Elsewhere Lies Its Meaning: The Vagaries of Kalīla and Dimna’s Reception

Abstract

alīla and Dimna was translated from Pahlavi into Arabic in the 8th century AD by Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, and it became an influential text in numerous literary cultures. Copyists in the Arabic manuscript tradition acted as coauthors, changing the text in ways both large and small. The modern scholarly tradition tends to see Kalīla and Dimna as part of a Fürstenspiegel genre or as an example of animal fables. What these categorizations overlook is the variegated medieval reception of the text, which was more multifaceted than is generally appreciated. The unruliness of the text's reception is the theme of this article, which explores the ways in which medieval readers categorized and reinterpreted Kalīla and Dimna over centuries, with special attention to Ibn al-Habbāriyya's late 11th-century dramatization of the divergent interpretations of Kalīla and Dimna. The article reveals that the interpreters of this text reconfigured its generic affiliation, making it a Quranic competitor, a repository of proverbs, an allegory for the soul, a source of law, and a model for storytelling that imparts practical wisdom.