Transcription

1According to Ibrāhīm (1983, 222–23)

Translation

2God be praised, only Him, and let Him bless our sayyid Muḥammad and his family and grant them salvation.

3Excellency, felicitous, well-guided, glorious, protected and supported, our ʾafandī ʾAḥmad ʿAzmī, daftardār (director of the financial administration of the province)—may God confer honours upon him. Amen—My fullest, best and most complete greetings to you, may the mercy of God and His blessings be upon you. Nothing is to be added, except [wishes for] the very best. Now, let me inform you that I received your precious letter, that I read it and understood its form and content, as well as what you said about what you did, with our Lord the protected by God—may his noble actions endure—for the comfort of the weak and the poor, and to raise truth and make falsehood vanish. God be praised for that, this is what I wanted. I am assured that your mediation is for the best, that you are the guardian of the Sultan’s honor, and that you are not coveting the properties of the people. Of this I have become truly convinced myself from what has happened between us since the time of Muḥammad Rāyif Bāšā until this very day, even if you were not mediating for me [at that time, when] I was put on the spot and put to shame in front of the Administration of Finance without any reason. And those who took charge after him did even worse to me. That is why I was blamed [for a crime I had not committed], whereas I am a devoted and upright servant, and I don’t need to be guided in the performance of my duties. In short, here is our Sovereign who came—let’s hope—for the good of the ʿamāla (governorate) and here you are, [his] nāḏ̣ir (superintendent). As for me, evaluate me and test me, on one condition: if it appears that, among all the tasks I can accomplish, I have failed to achieve the assigned one, and if I am summoned, first, it will be by our eminent Sovereign and he will treat me according to my abilities; second, let me choose by myself and, if it appears evident to me that he is sincere [in blaming me], I will start again without being asked to. And when you say that I did not write any letter to you except this correspondence… God’s human creatures have the key of hearts. We ask God—be He praised—to bring ease to the Muslims with your arrival, to allow you to ignore what the enviers and those who spread disturbance say, and may He make your mediation good and successful. Here we are, we informed our Sovereign about how things appear to us. The bearer of this letter, Mīlād son of the ḥājj Saʿīd, will inform you [in more detail] verbally about what I think. Farewell.

4The servant of the Porte Ġūma b. Ḫalīfa

5N.B. The translation of the passage from ‘As for… ’ until ‘… the key of hearts’ is purely tentative.

Commentary

61. In this Turkish term, the suffix(-lü) must initially have been written by mistake, and then left uncrossed out.

7² هيلي is an equivalent of

8. Notice the very unusual word order. The elegant turn of phrasewas likely meant here.

9⁴. MA qara / colloquial qre (cf. Classical qaraʾa), a C₃ = Y verb.

10⁵. Colloquial form of the 1pl imperfect. Notice also the ʾalif al-wiqāya.

11⁶. Colloquial negative turn (lā + bound 2ms pronoun) ‘you are not… ’. The negation is probably stronger than mā-k; for Takrūna in Tunisia, see Marçais and Guîga (1958–1961, 3571).

12⁷. Mafʿūl muṭlaq of. This turn of phrase is not frequently used in MA. Another example is

13⁸Two ʾalifs ( ا ا ) denoting ʾa (as well as aʾ and āʾ) is common in late MA orthography; see examples in Lentin (1997, 111– 12), e.g.,liʾannahum.

14⁹The initial prosthetic ʾalif indicates here that the initial syllable begins CC- (Mḥammad). Cf. text II.19, no. 15.

15¹⁰. For the meaning, compare form II hazzaba in Dozy (1881, II: 756). Corriente (1997, 549) offers another meaning: ‘to dumbfound’ for form V tahazzaba.

16¹¹The form لا is a form of the relative (cf. the two other examples هand).

17¹². Colloquial short form of the demonstrative.

18¹³Colloquial (prep. bi- + bound 3ms pronoun).

19¹⁴. Colloquial rāžǝl ‘man’.

20¹⁵. Colloquial 1s imperfect and colloquial ‘discontinuous’ (dimorphematic) negation ma… š.

21¹⁶Colloquial yqūdūni (cf. note to ln. 6 above); cf. also.

22¹⁷ هاه . Colloquial deictic particle hā- + bound 3ms pronoun -hu.

23¹⁸. The plural agreement of the pronouns ( مهـ ) with the feminine singular noun همدخ is rather uncommon.

24¹⁹elya (and ايل leya below). Colloquial conditional conjunction ‘if’.

25²⁰nda (cf. note to ln. 6 above). Cf. Classical nidāʾ (Boris 1958, 606^ǝnde).

26²¹. The mascudemonstrativewith the feminine nounis quite unexpected. But one should note thatis written here with ʾalif after the hāʾ, whereas its other occurrences in the text read اذه . Hence one could think here of another example of ا ا noting ʾa (see note to ln. 8 above) and readذاه (with the short form of the demonstrative, cf. note to ln. 12). This hypothesis cannot be verified since there is no facsimile reproduction of the manuscript in the edition.

27²². Probably, with ġ > q, as is common in several Maghrebi Bedouin dialects. For the meaning, cf. Boris (1958, 557): lġe ʿala ‘to abandon, not take care of anymore, to give up, to stop talking to’.

28²³=. With s > ṣ (in the vicinity of ṭ); but see above

29²⁴ Colloquialha/āwēn is a kind of presentative particle. The variantoccurs in another letter of Ġūma al-Maḥmūdī (Waṯāʾiq ʿan tārīẖ Lībiyā… p. 244):‘Here he is coming to you’. Nowadays in Tripoli, hāwēn- is used only with a suffixed 3rd-person pronoun (-a, -ha, -hum) or with the frozen 3ms pronoun -a: hāwēna.¹

30²⁵=.