The City of Brass is a weird one, for sure, lessfrom the perspective of modern Western readers than by comparison with the usual plot structure of the stories in alf layla wa layla. If you’re not familiar, the plot goes like this: the Caliph sends an expedition to a magic abandoned city he’s heard about. The expedition finds the city (made of brass, natch), then manages to get inside after overcoming a bunch of obstacles (including, notably, a shaytanic illusion that makes people think they’re jumping into an ocean when actually they’re plunging onto solid ground). There’s lots of treasure to be had, but one man – the Caliph’s vizeer, often a sinister figure in these stories – goes too far: he tries to take clothing from the preserved corpse of the city’s former queen, and gets his head chopped off by her zombie/automaton servants. The surviving expedition members grab their haul and head home.
There’s plenty of surreal stuff going on in the City of Brass, but we still experience a frisson of recognition at what’s basically an Indiana Jones movie waiting to be filmed. On the other hand, what’s it doing in a collection of stories that’s mostly about improbable solutions to serious problems? The plot of a normal story in alf layla is mostly about setting up a seemingly inescapable situation which the hero will nonetheless manage to escape. That’s a way of creating the suspense that’s keeping Shaharazad alive.
The story of the City of Brass, by contrast, is descriptive and meditative, slow and basically plotless: by far the bulk of the text gets taken up by pious poetry, ou sont les nieges d’antan-type reflections, and ecphrasis of the various treasures that the explorers find there. One can imagine these details as elements in a virtuouso oral performance, but that performance would be of a very different type than the ones that make up the rest of the alf layla.
You get some interesting suggestions about this from scholars. For instance, is the City of Brass a neo-Platonic allegory? Maybe, but that kind of claim is by its nature hard to prove. More verifiable are the generic links between the City of Brass and certain episodes in the qass tradition of popular folkloric expansion on narratives from the Qur’an. Qass recitals about the ruined cities of ‘Ad, Thamud, and especially Iram al-‘Imad feature similar ecphrases and similar pious meditations; the motif of the trap that catches a greedy explorer is also a commonplace. By abstracting those motifs from their Qur’anic frame and resituating them in the narrative world of the Caliphate, the story of the City of Brass creates a new kind of narrative – historical fiction that verges on sci-fi. But the germ of that narrative is still, unavoidably, Islamic civilization’s relationship with a pre-Islamic past.
The qass narratives on the pattern of which the City of Brass gets built are themselves expansions of Qur’anic pericopes about tribes destroyed by Allah whose houses remain as a sign to later generations. The sira and hadith show Muhammad attributing a kind of accursed quality to such ruins, which Muslims are encouraged to avoid. Yet the buildings themselves (vide the tombs at Mada’in Salih, a site associated with Thamud in the Islamic tradition) have a monumental appeal that, as the qass tradition attests, is hard to deny. Can good Muslims take anything from those monuments without falling victim to their curse?
Narratives like the City of Brass offer a reassuring answer to that question. Piety (as embodied in this story by the Sheikh ‘Abd as-Samad) can protect you against the seductive menace of ancient cities, and you can steal a lot of treasure as long as you don’t (like the vizeer) go beyond the bounds of decency. Alongside those material rewards comes an intellectual harvest, a vast cache of poetry (revealingly said to have been written in Greek) that instructs you about the transience of worldly things.
A more threatening version of the same basic story pattern would be the preface to the pseudo-Aristotelian Sir al-Asrar, a book of political and medical advice interspersed with a few magic recipes. There the “translator” of the book (again said to have been written in Greek) tells us how he swindled it out of a Christian monk living in a ruined building. We need to look for esoteric meanings, he says: the true meaning of the book would destroy the world if it were widely understood, so it needs to be hidden in code. We’re now far from conventional Islamic piety.
In both narratives, ruins share an enchanted quality which (outside of Indiana Jones movies) they’ve basically lost for us. Is modern archaeology to blame, with its relentlessly informational focus? Or are we actually losing in general the idea that the past can be interesting (not to mention dangerous?)