ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Andrea Camilleri’s The Terracotta Dog (Il cane di terracotta, 1996) is compared to its source inspiration: The People of the Cave (Ahl al-kahf, 1933) by Tawfik al-Hakim [Tawfīq Al-Hakīm]. Unknown to Camilleri, however, al-Hakim had also written a hugely popular detective novel earlier in the century: Diary of a County Prosecutor (Yawmiyyāt nā’ib fi-l aryāf, 1937). A memoir of his police work in the countryside, al-Hakim’s novella bears uncanny resemblances to Camilleri’s detective novel. Combined together the three works shed light on the practices of adaptation and inspiration across the southern and northern cultures of the Mediterranean, and question the intricate links between areas of the “global south”. Such links are topological, that is, even when unintended, are still ruled by probability. The central question posed here is: how can we refer to the affiliative relation between the two works, the Diaries and Terracotta Dog (which have no direct adaptational link, but share great resemblance), while bringing to bear on this discussion the relation between the Terracotta Dog and Sleepers (which share a direct adaptational link but bear little resemblance)? One answer is the classical Arabic artistic device of iqtibas [iqtibās]: literally, “to light one’s fire from another”, a process which can range from highway plagiarism to sacred quotation, but which ultimately reflects the artist’s intentional selection of textual precedents and the attempt to write him or herself into a wider textual tradition, and, from there, to claim a wider political affiliation.
