10 - The Martyrdom of the Seven Sleepers in Transformation: From Syriac Christianity to the Qur’ān and to the Dutch-Iranian Writer Kader Abdolah

Summary

Abstract

Marcel Poorthuis discusses the radical re-interpretation of the story about seven boys who fall asleep for several centuries in a cave during the persecution by Emperor Decius. They refused to burn incense before ‘idols made by hands’ and fled into a cave, where God took their spirits and brought them to heaven. The story has been associated with martyrdom and has pre-Christian forerunners but it was transmitted in a Syriac-Christian version by Jacob of Serugh (451-521 CE). The Qur’ān recycles this story, but its thrust is wholly different. Ironically, the story in Sura 18 has been transformed into an anti-Christian polemic. This story in turn has been re-created in the novel My Father's Notebook (Spijkerschrift) by the Iranian-Dutch writer Kader Abdollah (translated in English as My Father's Notebook, 2006). The story symbolises the future return of happiness and beauty for the people, persecuted both under the Shah and under Khomeini.

Keywords: the story of Seven Sleepers, Contestation, Persecution, Sacrifice and Heroism, Contemporary Literary Representations

The folkloristic theme of people who sleep long enough to relate stories about times gone by can be traced in many cultures. There is the tale of someone who on a summer evening meets a story-teller under a mulberry tree and decides to go home after hearing some beautiful stories, only to discover that some sixty years have passed. This is just one intriguing example. Another no less intriguing story deals with people in a cave. In Jewish and Christian stories from Antiquity a cave may indicate different motifs, from a sacred place to a burial site, from a place to hide from persecution to a place for contemplation. Sometimes it is difficult to make out which motif is dominant. This holds good for the story of the Men in the Cave as well, of which the Christian and the Islamic version are the best known. Whereas in these two versions persecution is a central motif, in Greek pre-Christian predecessors of this story this motif is generally lacking. This means that in spite of the interesting vistas which an analysis of the Vorlage of the Christian story may yield, the kernel of the story would remain unexplored. Searching for the origin of a story – an ideal in historic-critical research – does not always offer complete insight into a story.