By Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq
Leg over Leg recounts the existence, from start to heart age, of “the Fariyaq,” regulate ego of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, a pivotal determine within the highbrow and literary historical past of the trendy Arab international. The consistently edifying and sometimes hilarious adventures of the Fariyaq, as he strikes from his local Lebanon to Egypt, Malta, Tunis, England, and France, give you the writer with grist for wide-ranging discussions of the highbrow and social problems with his time, together with the lack of knowledge and corruption of the Lebanese spiritual and secular institutions, freedom of moral sense, women’s rights, sexual relationships among women and men, the manners and customs of Europeans and center Easterners, and the variations among modern ecu and Arabic literatures, all of the whereas celebrating the genius and wonder of the classical Arabic language.
Volumes One and stick to the hapless Fariyaq via his formative years and early schooling, his misadventures one of the clergymen of Mount Lebanon, his flight to the Egypt of Muhammad 'Ali, and his next employment with the 1st Arabic day-by-day newspaper—during which period he suffers a couple of illnesses that parallel his growth within the sciences of Arabic grammar, and engages in fun digressions at the desk manners of the Druze, younger love, snow, and the scandals of the early papacy. this primary booklet additionally sees the list—of destinations in Hell, sorts of medieval glue, tools of torture, stars and pre-Islamic idols—come into its personal as a signature machine of the work.
Akin to Sterne and Rabelais in his satirical outlook and technical inventiveness, al-Shidyaq produced in Leg Over Leg a piece that's distinct and unclassifiable. It used to be before everything generally condemned for its assaults on authority, its non secular skepticism, and its “obscenity,” and later variations have been frequently abridged. this can be the 1st whole English translation of this groundbreaking paintings.