“The measure of your [thinking] is to me unknown:” Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq’s Comparative Epistemology in “Maqāmah on Chapter Thirteen”

Abstract

Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq (1804/5–1887) was an unusual Arab renaissance figure whose work spanned travel and fictional writing, Bible criticism and translations, Arabic lexicography, poetry, philology, and grammar. His intellectual and professional life involved working with several languages, including Arabic, English, French, Hebrew, Syriac, Latin, and Maltese. He lived a life marked by political upheavals and intellectual polemics, prompting his multiple conversions across Maronite Christianity, Protestantism, and Islam. Although his work has received scholarly attention for its comparisons of Mediterranean and European societies, his own understanding of comparative practice remains understudied. This article seeks to reconstruct al-Shidyāq’s comparative epistemology by examining his fictional and non-fictional writings. It argues that his critique of the limits of comparison, and of analogical reasoning as they were practiced in the nineteenth century, emerged from a critical, anti-institutional stance toward three communities that marginalized embodied experience as a site of knowledge: the clergy in Lebanon, British orientalist philologists and translators, and American missionary translators. This article first situates al-Shidyāq’s work within nineteenth-century comparative thought and practice. It then combines close textual analysis with insights from translation and embodiment studies, cultural history, and the history of science and ideas to reconstruct al-Shidyāq’s distinct comparative method. A micro-analysis of al-Shidyāq’s first maqāmah will demonstrate how his comparative practice is ethically grounded in the dynamic interplay between formal and harmonic analogies.