In 1893, M. Urbain Bouriant, then Director of the French Archaeological Mission in Cairo, published a volume entitled Chansons Populaires Arabes en dialecte du Caire d'après les manuscrits d'un chanteur des rues. The book consists of 160 pages of carefully edited and very well printed texts, with no comment or study of any kind. A note from the publisher, however, refers to the ‘stroke of good fortune’ that brought the manuscripts into M. Bouriant's hands and announces that the selection presented then was only a forerunner of a translation and study to appear later. Sadly, M. Bouriant was struck down by ill-health in 1895, and as far as I have been able to ascertain never fulfilled his intention of following up on a very promising beginning.

More recently, Muḥammad Qandīl al-Baqlī has published a volume which, though he makes reference in it to a ‘booklet’ by Bouriant, he claims to be the result of painstaking independent research and a careful confrontation of texts. The truth is, however, that al-Baqlī has drawn solely on Bouriant's material, which he reproduces almost in its entirety, even to incorporating the Frenchman's conjectural emendations. And without mentioning that this material came from the hands of a street singer (indeed, he speaks vaguely of sources accessible only to the wellinformed), he builds round it what he claims is a survey of ‘dervish’ literature.