The Truth within a Circle: A Muḥabbaẓūna’s Play and Its Revival by Alfred Faraǧ

During his travels in Egypt, Edward William Lane attended “a low and ridiculous farce,” he reports, performed by the muḥabbaẓūna, before Muḥammad ʿAlī Bāšā. Lane described its plot and concluded that the farce was played before the Pasha to open his eyes to the conduct of the tax collectors. When recounting farces in the Ottoman Empire, some travellers and critics confirm the narrative of ridiculous and low shows, while others underline their social critique. In 1979, inspired by Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Faraǧ rehabilitates the show in Dāʾirat al-tibn al-miṣriyya, masraḥiyyat al-muḥabbaẓīna (The Egyptian Hay Circle, a Play by the Muḥabbaẓūna). Comparing different descriptions of the muḥabbaẓūna and Faraǧ’s interpretation of their play, this paper provides reflections on the social aim of performances using the circle as an ephemeral division of fiction from reality and highlights how the muḥabbaẓūna could deliver political comments both to the common people and to the elites.

“The old battle is to be fought again”: Reginald Stuart Poole, Edward William Lane, and the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Genesis-Geology Debate

In 1856 a small octavo volume with the title Genesis of the Earth and of Man was anonymously published. It argued for the existence of preadamites as a solution to the mid-Victorian debate about the veracity of the biblical account of creation in the light of geological discoveries, and as such it was widely read and commented. This essay examines the author's main theses, places it in the scholarly tradition of Biblical chronology, and analyzes it in the context of mid-nineteenth-century apologetic literature. It also surveys the contemporary reaction to the book and discusses the possibility that the book was written by the orientalist Edward William Lane.