ABSTRACT
The wind was howling like the plague. Thunder and lightning barracked and briefly illuminated the distress of a ship against black storm clouds as, rudderless and with topsail gone, it yawed towards the treacherous coast of Northern Lancashire. Abandoning the dire spectacle of the wreck, Sheikh Zoubeir struggled to the shore where he hoped to die at least a dry death. The ship had been in flight non-stop since it left Tunis only a few days
before, pursued by Barbary pirates up the coast of Portugal until it was caught in a vicious storm blowing from the West across the Atlantic. There was no turning back, just a line of flight born on icy winds towards the Gothic wastes of Northern Europe. In Tunis, Sheikh Zoubeir had been usurped by his brother as the head
of the Arab resistance against the Ottomans who had finally seized control of the city in 1575. Zoubeir was renowned for his erudition and his passion for poetry. His Arab heritage went way beyond the austerities of Islam, being steeped in the poetry of the nomadic Arab tribes that ‘maintained a tradition of chivalrous valour in which violence was combined with prodigality, and love with poetry’ (Bataille 1988: 90-91). Such sublime poetry, as it headed North, provided the basis for the Troubadour tradition in Spain and Southern France, and ultimately the development of courtly love in Europe, which until about the twelfth century had little or no recognizable modern poetry outside of religious liturgy and bardic narrative. Zoubeir’s depth of Arab and Islamic learning was nourished and enhanced by his passion for the classics of the Roman era, for Ovid, Virgil and Plutarch in particular. Frustrated by the amount of time Zoubeir spent on the ‘liberal arts’ in place of pursuing his jihad against the Turks, Zoubeir’s brother staged an uprising in their camp in Sidi Bou Said, a few miles outside the city of Tunis. Defeated and bloodied, Zoubeir was
allowed a ship and a small crew, and sent into exile. Now his ship, his crew and his books were gone, drowned in the Irish Sea. Washed up on the freezing, muddy sands of Morecambe Bay, Sheikh
Zoubeir would often reflect on this, the lowest point of his life. As Stephen Greenblatt writes:
Again and again in his plays, an unforeseen catastrophe – one of his favourite manifestations of it is a shipwreck – suddenly turns … smooth sailing into disaster, terror, and loss. The loss is obviously and immediately material, but it is also and more crushingly a loss of identity. To wind up on an unknown shore, without one’s friends, habitual associates, familiar network – this catastrophe is often epitomized by the deliberate alteration or disappearance of the name and, with it, the alteration or disappearance of social status … all of its conventional signs having been swept away by the wild waves.
