Leg over Leg recounts the existence, from delivery to heart age, of “the Fariyaq,” modify ego of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, a pivotal determine within the highbrow and literary heritage of the fashionable Arab international. The continually edifying and infrequently 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 understanding and corruption of the Lebanese non secular and secular institutions, freedom of moral sense, women’s rights, sexual relationships among women and men, the manners and customs of Europeans and heart Easterners, and the diversities among modern ecu and Arabic literatures, the entire whereas celebrating the genius and sweetness of the classical Arabic language.

Volumes One and stick to the hapless Fariyaq via his early life and early schooling, his misadventures one of the priests of Mount Lebanon, his flight to the Egypt of Muhammad 'Ali, and his next employment with the first Arabic day-by-day newspaper—during which era he suffers a few ailments that parallel his growth within the sciences of Arabic grammar, and engages in a laugh digressions at the desk manners of the Druze, younger love, snow, and the scandals of the early papacy. this primary publication additionally sees the list—of destinations in Hell, kinds 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 distinctive and unclassifiable. It was once at the start broadly condemned for its assaults on authority, its spiritual skepticism, and its “obscenity,” and later variants have been frequently abridged. this can be the 1st entire English translation of this groundbreaking work.