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• الحكاية على ألسنة البهائم

Neither the classical nor premodern Arabic language has a single term to denote the literary genre “fable” that is widely known in the European literatures since antiquity. Studies of the relevant genre in premodern Arabic literature mainly adopted the modern Western definition of the beast fable. Even the few existing comprehensive studies, such as those by Carl Brockelmann, Iḥsān ʿAbbās, or Robert Irwin, did not attempt to define the Arabic genre in relation to its dominantly perceived Western sibling. The present analysis and definition rely on a pragmatic bottom-up approach premised on the hypothesis that tales featuring speaking animals in premodern Arabic literature resemble the fables of the Graeco-Latin tradition in their central features. It focuses on the anonymous narratives featuring speaking animals scattered as single items or in small clusters or specific chapters in a large variety of different works of premodern Arabic literature. The presently identified corpus consists of about 160 items in a total of more than 1,000 individual attestations. The analysis of the corpus leads to a detailed definition of the Arabic fable, identified as a narrative (ḥikāya, ḥadīth, nādira, ramz) in which speaking beasts/animals (ʿalā alsinat/alsun/lisān al-bahāʾim/al-ḥayawān or equivalent) feature as protagonists. This definition is both more exclusive and more inclusive than that of its sibling genre in the Graeco-Latin tradition. On the one hand, the Arabic genre is predominantly an animal tale excluding narratives that prominently feature human beings; on the other hand, the genre also includes short linguistic exercises that lack a narrative dimension.