9. Lebanon: chronicle of al-ṣafadī (early 17th century [?])

Jérôme Lentin

p. 227-232


Texte intégral

1In the first annex to their edition of al-Ṣafadī’s chronicle (about the period 1612–1624) Bustānī and Rustum (1969, 208–41) published a section dealing specifically with the years (1613–1618) Faḫr al-Dīn spent in Italy. For them, al-Ṣafadī (a scholar born in Ṣafad, who studied in Al-ʾAzhar in Cairo, and the author of learned works as well as of travelogues) is not the author of this text, an opinion which seems reasonable, but is not shared by all scholars.

2A recent edition is the 2007 volume Riḥlat al-ʾAmīr Faḫr al-Dīn ʾilā ’Īṭāliyā, 1613–1618. Faḫr al-Dīn al-Maʿnī al-ṯānī, ḥaqqaqahā wa-qaddama lahā Qāsim Wahb. Beirut: Al-Muʾassasa al-ʿarabiyya li-l-dirāsāt wa-l-našr and Abu Dhabi: Dār al-Suwaydī li-l-našr wa-l-tawzīʿ (Irtiyād al-ʾāfāq).

Transcription

Image
Image

Translation

3In the town of Florence, as in others, there are hospitals for ill people. Whoever falls ill and wants to go to the hospital will find there doctors and everything needed by an ill person. Even those with the most limited means, if medicines costing one thousand piasters are necessary, they treat them without any return obligation. They also get food, drink, bed, and blankets. People are there ready to provide all the care patients need. When the doctor sees that the ill person has recovered, they let him out without paying anything: he doesn’t pay a single dirham. All these expenses are funded from the endowment income [waqf-s] of the hospitals. They also have monasteries with attendants and wet nurses. Every time a woman of disrepute gives birth to a child, or a woman wants to keep the birth of her child a secret, or even when a poor man with many children has a [new] child, [in all these cases] they can leave the child at this place, to have it brought up. This monastery has a marble window the size of a new-born child. The woman brings the baby in swaddling clothes and drops it at night through this window. People are there inside waiting for her and when the baby comes down, they catch it and give it to the wet nurses who take charge of it. When the children grow up, they pay for them to learn to read [and write] and to learn a handicraft— but only the boys. As for the girls, when they reach puberty, they go around the city with them and marry any one of these girls to whoever agrees to do so. Whether it is to one of the children raised in the monastery or to one of the people outside, they give to him as a wife the girl he has singled out. The costs of their upbringing and marriage are covered by the endowment income of the monastery and at the expense of the sultan, because this is their way of doing things: the woman gives to the man the dowry—each according to his situation and to their [respective] rank. They also have monasteries for the daughters of the notables and monasteries for the daughters of the common people, where they turn them into nuns. And the same goes for the monasteries for boys and men. All those who enter the monasteries [in the case of the children of the common people] have their costs paid from the endowment income [waqf-s] of the monastery. As for the children of the notables, they are funded by their families.

Commentary

41 Imageʾaymǝn ‘whoever’ (colloquial).

52 Image ‘to get sick, to fall ill’ (colloquial); compare no. 6.

63 Image + (subjunctive) imperfect ‘to want, wish, desire to, to feel like doing sth’ (colloquial).

74rāḥ (and less frequently rawwaḥ) is the usual verb in MA for ‘to go’ and ‘to go to’. For this last meaning, the more stylistically elevated جوت ّ ه is also widely.

85 Image + noun / pron. is the most common quantifier in (Levantine) MA for ‘all’; ‘whole, entire’, even before a singular (pro) noun.

96 Image ‘ill, sick’ (compare no. 2).

107 هووادي  . The (colloquial) -ū form (and not -ūn) is used most of the time in MA for the second and third person plural of the imperfect; the -ūn form is used either in classicising passages or as a marked form, for instance after final conjunctions (contrary to Classical usage). Compare the many other examples of -ū forms in this text: Image, 2( Image ا x), Image.

118 Image. Colloquial, see Barthélemy (1935–1969, 804); see also Dozy (1881, vol. II, p. 616).

129 Image is used with its colloquial meaning ‘to throw out, pull out, remove, dismiss, expel’, etc.

1310 Image ‘to put, place’, here figuratively ‘to pay (an amount of money)’ (colloquial).

1411 Image fard = ‘one and only, one and the same’; this construction, Ø + N sing. + art. + درف , is mainly used after a negation, as is the case here; it can be as a whole modified by the article (Image, i.e., [Image ـ ] Image). See Lentin (1997, 312).

1512 Image (also ارويد ) is the most frequently used (colloquial) plural of Image ‘convent, monastery’ in Ottoman MA texts (see Lentin 1997 184–186, §4.3.7.5).

1613 Image . The formerly mpl oblique case sound form -īn is predominantly used in MA regardless of the syntactic function of the noun (the n being generally retained in construct state). The Classical nominative -ūn form is reserved for stylistically marked use.

1714 ـ  Image lit. ‘a child is created (born) to… ’ (colloquial ḫiliq); compare the following Image (speaking of a man).

1815 Image. Invariable Image is extremely common in MA. Compare Image.

1916 Image. Most probably a transposition of colloquial ma bidd-hon yišǝhrū.

2017 Image. Colloquial verbal noun of rabbā (tǝrbāy, tǝrbāye, etc.).

2118 Image žāb, yžīb ‘to bring’ is probably the most frequently used colloquial verb in MA, and can be considered a typical ‘plain MA’ verb.

2219 Image ‘the woman’ (colloquial).

2320 Image lit. ‘from inside’. Colloquial žuwwā (adverb and preposition, construct state žuwwāt) ‘inside’ and barrā (barrāt) ‘outside’ are widely used in MA.

2421 Image (and Image). The use of Image, where either Classical or colloquial Arabic would have ل , is typical of a frequent MA procedure whereby a partial correspondence between a colloquial and a Standard preposition is generalised into total interchangeability (often bringing about a pair of stylistically contrasting variants).

2522 Image ‘to get old’ (colloquial kibir).

2623 Image and Image Colloquial forms (compare Classical Arabic zawāj and zawwaja).

2724 Image. Ø+ N + art. + active participle qualifying N (= Image . Image is morphologically colloquial (mitrabbyīn).

2825 Image. See no. 20.

2926 Image is the colloquial singular form (rǝžžāl), whereas in دעوעا Image it is the plural (Classical rijāl, colloquial ržāl).


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