not by the term Salafism but rather by the name of the society al-ʿUrwa al-Wuthqa (The Indissoluble Bond), which used the same name for its leading journal.Footnote ²⁸

During Suwaysi's lifetime, some of Tunisia's cities were undergoing reconstruction—as new cities were built alongside them to suit French (and other European) settlers—and in some cases destruction, such as occurred to the walls of the madīna (old city) of Tunis. Major boulevards sprang up along with municipal halls, theaters, and the administrative offices of the Protectorate. For Suwaysi, as the country's other cities became less authentic, Qayrawan, its past, and the early Muslims who settled there became more so. The characters in his maqāmāt speak of Qayrawan's values, which are synonymous with Islamic values and which other Tunisian cities were losing or had lost under the influence of France. The only environment that rivals the authenticity of Qayrawan in Suwaysi's writings is the desert.

SUWAYSI'S LITERARY CONTEXT

The 19th-century nahḍa fostered innovation in writing styles and genres (e.g., the introduction of historical and melodramatic novels) while sustaining literary genres popular in earlier periods. The classical maqāma, Devin Stewart explains, continued as “a vital genre in the rapidly changing world of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Arabic literature” and arguably played a role in the development of a variety of modern Arabic literary forms.Footnote ²⁹ The spectrum of Suwaysi's writings—which include both traditional Arabic-Islamic genres, such as the khiṭaṭ (urban topographical works) and the maqāma, and European genres such as the short story and the novel—affirms his participation in a geographically diverse group of nahḍa writers. Most of Suwaysi's maqāmāt have received far less treatment than his other works, but his use of the genre connects him both to earlier Arabic-Islamic literary styles and to contemporary eastern Mediterranean intellectual trends during the challenging period of colonial rule. Still, despite being a prolific writer fluent in many literary genres, with writings reflecting a diverse thematic palette—Islamic reform, urban space, orphans in society, and French colonial rule, among other topics—Suwaysi does not appear as a major figure in modern Tunisian history.

By writing an introduction to an 1889 republication of al-Hamadhani's 10th-century maqāmāt, Muhammad ʿAbduh played a role in reminding 19th-century Arabic readers of the significance of the genre.Footnote ³⁰ Because Suwaysi is not a prominent figure in Tunisian histories, it is difficult to know whether he met ʿAbduh during the latter's second visit to Tunisia (9–24 September 1903), at which time Suwaysi was thirty-two years old; during ʿAbduh's first visit (6 December 1884–4 January 1885) Suwaysi would have been too young.Footnote ³¹ Suwaysi's close association with Shaykh al-Nakhli—who did meet with ʿAbduh during his second visitFootnote ³²—might have led Tunisia's “social reformer” (the appellation Najwa al-Kafi gives to Suwaysi) to meet the well-known Egyptian Islamic reformer.Footnote ³³ Suwaysi was also likely familiar with ʿAbduh's writings on Islamic reform through al-ʿUrwa al-Wuthqa, a society that pledged to work for the reform of Islam and unity among Muslim peoples. A branch of al-ʿUrwa al-Wuthqa existed in Tunisia at the time, and the name of the society appears in Suwaysi's Tozeur maqāma. ʿAbduh's second visit to Tunis came shortly after the end of the publication of the society's eponymous reformist journal (al-ʿUrwa al-Wuthqa), which ʿAbduh had published in Paris with al-Afghani.

Matti Moosa notes that there were many writers engaged in the revival of the genre during this period; his own work focuses on those in the eastern Mediterranean, particularly Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon.Footnote ³⁴ The earliest maqāmāt revival appeared in Syria and was written by an author who died in 1811, while the latest described by Moosa was in Egypt in the early 20th century. He traces two distinct aesthetics within the maqāmāt revival: a traditional and an experimental form. Lebanese authors of early 19th-century maqāmāt worked to revive the genre within its traditional form but made a notable effort to parody it.Footnote ³⁵ These Lebanese writings, Moosa notes, bear a realistic quality of reflecting the lives of their authors, as does Suwaysi's maqāmāt.Footnote ³⁶ North Africans, including Tunisians, acquired reading material from Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East and thus partook in religious and intellectual literary trends circulating abroad.Footnote ³⁷ Suwaysi's choice to write maqāmāt places him within the group of Arab writers who turned to a revival of the genre during a period of social and political crisis, as local governments and societies struggled with increasing European influence and then outright rule over their countries.

In Moosa's explanation of these two distinct aesthetic approaches, the traditionalist remained faithful to the splendor of language and to imitating the medieval maqāmāt while the experimentalist “made a distinct step . . . in the direction of the Western short story.”Footnote ³⁸ Suwaysi's work reflects both approaches. Most of his maqāmāt resemble those of the experimentalists, in whose writings “the plot and settings are contemporary, reflecting the spirit and sentiment of the communities in which [the author] lived and worked,” according to Moosa.Footnote ³⁹ The literature penned by such writers illuminates the historical moment—for example, as in Suwaysi's frequent references to modern forms of transportation or to his character's legal troubles, which echo those of the author. Suwaysi clarifies in his autobiographical sketch that he “wrote these maqāmāt to represent to the reader the history of my life and my sufferings and hardships.”Footnote ⁴⁰ While most of his maqāmāt fit into the experimentalists’ category, Suwaysi's inclusion of Islamic themes in the desert maqāma—the salafiyyīn, poetry, courage, nobility—ties it to the works of maqāmāt traditionalists, making it difficult to fit Suwaysi's writings neatly into either category. Suwaysi's desert maqāma also reflects stylistic conventions of maqāmāt traditionalists, who rely on the imitation of earlier authors’ works to depict settings that they may never have visited, such as those in pre-Islamic and early Islamic times.Footnote ⁴¹ The desert episode appeared three times prior to its publication in the 1978 collection of maqāmāt: circa 1905 in the Tunisian newspaper Sawab; probably shortly thereafter in the Egyptian al-Nafiʿ;Footnote ⁴² and in Suwaysi's 1906 literary collection, Kitab Manjam al-Tibar fi al-Nathr wa-Shiʿr (Goldmine of Prose and Poetry).Footnote ⁴³ Suwaysi's representation of the pristine nature of the desert had the potential to influence many people due to its publication on four separate occasions over nearly three-quarters of a century. In the 1978 publication, however, the desert episode underwent some revisions, which will be discussed below.

Roger Allen's annotated critical edition and study of Muhammad al-Muwaylihi's maqāmāt, in Hadith ʿIsa ibn Hisham, traces the historical trajectory of al-Muwaylihi's writings. Allen ties the renewed maqāmāt genre to larger literary developments in Egypt during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including the spread of journalism and of satire criticizing the Egyptian government. The maqāmāt of al-Muwaylihi, who was born thirteen years before Suwaysi, are considered a direct predecessor of the Arabic novel.Footnote ⁴⁴ In his Salih Suwaysi al-Qayrawani: Hayatuhu wa-Mukhtarat min Kitabatihi, Ahmad bin ʿAbdallah raises the question of whether Suwaysi's maqāmāt might be an imitation of al-Muwaylihi's. Bin ʿAbdallah does not offer a detailed discussion of the possibility and comes to no final conclusion about the prospect.Footnote ⁴⁵ In any case, al-Muwaylihi's political involvement in Egypt, his journalistic activities, and his literary production suggest similar experiences to those of Suwaysi, and both chose the same literary genre to express comparable situations under British and French colonial rule.

SUWAYSI'S MAQĀMĀT

Suwaysi's maqāmāt share an autobiographical quality with the maqāmāt of other writers, although uncertainty around the dates of authorship makes it hard to place them precisely within his life. In his “Tarjama,” Suwaysi says that he “wrote these maqāmāt to throw light on the history of the life of the earthly servant” (himself). The author adds that he “drew from his imagination two characters for a conversation, and I named one of them al-Shakir ibn al-Radi and the other Abu al-ʿIbar.”Footnote ⁴⁶ That leaves one of the three main characters of the maqāmāt—the son of Abu al-ʿIbar—unaccounted for by Suwaysi, tempting readers to speculate that he represents the author himself. I argue for a more complex reading in which the three main characters represent Suwaysi at different ages while also signifying important figures in his life. Using this framework of analysis, it is possible to speculate about the date of composition of most of the maqāmāt (besides the desert episode, which preceded the others). Abu al-ʿIbar, a Qayrawani man dejected over the corruption and decline of his city, as was the author, is identified as forty years old in the Tunis maqāma. He appears only briefly, engaging with Shakir, but his memory pervades the text. The complex layers of Abu al-ʿIbar's character, which will be expounded on, make it likely that he initially represents Suwaysi, which helps with the dating of the work, and later represents Suwaysi's father. Knowing that Suwaysi turned forty years old in 1911 raises the prospect that he authored most of the maqāmāt in that year.

Momentous events took place in neighboring Libya in 1911, especially the Italian invasion that shocked many in Tunisia. Italy's brutal colonization of the country likely propelled Suwaysi to write literary works from a critical standpoint in order to grapple with his historical reality. As a voracious reader, he certainly knew about what was happening in Libya; as an author, he published his dalīl in 1911 as a kind of warning to his fellow Qayrawanis. Thus, we might consider that he wrote other works, including many of the maqāmāt, in that year. The local political context also provides clues. The Dustur Party had mobilized to collect money and supplies for the Libyan resistance; by 1920 (and possibly earlier) Suwaysi was politically active, joining the Dustur in Qayrawan, and his path through the legal system confirms that he opposed colonialism. All of these historical details, combined with an analysis of his writings, suggest that the events of Suwaysi's day served his literary contributions.Footnote ⁴⁷ The maqāmāt would not be published in a complete collection for almost seven decades after being written (assuming a composition date of 1911), and they may have undergone revision over the years. The timing of their publication suggests that they may have had a more significant influence on Tunisian anticolonial nationalist literature in the postindependence period than they did during Suwaysi's day.

The published maqāmāt are titled by the name of the cities and the desert the narrator visits and appear in this narrative sequence: Tunis (“al-Maqama al-Tunisiyya”), Qayrawan (“al-Maqama al-Qayrawaniyya”), the desert (“al-Maqama al-Badawiyya”), Sousse, Tozeur, and Sfax (“al-Maqama al-Susiyya,” “al-Maqama al-Tuzuriyya,” and “al-Maqama al-Safaqasiyya”). The desert is a polyvalent symbol in Arabic literature; in Suwaysi's case, the praise for the desert's simplicity in the maqāma contrasts with the critique of urban space in the other episodes. The desert serves as the locus of early Islam and the salafiyyīn and thus is endowed in the maqāma with a pristine character and with people who likewise possess a kind of purity less known among city folk.Footnote ⁴⁸ The desert maqāma differs from the others not only because of its setting but also because it is the only maqāma in which the character Shakir has no encounter with the son of Abu al-ʿIbar. It originally appeared in a Tunisian newspaper in 1905 and was later revised, in both form and content, to suit the full series of maqāmāt and to fit within the protagonist's journeys across the country. Each maqāma in the 1978 collection ends with a reference to the next destination. The original 1905 desert maqāma does not include a successive location. For its inclusion in the 1978 version, it was edited to mention the traveler's next stop as Sousse, a coastal city of stark contrasts to the desert and whose residents Shakir finds most contemptible.Footnote ⁴⁹ Overall, the maqāmāt reinforce the view of Qayrawan as an ideal city, far less corrupted by the French than other cities. The tour through the desert and five cities allows the reader to glean the significance of each environment to the author and to discern his strong social critique of Tunisian society as it grappled with changes in administration, education, and the justice system, among other spheres, brought on by the French occupation and becoming more entrenched as the Protectorate took shape.

During their journeys, the three fictional characters in the maqāmāt alternately identify the purity of some of the landscapes and cities and the impurity of others. Al-Shakir ibn al-Radi (hereafter Shakir) appears first in the episodes as the traveling narrator. He seems at home in the more traditional or authentic environments—the desert, Qayrawan, and Tozeur, all geographically far from French colonial projects, namely, the building of railroads and a settler economy that focused on agriculture and coastal cities. The second character, Shakir's friend Abu al-ʿIbar, dies early on yet remains a constant influence, as his memory is frequently invoked by the two other characters. The third is the son of Abu al-ʿIbar and is initially unnamed in the maqāmāt. He frequently imagines an authentic, traditional Arab-Islamic city, implying Qayrawan, and is incensed by what he experiences in other cities, where strangers are unwelcome, people no longer offer an “Islamic greeting” wishing others a long life, and enemies, envy, and hostility abound.Footnote ⁵⁰ The son of Abu al-ʿIbar does not appear at all in the desert maqāma.

The characters’ names are instrumental to understanding how Suwaysi saw himself and possibly his relationship with his father and his mentor. Al-Shakir ibn al-Radi is “the grateful one, son of the content one”; both names carry religious connotations that reflect an individual who patiently suffers. Abu al-ʿIbar, “the father of advice,” may be connected to a 9th-century historical figure who wrote a parody of hadith scholars in Baghdad; he offers lessons, through Shakir's memory of him, to his son as he matures into a man.Footnote ⁵¹ The name of Abu al-ʿIbar's son is revealed only in the fifth of six maqāmāt as Salih, the one who is upright or virtuous; it is also the name of the author. Shakir (the grateful one) and Salih (the virtuous one) represent the voices in Tunisian society that desire an authentic, indigenous Tunisian way of life, one intimately tied to Islam and its pious ancestors, whose tombs and monuments dot the Qayrawan cityscape and whose culture of purity mirrors the culture of the desert's Bedouin. Abu al-ʿIbar is more difficult to capture as a distinct cultural voice due to his limited speech in the maqāmāt; the role he plays is that of a father figure who gives advice and helps others navigate the monumental transformations occurring in Tunisian society during the colonial period. These included the reorganization of central and regional governments; the emergence of separate systems of judicial administration, one for Tunisians and one for Frenchmen and other Europeans; increasing land purchases by foreigners whose privileges were legalized by the Protectorate; and the construction of European cities next to existing cities.

The maqāmāt follow the progression of Shakir as he engages with the other two characters, all representing Suwaysi at different periods of his life. The traveler seems to represent the Suwaysi who traveled around Tunisia and wrote to express his thoughts, his feelings, and his discontent. In his “Tarjama,” Suwaysi writes that his “only goal [in writing] is to awaken the people of my nation [banī waṭanī] in particular, and Muslims in general, to the way of the pious ancestors [al-salaf al-ṣāliḥ] and to the manners and behaviors that originated on the path of reason.”Footnote ⁵² He does not explain what other cities (besides Qayrawan) mean to him, but his travels themselves suggest that he had a deep interest in what was happening not only in his birth city but also throughout the country.Footnote ⁵³ Occasional references in the autobiographical maqāmāt give further clues to Suwaysi's thoughts on the significance of his city and his country. For example, in the “al-Maqama al-Qayrawaniyya,” seeking to learn more about his father, the son of Abu al-ʿIbar asks Shakir what the latter knew about him. Shakir responds with a lesson in the form of a poem: “read the newspaper and learn what is happening in your balad [country or city]; maintain a zeal for your balad and a love for its past.”Footnote ⁵⁴ He adds: “listen to good advice.” The poetic verses in the maqāma read: “take reason as a guide, and submit to God.”Footnote ⁵⁵ God remains at the heart of Suwaysi's consciousness, but his country and his home city also take pride of place in his life, lessons he might have learned from his own father.

In each maqāma/city, Shakir interacts with different individuals, but the conversations inevitably focus on his friend Abu al-ʿIbar and then on the latter's young son. Abu al-ʿIbar, an intellectual, bears characteristics of Suwaysi's mentor, Shaykh Muhammad al-Nakhli. He may also represent how the author saw himself within Tunisian intellectual circles: wise and offering advice when it was sought despite his lack of formal education. Finally, Abu al-ʿIbar, who dies early in the maqāmāt and leaves an orphaned son, may represent Suwaysi's late father. Information about Suwaysi's father is difficult to discern because Suwaysi mentions him only briefly in his autobiographical sketch. He notes that his father had midlevel wealth and a “great place in the heart of the people of the city” (presumably Qayrawan).Footnote ⁵⁶ The author does not mention what his father did for a living or why he moved the family to Tunis for ten years during Suwaysi's childhood, noting only that a situation came up that required it.Footnote ⁵⁷ In the Tunis maqāma, Abu al-ʿIbar states that he left his hometown of Qayrawan years ago because of the deplorable situation that had befallen the religiously and historically significant city. He claims that it had lost its intellectual life, its important men, its honor, and its integrity and notes that the “city with offspring of the righteous was corrupted,” a refrain of a poem within the maqāma repeated four times in two pages.Footnote ⁵⁸ One of the very few studies addressing colonial Qayrawan is a work by Samir Bakkush; in a more nuanced account than that of Suwaysi, it describes an urban complexity similar to other cities, whether contemporary or historical: rich and poor, elite and subaltern, educated, religious, corrupt, and so on.Footnote ⁵⁹ Abu al-ʿIbar left Qayrawan for Tunis with his wife and son, just as Suwaysi's father did. The fictional twelve-year-old boy, orphaned in the story and whom the traveler first meets in the Qayrawan maqāma, echoes the life of the author, orphaned at the age of fifteen.Footnote ⁶⁰

Struggling with life in the cities of Tunis and Qayrawan, the settings of the first two maqāmāt, Shakir heads to the desert, where true culture resides much as it does in the city of Qayrawan. In the desert the Bedouin represent the conveyors of virtuous culture and of the pristine form of Arabic expressed through poetry.Footnote ⁶¹ Shakir delves into the beauty transmitted through poetry, quoting a line from Ibn al-Hasan: “Beauty appears in two glamorous houses [baytayn]: a goat-hair tent [bayt al-shaʿr] and a line of poetry [bayt al-shiʿr].” During Shakir's desert visit he waxes eloquently on the beauty of the land and its women, contrasting the beautiful vista with the ugliness of civilization.Footnote ⁶² He receives traditional greetings and kindness in the desert and accepts a young Bedouin boy's invitation to his family's goat-hair tent. Shakir speaks of Bedouin honor, courage, and hospitality, noting that, in contrast to the city's inhabitants, the people of the desert are not materialistic or frivolous; they are honorable people.Footnote ⁶³

Shakir's image of the desert is soon crushed by reality. The father of the Bedouin boy confirms for Shakir all of the valiant qualities of the desert and its people—but places them in the past. The father describes the contemporary Bedouin as quite the opposite, having lost their valor, integrity, knowledge, and even religion. The father both affirms and shatters Shakir's nostalgic view of the desert, which now mimics the corrupted city, referred to as jahl, the period of ignorance prior to the rise of Islam.Footnote ⁶⁴ He adds that the idyllic landscape is gone; the purity of the desert, along with the purity of Islam, remains only in the past. People have corrupted the religion, but, he says, “God will have mercy on the community of the Qurʾan” (fa-sa-yurḥamu Allahu ummat al-Qurʾan).Footnote ⁶⁵ The Bedouin “have destroyed what their ancestors built, as confusion reigns and evil runs rampant among the desert inhabitants, who have been influenced by the ignorance of the city dwellers.”Footnote ⁶⁶ From the desert came the salafiyyīn, those who were true and remained fast to their religion. Linking the salafiyyīn to the desert and to Islam's greatness, Suwaysi reminds the reader of the Qurʾan and its role in lifting the veil of ignorance from humanity.Footnote ⁶⁷ Much of this appears in a long poem that ties religion to the lost values and virtues of the desert, ending with a question from Shakir to his desert host: “Will the glory of Islam return?” and the host's succinct reply: “God will be merciful to the people of the Qurʾan.”Footnote ⁶⁸ The reliance on Islam as a focal aspect of life remains central in this maqāma, as the purity of Islam appears synonymous with the purity of the desert, which cannot exist until the former returns.

Suwaysi's construction in “al-Maqama al-Badawiyya” of the past as something lost, and to long for, raises the question of how the author situated himself within the literary discourse of his time, particularly when he employs the word salafī and its variants. Henri Lauzière has posited a number of ways to interpret the changing uses of this term through a framework of “conceptual history.”Footnote ⁶⁹ In a critical overview of the scholarship on Salafism, he challenges the notion that the standard interpretation of the term in the modern period emerged from the writings of Islamic modernists, such as al-Afghani and ʿAbduh, that espoused “the rejection of blind imitation, the promotion of rationality and progress, and the emancipation of women.”Footnote ⁷⁰ While “both men invoked the pious ancestors, as did many other Muslims before them, [that] does not constitute a sufficient explanation” for the later use of the term.Footnote ⁷¹ I see Suwaysi's use of salafiyyīn as a discursive practice similar to the way in which Samira Haj analyzes Muhammad ʿAbduh's thinking. Haj elaborates on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Talal Asad to explore Islam in “the way that Muslims do—namely, as a ‘discursive tradition’ consisting of historically evolving discourses embodied in the practices and institutions of communities.”Footnote ⁷² Reliance on the earliest period of Islam's history can be a way to begin a conversation anew around how communities should refashion themselves during an unsettling or challenging present.Footnote ⁷³ Suwaysi evinces just this method in his writings, as he grappled with European colonizers who established legal and political privilege for themselves in Tunisia while the indigenous population experienced economic displacement and social and religious dislocation.

Having left the desert and just arrived in Sousse, Shakir hears a clamor around a speaker who is reciting poetic verse that speaks of love while blaming unnamed people of trickery and the like. Shakir comes closer to the speaker, who turns out to be the son of Abu al-ʿIbar. Shakir wonders why the young man is in such despair and realizes that he is lamenting lost love in his poetry—not of a romantic kind but the love he used to have for his people, who have now turned away from religion. In this passage of the Sousse maqāma, the author expresses his disappointment through the young boy, who is heartbroken that people “have sold their religion at a cheap price.”Footnote ⁷⁴ The maqāma details major themes affecting Tunisian society: corruption, people's preoccupation with politics, their loss of religion, and other issues that have torn the fabric of their unity.Footnote ⁷⁵ Suwaysi's invocations in these passages of the Prophet and taking refuge in God, and his concern that the fabric of Muslim unity had been rent, like the references in other maqāmāt to the pious ancestors, reflect how Islamic reformers of the period spoke about repairing the fractured reality of the umma while promoting the advancement of Muslims in a world that was becoming increasingly dominated by colonialism.Footnote ⁷⁶

The son of Abu al-ʿIbar, now in Sousse, tells Shakir about his political involvement and the trouble it brought upon him when he was accused of being “against the government [siyāsa].”Footnote ⁷⁷ The young man takes his leave from his father's friend, traveling by train to Tunis to face charges of sedition while Shakir remains in the city. The departing train's smoke “spells out al-busīriyya verses on the pages of the sky,” likely a reference to the Sufi imam al-Busiri, who was born in Egypt in 1213 and wrote the qaṣīdat al-burdah (Mantle Ode) in praise of the Prophet Muhammad.Footnote ⁷⁸ The strength of Islam in its early period grounds both the young man adrift in the maqāma and the author Suwaysi. The Suwaysi family claims descent from the Prophet Muhammad, through his daughter Fatima and son-in-law ʿAli; Shakir reminds himself, when speaking about the young Salih who bears the same noble lineage as the author, that the family of the Prophet is always tested. After a few more days in Sousse, Shakir heads inland, passing the coastal cities of Sfax and Gafsa before arriving in arḍ al-jarīd, the land of date palms: Tozeur.Footnote ⁷⁹

The narrator begins and ends each maqāma with a discussion of how he gets to and from the place, highlighting the gamut of possible modes of transportation in early 20th-century Tunisia. The traveler arrives first by boat, heads into the heartland by train, and then travels to the desert on horseback; at other points he rides in a car and a postal coach. Personal travel by modern means does not trouble Shakir or his young companion. The development of the ports in Sousse and Sfax to receive commercial and war ships posed a greater dilemma for the two characters and undoubtedly for the author. In “al-Maqama al-Safaqasiyya” Shakir describes the magnificence of the commercial steamships and the cries of the sailors in a positive light but wonders, “If this splendor is the view of commercial ships, then what can be said about the hugeness of the fleet of warships, which, to the regret of the Muslim community, demonstrate lost glory and might? . . . O, the loss of past greatness . . .”Footnote ⁸⁰ His words decry the extent to which the French had developed infrastructure in the country for commercial and military purposes—the former to ensure that the settler-colonialists working the land could export their products and the latter so that France could project its domination over the country. The description of the journey to Tozeur and the time Shakir spent there elaborate on the subject of development in transportation—or rather the lack of it, because Tozeur remained outside the new network of railroads. Contemporary observers and later historians have documented how the Algerian-based French company Compagnie du Bône-Guelma, less interested in developing the inland areas that did not serve the colons, built the railway networks to follow the French settlers and thus facilitate their commercial interests.Footnote ⁸¹ The company also showed little interest in helping those settlers in sparsely populated areas and in the 1890s put the onus of responsibility on the Tunisian government to absorb all costs of railway extensions to Bizerte, Sousse, Sfax, and Qayrawan.Footnote ⁸²

While few Tunisians benefited from the railroad in ways that the French colons did, Suwaysi and his fictional characters took advantage, or were forced to take advantage, of the trains, thereby expanding their interest in and knowledge of the Tunisian countryside and coastal regions. Shakir is so interested in the country that he recalls his regret at not being able to stop in each of the places that he passed during his ride on a postal coach and later a horse, en route to Tozeur. He vows to return to Sfax (there is a maqāma on Sfax) and Gafsa (there is no maqāma on Gafsa) to learn about the character of each city while continuing on his journey to Tozeur.Footnote ⁸³ The details of the Tozeur maqāma, with its descriptions of different perspectives and periods of Suwaysi's stay in the city, are so realistic that it reads like a diary.

When Shakir arrives in Tozeur, he immediately feels like a stranger. He rents a hotel room there, “as is the custom of foreigners.” His sense of separation from his home is exacerbated when he falls ill.Footnote ⁸⁴ He begins to feel welcome when a young man comes into the hotel, learns the visitor is sick, and takes Shakir to a nice house to be cared for over the next year.Footnote ⁸⁵ After the previous visits in Sousse and the desert, the people's generosity in Tozeur overwhelms Shakir and restores his faith in humanity. While Suwaysi does not refer directly to the French, I argue that he was positing a correlation between the limited French reach into the countryside and the strength of hospitality and generosity among his fellow countrymen. Shakir, the narrator–protagonist and likely representing an older Suwaysi who traveled through the country's cities, stayed for one year in Tozeur. Suwaysi's own exile in the city was for three months but its positive effects, his easy rapport with the city's residents, and his connection with important religious figures there possibly inspired the lengthy stay of his character Shakir in “al-Maqama al-Tuzuriyya.”Footnote ⁸⁶

Suwaysi's preoccupation with Islam returns in the Tozeur maqāma when he meets a young man in a mosque who is reciting a poem about the Prophet questioning what people would do without him.Footnote ⁸⁷ Recognizing that this is none other than the son of his friend, Abu al-ʿIbar, Shakir calls the young man by his name, Salih, the virtuous one, for the first time; he “praises the opportunity to meet in a city whose people are as generous and gracious as Islam's pious ancestors, al-salaf al-ṣāliḥ.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Shakir is nevertheless surprised to find Salih in this remote town and asks how he came to be there. The answer constitutes the strongest critique of the Tunisian government to be found in the maqāmāt. Salih replies that the enemies of religion joined forces and charged him as a traitor. He was brought before the head of the government (amīr al-umarāʾ) in Tunis, who welcomed him as befits a descendant of the Prophet. Salih sought refuge in al-ʿurwa al-wuthqa, “the indissoluble bond” of Islam, a clear reference to ʿAbduh's society of the same name. Despite his faith, Salih was ultimately declared guilty and exiled for three months to Tozeur.Footnote ⁸⁹ The incident mirrors Suwaysi's own exile to Tozeur, based on a charge that may have included involvement with al-ʿUrwa al-Wuthqa. At the same time, the help and hospitality of the people of Tozeur make the characters Shakir and Salih forget their homes and families for a while. Yet even if they are able to briefly forget, the central message of their love of home, and in particular their devotion to Qayrawan, is intricately woven throughout the maqāmāt, which frequently recall the city's glory days in the early period of Islam when praiseworthy Muslims lived in a majestic era that Muslims of the current time needed to reclaim.