³⁰

1.1.1

Gently! Hush! Silence! Quiet! Cock an ear! Listen up! Hold your tongue! Quit talking! Hear! Hark! Hearken! — and know that I embarked upon the composition of this four-book opuscule of mine during wearing, grinding nights that had me praying to God standing and seated, until finally I found no further impediment to stop the faucet of my thoughts from emptying like rain clouds into the drainpipe of my pen and onto the surfaces of these pages; and that when I found the pen obedient to my fingertips and the inkpot to the pen, I said to myself, “There can be no harm to my following in the footsteps of that company of men who have rendered their reputations white by covering pages in black, for if they did well, then I too may be considered to have done well, and if they did badly, it may be that one more book is needed to add to their efforts, in which case my book, at least, may be described as perfect, for whatever has perfected something else must be capable itself of being perfect.” Taking this as my starting point, I never paused in the pursuit of my goal and felt no compunction in consigning to it all such words attractive and fascinating and figures admirable and scintillating as bring pleasure to the ear and to the constitution cheer; this, despite knowing that scarce an author can please everyone.

1.1.2

I picture myself, then, as one confronted by some picky fault-finder who says to himself, or to another, “If the author had put his talent to work to compose a book that was of some use, he’d deserve to be praised for it; but it seems to me he has wasted his time for nothing by mentioning on some occasions things that should not be mentioned and on others things that yield no benefit.” My reply to the first point is “How many a pot has called the kettle black!”³¹ and “You’ve made a bad business worse!”³² and “Make the most of what you’re given!”³³ and “So what are you going to do about it?!”³⁴ and “Mind your own business!” and “The accepting eye to every fault is blind!” while to the second it is to point out that one who limps (a) should go easy on himself, (b) shouldn’t try to climb mountains, (c) should tend to his own limp before anyone else’s, and (d) shouldn’t call attention to his limping;³⁵ or as though confronted by someone else who says, “Another of Khurāfah’s tales, Umm ʿAmr!”³⁶—to which I reply, “Many a true word has been spoken by the less than perfect!”

1.1.3

Next, I am confronted by a mighty crowd of priests, abbots, and monks, bequeathers of pious bequests, churchwardens, and sacristans, board-beaters,³⁷ patriarchs, and hegumens, before whom goes the Great Catholicos³⁸ with, before him, the Supreme Pontiff,³⁹ all of them clamoring and havering, mooing and snorting, raging and roaring, shouting and shrieking, fuming and furious, threatening and fulminating, complaining and calumniating, venting, ventilating, and hyperventilating, yelling and gasping, praying and spittle-spraying, thus causing me to say, “Hold your horses! Hold your horses! You have spent your whole lives in the craft of exegesis, so what harm would it do if you were to explain away what it is you don’t like about my book from the get-go, making arguments, as is your wont, that whatever is malformed is in fact comely and whatever seems hideously phrased is in fact elegant? This is something Abū Nuwās made incumbent on you hundreds of years ago, when he said,

1.2.1

It was in the Fāriyāq’s nature, as is normal among the young, to imitate in dress, behavior, and speech those in his time distinguished by merit and knowledge. One day, he saw a wretched poet wearing a large round turban. The said wretched poet then being numbered among the masters, the Fāriyāq set his heart on having just such a turban, small as was his head, and he would walk along nodding under the weight of it to right and left, like a judge passing through the markets on his way home after Friday prayers saluting the people.

1.2.2

Now it happened once, when his father went to the ruler’s house, that he took him along with him, mounting him on a filly of his, while he rode a stallion. There they stayed for a number of days, on one of which the Fāriyāq got it into his head to take his filly for a gallop in the square, where the stallion was tied up to one side. He’d raced her one length of the square when his filly, passing the place where her friend was picketed, turned her head toward him as though to indicate that her dashing cavalier was unworthy to ride her past the prince’s steeds. The Fāriyāq promptly flew off and landed on his head, while the filly set off running, leaving him flat on the ground, though, had he been an expert horseman, she’d never have left him in such a state but would have waited for him to get up. He then arose, thanking God for the size of his turban, for it was that which had protected his head from receiving any of “the ten head wounds”¹²⁰ (to wit, the bloodless abrasion and the bloodless graze, the break in the skin that brings blood but does not make it flow, the one that makes the blood flow, the one that enters the flesh without reaching the periosteum, the one that reaches the periosteum, the one that cuts to the bone, the one that breaks the bone, the one that shifts the bone, the one that leaves only a thin layer of skin over the brain, and the one that cuts to the brain).

1.2.3

However, he arose, having taken a blow to his loins, and that day made the discovery that there are benefits and advantages to a large turban, and he conceived the idea that the people of his country had taken to wearing large turbans simply to protect their heads and not to beautify their faces, for a huge turban hides the good qualities of the face and makes a small face look bad, not to mention that it hurts the head and blocks the ascent of vapors from the pores, something the Great Christian Master Physician¹²¹ prescribes.

1.2.4

If it be said,¹²² “If the sole reason for adopting large turbans is to protect people’s heads, not to adorn or beautify them, how do you explain the people who wear their turbans when they go to bed at night? Are they afraid their heads will roll off their pillows and fall into a chasm inside their houses, even though their bedding is placed on the floor?” I reply, “The origin of this custom lies in the fact that the women of that land are given to wearing on their heads those ‘horns’ that they there call ṭanāṭīr.¹²³ These are made of silver or gold, and are as long as a forearm in height and as wide as a wrist. Now, if a man spends the night with his wife with nothing, or only a thin covering, on his head, he will be in danger of being bashed on his pate by her ‘horn’ and receiving from her one of the ten head wounds referred to above.”

1.2.5

If you were to insist on being argumentative and say, “What is the reason for these veritable horns? Are they placed there to remind one of the figurative horns that a man acquires when he goes against his wife’s wishes or is stingy with her or breaks off relations with her, or as a kind of adornment, or as a sign of women’s wantonness and greed, in that, when they catch the smell of riches on their husbands, they think that every inch of their bodies should be decorated and ornamented, believing as they do that, while such things should be concealed from the eyes of others, they should not be concealed from their eyes or those of their husbands (albeit there is many a difference over the matter, with some forbidding it and some taking an attitude of acquiescence), for the mere knowledge that something valuable is safely hidden away may give pleasure to its owner, just as, if a person squirrels away treasure in a concealed hoard, he may revel in it even though he cannot see it?” I would reply, “The idea that they are there to provide a reminder of the figurative horns is not to be entertained, for the women of that country maintain their honor and preserve their chastity, and especially the women of the Mountain. In addition, the husband’s cudgel, the hooked staffs of his own and his wife’s families, and the eyes of the neighbors prevent her from having the full range of marital traits ascribed to her; in the cities, on the other hand, such traits are stronger and more widespread.”

1.2.6

In origin, these “horns” were merely a device from which to suspend the face veil and, when first used, were small and short. Then they grew taller and larger as time went by and people got richer, a wife’s horns getting taller and larger the richer and better off her husband became. And this brings us to a bit of useful information that we have to mention: the word qarn (“horn”) is one that is common to all languages,¹²⁴ like ṣābūn (“soap”),¹²⁵ qiṭṭ (“cat”),¹²⁶ mazj (“mixing”),¹²⁷ and so on and has become famous among writers as a metonym for you-know-what on the part of the wife against the husband, except where Jewish writers are concerned, for in their books the horn has a positive significance, which is why you often hear in the Book of Psalms, “My horn has been exalted” and “You have exalted my horn” and “I shall butt with my horn” and so on.¹²⁸

1.2.7

Both usages contain a certain incomprehensibility and ambiguity. The incomprehensibility of the use of “horn” by non-Jewish writers as a metonym for women’s infidelity to their husbands lies in the fact that the shape of the horn does not bring to mind any specific human member and neither do its actual manifestations bring to mind any specific animal, for the ox, the mountain goat, the billy goat, and the rhinoceros all have one. Similarly, the word itself is not derived from any verb that might indicate a woman’s being unfaithful or taking a lover.¹²⁹ What, then, lies behind this usage? I have asked many married men of lengthy experience about this prickly issue, and all of them changed color on hearing my question and, embarrassed and despondent, stammered, got up, and left me. Should God, then, grant any of those who peruse this book of mine a sudden insight as to the meaning of this word, both in common usage and as a technical term, let him be so good as to respond, out of kindness and charity. As to its usage among the writers of the Jews as a metonym for high rank, power, strength, and victory, what is true of the preceding is true of that too, namely, that it is common to many animals, some of which are possessed of neither power nor might. Observe, then, how people differ with regard to a single word and a single meaning!

1.2.8

As for “turban” (ʿimāma), I believe it derives from ʿamma meaning “to embrace,” for it embraces the head. It comes in various forms, among them the spiral, the cake-shaped, the wheel-shaped, the globular, the coil-shaped, the conical, the basket-shaped, and the cup-shaped, and all of these, whatever the type, are better than the baptismal fonts that the Maronite religious leaders wear. Let them just take a look at their faces in a well-polished mirror!

1.3.1

From childhood, the Fāriyāq had felt an instinctive disposition to read and assiduously study the classical language, picking out the rare words that he came across in books, of which his father had amassed a large number in a variety of disciplines. He, that is, the Fāriyāq, was also, from his youth, wild about poetry, even before he had learned anything about the requirements of that craft; thus sometimes he would hit the mark and other times miss it. He also believed poets were the best people and poetry the most magnificent thing with which a man could occupy himself.

1.3.2

Then one day he read in some chronicle of a poet who in his youth had been stupid and artless but had grown up to excel and to shine at composing lengthy odes. The story is told of him that one day he got drunk and sat down beside a monk’s cell(1)¹³⁰ from whence he set about delivering the sermon of Abū l-ʿIbar Ṭarad Ṭabak Ṭalandī Bak Nak Yak¹³¹ from the drain.¹³² Also that one day, he wanted to scale a wall so that he could reach some dates, and he fell into an animal trap set by the owner of the orchard.¹³³ And that one day he told his mother that such and such a woman had an excellent maid who had “washed the door of her house today till it was shining black.” And that one day he caught sight of a boy who had had one of his molars removed, so he went and borrowed a dirham and told the cupper, “Take my molar out too because it doesn’t cut my food; maybe another, sharper, molar will grow in its place.”

1.3.3

And one day someone said to him, “Many stories have been recorded of your stupidity,” to which he replied, “I wish someone would read them to me so I could have a laugh!” And one day his brother fell ill and his father said to his wife, “The food he ate yesterday was bad for him,” and the poet said, “Yes, the food was bad for him and so was the maid.” “What has the maid got to do with it?” his father asked him, and he said, “Maybe she gave him something he didn’t like.” And his mother noticed blood on his clothes and asked him, “What’s that blood?” and he answered, “I fell over and my blood ran, which is for the good, for it is said, ‘If someone falls over and his blood runs, he gets well and is strengthened.’” And he cut his hand with a knife and threw it away, saying, “This knife is worthless”; his father said to him, “If it really were, it wouldn’t have cut your hand,” to which the man replied, “Everyone in the world cuts his hand, if not with a knife then with something else.”

1.3.4

And he said, “Once I saw cheese as white as tar in the market.” And someone said to him, “Why don’t you wash your hands?” He replied, “I do, but they get dirty again straight away; I can’t get them clean because my blood is dirty.” And one day he saw some men who had been crucified and he asked his mother, “Mother, if those men survive, can those who crucified them re-crucify them?” And a company of people once asked after someone’s house and he said, “I know where it is located.” “How do you know?” he was asked and he replied, “I saw the man going through the market on foot.” And one day he said, “Time moves faster between eight and nine than between six and seven.” And someone asked him, “Which do you like better, meat or fish?” and he replied, “Really, I think I like this one better.”¹³⁴

1.3.5

And his father said to him, “If you were away from us, would you be able to write us a letter?” and he replied, “Yes. I’d write it and bring it to you, too.” And he heard his father singing the praises of some silk-wool he’d bought and with which he was delighted, so the man said, “It would have been a fortunate hour if you hadn’t bought it.” And he saw his father writing a letter and said to him, “Father, can you read what you write?” and the father replied, “How could I not when I am the one who wrote it?” “For my part,” the man said, “I cannot.” And he saw that his father was upset over a bird he had lost and told him, “God bless the hour in which it flew away!” so his father said to him, “You imbecile, I’m upset at its loss.” “So why didn’t you build it a house?” responded the man. “Can one build a house for a bird?” asked the father. “All I mean,” said the man “is two sticks going from here to there.”

1.3.6

And once he described some animals he’d seen, saying, “They included a pig that was larger than me.” And he complained of a pain in his foot and said, “I wish this foot would rot away.” And his father was explaining to him the meaning of “to save” and said to him, “If someone fell into the fire, for example, and you went and pulled him out, that would be saving him,” to which the man replied, “But he would have burned up, so how could I save him? Suppose I stuck this skewer into the fire and pulled him out with it, would that be saving?” And once another was explaining to him the meaning of “to reproach” and said to him, “If someone was slow in doing something for you and you said to him, ‘Why were you so slow? Why were you so slothful?’ that would be reproaching,” and the man said, “And I’d tell him too, ‘Why did you grow large? Why did you grow small? Why did you grow short?’”¹³⁵

1.3.7

And his mother reproached him for snorting when he spoke, and he replied, “You should reproach not me but my breath.” And his father wanted to go out one day when it was raining but decided against it because of the rain, so he said to his mother, “Mother, it’s a blessing from God that we didn’t go out today, for the weather was fine.” And his mother bought him a length of cloth and when she had had it made up he said to her, “Will the color of this cloth fade?” “I don’t know,” she replied. “I hope that it does,” he said, “because it might look better.” And once in the winter, when he was wearing only a shift, his mother said to him, “Wear your robe over your shift!” and he told her, “No. It’ll make me colder.”

1.3.8

And his father reproached him for shrieking as he read out loud, and he said, “I can’t shout any louder.” And one day he couldn’t think of the meaning of the word “visit,” so his mother said to him, “If I were to go today to such and such a lady to see her, I would be visiting her.” He responded, “I deduce from this that you’re going to her to play a trick on her.”¹³⁶ And his mother said to him, “Such and such a lady who was kind to you has died,” and he was silent for a while and then said, “I have mourned for her as I would for my mother. May God send her and her husband to Heaven this minute!” And one day he told his father, “Today our teacher bought a rod to beat the children, and now they are making him angry in order to make him beat them with it till it breaks, which will be a relief to me too.”

1.3.9

And he told his mother, who had fallen sick, “If we brought you a doctor and God wasn’t willing to cure you, what would be the point of the medicine?” And on another occasion he said to her, “Use this medicine. It may make you sick.” And one day he wanted to light the fire, so he said, “I wanted to put it out but it wouldn’t go out.” And his mother told him, “Go to such and such a woman and ask her, ‘Why are you afraid of my mother? She’s a human being like you,’” so he told her, “I’m going to tell her, ‘My mother asks you, “Why will you have nothing to do with her when she’s an animal just like you?”’” And once he said of something he admired, “May God be protected from every eye!”¹³⁷ And once he was told, “So and so wants to take you to his school to teach you” and he replied, “May God send him to Heaven!” His father asked him, “Do you want to kill him?” “What should I say then?” he asked. His father replied, “Say, ‘God prolong his life!’” “He already has,” said the man. And he asked his mother, “Will you give me some of that halvah tonight?” and she said to him, “If we live to see the night.” He responded, “We’re going to live to see the morrow, so how could we not see the night?” End.

1.3.10

An intelligent person of his country came to learn of these things and said to the Fāriyāq, “It appears to me that these sayings are dumb and disturbed, or dotty and deranged, or feather-brained and feeble-minded, or confounded and befuddled, or bedazed and confused, so how could he have gone on to become a poet?” The Fāriyāq told him, “Probably he intended, with these sayings of his, to make his parents laugh, or maybe his first impulses were slow-minded but his more carefully thought-out responses quick-witted. Some people are so put off their stroke by a question that they can only answer wrongly, but if they put their brains to work when they’re on their own, they perform excellently. Or maybe his intention in doing so was to become noted and celebrated among men, if only for foolishness and folly, for most people seek fame by any means possible.

1.3.11

“Some practice the translation of books and teaching when they know nothing, despite which they derive pleasure from putting their names at the beginning of the book and stuffing it with feeble phrases and stupid statements that they make up themselves, or in having others report their sayings so that it may be said, ‘So and so said thus and such,’ the statement itself being erroneous and pointless. Others sit cross-legged at the forefront of the salon among their brethren and peers and suddenly start telling tales of far-away countries, mixing their words with a few phrases from foreign languages that they have learned. Thus they will say to them, for example, sans façon, and pardon, monsieur, and dunque, and very well to show that they have spent a lot of time touring France, Italy, and England and have learned their languages, though they are ignorant of the language in which they were brought up.

1.3.12

“Some wear large turbans like those worn by certain scholars of religion, for a large turban is supposed to indicate a large head and a large head is supposed to indicate an excellent mind and sound judgment. Some affect to imitate some nasal intonation of those who are known for the chasteness of their speech, and you find them using high-sounding terms and chewing their words inside their mouths and using words inappropriately.

1.3.13

“But, to return to your original question: the poet does not have to be sensible, or a philosopher. Many madmen were poets. Examples are Abū l-ʿIbar, Buhlūl, ʿUlayyān,¹³⁸ Ṭuways,¹³⁹ and Muzabbid.¹⁴⁰ The philosophers have stated that poetry is the first product of rapture and that the best of it is that which has its origins in rapture and amorous infatuation, which explains why the poetry of sedate scholars is always feeble.”

1.3.14

When the Fāriyāq¹⁴¹ heard this, he renounced poetry in favor of committing rare words to heart. It wasn’t long, however, before he reverted to his first nature, the reason being that his father took him with him to a certain distant village to collect the taxes imposed on its inhabitants and deliver them to the ruler’s treasury. The people of the village put his father up in grand style, and, living close to where he was staying, was a girl of surpassing beauty. Despite his tender age, the Fāriyāq began to look on her with the eyes of the star-struck paramour, according to the custom of novices in love of first falling in love with girls who are their neighbors, because they believe the goal is easily reached and because they can make use of their relationship as neighbors to plead their cause. Similarly, the girl neighbors usually sigh over their boy neighbors and wink at them as a way of signaling that there’s no need to go looking for a distant physician when the cure is close at hand. Old hands at love, however, look far afield and cruise the most distant grazing grounds, for, having made it their custom and habit to give in to every fancy of their souls, they feel it an obligation and a duty to make things difficult for themselves, and they find enormous pleasure in distancing themselves from the beloved and falling sick over her; any who opens his mouth in the hope that the fruit will fall into it can only be regarded as impotent.

1.3.15

In short, the Fāriyāq fell in love with his neighbor because he was new to the game, and she welcomed his love and gave him hope of success because she was a neighbor and because the prestige that he derived from being with his father disposed people well toward him. His stay did not last long, however, and he was compelled to return with his father. He had fallen very much in love with the girl and, when the time for separation came, he wept and mourned and heaved mighty sighs, and passion prompted him to compose a poem to express his love, one of whose verses went

1.4.1

The Fāriyāq’s father was involved in matters as difficult in point of extrication as they were uncertain in terms of outcome and implication, given their ability to set people at one another’s throats and the bad feeling between ruler and ruled that this promotes. He had a close relationship with a faction of Druze shaykhs famous for their doughtiness, valor, and generosity, whose hands, money pouches, coffers, cupboards, waist-bands,¹⁴² and houses were, however, empty. It is no secret that the world, being round in shape, favors none unless they lure it with something equally round, namely the golden dinar, without which nothing happens. To serve it, sword and pen stand to arms, while knowledge and beauty throng to service its demands. Anyone endowed with an ample physique or excellent qualities will find that tallness and talent benefit him nothing without the dinar, which, despite its small size, can bend any large and weighty ambition or care of the soul to its will. Round, well-minted faces thus submit to it when e’er it appears, tall figures are drawn to it no matter where it wanders, shining brows bend o’er it, and the sunniest of dispositions darkens when it’s lost.

1.4.2

As to what they say about the Druze being lazy and slow and about their knowing neither covenant nor compact, the truth is entirely otherwise. Their characterization as lazy is more akin to a compliment, for it springs from their moderation, abstention from dishonorable acts, and renunciation of the world. On the other hand, the most praiseworthy characteristics become indistinguishable from their opposites when men compete in making a show of them and they exceed by even a little their proper bounds. Thus, excessive clemency, for example, becomes indistinguishable from weakness, generosity from prodigality, courage from impetuosity and recklessness. Indeed, even excessive worship and religiosity become indistinguishable from obsession and insanity. This being the case, and given that the Druze are excessive in their moderation — so that you will not find any of them braving the desert wastes or setting forth upon the seas to seek their sustenance (izāʾ)(1) or aspiring to elegance in clothing or food or stooping to or becoming deeply involved in any base occupation or practicing the toilsome crafts — they are thought to be lazy and sluggish. It is also well known that as a person’s appetites and greed increase, so too do his ill health, his hard work, and his cares. Frankish merchants, for all their wealth and riches, are worse off than the peasants of our country: you find them on their feet from morning until ten at night.

1.4.3

As for the Druze knowing no agreements or covenants, this is mere slander and falsehood, for they have never been known to undertake to do something and then to break their word, unless they sensed foul play on the other’s part. Nor is it known for an emir or shaykh of theirs to see his Christian neighbor’s wife bathing one day and, finding her fair-skinned plumpness, her buttocks, and her fine silks pleasing, to send someone to flatter or abduct her. Also, as you are well aware, there are many Christians living under their patronage who have requested and received their promises of protection and who, if given the choice of abandoning their protectors in favor of having their security provided by the Christian shaykhs, would refuse. In my opinion, anyone who takes care to preserve the sanctity of the neighbor who is under his protection deserves every good thing and will not betray him in other matters. As for the factionalism and conspiracies among the Druze and other communities, these are purely political matters, some wanting this emir to rule them and some that, and they have nothing to do with religion.

1.4.4

The Fāriyāq’s father was one of those who sought to depose the emir who was, at the time, entrusted with the political affairs of the Mountain; he took the side of his enemies, who were the emir’s relatives.¹⁴³ More than once, commotions and skirmishes broke out. Then the tide turned against the emir’s enemies, and they fled to Damascus begging for aid from its governor, who gave them promises and raised their hopes. On the night of their escape, the emir’s troops attacked the Fāriyāq’s home town, so he fled with his mother to a fortified house nearby belonging to another emir. Looters took all the silver and household possessions that they found in his house, among them a tambour¹⁴⁴ that he used to play in his spare time. When these convulsions quieted down, the Fāriyāq and his mother returned to their house and found it stripped bare. A few days later, the tambour was returned to him; the person who’d stolen it, seeing no benefit in carrying it about and unable to sell it — for players of musical instruments in those parts were very few — had given it to the village priest to make amends for what he had stolen, and the priest returned it to the Fāriyāq.

1.4.5

Do I hear someone objecting here and asking, “What is the point of this banal tale?” I respond: as we said, a tambour was a very rare item on the Mountain, for composing tunes and playing musical instruments are regarded as shameful, because they induce ecstatic pleasure and amorousness and incite desire. The natives there are fanatical about religion and warn against anything capable of causing sensual pleasure. Consequently, they do not want to learn to sing or play an instrument or to use the latter in their places of worship and their prayers, as do their Frankish shaykhs,¹⁴⁵ lest this lead them into disbelief. Thus, every one of the gentle arts, such as poetry and harmony, for example, or painting, is an abomination. Could they but hear the hymns sung in the churches of their aforementioned shaykhs or the tunes on the organ that people are so fond of and that are played in places of entertainment, dance halls, and cafés to attract men and women, they’d find no sin in the tambour.

1.4.6

The tambour is to the organ as the branch is to the tree or the thigh to the body, for the only sound that it makes is a strumming, while the organ produces strumming and humming, mumbling and rumbling, jangling and jingling, squeaking and creaking, chirping and cheeping, burbling and barking, clicking and clacking, gnashing and crashing, chinking and clinking, gurgling and gargling, purring, cooing, and bleating, thrumming and drumming, roaring and guffawing, glugging and gabbling, la-la-ing and lullabying, horses’ neighs and the roaring of waves, blubbing of billy goats and cricking of cradles, cries of men at war, call of merlins and raven’s caw, old women moaning and heavy doors groaning, snores and stertors, huffing and soughing, water boiling and grief-stricken bawling, frogs ribbiting and ears tinky-tinkling, bulls bellowing and gaming-house reprobates roaring, reverberations and crepitations, pots gently bubbling and chilly dogs whimpering, pulleys squeaking and crickets chirruping, milk flowing, chickens crowing, and cats mewing, not to mention caw-caw and hubble-bubble and wham-bam and slurp-slurp and baa-baa and tee-hee and keek-keek and buzz-buzz and schlup-flup¹⁴⁶—after all of which, what’s wrong, God guide you, with plinkety-plink? If it be said that that aversion to playing the organ derives solely from its resemblance to the buttocks, reply may be made, “What do you make then of the fact that their women enter their churches with those silver ‘horns’ that resemble pigs’ snouts (God exalt you above any contamination by their mention!) on their heads, given that pigs’ snouts (God exalt you above any contamination by their mention!) resemble you-know-whats?” This should prove to you that your objection is baseless and mention of the tambour appropriate.

1.4.7

If you insist on being obstinate, are bent on catching me out in error and exposing me for slips (and non-slips) of the pen, and want to show people how clever you are by criticizing me, then I won’t go through with this book. I swear, if you knew the reason why I embarked on it — namely, to relieve your dudgeon and entertain your mind — you wouldn’t utter a word of reproach against me about anything. Meet, then, good deeds with good and be patient with me till I finish my tale. Afterward, if it crosses your mind to throw my book into the fire, or the water, go ahead.

1.4.8

Let us return now to the Fāriyāq. We declare: he lived with his mother in the house and practiced the copyist’s trade, but news of his father’s demise in Damascus soon reached him. He was heartbroken and wished the tambour were still with the one who stole it. Each morning his mother would go off by herself, utter laments for her husband, and grieve for him, the tears gushing for his loss, for she was one of those righteous women who love their husbands with honest affection and true loyalty. She thought that, if she went off by herself, her son wouldn’t see her and her sorrow would not then be compounded by seeing him weep at her grief, but the Fāriyāq would look on her in her private place and weep bitterly over her desolation and loneliness. Then when she returned he would hold back his tears and busy himself with writing or anything else. It was now that he realized that he had nothing he could rely on, after God, but the sweat of his own brow, so he devoted himself to copying. However, since the day that God created the pen, that profession has never been enough to support those who practice it, especially in countries where the appearance of a piaster is cause for rejoicing and the sight of a dinar is greeted with plaudits of “God is great!” and “We seek refuge with God from lapidated Satan!” It did, however, give him a good hand and refine his thinking.

¹⁴⁷

1.5.1

If anyone read the end of the previous chapter and then his servant came and called him to dinner, causing him to leave the book and rise and turn toward glasses and goblets, tumblers and tankards (in all their different shapes and sizes), and then his friends dropped in to pass the evening with him, one saying, “Today I beat my slave girl and went down to the market with her intending to sell her, even at half price, because she’d given my wife a pert answer” and another, “And I too today beat my son because I found him playing with the neighbors’ children and then I locked him up in the latrine and he’s still there” and another, “And today I insisted to my wife that she make me privy to every thought and worry that goes through her head or troubles her breast and every dream she dreams at night — such dreams coming from the food vapors that fill her brain or from the smoke of passion consummated before sleeping — and I told her, ‘If you don’t tell me every detail, I’ll set the priest on you and he’ll declare you a disbeliever and ban you from the church and then he’ll get out of you everything you’re hiding and harboring and take a good look at everything you’re concealing and secreting and holding out on, that you’re on guard against, have taken measures to prevent, feel at ease with, have a liking for, and have taken it upon yourself to do,’ and I left my house in a rage against my wife, uttering threats, and swore I’d only make up with her if she told me her dreams” and another, “My problem with my eldest daughter is even worse, to wit, today, after she had coiffed, hatted, perfumed, scented, bedecked, painted, made-up, arrayed, displayed, rouged, bedizened, bejeweled, tricked out, beautified, decorated, adorned, dandified, prettified, primped, preened, prinked and pranked herself, donned her saffron-dyed dress and girded her loins for battle, she went and sat by the window to watch the people going in and out. I forbade her to do so, so she left, but then she disobeyed me and returned to her place and tricked me into thinking that she was sitting there to darn some of her clothes, but for every stitch she made, she stole two looks, so I went to her burning with anger and tugged her by the hair that she’d dressed and braided and curled, and a tress came off in my hand (here it is!), and, if she doesn’t put an end to her wicked ways, I’ll pull it all out, for she’s like an unruly filly without reins: boxing her ears doesn’t stop her, and nor do beatings with sticks”—if anyone, I say, filled his bowels with all kinds of food and his ears with talk of this sort, he will certainly have forgotten all the physical and moral incidents that have befallen the Fāriyāq (his grief at hearing of his father’s death, his devoting himself to the copying of books, and how he thereby acquired an excellent hand) which is why I have just been compelled to repeat them.

1.5.2

Though here I would add that, when his excellence as a copyist became bruited abroad, a certain man whose name rhymes with Baʿīr Bayʿar¹⁴⁸ summoned him to copy out the ledgers in which he would enter everything that had happened during his day. His purpose in doing so was not to benefit any scholar but derived from a simple desire to hold onto events lest they escape the orbit of the days or become detached from the chain of circumstance, for many believe that to summon up the past and make it a visible entity is in itself a great thing. This is why the Franks have been keen to record everything that happens in their lands; the exit of an old woman from her house in the morning and her return to it at ten o’clock, leading a dog of hers, with the wind blowing and the rain coming down hard, neither escapes their pens nor is foreign to their thoughts.

1.5.3

There is material of this sort in the introduction to the verse collection Méditations poétiques of Lamartine,¹⁴⁹ the greatest French poet of our day, which I translate as follows: “The Arabs smoked tobacco in their long pipes in silence, watching the smoke rising like graceful blue columns until it dispersed into the air in a way beguiling to the observer, the air at the time being transparent, gentle.” Later he goes on: “Then my Arab companions put the barley in goat’s hair nosebags and placed these around the necks of the horses that were around my tent, their feet tethered to iron rings, and which stood motionless, their heads lowered to the ground and shaded by their heavy forelocks, their coats a glossy grey and smoking beneath the hot rays of the sun. The men, having gathered in the shade of an enormous olive tree, had spread out beneath them on the ground mats from Damascus, and set about talking and telling tales of the desert as they smoked their tobacco. They recited verses by ʿAntar, one of those Arab poets celebrated for their valor,¹⁵⁰ husbandry”—by which he means, “animal husbandry”—“and eloquence, his verses having as much effect on them as the Persian tobacco in their nargilehs. When a verse cropped up that appealed particularly to their feelings, they would raise their hands to their ears, bow their heads, and cry out over and over again, ‘Allah! Allah! Allah!’”¹⁵¹ Later, describing a woman whom he saw weeping at the grave of her husband, he says, “Her hair hung down from her head, enveloped her, and brushed the ground. Her entire bosom was exposed, as is the custom among the women of this part of Arabia, and when she bent to kiss the carved turban that topped the gravestone or press her ear against it, her exposed breasts would touch the ground and press their shapes into the dust, as though they were molds” (end; p. 24). The rest of this introduction is of the same character, even though he calls it Poetry’s Destiny, meaning, “what God Almighty has ordained for poetry and poets.”¹⁵²

1.5.4

Similarly, the Voyage en Amérique of Chateaubriand,¹⁵³ also one of the greatest poets of his day, contains the following: “The residence of the president of the United States was a small house built in the English style, with neither a guard of soldiers round it nor servants inside. When I knocked on the door, a young girl opened to me, so I asked her if the general was at home. She replied that he was. I said I had a letter that I wanted to deliver to him, so she asked me my name, which she found hard to remember. Then she said, Walk in sir.” (He gives these words in English to show that he knows the language.) “Then she walked in front of me, down a long walkway like a corridor and took me into a private apartment and indicated to me that I should sit down there and wait,” etc. (p. 25). Elsewhere he writes that he saw an American Indian woman with a thin cow and said to her, bewailing its state, “Why is this cow so thin?” and the woman answered him, “She eats little,” and again he provides these words in English, to wit, She eats very little. In yet another place he writes that he observed fragments of clouds, some in the shape of animals and others in that of a mountain or a tree or similar things. Knowing this, you will appreciate that, in objecting to my talking of things that are of no interest to you but are to me, you are simply being stubborn.

1.5.5

These two great poets wrote what they did fearing the censure of none, and none of their race opposed them. Indeed, the acknowledgment of their worth and their reputations grew to such dimensions that Our Lord the Sultan, may God preserve his rule, awarded Lamartine vast estates in the area of Izmir, even though no one has ever heard of a Frankish king awarding an Arab, Persian, or Turkish poet a single field, sown or barren. As for the person-whose-name-rhymes-with-Baʿīr-Bayʿar imitating the Franks in his history when he was an Arab, both his parents were Arabs, and his paternal uncle and aunt were both Arabs — the reasons remain unclear to me to this day. Maybe I’ll find out after finishing this book and then, God willing, let the reader know. All I ask is that no reader stop reading just because he’s ignorant of the reasons behind this imitation, important as they may be.

1.5.6

Here now is an example of the sort of thing the Fāriyāq used to write concerning the legends of Baʿīr Bayʿar: “On this day, the eleventh of the month of March 1818, So-and-so, son of Mistress So-and-so daughter of Mistress So-and-so, cut the tail of his grey stallion, which had been so long it swept the ground. That very day, he mounted it and it threw him off.” If you ask, “Why does he give the man’s ancestry via the female line?” I reply, “Baʿīr Bayʿar was religious, godly, and pious, and it is more proper and precise to trace a man’s ancestry via his mother than his father, for there can be only one mother — which is not the case with the father — because the fetus has only one possible exit point.” Further: “Today a ship was seen on the sea, plowing along. It was thought to be a man-o’-war come from one of the ports of France to bring freedom to the people of the land. On investigation, however, it turned out to be just a rowing boat loaded with empty barrels coming to take water from the spring at such-and-such a place.” If it be said that this contradicts the normal state of affairs, for large things appear small at a distance and not the opposite, reply may be made that when a person gives himself over to his fancies, he sees things differently from how they really are. Thus, for example, someone in love with a short woman will fail to notice her shortness, and if someone finds himself alone with his beloved in a hunter’s hide, he’ll think it more spacious than the pavilion of Bilqīs;¹⁵⁴ furthermore, a small light seen from a distance will appear to us as a large one. Small wonder, then, that a rowing boat should look like a man-o’-war or a frigate. The people there still dream that their heads have been crowned with the bonnets of the French and their honor welded to theirs, to the degree that they see their womenfolk to be like those described by the poet when he says:

1.6.1

While the Fāriyāq’s head and feet stayed put in his house, his mind was climbing mountains and hills, scaling walls, conquering castles, descending into valleys and caves, plunging into mire, roaming deserts and launching itself upon the waves, for his dearest desire was to see a land other than his own and people other than his family, which is everyone’s first concern while growing up. It occurred to him therefore to visit one of his brothers who was a scribe working for a Druze notable, and he set forth, with nothing for baggage but his dreams. When he was united with him and beheld how coarse and rough were the people and how at variance with his own nature were the conditions there, he rejected some of those things and resigned himself to putting up with the rest.

1.6.2

At the same time, he didn’t want to find himself at some point about to return without first having got to know them better, albeit had he been wiser, he would have had nothing to do with them from the first day on, for it is not to be expected that the people of a city or a village will change their manners and the ways in which they’ve been raised for the sake of a stranger who has entered among them, especially if they be hulking fellows of great height and strength while he’s a little titch. The less work people have to do, though, the more their curiosity gets the better of them; this being the case, it wasn’t enough for him to make do with what his ears had heard: he had to see it with his own eyes.

1.6.3

The better the Fāriyāq got to know these folk through experience and close examination, the less he liked them and the less he wanted to do with them, for they were coarse-natured, full of boorishness, and horrid to excess, their clothes and bedding filthy, they themselves ever prey to shortage of provisions and distress. The filthiest of all was the emir’s cook: his shirt was fouler than a cumrag, and his feet bore more dirt than one could scrape into a vomit bag. When they sat down to eat, such rumbling and mumbling and teeth-gnashing and lip-smacking was to be heard you would have thought they were wild beasts at a carcass. They ate like animals, taking huge bites, burying their front teeth in the food, stripping off the meat down to the bone, sucking out the marrow, licking their lips and smacking them, polishing off the desserts, licking the plates with their tongues, and throwing half-eaten food down on the table, all the while seated on the ground with their legs crossed under them at their ease. You might think that on each one’s brow was inscribed the proverb “Eat your fill and you’ll never be ill.” When they stood up, one beheld their beards strewn with rice, their clothes dripping with grease. When the Fāriyāq ate with them, he’d get up hungry from the table and his guts would rise against him, so that till late at night to sleep he’d be unable.

1.6.4

To his brother he’d say, amazed at how any with wits could live in the company of these barbarous twits, “What distinguishes the Druze from the beasts save their beards and their turbans? For sure, their very way of life leads to the closing of their eyes and minds, the opening of their mouths and behinds. Scarce one of them can credit that God Almighty has created a race of men to which they are not superior. They’re unaware that a man isn’t better than a dumb animal or distinguishable from an inanimate mineral simply because he has the power of speech. Words are but the Matter pertaining to the Form in which various meanings may be expressed, and this Matter alone is of no use if the Form, which is the second stage of existence, has not within it been impressed.¹⁵⁹ It has been said that ‘a silver coin covers the fool’s shortcomings,’ but these people have been deprived of both brains and ease and are content to take from this whole world nought but the breeze. How can you bear to live alongside such kine, and at a time when your own gifts have just begun to shine?”

1.6.5

His brother replied, “They often envy me for my standing with the emir, but I bear the wiles of my enviers with patience, however hard they be to bear. As it is said:

1.7.1

Thereafter the Fāriyāq continued to practice his first profession, becoming, in the process, as sick of it as the invalid of his bed. He had a true friend who kept an eye on how he was; once they met and embarked on a discussion of how a person might keep himself fed and cut a dash before others by dint of wearing the best thread, both concluding that the people of their day judged others not by their virtue and discrimination but by their attire and its decoration, that those who were born to the wearing of the silk-wool, silk, cotton, and linen that are hung on the pegs of merchants’ stores were of greater account than those who were without of such things, and that a person, be he petty and dumb, so long as his pantaloons and drawers were baggy, was the one man all would point to as noble and learned and who’d be praised by every tongue. They ended up agreeing that they’d acquire some goods for trade and try to sell them in certain towns, as a way to observe how their inhabitants lived and to dispel the rancor from their minds.

1.7.2

They hired a donkey to carry their wares, though the donkey was so thin and emaciated he could barely carry his own carcass, let alone whatever might be put on top of him. Nothing of any force was left him but his bray and his fart. The first of these was an appeal for fodder, the second directed at any who threw a pack-saddle on him and at any prodder. Then they set off, cutting the cloth of success to fit the figure of hope, measuring out the carpet of triumph to fit fate’s scope. By the time they reached their destination, however, the donkey was at the edge of a crumbling dike of prostration, while the Fāriyāq too was about to give up the ghost from fatigue and vexation, remorseful at having abandoned his pen, however ungiving, along with the little it spat out by way of a living.

1.7.3

That day he discovered the consequence of greed and where cupidity can lead. He realized how foolish he’d been to lust after that which brings with it physical contusion and mental confusion. It is also true, though, that the wise man is he who extracts some benefit from each reverse, some advantage from each circumstance adverse. Even in loss of health there’s benefit to him whose path is straight, good fortune for him who doesn’t deviate, for the soul of the sick man stretched out head upon pillow is too constrained to pursue depravity, forbidden lusts, or mortal iniquity. As the disease makes him weaker, his insight becomes stronger, and he sees things more plainly as the pain lasts longer, thus pleasing both God and men with his behavior. This was how things stood with the Fāriyāq, after he had suffered through these travails, for when he became sensible of the hardships of travel, and saw what it had to offer by way of trials, it became clear to him that the slit of the pen nib was more capacious than the salesman’s sack, colored wares less gay than ink, however black, while to the marketing of goods there pertained a stigma no less great than that of buboes or of goiter. He determined, therefore, that, on returning to his hometown, he’d rest content with whatever ease or discomfort life might bring, not caring if he were a man of note, wore an elegant coat or lived like a king, and that never again through the world’s cities would he pass, walking behind an ass.

1.7.4

Now, were I to describe the donkey after our fashion, my dear Arab nation, I’d say he was a slow-witted beast with a vicious kick, balky, stubborn, and shaggy, with a hide that was thick, scarce willing to move without the stick. Catching sight of a drop of water on the ground, he’d think it a flotsam-covered ocean and, as scared as though it promised death, shy from it like an ostrich and make a commotion.

1.7.5

Were I, though, to describe him in the Frankish way, I’d say he was a donkey son of a donkey, born of a she-ass all of whose ancestors were donkeys. His color tended toward the black and his hair felt like thorns when you touched his back; his ears were cropped and listless, his legs stiff, his coat starting to fall, and he was toothless; wide-mouthed, slack-lipped, and with hide discolored, he kicked out when goaded and when driven walked with buttocks splayed, not to mention that he sniffed at she-asses’ pee, rolled on the ground, smeared his dung everywhere and sprayed. The stick on him had no effect, nor did rebuke, when he disobeyed and he never moved unless he sensed food, be it only darnel. No trace of animal nature would he show until a she-ass he espied; then you’d see him frisk and gambol, show vigor and pull the bridle to one side, so that he often overturned his load or sent it askew; and another peculiarity he had too, which was that, rarely though his molars were put to work, everywhere he defecated and incessantly over hill and dale he flatulated, making him seem yet more ill-fated. He’d been raised in lands where there was an abundance of cabbage, radish, rape, turnip, and cauliflower, as there is in certain foreign parts, and was therefore accustomed from his youth to producing farts, and this condition had only grown worse as he’d grown older. Thus any who walked behind him had, perforce, to hold his nose and keep saying “How coarse!” In any case, whichever of the two descriptive modes you choose, of all the pains of the journey and its injuries, keeping company with this beast was by no means the least.

1.7.6

After touring a number of villages offering neither bed nor board, and after long debates with customers and hagglings and chafferings they could ill afford, the Fāriyāq and his partner returned with nowt, deciding to cut their losses and return to whence they’d set out, well aware that “the empty well cannot be filled by rain,” that any further toil at this affair would be in vain. They were thus compelled to sell their goods for the price they’d paid to forestall from gloating any who might see them returning with the very stuff they’d taken to trade, and spent the night as though stunned from all the rout, for there are people who’ll buy a thing only after they’ve turned it inside out and called the seller a fool and a gyp, leaving him no choice but to bite his lip, to the likes of these paying no attention but turning, rather, a blind eye and offering no contention. This talent, though, was not one possessed by either the Fāriyāq or his friend, each of whom sought to bend the world to his own end.

1.7.7

Thus they returned with the cost of the goods and the donkey and handed the money over to his owner, who offered them other goods, which they refused. They did, however, agree to meet again to work as partners on some business of greater import, preferring that this be in selling and buying too, for it is usual, when someone does a job and does not at first succeed, that his avarice insist he try again, since no one will accept that he was born to be unlucky or suffer dire fortune; rather, he attributes his bad luck in his chosen profession to certain accidents and unexpected incidents that have befallen him, telling himself, “The same will not occur this time around.” The root of all this is man’s dependence on his own intelligence, his confidence in his own efforts, and his reliance on his own intuitions. Many of God’s creation have done so fecklessly, most hurting themselves in the process and destroying their livelihoods recklessly.

1.8.1

After a long discussion between the Fāriyāq and his companion, they settled on renting an inn on the road to the city of al-Kuʿaykāt, where are to be found the caravans that leave for the city of al-Rukākāt.¹⁶¹ They stocked up on what they needed by way of provisions and equipment and settled there, doing business with whatever capital (and assets)¹⁶² they’d been able to muster. It wasn’t long before their renown spread among all who came and went thence, all travelers learned of their good sense, and people started seeking them out for their reasonable prices, so that their inn was so much frequented by the better and more skilful class of men, those possessed of means and gravamen, that it became as a garden where the distressed could find relief.

1.8.2

Now, it is typical of the people of that district that they can hardly meet together in any place without passing back and forth among them the chalice of discussion and debate, plunging into matters that both to this world and the next relate. If one asserts a proof, the next denies its truth, and if the first believes that it is well, the other condemns it and claims it’ll send you to Hell. The people thus divide into opposing factions, the place filling with clamor and disastrous actions. Sometimes the discussion ends with boasting over noble extraction and high degree of influential connection, one saying, for example, to his fellow, “Would you answer me back, when my father’s the companion of the emir, sits with him of an evening to maintain his good cheer, is his partner at board and at bar, the frequenter of his salon and his mate, his special friend and intimate? Not a night goes by without him summoning him to socialize, and he makes no decisions without first asking his advice. Plus, my people have been known since time immemorial as ambassadors to many a land and confidential advisors to the grand. Never has any man vied with him in glory, honor, plenty, pride, or virtue without being beaten, thrashed, trashed, outdone and undone.” At this, cudgels might be set to work and take the place of arguments, he who hadn’t lost his temper losing it, and all, drunk and sober alike, setting down to brawl. In the end, news of the affair would come to the ear of the emir of the local lands, who would send men to exact punishment by dealing out to them slaps with their hands, and woe betide any who dragged the name of the emir into the discussion: pardon for him was out of the question. Where grave matters were concerned and the aggressor fled in fear of retribution, a member of his family or a neighbor, or his cattle and stores, would be taken to pay for his crime, his trees would be felled, and his house burned.

1.8.3

Our company, however, never crossed the line between debate and donnybrook, for the Fāriyāq and his companion took on the role of arbiter, and, this being the case, the number of those who frequented them became great. Many a time, family men would spend the night with them, each the other with wine plying, songs succeeding one another, faces radiant,¹⁶³ turbans flying—which led to conflict between the women and their husbands. It is in the nature of women generally, should anyone keep their husbands from them, to scheme till, by one of their wiles, they can get close to that person. If the man is handsome, they promptly make a deal of barter and exchange with him, to exact revenge, taking every limb of his as their husband, every hair as their boon companion; should he be of the type to which the eye’s averse, they get him into trouble, plotting to wrest their husbands from him and thus their loss of goods reverse.

1.8.4

The women of those lands,¹⁶⁴ however, do not oppose their husbands, keeping the latter’s infidelities to themselves and regarding it as permitted for their husbands to replace them. They have been raised to feel affection for their fathers and be obedient to their husbands, and their disputes with them go no further than reprimands — and how pleasurable a reprimand can often be! To this day no one has heard of any of them taking a dispute with her husband to the legal authorities or an emir or a bishop, though many members of these three groups would like that to happen in certain circumstances, either so that they could boast of their imposition of justice and fair dealing upon their subjects, or for some other reason. Also part of the nature of these blessed creatures is the purity of their intentions, the sincerity of their belief, and their capacity to create intimate relationships with men without hint of debauchery. One may observe one of these women, married or a widow, sitting beside a man and taking his hand, or putting her hand on his shoulder and resting her head on his chest, smiling at him, holding friendly converse with him, and making him a present of something that has come her way, and all that with sincere intent and uncomplicated affection. The best qualities to be observed in them are their simplemindedness and naiveté, which, in women, are to be preferred to guile and cunning, so long as they do nothing to bring them dishonor or destroy their sanctity as women. When things get serious, however, simplemindedness will not do.

1.8.5

In addition, given their habit of exposing their chests and their use of nothing, from childhood on, to support their breasts, theirs are mostly pendulous. Most of them think that the longer they breastfeed their children, the healthier it is for them, and some breastfeed them for two whole years, or even longer. Their affection for their children and their kindness to them and tenderness toward them are too great to describe. I have known many girls who, on their wedding days, wept at being separated from their fathers, mothers, and siblings as other women do at funerals, or more. The claim that their husbands eat on their own, without their wives, is completely without basis; this happens only if the husband has a guest who is not a member of the family, on which occasion, even if he should wish to have his wife sit down with the guest, she would refuse, believing that such a thing would indicate lack of respect for her and a violation of her sanctity.

1.8.6

Overall, there is nothing for which they can be blamed save ignorance, and in that they are to be excused. Ignorant Frankish women add to their ignorance cunning and baseness, so how much the worse is their shame! It pains me greatly to hear of the beloved women of Lebanon growing discontented with these virtues and adopting other ways. If this is indeed the case, I shall be obliged to change my description of their virtues, or give the reader permission to write in the margin either “Lies, lies, lies!” or the following lines of verse:

¹⁶⁹

1.9.1

It would be well to provide here an example of the kind of conversations that used to take place among this company. Thus we declare: Once, when this company of ours had gathered, the cup was on its rounds, joy unconfined, the chastest among them in speech and most dogged in debate posed the following question: “Which person, in your opinions, is the best-off and has the greatest peace of mind?” Replied the one with cup in hand, “He who’s in this same state as I, holding his vessel high.” The first told him, “It is not so at all, nor is it he on whom men may agree, for his condition’s one that will not last and his joy, it follows, will soon be past. Moreover, it rests on but a partial proof, is but a part of a greater truth, of which the rest remains to be considered — namely there’s no denying that imbibing wine can make a man ill and stop him from eating his fill, which is why it’s called qahwah;¹⁷⁰ no man can use it regularly without disaster.”

1.9.2

Another now declared, “He who enjoys the greatest peace of mind is the emir when on his sofa he sits at ease, a party of servants and scions at his knees. His living comes to him without a care, for his Provider relieves him of any effort regarding daily fare. When he takes himself off to his harem, he closets himself with the most gorgeous of women on the softest of beds (and how true the words of him who said, ‘There’s nothing more wonderful than to bed on a comfortable bed’!). What’s more, with a different dish each day his table’s laid, in soft garments he’s arrayed, his orders are obeyed, his judgment never gainsaid.” Another then declared, “That’s not how things are. The truth from that is far. The emir never sees his wife but his head’s full of strife, his heart with worries rife, for he’s always thinking how he’s been betrayed over his wealth, cheated by his agents of his pelf. His income’s consumed by his court, which yet finds fault. He places his affairs under their sway and yet they betray. He treats them with generosity and yet they accuse him of illiberality. In addition, they watch every step he takes, criticize him for every move he makes. He’d love to travel, but has to stay, longs to see new lands but can never have his way. He’s jealous of those who walk aimlessly hither and yonder and looks with envy on all who whimsically wander.”

1.9.3

Now rose another to criticize, saying, “Listen now, all you who’re wise. The happiest of God’s creation is the monk who remains in his cell to read, who from work on his land or in his village is freed; he eats of what others labor to earn, providing prayers in overflowing measure in return (so relieving them of any need for light, in the darkness of the night), and he takes his steed from among whatever beasts to their lot may be counted, so that he is, as the saying has it, ‘Fed, watered, and mounted.’ Thus equipped, it matters not to him whether the world flourish or go to pot, mankind be resurrected or left to rot.” One of those wise men then said, “These words are far from true. The monk and his like, should they see men setting forth on their labors, occupied in their endeavors, are far from happy to be reduced to living off their toil, taking their ease at the expense of others’ exhausting labor on the soil, idly waiting till they bring him their gifts. On the contrary, he’d rather take on a part of their chores than be a partner in what they’ve set aside as stores (this if he be of blameless soul and noble stock, honest in his striving, his conscience not ad hoc). Nay more — on seeing men with their wives and children he suffers agonies and sorrows too great to tell, especially when, alone in his cell, he sees his plumpness going to waste and doing him no good while others, weakened by toil and fatigue, enfeebled by effort, sickness, and lack of food, are more capable than him of realizing the desires to which all mankind, Arab and non-Arab alike, aspires.”

1.9.4

Another, who the last man’s opinion shared and was at ease with his view, declared, “This, I swear, is the revealed truth! The monk and those like him are better counted among those who live in ruth. However, it seems to me that the happiest of men where livelihood’s concerned is the merchant. He sits in his store for a few hours of his day and earns in one hour, with his mighty oaths, enough to pay his expenses for a month. By means of constant hype, he converts loss to gain, the unwanted into things desired, the shoddy into goods of superior stripe. Plus, when he goes home at night, Daʿd and Laylā¹⁷¹ are waiting there to treat him right; thus by day he earns his monies, and by night he spends it on his ankleted honies.”¹⁷² One who the truth of these words denied and wished to prove that the man before had lied now said, “The merchant can attain this pleasant life, enjoy this ample ease, only if he be ambitious, a rolling stone, with dealings in lands far from his own, a master of risks, one who boldly seizes what he wants. This being so, the realization of the results of his greed and toil must put paid to his leisure, the burgeoning of his ambitions must spoil his pleasure; what he must do to please customers and family must fill his soul with anomie. He fears for his goods at sea whenever the wind blows and, when dawn breaks, worries that someone will come to inform him of woes, some letter arrive to inform him of damage or loss, of stagnant markets or embargoes. Thus in thought his brow he ever furrows, gulping down regret and sorrows.”

1.9.5

One of his audience now said, “Verily, your words are true. As for me, I’d have no desire to engage in trade, even if each day a hundred golden dinars I made. Any who engages in that profession spreads gossip, tells lies and absurdities, schemes, practices craft and deception, and betrays, not to mention that I’d be stuck there in the store for a quarter of my days. I’d have no idea of what was afoot in my nest: perhaps some watcher would go there and make hay while I was away, while I was lying to a buyer and wangling, flattering, and wrangling. Sin’s rope would then be round my neck both for what I did in the store and for being a means to the commission of forbidden acts behind my very own door. For my part, I believe the man who most deserves to be envied for his way of life, whose craft and profession most deserve our praises, is none other than the cultivator, who labors to do good to both himself and others with what he raises, thus gaining both health for his body and provender for his dependants, which is the best of the many blessings by him enjoyed, though in addition his wife goes back and forth with him to work and keeps him company when times are hard and he’s unemployed. If he falls sick, she nurses him herself and looks after his mead; if he’s absent, she watches out for his interests and waits, hoping he’ll return with speed. What’s more, the tired man savors his meat and finds his slumbers sweet. Do you not observe that the children of those who strive and toil have healthier bodies and are quicker witted than the children of those who live a life of ease and are better outfitted? The sole reason for this is that they go to sleep when tired, eat when hungry, and drink when thirsty.” The one closest to him now answered, “I must take issue with what you say, for you look at the picture in only one way, while the other side escapes you. The cultivator, I swear, over and above his body’s hard work, is captive to care and woe, bedfellow to anxiety and sorrow, for he’s a slave to the elements, at the bidding of the great families and of accidents. If a storm blow, he fears his fruit will fall and he feel gall; if the rain’s too little or too savage, he fears lest what he’s sown be ravaged; if a great man in his town dies, he worries he won’t be able to market his supplies. If he be a man of insight and sensibility, it hurts him that his family should see him poorly clothed and shod, abject and submissive, wretched and downtrod, as does their grief at having nothing by way of food that’s tasty nor by way of clothes that’s comfy, at being unable to raise his son as he would have desired, unable to visit any town but the one in which he was sired, for that is his cradle and his tomb, his prison and sole dwelling room. In addition, he is the object of the designs of his leader in religion, and a stick on which any may lean who has more money than he, or any ruler or wielder of authority. He barely escapes the snare set for him by the one before he falls into the trap set by the other, and should one evil pass him by, he’ll find another, yet greater, nigh. Given his burdens and lack of education, he finds no escape for himself or for any relation. Should he ever desire to follow a path for his family that’s of his own choosing and he believes correct, but which is not what his imam, emir, or other high-ranking person would elect, he may not be spared a fine, or the lopping of his nose, or the breaking of his neck, and in no time his friends will be his enemies, his boon companions his dogged foes. In short, he’s a pawn to subjection, a prisoner to supplication.”

1.9.6

Said a companion, who held that what the former had outlined was correct, “Indeed, we may say with certitude that there is no abjection worse than servitude. Now, after all this scrutiny and reflection, interrogation and investigation, I see that the happiest of men in kind is he to whom God has allotted wealth, and a good mind, and who makes it his habit to travel to foreign places and observe new races. Each day some fresh matter he discovers¹⁷³ new homelands of every sort and new brothers.” Said one who’d understood his tenor, and attributed his views to dotage and error, “You’ve gone off track as you well know, and what you say is not thought through. The lot of any exposed to travel is suffering and danger, is it not? With the change of air and strange surroundings, awful diseases often strike, not to mention that he’s forced to drink things that bring chronic sickness and to eat what he doesn’t like. Thus he consumes what eats his body away and drives any wink of slumber from his eye. When these Franks come to our lands, their mood is ruined by the absence of swine, as by their innocence of turtle, rabbit, and other creatures of this sort to which they incline, for they claim to mix the grease and blood of the pig into each dish, every soup, and all their sweets, and make from turtle flesh a broth that all ills treats. They fault us because our milk’s neither watered nor thinned, our bread too salty, our food not with salt saturated, our water not mixed with chalk, our wine not adulterated, because we slaughter our animals by cutting their throats and eat the meat fresh, while they strangle theirs and eat it wormy and almost raw, because our weather’s never overcast, our rain’s not always pelting down and it doesn’t always pour, because our land’s not covered with a tilth of excrement, dung, and other filth. Our legumes they say are tasteless, our fruits flavorless. They blame us that our winter doesn’t last two-thirds of the year and in our summers no booming thunder fills the ear. Having made their way to our land to learn our tongue and after living among us a decade only to return as ignorant of it as they come, they blame the weather and say, ‘It gave me consumption and fever, or terrible diarrhea, or a cough that drove me to despair.’ Moreover, because of the foreigner’s ignorance of the language of those among whom he dwells, he cannot learn their customs and ways and one and the same to him are their outer and their inner selves. He sees what he sees and learns nothing, hears what he hears and understands nought; thus the traveler has no choice but to hire a dragoman, depending on him for business of every sort. Soon, however, he develops an unappreciative attitude and decides the man seeks to burden him with a debt of gratitude. Should he try to dispense with him, however, he can no longer the meaning of events discern, and he lives on among the people, a victim of loneliness and concern. He may yearn to see his family, to be reunited with his kin, in which case longing will make him sick, separation from the beloved thin. One can only have fun being peripatetic if one travels with a companion sympathetic, a confidant with whom one can share a lot—especially if each is polyglot, fancy-free, preconceptions quite forgot. How difficult it is, though, for two to agree on any one view, or for there to be any pleasure without strenuous objection or constraining reflection!”

1.9.7

Now spoke the least of those present in terms of good sense and scholarly renown, the one most likely to play the clown. “Dear friends!” said he. “I have something to say — forgive me if it offends. The happiest and most favored of persons, the best-off among them and most content, is the beautiful whore who opens her door to visitors and makes herself available to any who accosts her, for rent. She wins her visitor’s companionship as well as his wealth and drives him so wild with love he thinks groveling before her an honor to himself. Once she has a band of men who’d sell their eyes for her in hand, they provide her with all she needs of ‘the two best things,’¹⁷⁴ and she’s no longer obliged to look for custom on the roads or be exposed to anything that harms or discommodes. When she grows old, she finds she’d saved a lot when young, and so, with open hand, she spends and, with the money, for her earlier misdeeds she makes amends, living blamelessly the while, all praising her for her radiant repentance and large style. Man is by nature amnesiac. He thinks only of what’s present, not what’s passed, especially if the current situation yield a mighty dividend and the good life on which all hopes depend. The clergy have only to praise her high and low, to exonerate her of all debaucheries and abominations, to be given non-stop gifts and abundant donations. With each present she gets from them prayers, with each banquet blessings. Let any who doesn’t believe me, ask his consort and master his irritation, till such time as I can furnish proofs from both this and any earlier generation.”

1.9.8

When the company had heard his claim and seen through to his hidden aim, they laughed at his raving and decided that the correct response to his misleading words, simply for the sake of the wrangle, should be to address the matter from a different angle, so they snubbed him, saying, “Shame on your opinion and God damn you! If all the people of a place sang the same refrain, the land would become corrupted, honor be blighted, and no vestige or smidgen of decent behavior remain. But the fault is the cup’s, which has made off with your brain and revealed the corrupt thinking of your kind, the ignominy of your mischief-ridden mind. Perhaps, when you sober up, you’ll be guided to what’s right, and, after your gross falsehood and irresponsibility, see the light.” The man decided then that silence was a safer course for him than discussion and back-and-forth, or bickering and getting cross, and that the mass outranks the one, even if the latter’s well-guided and full of wisdom, the former in the wrong. He swallowed therefore their rebuttals and took fearful account of their monitions and the company dispersed without having come to a consensus as to who is the happiest of men or which the most easeful of conditions, finding that for each trade there was a fly in the ointment, for every state a disappointment, and every dish was accompanied by its own form of indigestion, albeit to many a condition of men they’d paid no attention, the time being too short to allow its mention, just as this chapter has been too short to allow a computation of all the arguments they made or their enumeration. Halt with me, then, at this portion that I’ve outlined, and let us return together to the story of the one I’ve left behind. Farewell.

1.10.1

Rhymed prose is to the writer as a wooden leg to the walker. I must be careful therefore not to rest all my weight on it every time I go for a stroll down the highways of literary expression lest its vagaries end up cramping my style or it toss me into a pothole from which I cannot crawl. Indeed, it seems to me that the difficulties of rhymed prose are greater than those of poetry, for the requirements regarding linking and correspondence set for lines of verse are fewer than those for the periods of rhymed prose. In rhymed prose, the rhyme often leads the writer from his original path to a place he would never have wanted to reach had he not been subjected to its constraints. Here our aim is to weave our story in a way acceptable to every reader. Anyone who likes to listen to language that’s entirely rhymed and chimed, with metaphors and metonymies adorned and primed, should go to the Maqāmāt of al-Ḥarīrī¹⁷⁵ or the Nawābigh¹⁷⁶ of al-Zamakhsharī.

1.10.2

Thus we declare: after our friend the Fāriyāq had lived for a while in the state that we’ve described, he was obliged by the conflicts and quarrels that occurred between him and his grandfather¹⁷⁷ to abandon what he was at and adopt another means of making a living. Fate ordained he should become tutor to the daughter of an emir, and a bonny lass was she, her features pleasing to a degree, with a body in which naught was awry, and a sleepy eye¹⁷⁸ (which doesn’t mean that she was unable to see anyone who loved her, as would be the case with one who was actually sleepy; it means that she had an eye that was “dried up.”¹⁷⁹ And even that doesn’t fully express what I’m trying to say, because it gives the false impression that she was dried up, when, in fact, she was tender and full of sap. No, what I’m trying to get at is that she would seem to be, as we say, “given to looking through half-closed eyes [taḥshīf]”—but the whole entry for ḥ-sh-f in the dictionary is repugnant to me: it contains the senses “dryness,” “baseness,” and “mediocrity,” plus something else that pretty girls are too dignified to speak of.¹⁸⁰ What I really mean is that, when looking, she would open her eyelids a crack — but even “crack” isn’t the right thing here. In the end, I don’t know how to to convey to the reader what I’m trying to get at. Perhaps the most appropriate way of saying it would be “she shot arrows from her eyes.”)

1.10.3

Her youth was no impediment to her “tenderizing” a man’s heart with her glance, for the heart attaches itself as easily to the small-breasted girl as to the big-busted grown woman, not every passion being a prelude to prostitution. Men have fallen in love with pictures, with the remains of the beloved’s campfire, with her footprints in the sand, with outward forms, with a beloved land. Some have fallen in love at the sight of a hennaed hand, a lock of hair, a dress, a pair of drawers, a drawstring, or whatever. I know a man who fell in love with a woman’s cat and would play with it, led by passion to imagine that he was playing with its owner; often it would fasten its claws in him and draw blood, which pleased and delighted him, either because he took pleasure in being tormented as part of his love for the beloved or because of his belief that toying with a woman was likely to lead to scratches and blood-letting so in the end it would come to the same thing, whether the wound was inflicted personally or by proxy. One who had loved was asked to what lengths his ardor had gone and he said, “I used to find pleasure in the wind if, coming to me from the direction of the beloved, it carried with it the smell of carrion.” Most loves of the people of these lands are of this sort: when one of them is in love he goes into ecstasies over anything associated with the beloved, such as a handkerchief, a flower, a letter, or, especially, a lock of hair, which he will sniff and hug, kiss, turn over in his hands, and hold to his chest, in accordance with the words of the poet who said,

¹⁸⁹

1.11.1

Let us now return to the Fāriyāq, just as he returned to his profession — namely, the copying of manuscripts — albeit against his will. It happened that at that time two young emirs of the region had decided to study works of grammar at the feet of a grammarian, and the Fāriyāq was present at these classes, bent over his copying. One of the two pupils was slow to understand, quick to answer. He’d yawn and stretch, fidget and fart, slack off and snore, stick out his bum and sneeze. If he thought he’d understood a point, he’d scratch himself under his armpit and smell the scent, sniffing at it with bared teeth and smacking his lips like someone savoring a piece of cottage cheese. Then, out of delight at his own cleverness, he’d kick up a rumpus and tongue-lash the one next to him, saying, “Shame indeed on those of slow comprehension and dim apprehension! How is it that not all men can master grammar’s rules, which is easier than scratching your balls? If all the sciences were like that, I swear I’d have them down pat. I’ve heard, though, that grammar, while being ‘a key to the sciences’ is not regarded as one of them, so the others must be harder.”

1.11.2

Then his tutor would tell him, “Say not so! Say rather, ‘Grammar is the basis of the sciences’ and all the rest are as much in need of it as a building is of a foundation. Have you not observed that the people of our land learn only this and do not stray from it to any other? They think that he who has a command of grammar commands a knowledge of all aspects of the universe. That’s why it’s the only thing they write books about and why the only disputes that arise among them are about which chapters to put before others and the clarification of the ambiguities of that science with proofs and citations. They also disagree over the latter, some saying that they’re fabricated, others that they are determined by the meter or anomalous, though it all comes to the same in the end, namely that a scholar cannot be considered such unless he has acquired a command of grammar and gone deeply into all its finer points, and that almost no business can go smoothly without it. If you were to say, for example, ‘Zayd struck ʿAmr’¹⁹⁰ without putting Zayd in the nominative and ʿAmr in the accusative, he would not in fact have struck him, and it would be wrong to depend on the information thus conveyed, for a true understanding of the nature of the act of striking is dependent in this instance on knowing that Zayd is in the nominative. Any language that has no markers for the nominative is utterly worthless, people understanding one another in the absence of these only by virtue of custom or convention; their books cannot therefore be relied on, however they may multiply, and neither can their sciences, however they ramify. Even though I might toil over this science by day and would often go to bed racking my brains over one of its knotty points or fiendish difficulties, I’d have to spend the whole night awake, unable to find my way to the proper solution to whatever was giving me such trouble. I did, however, derive one great benefit from it that made me eternally grateful to the daughter of Abū l-Aswad al-Duʾalī (since she was one of the reasons for its invention).”¹⁹¹ (To which I would add that all the other rhetorical sciences owe their existence to women, too.)

1.11.3

“And what was that benefit, master?” asked his pupil. Replied the tutor, “I had long harbored doubts over the question of the immortality of the soul and inclined toward the dictum of the philosophers to the effect that whatever has a beginning must have an end. But when I found that grammar has an ‘inchoative’ but no ‘terminative,’ I drew an analogy between that and the soul and ceased to be confused, praise God. Similar to grammar or greater in difficulty is the science of topoi and rhetoric.” “That I have never ever heard of before,” said the pupil. “I, however, have,” said his teacher, “and I know what it covers, which is metaphor, metonymy, figurative usage, punning, morphological parallelism, and more than a hundred other things. Laying all that out in detail takes an age, and one could spend his whole life just on the science of figurative usages and then die and still know little about it, or forget by the end of the book or books what he’d learned at the beginning.

1.11.4

“The reason for this is that the inventor of this magnificent science was no sultan with the authority to force everyone to follow up on it and unceasingly pursue it. On the contrary, he was a just poor man who fell in love with the subject and whose heart God had made receptive to the laying out of its principles. Thus his eyes had only to fall on a particular thing for his mind to come up with a way of dealing with it. If, for example, he saw the sun rising, he’d say, ‘How are we to understand the “rising” of the sun here? Is it “literal” or “metaphorical,” and would the metaphor here be “conventional” or “linguistic”?’ Likewise, if he were to see green plants sprouting in the spring, he’d say, ‘How should we analyze the words of the one who said, “The spring caused the plants to sprout”? Can we correctly trace the sprouting back to the spring, which itself is born of the revolution of the earth around the sun, this revolution being without doubt a contributing factor? At the same time, however, there can be no doubt that the one who makes the earth revolve is God, Mighty and Majestic, in which case his words “the spring caused the plants to sprout” would be a two-step metaphor, for the spring is caused by the revolution of the earth and the revolution of the earth is caused by the ordinances of the Almighty Creator. The same applies to the expressions “the ship sails” or “the mare runs.”’¹⁹² There are also three- and four-step metaphors and some with more steps than the stairway of a minaret. Some of these stairways are smooth, some spiral, some winding, and others something else.

1.11.5

“The originator of this science went on thinking about these rhetorical figures until he came to the end of his life, and he died leaving much undecided. After him, another, similarly enamored, arose and fleshed out many areas left by his predecessor, continuing to debate with and contradict him until he too passed away, making room for others. Next came someone who reconciled the two with regard to a number of cases, while declaring them both at fault with regard to others, but he died without finishing what he’d set out to do, and after him another came along, who did to him what he’d done to the rest, and thus it is that the doors of criticism have remained open down to these days of ours. One will say, ‘This expression belongs to the category of “subordinate metaphorization,”’ while another will claim that it is ‘propositional.’ Certain scholars have said that metaphors may be divided into the literal and the analogical, the literal into the categorical and the presumptive, and the categorical firstly into the make-believe and the factual, secondly into the primary and the subordinate, and thirdly into the abstracted and the presumed, with some claiming that this last may be sub-divided into the aeolian,¹⁹³ the ornitho-sibilant,¹⁹⁴ the feebly chirping, the tongue-smacking,¹⁹⁵ the faintly tinkling, the bone-snapping, the emptily thunderous, and the phasmic, while the aeolian itself may be sub-divided into the stridulaceous, the crepitaceous, and the oropharyngeal, the crepitaceous may be sub-sub-divided into the absquiliferous, the vulgaritissimous, the exquipilifabulous, the seborrhaceous, the squapalidaceous, and the kalipaceous, the crepitaceous into the panthero-dyspneaceous,¹⁹⁶ the skrowlaceous¹⁹⁷ and the skraaaghhalaceous,¹⁹⁸ as well as the transtextual and the intertextual,¹⁹⁹ and the oropharyngeal into the enteric, the dipteric, the vermiculo-epigastric, the intestinal, the audio-zygo-amatory, the anal-resonatory, the oro-phlebo-evacuative, the capro-audio-lactative, the ovo- (or assino-) audio-lactative, and other ‘may-besub-divideds.’ A book’s prologue²⁰⁰ is required to bring together all of these kinds of metaphor, just as attention should be paid, there and throughout, to the specific kind known as ‘opposition.’²⁰¹ For example, if someone writes in a certain paragraph ‘he went up,’ in the next he has to write ‘he went down,’ and if he says ‘he ate’ he has to say afterward, without let up, ‘he vomited’ or ‘** ****.’ Over all, the prologue should be as difficult as possible to understand; a prologue that isn’t serves notice that the book as a whole is poorly written and not worth the reading.”

1.11.6

The pupil, who by now had turned pale, asked his teacher, “Did all the grammarians too die before completing the rules for that science? And does the fact that I’ve studied it at your hands relieve me of the need to go over it all again with someone else here? And is the student obliged to learn grammar as it is understood by the people of every country he travels to, or is it a science that has to be learned only once?” The shaykh told him, “As far as the first’s concerned, my response would be that the story of the rhetoricians is that of the grammarians. Al-Farrāʾ²⁰² said, ‘I shall die still pondering the meaning of ḥattā,’²⁰³ and Sībawayhi died still unsure as to certain questions relating to when *nna should be realized as anna and when as inna.²⁰⁴ Al-Kisāʾī died of tetters he was so exercised over the difference between connective fāʾ, causative fāʾ, clarifying or deductive fāʾ, consequential fāʾ, and binding fāʾ,²⁰⁵ while al-Yazīdī²⁰⁶ died of a headache (and what a headache!) caused by connective wāw, resumptive wāw, affirmative wāw, supplemental wāw, and negative wāw.²⁰⁷ Al-Zamakhsharī died with ulcers on his liver from the differences between the right-related, ascriptive, proprietorial and semi-proprietorial, purposive, emphatic-negative, and other uses of lām,²⁰⁸ and al-Aṣmaʿī²⁰⁹ died with a goiter on his neck from worrying about the glottal stop. In sum, if a student wants to acquire an in-depth knowledge of just one of these particles, he will have to give up all other concerns and interests and devote himself to what has been said about it and the refutations thereof, which is why we have such proverbs as ‘You may give all of yourself to scholarship but it will give only part of itself to you.’

1.11.7

“As to your question whether you should study grammar with others than myself here, meaning in this country of ours, that will not be necessary. None of our countrymen have read any books other than the very one you are reading. Indeed, few are those who have read that and understood it or can apply its rules. As for your third question, I’d say that it is not necessary for you to go over the same science in every country. However, wherever you go and in whichever direction you head, you will find people who will criticize you for your way of speaking. Thus, if you use wāw, for example, they will say that fāʾ is the more correct, and if you use aw, they will say that am²¹⁰ is preferable, while in some countries, if you put dots below the letter yāʾ in the words qāʾil or bāʾiʿ,²¹¹ you will lose all respect in people’s eyes. I read in some work of belles lettres that a certain scholar paid a visit to a friend of his who was sick in bed and caught sight of a notebook in which the word qāʾil was written with two dots below the yāʾ, so he turned on his heel and said to his companion, ‘We have wasted our steps in coming to see him.’

1.11.8

“This is why so few people write works on grammar in this day and age: under such circumstances, the writer exposes himself to criticism, vilification, and tribulation and no one will pay any attention to the useful information and maxims in his book, unless it be replete with every kind of stylistic embellishment and linguistic nicety. It’s as though a virtuous man were to go into a gathering dressed in rags and tatters; they wouldn’t see his inner refinement, only his outer clothing and attire. Thank God there are so few writers in our country these days: if they were to increase — and, along with them, their criticism and fault-finding — the occasions for their mutual hatred and quarrelsomeness would increase in proportion. People have substituted for serious writing the concoction of a few paragraphs in rhymed prose that they put in letters and the like, as when they say ‘salutation and veneration’ or ‘the splendid and resplendent,’ these being easiest to take when pronounced without vowels at the end.²¹² As far as poetry in this day and age is concerned, it consists merely of describing a man who is the subject of a eulogy as generous and brave or of a woman as having a slender waist, heavy nates, and an eye with collyrium laced. Anyone who sets out to compose a poem fills up most of its lines with amatory and erotic or plaintive and querulous material and keeps the rest for eulogy.”

1.11.9

This brilliant pupil continued to read grammar with his shaykh until he got to the chapter on the “doer” and the “done,”²¹³ when he objected to the fact that the doer was “raised” while the done was “laid,”²¹⁴ claiming that the terminology was corrupt, for if the doer was raised then someone else must have raised him, whereas in fact it was the doer who did the work, the evidence being that we may observe a man working on a building raising a stone or the like on his shoulder, in which case the stone is the thing raised and the doer is the raiser, and likewise the doer of the… ²¹⁵ is the one who raises his leg. At this point, the tutor told him, “Steady on! Steady on! You’re being foul-mouthed. In the scholarly gathering — which is quite different from the princely — you’re supposed to demonstrate good manners.” Then the two pupils concluded the reading of the book, neither having benefited in any way, and the commentary might as well have been directed entirely at the Fāriyāq who, from then on, took to improving his speech by following the rules of grammar till he came to scare the pants off the rabble as will become clear in the following chapter.

1.12.1

I must go on at some length in this chapter, just to test the reader’s endurance. If he gets to the end of it at one go without his teeth smoking with rage, his knees knocking together from frustration and fury, the place between his eyes knitting in disgust and shame, or his jugulars swelling in wrath and ire, I shall devote a separate chapter to his praise and count him among those readers “who are steadfast.”²¹⁶ And because the Fāriyāq had become prone in those days to making a long tongue at people — even though his brains remained quite short and his head quite small and exiguous at the occiput — and I had taken a vow to follow along behind him step by step, mimicking the way he walked, if I saw him doing something stupid I would do the same, wandering off the path if he did, and matching too anything sensible he did, for otherwise I’d be his foe, not the writer of his life story or the reporter of his sayings. An injunction to do the same should be hung around the necks of all writers, who, in fact, are very far from obeying it. I observe that most of them depart from this approach, and you suddenly find such a writer, in the middle of describing a disaster that has affected some mortal’s sanity, wife, or wealth, going to the trouble of inserting paragraphs in rhymed prose and expressions full of parallelisms, padding his story with all sorts of metaphors and metonymies, and forgetting all about his subject’s worries, thus indicating that he doesn’t care about them. As a result you find the victim moaning and wailing, objecting and complaining, while the author is rhyming and using paronomasia, making parallel constructions and puns, going off on tangents, switching persons,²¹⁷ and playing with unlikely topoi, as when he reaches out his hand now to the sun, now to the stars, trying to bring them from the zenith of the heavens down to the lowly level of his words, or, on some occasions, plows across oceans and at others plucks orchids while bounding around in garden and thicket from trunk to branch and from hollow to hill. Such, though, is not my way of doing things, for if I introduce the words of an idiot, I put every kind of silly expression in his mouth, and if I report something said by an emir, I use, to the extent possible, polite language, as though I were sitting with him in this salon; or by a priest, for example, or a bishop, I make him a gift of every variety of lame and defective phrase so that it isn’t too difficult for him to express himself, which, should it happen, would undermine the purpose of writing this book.

1.12.2

Know, then, that after the Fāriyāq’s brains had boiled over following the application of the heat of grammar, which came on top of his desire to be a poet, he set off one day to take care of some business. On the road he passed a monastery and, it being evening, thought it would be a good idea to spend the night there. Turning off to it, he knocked on the door, at which a young monk appeared before him. “Can you provide a guest with bed and board?” the Fāriyāq asked, to which the young monk replied, “He’d be most welcome so long as he has no sword.” The Fāriyāq was delighted with this response and amazed to find in the monastery someone who was good at repartee. The young monk had only said what he did because numbers of the large-gulleted, omnivorous, gluttonous, voracious, craving, dyspeptic, ravenous, loudly swallowing followers of the emir afflicted the monastery with their demands for lodging, and, whenever one of them spent the night there, he would charge the monks with providing fine dishes that they knew nothing of, for these folk live a life of short commons and abnegation, surviving on the most meager ration, regarding, as they do, this world and its pleasures as their foe; it is to them the arch-rival of the life to come, and the further mortal man distances himself from it, the closer he approaches Paradise. Even their bread, which they often eat plain, is unlike other people’s, for after they’ve baked it in thin layers, they expose it to the sun for several days in rows until it dries and gets so hard that if one were to take a loaf in each hand and strike them against each other, the din would panic all the rats in the monastery, or they could use them in place of the wooden plank they strike to mark the times of prayer, and they can eat it only after it’s been soaked in water so long it has turned back to dough. The emir’s followers wear swords to terrify those who pay them less than total respect and to warn them of the consequences, in just the same manner as the Fāriyāq terrified the young monk with his question. If one of them doesn’t have a sword, he borrows his friend’s or takes a thin stick and puts it in a scabbard. The people of the Mountain find nothing shameful about borrowing provisions or other things; on the contrary, they often borrow jewelry and apparel for the bride for her procession and borrow clothes and a turban for the groom to make him look smart.

1.12.3

When dinnertime came, the same young monk brought a dish of lentils cooked in oil and three “cymbals” of that bread and placed them before the Fāriyāq, who then sat down to eat, taking a piece of bread and whacking it against another until it broke. When he took the first mouthful a sliver of the bread caught against a tooth and almost carried it off. The Fāriyāq tried to prop it up and fill the holes in the tooth with lentils but hardly had he finished his meal before the heat of the lentils started to grow in his body and he took to scratching with his fingernails and fragments of the loaf until his skin was in shreds. This upset him greatly and he said to himself, “That crust almost dislodged my tooth, so I’m going to dislodge one of the monastery’s,” and he cudgeled his brains to compose a couple of lines of verse on lentils to avenge himself for what it had done to him, in imitation of the custom of poets of getting their own back by rebuking fate for any ill-fortune or depression, wretchedness or oppression they may have suffered.

1.12.4

Searching for a certain word, he rose and went looking for a copy of the Qāmūs and knocked on the door of his neighbor, who was one of those particularly zealous in religion, and asked him, “Do you have, sir, a Qāmūs?” to which the other replied, “In the monastery we have neither qāmūs nor jāmūs (‘buffaloes’) nor oxen, and what would you be needing them for at this hour, anyway?” So he knocked on the door of another who was even coarser and asked him, “Would you mind lending me the Qāmūs for an hour?” to which he replied, “Hang on till midnight, for the kābūs (‘nightmare’) never comes at any other time.” So he went to another and asked him the same question and the man replied, “What qāmūṣ, you māghūṣ?”²¹⁸ So he returned to his cell, saying, “I’ll have to compose the lines and leave a space for the missing word,” and he wrote,

1.13.1

A while has passed now since I tasked myself with writing in rhymed prose and patterned period, and I think I’ve forgotten how to do so. I must therefore put my faculties to the test in this chapter, which is worthier than the rest — because it’s higher in number than the twelfth and lower than the fourteenth — and I shall continue to do so in every chapter branded with this number till I’ve finished my four books. The total number of maqāmahs in it will therefore, I believe, be four. Thus I declare:

1.13.2

Faid al-Hāwif ibn Hifām in lifping tones:²¹⁹ “Sleepless I lay on a night on which the stars were concealed, the clouds revealed, a night never-ending, full of worries to anguish trending. Now on my back to sleep I tried, now on any other side, placing before my eyes the image of a person drowsing or yawning or snoring, or of another into a drunken stupor falling. Imagination, they say, is conducive to the doing of the thing for which you burn, and stimulates the achievement of that for which you yearn, despite which sleep to my eyes not a drop of salve applied, not a yawn spread wide my mouth, from top to bottom or from side to side. Meseemed the people of the earth, without exception, were fast asleep, while I alone among them all no repose could reap, that all my neighbors were at rest, while I alone remained distressed. So I arose to take a nip and took indeed a sip, but all this brought was an oscitation, something barely more than a lapse of attention, after which I awoke once more quite overwrought, in a desperate agony of thought, cares thronging toward me from every side, my worries ranging far and wide. All things possible and impossible to my mind occurred, every situation over which I’d ever worried (if only once and many years before) recurred.

1.13.3

“When I grasped that slumber had escaped me, even though sleep I feigned, and that I’d have to witness dawn whether I resisted or was resigned, I stretched out my hand for a book to read, with the following hope, that, ‘If it doesn’t make me sleep, it may at least engage my attention with some trope.’ I picked up the first thing to come to hand, feeling no preference for any particular work, and what should it be but Kitāb Muwāzanat al-ḥālatayn wa-murāzanat al-ālatayn (The Book of Balancing the Two States and Comparing the Two Straits)²²⁰ by the Honored Shaykh and Productive Scholar of Perfect Virtue, Abū Rushd ‘Brains’ ibn Ḥazm,²²¹ whose rhetorical skills in both prose and verse have provoked widespread enthusiasm. This is a book such as no author before him ever hatched nor any writer, however distinguished, ever matched, for in it he compares man’s two states of wretchedness and leisure, of joy and care, of gain and loss, of sorrow and pleasure, from childhood till he arrives at maturity, then desiccated senility, all set out in facing tables using a columnar system that comparison enables. However, the shaykh (God sanctify his soul and elevate his rank and worth to the highest point above the earth) living, as it seems to me, a life of goodly weal, with abundant fortune and energetic zeal, gave undue weight to pleasure and failed to treat life’s evils in equal measure. He even asserts that pleasure is to be had from both deed and thought—unlike pain, in which thinking is of no import—claiming that were he to picture himself cavorting with a ripe young wench, and she with him, he’d be so shaken by ecstasy he’d be entirely carried away, chest and flank, bed and bench. However, I doubted his words upon this point, thinking to myself, ‘Glory be! Every writer, however great, must on occasion be out of joint’: in my case, when I pictured the drunkard, the drowser, and the yawner, as I lay there trying to sleep, all that picturing didn’t compensate for the actual thing by even a jot,²²² and I found no pleasure in it, either a little or a lot. I tend to the belief of a certain madman that the pleasure of sleep is not felt by the sleeper, either while, after, or before it prevails—a knot those who hold to the humoral theory²²³ remain incapable of untying by talking or thinking, or even with their teeth and their nails.

1.13.4

“This said, the words of the compiler of these tables are of so full of knowledge and wisdom as to bemuse the expert critic, and reduce any maven, in the investigation of either argument, to confusion. After, then, I’d turned on them my eye’s gaze, and it had returned aglaze, and I’d applied to them the blade of careful examination, only for it to come back full of indentation, I determined to throw light on this problematique by consulting one known for his skill in debate and insightful critique, saying to myself, ‘Just as my hand fell upon the nearest tome, so let my next choice be the neighbor closest to home.’ Living near me was a metropolitan whose adornments, worth, and culture by his congregation were lauded and cheered at a length equal to his beard. I went to see him at midday, all ready to rejoice, and found him wearing a buckle to amaze, a habit to set the heart ablaze. Setting before him the two tables, I said, ‘Rule for me on this case, and may you be rewarded by God, Lord of the Human Race.’ He looked at them, then nodded off and started blinking, complaining he was too sleepy to do much thinking, and telling me something to the effect that since he wasn’t one of those whose ambitions ever rose to rhyming in prose, he ‘hadn’t caught their implication or grasped their signification, though, had they been penned in hackneyed terms, I vouch, I’d have got them as easy as sitting on this couch!’

1.13.5

“I thought, ‘His advancement up the ranks of the clergy has retarded his scholarship and erudition, and the longer his beard and sleeves have grown the shorter have become his intellect and intuition. Let me enquire then of the silliest and least intelligent of men, and who other should that be but the one who teaches children their ABC?’ In the town was one who, despite his pride and arrogance, had, for these qualities, won renown. Off I set, then, to where he was and put to him the case, and he stood up, clapped his hands, rolled his eyes, and said, ‘Guided by sound judgment, you’ve arrived at the right place. If you wish to know which of the two arguments carries the greater weight, is the more correct and accurate, place the two columns (minus the binding) in a scale. The one that dips will be the weightier; on that all men will agree without fail.’ I left him, then, in fury and regret, cursing the sleeplessness that had driven me to ask a teacher of young boys, even after I’d read in books on more than one occasion, and heard from men of perspication, that they were the most feeble of mind among God’s creation, the most to ignorance inclined, the furthest from ratiocination and most given to foolishness and hallucination.

1.13.6

“On that day then I betook myself to a jurisprudent, of all that people the most resplendent, who had inflated his turban and coiled it round and round, using extra cloth, and decorations on his gown, and to him I said, ‘Give me a ruling, most virtuous and sagacious man, as to which of the two arguments in your opinion is the closer to the truth, which most sooth.’ Answered he, ‘If you’ve come to me seeking a ruling, by my opinion to be guided and my path to emulate, allow me to tell you (due deliberation having been devoted to this school of law so convoluted) that we — we noble company of jurists, that is — are men of debate, makers of the rules that govern the rules that govern the game, revealers of fine distinctions among things that might otherwise seem the same; likewise that it is our way, to make clear the truth, to analyze in depth and go to great lengths in argumentation, since there’s no escape, if you’d sniff the aroma of veracity, from expatiation, and from seeking the guidance of one of the schools, which, by insisting on the impossible and making from the nonexistent something necessarily existent,²²⁴ imposes its rules. In my opinion, then, you must add up the words of the two arguments and calculate the number of letters that in each column are disposed, and whichever has more will then be the weightier and better composed (though God alone truly knows).’ So I parted ways with that jurisprudent as I had from his foolish friend, telling myself that any who asked him for a ruling had none to blame but himself, in the end.

1.13.7

“Next I proceeded to a poet whom I knew to be a great flatterer, a mouth-twisting faux-Arabic patterer, a would-be master of classical lays and spouter of praise, a gusher and self-pusher, and I said to him, ‘Here’s something off which you can make some money and that may make you renowned. Show me which of the two forms is the more brilliant in style, and let the truth resound!’ Said he, ‘Eulogies and poems of love are all I write; in the first I express my pain, in the second my delight. Be patient while I review my Collected Works, leafing through it from cover to cover; if I find the panegyrics there more numerous than the sonnets, the good things of this world must be the fewer.’ I added him then to his friends the jurisprudent and the teacher, remarking, ‘How many a wound from how many a speaker!’

1.13.8

“Then I set off for the scribe of the emir, one whose skills of discernment and careful accounting were acknowledged far and near, but before putting the question, I praised him to his face and said, ‘None but you could possibly suffice.’ Said he, ‘Happiness for me lies in being content with my emir and his contentment, unhappiness in resenting him and feeling his resentment. At this point, given the fighting and all that goes with it that there’s been, I’ve forgotten both any anger and any content that I may have seen. If you can wait for a month into the future, so I may inscribe in my ledger all that I meet with from him that is sweet and all that is sour, all that is gold and all that is pewter, I’ll inform you of the answer in due time; till then, I must decline.’ I added him then to the three, making him number four,²²⁵ and thought, ‘I really must consult someone who’s still young, for pride of place has left of the brains of those who hold high rank and office not a trace, and there’s nothing left for those who knock at their door.’

1.13.9

“To the Fāriyāq then I went, to find him o’er his copying bent, on his visage the first signs of transmogrification, eyes, as I beheld, deeply sunken, hands suffering from desiccation, cheekbones as though from the face’s surface hewn, skin as tight as the shade at noon, so that I deplored his state and came close to staying silent for pity at his plight. When he saw me, though, he rose and came toward me, saying, ‘Is there some service you require me to perform, or private word you need to convey?’ ‘Thus and so,’ I said, ‘have come my way, so settle this question, God save you from harm,’ at which he pulled from inside his tattered coat a scrap of paper and on it wrote without a qualm:

1.13.10

You came to me seeking an answer—

One to mindful men²²⁶ already known — to a question.

Good, compared to evil,

Is, over a life span, as a drop to an ocean.

See you not how, if one man has the mange,

To a whole city he spreads his disease,

Yet no one infects his fellows, no matter how close,

Who’s healthy and lives a life of ease?

How many a sickness afflicts the child from the day he cuts his teeth,

And with him to the grave’s consigned?

How he, from the first sprouting of his hair and nails,

No pleasure and no joy can find?

Any limb’s more easy broken

Than it is mended

And that, like the eye, whose corruption will fast destroy you,

You’ll ne’er fix, till time is ended.

Mourning for a child rends his father’s heart

Wears through his every bone,

And in his birth there is no joy

Equal to the sorrow of his death, by which the greater harm is done.

Pleasure cannot come from thinking,

Nor from recollection; that’s naught but an illusion

When you think upon it well — one that may occur

To the dimwit or victim of delusion.

Can a patient who for the past month’s been sick,

By picturing a cure, his illness treat?

Can one who in winter’s depth grows cold

Feel warm by recalling the days of heat?

This world of ours, to those who know,

Is naught but loss and tribulation that we must endure.

Man’s born enslaved, not free,

And so he dies, of that you may be sure.

1.13.11

“Thus his words, and as I took the scrap, my gaze upon it bent, and started thinking what it meant, I realized that these words of his were the most wise, those of the others mere drivel and lies, and I told him, ‘Blessed be the Lord for an age that has brought us the likes of you, and guided seekers after knowledge to your good sense and superior view, and shame upon the people of this earth, should they fail to recognize your worth!’ Then I departed from where he was, calling blessings down upon his head, and heedful of everything he’d said.”

²²⁷

1.14.1

Ahahahah! Ahahahah! Thank God! Thank God I’m done with the composition of that maqāmah, and with its number too,²²⁸ for it was weighing on my mind. Now all that remains for me to do is to urge the reader to read it. Though more coarsely woven than the finely knit rhymed prose of al-Ḥarīrī and despite its prosodic irregularities, it may, for all that, be worn, and commended for its beneficial verities. I believe the second will be better than it was, the third better than the second, the fourth better than the third, and the fiftieth better than the forty-ninth. (Don’t panic! Don’t panic at these attempts to shock and scare! There are in fact, as promised, only four.)

1.14.2

Now I have to squeeze my sconce to extract some more nice thoughts, figures, and choice words, at the same time avoiding chatter, a process that scholars refer to, I believe, as “voiding verbiage.” But hang on a moment, and I’ll ask them! What do you call words that are so bursting with meaning that they drench the reader, so that I can fetch them for you? If you don’t tell me their name right away, don’t blame me if I use their opposite. I exist, and it is my custom to look for what exists, not for what doesn’t. Given that the term “voiding verbiage” exists and its opposite doesn’t, it is perfectly appropriate for me to turn to it in preference to some other term. You may if you wish put your heads together and come up with a word — but instead of flying at each other’s throats and fighting, pecking out each other’s eyes and biting, or striking with swords and swiping with words, or grabbing each other by your pockets and skirts, do so sedately and soberly, serenely and rationally, for when someone sedate bestows a name on something, it comes out as sedate as he is and cannot thereafter be converted into something different. In fact, the thing named may even acquire dignity from the name given it, even when it is innately insignificant and frivolous. Have you not noticed how the words of a slim poet come out slim, and those of a big poet come out big? As the saying goes, “The words of kings are the kings of words.” By the same token, poetry written by a woman is as bewitching to the mind and teasing to the heart as a woman.

1.14.3

An exception to this principle is the donation of the child by the father, meaning the donation by the father of the material used to form the child. By making an exception of this I don’t mean to say that the father becomes pregnant and gives birth but that the father may be ugly and the child turn out good-looking. The reason is that, because conception requires the collaboration of two persons, i.e., a man and a woman, it is unclear which contribution is determinative. The father does not have absolute sway to shape the child as he wishes. He may have in mind at that instant a certain form that he finds attractive, while the mother, God protect her, may have another, depending on her preferences and whatever is then uppermost in her mind; as a result the child may come out a bit of this and bit of that. By the way, it cannot be said that the man is incapable of summoning up a familiar form at that moment just because he’s all in a tizzy over the business of that formative material. That’s not credible in the case of one who’s become used to what is always the same old thing where he’s concerned, for long acquaintance modifies a person’s attitude to a thing, and, as a result, he deals with it with good sense and deliberation. Take for example the well-fed cook, who prepares all the various dishes with perfect skill and mastery, unlike the hungry cook, who hurries his work and botches it.

1.14.4

Know then (after this polished excursion and prolonged and stimulating insertion) that the Fāriyāq went one day to a priest to make confession to him of all he had done, said, and thought that he didn’t ought. The priest asked, among other questions, “I hear you’re fond of poetry and tunes, which are among the worst causes of evil and passion. Has the Recoiler ever put it into your mind to court in verse a woman firm of breast, rosy of cheek, the kohl on her eyes clear to see, her buttocks wobbling free, slender of waist, her teeth widely spaced, her legs with thickness and splendor graced, her forearms muscled and without slack, her hair and nipples black, her eyes startling in the contrast of black and white, her hands with henna bright, her lips fine, her eyebrows a thin, arched line, her belly-button round, her belly folds unbound, her smile sweet, her figure svelte, with saliva like honey, sweet enough to turn iron into candy?” Said the Fāriyāq, “I have indeed done so, but I see that you are my fellow in this craft, for I note how well you can describe a beautiful woman.”

1.14.5

Said the other, “It isn’t my job to produce such verbal fabrication, just something I’ve learned by analogy and spontaneous inspiration, for all who listen to verse find their brains filled with such descriptions perverse. But, be that as it may, you must burn your love poems, each one, singly and in sum, for they incite the heedless to err and you’ll be punished for them on that day when men are ‘seized by their forelocks,’²²⁹ and you hold extrication dear.” “How,” said the Fāriyāq, “can you expect me to burn in a single moment things I stayed up working on for many a night, during which I knew no slumber and on which I worked as hard as a horse in a race, or cameleers who, from dusk to dawn, maintain their pace? When I finished a line of the poem, it would seem to me as though I’d covered a stage on the road to her whom I was wooing, and, when the poem was done, I’d imagine I’d reached her and all that stood between us was for me to open the door, which made the conclusion in my case an inauguration, in contrast with all other poets. That is why I didn’t attempt long poems — lest the time it took to write them should be as long as the time it took me to cover the distance to my beloved. Does it make sense that all that effort of mine should be thwarted for the sake of the heedless? Not to mention that I don’t want them to read what I write anyway, because if they don’t understand it, they’ll ask the scholars, who will proceed to hold it up to scorn, accusing me of mistakes and pointing out shortcomings. They never see merit in the writings of the young and humble, and even if they do, my only reward will be, ‘God shame him! God destroy him! May his mother be bereaved of him! May he have no father and no mother!’” Said the priest, “If on stubbornness you insist, and in divergence from the road of right guidance you persist, I’ll withhold absolution and expose your dirty laundry in open church for ablution.”

1.14.6

“Don’t be so hasty,” said the Fāriyāq, “for ‘haste is of the Devil’! Do you suppose, if I praised you in a long ode, you could take that as expiation for my sin? And if you’d like me to laud therein each monk and nun, each contemplative (male and female), each ascetic (male and female), each recluse (male and female), each person who stands long in prayer (male and female), each hermit (male and female), each ecstastic reciter (male and female), each preacher (male and female), each caller on God’s name (male and female), each God-fearer (male and female), each celibate (male and female), each one who arises from sleep to pray (male and female), each one who prostrates him- (or her-)self in prayer, each one who humbles him- (or her-)self before God, and each teller (male or female) of the rosary, I could do so.” The priest thought for a moment and apparently discovered that love poetry wasn’t such a great sin, for if it described a woman as having huge buttocks, fat arms, and round breasts, and she really did, then it would be just like someone saying “the moon has risen” when it really had, or “the clouds are parting” when they really were. It would be a lie and a sin only if the woman so characterized was in fact flat-chested and flat-buttocked or used stuffing to make people think she had a large backside, and the one who saw her took what she’d done for real and said what he did without exercising due caution.

1.14.7

When the priest had thought the matter through and weighed it in his mind, he said, “It won’t do for you to use your praise of me as expiation, for I’m afraid that, once you get hold of me, you’ll never let me go, seeing as I do from your rhymes about those who do this and that (male and female) that you’re stubborn, leech-like, dogged, and assiduous. You may praise only those close to God and the righteous divines who deny themselves in this world out of desire to see God’s face in the next, who wear hair shirts and spend their nights in constant prayer out of obedience to God, and who subject themselves to perpetual mortification out of love for Him, some eating nothing all their lives but lentils and hardtack.”

1.14.8

“Followed,” said the Fāriyāq, “by the breaking of a tooth and pruritis. Wait! Wait! I forgot to mention something that the lentils have just now brought to mind. Once I was responsible for persuading a young monk to leave his monastery and abandon the path. The reason was the sufferings I’d undergone there, and I did what I did so that I could gloat over the monastery’s discomforture.” Said the priest, “Your sin in gloating, which is a type of revenge-taking, was greater than your sin in persuading the young monk to leave, for there is no benefit to be had from the residence of most of the monks, or anyone else, in the monastery. In addition, it may be supposed that this young monk will marry and create lots of monks from his children. If, however, you go praising nuns, be careful you don’t talk of them as though they had breasts and buttocks, since they know nothing of such things. Their prolonged devotion and seclusion have made them into something different from other women. We, as contemplatives, are the best authorities on them.”

1.14.9

The Fāriyāq then asked him, “In the name of Him who’s worshipped in Heaven and in Earth, are all priests like you, so witty and funny?” “I have no idea,” the other replied. “I do know, though, that I have suffered for what I’ve learned and would have done better to remain ignorant like them. Indeed, ‘in ignorance lies ease.’” “How can that be?” asked the Fāriyāq. The man replied, “Have you a place well guarded where a secret may be kept?” Said the Fāriyāq, “Secrets to me are like my own blood: I never let them out!” (though I say, he’s let it out now). “Would you like me,” asked the priest, “to tell you my story?” “It would be an honor,” said the other. “Listen well, then,” said he.

1.15.1

Without further ado, he spoke. “Know that when I started out in life I was a weaver. However — given that Almighty God had decided, in His sempiternal wisdom, to make me so ugly and short that even my mother, when she looked at me, would thank God that He hadn’t made me a girl — I was no good for weaving. The reason for this was that my terrible shortness often caused me to pant and choke in the loom pit, because my whole body would disappear inside it, and I’d find it impossible to breathe, despite which my nostrils, praise God, could take in enough air to fill fifty lungs and fifty bellies. Often I’d faint down there and have to be pulled out at my last gasp.

1.15.2

“When I’d suffered from that craft as much toil and trouble as I could stand, I decided it would be better to set up shop selling a few things that women crave, so I rented me a little store and sat there, and the women would pass by, look at me, and then laugh to one another. Once I heard one of them say, ‘If the outside is a true guide to the inside, that shopkeeper’s hose will intercede for his body and sell his goods for him.’ I put my trust in her words and said, ‘Maybe from ugliness will come good fortune, for, as the proverb has it, “from good comes evil.”’ I went on for a while that way but to no avail, for my nose stood between me and my living, and it grew so monstrous that it left room for nothing but rejection and aversion.

1.15.3

“One day I was sitting thinking about the Almighty’s creation of this universe, when I said to myself, ‘My, my! What a wise God! How could He make an individual a part of this world and at the same time make a part of that individual an impediment to his earning a living or making his way in it? What use is this huge nose except for having the “buttocks” of “Halt and weep”²³⁰ stuffed up it? And why shouldn’t a part of it be cored out and curled about my body? How is it I see that some people have been created as beautiful as angels and others as ugly as the Devil? Are we not all God’s creatures? Has not He, glory be to Him, taken them all into His care, on the same footing? Does not the earthly craftsman, when he wants to make something, work on it meticulously and make it as nearly perfect as he can, bringing it to the best state possible? Does a painter paint an ugly picture, unless he wants to make people laugh at the thing portrayed? Could it be that, in a nose of huge size, there is some comeliness, value, or benefit of which we ordinary mortals are unaware?’

1.15.4

“Then I would get up and go to the mirror and contemplate my face and reject it, finding nothing in it to like, and say, returning to my first line of thought, ‘If I cannot find anything to like about my face, how can anyone else find it attractive?’ People will, however, find good in the faults of others and in their vices virtues. Do you not observe how, to some people’s eyes, ugliness is attractive? It is said that blacks find nothing attractive in the fair-complexioned among us, while blackness, being general among them, is something they appreciate. Never do I see anyone carrying around a nose like mine without hoping that he’ll find mine attractive. As for color, I belong neither to the blacks nor the whites and am cursed by both their houses. Would that the people of my town were all like me, with big noses; then I could share in their joys and sorrows. From whom did I inherit this boulder, when my father’s nose was just like other people’s? I wish I knew what my father was thinking about when the idea of bringing me into this universe came knocking at his head, and about what lofty mountain peak, craggy landmark, or minaret my mother was thinking on the night when she collaborated with him in that deed! Would they’d swooned that night and not awoken, or gone off the boil and found their appetites broken, or been bewitched and lost all feeling, or got drunk and and gone about reeling!

1.15.5

“I was turning these ideas over in my head and fashioning them into different forms and varying shapes, when behold, a woman with covered face approached, with something that might have been a water pitcher forming a bump beneath her veil; I thought she must have placed a flask of scent by her nose to sniff at when passing the carrion in the city’s markets. She asked me about something she wanted to buy, and I told her its price, which she seemed to find high, so she told me, ‘Bring it down. Your price is pyretic,’ to which I responded ‘And your proposal’s pruritic.’ She laughed and said, ‘You did well on the response but you made a mess of the request. Make allowance for the rights of partnership and commonality, for I’m your partner and comrade, which means you should make me a gift for friendship’s sake.’ ‘What partnership can there be between us, God set you to rights,’ I asked, ‘when this is the first time you have honored me with a visit?’ At this she raised her veil, and I beheld that her nose bulged out so far it left almost no room for her face and seemed to stand face to face with mine as though to salute it. It made me think of the story of the lame crow that made friends with a crow with a broken wing, on seeing which a certain poet declared, ‘I never knew what people meant by the saying “Birds of a feather flock together” until I saw these two crows.’ In the end I sold her what she wanted to buy, trying to get one kiss as a compensation for my loss, but I couldn’t because our noses got in the way. Then she departed and I continued for a while as before.

1.15.6

“When I realized that I wasn’t cut out for trade (for women buy only from young men who are well-built and supple as a branch, taking the beauty of their faces as a good omen that they will enjoy whatever they buy from them and as as a memento of the happy day on which they made their acquaintance), and that since I’d opened the store the only thing I’d sold had been to the woman with the bulbous beezer (and that at a loss!), I decided to become a monk. I found my way to a monastery and said to its abbot, ‘I come to you disillusioned with this world and eager for the next, for this world can never assume that other’s place. The wise man is he who takes this as a metaphor for that, for were this the home that our Creator desired for us, we would live in it for eons, though in fact we see that some people are born into it and live a single day, which is evidence that it’s not what we were created for’ and similar stuff of the sort that trips off the tongues of contemplatives. The abbot saw virtue in me and accepted me, but the next day he happened to try to climb over the wall to get to the houses of certain partners and the broken end of a tree branch entered his eye and blinded him, so he returned in a fury, saying that my arrival at the monastery had brought bad luck, because for ages before I came he’d climbed that wall all the time and nothing had ever happened to him.

1.15.7

“As a result, he threw me out of the monastery, so I entered another and repeated what I’d said the first time. Its abbot accepted me, and I resided there for a few days, suffering such squalor and dirt as neither God nor man could put up with, in addition to the obduracy of the monks, the divergence of their opinions, their accusations against one another, and their constant complaints to the abbot over matters of no importance, as well as the way the latter lorded it over them, his selfishness over things that he kept for himself alone, allowing them no share in them, and their rivalry over things that women would give them, such as a handkerchief, a purse, or the drawstring from a pair of bloomers.

1.15.8

“To this you have to add the ignorance of them all, for in the whole monastery there wasn’t one who could pen an epistle on any topic. Even the abbot himself, God preserve his high degree, was incapable of writing a single line in proper Arabic, using instead the Syriac letters known as karshūnī,²³¹ of his knowledge of which the ignoramus was so inordinately proud that he’d force everyone who entered his cell to say how wonderful they were, and even invite all and sundry to visit him, which the gullible monks thought he did out of noble morals and generosity of character. He had written a line in these letters above his door and another on his wall, and when I looked at it, I’d smile, which he, in his simplemindedness, believed was because I admired them. Other monks who, for all their ignorance, were wily swindlers (and how many a man combines ignorance and dishonesty!) would, in hope of gaining his favor, cozy up to him by telling him, as he sat there with his head lowered in modesty and submissiveness, ‘Would you be so generous, Master, as to let me have a sample of your handwriting to use as a model for my own?’ and this was one of the best ways for them to get things out of him.

1.15.9

“When, then, their company, and, above all, the awfulness of the food, became too much for me to bear, I took to grumbling and muttering. One day the monastery cook heard me complaining about how little clarified butter there was in the rice he was cooking for a high holiday. He was a ruffian and a knave and he exploded at me in anger, picking me up and putting me over his shoulder as a man might his child, though without the tenderness. Then he carried me through the passageways of the monastery and plunged me into the vat of butter, saying, ‘This is the butter with which I cook the rice that you don’t like, you schnozzle-chik, owl-chick, poor man’s portion, rascal’s scion, committer of sins great and small, emitter of a garlicky pall, poisonous wind anabatic, blood-sucking tic parasitic, insatiate, crapulate, indigestate’—and poured over me many more rhymes of this sort, the dunking in insults received by my good name exceeding the dunking my head got in the butter. After some effort, I contrived to slip out of his clutches and entered my cell to wash, and suddenly there he was again, knocking on the door and bellowing, ‘I have to squeeze your nose out, for enough butter’s got into it to keep the monks going for days!’ Then he reached for my nostrils with hands like iron pincers and set about squeezing them as hard as he could till I thought the soul (nafs) was about to about to depart, for the nose alone among the body’s orifices (and I say this in knowing contradiction of the beliefs of a certain school) is the point of entry and exit for the breath (nafas), which is why one says that a person yatanaffas (‘breathes’).²³²

1.15.10

“As my sufferings were too much to bear, and I could find no one in the monastery to complain to, because the monks all flattered him and made up to him so that he’d give them enough to eat, even if it were only the thurtum (which is the food or condiments left on a dish), I left the monastery, in parlous state, saddened and discouraged, the world in all its expansiveness seeming me a narrow space, and said, ‘Where am I to take this nose of mine that has blocked every avenue by which I might make a living, or where is it to take me?’ It occurred to me to head for a monastery far away, of which I had heard that its monks were righteous men and that some wrote a good Arabic hand, loved strangers, and honored their guests. So I made my way to it, and when I saluted its abbot and acquainted him with what I had resolved, he praised my opinion highly and welcomed me warmly, though he couldn’t prevent himself from gazing at me in surprise and praying for God’s protection from any ill consequences that might befall him because of my nose. So I stayed in his monastery for as long as it was God’s will that I should stay.”

1.16.1

“From the outset and for as long as I was there, I made it my concern to humor the cook, get on his good side, and praise him. He, in return, let me want for nothing that could be had in the monastery. In fact, I spent the greater part of my time in the kitchen. I was also good at cooking dishes he knew nothing of, so I taught him these, and he became exceedingly fond of me. Thus it came to pass that, when the abbot invited someone dear to him to eat with him, or had an urge to eat a certain kind of food on his own, the cook would charge me with preparing it. Because I was as meticulous as possible in doing so, I ended up in his good graces, meaning that I’d sit with him in the evenings and keep him company, acquiring in this way a reputation for righteousness and piety among the monks. I pulled my hood down till it reached the bridge of my nose — and would that custom had allowed it to cover the nose entirely! — and when I walked I kept my head bent toward the ground and cast only brief glances to right and left, and when I ate, drank, slept, walked, or washed my face, I made mention of all of those things, thanking and praising God as I did so. Thus I would say, for example, ‘Today I left my cell, praise be to God!’ or ‘To God be glory!’ (the latter being the monks’ preferred form), or ‘This morning I took a laxative, may this find favor in God’s eyes!’ and other stuff that those who make a show of piety are known to say. Thus the monks ended up believing that I was full of righteousness and virtue. I’d also written out a few hymns in bad Arabic for the abbot, who admired and praised me for my hand, promising to promote me to a rank worthy of me, for he believed I was distinguished from the rest of the monks by my learning and excellence of judgment, a faculty he attributed to my being ghaydār (meaning ‘a suspicious person who ponders a matter and then comes up with a correct interpretation’).

1.16.2

“Then God, Lord of Death and Life, decreed that one of those priests who service the laity in certain far-off parts (meaning that they eat and drink in people’s houses instead of at the monastery and mingle with their congregants, against the custom of monks, who mix with people only when they have to) should die, causing the abbot to send me to that country to adopt the same position as the deceased (meaning to substitute for him, not to be buried along with him). On my arrival, my congregation received me generously and with open arms, while I demonstrated god-fearingness and chastity to them and my virtues became well known among them. A merchant, one to whom God had denied the pleasure of children, even invited me into his home and asked me to lodge with him, in the hope that, by virtue of my presence, God would ‘open his wife’s womb,’ as it says in the Old Testament,²³³ and children be born to him. This wife was beautiful, slender of figure, and well-endowed of chest, fond of dissolute pleasure, revelry, and zest (God be praised — the mere thought of women produces the urge to write in rhymed prose!), so I stayed with him a while, living in the most luxurious style.

1.16.3

“Then it occurred to me to flirt with his wife and to pursue her, be her close companion and woo her. She responded to my enticements, paying no attention to the tip of my nose, for it is in women’s nature to incline to what’s close, ignoring what’s far away (and I’m sure you’re aware of what one woman said, concerning ‘long converse and closeness in bed.’)²³⁴ The world now appeared to my eyes at its best, I forgot the many hardships that, at the monastery, I’d had to digest, and I said to myself, ‘So long as my good fortune persists and its currents serve, I shall make up to myself for all the good things of which I saw no use when I was a weaver, a cook, and a recluse,’ and I made it a rule that my pleasures with her be measured—taking care that I be pleasured once for each day past (like any man with his lawful wedded wife) and then once again for the present (which of course didn’t last), as incitement and impulse might take me — and kept count, soon reaching a huge amount. The husband, having no ill thoughts and being of a trusting disposition, was quite unperturbed, and, with no suspicions to distract him from his work, pleasure’s fruits were there for the plucking, the cups of our joy undisturbed.

1.16.4

“Now here’s an amazing thing that deserves to be recorded in books — she’d pick quarrels with the maid, both in her husband’s presence and when he was delayed, and abuse her in front of him in the nastiest way, thus forestalling any suspicions of his that might come into play—she fearing no consequences from this, nor being concerned at what might happen should she the said maid dismiss, for she’d fired many a maid before, for good reasons and for poor, after subjecting them to every kind of insult, and making them to hatred and anger inclined; and this is one of the miracles of women and their strange uniqueness, to the essence of whose extraordinary secret we men are blind. In sum, I was entranced by her beauty, just as I marveled at her art, and I dwelt with her in this state in extreme delight, like one married without having to pay a bride-price, coddled after calamities, indulging without restraint my every appetite.(1)

1.16.5

“Then I started another count, longer and more extended than the first, for, as the easy life made me reckless and I felt safe from any blow that fate might deal, I couldn’t stop thinking I should combine the two cs,²³⁵ for ‘much prosperity brings much weal’ and rarely have I seen one truckle with the first who does not also indulge in the second and similar worldly attachments — such as shuffling gaming arrows and twirling bones,²³⁶ cheating at games and accusing others of the same, trading in livestock as yet unborn and usury, shooting arrows and brandishing spears, arrow-shooting contests and casting lots, flushing game and picking up the dice before a throw, cheating and selling things at arbitrary prices, inciting others to shuffle the gaming arrows and inciting them to lay bets, betting and laying stakes, dealing in grain futures and selling dates while still on the tree, selling seed before it has matured and other fast practice, swapping commodities and making bargains, bartering and defrauding, swindling and misrepresenting, concealing defects and delaying payment of debts, selling grain on the basis of the weight of a single sample and deferring (while at the same time increasing the amount of) a debt, offering blandishments and contracting to buy things on the basis of a description only — at which point [i.e., when he has lost], he wanders, making do with nothing to eat but bread made of sorghum, and he cheats and plots, swindles and lies, jokes around, behaves like a lunatic, and tries to con people, taking his clothes off, stripping naked, and using them as stakes for his bets.(2) So I met with a man of whom I’d heard it said he practiced this profession and devoted himself to it seriously and without digression, devoting to it great pains and expending on it much of his gains, while confining his thoughts to that alone. To cut things short, and without having to further lengthy rhyme resort, I went into the same trade with him.” (Here ends the priest’s rhymed prose.)

1.16.6

“I started funding it from what I gathered from the old women and greenhorns by way of fees for welcoming new souls and seeing off old, as I continued to ply my first profession. Indeed, all the preceding was a stimulus to extra passion from both my side and that of my little cutie, for she now grew greedy for presents and gifts, as women do every time there is some occasion in the lives of their husbands and lovers. The news of my new profession reached my abbot, who sent to demand from me the money that I’d made. I made excuses that he refused and didn’t accept, and he found a reason to recall me, seizing the baggage and everything else I had with me, though the loss of all of that didn’t upset me as much as the interruption of the first count (the one I’d initiated at the house of the righteous merchant). After a period almost long enough to make me forget the pleasures of those by-gone days, I slipped from that abbot’s bonds and set off in search of another, to spite the former. I thus made my way to an abbot who was one of those most hostile to the abbot I’d been with before — for hostility is to be found as much among abbots as among atheists — and the former, fearing that I might come to harm from the latter, sent me off to distant lands in a ship of war.

1.16.7

“Before we’d been at sea for more than a few hours, some of the ship’s instruments failed, causing its captain to fear that it would take us down, so he turned back, having decided that I was the cause of his misfortune and telling one of the passengers that what happened had occurred because of my ugly mug. I was greatly amazed to hear his words, for such people²³⁷ are not given to irtisām,²³⁸ to tashāʾum,²³⁹ to taṭayyur,²⁴⁰ to tafāʾul,²⁴¹ to taḥattum,²⁴² to tayammun,²⁴³ to tasaʿʿud,²⁴⁴ to tamassuḥ,²⁴⁵ or to hanging necklaces of shubāriq wood or making use of ʿaṭaf; nor do they place any faith in haqʿah or lujām, ʿāṭūs or ʿāṭis,²⁴⁶ kābiḥ or kādis, qaʿīd or dākis,²⁴⁷ bāriḥ or sāniḥ, zajr or taḥazzī, ʿiyāfah or ʿaytharah, ṭarq or ʿirāfah, hajīj, or kahānah,²⁴⁸ ibnā ʿiyān or tanajjī, lammah or ḥufūf, luʿṭah or intijāʾ,²⁴⁹ tashawwuh or taʿayyud, ṭalāsim²⁵⁰ or tashahhuq or ʿazāʾim,²⁵¹ ruqā²⁵² or tamāʾim,²⁵³ yanjalib or tuwalah, ḥawṭ or ghazz, tadsīm al-nūnah or shadd al-ḥiqāb, rasʿ or ṣakhbah, qulayb or kabdah, wajīh or sulwānah, sulwān or ʿuqarah, mijwal or muhrah, ukhdhah or ʿūdhah,²⁵⁴ habrah or raʾamah, kaḥlah or hinnamah, julbah or ṣarrah, qablah or nushzah, qublah or nufrah, ṣudḥah or hamrah, zarqah or ʿaṭfah, faṭsah or ṣarfah, ghaḍār or karār, barīm or ḥirz, khaṣmah or ratīmah, asḥam or ṣihmīm, tadhaʿʿaba or ṣawt al-lūf, hāmah or ṣafar, ukhdhat al-nār or tanjīs, laḥj or inkīs, us or shaḥīthā, ṭibb or tawl, siḥr²⁵⁵ or māqiṭ, ʿāḍih or mustanshiʾah, naffāthāt fi l-ʿuqad or ṣadā,²⁵⁶ shaʿbadhah or nīranj, shaʿwadhah or ḥābil or ḥāwī.

1.16.8

“On that day I learned for sure that a man with a big nose is hated in every country and that half a pound of extra flesh on a man’s face will bring him woe and privation, while two pounds on a woman’s rump will bring her fortune and success, and my wonder at this world that’s built on two-and-a-half pounds of flesh increased, despite which I couldn’t bring myself to renounce it. Then I traveled to those lands²⁵⁷ and found safety in them from the intrigues of my enemies, and rented a house and brought a woman to serve me. It has become customary for priests, in those lands and in the lands of the Franks too, to take a woman to serve them, who comes to him in the morning, while he is still in his comfortable bed, and provides him with whatever he wants from her. Having tasted the sweetness of that life, the Tempter whispered in my ear that I should marry a girl who was poor but beautiful. I wasn’t quite certain that her breasts had completely rounded out but had taken a fancy to her all the same. I therefore asked the abbot to increase my stipend, but he refused. I insisted, but he was adamant in saying no, while I was adamant in asking for more. Then, when I argued with him and ended our discussion on an angry note, he decided to send me back to whence I’d come, so I went to an abbot who was friendly with the first abbot, and he was delighted to see me and put me up with him, and I found myself back where I’d begun. Now I’m waiting for an opportunity to exchange this other no-hoper too, for he is very ignorant, and, in my opinion, swapping abbots in these days of oppression brings more benefit than the philosopher’s stone.” Here ends the priest’s tale.

1.16.9

Here are the meanings of the rare words mentioned above:

1.17.1

No doubt, some readers will find what I have to say in this chapter hard to warm to as I wrote it on a “frowning day, inauspicious,”²⁶⁷ a day of cold that was vicious. Snow at the time o’er the rooftops was sifting, had blocked the highways, and into house and palace was drifting. It was almost enough to extinguish any fire, put an end to any patience, and thoughts of moon and of money-wagering inspire.²⁶⁸

1.17.2

Be that as it may, no one can deny that anyone who drinks, eats, or plays with snow derives from it a feeling of heat. The same goes for the reader of my words: if he finds himself getting chilly, all he has to do is seek protection with me from the cold, in which case the goal, which is to put his brain through some warm-up exercises, will have been achieved. This will be especially true if the said brain still carries some traces of anger and indignation left over from the preceding chapter, though I meant nothing by telling the tale but to speak the truth, and, had it crossed my mind to lie or fib, I would have done so in a poem concluding with prayers and praise for some miser; if anyone doesn’t believe me, let him ask the priest himself. All the same, snow differs from my words in one thing: snow falls on what is black and makes it white, while my words fall on paper and make it black. Both, in my opinion, are a delight to the eye, and the two share the following feature: a few days after the sun rises over the snow, it melts, and the same is true of my words, for almost nothing will remain of them in the reader’s head after the passing of one moonlit night or the rising over him of one Shining Orb. And here’s a further point of resemblance: the falling of the snow gives rise to a clearing and brightening of the weather; so too the descent of my words from my head brings about a brightening of the weather of my thoughts, a clearing of my mind, and a readiness on its part to delight and please. In any case, I’m sure you’ll agree that the comparison is appropriate here and my excuse to the point.

1.17.3

To proceed. I see that the well-off and well-to-do, in their spacious homes, use one set of living quarters for the summer and another for the winter, one nook for passing the night and another for taking a bath. Others, who have only one house, aren’t worth the visiting, unless that house happens to be close by at the time for visits or the time for visits happens to coincide with closeness to their houses. It follows that, in emulation of their better-off betters, scholars should assign themselves, in their roomy heads, numerous and varied locations for the cold, tepid, and hot words that come to them. That way, when their blood is hot and their natural tempers are aroused, they’ll be able to read something cold and so reduce the underlying causes of the heat that has exercised them, and when things are quiet they’ll be able to recite out loud from the hot, or pursue the opposite strategy, in keeping with the school of those who treat things with their like and not with their opposite. Let no one say that the reader will be wasting his time if he spends it distinguishing between the cold and the hot among these chapters, for the only way to thoroughly digest their contents is to read them through to the end, unlike other books, in which the sin of “cold talk”²⁶⁹ isn’t committed and which follow one set curriculum. Every one of these chapters, I declare, has a title that points to its contents as unambiguously as smoke does to fire; anyone who knows what the title is knows what the whole chapter is about. If, for example, you happen to come across some chapter with the word bālūʿah or ballūʿah or ballāʿah (“drain”) or barbakh (“drainpipe”) or irdabbah (“sewer”) as a heading, you can assume that one of the donkeys at the monastery must have dived into something of the sort looking for help with their Arabizations and translations.

1.17.4

On the other hand, of course, just because the reader has got to know the gist of the chapter from its title doesn’t mean he can decide not to read it and then boast to his friends and brethren, “I read Leg over Leg and understood it all!” That would be like someone who claims to be of noble origin(1) saying, “Today I saw the emir, God strengthen him, and spoke to him,” when all he saw of him was the back of his head, and that from a distance, and it wasn’t granted to him to kiss the noble hand; or the same emir asked him about something and he stammered over his reply or had to think about it, so the emir insulted his father and forefathers and cursed him out, threatening to have him crucified or to have his eyes put out with hot irons; or like some habanqaʿ (one who puts on airs, is stupid, and loves talking to women) saying, “I saw such and such a woman today, and, when she was face to face with me, she stopped and sighed deeply,” when she probably stopped to spit, or she sighed a deeply malodorous sigh. The reader should, preferably, on opening this book, go through it page by page, from the beginning to the end, including the footnotes and page numbers.

1.17.5

It is believed that each author has his own style and no one can please everybody, for people’s likes are diverse, their opinions various. One mystery I’ve never been able to get to the bottom of is that a certain author will appear slothful, with neither energy or good cheer, ill at ease with anything that might stir up commotion or conflict, tepid in both inaction and action, viewing everything that happens as though it was just what he’d expected — and yet set every vein of the reader’s throbbing and every muscle aquiver the moment he takes up the pen; and there are some whom you’ll find lively and brisk, always in a hurry and a rush, quick and agile, coming and going, running around and falling over himself, chasing and speeding, ducking and weaving, shoving and jostling — and then, when he composes something, it falls out of his head onto the reader’s brain like snow and almost douses the fires of his intelligence.

1.17.6

When I thought about the matter and looked into it in depth, I started to doubt that snow could be created by an excess of cold formed in the air. I decided that, on the contrary, it may well, in fact, be caused by the creation by excessive heat of an irritated patch on the air’s breast above the inhabitants of the Earth plus a superabundance of ire inside its guts, followed by the precipation of the latter onto the said inhabitants in the form of snow, to pay them back for the abominations they practice on cold nights, meaning the way that some of them try to turn nature upside down and heat their beds with an instrument containing fire or, in the case of others, one containing piping hot water or, of others, by using an instrument containing drink, or of others, one containing meat.²⁷⁰ Such meat might even include pork, God save your dignity, and the air would therefore drop accumulations of snow upon them to prevent them from leaving their houses to make use of these instruments, and thus be relieved of their corruption, be it but for a couple of days.

1.17.7

What would have escaped its notice, however, is that many of these same people make use of one instrument to instrumentalize another, or several others. An example of the first would be the rich man who sits cross-legged in his tub, wraps himself in his fur mantle, and says to his servant, “You there! Off with you to such and such a store and bring me an instrument with which to heat my bed tonight!” so that the servant treads the mire and snow while his master’s foot stays clean. An example of the second would be if the master is open-handed and liberal and sends his servant in a vehicle either belonging to him or hired off the street, or, if he’s a sovereign emir and wants to keep his secret from his servant (it being ever the pleasure of servants to slander their master’s good name and pretend that they are worthier to be served than he), in which case the master will make use of another, or a couple of others, or of several others, in place of his servant, he having sent them, ahead of time, via his servant, a gift as a way of showing his generosity or perhaps having given it to them with his own hand. Whatever the case may be, the falling of snow will have been the cause of heating and warmth, for, if the latter be regarded as due to the action of the master, it would be the cause of his having made use of the instrument, and if it is regarded as being due to the action of the servant or others who might take his place, it would be attributable to envy, which is one of the most effective stimulators of warmth and heat.

1.17.8

Despite the fact that it (the snow, that is) appears to fall everywhere in the city without favoring one house over another, in reality this precipitation (by the sky, of its anger) targets only the heads of certain people, though it would be more proper if its sentence were inclusive and thus felt equally by all, unlike sentences of earthly precipitation, which are applied to some groups and not others. The difference between the two precipitations is that it might have been supposed that the snow, given that its falling, or precipitation, is top down, would be deposited on all heads with equal force and thus include old and young, fat-headed and long-headed. Earthly sentences and laws, on the other hand, given that their precipitation is bottom up, or in other words from the heads of people who are themselves ruled to the heads of those who rule,²⁷¹ are unlikely to carry strongly enough to reach those who are possessed of high status and elevated station, whose heads are so high that the clouds pass beneath them.

1.17.9

It is also the case that snow, however much misery and trouble it may bring in reality to those who are familiar with it, often looks delightful to someone who has never seen it before. We have been told that a certain vagabond was once the guest of people who failed to honor and celebrate him²⁷² because he was inferior to them in terms of acquaintance and social eminence, their country being one in which snow never fell. When he left them and went to another, which he found to be a land of plenty and where he witnessed snow falling with his own eyes, he exclaimed and cheered at the sight and was as pleased as he could be, to the point that he claimed that it was a gift from God that the latter had made specific to that particular spot to distinguish it from all others, just as the Almighty had denied it to the first country in which he’d been a guest.

1.17.10

Of the same type are my words here,²⁷³ for, despite all the digression and padding, the words that have been squeezed into figures of speech and the meanings that have been made knotty with allusions and insinuations, transformations and witty formulations, someone unused to such minglings may find it appealing; indeed his admiration may even drive him to seek to outdo and emulate it. Too late, though! The door has closed in the face of competitors. While I do not claim to be the first writer in the world to follow this path or thrust a pinch of it up the noses of those who pretend they are dozing, I do notice that all the authors in my bookcase are shackled to a single stylistic chain. I don’t know whether they’ve changed their style now or not: more than five years have passed since I left them. Once you’ve become familiar with one link of the chain, you feel as though you know all the others, so that each one of them may truly be called a chain-man, given that each has followed in the footsteps of the rest and imitated them closely. This being established, know that I have exited the chain, for I am no chain-man and will not form the rump of the line; nor do I have any desire to be at its front, for the latter is an even more calamitous place to be than the former. I follow what I see to be good, seize what I find appealing by the forelock, reject the impositions of tradition.

1.18.1

The reason I gave the nib of my pen a little rest from the snapping teeth of the Fāriyāq’s name, after leaving him with the self-denying priest, and distracted myself by talking about snow was that I was so angry at the two of them. Where the priest’s concerned, I was angry that he’d betrayed his friend who had taken him in and had played fast and loose with his womenfolk; had the Almighty given that merchant a son whom he’d accepted in good conscience as his own — or, in other words, had He “opened his wife’s womb,” as it says in the Old Testament²⁷⁴—four quarters of the child would have been from the priest and the rest, which is his name, from the merchant, the latter thus putting himself in the position of a raiser of bastards, though the first male to open a womb is, as the Old Testament says, “blessed and magnified among the nations.”²⁷⁵ That is why, among the British, the right of inheritance goes to the eldest, or the “opener of the womb.”²⁷⁶ How could the priest have attempted, by doing so, to bring both a curse and a blessing down on the head of any of God’s creatures? It’s unthinkable.

1.18.2

As to the Fāriyāq, I was angry because he was the cause of the secret’s being revealed²⁷⁷ through the obstinacy and blustering that he demonstrated in hanging on to his verses, in which, I have no doubt, he was guilty of falsity, overstatement, and objectionable exaggeration to no purpose (despite which he thinks he’s a great poet). As for the claim that the child’s physical resemblance to its father constitutes definitive proof of his being his son, there is no consensus. Some believe it is an insufficient indication because it is possible that the mother, even while fornicating, might be thinking about her husband and picturing him to herself, in which case the fetus would take on the form of that image. Others say that the mother, on her own, has no role in the shaping of the fetus; some children come out looking like their paternal or maternal uncles, or someone their mothers never ever set eyes on.

1.18.3

Now I must resume my tale, presenting it to the reader’s ears without leading either of us to choke on his tears. Thus I declare: as stated earlier in this book, the Fāriyāq was born with the misfortune of having misfortune everywhere in the ascendant, the Scorpion raising its tail to strike at the Kid, or Billy Goat, and the Crab set on a collision course with the horn of the Ox. Here you must know that bad luck is of two kinds — inseparable bad luck and separable bad luck. Inseparable bad luck is the kind that dogs a person in his waking and sleeping, his eating and drinking, in his setting off of a morning and his coming home at night, and in everything that comes his way. Separable bad luck is the contrary, by which I mean that it is the kind that dogs a person under certain conditions and not others, the best-known such conditions being the critical ones, such as marriage, travel, writing a book, and the like.

1.18.4

The specificities of inseparable bad luck are various too. One kind is like a tightly tied knot, another like a noose, another like a nail, another like a peg, another like a clip, and another like a lock without a key; one is like fish glue, another like corn glue, another like flour paste, another like bookbinder’s paste, another like birdlime or mistletoe slime, or like arrow-feather glue or shoe-maker’s glue or chrysocolla; one is like the skin and another like the blood that courses through the body’s every joint and member²⁷⁸—the breastbones and polyps, the vertebrae tips and osmotic membranes, the thoraces and collarbones, the rib cartilage and shoulder blades, the gristle and the four long ribs, the upper thighs and lower belly, the muscles and the sinews of the arm, the veins and the flesh between the shoulder and the neck, the intestines and fatty deposits, the vein that runs on the inner side of the spine and is joined to the aorta and the hemophilic vein, the jugular and aorta, the seminal ducts and the two hidden veins at the cupping-place on the neck, the esophagus and the cephalic vein, the gullet and the backbone nerve, the spinal vein that is cut to cure jaundice and the bone marrow, the jugular veins and the sweaty place behind the ear, the stifle joint and the small bone in the knee that is sometimes displaced, the inner-arm sinews and the arteries, the two veins that supply blood to the brain and the limbs, the spine and the extremities — and it was to this type that the Fāriyāq’s bad luck belonged. It shouldn’t be understood, however, that he was “bloody” in the sense of having much blood, or being fond of shedding or wallowing in it; he was innocent of all such characteristics. It’s just that his bad luck was like blood in being inseparable from him under any circumstances.

1.18.5

He has said — and if he lied the responsibility is his — that one night he saw in his dreams that he drank an iced drink and then, immediately after it, a hot drink and started complaining of a severe pain in his molars and of a hoarseness in his throat. On other occasions, he would dream he was plunging from a mountain top or falling off a camel’s back, so that he ended up bent double. If he dreamed that he ate pickles, he would get a stomachache from them that same night, if he drank salty or brackish water, he would vomit, and if he smelled a bad smell, he would faint. And if anyone were to tell him that he’d seen a fair, full-bodied girl in his garden, that night in his dreams he would see himself

³⁰⁵

1.19.1

It is the custom of people everywhere to say when they love or long for something, “My heart loves” that thing or it “feels drawn to” it or “desires” it. I don’t know the underlying reason for this usage, for the heart is only one of the many organs of the body, and it’s not possible that the sensory capacities of all the organs should be gathered together in just that one. The proof is that if someone loves a certain kind of food, for example, the cause is to be sought in the gustatory organs that give rise to his desire for it, and if someone loves a woman, the cause is to be sought in the organ that gives rise to his desire for her. Natural inclinations that do not call for the employment of any visible organ — such as love of leadership, good fortune, or religion — must be attributed to the head, these being abstractions that have nothing to do with that lump of flesh called the heart. By the same token, as the spleen, which is the Vizier of the Right-hand Side, has nothing to do with these matters, so the heart, which is the Vizier of the Left-hand Side,³⁰⁶ can have none either. However, given that the motion of the heart is more rapid than that of other organs because of its greater proximity to the lungs, where breathing originates, people think that the heart must be a primary source for all a person’s affections and desires. It is also their custom, to avoid having to search for numerous reasons and causes and of having to be certain of their facts, to reduce everything to one cause among the many. In the same way, poets, for example, attribute the proximate causes of bad luck to fate and of ill-fortune and separation to crows.

1.19.2

Based on this belief (namely, that all affections are attributable to the heart), the Bag-man wanted to test the Fāriyāq’s in order to find out whether or not love for the new goods beat strongly within it. He started off by asking him, “Do you feel in your heart that the new goods are better than the old, and does it pound with joy and pleasure when you hear them mentioned? Does it feel happy, expansive, and care-free when the thought of them occurs to your mind and does it clench itself, shrink, and recoil at the mention of the other? When you read the price list, do you feel that every single letter in it has been imprinted on it (meaning, on your heart), so that, even if it weren’t there, those same letters could take its place? Does it sometimes ignite and burn, and then at others go out, only to return more strongly, like the celebrated phoenix? Do you feel too that it’s being prodded by a prodder, pricked by a pricker, squeezed by a squeezer, constricted by a constrictor, ripped by a ripper, and pressed by a presser?”

1.19.3

The Fāriyāq told him, “As for the pounding and the choking, my heart’s always that way, being subject to such sensations in both joy and sadness, for the least thing affects it. As far as igniting and melting are concerned, though, I don’t know what you mean.” “What is meant by ‘burning’ here,” replied the Bag-man, “and by ‘prodding’ and ‘squeezing,’ is ardor, enthusiasm, and obsessive interest, and imagining that what isn’t there is present and what is a fantasy is real. An example would be someone walking in a waterless desert who becomes so thirsty that he thinks the mirage is water and the sun’s rays, too, are pure, sweet water, and keeps on going in the hope of finding water until he’s crossed the waste, because intense imagining and obsessive interest help a person put up with trials and tribulations, and, though he be sinking under their weight, he will imagine that he’s reclining at ease on a couch. Thus the figurative and the real, the tangible and the intangible, all come to be on the same plane to him, to the point that he reckons hunger a dining table, the bier a throne, the impaling stake or cross a pulpit. He may have a wife and children and use them as though they were no more valuable than china plates and go running off through distant lands to promote his goods, giving up family, friends, and companions in favor of the contents of his saddlebag. This he carries on his shoulder, gladly and with high hopes, trudging high and low over the earth, offering to make any mortal who crosses his path his partner and co-financer. He goes on this way until his time is up, and nothing pleases him better than to die thus engaged. The bag! The bag! No other trade or work have we than it. The goods! The goods! No other reward have we than they.” At this point he broke down, weeping and sobbing.

1.19.4

When, after a while, he’d recovered his composure, the Fāriyāq asked him, “Do you Bag-men have a marketplace and a boss to take charge of it?” He said, “No.” “Who, then,” said the Fāriyāq, “checks the quality of the goods?” He replied, “Each of us does so himself and we don’t need anyone else.” The Fāriyāq was amazed and said to himself, “Now here’s a wonder! We have a group of undercapitalized parasites who have a market boss but no saddlebags, and a similar group who have saddlebags but no boss. But perhaps my friend is in the right: if it were otherwise, he would not have undertaken to bring his bag from such distant lands or braved the dangers of the journey and all the rest.” Now, however, the Recoiler poisoned his mind with the thought that perhaps the Bag-man hadn’t found anywhere to set up shop in his own country, so he’d brought what he had in stock to get rid of here. If a merchant stocked up on, say, silk-wool, or cotton goods, and brought them to another country, he couldn’t be regarded as doing so out of love for its inhabitants; it had, after all, become commonplace for those in search of work to roam the world. Next, though, it occurred to him that the Bag-man’s perseverance and his equanimity and patience must inevitably be complemented by good sense and resolve, in contrast to rashness and flightiness, whose only complements are conceit and error, and he concluded that, in view of his said perseverance and mild manners, the Bag-man must be following the right path and that the metropolitan, with his vehemence and eagerness to do evil, must be among the misguided.

1.19.5

He said, therefore, to the Bag-man, “Sir, I have heeded everything with which you’ve filled my ears and believe the truth to lie with you alone. I am your partisan, your follower, and the co-carrier of your bag. Just protect me from these undercapitalized parasites, for they are like ravening lions that feel no mercy or pity for God’s creatures. They think that destroying a soul out of zeal for religion will earn them a place close to Him. They hold tight to such exterior meanings of the words of the gospel as they believe are in keeping with their aims and will increase their standing and authority. They say, for instance, that Christ’s words ‘I came not to send peace, but a sword’³⁰⁷ license them to apply the said instrument to people’s necks to make them return to the true path. They have cast behind them the essence, substance, and consequence of religion, which are friendship among all men, affection, assistance, and a proper certitude as to the existence of God Almighty. Those who have gone astray and are blind to the truth find no difficulty in extracting from any book, divinely inspired or not, whatever may suit their purpose and corrupt creed, for the door of exegesis is a wide one. Should the Emir of the Mountain, once he’s grown old and wrapping himself up in his clothes is no longer enough to keep him warm, be permitted to cozy up to a beautiful virgin girl, i.e., warm himself with her and heat himself with the warmth of her body, like King David? When he makes war on the Druze and God grants him victory over them, is he permitted to slay their married women and their children and leave their virgins alive for the stud bulls among his troops to debauch, the way that Moses did to the people of Midian, as stated in Numbers, chapter 33? Is he permitted to marry a thousand women, queens and concubines, as Solomon did? Is a priest permitted to have intercourse with an adulteress and beget bastards, as did the prophet Hosea? Or to tolerate one of his governors slaying every man, woman, and suckling child among his enemies, as Saul did at the Lord’s command with the Amalekites, the Lord even being angry with him that he hadn’t killed along with them the best of their sheep and oxen and had spared Agag, King of Amalek, and repenting that he had made Saul king over the Children of Israel, so that Samuel arose and hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord in Gilgal? Moreover, I have read in the index to the Old Testament printed in Rome, under the letter h, the following: ‘We (i.e., the adherents of the Church of Rome) are obligated to destroy the heretics (i.e., innovators and schismatics)’; in justification, they cite the fighting, bloodshed, and assassination that occurred between the Jews and their enemies, as outlined above. Thus, if the religion of the Christians makes lawful the slaying of men, women, and children and the debauching of virgins, and allows the seizing of other people’s property without first inviting the victims to join the true religion but out of mere ferocity and tyranny, as does the religion of the Jews, why did the first abrogate the second and declare its laws null and void? In fact, though, the Christian religion is built on high moral values and its aim from beginning to end is to maintain peace among men and urge them to what is righteous and good. Otherwise, we might as well go back to being Jews.”

1.19.6

When the Bag-man heard this, he decided that behind the words was a sly dog, so he exerted himself to save the Fāriyāq from the hands of the arrogant,³⁰⁸ thinking it best to send him to an island known as the Island of Scoundrels,³⁰⁹ believing it would make a safe haven for him. The Faryāq thus embarked on a small ship going to Alexandria, but before they had gone far, the sea rose and threw the ship about, and our friend became so dizzy he had to stick to his bunk, where he set to complaining of the dolors of the sea and to lamenting, as follows:

T

HE

F

ARYĀQ

’

S

L

AMENT AND

P

LAINT

1.19.7

“Alas for my traveling and alack for my travail! Why do I endure this painful distress to no avail? What good this bargain when this mighty affliction is all it earns? What tempted me to take on the traders when such low meddling could bring me no returns? I was born into this world and lived there many a year before, without giving a thought to the squabbles of every dolt and boor. Why did I enter these straits and get embroiled in these sterile debates? Why should the shouting matches engaged in by people west and east, with their corrupt thinking and low characters, concern me in the least? Ah how I miss the pen, however hard over its nib-notch I’ve toiled and even if the page onto which it spits its ink with fly shit’s soiled! Ah how I miss the donkey that brayed and kicked — who will bring me back that beast? He may be better off than me these days — he may be living a life of ease, while I, today, am cut off from all I once held dear. Who will bring me back the inn and brethren — each one a gracious and companionable peer? All I had to do then was sing, warble, and quaff—would that I’d gone along with all the rest and worshipped the golden calf!”³¹⁰ (I seek refuge with God — our friend has blasphemed!). “Not every second has to be given over to wrangling and trying to grab your opponent by the collar. The metropolitan gave me sound advice when he said the senses deceive mighty and meek, stupid and wise, ignoramus and scholar. He knows the truth but says something different, fearing all who are ‘ignoble and, beside that, basely born,’³¹¹ for nothing pleases the ignorant more than to distract and suborn. Did he not tell me, ‘You cannot renew the old, or straighten what is bent?’ True, the senses deceive and alike in this are the murderer and the man of mercy, the vile and the benevolent.”

1.19.8

After pausing for a moment to marshal examples of the preceding, he resumed, “When an ugly, misshapen (shawhāʾ) woman looks at her face in the mirror, she says, ‘I may be ugly and misshapen to some but to others I am handsome,’ which is why the author of the Qāmūs says, ‘Shawhāʾ means both “a woman who frowns” and “a beautiful woman”; a word with two opposite meanings.’ When a man with a big nose looks at that crag on his face, he says, ‘It may well be that some good-looking women will desire it and see in it no crookedness or curve.’ Painters portray our ugly overlords, kings, queens, and any others on whom fortune has smiled as though they were comely and they, in their years of spinster- and bachelorhood, see themselves exactly as the painters have portrayed them. We see the sun as though it had risen, when according to the scientists it hasn’t yet done so, and we see a stick in water as though it were crooked, though ‘there is no therein no crookedness.’³¹² A mirage shows a person as though double and certain colors appear in two different forms. Magicians make observers think they are walking on water or going through fire without being burned. To a person in a ship plowing along opposite houses and property, the part of the land closest to him appears to be moving and mobile, when it is unmoving and fixed. A person who sits at a window opposite another at the same level sees the latter as though it were higher than his own. Maybe, then, the Bag-man’s tears were not for his goods but for some other cause, for I hear that the players in theaters weep and laugh at will. Maybe weeping is one of those arts that the Bag-men are instructed in when young. What benefit to me is the saddlebag now? I call on it, and it abandons me? I love it, and it hates me? I pick it up, and it spurns me?”

1.19.9

When he started in on this foolishness — which the Bag-men regard as blasphemy, the Market-men as glorification of the Lord, and those in between as generated by fear (for to this day people can agree only to disagree) — the ship gave him a violent shove, such as the Bag-men would consider to be the Lord’s revenge and the Market-men entirely incidental, and he began yelling, “Forgive me, Market Boss! By your beard, which is at the barber’s, save me! Bag! Goods! Price list! Traders! Undercapitalized parasites! You who weave the goods and you who dye them, you who warp and you who weft them, you who hem and you who embroider them, you who ornament and you who stripe them, you who darn and you who stitch them, you who sew and you who edge them, you who baste and you who unroll them, you who fold and you who crease them,(1) you who wrap and you who sew them edge to edge, catch me, by your lives, or I am done for!” This cry had barely left his lips before the ship gave a list to one side that sent his little head rolling like a watermelon, so he started yelling and calling for help, saying, “I’ll never cry goods for sale again! If this is what’s in store for us at the start of the road, where will it all lead?” Then he fainted and started raving, saying, “Sh…! Sh…!” which made a passenger who overheard him repeating it again and again think he must be complaining that there was one of “the two impure things” in his bed.³¹³ Finding nothing, though, he said to himself, “He must be raving with pain” and left him.

1.19.10

Then God decreed that the sea grow calm and the weather turn fair, and after some hours the Alexandrine shore appeared, and the same man came and gave him the good news that land was in sight, so he arose stoically, washed his face, and changed his clothes. When they left the ship, the Fāriyāq was ahead of them all, and no sooner had he set foot on the ground than he picked up some pebbles from its surface and swallowed them, declaring, “This is my mother and to it I return. On it I was born and on it I shall die.” Then he made his way to a Bag-man who was in the city and presented him with his letter of recommendation from the other Bag-man, and he stayed with him while waiting for a ship leaving for the island. Let us then congratulate him for arriving safe and sound, and let us present a memorandum to the Princely See and Royal Presence, His Excellency the Patriarch of the Maronite Sect, whoever he may be, after which we shall turn our attention for a short while to the Market-men and the Bag-men and set out the differences between them.

A M

EMORANDUM FROM THE

W

RITER OF

T

HESE

C

HARACTERS

1.19.11

The Fāriyāq now has escaped your lands and slipped through your hands. He’s blown a raspberry in all your faces, and at your threats his pulse no longer races. All that remains is for me to remind you of the injustice, tyranny, oppression, and aggression that you carried to such great lengths against my brother, the late Asʿad,³¹⁴ to wit, that you held him in your prison at your official abode at Qannūbīn³¹⁵ for around six years and that, after you had forced him to taste every form of humiliation, degradation, misery, and distress in the small cell that was his sole abode — for he never left it for a place where he could see the light or breathe the air that the Creator has bestowed on the innocent and guilty alike among his creatures, — he gave up the ghost. Your only reason for imprisoning him was that he was at odds with you over matters that call for neither punishment nor reproach. You had no authority over him, either religious or civil. As for the religious aspect, Christ and his apostles never ordered the imprisonment of those who disagreed with what they had to say; they merely held themselves aloof from them. If the Christian religion had adopted from its beginnings the same vicious cruelty that characterizes you now — you, the shepherds of the lost and guides of the erring — no one would have believed in it, for no one converts unless he believes that the religion he is adopting is better than the one he is abandoning. Everyone in the world knows that there is nothing good to be said for imprisoning, starving, humiliating, threatening, discomforting, and reviling people, not to mention that Christ and his apostles acknowledged the authority and government of the sovereign and never themselves did more than urge on people the noble virtues and command them to piety, modesty, peace, endurance of suffering, and mildness of behavior, which are the goals of every religion known to man.

1.19.12

And as for the civil aspect, given that my brother Asʿad did nothing reprehensible and committed no crime against his neighbor or his emir, or against the state — which, if he had done so, would have required that he be tried before the legal authorities — the patriarch’s maltreatment of him is no less than maltreatment of the person of Our Lord the Sultan, whose slaves we all are and to whose safekeeping and rule we all appeal. All of us are equal in rights, for the patriarch has no right to take a single silver coin from my house by force; how much less then is his right to take a life by force! Even if we concede that my brother debated and argued over religion and said that you were misguided, it was not yours to kill him for that reason. If you acknowledged his status as a scholar and feared the consequences of his activities, you ought to have pulled apart his evidence and refuted his arguments orally or in writing; if not, you should have banished him from the country, as he asked you to do. Instead, though, you persisted in your ferocious punishment in order to make an example of him and claimed that the fact that he once escaped from your abode in an attempt to save himself exacerbated his crime and increased his guilt, meaning that your own tyranny and injustice toward him should also be increased.

1.19.13

Do I hear you, you confederacy of cretins, claiming that to destroy one soul for the salvation of many is a praiseworthy act that should be encouraged? If you had any insight or good sense you would know that persecution and compulsion only increase the persecuted in his love of that for which he is persecuted, especially if he is convinced in his heart that he is right and his tormentor wrong, or that he is blessed with knowledge and virtue while the other is innocent of them. The fact is, you are without either religious or political understanding and have exposed your honor to defamation and blackening and your reputation to revulsion and condemnation for as long as sky is sky and earth earth, and that my brother’s reputation, God have mercy upon him, though he be dead, will never die. Whenever anyone of good sense and insight mentions him, he will mention along with him your misdeeds, your atrocities, your excesses, your ignorance, and your ugliness. I swear, he drove more of your blood-thirsty community out of their allegiance to you by his death than he would have done if he had remained alive — suffice it to mention the Most Honorable Khawājā Mikhāʾīl Mishāqah³¹⁶ and other persons of wealth and capability.

1.19.14

Did you feel no compassion, you bull-necked thugs, for his youth and beauty? Were your hard hearts not affected by the pallor of his face when you kept him from the light and air, when his firm and tender body withered and nothing was left of his well-turned physique but skin and bones (and even then you were too stingy to release him with just those)? Did you take no pity on him when you saw that his fingertips had been worn away for want of those very things to which the al-Aṣmaʿī in your monastery had unfettered access? How many a time, by God, did they take up the pen only to use it to write out what kings wished to hear and how many a time, by God, did he ascend the pulpit and preach to you extemporaneously, the sweat pouring from that shining brow, and how hard did his listeners weep as they remembered their sins and determined to renounce them! How many a time did he write and translate insipid books for you and instruct your stupid monks and bring them out from the shadows of their ignorance! Did not the modest decency that shone from his face put your own impudent countenances to shame — he who was more bashful than the most demure of women? Or his dearness to his family, the honor paid him by emirs, the love shown him by lords and commoners? His unblemished purity and honorable morals? The elegance of his language, the good cheer he brought to those he was with? Is one such as him to be imprisoned for six years, humiliated, punished, and to die (and God alone knows of what he died)?

1.19.15

How do you explain that neither the French churches nor the Austrian nor the English nor the Muscovite nor the Greek Orthodox nor the Greek Catholic nor the Coptic nor the Jacobite nor the Nestorian nor the Druze nor the Mutawālīs³¹⁷ nor the Anṣārīs³¹⁸ nor the Jews perform such abominable and vile acts as are performed by the Maronite church? Or is it alone possessed of the truth, while all others are in error? Do you not claim that the King of France is the protector and defender of religion? Yet at the same time, the Catholic citizens of his kingdom continue to print books condemning the vices, shameful deeds, stupidity, obscenity, lustfulness, and atheism of the leaders of their church. Some of them, indeed, have written histories devoted to the immorality, depravity, and bad conduct of the popes, as of their denial of the truth of the immortality of the soul, of divine inspiration, and of the divinity of Christ.³¹⁹

1.19.16

One has said that Pope Amadeus VIII, known as the Duke of Savoy,³²⁰ was elevated to the papacy when he was a layman. Another that the Council of Basel was convened specifically to depose Pope Eugene³²¹ and found him guilty of sedition, bribery, sowing discord, and betraying his vows. Another that Pope Nicolas I excommunicated Bishop Günther of Cologne because of a disagreement with him at the council that was convened in Metz in 864 and that the aforementioned bishop sent letters to all his churches in which he said, “Although Vicar Nicholas, who has taken the title of pope and considers himself to be simultaneously pope and secular leader, has excommunicated us, we have dismissed his folly.”³²² And another that Ambrose, governor of Milan, obtained the rank of bishop, even though his belief in the Christian religion was unsound.³²³ Another has said that Pope John VIII sent delegates to Constantinople, where they convened a synod at which four hundred bishops met and that all of them found Photius innocent and declared him to be worthy of the rank of bishop.³²⁴ Another that Pope Stephen VI ordered that the body of Formosus, Bishop of Porto, be exhumed from its grave because he had incited strife against his predecessor John VIII, and then sentenced him, dead as he was, to have his head and three of his fingers cut off, after which his body was thrown into the Tiber.³²⁵

1.19.17

And that Pope Sergius³²⁶ appointed Theodora, the mother of Marozia,³²⁷ who was married to the Count of Tuscany, a senator³²⁸ and that he, that is, the pope, fathered a boy³²⁹ on the said Marozia and had him raised inside his palace far from the eyes of the people of Rome, after which Marozia married Hugh, King of Arles,³³⁰ and intrigued to have Pope John X³³¹ killed because he was in love with her sister, smothering him between two pieces of bedding and assuming absolute power. Next, she schemed to appoint Leo³³² to the same position, and then, a few months later, murdered him in prison; after him, she appointed another man whose name has now fallen into oblivion³³³ and he ruled for a few years, after which she deposed him, placing John XI — her son by Sergius III — on the throne when he was only twenty-four years old, imposing on him the condition that he should implement no decision that did not directly derive from his rank as pope. She also poisoned her husband³³⁴ and married her brother-in-law the king of Lombardy,³³⁵ to whom she delegated the rule of the Papal States. One of her sons by her first husband³³⁶ rose up and incited the people of Rome against her, imprisoning her and her son, the pope, in Sant’Angelo. After him, Stephen VIII³³⁷ held office but he was hated by the Romans because he was from Germany, and they so disfigured his face that he could not show himself among the people.³³⁸ Then Marozia’s grandson Octavianus was elected pope at the age of eighteen, being known thereafter as John XII.³³⁹ He was licentious, indecent, depraved, a scoffer at religion, entirely given over to the satisfaction of sensual pleasures and his appetites, infatuated with horse-riding and chivalry — a situation that failed to disturb the church only because most other churches and nations were in the same state.

1.19.18

When Otto, the emperor,³⁴⁰ learned that this pope was secretly in revolt against him, and the people of Italy called on him to come and set their affairs to rights, he made his way from Pavia to Rome and, after settling the affairs of the city, convened a synod that the pope himself attended along with many princes of Germany and Rome, forty bishops, and seventeen cardinals, in the church of Saint Paul. There, in the presence of all, the emperor made a complaint against the pope that the latter had fornicated with a number of women, and specifically with Étiennette, who died in childbirth, that he had ordained as bishop of Todi a boy who was only fourteen years old, that he used to sell church titles and offices for money, that he had put out the eyes of his godson at his baptism, that he had “snipped” (i.e., castrated) a cardinal and then murdered him, and that he did not believe in Christ, along with other charges, the emperor thus being obliged to depose him and install Leo VIII³⁴¹ in his place. Barely, however, had the emperor left Rome before the pope (John XII) whipped up the people of the city, convened a synod at which Leo VIII was deposed, and ordered the amputation of the hand of the cardinal who had recorded the complaint against him. He also had the tongue of the clerk who had recorded these events cut off, as well as his nose and two of his fingers. John XII was later murdered while embracing a woman — the murderer being, according to some, the woman’s husband.

1.19.19

Next, Consul Crescentius,³⁴² son of Pope John X by Marozia, mobilized the people of Rome against Otto II and imprisoned Benedict,³⁴³ who was of the emperor’s party, and he died in prison. When this reached Otto’s ears he appointed John XIV,³⁴⁴ but Boniface VII,³⁴⁵ who had been appointed to the top position by the consul, rose up against him and killed him, leaving the consul a free hand in the running of affairs and execution of decisions until Gregory,³⁴⁶ the emperor’s sister’s son, was installed and Otto III³⁴⁷ deposed Crescentius; the emperor then played a trick on him, cut off his head, and ordered that his body be hung up by the feet.³⁴⁸ Pope John XV, who had been elected by the Romans, had both eyes put out and his nose cut off,³⁴⁹ and was then thrown from the top of the castle of Sant’Angelo. After this, the papacy was put up for sale, to be bought successively by Benedict VIII³⁵⁰ and John XIX,³⁵¹ who were brothers to the Count of Tuscany. Then it was bought for a boy aged ten, Benedict IX.³⁵² Then two further popes were elected, each of whom excommunicated the other,³⁵³ only to reconcile later on the basis that they divide the wealth of the church between them, each living with his concubine.³⁵⁴

1.19.20

Others have stated that the Church of Rome once issued an edict by which it ruled that one of the kings of France should divorce his wife and perform acts of penance for seven years³⁵⁵ and that, when the edict was published in the kingdom, the king lost his sanctity in the eyes of the people, who, lords and commoners alike, ostracized him to the point that he was left eventually with no one but two servants. Some say that Pope Gregory VII³⁵⁶ convened a synod against Henry IV,³⁵⁷ king of Germany, in Rome, where he declared, “I hereby depose Henry as ruler of Austria and Italy and absolve all Christians from obedience to him, and I will permit no one to serve him as a sovereign king.” When Henry IV could stand it no longer, he was forced to go to Rome. When he went to the pope, he found him alone with Countess(1) Matilda³⁵⁸ at Canossa,³⁵⁹ and the emperor stood at the gate, with no guard of his own, asking for permission to enter. When he entered the first courtyard, his way was barred by some of the pope’s servants, who stripped him of his royal mantle and dressed him in a hair shirt, and again he stood and waited for permission, barefoot in the castle courtyard, in the middle of winter. Then he was told he had to fast for three days before he could kiss the pope’s foot. When the three days were over, he was brought into the pope’s council chamber, where the pope promised to pardon him provided he should wait to see what sentence the Diet of Augsburg might pass on him. The writer goes on to say that the aforementioned pope died and was succeeded by the abbot of a monastery, under the name Urbanus II,³⁶⁰ who was as arrogant and tyrannical as his predecessors and, as such, set about inciting the two sons of Henry IV³⁶¹ to fight their father, which was the second time the pope had set the sons against their father. They rose up against him and put him in prison but he escaped and died at Liège, pitiful and humiliated. Some say that Henry VI,³⁶² son of Frederick II, went to Rome to have himself crowned by Pope Celestine³⁶³ and that when the emperor, crown on head, bent over to kiss the pope’s foot, the pope lifted his leg and kicked off the crown, which fell on the ground; the pope was eighty-six at the time.

1.19.21

Someone else says that one of the popes, Innocent III³⁶⁴ I think, excommunicated King Louis and his father but that the French bishops abrogated the sentence and ordered him to cancel it, and that Pope Innocent IV³⁶⁵ convened the thirteenth synod against the emperor Frederick II³⁶⁶ in 1245 and there found him guilty of unbelief and of taking Muslim girls as concubines. The emperor’s preachers and the members of his party stood up for him and responded by accusing the pope of having deflowered a virgin and of taking bribes on more than one occasion. Another has said that the aforementioned pope seduced the aforementioned emperor’s physician into slipping poison into his food, and that Pope Lucius II³⁶⁷ on one occasion took command in person of besieging Rome and died as the result of a stone striking him in the head; that Pope Clement XV³⁶⁸ used to roam about in Vienne³⁶⁹ and Lyons collecting money with his mistress, that a Dominican monk poisoned Emperor Henry on the orders of the pope (and at communion too!), that in 1200 two popes jostled for the throne, each gathering his party in readiness for a fight, on the banner of each the image of the keys, that one of these seized the liturgical vessels of the church of Saint Peter and sold them in preparation for the war, and that Pope Urban³⁷⁰ used to torture any cardinal who disagreed with him. At this time also, the French state refused to acknowledge the pope and its bishops ruled tyrannically over the people. Some say that Pope John XXIII³⁷¹ was accused of poisoning his predecessor, selling church offices, murdering a number of innocents, and being both an unbeliever and a sodomite, as a result of which he was deposed by the emperor.³⁷² And so it continues, beyond the scope of this book, for it has not been my intention to belittle religion; I simply provide the foregoing by way of a digression.

1.19.22

However, if what these French authors say is true, then my brother was far more pious and godly than these leaders of the church, for no one ever accused him of practicing sodomy or adultery or poisoning anyone or inciting sons to kill their fathers, or of making off with the church plate or behaving unjustly or rebelling against his sovereign or taking bribes. The whole matter comes down to no more than arguments between him and a patriarch over things that have no fixed measure or number or weight or volume. You might say that the steps from Qannūbīn to Sijjīn³⁷³ are three in number; he might say three hundred; I might say three thousand — what role do prison and torment have to play in such matters? If, on the other hand, what these writers say is lies and slanders, that would call for them to be punished and for retribution to be exacted upon them for slandering God’s priests and successors with libels so vile no fetish-worshipper could come up with anything more appalling. In fact, however, we are not aware of any of them having been tortured or banished or scared out of their houses or summarily removed from their abodes — quite the opposite, as their books have been printed time and time again and are priced in the market as scholarly works.

1.19.23

Someone may say, “This memorandum of yours is addressed to the present patriarch, who is a man of virtuous and noble qualities and not the one who imprisoned and killed your brother, who was his predecessor.” I reply, “I am aware of that, but so long as he believes that what his predecessor did was right he is his partner and sooner or later will mete out the same treatment to those who have followed in my brother’s footsteps. By the same token, all metropolitans, bishops, priests, and monks are equally blameworthy if they condone what the deceased patriarch did. I would have preferred to conclude this memorandum with a word of censure addressed to His Excellency Metropolitan Būlus Musʿad, our maternal uncle and confidential secretary to the patriarch. But I see that I’m in danger of going on too long, and what I’ve said above should be enough for the wise.”

1.20.1

You must know that the Market-men are famous everywhere, for they have, since ancient times, held a monopoly over the goods, which they keep in warehouses of theirs, declaring, “We shall exact revenge on anyone who does not buy from our warehouses.” They have also hidden the price list from the buyers and jacked up the prices of the various items to an exorbitant degree, demanding from the buyer several times the original price. More recently they opened workshops and warehouses in all the cities, and they have kept these dark, with no apertures or openings for the light, and they sell from them without showing the true colors of the goods or the kind of cloth. They keep the items they sell wrapped and packaged, and the buyer takes them and goes off without having set eyes on them. They have innumerable weavers, tailors, darners, and dyers, and these make them whatever they ask for.

1.20.2

One year it happened that a devastating die-off of cattle occurred, and the land was laid waste. Their stocks of wool and silk were thus reduced, and the looms and workshops were close to falling idle. One among them, a man of sound judgment and perspicuity, decided to use hair and certain kinds of plant in place of the silk and other stuffs that they could not find, and the work that he did with such materials was so well and cleverly made that most people were taken in. Then a company of those hard-pressed types who have been driven by their poverty-stricken situations to broaden the scope of their thinking and to look into and compare and contrast things — for the majority of scholars and original thinkers are vagabonds — went to one of the warehouses to buy what they needed and took what they’d bought to their homes, wrapped and untouched, as usual.

1.20.3

Now one of them was in love with and wanted to marry a woman, and he’d bought her a handkerchief. When he presented it to her in the presence of the others — it being noted that she was, like all women, skilled at examination and inspection and the uncovering of what is hidden — she took the handkerchief and, before thanking him for his kindness, brought it close to the light of the lamp (for she was visiting him at night), only to find in it a large hole, even though the light was weak and on the point of going out. Before them all, she cried, “Woe to him who sold you this! He cheated you. It’s got a hole in it as big as the one that holds you in thrall!” When they heard this, they were put on their guard, some picking apart what they’d bought, others measuring their clothes against their bodies, and so on, until it became plain to them that the wares were not what they’d asked for. He who had gone to buy something red found it was black, he who had wanted a long robe found it was short, and he who had wanted silk found it was cotton.

1.20.4

The next day, they returned to the salesmen and told them, “You sold us things we didn’t ask for” and gave them reasons and justifications for returning the goods. Said the owner of the handkerchief, “You almost blackened my face in front of my white-skinned beloved, and she would have quarreled with me over the low quality of what I gave her, had she not been anxious to get something better.” The salesmen, however, told them, “We sold you what you requested but ‘over your eyes there is a covering’³⁷⁴ that stops you from seeing the colors or kinds of cloth and from recognizing either quantities or measurements.” “How,” asked the one who had bought a robe, “can a person be ignorant of his height and another know it?” And the man who had the black but had wanted red said, “Look! The robe you sold me is black, and these two companions of mine will bear witness to what I say. See! It’s clear to anyone with eyes.” “You are blind and cannot distinguish colors,” said the salesman. Then he went to fetch some eye-wash with which to treat the man’s eyes, but the other refused, saying, “On the contrary, it’s you who are blind, and stupid, too.” The one who’d bought cotton instead of silk now said, “Suppose the eyes can deceive. Can touch also mislead the blind man?” Thus debate and intransigence did battle between them, and they filled the place with shouting and uproar.

1.20.5

While they were so engaged, a man came up at a run, panting and gasping. His tongue was hanging out, and he was holding his midriff with his hands. He had barely entered the store before he fell to the ground and could move no more, and he started moaning and saying, “Ah my wife! Ah my wife!” Then he passed out for a time. When he revived, he cast looks right and left, caught sight of his foe, and could not restrain himself from leaping up from where he lay and saying, “You wicked people! You pushers of goods that have exhausted their life! You stirrers-up of conflict twixt a man and his wife! You drivers of wedges between father, son, and daughter! You veilers of the eyes of those who can see and cheaters of gullible buyers without quarter! How can you think that it is allowable in God’s sight to cheat me and sell me something of which I have no need? Yesterday I came to you and asked you to sell me meat so that I could make broth for my wife who has been sick for some days, and you sold me crusts of bread and told me they were tender flesh. When I lit the fire to cook them, I found they were bread, and my wife went the whole night without tasting food and when morning came nothing of her moved, except her tongue, which never ceased cursing the wretched hour in which she set eyes on me before we married and abusing the priest who was the cause of our doing so, and she swears that, if she recovers from this sickness, she will give orders to all women to be to their husbands contrarians, excuse-makers, and beddeniers.”(1) As he said this, the blood in his brains apparently boiled, and he leaped up from where he lay and would have beaten the salesman had not some of the workers in the store grabbed hold of him.

1.20.6

When the salesman had wriggled from his grasp, he mounted a pulpit and declared, “Listen, all you adversaries, and do not rush to criticize. Typically, as critics, your eyes have become so clouded you see black as red, your taste buds so corrupted you think meat toasted bread, your minds so enfeebled and jaded you believe jewels to be colored pompoms that have faded. Only the Market Boss can judge fairly between us, so off with us to him, otherwise you must be counted people of unbelief and sin!” When the others heard the man’s words and realized that for him to have them tried before the Shaykh of the Market would be fast practice because the latter, by reason of his extreme old age, was weaker both in sight and judgment than they, they erupted in anger and started overturning the goods, jumbling them, and scattering them, ripping to pieces everything they could lay hands on, stamping on everything they could stamp on, and smashing every implement, box, glass, and cup they could reach. Then they left, heads held high. Next, they agreed among themselves to convene a council that night to arrange matters.

1.20.7

When it was evening, they met and said, “It’s become clear to us that these salesmen are oppressors and cheats and that our senses perceived everything the way it really is. Thanks then to God and to the Lady of the Handkerchief, who guided us to this. Come, let us be independent in our affairs and set up our own warehouses and workshops as they did theirs,” and they found themselves partisans and confidants, friends and assistants, and brought prices down so much that many became well disposed toward them. To these they said, “Our covenant with you is that we will sell you the goods in such a way that your eyes can see them, your hands touch them, and your tongues taste them, and if anyone’s unhappy with what he’s bought, we’ll exchange it for something better.” Then they looked for the price list and published it in all the lands, using a variety of means to that end, and they said to the people, “Behold the clearest of ledgers, the most extensive of registers. Buy from us nothing that isn’t according to the price sheet. Don’t go to the Market Boss; he is beyond redemption in his conceit.” The people, pleased with the conditions these men had set themselves, split off from the aforementioned Market Boss and his party, and each of the two parties took to accusing their opposite numbers of lying, and calumny, calling them stupid, excoriating them, rebutting their claims, accusing them of feeble-mindedness, cursing them out, calling them unbelievers, and charging them with sin and fornication—glory be to Him who makes each of man’s days succeed the one that went before, in never-ending fluctuation.

END OF BOOK ONE

2.1.1

I have cast from me, thank God, Book One, and relieved my pate of its burden. I scarcely believed I’d ever get to the second book, the first made me feel so dizzy, especially when I set out upon the waves to pay the Fāriyāq a respectful and honorable farewell. Anyway, I’m under no obligation to follow him wherever he goes, and for a while, after he reached Alexandria and swallowed the pebbles off its ground, my pen just sat there smacking its lips, my inkwell closed.

2.1.2

Then my energy returned and I started writing again, thinking it best that I commence Book Two with something weighty, so that it should be given greater consideration and remain for longer a matter of cogitation, and, just as I commenced Book One with something to demonstrate my thorough knowledge of certain high matters — and I’m assuming you haven’t already forgotten what you read earlier — I thought it would be a good idea now to start with certain low matters, to keep things symmetrical. In addition, given that plain rock must be counted among the precious stones that are both hard to obtain and beneficial, it occurred to me that I should roll a boulder of that material down from the topmost peak of my thoughts to the lowest bottoms of men’s ears. Now, then, if you stand and watch its progress without getting in its way or trying to stop it, it will pass you by just as happiness has me, which is to say, without touching you. Otherwise (if you think it a simple matter to bar its descent), it will pass over you and thrust you under it, and God protect us from the consequences of such a thrust! Observe: here it is, shifting in preparation for its fall, and now it’s on its way. Beware then, and beware! Stand at a distance and hear the message in its thunder: “Who looks on this world with the eye of reason — on the diversity and convergence of its states and conditions, of what’s essential and what incidental, of objects and ambitions, of customs and schools of thought, of ranks and dispositions—will find that the quintessence of all that passes before him is beyond his comprehension and moves too fast for his discernment and that, while our senses may have become familiar with certain things, that very familiarity leaves us no room for wonder. Those same things never cease, all the same, to be amazing and puzzling and any who subjects even the least of them to proper scrutiny will realize that his failure to pay them due attention is equivalent to the omission of the performance of a religious obligation.

2.1.3

“Observe, for example, the different types of plants there are on Earth — how many flowers of which we cannot say, brilliantly constructed and amazingly formed though they be, that they serve a specific purpose. And look at the different types of animals — reptiles, vermin, insects, and others: some are beautiful to look at but have no use and some are ugly to look at but are most urgently needed. And look at the heavens, at all their stars—

2.2.1

“Good morning, Fāriyāq! How are you and how do you find Alexandria? Have you learned to tell its women from its men (for the women in your country do not veil their faces)? And how do you find its food and drink, its clothes, its air and water, its parks, and how its people honor strangers? Is your head still swimming, your tongue with disparagement of travel still brimming?” Replied he, “So far as the city’s situation is concerned, it’s elegant because it’s on the sea, and the number of foreigners it contains adds to its brio: in it you see some people whose heads are covered with tall pointed hats and others with tarbushes, some with round caps and others with maqāʿiṭ turbans, some with burnooses and others with ordinary turbans, some with aṣnāʿ turbans and others with fillets, some with headgear of a generic nature⁴⁰⁰ and others with madāmīj turbans, some with sailors’ caps and others with hoods, some with caps and others with bonnets, some with further turbans and others with watermelon-shaped(1) and cantaloupe-shaped caps,⁴⁰¹ and others with head scarves large and small, some with judges’ tun-caps⁴⁰² and others with antimacassars,⁴⁰³ some with undercloths for turbans and others with head rags, some with the turban under the name mishmadh and others with the turban under the name mishwadh, and some with Frankish hats shaped like earthenware jars, or carp, or the creases between the cheek, nose, and eye, or the crevices between the same, or the children of the jinn, or armpit sinews, or white varan lizards, or disreputable demons, or babies’ clouts.

2.2.2

“Some of them have long saggy drawers that sweep the ground behind and before them and some have no drawers at all, so that their anuses are on display and the people pass their hands over what is in front of the latter.⁴⁰⁴ Some of them have short breaches and some drawers without legs, some of them have drawstrings and some have belts, some have leggings (drawers made of one piece of material) and others have underwear,⁴⁰⁵ some have boxers and others briefs. Some ride mules and asses, others dromedaries and horses. Camels are on every side, people collide. One moving among them must never slacken in his pious exclamations,⁴⁰⁶ saying, ‘God protect! God preserve! God be kind! I have put my trust in God! I seek God’s help! I seek refuge with God!’

2.2.3

“As for women’s face veils, if they conceal the beauty of some, at least they relieve the eye of the ugliness of the rest. It is, however, the ugly ones who most often cover their faces, for the pretty ones think it a pity, when they leave their cages, to fly through the markets without the onlookers being able to see their charms’ array, behold their comeliness, and make much ado over the beauty on display, saying, ‘As God wills!⁴⁰⁷ God be blessed! How mighty is God! O God, O God!’ When such a one returns to her house, she believes that all the inhabitants of the city have fallen passionately in love with her and sits there expecting them to send her gifts and tokens of esteem, verses and sonnets with an amatory theme. Whenever anyone raises his voice in song, she cocks an attentive ear and believes she hears him rhapsodizing over her name, and if, then, she sets off early the following day to the marketplace and finds everyone busy with their work, she’s amazed that they’re still conscious and capable of effort and action.

2.2.4

“She therefore shows off more of her hidden charms, her elegance, and her forbidden fruits. She bewitches them with her gestures and nods, her eye-rolling and her gestures behind her back, her expressive looks and glances, her come-hither winks and cow eyes, her billings and cooings, her haughtiness and conceit, her vanity and coquetry, her playfulness and her turning aside of her cheek in pride, her comings and goings and goings and comings, her demurrals and her mincing walk, her glances to the side and her glances askance, her looks of surprise and swivelings of her eyes, her backward glances of spite or surprise and her angry looks, her peepings through her fingers against the sun to see⁴⁰⁸ and her turnings to observe what lies behind her, her shading of her eyes against the sun to see and her peering through her fingers against the sun to see, her wantonness and her conceitedness, her staggering and swaying, her tottering and strutting, her bending and bowing, her coyness and bough-like curvaceousness, the trailing of her skirts over the ground as she walks and her sweeping by, her turning of her face aside as she proceeds and her walking with a swinging gait, her stepping out manfully and her walking proudly in her clothes, her ambling and her rambling, her stepping like a pouting pigeon and her rolling gait, the swinging of her mighty buttocks and her sashaying, the insinuating wriggling of her shoulders, her pretty waddling and the way she walks as though she were short, her shaking of her shoulders, her sprinting and her haughtiness (especially in walking), her taking short steps and her sinuosity, her ponderousness and her modesty of deportment, her hastening and her willowiness, her slowness of motion and her looseness of motion, her slow stepping and her skipping from foot to foot, her stretching out her hands as she paces and her walking with short steps, her swaying and her slowness, her walking proudly like a high priest of the Parsees and her sudden startings off the road, her sprightly running and her bending as she walks, her languishing gait and her strutting, her galloping and her striding out, her stalking and her swaying from side to side, her nonchalant sauntering and her walking with the limbs held close to the body, her swaggering, her walking finely and loosely and her staggering as though intoxicated, her walking with her thighs far apart kicking up her feet and her walking with a swing, her striding fast and her rushing, her skelping and her stepping quick, her tripping quickly along with short steps and three other ways of walking, each with a difference of one letter, and her walking nicely, her limping and a fourth way of walking with yet another letter changed⁴⁰⁹ and her walking making her steps close together, her gliding and her walking slowly, her shambling and a fifth way of walking, with further letters changed,⁴¹⁰ her walking with tiny steps⁴¹¹ and her shuffling, her walking with conceit and her walking as though too weak to take long strides, her running with short steps and her walking fast, her disjointed walking and the moving of her buttocks and sides as she walks, the looseness of her joints as she walks and her walking with close steps, her walking with a rolling gait and her slowness and turning in walking, her walking fast with close steps and her close stepping, her walking with steps as close as closely written letters and her walking with steps as close as rapidly uttered words, her hopping like a shackled camel and her rolling walk, her walking with small hurried steps and her moving like a fast, well-gaited donkey, her easy pacing and her twisting and turning, her marching proudly (spelled two ways),⁴¹² her walking arrogantly and her tottering, her walking so fast that her shoulders shake and her cleavage rises and her moving like a wave, her walking as though falling onto a bed and her walking proudly like a horse, her walking like an effeminate man and her fast, agitated walking, her handsome way of walking and the same said another way,⁴¹³ the beauty of her walk and her walking like a dove dragging its wings and tail on the ground, her walking like a pouting pigeon and her floppy walking, her walking with close, fast steps, moving her shoulders, her swashbuckling and stepping like a crow, her nubile grace, her hastening as she sways and her running with close steps, her lion-like pacing and her hurrying, her swaying as she walks and her walking slowly with long steps, her walking finely and the way she drags her skirts behind her, her active way of walking and her racing, her nimbleness and her knock-kneed running, her starting like a scared gazelle and and her leaping, and her jumping up and down in place and her facing forward and facing backward — and all the time her appetite for presents grows. I have composed two lines⁴¹⁴ on the face veil that are, I believe, without precedent:

⁴³⁶

2.3.1

A typical example of our friend’s bad luck was that, at the time of his leaving for the island, the Franks had yet to discover the special properties of steam. Travel by sea was dependent on the wind, which blew if it felt like it and didn’t if it didn’t. As al-Ṣāḥib ibn ʿAbbād has said,⁴³⁷

2.4.1

As long as sea’s sea and wind’s not ceased to be, the Fāriyāq’s ascendant star will never cease to slip, his tongue to trip. When he reached Alexandria, he found a new Bag-man in the place of the old, one who had been through times so rough even Shaykh Khalīl ibn Aybak al-Ṣafadī⁴⁴⁵ would have refused to put up with them. As a result, he had failed to advance, and his name was mud among his peers. He had been brought to this pass by his belief that the air in these lands was too warm for him, as a consequence of which he’d decided to make use of a pair of pyramids that he’d scale whenever the weather turned hot, just as his predecessor had made use of a pyramid of wine barrels. After he’d spent enough silver on the pair to fill a valley, the news of his extravagance got out and his friends became upset with him.

2.4.2

The Fāriyāq left Alexandria for Cairo and gave the letter of recommendation to the Bag-man, who put him up in the house of a colleague of his that was next door to the house of a Levantine, at whose home a group of singers and musicians used to gather each night. From his room the Fāriyāq would hear the singing, be moved by passion and longing, and, recalling his days in the Levant, yearn and ache to be ensconced amongst friends again, imagining he’d been transported from the world of jinn to that of men, that life had unveiled for him pleasures novel and lusts long in abeyance, joys untrammeled and hopes now in abundance.

2.4.3

Thus he forgot the miseries of dizziness and the deathly gasps he’d suffered at the ocean’s hand, the hunger and boarding up of his window he’d suffered on land, the sore throat he’d contracted on his salesman’s mission, the grief induced by blind tradition, and found in Egypt, as a state, sparkle and self-confidence, and, as a place to live, bounty and opulence, for all its people are like members of a never-ending wedding celebration, or jousters for ever engaged in competition and self-acclamation, while their women display their wit and sophistication, beauty, refinement, grace, and coquetry, pride and vanity, as they move through the streets like galleons in full sail in silk and velvet wrapper, causing the cares that cluster about the heart to scatter. I am not the first to describe them as seducers of the mind, conquerors of every virile male they find: thus has described them every master of prose and of the poetic arts, and any, old or young, who’s sought to deceive them has mentioned their smarts. As the proverb that’s going around would have it, “Cairo’s dust is gold, its maidens are the best of playthings, and its spoils go to the bold.”

2.4.4

The most amazing thing they do on slipping their hobbles and leaving their bridal recesses is straightway to mount tall, imposing asses, sitting upright atop them on a throne with galia moschata daubed, their scent thus being by every nostril absorbed, while the blacks of their irises and the whites of their eyes make men to think of the maidens of the gardens of Paradise. All who behold a houri of this type exclaim, “How great is God!” and see the world, beside the beauty of her visage, as but a paltry sod. One calls out to catch her eye and, having done so, “Praise the Lord!” goes up his cry. Another expresses his wish to hold her stirrup or her dress to touch, to carry her slippers or her train to clutch, to be a lining to her shawl or the porter at her hall, to be a go-between between her and her lover or her companions’ follower’s follower, to be a tire-woman dressing her hair or her tailor sewing up a tear, to be a jeweler fashioning for her wrist a band or a blacksmith forging her a nail by hand, to be a bathhouse attendant massaging her to release a knot or any other inconsequential thing that might bring him closer to her you-know-what, while she, from on top of that throne, revels and repulses, glares and stares, casting at this a glance that makes him bleed, at that a wink that steals his heart, never to be freed, bringing commerce to an end and sending the unemployed right round the bend. Even the jackass beneath her seems to know the worth of what he bears and understand what drives her halleluiah-shouting fans as they let fly their cheers, for he doesn’t bray, is never heard to snort, and never sniffs (unlike the others) she-donkeys’ rears. On the contrary, he lords it over every horse and struts in pride and glory as he pursues his course. As for the the donkey’s driver, he thinks he’s in a class outranking the army’s topmost brass, and that the people are in need of his ministrations, for which he requires presents and oblations (and how could it not be so, when he derives his very name from his “stable management (of affairs),” his “leadership qualities,” and his “horse sense”?)⁴⁴⁶

2.4.5

And here’s a matter to which I forgot to draw attention and so must enter here and mention: hearts are more easily set alight by women whose faces are fully veiled than those whose faces are in plain sight. This is because, if the eye beholds a beautiful face (even the most charming and intriguing that could be), the imagination rests and ceases to race. If, however, one gazes upon one that’s got a veil on top (assuming that the heart believes its owner to belong to the beloved sex and especially if evidence of this is provided by the prettiness of eye, length of lash, and penciling of eyebrow), the imagination comes flying, freighted with thoughts, and finds no barrier at which to stop.

2.4.6

Then (and here the rhymed prose can end, because it’s filled a page) the mind declares, “This face could be

⁴⁵⁴

2.5.1

Many an ancient historian toward Cairo has bent his gaze and on it hosts of poets past have lavished praise, and here now stand I, to describe it and to praise it as did no scholar in former days. Thus I declare: Cairo is one metropolis among metropoli, one city among cities, one settlement among settlements, one borough among boroughs, one seat among seats, one town among towns, one citadel among citadels, one village among villages, one urban center among urban centers, one capital among capitals, one locality among localities, one territory among territories, one land among lands, one township among townships, one region among regions, one thing among many things. Its people, though, would say, “It is the metropolis among metropoli, the city among cities, the capital among capitals, the thing among all other things” and so on, and I do not know how to account for the difference. However that may be, it is indeed a city replete with permissible pleasures, bursting with boundless appetites, answering to the needs of hot-humored men (contrary to what ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī has said).⁴⁵⁵ There the stranger finds amusement and accommodation, in it he forgets family and nation.

2.5.2

Among its curiosities⁴⁵⁶ is that what leaves the bodies of its men enters the bodies of its women, and the women are therefore as fat as cottage cheese and clarified butter eaten on an empty stomach, while its men are like dry bread with sesame oil eaten on a full. Another is that its markets in no way resemble its men, for its inhabitants are full of refinement, sophistication, literary culture, and wit, qualities pleasing and morals pure, while its markets are utterly without such things. Another is that its water in no way resembles its bread, which they call ʿaysh, for the first is sweet while the second is worthless. Another is that its scholars are scholars, its jurisprudents jurisprudents, its poets poets, its profligates profligates, its lechers lechers. Another is that its women walk sometimes on the ground like other women and sometimes on the ceiling or the walls.⁴⁵⁷

2.5.3

Another is the treatment of the feminine as masculine and of the masculine as feminine,⁴⁵⁸ even though its people are masters of scholarship (and what masters too!). Another is that, in their bathhouses, they constantly recite a sura or two of the Qurʾan that mention “glasses” and “those who pass around with them,” so that one emerges in a state of simultaneous ritual purity and impurity.⁴⁵⁹ More amazing still, many of the city’s men have no hearts, such men substituting for them two pairs of shoulders, two backs, four hands, and four legs.⁴⁶⁰ And further, many of the girls who launder their shifts in the channels of the Nile, make them, once washed, into turbans, which they place on top of their heads; then they walk about stark naked. Another is that a tribe of them once heard that women in China use — or, more accurately, have used upon them — iron forms to reduce the size of their feet to below that of the norm, so they took to lopping off their fingers in the belief that if the hand has only four fingers, it will work more dexterously and be more useful to its owner.⁴⁶¹ This was despite the fact that they have no custom of covering their fingers and palms that would impose additional expense on them, unlike Franks, who leave no limb uncovered, either out of a desire to magnify the glory of those and show them off, or to guard against infection.

2.5.4

In addition to these (to these curiosities, that is, not these limbs), girls employed in public works to carry bricks, plaster, dirt, mud, stones, lumber, and so on, do so on their heads, and do so joyfully, energetically, gallopingly, canteringly, cantabulatingly, celebratorily, and merrily, not sighingly, dejectedly, stumblingly, sinkingly, frowningly, or weepily. She to whose lot fall bricks will compose for them a brickish mawwāl or, if plaster, will sing to it a plastery song, as though walking in a bridal procession. And further, there are there two great offices, each called the Domestic Services Office. The first is presided over by a man and provides men with whatever they need to cool their beds by way of hes, the second, of lower standing and status, is presided over by a woman and provides them with whatever they need to warm them up by way of shes. The founder of the first is of Persian origin and has now became so well-known and respected among the Arabs that you hear him mentioned with praise everywhere, and hardly a social, musical, or literary gathering is without his presence.

2.5.5

And further, the Frankish bonnet grows there and expands, gets thicker and huger, widens and lengthens and broadens and deepens to the point that, when you see one on its wearer’s head, you think it must be a grain silo. Said the Fāriyāq, “I often used to wonder at this and say, ‘How came it to be considered right and proper, or seem acceptable to the eye, that heads so misshapen, meager, and miserable, so vile and contemptible, so ignominious and meet to be condemned, so strange and so ill-omened, so evocative of filth and so emetic, so ugly to look at and so pathetic, so disgusting and repulsive, despicable and convulsive, should bear these most noble bonnets? And how could the air of Cairo have made them develop so and grow, when as long as they were in their own countries they weren’t worth a bottle of bubbles or a fountain of frittilaries? And how can it be that there they were like dust, and here they’ve been metathesized into diamonds? O air, fire, water, dust of Cairo, turn this tarbush of mine into a Frankish bonnet (even if the former be better and of greater élan in the sight of God and man, more imposing and correct, to the eye more brilliant and perfect, to the head better fitted, to the body better suited, not equipped with horns that truckle for tucker and that the birds have to shit on if you’re to find succor)!’ But my cry helped not at all — the tarbush was on my head to stay, fate had turned to look the other way.”

2.5.6

And further, a tribe of craving catamites there dress and talk like women and “veil their beards”⁴⁶² to keep them out of sight, jostling at the watering hole of femininity those who wear such veils by right, plucking out their facial hair, making eyes at men, dressing to the nines, mincing, tittupping, and speaking in sugary whines, though they are the ugliest of God’s creatures. And further, the city’s police chief is so solicitous of its people’s welfare that it amounts almost to tyranny, for he commands everyone who walks its highways by night to have with him a lantern, even if the night is moonlit, out of fear lest they trip over something in one of the city’s marketplaces and fall into a hole or a pit and their legs be broken or their necks crushed. If anyone, other than someone wearing a Frankish hat, be found roaming around at night without a lantern in his hand, his foot is shackled to his hand, his hand to his neck, his neck to a rope, the rope to a peg, the peg to a wall, and the wall to Nākir and Nakīr, to the roasting of hellfire. And further, the Sons of Ḥannā⁴⁶³ there have a way of writing that is known to none but themselves⁴⁶⁴ and have letters like our own but which can be read only if one holds them within an inch of one’s face, as I have seen them do. Another is that, when one of them dies, his family wails and keens over him in the hope that he will return to them, his milkskin filled with cured fish fry.⁴⁶⁵ A further curiosity of the place is that ignoble birds there may pretend to be mighty eagles,⁴⁶⁶ flies hawks, cow-camels bull-camels, donkey foals oryxes, and cats tigers — provided only that these animals have been imported from distant lands.

2.5.7

Further, many of its inhabitants believe that many thoughts in the head lead to many worries and vexations and vice versa, that the mind that ponders at length grasps the distant matter in the same manner that the tall man grasps the distant fruit, etc., that such abundance is a cause of destitution and such prolonged cogitation results in a shorter life. They adduce many pertinent proofs for this, saying that the mind is to the head as the light to the wick: if the light is left burning, the wick will be used up, and the latter can be preserved only if the former is extinguished; or that it’s like the water in a water course: if the water keeps flowing, it must inevitably either soak into the ground or empty into the sea, but when it’s contained it remains; or like money in a purse: so long as the exiguously monied one (meaning the owner of the money)⁴⁶⁷ keeps putting his hand into the purse and spending, what he has will disappear (unless he tie down his hand so it can’t reach the purse, or the purse so it can’t reach his hand); or like a leaping billy goat: if he keeps on leaping, his vital juices will leak out and he will perish, so that a thong must be tied from his willy to his belly to prevent him from mounting the female.

2.5.8

Consequently, they have agreed among themselves on a method of halting the flow of the mind through the open arena of the brain at certain times so that it will be available to them at others, the method in question being to smoke, chew, contemplate, or talk about, hashish, for when they consume it, care takes off and pleasure advances, grief turns its back and the whole place dances. Any who sees them in this state longs to be registered among their company and entered among their constituency, be he even the chief judge. And further, its roads are ever packed with loaded camels, and, if anyone walking them sees one coming, he has to make way; if he doesn’t, there’s no guarantee he won’t lose an eye. This crowding may bring with it good things, as in the case of the woman who went with her mother to attend her sister’s wedding: the rise in her fortunes came from her setting herself down.⁴⁶⁸

2.6.1

I had thought that, if I abandoned the Fāriyāq and set about describing Cairo, I’d find rest, but the second turned out to be just like the first, or, to put it differently, the vice was the same as the versa. I must now therefore sit myself down a while in the shade of this short chapter to brush off the dust of my labors. Then I shall arise once more, should the Almighty so allow.

2.7.1

I am risen to my feet once more, praising and thanking God. Now, where are my pen and inkwell, that I may describe this happy city, which deserves the eulogies of all who behold it, for it is the home of good things, the mother-lode of bounty and magnanimity? Its people are refined, cultured, and kind to the stranger, and there’s such amiability in their speech that the grief-struck of getting any sadder need never be in danger. When they hail you, they regale you. When they salute you, they save you. After they’ve visited you, you can’t wait to see them once more, and when you visit them, they open to you their hearts, to say nothing of their door. As for their scholars, praise of them has spread to every quarter, leaving the rest dead in the water. In fact, their geniality, natural delicacy, modesty, and welcoming mien cannot be over-extolled, while, for every condition of men among them, there is an appropriate respectful salute, be they Christians or others. The latter address the former as “My Master,” and have no aversion to visiting them, mixing with them, or keeping company with them, in contrast with the custom of the Muslims of the Levant, and this a virtue to be credited to their account as against others.

2.7.2

It seems that these traits, of high moral character and natural delicacy, are things ingrained in all the people of Cairo, for their common folk too are good-natured and courteous. All of them are eloquent and articulate, quick-thinking and good at pleasant joking and joshing. Most have a liking for the kind of jokes they call anqāṭ, which are something like mujārazah, which is “a kind of joking back and forth that resembles mutual abuse,”⁴⁶⁹ and are almost a kind of puzzle, for anyone not trained in them will find it impossible to understand the slightest thing about them, even if he’s a poet.

2.7.3

All of them love music, amusements, and license, and their singing is the most tuneful possible; anyone who gets used to it finds that no other can move him. Similarly, their instruments seem almost to give tongue to the one who plays them, the most important being the lute, while they pay scant attention to the reed flute. They have methods and styles of playing the lute that seem almost to belong to the world of the divine mysteries. I would criticize their singing for one thing only, which is that they repeat a single word of a line of verse or a mawwāl so many times that the listener loses the pleasure of the meaning. However, this is mostly to be found among those who merely sponge off the art. At the opposite pole you have the method of the people of Tunis, whose singing is closer to chant; they claim that this was the way of the Arabs of al-Andalus.

2.7.4

It has to be stated here that the Christians native to the Islamic lands, who follow the Muslims in their customs and morality, are always inferior to them in the chasteness of their language, in literature, in aesthetics, in intelligence, in sophistication, and in cleanliness. They are, however, more active than them in travel, trading, and manufacturing, and bolder and more steadfast in taking on difficult tasks. This is because Muslims are a nation of self-denial and abnegation while Christians have an insatiable appetite for territorial expansion, not to mention the acquisition of pure-bred horses, precious gems, and luxury goods. If you enter the house of a wealthy Christian in Cairo, you’ll find he has both serving women and serving men, around twenty tobacco pipes of the most expensive kind (half of them valuable waterpipes), three rooms upholstered in the best materials, silver vessels for eating and drinking, along with smooth, high beds, luxurious clothes, and so forth, and yet, for all that, not a single book. Also, if someone wants to buy something from a Muslim trader, he’ll find it costs him twenty-five percent less than the Christian’s goods. This avarice is, however, found, for the most part, only among foreign Christians. The Copts are more like the Muslims, and few of them practice trade.

2.7.5

As far as the Egyptian state is concerned, it had reached in those days a peak of splendor, strength, magnificence, munificence, and glory. Those inducted into its service enjoyed a huge salary in the form of money, clothing, and provisions, more than was customary in any other state. Its viceroy⁴⁷⁰ awarded high rank and tokens of imperial favor to Muslim and Christian alike, though not to Jews, in which Egypt differed from the Tunisian state, whose honors fell on all men equally.⁴⁷¹ Despite the large amounts earned by both merchants and craftsmen and the generous livings obtained by the servants of the state, prices in Cairo were exceedingly low, and, as a result, one might observe everyone, members of the elite and commoners, engaging together in work and play. The gardens overflowed with pleasure-seekers and revelers. The cafés were meeting places for friends. At the weddings, singing and musical instruments of every kind might be heard. The men swaggered in silk-wool and brocade, the women staggered under the weight of their jewelry. The horses, mules, and donkeys wore saddles and saddle-coths of embroidered silk. Any land blessed by fortune, however — if our friend the Fāriyāq ever entered it — inevitably changed for the worse before he exited it. Return, then, with me now so that we can release him from the hands of the Bag-men, for I left him a while ago engaged in trying to do just that.

2.8.1

We — that is, all my good friends and I — had left the Fāriyāq trying to shake the Bag-men’s bag off his back. Now I, to the exclusion of the others, have come to know that he spent a night pondering the fact that everything that skill may set firmly in place external factors will shake to the core, and, this being the case, he decided to take the shaking business into his own hands. When morning came, he left the place where he’d been playing and started to wander through the markets, shaking his shoulders with every step and saying, “I shall turn him upside down! I shall give him the push! I shall send him back to where he came from! I shall beat him to mush! He has broken, meaning galled, meaning chafed, my back. Am I become today no better than one ass owned by another? A pretty pass!”

2.8.2

A man of some sophistication observed him shaking his shoulders and said to himself, “There is something afoot with this man” and approached him and spoke politely to him, finally extracting his secret from his navel, and learning his condition and the reason for his travel. “Never mind,” he told him. “Cairo — God protect it! — is the mother-lode of good things and benefaction, though to win them you will have to take action.” “What greater action can I undertake than what you observe?” he asked. “There’s no call for such things,” the other replied. “Have you a ready ear, a clever mind, a foot to effort inclined?” “I have,” he said. “Then listen while I tell you,” said the other.

2.8.3

“In this metropolis is a poet of great skill,⁴⁷² a Christian, who has influence and standing with the whole elite.” Said the other, “These aren’t the characteristics of a poet, and to me your words appear an oxymoron. How can this riddle be solved, this puzzle explained?” The other replied, “There is no contradiction: he’s a poet by nature, not by trade, the difference being that the poet by trade is one who depends on his verse to make his living; thus he eulogizes this one and flatters that in order to get something from them. The poet by nature, on the other hand, speaks poetry because he cannot help himself — without having to force himself or in expectation of reward.” “That’s not the difference mentioned by al-Āmidī,”⁴⁷³ said the Fāriyāq. “Then scoot al-Āmidī back to Āmid⁴⁷⁴ and listen to me,” said the other. “Voilà! I’ve a-i-m-(e)-d him and scooted him,” he said, “so what’s the scoop?” “I advise you to write a letter to this scholarly man and beg him, through the deployment of your praise, for an audience. If he is kind enough to grant this, use the occasion to tell him of your sufferings and seek his help. He is certain to say yes, for he is known for his noble morals and loves the titillation of high self-esteem. Your chances are especially good, because he loves to keep company with literary types and make their lives more comfortable. Speak to him courteously, and I guarantee you’ll realize your hopes through him.” The Fāriyāq thanked the man for his advice and returned to his lodging comforted and expecting the best.

2.8.4

When night came, he took his pen and paper and wrote the following:

A greeting I send that, if ’twere carried on the breeze, the horizon with perfume would freight and if ’twere made a halo for the moon, would save the latter from its monthly fate; if ’twere added to the tawny wine, would cause no headache to follow its potation and if ’twere swallowed or licked by a sick man, would cause him no fever or excruciation; if ’twere hung upon a tree, though the season were autumn, would make its leaves straightway burst out and if ’twere used to water gardens, would make each charming and delightful flower sprout; if ’twere laid o’er the strings of a lute, would have them induce ecstasy without need of any agent instrumental and if at a gathering ’twere sung, would render all sweet-smelling plants and instruments purely incidental; if ’twere hung in the ear as a pendant, it would be one of those that, being from its upper rim dependent, are the more clearly seen and, if ’twere used to whet the dulled sword’s edge, would make it keen; if ’twere portrayed, would be as blooming gardens and meadows of that ilk and soothing liquids and purest milk and if ’twere suspended from one’s headdress, would render amulets superfl’ous; if ’twere worn as a ring by one by passion misled, would serve him in oblivion’s stead and if ’twere written on a tombstone, would distract the grieving mother from making moan, or on the waist of a slender lass, would take the place of a sash, or on the nose of one with a rheum, for nose drops would leave no room, or on a cripple’s feet, would make him hop ahead and all others in the race to the wellhead beat, or on a dumb man’s tongue, would cause the knot therein to come undone, or on a miser’s hand, would make it easier for him his gold and silver to spend, or on brackish water, would make it sweet at just one go, or on sand, would cause it to make even basil grow; plus salutations ornamented, sweet-smelling and scented, softer than the breeze, sweeter than heaven’s mead, than good health for the sick a more sought-after goal, more brightening for the eye than kohl, dearer to the assayer than purest gold, clearer than sweetest water fresh and cold, dearer to the heart than hope of the beloved’s arms, more distracting than a coquette’s charms, brighter than the light of morn, more brilliant than the anemone’s bloom, more fragrant than wine’s aromas, more closely guarded than tiaras, dearer to al-Bustī than paronomasias,⁴⁷⁵ to Abū l-ʿAtāhiyah⁴⁷⁶ than ascetic verse, to Abū Nuwās⁴⁷⁷ than poems about wine (and worse), to al-Farazdaq⁴⁷⁸ than panegyrics, to Jarīr⁴⁷⁹ than lyrics, to Abū Tammām⁴⁸⁰ than sagacity, to al-Mutanabbī⁴⁸¹ than poems demonstrating rhetorical capacity—to be presented to that honored person of respected station who is the resort of the depressed, object of the entreaties of the oppressed, protector of those who’ve suffered wrong, refuge of the victims of the strong, watering hole of those who aspire to his attention, wellspring of those who seek his intervention, may God preserve his good fortune for ever and a day, and never let his glory fade away!

2.8.5

To proceed: Master, I am come to these territories bearing a bag that has broken my back and in my patience made a crack, and I have found none to relieve me of even a little of the encumbrance and can see no way to rid myself of it without assistance. In the midst of this inky darkness I have been guided to your kindly light, informed that you alone, to the exclusion of any other wight, can free me from my plight. Will you then permit me to visit your noble circle and to you myself unburden of that from which I endlessly suffer, and of my dolorous hurt, in person? On you alone can I rely to take the hand of one without ally, knowing that, should you but look on him with favor, you’ll make his wishes come true and help him obtain all he has in view, and should you take him to yourself, he will thenceforth owe you a debt of gratitude and of thankfulness for your pious attitude. Such a one thus asks this of you as a petitioner in the forecourt of your dignity, and your willingness to oblige will be but further token of your kindness and far-reaching benignity. Farewell.

For the address he wrote:

To be honored by the fingertips of my most generous, most nobly descended, most imposing, most unique, most bountiful, most fortunate, most exemplary, most well-guided, most complete, most glorious, most sublime master, Khawājā So-and-so, may God preserve him for ever in splendor and ease!

2.8.6

When this message reached the khawājā in question and the latter perused the affected similes employed in the elaboration of the greeting, he couldn’t contain his laughter and guffaws and said to one of those seated with him in his salon, a man of culture, “Glory be! I find that most of our writers abandon themselves in their presentation of greetings and salutations to the addressee as unrestrainedly as if they were presenting him with the throne of Bilqīs or Our Master Sulaymān’s ring,⁴⁸² comparing him to things he doesn’t resemble, drowning him in immoderate praise, and boiling him over the fires of excess, with the result that he ends up soaked and singed. Sometimes they come up with two phrases that are identical in meaning, such as when the writer of this epistle here says ‘object of the entreaties of the oppressed, protector of those who’ve suffered wrong.’ Then, as soon as they move from salutation to content, they write excellently. I don’t know why the writers of compositions have thought good to waste their time on such hackneyed metaphors and similes and on composing phrases of identical sense, when the scholar can, with ease, demonstrate his erudition in a single phrase if it’s well worded and effective at conveying the meaning. Twelve hundred years have passed, and we still find Zayd chewing over what ʿAmr⁴⁸³ uttered and ʿAmr masticating what Zayd said. This vice has entered the veins of every writer.

2.8.7

“When it comes to eulogizing the addressee in the address with ‘the most sublime,’ ‘the most glorious,’ ‘the most fortunate,’ ‘the most exemplary,’ and the like, there is a particular issue. The custom of delivering the mail via the postal service is not observed in our country; it is sent with persons who have no knowledge of the roads or the neighborhoods, which, as you will be aware, are innocent of any written signs. If the letter is borne by a man who doesn’t know how to read, he will ask everyone he meets on the road about the addressee by name. If the address doesn’t give a clue as to who he is, any who read it will be confused, for many share the same name, though they may differ in fine qualities and morals. In addition, it may happen that the one who is to deliver the letter, after asking more one than one person the name of the addressee and finding all of them to be illiterate and having wasted half his day searching for the way and and after failing in the end to be guided to it, finds a servant in the street watching him. As soon as he sees him, then, he seizes hold of him and sends him off in some direction he thinks correct. The letter stays with the new messenger for a while, and then he passes it on to someone else, and that someone else may face the same problems he did and so pass it on to another, etc., etc. One should therefore go into great detail when describing the addressee in the address.”

2.8.8

His companion then said, “In that case, dear sir, all the addressee’s characteristics should be mentioned in the address. If the addressee is, for instance, beautiful, intelligent, rich, shapely, of large turban, and broadly cummerbunded, he must be referred to as ‘the beautiful, the intelligent, the rich,’ etc.” Responded the other, “As far as describing someone as beautiful, rich, and so on is concerned, to do so is a grave offense against him,⁴⁸⁴ and as far as the rest, such as the size of his turban and the breadth of his cummerbund, is concerned, these are non-specific characteristics, for everyone’s on the same footing in such matters. How much more appropriate it is to employ other forms of address, as you will soon see, God willing. Such other forms may on occasion make one laugh — as when one describes a man as being characterized, for example, by hypertrichotism, or hirsutism, or triticoidism, or hypermetacarpalism, or superrhysism, or partial hirsutism, or pyknism, or ectomorphism, or mesomorphism, or endomorphism, or somatomegalism, or exophthalmism, or planirostrism, or glabrotism, or acromegalism, or macrocephalism, or macrolabialism — but are better than others that create confusion over the addressee’s distinguishing features. I’m told that many letters containing important messages that don’t spell out the address explicitly and don’t have directions have been opened so as to discover for whom they’re intended, and this has been a cause of injury to both sender and recipient.” Here ends their dialogue.

2.8.9

Be informed here that, when the the khawājā in question received the Fāriyāq’s epistle, he was sick and so did not answer immediately. As a result, the Fāriyāq was left waiting days for his reply and finally came to believe, being unaware, as he was, of the reason, that all his rhyming had gone for nought, and during this time he was prey to constant worry and anxiety. I shall leave him now in that state, waiting for an answer, and leave too the one who is to send it to take his medicine and get better, and turn aside for a little to the ranks of titles and titles of rank then recognized, on condition that you allow me to move on to a new chapter, namely…

2.9.1

The definition of a title in the minds of Orientals is that it is an insignificant fleshy protuberance or a flap of skin,⁴⁸⁵ or an extra bag hung onto an already loaded camel, that dangles from a man’s essential being. The author of the Qāmūs has said, “ʿalāqā means ‘titles,’ because they are hung onto people (li-annahā tuʿallaqu ʿalā l-nās).” To Occidentals, which is to say Franks, it is a second skin that wraps itself around the body. Our commentary on this is that an insignificant protuberance may be cut off and totally excised with ease, and the same goes for the skin tag and the extra bag, which may be overturned or inverted; the second skin, however, cannot be removed from the body without harm to its owner. Our super-commentary — for every commentary must have a super-commentary, however incomprehensible — is that the skin flap is not hereditary among the people of the East, or only rarely so (and every rule must have its exceptions). Among Franks, on the other hand, the second skin is passed from older to younger by inheritance. Examples of the former are the titles Bāshā (“Pasha”), Bēh (“Bey”), Afandī (“Effendi”), and Aghā (“Agha”). Even Malik (“King”) is limited in its application to the person so titled and is not extrapolated from him to his son, for the son of a minister or a king may be a clerk or a sailor. Among Franks, however, it is incorrect to refer to the son of a marquis as a “marquisito” or as being “marquisate.”⁴⁸⁶ Regardless of the fact that the former is finite and the latter infinite, the essential meanings of “skin flap” and “second skin” may converge at a certain point, in that both generally have their origin in an itch that affects the bodies of those in positions of power because of the aggravation caused them by their blood. Such aggravation cannot be quieted, and such itches cannot be scratched, without creating either a flap or a second skin.

2.9.2

The archetype of this would be a king getting angry, for example, with some man or other for an offense he had committed, that man sending him a naked intercessor to placate him, this intercession soothing the eruption of the king’s anger, the aggravational modality then combining with the gymnological quiddity, these two forming a second skin around the one who’d been in fear of losing his first skin through flaying, and he thenceforth flaunting this among his peers as a permanent adornment, never again to fear that fate might one day turn on him and gore him. In general, such second skins require two bodies — a body with which someone is angry and a body interceding on the former’s behalf — while, in general, the insignificant protuberance requires just one.

2.9.3

One kind of insignificant protuberance is the ecclesiastical, which is of two sorts, the earth-bound and the air-borne. The earth-bound is that which has an abode or place of origin in the earth where it grows and bears fruit; such would be the case, for example, of some “catholicos” abiding in a house or a monastery who has authority over the people, who send him tithes and the like and whom he therefore commands, forbids, rules, and judges according to the requirements of the law, or whim. He is bound to have a secretary to keep his secrets off the books, to stiffen his backbone one or more cooks, a treasurer to hoard his golden dinars, a jail to hold anyone who differs from him in opinion or his ambitions bars, and so forth. The air-borne is the opposite of the preceding, an example being the protuberance borne by Metropolitan Atanāsiyūs al-Tutūnjī, author of The Leavings Pile Concerning Lame Style,⁴⁸⁷ whose master has invested him with it so that he can use it to rule over Levantine Tripoli, even though there are none of his sect in that city to send him his tithes, make him his food, or write a letter for him; he has been invested with it, it follows, simply for decorative purposes, in keeping with the custom of certain ancients, who would give the protuberance of “emir” to one who raised donkeys and “king” to the shaykh of some benighted village. The object of all this is to set one individual apart from the rest by the use of some distinguishing mark.

2.9.4

Now that you have become aware of this, know too that the titles Khawājā, Muʿallim, and Shaykh are not to be considered either protuberances or second skins, because obtaining them calls neither for intercession nor for any pruritic combining with gymnological quiddities.⁴⁸⁸ They are merely rags to cover the shame of the naked name that has been given its bearer and are neither stitched, tacked, buttoned onto, or wrapped around it. In fact, they are more like a ticket tied onto the one wearing it to show his value. Frequently, however, the mistake is made of attaching them to persons to whom they have no connection. Thus in Egypt, for example, they apply the word Muʿallim to Coptic Christians, who are neither muʿallim nor muʿallam, if we are to derive the word from ʿilm (“knowledge”),⁴⁸⁹ though if we are to derive it from ʿalāmah (“mark”), there can be no objection. They apply the term Khawājā to others too,⁴⁹⁰ and as its original meaning is the same as that of Muʿallim, the same objection holds true. The word shaykh appertained originally to one who had reached old age; then it was applied to someone who had advanced in learning and other things, as a figurative extension of advancement in years, for the minds of the elderly are discriminating and their judgment is sound, even if women will have no more to do with them. This distinguishing characteristic was then transferred to those who engage in scholarly pursuits.

2.9.5

After pondering the matter, it seems to me that these protuberances and skin flaps do great injury both to those whom they adorn and those who are devoid of them. The first argument in support of this is that a person who bears one believes, in the depths of his heart, that he is better than others, physically and morally. Thus, he looks at the other as a ram with horns does at one without and contents himself with this external feature instead of seeking to attain praiseworthy qualities and meritorious inner traits, and this allows it to lead him in the direction of moral torpor and vicious pleasure. The second is that, should Saturn’s noose get caught round his neck one day and drag him into the orbit of its adversities, if he fails to find a woman with a second skin like his, he’ll be unable to withstand those adversities with any other; and it may happen that he fall in love with a beautiful serving girl who works in his house, in the kitchen or the stable, and his father, or his father-in-law, or his other relatives, or his emir, may tell him to have nothing to do with her, in which case beautiful girls will be left high and dry, which is regarded by Islamic law as reprehensible — nay, the scholars have all asserted authoritatively that it is absolutely forbidden.

2.9.6

The third is that it might happen that he marry a woman with a second skin who is as badly off as he and not well-heeled. Then, if she bears him children, he will lack the means to bring them a shaykh to teach them at home and he’ll be too embarrassed to send them to the local school to learn along with everyone else’s. Should this be the case, his children will grow up unlettered, and the process will repeat itself with their offspring for as long as God wills. The fourth is that both protuberance and second skin impose upon those who bear them devastating expenses and catastrophic costs, driving their owner to excessive outlay and profligacy, to collapse and imminent bankruptcy, which may even lead him, in the end, to the noose of a palm-fiber rope. The fifth is that humans in their native state have neither protuberance nor second skin and to add them at a later stage is contrary to nature, or at least a form of meddling or recklessness. Other arguments exist, but I have decided not to mention them here for fear of going on too long. At least it must be clear to you by now that the Khawājā in question was possessed of neither protuberance nor second skin, though perhaps, had it not been for his natural inclination toward poetry, he might have acquired one or the other. But everything has its drawbacks.

2.10.1

May God relieve you — or shrive you or deceive you,⁴⁹¹ following those who read ṣirāṭ or sirāṭ or zirāṭ or those who say “Demand the choicest of camels as your ransom!” and read the last word as either buṣāq or busāq or buzāq—of your sickness, Khawājā Yanṣur! You left the Fāriyāq in a state of unease and apprehension, waiting for an answer from you, morning and evening, in a state of tension. Replied the poet, “It grieves me greatly that your friend’s letter should have reached me while I was feverish and had a headache, thus preventing me from responding quickly. I would have liked to do so, despite my sufferings, had not the doctor, envoy of ʿAzrāʾīl,⁴⁹² forbidden me to move. But you must hear the story of what happened to me with that cuckold.

2.10.2

“One day, I got indigestion from eating bulgur that I’d bolted down, lock, stock, and barrel, so that the next day I was ill and nauseous. It so happened that I was visited that morning by one of those emirs to whom, when they insist that something is thus and so, you have to say ‘Yes’ instead of ‘No’ and when they insist that it isn’t, you have to say ‘No’ instead of ‘Yes.’ Seeing me in that state, he asked, ‘What ails you?’ so I told him what had happened. ‘You must let my doctor see you right away,’ said he. ‘He is the most skillful of all doctors because he just arrived from Paris a few days ago. Were it not so, I wouldn’t have taken him on as a physician for me and my family.’ ‘It is my custom,’ I said, ‘to endure minor illnesses for a few days, and seek to cure them through dieting and precaution, for this may render medicines unnecessary. I find that doctors treat illnesses by conjecture and guesswork, and, by the time they arrive at cause and effect, one’s soul is almost coming out of one’s gullet, for they try one medication this time and another the next.’

2.10.3

“‘If the disease hadn’t already got to you,’ he replied, ‘you wouldn’t be talking this way. We must bring him now,’ and he kept on at me until, shame-faced and embarrassed, I sent my servant to him. Then it occurred to me that, among us, a host, from an excessive sense of hospitality, may force a guest to eat and even sometimes feed him with his own hand something the other cannot stomach but that I’d never heard of anyone doing the honors by forcing another to take medical treatment, so I couldn’t stop myself from laughing. ‘What’s making you laugh?’ he asked. ‘Nothing,’ I responded. ‘No one laughs at nothing,’ he said. ‘There must be something going on.’ I said, ‘I thought of the doctor who visited a sick man and said to his family, “God recompense you for your loss!” “He isn’t dead yet,” they replied. “He will be soon, God willing,” said the doctor, so I laughed.’ ‘Don’t worry about it,’ said the emir. ‘This doctor isn’t like that one, and anyway you’re a bachelor and don’t have any family he could say that to.’

2.10.4

“Presently, the servant came back with the doctor, who was sicker and thinner than me, for it seems he had no work that would take him out of the house. When he entered, he felt my pulse and looked at my tongue. Then he furrowed his brows and looked down at the ground, soliloquizing (which means ‘talking to himself’). Next he raised his head and told my servant, ‘Bring the basin.’ ‘What do you want to do?’ I asked. ‘It’s my body. Shouldn’t you consult me?’ ‘Either I bleed you or it’s the tomb,’ he said. ‘God guide you aright, old man!’ I said. ‘All I did was eat bulgur with meat — what people call kubaybah.’ ‘I know that,’ he said, ‘I know. You Levantines — you all die of eating that kubbah stuff.⁴⁹³ I must have buried a hundred cases when I was in your country. It’s definitely the kubbah.’ ‘A kubbah up your patootie, God willing!’ I said. ‘There’s no kubbah whatsoever in my patties!’ he replied.⁴⁹⁴ I turned to the emir and laughed, but, as far as I could tell, he didn’t get it either.

2.10.5

“To keep it brief, he and the emir kept on finding fault with my opinion until I surrendered myself to destruction and put out my hand, and he worked away at it with his scalpel like someone cutting a watermelon with a knife and out came the blood, spurting everywhere, some of it even getting into his eyes, which made him let go of my hand and go off to wash his face. When he returned after a short while, I had fainted, so my servant ministered to me with orange-blossom water and other things, while the emir gazed at the smoke made by his tobacco and the doctor whispered in his ear. When I revived, he bandaged my hand and left with the emir, the two of them telling me to look after myself and that they’d come and visit me soon, while I said, under my breath, ‘May God never bring you back!’

2.10.6

“Next day, the doctor returned with an armful of medicinal plants. ‘What are those plants for?’ I asked. ‘An enema,’ he replied. ‘One will be enough for me,’ I said. He replied, ‘The emir says you have to take enemas, if not for your sake, then to do him honor.’ ‘There’s no harm in honoring him with an enema,’ I thought to myself, ‘but once again he’s going against custom, which is that the person visited should adjure the visitor by the name of God and the names of His angels, His apostles, His books, and the Last Day and the Resurrection, to take something to eat or drink for his sake, but here it’s the visitor, and he’s insisting on flushing me out!’ Then I took the enema. The next day, he showed up again, carrying a small pot. ‘What’s that in your hand?’ I asked. ‘A laxative,’ he replied, ‘of the kind I make specially for the emir.’ So I swallowed it down.

2.10.7

“Then the following day he came to me carrying nothing, so I rejoiced and told him, ‘The laxative was so powerful it’s drained me of all my strength.’ ‘Today,’ he replied, ‘you have to take the hottest bath possible, so that you sweat. I have tried it before on the emir’s family and found it to be most beneficial.’ He undertook to heat the water himself and made me get into a bathing tub that I’d bought. When I got in, the heat struck me with such force that I fainted, though it had time to scald my skin first. I was pulled out at my last gasp, and my servant ministered to me with pungent herbs until I recovered.

2.10.8

“The day after that he came to me carrying nothing, and I was again delighted and thought, ‘Maybe he’s exhausted his box of tricks and the bath was the last thing he had up his sleeve.’ He asked me how I was. ‘As you see,’ I responded. ‘Sick?’ he said. ‘Sick indeed,’ I answered. ‘You have to be bled,’ he said, his words falling on my ears like ‘a rugged boulder hurled from on high by the torrent’⁴⁹⁵ and I said, ‘It seems you’re going back to what you began with. When will this cycle end?’ He replied, ‘One of these giaours (plural of cure)⁴⁹⁶ is bound to get rid of what you have.’ ‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘As for the first named, that’s you, and as for the second, that’s my blood or living spirit,’ and I stood firm and refused, saying, ‘Tell the emir that I am, thank God, a bachelor, so why is he trying to send me away from here so quickly?’ but he didn’t get it.⁴⁹⁷ ‘I want to bleed you,’ he said to me, ‘not be your messenger.’ ‘But I don’t want you to,’ I said, ‘so grant me rest, may God grant you the same.’

2.10.9

“At this he showed me his back and departed, sending me soon after his bill, in which he demanded of me five hundred piasters, for he claimed to have people in the countryside among the peasants who collected those medicinal plants for him, even though they were the same that sprout from the walls of Cairo’s houses. Not content with this, he threatened that, if I was as reluctant to pay as I had been to get bled the second time, he’d bring a case against me in his consul’s office.⁴⁹⁸ I paid him, therefore, the aforementioned sum in full, saying to myself, ‘God damn the hour that showed us foreigners’ faces, and their backsides!’

2.10.10

“Now here I am today, feeling much better, and I’d like to meet with your friend. Before the visit, though, I must do him some honor”—and he ordered his servant to select a trunkful of fine clothes and take it to the Fāriyāq, who at the time was dressing as a Frank. Then he wrote him a short message with a few lines of verse inviting him to his salon the following day, details to come in the following chapter.

2.11.1

The Fāriyāq had a friend from the Damascene lands who used to visit him, and he was with him when the servant arrived with the letter and the set of clothes. He told the Fāriyāq, “I shall go with you to see Khawājā Yanṣur, for I have often heard him mentioned and would love to meet him.” “But,” the Fāryaq said, “turning up with another (al-izwāʾ)(1) may be considered a discourtesy to the person visited, for it is inappropriate for an invitee to bring a companion with him.” “Forget about that,” said his friend, “for it’s the Frankish way. In Egypt, on the other hand, a guest may bring anyone he wishes, and his companion too, should he come across any acquaintance on the way, has the right to bring him along with him, and the latter too has the right to bring along another, and that other another, till they turn into a chain of friends, the only condition being that none of the links be female; all of them, without exception, talk to the person being visited, are treated to his hospitality, and are welcomed by him. He can’t question one of them and say, ‘You! What do you want, what letter of introduction do you have, and what are the names of your wife and your sister, and how old are they, and on what street do they live?’ like your Frankish friends. Have no fear that the man will receive us harshly. And anyway, we have literature to commend us to him, and that will relieve us of the need to invoke pedigree.”

2.11.2

So the Fāriyāq agreed to his request, and they set off to see the man together, the Fāriyāq strutting along in his new clothes; he had also got himself a large turban that made him think of his turban in Lebanon and his ill-fated fall.⁴⁹⁹ When they’d settled down in the aforementioned salon and been greeted and received with warmth and welcoming faces, and once “We’ve been looking forward to meeting you” had been followed up with “You bring us good cheer,” and “You bring us good cheer” had fallen fast on the heels of “We’ve been looking forward to meeting you,” and after the salutations of kindly men had followed hard on the kindliest of salutations, as is the custom among both elite and commoners, the Khawājā said to the Fāriyāq, “I am delighted with your arrival in these lands and that God, Glorious and Almighty, has granted me His blessing in allowing me to make you my partner here, for as the poet has said,

2.12.1

Our friend the Fāriyāq had no heavy baggage at the Bag-man’s house other than his own body, so he took his tambour under his arm, put his pen-box in his belt, and told the man, “God has come to my aid and shown me a path different from that laid down for me by you and your company of Bag-men. Today I shall leave you and nothing shall dissuade me.” “How can you leave me, when I’ve done you no injury?” asked the other. “This tambour,” replied the Fāriyāq, “bears witness against you that you did.” “If the tambour-player isn’t acceptable as a witness, how can the witness of the instrument itself — the reason for the discounting of its owner’s witness — be valid?”⁵⁰⁸ “On the contrary,” said the Fāriyāq “it’s as valid as your father’s mare’s, can announce your sins as loudly as your grandfather’s she-ass, and can demolish the castles where you store your peddlers’ goods as well as any kingly trumpet!”⁵⁰⁹ Said he, “What am I to make of such a peroration?” “That it’s revelation and inspiration!” he replied. “It doesn’t matter if you play your tambour,” the Bag-man said, “for I’ve discovered that the servant only brought the complaint against you out of envy.” “Never!” said the Fāriyāq. “I’m going to play it to people who tell me, ‘More!’ and ‘Encore!’ and ‘Well done!’ and ‘Allāh!’⁵¹⁰ not to foreigners who only say God’s name when praying.” “You’re a trouble-maker and have gone too far!” said the man. “And you’ve let me down and haven’t treated me fair!” the Fāriyāq retorted. “You’re untrue!” he said. “And you’re a Jew!” he responded. Then he turned his back on him, head held high, eyes bulging with fury, and set off, and he rented a room, where he stowed his tambour and made his way to the Panegyricon.

2.12.2

He had barely had time to take his seat before a messenger appeared before him with a piece of paper in his hand, on which were two lines of verse that were to be translated, for after they had been presented to those translating into languages other than Arabic and delivered by them to the Grand Panjandrum of the Panegyricon, it was finally the Fāriyāq’s turn. He took up his pen and wrote,

2.13.1

I shall not sleep well tonight unless I compose a maqāmah first. I have made it the custom of my pen at this point⁵²⁴ to do nothing but rhyme, producing elegant periods that charm the mind and are appetizing and pleasing to the ear. I thus declare:

2.13.2

Faid al-Hāwif ibn Hifām in lifping tones, “Once, as I walked through Cairo’s markets, my eyes o’er their attractions wandering aglaze, the beauty of their sideways-glancing girls absorbing my gaze, overtaken by camels from its every zone, so that now I was against this wall crushed, now at the foot of that one thrown, at one moment placing my hand over my eye, at another over something that might smaller or larger be, a young man signaled to me from a store he seemed to own—a youth bearing every sign of prestige and high-standing — with an agitation that pierced one’s chest and settled there to rest.

2.13.3

“‘If you like,’ said he, ‘climb up here with me, till this crush of camels has dispersed and the hideous climax of these distressing straits has passed its worst, for you are to us as a close friend and to do you honor I intend.’ I found his invitation as compelling as ‘Hie ye to security!’⁵²⁵ so said, ‘None refuses the offers of the kind but he who’s devoid of righteousness and to the path of prosperity is blind. How can I say no, when my limbs are once more about to be injured and the loads on your camels’ backs leave no place in this land, broad as it is, on which to make tracks?’ He smiled, indicating a wit quick to answer, a nature ever alert to render a favor.

2.13.4

“Having climbed up to where he was, I found with him a party of men each wearing a turban of a different fashion,⁵²⁶ their faces full of good-natured compassion. After I’d uttered a friendly salutation them to greet and found among them a seat, I was asked by the owner of the store, ‘In a debate that since the middle of the morning has kept us busy, would you care to take your turn (a debate for which we’ve made our ears like the cloth that’s spread to catch the crumbs beneath the quern)? From each to each the turn’s relayed, each one’s opening words amplifying, in sequence, what the last one said, there being no punishment or consequences to be paid, for it’s not a matter here of calling religion into question; it’s an issue into which any may make investigation.’

2.13.5

“‘You ask of me a terrible thing,’ said I, ‘and go too far by including me among your ranks, if your appeal be to the mind, for I’m no book-worm, but rather one to roaming and travel inclined. If, though, your appeal is to natural intuition, then mine, naturally, is sound, just as upright is my disposition.’ ‘The second,’ said he, ‘is the point round which it all revolves, the factor in our discussion that will lead to a decision.’ ‘Fill, then,’ said I, ‘my ears with your debate and throw upon my back the matched loads of argument between which you hesitate.’ ‘Know,’ said he, God save you all grief, ‘that I, to God be thanks, am a Muslim who to God and His messenger, His inspiration and His revelation, owes belief. My dear friend here (and he pointed to one of the seated) is a Christian, the other a Jew, the next a man with no ideas of his own, who to neither belief nor unbelief will hew. Know too that the debate whose cup we’ve wrested from each other in turn, and in which we’ve taken as many separate ways as pilgrims leaving ʿArafāt,⁵²⁷ has matrimony as its concern.

2.13.6

“‘Now, the Christian claims that to divorce a woman is a very grave sin, an occasion for regret bringing its initiator naught but trouble and chagrin. The proof of its evil, according to his claim and in keeping with his degree of comprehension, is that, once a wife finds she’s no more to her husband than a disposable chattel or worn-out bit of kit, her presence hostage to any chance mistake or trivial slip, she’ll never again honestly share with him her introspection or grant to him her sincere affection. On the contrary, as long as she’s with him she’ll be depressed and full of misapprehension, lonely, sad, bad-tempered, and prone to desperation, practicing deceit and falsification. If she thinks of him as someone by whom she’s been bought, believes his belongings aren’t hers and that soon enough sworn allegations of adultery will be brought, or that he’ll leave her, or strip her of her clothes, dress her in those of a divorcée, and tell her, “Back to your family!” or “Good luck on your own!” or “You are to me as my mother’s back!”⁵²⁸ or “Your nose-rope’s on top of your hump!”⁵²⁹ or “Return to your covert,⁵³⁰ among your kith and kin, for you’re no family to me and I’m no husband to thee!” she’ll never be solicitous of his secrets or what he may need and to whatever evils may befall him she’ll pay no heed.

2.13.7

“‘She may betray him with regard to his honor or his monies and lay traps to make him an object of scandal before his peers and cronies. And there’s another danger too, more calamitous still and leading to greater sorrow, more injurious and harmful, yet more painful and harder to swallow, which is that, if a wife hates her husband because of what she’s suffered at his hands and fears what havoc he may wreak, she’ll not bother to care for his children or the welfare of his household seek, for if a woman doesn’t love her husband, she’ll not love his offspring and his seed; she’ll love her husband only if he maintains their union and fulfills her need. Any man who has a wife to whom he does not give his heart and devote his entire affection will be taken by her as a deadly foe, not a friendly companion, in which case he’s to be pitied even by those who observe his misfortunes with glee and those who inveigh against him should leave him be, for when things reach this point his breast becomes a wellspring of sorrow, his head a place for horns to grow, his home a camping-ground for ire, and, in short, his condition that of Those Who Dwell in Fire.

2.13.8

“‘I, on the other hand, object to those who’d forbid divorce and the obligations of their wives enforce, on the grounds that, if a wife knows her husband’s body with hers is one, that his secrets are on her tongue, making them like a single person, not a pair, whether they plumb the depths or rise to great heights in the air, that naught but the file of death this solder can fray, naught untie the knots of this condition but the dissolution of their earthly clay—so that, should she sicken, he too falls ill and, if she takes a stand, he must (un)buckle to her will, her every demand fulfil⁵³¹—then she’ll rebel and disobey, play tyrant and insist she have her way. One time she’ll force him to buy jewelry and clothes, another insist on his swallowing some other bitter dose; then woe unto him if he concurs, and double woe if he demurs! If he spends one night away from home, all her guile on him she’ll vent, and if some profitable business of his distracts him from her, she’ll do anything she can to his detriment. Thus he makes it his habit to placate and flatter her, to play up to and humor her, to pay her compliments when she gives him the cold shoulder and be nice to her if she leads him a dance, to play the woman with her when she plays the man, and cower when she looks at him askance. Can life be sweet when one knows he’s a pawn to the whims of another and at his hands condemned to suffer?

2.13.9

“‘As for the children (the reason for putting up with this pain in the liver), if a couple are in a state of aversion and contumely, conflict and contumacy, the way they bring them up will be simply an invitation to imitation, a training, through their agency, in abomination, and how much better it would be to divorce the mother and leave them sans upbringing, concord being a factor more important than any other. In addition we know — from experience gained since the day the Almighty decreed that marriage be the law and saw that it was good—if a woman knows her husband can divorce her and slip from her clutches, she’ll treat him lovingly and as she should, indulge him and be a good friend, go along with his whims and help him unbend, put right anything that’s wrong and agree with his views, compliment him and use language that soothes, fearing lest her life become unbearable should he leave her or she be deprived of what he owes her of this world’s joy, for if there’s no concord between them, “Divorce! Divorce!” will be his cry. This Jewish friend of ours doesn’t differ in his opinion much, for he disagrees with me only over the conditions for divorce (which, for him, are such and such).

2.13.10

“‘As for our wishy-washy friend, he’s at sea as to where this thorny issue will end. Sometimes he says divorce leads to ease, at others that it must disturb life’s calm and be nasty as a slap with the palm. On occasion he claims that a set period for legal dalliance⁵³² or marriage is more likely to lead to a successful conclusion, for even when that ends the contract may be renewed, with official collusion, until the two part without any grudge and settle it all mutually without recourse to a judge, this being less likely to create inconvenience and expose the purse to ravages (albeit it’s also the practice of certain savages). On others he says that, on the contrary, keeping a concubine is more comfortable, pleasant, and restorative for the listless, and there is no substitute for keeping a mistress. At moments, he decides to make do with a plump little serving girl as wife, at others with the bachelor’s solitary life (taking any, much-anticipated, opportunities as may be on offer), at yet others to cut off his tackle completely (supposing, if we may, that one can slice through such snares so neatly).’

2.13.11

“The speaker now declared, ‘We’re discussing all this because I’ve descended the staircase of this business from top to bottom and suffered each of the kinds of danger and perdition with which it’s rotten, for at every step I found a chasm into which discernment vanished and where reason was banished, where strength waned and bankruptcy was to be relished, a chasm beside which all other disasters seemed diminished, to the point that I became convinced that it plays no useful role and benefits not one living soul. It’s a sickness none can cure, a smart but poisoned garment that pleasure to those both who see and those who wear it brings but ulcerates their joints and limbs. With the exception of this curse, any matter in the world may be sized up by the astute and dealt with for better or for worse, for it all goes back to the individual’s disposition and neither good sense helps, nor resolute decision.’

2.13.12

“Then said he, moaning like a mourning mother, ‘To the words of the wishy-washy man I would add what follows (and I fear not the censure of my fellows): How many a heart has been tied to the rack⁵³³ by reason of that crack, by reason of that cleft how many of all tranquility bereft! How many a head for its sake has been softened and contused, how many a mind weakened and abused, how many a neck chopped and eye popped, how many a tooth split and nose slit, how many a head of hair shaved smooth and beard plucked out, how many a hand cut off and lineage lost, how many a brigade raised and tome off tossed’ (a category to which this tome belongs) ‘or horse galloped or sword flashed or lance flourished or band into battle dashed or mountain crumbled and shattered or house abandoned, its stones scattered, or possession plundered, or king by adversity crushed, or land reduced to dust—nay, how many a nation has disappeared and been dismembered, how many a generation receded and ceased to be remembered!’ And then he sighed and added, ‘Or goods depleted and gold coins deleted.’”

2.13.13

Said al-Hāwif, “Then I realized that ‘the crack’ had cracked him in his pocket, and its ‘uvula’ bitten him, once well inserted in its socket. That was why he’d gone on at such length in his discourse and waded so far out: to discover if any other had suffered as had he and knew of aught that might bring a cure about. Now he turned to me, his eyes full to the brink, and said, ‘And you, what do you think?’ ‘Verily,’ I replied, ‘it is a very great woe,⁵³⁴ a dilemma fit to make tears flow. For long the greatest scholars have been confounded as to the affair, and of ever understanding it the wisest of sages are in despair. Let there be no misapprehension, knowing each celestial sphere and every star, diving where lie Earth’s metals and wonders bizarre, or comprehending its secrets and things exotic, would be easier by far for me than giving a yes or no on such a topic. So it seems to me I’d better say nothing.’ Then, while they all argued to and fro, at length and in brief, who but the Fāriyāq should come riding briskly by on a trotting donkey that bowled along, its head held high. Catching sight of him, I called, ‘Get down, get down, and hie thee to this locus of indecision, for none but you, we think, is capable of ridding us of its reek and presenting the facts with some precision!’ He asked, ‘Into what muddled matter have you waded and regarding what muddy miasma do you seek to be persuaded?’ We told him, ‘Matrimony. Now give us your remedy instantaneously!’ at which he launched into the following, quite spontaneously:

⁵³⁶

2.14.1

There is no word in this noble tongue of ours, or in that of any other nation, for an active subject or a passive object, or two actives, who, having participated in one and the same act for their own pleasure and advantage, are in need of someone to burst in upon them to inform himself as to what kind of “raising” and “erecting” they are engaged in.⁵³⁷ This may be demonstrated by the fact that our word zawāj (“marriage”) means the joining of one thing to another in such a way that each forms a conjunct (zawj) with its companion without, however, specification of time or place. Thus, if Zayd enters into conjunction (tazawwaja) with Hind on a plain or on a mountain top or in a cave, or on a Sunday or a Monday or a Saturday, and provided there is mutual consent to the man’s writing the woman a document publicly proclaiming that he has formed a conjunction with her, or he brings two men to bear witness to the same, then all is as it should be. This was the way of the earliest prophets and others, as recorded in their histories; in fact, they didn’t even tie themselves down with documents or witnesses.

2.14.2

As to the word nikāḥ (“copulation”), it means having a woman, however that may come about. This is because the Arabs of the Days of Barbarism had no conventions governing intercourse, or eating, or anything else. Then the Revelation came and classified the categories of intercourse and distinguished the permitted from the forbidden. Abū l-Baqāʾ states in al-Kulliyyāt (The Universals)⁵³⁸—well, I can’t find it in the chapter on the letter nūn but if I come across it in someone else’s work, I promise to get you the reference.

2.14.3

I’d hoped to cite what he has to say, namely that the noun nikāḥ⁵³⁹ remains in use until now and occurs in books of jurisprudence innumerable times, which is an argument against those Christians who deny this and anyone who throws up his hands in horror when it’s employed. Scholars of religion used it without embarrassment for several reasons. The first is that it was used anciently in the Days of Barbarism and that same usage was then confirmed in the Era of Rationality. The second is that it occurs in the Qurʾan. The third is that it is composed of four letters and thus accords with the humors, the elements, and the directions. The fourth is that the letters of which it is composed occur among the “mysterious letters”⁵⁴⁰ of the chapters of the Qurʾan; thus the nūn occurs in “Nūn. By the Pen and what they inscribe,”⁵⁴¹ the kāf in kāf-hāʾ-yāʾ-ṣād,⁵⁴² the alif in alif-lām-fāʾ,⁵⁴³ and the ḥ in ḥāʾ-mīm.⁵⁴⁴ The fifth is that if you write the word backward, you will find two noble meanings, the first being an active participle of the verb ḥ-y-y, the second an imperative verb formed from kāna;⁵⁴⁵ thus God’s creation is revealed, the essential truths made manifest to those whose eyes can pierce the veil to arrive at what’s concealed. The sixth is the lightness of the word on the tongue and its sweetness to the taste. The seventh is that its beginning signifies its end and its end its beginning, this kind of word play being called by some “the signifying of the end by the beginning and vice versa.” The advantage this bestows lies in the fact that, if a judge calls on someone to bear witness against the commissioner of such an act and the witness utters the letter nūn followed by the letter kāf⁵⁴⁶ and then swoons, or the judge swoons, from lasciviousness, those left standing in the judge’s chambers will understand what the speaker was trying to say. Similarly, should he be overcome in the course of his testimony by such longing and dread that he can no longer speak and all that can be heard from him is the alif and the ḥāʾ,⁵⁴⁷ this last part of the word, though consisting of only a small number of letters, will provide all the signification that could be asked for.

2.14.4

I declare, “This analysis is indeed elegant. It is not, however, to be found in the books of the rhetoricians and the stylists. Personally, I’m not fond of long words, so the best thing would be to create a new, shorter, one from that assemblage of letters by keeping only the end.⁵⁴⁸ If it be said, ‘But you used very long words when you described a bonnet as being mustaqbiḥah and mustafẓiʿah⁵⁴⁹ even though you could just as well have described it with short words,’ I reply, ‘That falls under the rubric of “maintenance of consistency,” for it is required by the height of the bonnet, whereas what is signified by the word in question doesn’t take long.’”

2.14.5

I started to say something at the beginning of this chapter and didn’t finish it, the pen, as usual, having drawn me unawares into another topic, and I doubt that Your Elevated Honor or Sublime Presence understood it. I now therefore declare: “If the ideal of marriage be that each of the two spouses take his companion for his own sake and not for that of his countrymen, acquaintances, or friends, the way that ʿUlayyān ate Umm ʿAlī’s chicken’s thigh,⁵⁵⁰ it would be unreasonable for someone wearing a bonnet to intrude upon them and tell the woman, ‘Don’t marry so-and-so because he wasn’t given the name Buṭrus’ and then to the man, ‘Don’t marry so-and-so because she wasn’t given the name Maryam’ or ‘Today’s Sunday, and marriage is not allowed’ or ‘This room isn’t licensed for the contraction of marriages.’ Nor would it be proper for him to say to them, ‘I want to see the kohl-stick stuck in the pot.’ Such things, I swear, are not fit to be spoken or written of by any.

2.14.6

“Then again, the woman is one of those things that, like the sun or the moon, are so much looked at that the mind doesn’t pay them the attention they deserve. This may be demonstrated by the fact that God, Mighty and Powerful, created woman from man to be a helpmeet to him in his daily affairs and a comfort to him in the midst of his anguish and cares. It seems to us, though, that this underlying intention is so frequently distorted that man’s calamities, care, loneliness, ill fortune, wretchedness, and deprivation, nay even his perdition, come from woman, thus turning that collaboration into a cause of aggravation. In brief, one is born into this world in need of many things required for one’s survival (such as food, drink, sleep, and warmth) and others that are not but that exist rather to rectify one’s nature so that it does not become imbalanced (such as laughter, speech, recreation, listening to songs, and having women). This last, however, while originally created for the rectification of nature (as evidenced by the fact that a man can live for a while without it), has gained the upper hand over all other mundane requirements of life which cannot be foregone. Observe that a man who dreams of a woman gets from her in his dream what he would have had were he awake, while this is not true of one who dreams of eating honey or drinking the best wine, which is anyway something that very rarely happens, even to one who is hungry or thirsty. How often have our friends the poets been content to see the image of the beloved in their dreams! None, however, was ever content to have the object of his eulogies send him a glass of wine or a pot of porridge in a dream. Likewise, if a person partakes of some tasty food, be it of one kind or two, he will remain satisfied with what he’s eaten for a number of hours and give no thought to the cooking pot and its potential contents. Then, when revisited by hunger, he will start thinking again of having another meal. Never, however, has it been heard that one in a state of hunger or thirst, on seeing a bird, would wish for it to fall onto the spit in his house so that he could gulp it down or keep ogling the cooks’, grocers’, and oil chandlers’ shops or peering through their keyholes, the chinks in their doors, or the cracks in their walls at the different kinds of food inside.

2.14.7

“True, in our country ‘the hungry man thinks that everything round is a loaf,’ as the saying goes, and it may be that in some Frankish countries, where they have so many different kinds of food, they harbor similar thoughts about everything round, oblong, or cloven like a sheep’s hoof, but one who is hungry for women has no one shape to fix on. The same goes for drink, for a thirsty man, having once quenched his longing with water, will feel aversion to drinking more, even if a glass filled with the nectar of paradise is brought him. Similarly, one who is cold and needs warmth, once he has put on some clothes to warm himself and cut himself a fine figure in public, will not thereafter stand on tiptoes to peer at every garment he sees displayed for sale in the merchants’ stores. Were he to see, for example, a rainbow or a meadow brocaded with gay flowers, he wouldn’t want the same colors to be on his drawers or his shirt; he would see it and simply find it beautiful without exercising his mind and heart over it or dreaming that same night of an elegant garden or imagining as he lay on his bed that, if it were next to his pillow, he’d feel more comfortable or live longer. The same goes for the sleeper: if he gets enough sleep on his hard bed, the subsequent sight of a luxuriously comfortable bed will be of no interest to him. In sum, everyone has a brain in his cranium that guides him to what will benefit him and what will hurt him and to what will do him harm and what will bring him pleasure, and, in both his stomach and his gullet, there is an accurate set of scales that measures what food and drink he needs and that enables him to grasp the meaning of the saying, ‘One meal precludes many another.’

2.14.8

“Where women are concerned, though, the self-denying ascetic becomes a lustful lecher, the reasonable man a slave to his passions, the clement ruler a tyrant, the well-guided person a lost soul, the wise man an idiot, the scholar an ignoramus, the eloquent a stutterer (and vice versa), the patient man a prey to his impulses (but not vice versa), the young man old (but not vice versa), the rich man a pauper (and vice versa), the lout a sophisticate (but not vice versa), the fat thin (and vice versa), the healthy an invalid (but not vice versa), the steady-going reckless (and vice versa), the miser generous (but not vice versa), the immobile mobile (and vice versa), and all things their opposites (and vice versa, and so on, and so forth). If a man finds a woman who hates him, how often will he fall in love with her, if one who ignores him devote himself to her, if one who avoids him throw himself in her path, if one who flatters him and offers him false hopes become infatuated by her, if one who throws him her bag,⁵⁵¹ however heavy, go mad for her — unless he attend a gathering where there’s