One day, the mouse whispered something in my ear, her voice pitched high and delicate. I leaned in to listen carefully. She was saying: We know a lot. I asked: How so? The mouse replied: Don’t you know? For centuries, we mice have been struggling with our eternal fear, seeking ways to overcome it. This fear has run through our lineage since time immemorial, and our battle against the law of fear became essential, passed down through generations. We know why the dinosaurs went extinct, understand the psychology of cat owners, and comprehend how mouse poison can affect our bodies. We study such things and carefully read the books of our predecessors. Then her voice faded and I could no longer follow.

When we quote, we bring voices into relation: a voice speaks through another’s voice, like the mouse’s voice through mine, or her predecessors through hers. Quoting is an asymmetrical intimacy—one voice temporarily inhabits another, creating an uneven relationship where past and present, speaker and spoken, merge in complex ways—perhaps to summon what has been rendered absent or to push back against a dominant voice. Quotation becomes then a landscape of borrowing and lending voices: some of these voices are dead, some alive; some human, others nonhuman, or those dehumanised. This fragmentary ensemble of voices makes claims on the present, demanding aesthetic and political consideration.

The mouse told me that her name was Nosa, and she spoke in Arabic. I first met her in an 8th-century Arabic book of fables called Kalīlah and Dimnah, where animals speak and humans listen. I turned to this book during the bleak aftermath of the Arab Spring, as counter-revolutionary forces seized power. Words felt both insufficient and dangerous—either there was nothing left to say, or saying it could be too risky. The experience of fear and risk made Nosa and me friends. She visited often, sharing their plans to conquer fear. Once, she told me about a clever plan to widen their burrows slightly, luring cats inside. Since the entrance was barely suitable for a cat’s frame, one cat became stuck, and the mice began their attack. I tried to listen carefully, but Nosa’s voice faded again. Suddenly, I heard her cry: It didn’t work out! But our struggle continues.

My encounter with Nosa led me to reflect on the nature of voice and quotation in Arabic literary tradition. In Kalīlah and Dimnah, fables unfold from within each other, like the stories of One Thousand and One Nights. Each fable exists within another fable, voice within voice. Interestingly, these voices weren’t marked by quotation marks. For centuries, Arabic script didn’t use quotation marks. Quoted fragments flowed in the text stream without formal distinction. Only after the Arabic Nahda (Renaissance) and the spread of printed journalism in the second half of the nineteenth century did quotation marks become necessary. Ahmed Zaki Pasha, a key figure of the modern Nahda, wrote a book in 1912 in Cairo about punctuation rules, titled Punctuation and its Signs in the Arabic Language. He adapted punctuation from both Arabic and European conventions, noting that “when Arabic printing appeared, the situation became more problematic and complicated. Most books in our hands appear muddled by writing from beginning to end, offering no respite for the eye or tongue.”

In the era of industrial printing, script needed modification to remove ambiguities and clarify boundaries. One sign Zaki introduced was what he called “the Tadbib marks (علامات التضبيب),” roughly meaning “the chaining marks,” essentially modern quotation marks, used to enclose “sentences and phrases quoted verbatim.” The name derives from “dabba (ضبّة)”, meaning lock, a term from Hadith studies used to distinguish the Prophet’s words from those of narrators. Meeting Nosa “unchained” in Kalilah and Dimnah might not have been possible in modern Arabic, where subjects can only speak individually through quotation marks. 

Ironically, when Arabic writing sought to distinguish quoted text to reduce ambiguity, it chose a mark that—in history’s cunning twist—actually indicated confusion. One of the uses of the Tadbib mark by copyists, left unmentioned by Zaki, was to mark text whose meaning they doubted, despite being certain of its accurate transmission, or passages requiring further research. Thus, today’s marks for fixed and accurate meaning originated from marks once used to denote ambiguity. In other words, the term Tadbib carries a productive tension: while it suggests the constraining action of a lock—fixing meaning and attributing speech—it simultaneously implies openness and revising. Tadbib doesn’t only stabilise what is between quotation marks, but also opens a way to question and review what we thought was settled. This dual nature of quotation, as both constraint and questioning, reflects the complex way voices interact in classical Arabic literary tradition, especially in works like Kalīlah and Dimnah where voices flow into one another.

Imagine Kalīlah and Dimnah, or other classical texts rich with quotations, written with modern punctuation marks. It would likely have resembled an intricate forest of crescents and semicircles, as stories and voices intertwine and flow though one another, ventriloquising one another. Luckily this is not the case. This interweaving of voices in Arabic calligraphy isn’t merely formal—it suggests something profound about the nature of writing that remains relevant today. The fables in Kalīlah and Dimnah are the voices of dominated animals striving to undermine their domination. And if fables, as a literary genre, relies on an unmarked abundance of quotations, then perhaps their ancient wisdom suggests a contemporary truth: writing opens a voice within another voice, re-shaping reality as something quotable—something that can be shifted and questioned. To challenge domination, a writer should quote, in both senses of the word: not just lending voices from existing sources, but also borrowing voices from what is barely audible within that reality.

It’s no coincidence that Kalīlah and Dimnah is a translated book, more precisely part of a chain of translation: from Sanskrit to Persian to Arabic. The scholar Abdullah Ibn Al-Muqaffa translated the fables into Arabic in the 8th century, during a time of social and political upheaval when many were fighting against both segregation and religious orthodoxy. Through translation, the book becomes a “tongue in a tongue.” Translation itself mirrors the complexity of quotation. If quotation lends voice to a text, conjuring it into another voice, then translation also lends voices to an original, to an Other. Translated works speak through layered voices—the authors, translators, characters, eras, and more. In the same way, quotations within texts act as translations, or translators, speaking in different tongues while still understanding each other. Reading, then, becomes an act of carefully listening to an ensemble of voices speaking through each other. This is, perhaps, what it means to listen to animals speaking, especially in times of political oppression.

Originally, Kalīlah and Dimnah was a series of fables recited by the Indian philosopher Bidapa to Dabshalim, the unjust ruler. Through these stories, Bidapa attempted to reeducate the cruel king and try to protect his suffering subjects. The book presents an ensemble of animal stories that illuminate the possibilities of collectivity through storytelling. One could say that the structure of Kalīlah and Dimnah emerges as three-dimensional chaining, where fables don’t simply align side by side, but spring forth from within each other. Here, quoting becomes more than mere citation; it sustains a living tradition and a dynamic history of knowledge. This knowledge isn’t accumulated for its own sake, but serves to conquer fear: the fear that Nosa and her fellow mice carry in their bodies and all fear that hinders historical liberation. In this way, quotation in this book reveals itself as a profound meditation on solidarity, where voices borrow and lend themselves to each other. Through this exchange, what might seem like textual ambiguity and interconnection transform into powerful tools for collective transformation.

* Kalīlah and Dimnah, Fables of Virtue and Vice, Translated by: Michael Fishbein and James E. Montgomery, Published by: NYU Press, 2022. 

** Ahmad Zaki, The Punctuation Signs in Arabic, Al-Ma’arif Publisher, 1912 (a digital copy is provided by Hindawi Foundation: https://www.hindawi.org/books/82047270/).

*** For more information on Tadbib: Yaqut Al-Hamawy - Mujam Al-odaba and Alqadi Aiad - Al-Ilma Ina Ma'rifat Asol Al-riwaya wa Taqieed Al-Sama'a.