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Annon: Kitab Qissat al-muqaddam Ali al Zaybaq

(Romance of Ali al-Zaibaq) (15th)

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Taken from: The Arabian Epic: Volume 1and 3, Introduction: Heroic and Oral Story-telling By M. C. Lyons.

Ali al-Zaybaq is the protagonist of an Arabic popular story (Qissat [or Sirat] Ali al-Zaybaq, The story of Mercury Ali) that dates from the Mamluk era. Ali is one of several prominent characters in the narrative, others being Ahmad al-Danaf (Ahmad the Plague) and the female trickster Dalila al-Muhtala (Dalila the Crafty). Supposedly set in early Abbasid times, the narrative is episodic in structure and focuses on the many adventures and stratagems of its heroes, who are rogues (ayyarun) and ruffians (zu’r), leaders of the mediaeval Arabic criminal underworlds of Cairo and Baghdad…

The story is unique in that the hero cycle is transferred in a different class and context. In place of kings and warriors there are police chiefs and rogues; heroic struggle is replaced by contests of trickery….

When the narrative abandons its urban alleys and markets, it moves to the land of the jinn in the Mountains of the Moon (which are mentioned twice in the epic).

This is the only epic except for  Sirat Sayf ibn Dhi-Yazan (15th) to mention these mountains.

Ali….. is challenged to perform a number of tasks, during one of which he rescues the jinn princess, Saisaban…. The grateful princess takes him to visit her father, the White King of the Jinn, in the Mountains of the Moon, where she tells him to ask for the robe of Dummar ibn Sayf. He is then seized by a Magian (1) marid (2), who tells him not to mention the name of God, and he is saved from execution by the White King’s rival, the Red King, on the advice of a crypto-Muslim vizier. He is then rescued, given Dummar’s robe, and returned to Cairo.