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Personnages historiques dans la Sîrat 'Antar, une temporalité originale: le cas d’Alexandre le Grand

par Decharneux, Julien
Editeur scientifique Le Blanc, Claudine;Martin, Jean-Pierre
Référence La temporalité dans les épopées : structuration, fonctions et modes d’expression(2016: Paris), Les Temps épiques, Structuration, modes d’expression et fonction de la temporalité dans l’épopée, Publications numériques du REARE
Publication Publié, 2018-11-15

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Résumé :

This article discusses the occurrences of the figure of Alexander the Great in the Sīrat ʿAntar, one of the most famous medieval Arabian epics. This epic, which belongs to the popular genre of the siyar šaʿbiyya (popular epics), relates the life (sīra) of the famous preislamic black poet and warrior ʿAntara bin Šaddād. Although the text often has the hero interact with famous Arab and non-Arab historical figures in order to confer upon the text a pseudo-historical tone, the references to Alexander the Great in the text appear to serve a slightly different purpose. Alexander plays a very minor role in the Sīrat ʿAntar – he does not even interact with the hero but is only referred to. However, these references made to the Macedonian king, although insignificant for the narrative itself, give us a glimpse at the very temporality wherein the epic is intended to unfold.Quite interestingly, there existed in medieval times an Arabic epic concerning the life of Alexander the Great, the Sīrat al-Iskandar. In this text, Alexander is presented as a Prophet travelling around the world to convert peoples to monotheism. This article shows that the Alexander to which the Sīrat ʿAntar refers is precisely this Alexander, prophet and king, depicted in the Sīrat al-Iskandar. In mentioning Alexander’s name in the text, we argue that the storyteller aims at establishing a kind of prophetic typology between ʿAntar and Alexander, in order to confer upon the former a sacred dimension.The study of the mentions of Alexander the Great in the Sīrat ʿAntar therefore contributes to the reassessment of the status bestowed upon Arabic popular epics in medieval times. It also suggests that the different Arabic epics interact and complete each other to a significant extent, a phenomenon that remains ill-studied in modern scholarship.