3.1.1

Are they not enough, the troubles to which men are subject by way of misery and care, effort and wear, toil and disease, hardship and dis-ease, of deprivation and lucklessness, despair and unhappiness? Men are carried to nausea and craving, born in pain and suffering, nursed to their mothers’ detriment, weaned to their imperilment. They crawl only to stumble, climb only to tumble, walk only to lag, labor only to flag, find themselves unemployed only by hunger’s pangs to be destroyed. They languish and grow weak when they go without, suffer indigestion when they eat and grow stout. When they thirst, they lose weight, and when they drink, become sick as poisoned birds, gulp air, and nauseate. Lying awake at night, they waste away, worried and fraught, and sleeping, their allotted share of hours goes by and gains them naught. Old and feeble, they’re a burden to kith and kin, yet, should they die before their time, they cause them such grief as may do them in.

3.1.2

In the midst of all this, they must strive to obtain the means to earn their daily bread, while tormented by the need to make a show of dress and thread. The bachelor’s desperate to find a woman to call his own, the family man preoccupied with spouse and care of children, be they young or grown. When they fall ill, he does so too and when they mourn, he mourns and grieves in turn. Woe to him should his wife be overly fertile, but so too should she be barren and sterile, for then he sees other married men surrounded by bonny faces and children with pleasing graces and says to himself, “Verily, in sons lies all this world’s pleasure, and I am as one who dies (and what a fate!) leaving no successor!”

3.1.3

How often by the fall of a single fingernail is the whole body defeated, how often by the extraction of a single molar is most, if not all, of its power to endure depleted—not to mention the sicknesses that defy all doctors’ skills, the chronic ills, the passage of time and the passing of the years, the succession of sorrows and shifts of fortune that this worn-out, debilitated body bears, for in winter it is exposed to wind, nasal congestion, sputum, and the damp chills, to incontinence and miasmatic airs; in summer, to cholera, fever, and headache, bloating, and stagnant weirs; in spring, to the imperious demands of the rising blood and its evil commands; in autumn, to the stirring of the black bile, the wind’s bane and its piercing of the bone.

3.1.4

In addition, some are born afflicted with (among the various defects and diseases)

3.2.1

I mentioned at the end of Book Two that God first afflicted the Fāriyāq with many diseases and more books, then rescued him from them all, and that, believing himself pardoned, he felt great relief and devoted himself to song. Now I must relate how that episode turned out and all that this sinful pursuit brought about. To get down to detail, the house that contained the Bag-men was next door to the house of a merchant who had a daughter¹⁰ who loved music, diversion, and the raptures of art, reserving a specially soft spot for singing. Every time she heard the Fāriyāq singing or playing in his room, she’d climb to the roof of her house and listen attentively until he was done, then go back down to her chamber. When the Fāriyāq discovered that she was making the climb for him — for it was not to be imagined that anyone else could have been exhibited to her¹¹—his soul fell ardently in love with her and felt for her the promptings of desire.

3.2.2

At the same time, however, he was by nature so averse to the idea of marriage that he considered married men the least happy of people, for all that can be seen, in general, of the married state is its trials and tribulations. If ever he was told, “So-and-so has married,” he’d be overcome by pity and would mourn for him as for one swept away by a mighty torrent or afflicted by some other terrible calamity. At that moment, then, the two elements of love and caution waged war within him, the latter in the end coming to outweigh the former in the scale. He therefore decided that it was a better idea simply to look than to make any sign indicating that he was head over heels in love.

3.2.3

The two of them continued in this fashion for a while, he behaving more shyly than the loon, which dives the moment it senses danger, until that day when he saw her wipe her eyes with a handkerchief (whether from the heat of the sun or for some other reason) and convinced himself in the depths of his soul that she was wiping away tears of yearning for him. At this his breast burst the gussets of resignation and emotion drove him to abandon circumspection. To himself he said, “Would any but I confront the tears of a weeping woman by turning away? And behind those tears can there be anything but love? How can they not melt me, when my heart’s no rock, I no knave of low-mannered stock? I know that the greatest pleasures in life depend on finding a boon companion and sympathetic friend. I am a stranger, in need of one to cheer me when I long for home, a comrade when I’m all alone. Who better to cheer one than a wife, and what benefit lies in bachelorhood once God has provided one with food and the other needs of life?”

3.2.4

By such speedy calculations, he reconciled himself to bearing the burdens of love from wherever it might come and this opened the door before the two of them to signing back and forth with a hand placed now upon the heart, next upon the cheek, a finger yoked to another, beseeching arms extended with a gulp and a sigh, pursed lips, a nodding head, and other such things to which love’s novices resort (old hands in contrast being satisfied with nothing less than the “twisting of the side-tresses”¹² specified by the master, Imruʾ al-Qays). The era of the sign lasted for many long days, without speech, but when the hands and other limbs could no longer translate what was in the heart, especially in view of the distance between them, they came up with a stratagem by which they might meet in a certain place, so that the lover might behold his beloved.

3.2.5

When he saw her close up, he found her to be a woman big of bosom and bottom, the credit for this going to the inventor of Egyptian dress, for had she been wearing Frankish clothes, he would never have known if the things on her chest were dyed wool, cotton bolls, cotton cardings, teased wool, papyrus cotton, wool waste, silk, or breasts,(1) or whether what was behind her was a bustle or flesh and fat. These two characteristics — by which I mean bigness of bosom and bigness of bottom — are the best one can want from a woman, for the first assures the appeal of the forward dimension, the second that of the rearward. I might add that it is reported that Our Master Sulaymān, peace be upon him, said in praise of bigness of bosom (Proverbs, chapter 5), “Let her breasts satisfy thee at all times.”¹³ Someone might object that, should the two bodies be gathered together in one place, the presence of colored wool, etc., would not — given the presence of hands and possibility of their giving the body a good squeeze here and there as one would when testing a ram for fatness(2) — prevent the investigation of the status of the abovementioned characteristics. The response would be that such a situation is generally prohibited in the lands of the East, especially on the first occasion; the rest of the world has no such prohibition, which is why the use of bustles has spread, which no one can deny.

3.2.6

Now, given that we were previously presented, in Book One,¹⁴ with a description, in the Frankish style, of a donkey, there can be no harm in presenting here too a description in the same style of a man on the verge of marriage. Thus we declare: it is a time that seduces him with thoughts of the joys of being wed and makes him drool as he anticipates the pleasures of the bed. No thoughts of future troubles cross his mind — all he can surmise, the most his mind devise, is “My state is not like that of my friends and neighbors who married and were disappointed in their hopes. They didn’t give marriage its due, didn’t cling with confidence to its ropes, for some wedded when unequal to its demands, either for want of magnanimity or of liquidity, or because of a disparity between them and their wives in age or, in their instrument, some debility, or were prone to come at the rim, before entering the hole, or rejected by their wives, or reduced to a constant tizzy by the husband’s role,(1) or because their emir had exiled them from their houses, or because their mothers constantly spied on their spouses, or because of quarrels with their neighbors over where to water their cattle, or because their imams regarded their wives as chattel.¹⁵ For all these reasons, squabbles would break out between man and wife and they’d go for long periods in a state of strife, shifts would be ripped from in front and from the rear,¹⁶ heads and pubes plucked of their hair, uproar would never stop, skins would be scratched with fingernails, and the scented herbs upon the beds would go to rot.

3.2.7

“I, though, am free, praise God, from any such flaw. Nothing need come between me and my wife, no man will jostle me for her affections, she won’t find me a bore. My happiness will be hers, my wishes and hers the same. I am neither toothless nor foul of breath nor hunchbacked nor lame. I have two hands with which to work, two legs that, to earn their living, will not shirk, and if in my body there’s any distemper, it’s covered by my excellence of temper. I will object to none of her cooking, her clothes, or her manner of reposing, for she’ll sleep next to me and adopt what suits us both by way of clothing. What then should stop me from taking a mate, one possessed of each such happy trait, even should people, hearing that my spouse is full of affection, that with me her honor enjoys full protection and her face no visitor sees, envy me such abundant ease? Every choking sorrow will then seem easy to swallow, and it’s no secret what pleasure lies in giving the envious the finger—a pleasure over which no connoisseur will hesitate to linger. Not to mention the delight found by the psyche in the companionate gender, whose nearness to the heart comfort, and in times of stress an outlet, doth render. One who endures his toil by day only by night to sleep alone and who no bedmate to breathe into his nostrils or warm his blood from in front and behind owns is meet to be counted among the dead and thrown among the bones. In addition, I shall by her saliva to the need for drink be made immune, by the smell of her hair to the need for musk and other perfume, for they say that the smell of a woman from the roots of the hair (be those in the body’s cracks and crevices or on the head) may be inhaled and by it all the senses are derailed. Likewise, the heat of her body will suffice as fuel to keep me warm, the sight of her serve as antimony and balm, meaning that I shall save at least one silver coin a day, half of which for a daily morning visit to the bathhouse I’ll pay, leaving me the other half to live on, which is riches indeed and will suffice for any need.

3.2.8

“As to what people say about ‘women’s wiles’ and how they ride their husbands so hard they’re left beyond the reach of consolation, in most cases this isn’t true — and no rule’s without exceptions to its general application. I may be the first to expose this qualification and fashion, in praise of marriage for bachelors, such a commendation, and how could this not be so, when I’m a master of chaste language and eloquence, a man of craft and intelligence? Thus none of her cunning ways will defy me and none of her attempts at concealment get by me. I shall oppose her and remonstrate, and that my superiority to her compels her to obey and comply I shall demonstrate. One day I’ll tell her, ‘This is a day on which the married desist and active lovers to celibacy keep’ to which she’ll reply, ‘I shall be the first to desist and the last to sleep.’ Should I tell her, ‘It’s not attractive for a respectable married woman to put her charms on display,’ she’ll tell me, ‘Or flirt and play,’ and if I tell her, ‘A wife her husband once a week has a right to expect,’ she’ll tell me, ‘While remaining chaste and worthy of respect.’ If I tell her, ‘Jewelry’s no requirement for a wedding,’ she’ll tell me, ‘and nor is brocade, that most evil cladding.’ Taken as a whole, my life with her will be easy, my state happy, my good fortune extensive, my food wholesome, my drink healthy, my clothes clean, my bed comfy, my possessions well guarded, my house no longer lonesome. Good cheer will be there, my every effort blessed, my status one of note, my endeavors guaranteed success. Hie ye then to marriage with a jolly girl who’s full of coquetry, whose looks provide a cure for bankruptcy, and to bed whom is to ride the road to victory!” End.

3.2.9

I further declare that it is a fact, deeply rooted in our sticky human clay, that when a man sets his heart on getting married, God endears his spouse to him however she be and makes him believe she’s the best of people, morally and physically. And that’s not all: the man may well believe that he’s been elevated above his peers and distinguished among his brethren to the point that he dismisses as trivial what previously he saw as important and imagines that he has become a new person, for whom the face of the earth ought, by rights, to be remade. It follows that the Fāriyāq no longer found contentment in the old familiar songs and poetry; instead, he substituted for them other, new ones of his own composition. In the process, he composed two poems¹⁷ in which he attempted to invent a strange new style, with the result that they turned out quite titter-making, as you shall see — and had he had the ability to invent a new form of speech to express his passion and rejuvenation, he would have done so.

3.2.10

Thus, should he lay eyes on a married man, he’d call out to him and sing as follows:

On the racetrack of marriage, I’m the front-runner

While you’re the also-ran last-placer.

My shaft soon will take the prize

While your luckless stick’s a failure.¹⁸

3.3.1

It has been stated previously, in the first maqāmah,³⁷ that the contagion of evil spreads more widely than that of good and that one man with mange may infect a whole city while a healthy man will infect none of his neighbors, and the same is true of disorders of the brain and the heart. The proof of this, as they claim, is that the brains of teachers of small children go soft and their judgment turns foolish because they spend too much time in their company and mix with them too much. The same goes for those who spend too much time mixing with women — their hearts grow soft and their natures effeminate and they are stripped of that audacity and courage that mark the more exasperated among us.

3.3.2

I know many of my race who have lived among the Franks but have become no more refined in nature as a result of that contact, or it was their vices that they picked up, not their virtues. One such will not rise from the board without first wiping the plate he’s been eating from so clean that it needs no washing, or enter an assembly, without bowing to one of its sides and letting rip a fart, as loud as any donkey’s, that echoes round the chamber, which he will then try to atone for by saying “Scusi!” (meaning “Excuse me!”). Another will wear those special Frankish shoes and walk in them all over your special Arab cushions, or will wear his hair loose like a woman’s and the moment he takes his seat in the assembly pull off his hat and sit there sending the scurf flying over your lap. Another, if he finds himself in an assembly among his brethren, acquaintances, and others and notices two men of letters engaged in a contest or telling curious anecdotes, will start whistling, but a mongrel, off-key whistle that is neither honest-to-goodness Frankish — given that he won’t have lived among those people long enough to master that noble art — nor authentic Arab. Another, on sitting down, will stretch out his legs, thrusting the soles of his feet toward the face of the person sitting with him.³⁸ Another will come to pay you a visit and glance every little while at his watch to show that he’s an extremely busy man with lots of things to attend to, despite which he’ll stay with you until he sees you nodding off or sees you’ve gone and gotten your pillow and said, “May your sick friend get well!” as al-Akhfash did to those who visited him when he was ill.

3.3.3

At the same time, there’s no denying that the Franks have numerous good qualities. One is that they consider it shameful to borrow furniture, pots and pans, books, and other things. Another is that if a friend visits one of them and sees that he’s busy, he turns on his heel and goes back where he came from and doesn’t sit and wait for him to finish what he’s working on; indeed, even if he finds that he’s free, he spends as little time sitting with him as possible, and if he sees notebooks or papers on the table, doesn’t snatch them up so as to read them and discover their contents. Another is that if one of them who has a visitor has a sick child or his wife has just given birth or has fallen ill, he won’t leave the patient and sit with his visitor to exchange pointless courtesies and gossip. Another is that a Frank won’t marry a woman unless he has first seen her and kept her company and that they kiss women’s hands and the faces of their daughters and see no disgrace or disrespect in that. Also, no meal-scrounger,(1) sponger who attaches himself to invited guests, or guest who invites other guests exists among them and none of them says to his friend, “Lend me your handkerchief so I can blow my nose in it” or “Lend me your clyster syringe so I can give myself an enema.” Another is how easygoing they are on authors and how ready they are to put up with their ignorance and mistakes and attribute them to absent-mindedness or exoticism. They do not, for example, find fault with someone if he says, Fulān shamma l-narjisa wa-ḥabaq (“So-and-so smelled narcissi and farted”) or ḥabaqa wa-shamma l-narjis (“He farted and smelled narcissi”) or shamma fa-ḥabaq (“He smelled and farted”) or… thumma ḥabaq (“… and then farted”),³⁹ though our authors would not allow this.

3.3.4

An acquaintance of mine from the Syrian lands once wrote a book in English about conditions there and the ways of their people. After first describing a wedding he had attended in Damascus, he stated that they had concluded the celebrations with a song he could still remember word for word and which he had kindly decided to translate into the aforementioned language. In fact, it was a funeral lament for a woman, of which I recall two verses, as follows:⁴⁰

By God, O grave, have her charms been quite expunged,

Her verdant features all undone?

O grave, you are no garden or celestial sphere,

So how can flower and moon in you be gathered as one?

3.4.1

It is the custom of my fellow writers sometimes to go back and leap over a period of time and connect an event that happened before it to an event that happened after it. This is called analepsis (tawriyah), that is, “taking backward” (warāʾ). They may also start by mentioning everything about the protagonist from his first whisperings into his beloved’s ear until his reappearance as a married man. In the course of this, the author will relate such long and tedious matters as how his face paled and his pulse raced when he met her, how he was reduced to a tizzy and felt ill while he waited for her answer, how he sent her an old woman or a missive, how he met with her at such and such a time and place, and how she changed color when he spoke to her of the bed, of drawing her close, of embracing, of leg over leg, of kissing, of kissing tongue to tongue, of intercourse, and the like.

3.4.2

Sometimes the same writers make rude insinuations about the mother and father too, often stating plainly that the mother is content for her daughter to be a source of discord among those who lay eyes on her and allows her free rein to flirt with a passel of men so she can share some of them with her. Likewise, that the father, given that his mind is in his wife’s lap, not in his own head, is powerless to prevent such goings-on and that the servants all connive with the wife against the husband — the females because they seek to imitate their mistress’s way of doing things and the males because they want her. All in all, they turn the house of the girl being courted into an alehouse, a brothel, a den of iniquity, and a spawning ground for every sort of corruption, trickery, and wile. Each of these fellow authors of mine comes up with a device off the top of his head and then attributes its invention to someone else.

3.4.3

The leap backwards is acceptable, in my opinion, if the author finds himself faced with a block to composition; afterwards, he can return to what he was about. But leading the man to his bride’s bed and then shutting the book on the couple without peeping through the crack in the door to find out how they fared next I cannot accept; I have to know what happened to them after the wedding. Many women who were reckoned females before assuming that noble station turn into men, just as men turn into women. I have therefore decided to follow the Fāriyāq more closely after his marriage than I did before it, for talk of two invites more admiration than talk of just one. Chasing after low matters, digging up dirt, and pursuing trivial affairs are not, however, my way. Allow me then, my dear sir, and permit me, my dear madam, to make use of “the leap” and say,

3.4.4

During the time when the Fāriyāq was caught in the noose of love but before he got married, one of the Bag-men had invited him to the Island of the Foul of Breath⁵²—meaning that island whose inhabitants speak a mephitic tongue — to take over the post of dream interpreter⁵³ at a wage higher than that which he received from the Bag-man in Cairo. He determined to undertake the voyage and informed his fiancée of this a while before the wedding. She said, “So be it. A husband has the right to take his wife with him wherever he wills, and every spot on earth should be for her, in his company, a home and a homeland.” Then he informed her mother of the same and she agreed.

3.4.5

When the day appointed for the wedding arrived and the knot had been tied, the Fāriyāq said to his wife, “Now we must make ready for the voyage, for the Bag-man’s dreams are multiplying in his head and he’s afraid they’ll get away from him before they can be interpreted.” She replied, “Are you really serious? Is it the custom for women to travel immediately following their marriage, exposing themselves to barrenness and danger? Are we not exempted, here in Cairo, from the need to be strangers and voyagers? How am I to leave my brothers and my parents and go to a land in which I have no friends or intimates?” “I haven’t presented you with a surprise, or told you anything different from what I told you before,” he replied. “I didn’t know about marriage then,” she answered, “what I know now. People likened it to the smelling salts the physician gives a sleeper or a drunk to make him wake. Now I realize that women were not created for travel but travel for them.” “I promised the man that I would go to him,” he said, “so I must fulfill my promise. The proverb says that a man is tied by his tongue,⁵⁴ not his horn. Moreover, this Bag-man of ours will be traveling with us along with his wife, so you’re just like her.” She said, “I am not like the Bag-man’s wife, for I am newly inducted and in the limbo between virginity and marriage, and I have yet to grow tired of land that I should go to sea.” When her mother heard this, she insisted that she travel, so she said, “Let me then consult a doctor and find out if travel by sea is injurious to the newly wedded woman or not.”

3.4.6

A doctor was brought who, when he heard what she had to say, laughed and said, “You eastern Christians make pledges to churches in the hope that the patron saint will grant you pregnancy or a cure from some illness. Here we make pledges to the sea, for when our women despair of getting pregnant, they make for the back of that Friend of God⁵⁵ and beseech his blessing. Some of them return pregnant with a single child and some bear twins, especially if the ship’s captain has a soft spot for women and can provide them with the food they desire” (at which the Fāriyāq said to himself, “God grant that the captain of our ship be ill-humored, ill-tempered, ill-affected, ill-natured, ill-disposed, and irascible!”). When his wife heard what the doctor had to say, her fears abated and she took to the idea of travel, so they got together their provisions and made the journey to Alexandria.

3.4.7

To travel from Būlāq by bark is one of the greatest pleasures a person can enjoy. The Nile is calm and the captain of the bark stops in front of each village to take on supplies of chickens, fresh fruit, milk, eggs, and other things, not to mention that the water of the Nile is sweet and good for the health. Thus the passenger on such a bark spends the whole day happily eating and taking pleasure at the sight of the greenness of the countryside and the fertility of the villages. He may even hope that the journey will be prolonged, despite being engaged on an important mission. On this occasion, then, the Fāriyāq took full advantage of this opportunity and assiduously devoted himself to “the two sweetest things,”⁵⁶ forgetting about Cairo and its pleasures, its luxuries and its baths, its eye diseases and its pestilences, its books and their shaykhs, its saddlebags and their Arabic-murdering owners, its offices and their drainpipes, the tambour and its strings, the donkey and its flight, the doctor and his obscenity, the miracle man and his insanity, the prince and his smell, and the plague and its evil effects, and he continued in that fashion till he reached Alexandria fed and watered, having taken on supplies sufficient to the needs of his looming idleness at sea. He had triumphed and succeeded — and with what triumph and what success!⁵⁷

3.5.1

The Bag-man who was the Fāriyāq’s traveling companion had sent a letter from Cairo to some acquaintances of his in Alexandria asking them to prepare lodging for them, and after reaching that city they spent some time there awaiting the arrival of the “fire-ship”⁵⁸ that went to the island, all eating at one table and discussing baggish business, the forthcoming voyage, and so on. Now the Fāriyāq’s wife was familiar with nothing but her parents’ house and spoke of nothing but things that had happened between her and her mother, or her mother and the maid, or the last and the other two, and if she were telling the story of how, for example, the maid had gone to the market to buy something, she would divide each sentence from the next with a long laugh, so that it would take as much time for her to tell the tale as it had taken the maid to go to the market and back.

3.5.2

The reason for this was that the girls of Cairo and Damascus know no company but that of servants and members of their family, and their mothers explain to them nothing of the affairs of the world for fear that the scales will fall from their eyes and that they will work out what it is that is going to be required of them. As a result, the sum total of what they know comes exclusively from the maids, and these believe that they are bound to do very well for themselves if they give the girls news of things they like and are attracted to. Thus if one of them sees, for example, a comely young man, she goes directly to the girl and tells her, “Today, my lady, I saw a handsome, charming young man who’s just the thing for you, and when he saw me, he stopped and looked at me hard as though he wanted to speak to me, and I think he’s found out that you’re my mistress, so the next time I see him, I’ll speak to him” and similar stuff that will make the girl her ally should the mother ever be angry with her.

3.5.3

Now it is no secret that if girls do not know how to read and write or hold their own in conversation, or the conventions of the polite gathering, the dining table, and so on, they will inevitably compensate for that ignorance by acquiring a knowledge of stratagems and wiles so that they can deploy these to get what they want. If girls were to busy themselves with the study of a certain art or in reading useful books, it would divert them from dreaming up tricks. If, on the other hand, they have nothing to do but keep to the house, where no one is to be found except the maid, they will single-mindedly focus their thoughts and desires on how to use her as a tool and a support, for she has greater credibility in their eyes than do their mothers.

3.5.4

In my humble opinion, then, it would be better to keep girls busy with a beneficial art or science, either theoretical or practical. Do you not see that it is in the nature of the female to love the male just as it is in the nature of the male to love the female? It follows that girls’ ignorance of the world is no obstacle to their finding out about men and studying their ways. Indeed, such ignorance may result in girls becoming infatuated with them and submitting to them without regard for the consequences. Were they, on the other hand, to be raised so as to acquire good qualities and the knowledge appropriate to them, they would, under such circumstances, obtain whatever knowledge of men they might through observation and reflection.

3.5.5

And there is another point, too, to wit: that if women discover for themselves that they are men’s equals in understanding and knowledge, they will use this knowledge as a shield against them and deploy it to make themselves unassailable when men treat them without due respect. Indeed, men themselves will recognize their worth and refrain from overstepping the bounds of decent behavior with them. For instance, if a young man meets with a girl in private and the youth is well-read and informed while the girl knows only how to talk about clothes and makeup and going on picnics, the young man will quickly violate the canon of good manners, because he will believe she has been placed in this world simply to give him what he wants of her. Were he, on the other hand, to see that she has opinions that are intelligent and can make points that are pertinent, ideas that are apposite and an understanding of matters both distant and proximate, can hold her own in conversation and come up with a ready answer, has objections to raise and arguments with which to dispute, he will hold her in awe and respect her. What I am saying here does not contradict what I said in “Angering Women Who Dart Sideways Looks, and Claws like Hooks”;⁵⁹ it all comes down to the means by which knowledge is imparted. The whole point of this digression was to say that, even though the Fāriyāq’s wife had picked up little information about men and women, she showed, by standing up to her mother when the social good of marriage clashed with the social evil of the Fāriyāq’s baggishness, that she could strike down any argument and silence any combatant. In other ways, however, she remained ignorant.

3.5.6

One day, for example, when the Fāriyāq was at table, the Bag-man informed him that the “fire-ship” had arrived and urged him to get ready to leave. Hearing mention of the “fire-ship,” the Fāriyāq’s wife asked, “What’s that?” to which the Bag-man replied that it was a ship made with planks and nails but moved by the power of steam, generated by fire. “And where’s the fire?” she asked. “In a furnace on board,” he replied. “Goodness gracious!” she said, “How can I travel in a ship with a furnace and expose myself to fire? Isn’t the voyage from here to the island going to be in a bark like our voyage from Būlāq?” “A bark won’t do for the open sea,” he replied. “As far as I’m concerned,” she then said, “I’m not going. Let those go who want to get burned.” The Bag-man and his wife pleaded with her but she was adamant. When the time came to sleep, she lay down in the bed and turned her face to the wall.

3.5.7

And this is the purpose of this chapter — to alert people to the fact that this is one of those customs whose practice people misunderstand, since there is nothing in the backside to indicate anger. On the contrary, the locus of the latter is the front side. If a woman faces her husband when she lies down and scowls at his face, wrinkles her brow, sticks her nose in the air, blocks her nostrils, and closes her eyes so that she cannot smell his smell or see his ugly countenance, or covers both mouth and nostrils with her hands, her sleeve, or a handkerchief, that is a sign of anger, but when she turns her backside to him, there is nothing to indicate that. Were you to tell me that if she faced him she still might faint at his breath because the foul smell would inevitably penetrate her nostrils even if they were blocked, from which it follows that she has no alternative but to turn her backside to him, I would reply that in that case it would be better for her to lie flat on her stomach, thus avoiding unpleasantness altogether.

3.5.8

To proceed: the backside is one of those things that people have gone to great lengths to exalt, magnify, and aggrandize both materially and immaterially. On the material side, they use padding, wadding, stuffing, packing, pillows, cushions, supports, bolsters, and bustles to lure the hearts of onlookers and fascinate the minds of suitors. How, one must ask, can one and the same thing be used as a means to contentment and ire at one and the same time? It is a blatant contradiction. On the immaterial side, scholars, litterateurs, and our masters the poets never stop singing its praises and competing in descriptions of its breadth and capacity, one of them going so far as to say

Who has seen the like of my beloved?

She’s like a full moon should it appear.

Her waist comes in today,

A day later her rear.

3.6.1

The Fāriyāq and his wife now set about exploring the streets of the city,⁸⁸ dressed in the costume of the people of Egypt. He was wearing wide drawers, whose bottoms wrapped themselves around him in front and in back as he walked. She had enveloped herself in a white woolen hooded cloak so as to cover her sleeves, which otherwise would have swept the ground. The passersby and shopkeepers were amazed by them and didn’t know whether his wife was a woman or not, some asking, “Is it a man or a woman?”, some following along behind them, some touching their clothes and staring into their faces and saying, “We never saw the like of this day — something that’s neither a man nor a woman!” One of the more intelligent English faqīhs, whose name was Steven,⁸⁹ happened to run across them; having looked hard at their faces and worked out that the Fāriyāq was a man and the Fāriyāqiyyah a woman, he went up to them and said, “You, Man, and you, Woman, will you have lunch at my house next Sunday?” “How very kind of you!” they replied. “My house,” he said, “is in Across the Sea,⁹⁰ at such and such a place. Come in the morning before lunch.”

3.6.2

On Sunday, they took a skiff and set off for his house, where they found him about to go out, for it seems he wanted to bring a few of his acquaintances to gawp at his guests. Apparently he then got drunk on the road or at his friends’ house and he never came back. When he saw them, he told them, “I have to go and see to some business but here’s my wife and these are my daughters, so make yourselves at home with them till I come back and then we can all have lunch together.” “By all means!” they said. Then they sat down with his wife. In the sitting room was a young Englishman who was whispering sweet nothings into the ear of one of the daughters of the English faraḍī and holding her hand. Then he started kissing her in front of her mother and the visitors. The Fāriyāq’s face turned yellow, his wife’s turned red, and the mother beamed. “How,” said the Fāriyāqiyyah to her husband, “can this young man kiss the girl and not be embarrassed by our presence?” He replied, “Kissing isn’t considered shameful by the Franks. Among them, a visitor is obliged, when he enters the house of a friend, to kiss the man’s wife and all his daughters, especially if it’s a holiday; this is despite the fact that ‘to kiss’ is sometimes used by them to mean what follows. Such, though, is their custom.” “But,” she asked, “isn’t he embarrassed by us, given that we are strangers?” “If a thing is permitted,” he replied, “it is permitted before kinsman and stranger alike. Or it may be that the man thinks we are ignorant of this practice in our country.”

3.6.3

“Who could be so ignorant as to believe that?” she asked. “Kissing among us is always accompanied by panting, sighing, sucking, smelling, and closing of the eyes. But this fellow seems to me to be doing no more than delivering a light puff of breath, devoid of any feeling, as one might if one had no regard for the matter at hand.” “I find in the Qāmūs,” he said, “that mukāfaḥah, mulāghafah, muthāghamah, lathm, faghm, kaʿm, and taqbīl all mean a man’s kissing a woman on the mouth, or doing so while simultaneously chewing on it.” She said, “It makes no difference! The Arabs have set the standard for both orientation and osculation,⁹¹ for to kiss the brow, as the Franks do, is meaningless. But why is the kissing of parts other than the mouth and the cheek devoid of the pleasure that the kisser experiences at those two spots?” “Because,” he replied, “one who is thirsty cannot quench his thirst by planting his mouth at the top of the water pitcher or on its side.” “Speaking of thirst,” she then said, “why do the poets describe saliva sometimes as sweet and sometimes as thirst-quenching, which is a contradiction?” “Perhaps,” he replied, “that should be considered one of the mysteries of poetry or one of the intricate issues involving women.” “And speaking of mysteries and intricate issues,” she said, “can the lover find pleasure in drinking salivary secretions from any part other than the mouth?” “Quite possibly, where some of the Arabs are concerned,” he answered, “but the Franks object to doing so even from the mouth. Indeed, the only name they know for such things is ‘spittle.’”

3.6.4

“Speaking of the different names for things,” she said, “what would one call this mother who is comfortable watching her daughter in such a state? Would one call her a procuress?” “‘Procuring’ may be used properly only of a man, if he procures for his womenfolk,” he replied. “In fact,” she replied, “it happens more often with mothers than with fathers, for mothers fill with happiness when they watch a man pay suit to one of their girls, because when a mother sees a suitor paying court to her daughter she imagines that whatever beauty he finds in the girl he must find in the mother, seeing that she’s the original, and that he can hardly love the branch without feeling affection for its root.”

3.6.5

They continued their conversation at length until it was noon, when one of the faraḍī’s daughters came in, a piece of bread and a chunk of cheese in her hand, and started eating where she stood. Then she turned around and brought another and did the same. The aforementioned faqīh had seven daughters and a number of boys. When it was two o’clock, the mother said to the guests, “You must be feeling hungry, for it is past noon and my husband is late.” “Let us wait,” they said, “until he comes.” At five, the dinner bell was rung to gather the scattered children of the house, as is the custom with English parents. An hour passed, the bell was rung again, and the hours continued to pass until it was eleven o’clock, during which time the mother would visit the kitchen and the girls whisper to one another in secret as though the same downfall had befallen them as befell the Barāmikah.⁹² The Fāriyāq told his wife, “If we don’t leave now, we won’t find a skiff or anywhere suitable to spend the night in this ‘Across.’” So they got up, said good night to the mistress of the house, boarded a skiff, and at midnight re-entered the town, where they ate in a restaurant, having a dinner that was also a lunch.

3.6.6

A few days later, the Fāriyāq’s wife said to him, “I have seen strange things in this town.” “What were they?” he asked. “I see that no hair sprouts on the faces of the men here, and that they have no shame.” “Explain!” he said. She said, “I haven’t seen a beard or a mustache on the face of a single one. Are all of them then beardless?” “What you do not know,” he said, “is that they shave their faces every day with a razor.” “Why?” she asked. “To please their women,” he replied, “for they like a smooth, clean cheek.” “On the contrary,” she said. “A woman derives her pleasure in a man from all the things that point to his manliness, and a profusion of hair on the face of a man is the equivalent of its absence on the face of a woman.” “And what,” he asked, “did you mean by saying that they have no shame? Did one of them ask something indecent of you?” “That has yet to happen,” she replied, “but I note that they wear their drawers so tight that their private parts are on display at the back.” “And that,” he responded, “is something that should please women, according to your statement.” “Indeed,” she replied, “such a costume is more pleasing to the eye than that worn by the Arabs. It shows off the thighs, the calves, the stomach, and the buttocks. However, going too far in such tightness is an offense to decency for those who are not accustomed to it, albeit at the same time handsomer and more captivating. But be that as it may, what is going on with those priests? I see that they go to even greater excess than the common people with those short breeches of theirs, which is inappropriate to their station. Even uglier is their shaving of their mustaches, though the mustache is an adornment to the face of a young man just as the beard is to that of an older man. What has seduced them into adopting this custom, when they don’t marry and don’t have to please their womenfolk? I swear, were one of them to go to Egypt, the people would think he was one of those effeminates called khawals⁹³ who pluck the hair from their faces and remove it from their bodies in imitation of women, and may God bring disgrace to any man who behaves effeminately!” To which he added, “And every woman who behaves masculinely!” “Indeed,” said she, “and any person who practices evil customs! Observe how custom here has made the shaving of the hair a mark of bounty and perfection when, to us, it is a sign of deficiency and corruption.”

3.6.7

“You’re right,” he said, “but I’d like to ask you about something, now that the conversation has come around to what men want from women and women from men. Since you’ve started to develop an understanding of these differences, tell me by the roof (for it was his custom, whenever he asked her about something important, to make her swear by the roof to which she had climbed before they got married) and tell me true, is the pleasure a woman gets when she looks at a man’s body equal to a man’s when he looks at a woman’s?” “They’re the same,” she said, “or perhaps the former is the greater.” The Fāriyāq went on,⁹⁴ “Then I said, ‘How can that be when there is no softness or smoothness to a man’s body while a woman is distinguished by numerous charms that are absent in a man, such as softness of skin, fineness of digit, shapeliness of finger and fingertip (these being likened to the ʿiswaddah,(1) to asārīʿ, to the ʿudhfūṭ, and to the ʿanam tree), the quality called dasʿ, softness of the kaʿs, the dakhīṣ, and the rawājib, and the way the flesh covers the rawāhish so that a dimple appears on each knuckle; or softness of hand, smallness and suppleness of foot, fullness of wrist and heel and flatness of instep, smoothness of ʿursh and of ʿasīb, strength of arm and comely largeness of calf, massiveness of calf muscle and roundedness of kneecap, hugeness of haunch, posterior, thigh, backside, and belly; or narrowness of waist, grace of shoulder, declivity of flank, and glossiness of clavicle, breast, and mafāhir; or as length of neck, ʿaṭaf, broadness of brow and length of hair; or sweetness of voice and odor, absence of ḥārr, rayash, ghafar, and surbah and of hair on her mons veneris, her vagina, or her anus; or her ears being small, or cutesy-comely and tiny, or ornamented, or well-defined and pointy and pricked (and what a feast for the eye they are when the upper parts are hung with earrings!)?

3.6.8

“‘Greater than all of this and more wonderful, however, is the protuberance of her two breasts and their perkiness,⁹⁶ their prominence and their pertness, their bulginess and their curviness, their roundness and their compactness, their firmness and their constrictedness, their massiveness and their glossiness, their creaminess and their smoothness, their convexity and their poutiness, their gibbosity and their slipperiness, their incrassation and their turgidness, their slickness and their sturdiness, their rotundity and their ampleness, their orbicularity and their curvaceousness, their resplendence and their fairness, their lustrousness and their silkiness, their curvature and their satininess, their bulbosity and their thrustingness, their tumescence and their sleekness, their heaviness and their bounciness, their globosity and their whiteness, their incandescence and their tremulousness, their fullness and their fatness, their solidity and their pearliness, their albescence and their sphericalness, their jerkiness and their crammed-togetherness, their curvity and their tightness, their suavity and their distendedness, their cleftness and their bustiness. They are known, among other things, as “the weights” because they can be weighed, either in the hand or in the mind. They are likened to pomegranates and to euphorbia fruit and their nipples are likened to saʿdān prickles.⁹⁷ Now, it is also the case that….’ ‘Stop now,’ she said, ‘for you have gone to excessive lengths in your description while failing to mention the best part of what they signify.’ ‘Pray tell!’ said I. She continued, ‘If you had cited a word that referred to gobbling on them or rubbing up against them, it would have served better than many of those adjectives.’ ‘That’s not my fault,’ I said. ‘I failed to find any such pearl in the Qāmūs.’

3.6.9

“Then I went on, ‘That’s one thing, and another thing I’d like to ask you is why everyone finds it agreeable for a female to have a certain amount of soft hair or down on her face and particularly on her lip, while the hairless, the beardless, and the smooth-faced male are hated by God and man alike?’ ‘As for the first,’ she said, ‘it’s because the woman, knowing that nothing in the world can take the place of a man for her, is inspired with longing for one by the slightest thing. Even if, after uttering in front of a woman the words aʿūdhu bi-llāhi mina l-shayṭān (“I seek refuge with God from the Devil”), for example, you start to say ra… , she will immediately start fantasizing about a man and straightaway blanch or blush, depending on the direction in which her thoughts have taken her.⁹⁸ The same will happen if you begin to pronounce ra… following the words bi-smi llāh (“In the name of God”).’ ‘God bless you for a refined and honest woman!’ said I. ‘If such is your nature and its inborn disposition while still unformed, what will they be like when they mature?’

3.6.10

“Then she said, ‘Concerning the good attributes to be found in the woman and not the man (according to your statement and that of the poets who write amatory verses to, and the painters who revel in the depiction of, the former), their absence in the man is no obstacle to his being loved. A woman knows that nothing but a man can bring her joy, so his presence in any shape or form inspires longing in her, as you mentioned earlier. Do you not observe that the women of the lands of the blacks love their menfolk more than women do their husbands in our and other countries? It’s like the situation of a man who has lots of books containing different stories and anecdotes as compared to another who has only one to read. You will notice that the man with many books will move from one to another and reach the last without anything having stuck in his mind and thereafter find the idea of rereading them distasteful. The man with only one book, on the other hand, knowing that he will find nothing else to read when he gets to the end of that, will not move on from a page he is reading until he has pondered it well, mulled over its meanings, committed it to memory, learned from it, scrutinized it, thought about it, absorbed it, weighed it, examined it, conned it, picked at it, finecombed it, and meditated upon it. I came up with this simile of the books because I’ve noticed how taken you are with reading, but I have lots of other examples too.

3.6.11

“‘To proceed: a man has numerous charms that women do not. These include the breadth of his chest and of the pelt that’s upon it, the height of his shoulders and capacity of his breast, the straightness of his legs and the thickness of his arms and the number of muscles in them, the massiveness of his hands and the fact of his being strong and hard,⁹⁹ stalwart and hearty, stalward and husky, stalworthy and strapping, stalworth, stout, and sturdy, stark and lusty, stith, stour, staunch and shredded, robustious, robustuous, rumbustious, robustic, wrast, mettlesome, doughty, puissant, potent, rugged, hale, flush, ripped, buff, diesel, beast, built, cut, jacked, yoked out, fine-looking, and loud-voiced.(1) All these attributes we women consider to be among men’s charms, and he has other, intangible, good qualities too, such as when he climbs the pulpit, for example, to preach, or rides a fine horse, or bears arms — and how fine a figure a man cuts when he walks along, his sword grazing the ground!’

3.6.12

“Then she said, ‘If only I knew how to read and write, I’d write more books about men and women than did that shaykh whose name you once mentioned but which I’ve forgotten because he’s dead on all the sciences put together.’ ‘That would be Imam al-Suyūṭī, God have mercy on his soul,’ I said. ‘Right,’ she said, ‘more than al-Suyūṭī and all the other suits too,’ to which I responded, ‘And all the sots as well.’¹⁰⁰ ‘However,’ she continued, ‘it’s all the fault of those who left me without an education. The Arabs claim that a knowledge of reading will corrupt women and that as soon as a woman is able to stick one character next to another, she’ll spell out a letter to her lover. In fact, though, if left to her own devices, she will have in her shyness and sense of decency a minder stricter than any father or husband. If, on the other hand, she’s penned in and cooped up, she’ll keep trying to squirm out of and get away from the restrictions imposed upon her. It will be with her as it is with water, which becomes purer and more appetizing the faster it gushes and runs, or with a fast-walking person, who feels the air to be colder the faster he walks.’ ‘I swear they did the right thing!’ I thought to myself. ‘If she’d learned how to read and write, not one line of my poetry would have been left without her splitting it into hemistichs and inserting between them others of her own or building new stanzas based on what I’ve already written,¹⁰¹ so as to twist it to her purposes. May God direct what she already knows to useful ends, and spare me the evil that any increase therein attends!’”

Postscript¹⁰² on synonyms for “strong and vigorous” or “hard and tough,” and other words of similar meaning: ʿutʿut, kunbuth, kunduth, mikalth, milyath, maghith, ʿuḍāfij, ʿafḍaj, ʿullaj, hamarraj, ṣalawḍaḥ, ṣalanqaḥ, ṣamaḥmaḥ, ṣamaydaḥ, kirdiḥ, kaldiḥ, daḥūḥ, mujlandā, jalʿad, jalmad, ṣalkhad, ṣimqid, ḍahyad, ʿirbadd, ʿaṣlad, aqwad, dhifirr, dhimirr, dhaymurī, zibirr, zimirr, ṣamʿarī, ḍabīr, ḍibaṭr, ḍabaghṭarā, ʿayzār, ʿashanzar, qabaʿtharā, qunāṣir, kumātir, tiyazz, julabiz, julāfiz, khuzākhiz, turāmiz, dakhz, ḍubāriz, ʿaḍamazz, ʿilkiz, ʿalankaz, fiyazz, qilizz, kilizz, mulazzaz, ḥumāris, dakhnas, durāhis, dalahmas, mutashammis, ʿatras, ʿakandas, ʿamarras, qalammas, qunāʿis, hakallas, hamallas, furāfiṣ, kiyaṣṣ, mutakhammiṭ, ḍabanṭā, ḍifaṭṭ, ʿamallaṭ, muʿallaṭ, ḍalīʿ, ṣaniq, damakmak, ṣamakīk, ṣamallak, ʿabannak, ʿarik, janaʿdal, ḥuwwal, ʿarandal, ʿunthul, kamtal, kunbul, kanahdal, nabtal, buhṣum, dilaẓm, mirjam, ḍirghāmah, ʿardam, fayyim, qirshamm, hayzam, hayṣam.

3.7.1

Our previous comments on the Fāriyāq, made at a time when he was single, were an intrusion; how much more so would they be now, when he’s a husband? I think it better, therefore, to leave him now, in his married state (for this conversation of theirs took place at night, and there’s no call for us to spoil the rest of it for them), until they awake and he goes to his Oneiromancer’s Chamber, meaning the place appointed for him to interpret dreams. Your Eminence may likewise be ready, after suffering the stinging sensation induced by all that hot sauce, to go to bed. Rest a while, then, and if you dream tonight, tell your dream to the Fāriyāq, for he is now considered to be one of the world’s great dream interpreters.

3.8.1

Behold the Fāriyāq, seated on a chair, in front of him a table bearing a large number of books, among them, for all the scraps of paper they contained, not a scrap of food,¹⁰³ in his fingers a long pen, and in his hands a pot containing ink as black as tar. He has started interpreting dreams seen by the head of the Chamber¹⁰⁴ in his sleep.

3.8.2

The First Dream. The aforementioned hag-ridden person beheld himself traveling to India, where he met upon the road a mare, getting on in years and with no saddle upon her. When the mare saw him, she approached him and stopped, whinnying. He went some steps beyond her and lo, she ran after him. Catching up with him, she stopped again, causing him to say to himself, “There is some mystery behind this mare. I shall take hold of her forelock that I may see what her matter may be.” As soon as he laid his hand upon her, she lowered her head, as if to say, “Mount, and fear not the lack of a saddle!” so he mounted her, for he was fatigued with walking, and proceeded for a short distance. Suddenly, he found himself at a saddler’s shop, so he got down from the mare and bought her a saddle. Then he remounted and proceeded down a thickly forested ravine and a branch trapped his head and prevented him from going further. He tried to move forward but could not and he did not want, for pity, to force the mare forward with his spurs, so he stopped and thought about all that had befallen him, wondering greatly. At that moment, he happened to scratch his head, and lo, it had sprouted six horns, two in front (one on each temple), two in back, and two in the middle, and the branch in question was caught in them all. He managed to cut the branch off the tree, but it remained caught in the horns. He then proceeded in this state and all who saw him wondered at him and said, “Look at the six horns on the head of that man!” but he paid them no attention.

3.8.3

Eventually, he entered a dark and narrow place overlooked by rocks and boulders and four of the horns smashed against one of the rocks and broke and fell off, leaving him with only the two in front. One of these, however, now leaned toward the other, touching it, so that they rubbed and knocked against each other, and every time they knocked against one another they made a mighty sound, and people came from afar to behold him and gaze at him. Finding himself helpless before them and seeing that the crowd was preventing him from proceeding, he resolved to turn back, but the mare refused to let him do so and started bucking and bounding forward, and the more he kicked her with his leg to make her turn, the more she bucked and moved ahead. Wondering, he looked at her and lo, her color was no longer what it once had been, so he said to himself, “Maybe this is not the animal that I first mounted,” and he got down to take a look at her teeth. When he tried to put his hand in her mouth, she reared up and knocked him over, giving him such a powerful wallop that he fainted. When the mare beheld him cast down and prostrate on the ground, she seemed to take pity on him and commenced to breathe into his nostrils and lick the place where the horns had broken off until he revived somewhat and started moaning and bellowing out prayers to God to rescue him from his plight. The mare indicated to him with her head that he should mount so that they might return by the road by which they had come and, gathering all his strength, he arose and mounted. When he reached the same thickly forested place, those same broken horns grew back and became as they had been, and he kept touching them with his hand as he proceeded.

3.8.4

When evening came, he alighted at an inn so as to spend the night there and ordered the innkeeper to take care of his mount and to bring both her and him dinner. When he awoke the next morning, he found that the saddle had been stolen and said to the innkeeper, “You lost my mare’s saddle while it was in your keeping and I cannot easily ride her without it.” “On the contrary,” said the other, “your claim is false, for when you came, you were riding it bareback,” and a quarrel broke out between them and they seized the front of each other’s robes. When the man realized that he would receive no benefit from this, he decided to make the best of a bad job and go back and he went to the mare and mounted her and kept moving until the evening, when he found another inn on his road so he stayed the night there. When morning came, and he wanted to mount, he could not find the bridle, and things took their course with him and this innkeeper as they had with the other. Then he spent a third night in another place and in the morning he found that his mare had lost its tail, and so it continued: every night he spent in an inn, he lost another of the mare’s limbs, so that he reached his city on foot, the mare having disappeared entirely. As for the horns, four vanished with the mare and the two in front remained.

T

HE

I

NTERPRETATION

3.8.5

When this horny dream was thrown at the Fāriyāq, he set about playing with his mustache, as was his custom, rubbing his forehead, and pinching the place between his eyes, until he was guided to an understanding of its meaning, at which he wrote in the margin the following:

3.8.6

This is the interpretation offered by the humble slave named the Fāriyāq to the honorable and most excellent gentleman Flummox son of Lummox of the dream that he saw in his sleep. The mare stands for a woman. The walking and the fatigue stand for bachelorhood. The saddle stands for the woman’s good manners and the bridle for her honor. The thickly forested place stands for the feasts, banquets, and visits that the married man is obliged against his will to become involved in and into which he has to stick his head and that of his wife. The branch stands for certain of the invitees who get their claws into the wife. The horns stand for the married state existing between the man and the woman and their sprouting and their disappearance stand for the changing of that state and its return to how it was before. His staying at the inns stands for his traveling with his wife and the vanishing of the mare stands for his losing her. The rest of the dream is self-explanatory¹⁰⁵—though God knows best.

3.8.7

After the master of the Chamber had taken the interpretation and examined it for a while, he returned to the Fāriyāq in haste, signs of anger on his face, and said, “Your interpretation is wrong on many points. Firstly, you express yourself briefly, in contrast to the custom of oneiromancers. Secondly, the mare cannot stand for a woman because among us the woman cannot be less than, which is to say under, the man; on the contrary, she is higher than he. Your interpretation has to be made in our terms, not those of your people. Thirdly, the bridle cannot stand for a woman’s honor because the bridle is placed in the mouth and a woman’s honor lies elsewhere. Now, though, you must set that aside and start on the interpretation of the second dream. Exert yourself, then, in writing and expatiation; haply you may hit the mark and gain heavenly compensation.”

3.9.1

The master of the Oneiromancer’s Chamber — may God prolong his days, exalt his standing among the hag-ridden and give it a raise—beheld in a dream one day that he had conceived the desire to write a sermon and read it out to the congregation on a feast day, so he took pen and paper and wrote a single letter and lo, he heard his wife calling to him from her room to help her put on her stockings, so he left his writing and hastened to her. After he had helped her to put on her stockings and returned, he saw that a second letter had been added to the first in an ink that was not his. “Who, I wonder,” he said to himself, “entered my room and penned this letter, which fits what I wanted to say?” Then he took up the pen and wrote another letter and lo, he heard his wife calling to him to fasten the strap of her sandal, so he went to her and did what she asked of him and returned and found another letter had been added to the first three, thus completing the word. At this, his wonder grew. Then he took up his pen and wrote a whole word and lo, he heard his wife calling him once more to comb her kuʿkubbah,¹⁰⁶ which seems to mean (though only God knows for sure) the front part of her hair, so he went to her and combed it gently and smoothly and then went back and found that a whole word had been added to his word, complementing it. Then he took up his pen and wrote two words and lo, he heard his wife calling him to put up the hair at the back of her neck, so he left his notebook and went, and when he returned he found two whole words. Once a line had completed itself, his wife called to him to tie on her bustle. When he returned, he found another whole line. He continued until, when he had finished a page, his wife called to him once more, and when he came back he found a second whole page, and when he had filled a quire, he found another quire, and so it continued until the whole notebook was full.

3.9.2

His wife having now completed the donning of her finery and her toilet, he carried the notebook to her and told her what had happened to him. She was overjoyed beyond description and told him, “All that was thanks to the service you did me and your help to me in getting dressed. You must continue, my dear, and be regular about so doing.” The next day, he did as he had done the day before in terms of both writing and serving and it happened to him exactly as it had the first day, and both grew happier still. When it was the day of the feast, he climbed up to the pulpit and read out the first notebook, so astonishing his audience with his eloquence, the felicity of his wording, and the niceness of his choice of tropes that, when he was finished, the people set to congratulating him and saying to him, “Never have our ears been struck by words as eloquent as yours.” “That,” he told them, “is by the grace of the sandal strap,” but they didn’t understand. Then he returned to his house, happily uttering hallelujahs, and told his wife what had happened. “My advice to you, my dear,” she said, “is to devote your efforts to serving and to writing, so that when you have fifty notebooks, we can make our way with them to some distant lands and read them there, for in this country you can only read a sermon on a feast day and the feasts here are few, and it would be a shame for these magnificent notebooks to go unread.” “I was thinking the same thing myself,” he said.

3.9.3

Then they prepared themselves to travel to certain Eastern lands, taking with them the notebooks, which filled precious teakwood chests on which they had spent a huge sum. When they reached those shores, they rented a spacious house overlooking verdant gardens and he sent a crier to cry through the markets, “Attend, good folk, the sermon of Master Flummox son of Lummox on such and such a day at such and such a time, that he may expose your ears to such elegant tropes as you have never heard before!” People then crowded in to hear him, drove after drove. When they had settled down in the gathering place, he ascended a staircase that had been set up for him there and opened up the first notebook that his own congregation had found so admirable and lo, it was erased, and contained nothing but the letters he had written with his own hand. He tried to link them up to extract from them some sort of meaning but could not do so, so he came down from the pulpit in embarrassment, and it was in that state that he woke from his sleep.

T

HE

I

NTERPRETATION

3.9.4

This is the interpretation offered by the God-needy slave the Fāriyāq to Master Flummox son of Lummox: “The letters, words, lines, pages, quires, and volumes that you imagined had been added to your words and that your congregation admired will not work in countries other than your own because of their tie to the tying of the bustle and the sandal strap — though God knows best.”

3.9.5

When these words reached the person in question, he burst in upon the Fāriyāq, stamping the ground with his foot and sticking his nose in the air, and said, “This interpretation is more incorrect than the first and the expression is even more succinct. One can barely understand what you are saying, and if the interpretation of dreams is to be as mysterious and murky as the dreams themselves, there is no call to employ oneiromancers and put people to the trouble of reading the incomprehensible.” The Fāriyāq responded, “This is how it is done in our country, which is the fountainhead of dreams and the font of dream interpretation, for your heads derived this feature from our heads and ours only, and were it not for us, you wouldn’t have been capable of dreaming a single dream all your life long.” At this, the man appeared to come to his senses and he calmed down. Then he said, “You have one dream left now and here it is.”

3.10.1

The master of the Oneiromancer’s Chamber — may God prolong his tenure as spokesman for all hag-ridden dreamers and realize his dreams along with those of other high achievers—saw one day in a dream that a tall staircase consisting of a hundred steps had been set up for him so that he could climb it and preach to the congregation from the top. After he’d shaved his beard and mustache and donned his stair-climbing clothes, he dispatched someone to gather the faithful in an appointed place and all had been informed as to this in advance and gone there before him, while he tarried a while waiting for his wife to get out of bed so that he might wipe her nose¹⁰⁷ and embrace her before setting off. Having done so, he took his notebook under his arm and took off at a run in the direction of that mighty assembly, looking neither right nor left.

3.10.2

When he reached the place and saw that the staircase was set up and the people gathered around it, he was beside himself with joy and said to himself, “This is an opportunity such as Fate has granted to no other. Today I shall send these folk back to their homes with hearts like mine and morals like mine. Should I never perform another good deed, it will be enough and my future reward will have been entered in God’s records.” Then his thoughts took him to extremes and he grew drunk with happy dreams and he approached the staircase in a state of distraction and almost before he had reached it took a flying stride onto its first step, omitting to first extend greetings to any of those present.

3.10.3

He opened his sermon with the words, “Praise be to God, who commanded the erection of this staircase and found it pleasing to serve as His throne…,” on hearing which invocation one of those standing said to the person behind him in disavowal, “It seems to me that our preacher today is out of his mind, and I have no desire to hear more from him” and he turned and left. The preacher now climbed the second step and said, “… and has brought the people to this blessed assembly, each spreading his ears like a cloth to catch his words…,” causing another of the bystanders who heard his words to say, “This clause is worse than the first: it doesn’t matter to me if the staircase is a throne or a bier, but it makes me angry to think of my ears being spread out like a cloth!” and he turned and went. The preacher, however, went on pronouncing another lame sentence of the same sort with each new step he climbed and with each another bystander withdrew, which he failed to notice, being too taken up with the joy that distracted him, and by the time he reached the hundredth step everyone had abandoned him.

3.10.4

Once he had settled himself upon it, he turned his head to right and left and saw no one, so he said to himself, “I composed my sermon and brought the people here for it. Now I see that they have turned their backs but the sermon is still with me. Let me then read it out aloud in this noble place that is elevated above the defilements and filth of the earth. Even if they do not hear it, God and His angels will, for it is said, ‘The further a person is from Earth, the closer he is to Heaven,’ and I see no place more proper for sermons than this. Perhaps some passerby will catch some word of what I say and it will bring about the salvation of his soul and those of his family and his neighbors. A single word from a single mouth may make the difference between death and life, and it would be shameful if I were to return to my wife and tell her that the sermon remained unread.” Then he mopped his brow, cleared his throat, and adjusted his clothes, having first placed the sermon on the Scriptures and knelt and briefly prayed, calling on God to inspire someone to pass that way and hear him. Then he arose, full of vigor and happiness, and said, “Listen, beloved brethren, and hearken well to what I tell you!”

3.10.5

Now it happened that a certain misguided poet was passing by at the time and when he heard him say that and saw that he had no one to listen to him, he stopped and said, “Who can have put this madman at the top of this staircase and where are his brethren whom he is addressing? Or could it be that he is speaking with the jinn in the air? Verily, there is something wondrous here!” Then he shouted to him, “Come down, man, and do not expose yourself to scorn and derision, for not one of God’s slaves is listening to you!” The preacher, however, paid him no attention because he was gazing toward Heaven. The man therefore decided that he must be touched in the head and wanted to get him down by any means possible and set about cutting the pegs and ropes securing the staircase and before he knew it, the staircase had disintegrated and fallen down and the preacher and his notebook had fallen down with it onto the head of the man, which is to say onto the head of the poet, and both were smashed and broken into little pieces.

T

HE

I

NTERPRETATION

3.10.6

“A preacher shouldn’t be a chatterbox and if our long-winded master persists in his chatter, he will not escape a fall that will break his neck — though God knows best.” This interpretation was more hurtful and vexing to the man than those that preceded it because of its abstention from prolixity and its brevity of expression.

3.10.7

A few days later, the master brought him a piece of paper bearing the following: I dreamed that one of my friends gave me a cauliflower of the sort that grows on Jordan’s plain. I had it for dinner, went to sleep, and dreamed that I smashed the walls of a city in the air that resembled the city of Jericho in the sturdiness and impregnability of its fortifications. The Fāriyāq wrote next to it

If a glutton eats cauliflow’r for dinner,

From the siege-tower of his anus he’ll pelt the air with balls of clay,

Only for those to be recast as bullets

Once the holes in his nose have become clogged with the spray.

3.10.8

The man showed this to his wife, who said, “The man seems now to have become acclimatized to this country: I note that he has begun to hit the target and that that vehemence in deed and word that he previously displayed has left him. I, now, shall myself try him out concerning a dream I saw last night.” Then she took a piece of paper and wrote on it, “Madame Ditzia, wife of Flummox son of Lummox, dreamed that she held a polished, glossy lock with many keyholes in her hand while in her husband’s was a rusty key with a single hole.” Beneath this the Fāriyāq wrote

Husband and wife tend alike

To passion and depravity

But while the key of the first is all worn out

The latter’s still good as a cavity.

3.10.9

When she’d inspected the contents, she told her husband, “The same had occurred to me before he came up with this interpretation. How close he now is to accuracy! Take him this additional sheet of paper.” So the man handed it over to the Fāriyāq, who found written on it, “Madame Ditzia dreamed that she wrote on her husband’s brow a figure 2 and when he saw himself in the mirror he tried to wipe off the two strokes¹⁰⁸ but she was too fast for him and grabbed his hand and he managed to wipe off only one, though the other was no longer clearly readable.” Below this the Fāriyāq wrote

It’s a husband’s religious duty to pleasure his wife once each night

While a supererogatory act on top is often considered polite.

Should he swap, though, rafḍ for farḍ,

You can be sure she’ll swap ʿirḍ for ʿarḍ.¹⁰⁹

3.10.10

She admired the lines greatly and handed her husband a further sheet on which she had written, “Madame Ditzia, wife of Flummox son of Lummox, dreamed that with her right eye she saw black as white and with her left eye white as black.” Beneath this the Fāriyāq wrote

How hard it is to please a wife,

Especially once she’s laid eyes on an eloquent preacher!

Thenceforth she’ll think your every beauty a blemish

And his every blemish a comely feature.

3.10.11

The wife found these lines witty and told her husband, “I find that he interprets the short dreams of women very well. Dream me now a short dream, my dear, and write it on a sheet of paper and I’ll give it to him to see whether he proceeds in the same fashion with you.” The next day, then, she brought the Fāriyāq a sheet of paper with the words “The dreamer saw in his sleep something elongated, which then seemed to the dreamer to turn into something rounded, and then again into something elongated, and then again into something rounded, and so on.” Beneath this the Fāriyāq wrote

I once thought the world like the vulva

For both are shifting in shape.

I said, when they claimed it’s more like the anus

In its circularity,¹¹⁰ “Each doth the other ape.”

3.10.12

When he showed these lines to his wife, she laughed and said, “I see that he only minds his manners with me and that he has a fine nose for the understanding of women’s affairs; he must be a true lady’s man. However, why not try him with a further dream and then we can decide what to do with him?” So the following morning, the master brought him a further sheet, on which was written, “I dreamed that a hand drew a figure 3 on my temple and then vanished. I put my hand to my temple to rub it off and it erased the two teeth, so that what was left formed a crooked figure 1.”¹¹¹ Beneath this the Fāriyāq wrote

My wife tasks me with three but I can’t take

More than one tumble — a weakness in “it,” not in me.

My heart and eye, like her vagina, ne’er tire,

But that thing will just never agree.

3.12.1

The following day, the Fāriyāq went to the Chamber apprehensive about having to interpret the monster dream, but the master came to tell him, “The idea has sprung to my mind of making a trip to the Syrian lands for a change of air: the air of that clime is good and dreams dreamed there are true and easy to interpret. I see that you, like me, are weakened in your powers, thin of body. Prepare yourself then for the journey. May God smooth the path and we return in good health!” So the Fāriyāq requested the ruler’s permission to undertake the journey, and the latter, out of his kindness and generosity, granted that.

3.12.2

Then he went to his wife to bid her farewell and said, “My charge to you, my wife, is to remember, before all else, the roof. Let it be an incentive to you to keep your troth and your affection, and likewise, after I depart, to take good care of my son, in leaving whom in your keeping I leave my heart. Should any profligate bring you news of me, confirm it for yourself. In other words, should any of those who envy me for having you tell you, ‘Your husband died at sea and was eaten by a whale and nothing remains of him in the world of the living but his name,’ pay him no attention till you receive a letter from me that you can rely on.” “But how will you write to me if the news is true?” she asked. “I told her,” continued the Fāriyāq, “‘the master of the Chamber will write to you. But anyway, I hope to arrive safely and enjoy the sight of my family and yours and to pass on to them your greetings.’ ‘Won’t you set me a date by which you must have sent the letter?’ she replied. ‘Two months,’ I said. She said, ‘That’s as long as all eternity! What woman can wait two months?’ I said, ‘We shall be traveling by sailing ship. The doctor has told the master that it is more suitable than a steamship, because the latter smells of coal, which is bad for those with chest problems.’ ‘I shall do as you think best,’ she said, ‘but be careful you don’t recover and fall in love with someone else,’ to which I replied, ‘I’ll be careful only of the second, not the first!’ to which she said, ‘Nay, it’s me you’d better be careful of!’ ‘I only meant’ I said, ‘that I’d be careful not to fall in love.’ ‘Right!’ she said. ‘Be on guard against it, because it’ll only make you worse!’ I said, ‘The lands to which we are going provide less cause for worry in that respect than this island,’ to which she responded, ‘Men and women are the same in all countries, especially now that you’ll be wearing the garb of the stranger and that women everywhere go into ecstasies over exotic men, just as men do over exotic women.’ I said, ‘I understand what you mean, but don’t forget that a respectable woman can walk between two armies and emerge as she entered.’ ‘Indeed,’ she responded. ‘She goes in a woman and comes out a woman.’ ‘Where did the respectable woman go?’ I asked. ‘You appear to have struck her off the list.’ ‘She was in the preadamic period,’ she answered. ‘And what’s “the preadamic period”?’ I asked. ‘The age when mankind had yet to be created,’ she replied. ‘Where did you learn that odd word?’ I asked her. ‘I heard you use it once,’ she said, ‘so I learned it by heart, which is proof of that same infatuation with the exotic.’

3.12.3

“Then she was silent for a while, thinking, after which she burst into laughter. ‘What are you laughing at?’ I asked her. ‘Is it “preadamic”?’ ‘No,’ she answered. ‘I just thought of a story about a woman whose husband left her to go on a voyage, and I laughed.’ ‘And what story is that?’ I asked. She replied, ‘A woman was married to a man about whom she sometimes harbored doubts, but she wasn’t sure what about him made her suspicious. Now he happened to leave her to go on a voyage. She was sad to see him go but angry with him too, so sometimes she’d call on God to bless him and at others to curse him, telling herself, “If he’s innocent, the blessings will reach him and if not, the curses will!”’ ‘And do you intend to do as she did?’ I asked her. ‘God forbid I should call on God!’ she exclaimed. ‘Tell me “call on God to do what” exactly, to make the meaning clear,’ I said. ‘To curse you,’ she said. I responded, ‘I can see there’s no getting around you! Je t’adore!’ At this she turned to the door and said, ‘There’s no one there.’¹²⁵ I said, ‘Don’t bother me, I beg you, with talk of patrons¹²⁶ and who’s at the door: I’m about to set off on a journey.’ ‘Go,’ she said, ‘in God’s good keeping, and harbor no doubts. There’s a time for joking and a time for being serious, and a woman’s honor belongs to the latter.’ I replied, ‘That too contains an insinuation, as though you were saying it isn’t something to be brought to the forefront.’ Said she, ‘Put your mind at rest. Whether it belong to the former or the latter, you will find me as you left me, God willing.’”

3.12.4

He went on, “Then I bade her farewell, my tears bathing her neck, and she wept too to see me go, for it was the first time I had left her. It was part of her nature that when she wept, her face took on an arousing look and appealingly comely expression — and women are as attractive as can be when they cry (though these words shouldn’t be taken as an incitement to beat them: paralyzed be the hands of any who touches them in anger!).” Then he continued, “At the sight of her tears, mine increased too and at that moment I truly felt the agony of parting. We set sail and no sooner had the land disappeared from sight than pangs of desire rose in my breast and everything she’d said passed through my mind, tinged with misgivings and forebodings.” He added, “And stay-at-homes who never leave their houses and the scent of whose wives never leaves their nostrils know nothing of the pain of separation, after nights of hugging and love’s consummation, especially when it happens for the first time. It behooves me therefore to picture to the mind of our stay-at-home, ever nostril-fed friend something of the pain that separation brings the lover, so that perhaps his heart then may soften and he may pray that all those far from their loved ones may soon be at one with them, reunited. I therefore declare as follows:

3.12.5

“Separation — be it for a longer or shorter period, be its ending in sight or far off — consists of the detachment of one of two would-be lovers and his deprival of the joys of the company of his friend. His agony may be sharper than that of death, for separation from the dead is accompanied by regret and sorrow while separation from the living is accompanied by both of these plus jealousy, and, though comparable to the despair caused by separation from the dead, is yet more distressing. (The foregoing refers to married couples who are in love; when they hate one another, neither case brings either regret or sorrow.) Furthermore, if the departed lover, on leaving his beloved, finds in some other country an easy life, replete with delicious food to eat, a delightfully heady nightlife to enjoy and songs to listen to, wonderful novelties and gracious, sparkling, eye-catching faces to behold, the first thing he’ll think of will be his distant beloved and he’ll say to himself, ‘How I wish that he¹²⁷ were with me now to share with me in this luxury! This day, I think, he must be bereft of all such things; nay, his heart may well be enveloped in a veil of grief and mourning. How can I sport and play while he grieves? How can I find food appetizing, drink refreshing, when he, at this very moment, may be too lonely and depressed to have any appetite for them?’ and so on and so forth by way of gloomy cogitations and sorrowful speculations.

3.12.6

“If, however, the lover experiences toil and trouble after his departure, he’ll say, ‘Alas! Alack! Too bad! Dear me! Oh woe! Oh gee! Now I live a life that’s dour, I’m lonely and my heart is sore. I agreed with my friend that we’d be partners for better or for worse, through thick and through thin, but now, I think, he lives cushioned and cosseted, lodged in luxury’s lap, petted and posseted, on an even keel and relieved of all loads, riding on the flat on the straightest of roads, partying by night with crafty sophisticates, hanging out by day with clever profligates. I can see him (meaning her)¹²⁸ now, smiling a smile of consent and admiration at someone who, having praised her charms and beauty, is telling her, “I wish you would obtain an amulet, to protect you from envious eyes! If it were up to me, I would allow no one to look upon this radiant, effulgent face, for there would be nothing strange if someone afflicted with an ugly wife were to gulp back tears over you, for the envious eye is a reality, and your beauty is unique.” What could her response to him possibly be other than to tell him, “How excellent your eyes, for they see things as they are! My husband’s, on the other hand, are covered with a film and he belongs to that evil school of thought that says, ‘If the eye becomes familiar with something, no matter how outstanding its beauty, the soul desires it less,’ or, as the common people say, ‘What the hand holds, the soul renounces.’ Yet I fear that if you look at me too much and grow too close to me, you’ll quickly join his school and see me as something other than what I am now.”

3.12.7

“‘To this he will reply, “I seek refuge with God! Such is the talk of the ignorant. Those such as I (and how few we are!) who are honest in their love ever take as their example the words of Abū Nuwās, to wit,

Her face appears more lovely to you

The more you gaze upon it.

3.13.1

Faid al-Hāwif ibn Hifām in lifping tones,¹⁴¹ “By the Recoiler I was seduced” (I seek refuge with God from such an introduction!) “—that Recoiler who whispers in men’s ears every dark thought and all that feeds their fears—into thinking I’d married a woman cunning and deceitful, loudmouthed and lustful, shrewish and frigid, censorious and rigid, one moment vanished without trace, the next in your face, a woman lewd and rude, answering questions never asked, throwing down the gauntlet with none to take to task, proposing things to which no coin could aspire, and casting me into perils ringed about with fire. Thus at times my way was one of restraint, at others of complaint—at which she’d grow yet more wicked and more of a prig (though for my reproaches she cared not a fig). I then said to myself, ‘By God, either it’s the cold shoulder and making her think I’ve no interest in her snatch, or I roam the earth to see if I can find her match.’ I chose the second view, having first sought protection through Qur’anic recitation, and left my house despondent and downcast, full of misogynistic exasperation.

3.13.2

“Before I’d gone too far upon the road, a flock of them suddenly past me strode, each strutting in a garment woven tight and jewelry that shone bright, their antique perfume wafting to horizons infinite. Among them I beheld the slim-waisted and the plump, the handsome, radiant sisters to the houris of the Garden, curers, through their blandishments, of those whose members never harden. With them my soul hankered to have union, by their beauty my mind was driven to confusion, and, forgetting the humiliations I’d suffered at home, exclaimed, ‘Would that you were mine (should wishing be of any use)!’ and then declaimed

I see sweetness in the women walking by

Though I wonder, do they in their harems still beguile?

In my hussy wife, however, be she walking or standing still,

I find naught but hatred, aversion, and cause for bile.

With my eye I see her as she is—

Could she, even to a blind man (which I am not), be less than vile?

3.13.3

“One, with a neck like that of a deer, eyebrow like the crescent moon should it appear, now addressed me and said, ‘Don’t take it so hard: you’re not alone among men. My husband has written, with his pen,

I ponder the base nature of my wife

And hate all members of the feminine gender,

But then recall not all of them are she,

And toward all of them feel equally tender.’

3.14.1

When the Bag-man found that living in Beirut was good for neither his body nor his mind,¹⁵⁸ he decided to leave it and set off for the Mountain, for he had gotten it into his head that he’d like to live in a Greek Orthodox monastery. He therefore proceeded with his wife and the Fāriyāq and they put up in a village below said monastery¹⁵⁹ for a few days. Now certain local beauties used to keep the Fāriyāq company there and share his meals, and when one of these learned that he was going up the following day to the monastery, she burst into tears, seemingly thinking he’d decided to take monastic vows. It occurred to him that she was at odds in this with women’s ways, for women love monks more than they do common folk, since the seduction of a contemplative ascetic calls for a more than usually persuasive deployment of desire and deviousness, which is something that appeals to women, or vice versa;¹⁶⁰ afterward, when they find said ascetic to be obedient to them, they return to their former ways so that they can try out every kind of love and let not one escape them.

3.14.2

In short, the Fāriyāq was wept over enough at his departure this second time in his life to be counted among the ranks of those who have been loved, and he went the following day to the monastery, where he took a cell without lock or key, thus joining the company of Shitter Bāy,¹⁶¹ whose doors cannot be closed (which, I declare, is a strange way to build). This monastery was a place where all the people of the surrounding villages gathered, depositing their belongings there for fear that the Egyptian soldiers might attack them, the monastery being a safe sanctuary. When they arrived, they would go into any cell without exception, including that of the Fāriyāq, and if they found papers on his bed containing the interpretation of a dream or anything else, they’d snatch them up and read them. Some would understand enough for their tongues to turn, some enough for their heads to turn, some enough for their whole bodies to turn — meaning they’d turn their backs on him and leave — and some enough for their hands to turn, in which case they’d raise them so as to fall with a thud on writer and writings alike. Some would scoff at them and say, “They’re just nonsensical dreams” and others would say, “They are inappropriate to a time of war” and he found no one among them who approved. Among these uninvited male visitors were uninvited female visitors, among them those whom it was an obligation to greet with “Hello!”, “Well met!”, and “Welcome!”, others for whom just one of those would do, others who were worth two greetings in quick succession, and yet others who weren’t worth even one.

3.14.3

All of this, taking the rough with the smooth, was bearable. What could not be borne was the hunger, which was caused by the closing of the highways. At the same time, the Fāriyāq had just emerged from the sufferings of the sea voyage, which had imposed on him a fast of successive days, and he could not do without something to snack on. This led him to go to the village and call out, “Any woman who has a chicken to sell should sell it to me!” to which one of them would answer, “You see that hen roaming with the others in the field? I want to sell it. If you want it, run after it and grab it with your hands,” so he’d run after the chickens and jump over walls with them, and if he was lucky enough to break the leg of one or to tire it out, he’d pounce on it. As he ran after the hen, his thoughts would run alongside him, and he’d say to himself, “Here I am running after a hen. Is my wife, on the island, running after a rooster?” With all this running, I have to stop and point out that I mentioned earlier that the Fāriyāq was full of rashness, impetuosity, and apprehension. It was his nature, when away from his family, to keep contrasting his state with theirs, either sequentially or non-sequentially. An example of the first would be his saying, “Here I am running after a hen. Is my wife running after a rooster?” or his saying, for example, when dressed, “Is she at this moment naked?” or when standing, “Is she now flat on her back?” and so on and so forth. An example of the second would be “I am now running after a hen. Is a rooster running after her?”

3.14.4

The bread at the monastery and in the villages at that time was adulterated with darnel¹⁶² and when the Fāriyāq ate it, he’d imagine he was still in the ship, at the mercy of sea monsters, and this would be confirmed for him by the entry of one of the monks into his cell while he was in that state. When he had reached the end of his tether, he composed some verses and sent them to the head of another monastery, thinking he might have some surplus supplies. They went as follows:

Would that I knew what use is eloquence

On an empty stomach, or clarity of expression, or all the kinds of brilliant style:

When there’s naught to eat

They sear the throat and tongue like bile.

I’ll give you a thousand metaphors for a single loaf

And, compared to a lettuce, Taftāzān’s¹⁶³ of paltry value.

Arabists, get lost!

“Zayd struck ʿAmr”¹⁶⁴ will ne’er set bread on table.

Where oh where are the kebabs, the rice and

Cracked wheat, the bowls of them spilling, so full they are, the cloth upon?

The days of stew are done and come is the turn of hunger,

Whose dwelling place is Lebanon.

What ignominy! We dispatch gold coins

But no one for them strives.

There is no selling and buying in a land

Where the staff of life is nowhere to be found, whilst darnel thrives.

I spent so long in the monastery ‘twas as though

I were a monk the others could not stand,

For they saw about me books and pens

Of the sort their metropolitan has banned.

I’m hungry for gay company but live alone.

No woman, nor any man, e’er sees me—

My life’s so bad that, were I shown it in a dream,

Bad grammar would never thenceforth make me moan.

3.15.1

The Fāriyāq and the Branch each mounted a mule, and the mistress and her husband each a mare, and a company of travelers joined them and they set off, making for Damascus. Somewhere along the road, the Fāriyāq’s mule took fright at some passing surmise that occurred to it, bolted with him, and then threw him, and he landed with his thigh on a rock so that when he stood up he limped like a hyena. The master of the Chamber was saddened, being worried that the work of oneiromancy might be delayed, while the man’s wife gloated since she regarded him as a spy, watching her and her Branch, and thus it is that what makes a man sad may make a woman glad; and here you must add to your extensive store of information the following, namely, that there is no kind of travel more wearisome than riding those obdurate mules. They have neither saddles nor bridles nor stirrups, and the imbeciles who rent them out provide ropes connected by rough metal chains in the place of a bridle. The rider holds this chain in his hand. If the mule bolts, the hand holding the chain will be too weak to check it, and usually when one mule bolts, they all do.

3.15.2

Next the Branch’s mule took fright; he was thrown half off its back, his foot caught in a rope, and he hung there, his head bumping along the ground. At this, the mistress lost whatever fortitude she may have had regarding him, while no one could stop the mule. The mistress’s eye appeared to be going in one direction and her heart in another, while parts of her grew larger and parts smaller, parts went dry and parts stood on end, parts went wet and parts fell apart, parts got goose bumps and parts bristled, parts wagged and parts shook, parts darted like the tongue of a snake and parts waggled the same way, parts darted their heads forwards and backwards like an angry snake and parts bulged and parts got dirtied, and she started to fidget and twist, toss and turn, and for the first time in her life the wish entered her head that she might be a man so that she could protect him. Finally, God alleviated their plight and the mule stopped, and the Branch righted himself and they proceeded until they reached Baalbek, the Fāriyāq being at death’s door. There he went and took shelter in the shade of a tree, where the breeze made him nod off and he slept, awaking exhausted.

3.15.3

Then they remounted and continued until they made Damascus, the Fāriyāq being unwell the whole way, and he rented a room in a caravanserai and stayed there for days, unable to go out. When he had largely recovered, he made his way to his wife’s family’s house and informed them of what had happened, and they were delighted to see him. Then the fever took him once more. Then he revived and wanted to go to the bathhouse to bathe, but when he returned, it returned too. One day he happened to have gone down to the latrine when he fainted and fell down and his head went into the hole of the latrine and he started shouting, “My head’s in the hole! There’s a hole in my head!” and the people came running and found him in that state, and some laughed at him and some felt sorry. Then he got a little better and it seemed to him and his companion¹⁶⁷ that they should leave — but before he departs that noble city I must crush him and press him hard till he gives us a description of the charms of its women, that being the only thing he’s fit for, for any talk of the peculiarities of its plants, its minerals, its air, the number of its inhabitants, or its political affairs would be beyond him.

3.15.4

He declared: “I entered the city of Damascus with a fever that had accompanied me from Baalbek, and I had barely recovered by the time I left the place. I can, therefore, give only a poor description of its women. If you accept this, I say, ‘When I entered the city, I put up at a caravanserai called Khān Fāris, and the owner assigned an old woman to serve me. I observed, from her gentle treatment and caco-euphonious speech (meaning the way she mixed soft words with harsh), that old women play a large role there in women’s dealings, by which I mean that they enter people’s houses on the excuse that they will sell the women clothes to wear and come out having undertaken to strip them totally bare, for they are the closest means to hand and the trustiest method for bringing lover and beloved together. At first sight, it seemed to me that the Muslim women were better looking than the Christian ones, just as the Muslim men were more handsome and more chaste in speech, as they are in all the lands of Islam. The women’s color is generally white flushed with red and most are tall and have fine figures. On the other hand, the white wrap that they wear when they leave their houses is not as appealing to the eye as the ḥabar of the women of Egypt.¹⁶⁸ Both conceal the charms of the figure, and it may be that they wear these deliberately to spare men their seductiveness, in which case they are to be thanked. But for what then this flirtatiousness and peering about, and what is this shaking of the buttocks as they walk and this voluptuousness of stride? Does not the heart have eyes to see what lies beneath the wrap? Does an overcast of clouds, without which the eye would be unable to gaze upon the sun, conceal the same? The clothes they wear indoors are as attractive and captivating as can be.’” The Fāriyāq continued, “When I was sick with fever, after I had left the caravanserai and breathed in the scent of the Christian women who came to visit me, they too appeared to me so entertaining and well-spoken, and had such pleasant traits and were so eloquent,¹⁶⁹ that I came to believe that my cure lay in such things, and had I not feared being called a miser for dispensing with the services of the doctor and, especially, had I not been obsessed with the idea that while in Damascus I might join my father who had died there, I wouldn’t have needed the attentions of any physician. While, from my pillow, I was stealing glances at these women, I noticed on their breasts something that heaved and reared as they breathed.

3.15.5

“I also observed some Muslim notables who would visit the master of the house and talk with him at their ease — men of considerable dignity and gravitas — and I don’t know what persuaded Metropolitan Jirmānūs Farḥāt to say, in his collected poems,

Meseems, then, I’m Aleppo, by nature refined,

While your nature, in its coarseness, is Damascus.

3.16.1

It’s the smell of Umm Dafār, in which all that walks or flies or plows the seas is as one, and it is made plain in the title. Can you smell it?¹⁷⁵

3.17.1

The two of them¹⁷⁶ then entered the town and the Fāriyāq went back to interpreting dreams and physicking the foul of breath. After a short while, a Persian, of whom it was said that he had been a Muslim and become a Christian and that he was a master poet well-known among the scholars of Persia, came to visit the master of the Chamber. The latter therefore took the Fāriyāq to welcome him in the quarantine quarters. He turned out to be a short, squat, round, bearded little fellow, and when he entered the town, he put up at the Chamber. Now the master decided, right at the outset, that he should shave off his beard. The barber was brought and set his razor to work but when he got to the poet’s mustache, the latter covered it with his hands. The master approached him with a book in his hand from which he drew proofs for the necessity of shaving mustaches and they discussed and argued until the master agreed to limit the sacrifice to half.

3.17.2

On another of those ill-omened days, the Fāriyāq went to the Chamber and there found that the master had stripped himself of every stitch of his clothing and set to roaming around the house in that state and inciting people to follow his example, saying, “Dear People, clothes were made to cover the pudenda but he who is pure and innocent of all sin has nothing of which to be ashamed. When Adam was in Paradise, in a state of sinlessness and innocence, he had no need of clothes.” When he went to his wife to persuade her to undress, she told him, “Women are without sin only at night, so they have to be covered by day.” The Persian saw him in this state and asked the Fāriyāq, “What has made our friend change his black clothes today and put on red ones?” The Fāriyāq replied, “He’s a soldier of the Bag and soldiers here wear uniforms.”

3.17.3

The derangement of both husband and Persian increased and became so entrenched that the wife feared they might find themselves together in some tricky situation and get into an argument and a fight. She therefore requested that the Fāriyāq take the Persian into his home. In the midst of all this, the Branch had now caught up with her, coming from the Syrian lands, bringing with him the delirious promise of delicious fruit and a sturdy trunk.¹⁷⁷ She therefore put him up in her house, treating him like an honored guest and trying constantly to have the Chamber to herself with him, even at the cost of her husband’s continued derangement and her own loss of her family. The Branch thus stayed there in the lap of luxury, while she stayed with him, her hands fuller than those of Dhāt al-Niḥyayn,¹⁷⁸ in the utmost ecstasy, and her husband continued to incite people to nudity, claiming it as a sign of innocence and purity.

3.17.4

The Persian stayed with the Fāriyāq, who accepted him only because of his meekness, weakness, and general taciturnity. Then, one night, after seeing lovely ladies visiting the Fāriyāq’s wife, his tongue was untied and he said things that indicated that it was not by divine guidance that he had become a Christian but that he had been compelled by poverty and hunger. The man went to bed that night with his heart afire with passion and during the night he left his room and set off for that of the Fāriyāqiyyah. Her husband noticed what was going on and set upon him with a rope, and the other was unable to defend himself. In the morning, the Fāriyāq consulted his wife on the matter. She said, “I think this Persian has gone insane because he isn’t married, and the same applies to all other madmen. Didn’t you see how, when he saw the girls at our house yesterday, his face lit up and he started talking?” The Fāriyāq said, “I replied, ‘I don’t believe you’re right this time, for our friend the Bag-man went mad after he got married.’ ‘But,’ she responded, ‘the balance of his mind had been disturbed before that by the dreams, and when he got married he failed to give marriage its due, so marriage got its own back at him, and others should take him as a warning.’ I said, ‘How did you come to know that?’ and she replied, ‘Married men shouldn’t be inquisitive and stick their noses into things that don’t concern them.’ I said, ‘That would be in restraint of men’s daily business.’ ‘There’d be no restraint,’ she said, ‘because I wouldn’t prevent them from going about their work, just from idle conversation and an obsession with dream interpretation. Plumbing the science of the supernatural requires more effort than succumbing to compliance with the super-stupid. If it were up to me, I’d treat all madmen with women, through women, and against women.’ ‘Do all the “particles of attraction”¹⁷⁹ belong to women?’ I asked. ‘Indeed,’ she replied. ‘All attraction is to be found in women.’ ‘But you omitted “particles,”’ I said. ‘On the contrary,’ she answered. ‘They’re still there.’¹⁸⁰

3.17.5

“‘Enough banter,’ I said. ‘Give me a ruling on this madman.’ ‘Take him back,’ she said, ‘to the Chamber. I hate the idea of his staying with us for long because I’m afraid that if I get pregnant, the child will come out like him.’ ‘By what means,’ I asked, ‘would madness be able to get into a fetus?’ ‘Aren’t children born white and bonny,’ she enquired, ‘when their fathers are hideous? If the mother’s eye didn’t have some special influence during her pregnant cravings, it wouldn’t be so.’ ‘That’s a view,’ I said, ‘that will lead to unbelief and absurdity. Unbelief because you are claiming that women are participants in the creation of mankind and absurdity because if women had some special influence over that, sons would either all look like their fathers or all be bonny.’ ‘Responding to your accusation of unbelief,’ she returned, ‘it is unquestionable that God, Mighty and Majestic, has created this feature in women, and He is the prime mover, meaning that the esurient power placed in her by the All-Capable Creator has an impact on the child’s environment. Responding to that of absurdity, the last thing women ever want their children to look like is their fathers, and any son you see who looks to you like his father is likely to be her eldest.’ ‘May God produce many more like you!’ I said. ‘You must have done your theology¹⁸¹ in the school of “the Hairy One”!’¹⁸² ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘We’re talking here about hairy ones, not shaven or plucked ones.’ ‘The potty one!’ I cried. ‘Tell me what to do with the potty one and enough of your potty tongue! You’ve almost driven me mad as well with your seminary¹⁸³ talk!’ ‘And since when,’ she answered, ‘did you hate semen? It’s all you care about. As for the madman, it must be as I said. Take him off to the Chamber and leave him there without telling anyone.’”

3.17.6

The Fāriyāq continued, “So I took him off and put him in one of the rooms there and locked the door on him. When he got hungry, he kept trying the door to see if he could get out and the servant heard him and let him out. The wife of the master of the Chamber managed to send him back to where he came from and she decided to take her husband back to her own country. Another man from his country came to deputize for him where oneiromantic matters were concerned but didn’t stay long, for reasons that will be explained.¹⁸⁴ Before revealing these, however, we must close this chapter with the verses composed by the Fāriyāq when the master of the Chamber was inciting people to take off their clothes. They go as follows:¹⁸⁵

3.17.7

You want us, then, friend, to go crazy

And take our clothes off today

And not sleep tonight when it gets dark

Or harbor suspicions about women

And not see when Ḥannā¹⁸⁶ comes

And, if he doesn’t, say, ‘He must be sick, depleted’!¹⁸⁷

And if some lecher¹⁸⁸ comes to us and his joints go weak,¹⁸⁹

We’re to mount him on horses, so he be not distressed

And make the wife a shield for him,

To protect him from any tormentor who may hurt him¹⁹⁰

And not care if we see that a horn

Has appeared on our temples, dinging and donging—

For you have seen that the mind exhausts the body

And denies the free man what he hopes for

And none will attain good fortune in serenity

Unless he display what he has concealed.

3.17.8

Shush, you old man who has grown long in the tooth!

What have you to do with the whickering doe, the snickering buck?¹⁹¹

You get into difficulties and you suffer

And do not care should you find yourself feeble.

What did you meet with from a preacher who went mad—

And from one who goes around here — and who wept?¹⁹²

You appeared before us in an ill-omened month that crushed

The loving couple¹⁹³ so we said, ‘Verily,

No abode we have stayed in with you

Has been without some evil upset that occurred.

Every one among us who has dependents complains of you.

You have brought a specimen of every misfortune—

Madmen who have exposed their willies,¹⁹⁴

One afflicted with fever who suffers from a lingering disease,

And a sickly invalid who moans¹⁹⁵

Till even his enemy would mourn for him and feel sorrow.

Enough! Slow down! You have ignited sorrow in us

And burdened the city with a worry that has preoccupied it utterly.

Be off, God guide you, and depart from us

Before you cut off our supplies of flour

And dry up the water and drive away good fortune

From a town that previously was secure,

And choose some other place to hole up in

Where you can take refuge, in comfort and quiet.

3.17.9

It won’t matter if you are sold short there

And repulsed as harshly as an orphan or if you are flung aside

Or if you came prattling and boasting vaingloriously

And thinking that all that’s ugly in you is comely

So that you will never see your like

Or an enemy who harbors a secret grudge against you,

Just as here you did injury to a crabbed little man¹⁹⁶

Whose molars and then his other teeth turned a rusty color because of you.

Were he able, he would make you a guest in prison

Where you would be a pawn to disasters.

His devil¹⁹⁷ has accused you of a crime:

He says he’s grown old from your tobacco.

You have put in the house of prayer an oven

Whose smoke has gone everywhere and blinded the heedless.’

A company said, ‘His spittle has turned smelly

And his mistakes in Arabic amount to an injury to us,

So let him seek a friend in some other abode than there

And it matters not to us if he is generous or miserly

Or if he weeps at his misfortune or sings

Or calls sincere blessings on us or curses us

Or roars with hunger and humiliation and wails

Or says, “We have become [nothing] after we were [something]!”’

You never loved us, conceited one,

And never spoke to us in Arabic and never pleased us,

So may God not reward you with good fortune on our behalf!”

3.18.1

When the Fāriyāq was left with no more dreams to interpret, he was charged with the translation of a book¹⁹⁸ on behalf of the Committee¹⁹⁹ in the land of the English, so he translated it for them into this language of ours, according to its proper rules. It so happened that at the same time Metropolitan Atanāsiyūs al-Tutūnjī the Aleppine, author of Al-Ḥakākah fī l-rakākah (The Leavings Pile concerning Lame Style), traveled to the same country on some pot-scraping business and got to know the aforesaid Committee, whom he proceeded to inform that the Fāriyāq’s language was utterly corrupt because of his failure to observe the conditions that he had laid down for translators and Arabizers in the abovementioned book. He also told them that the Christians²⁰⁰ loved disorderly, disarranged discourse, that he had been raised in this craft since many a year, that he had trained many others at the school of ʿAyn Tirāz and elsewhere,²⁰¹

And that the books of the church have their own method

Which differs from that of the rest of mankind and is at variance with it,

And that there is blessing in the lame phrase

And good fortune for a people whose shame is conspicuous

And that the richness of their solecisms in speaking is to them

Like a song sung to a rhythm and the common factor is obvious²⁰²

And that the use of al-Mawlā²⁰³ in reference to God is an abomination

And that all should be on guard against saying wallawu l-adbāra²⁰⁴

And that tukāh is to be found as the plural of muttakiʾ²⁰⁵

And that maṣūn is rare compared to muṣān²⁰⁶

That shaʿb is more common than qawm²⁰⁷

And great sins lie in saying malak and not malāk²⁰⁸

And that ʿabīd, when preceding “God,”

Is more proper than ʿibād,²⁰⁹ and that is a judgment no one can deny

And that the plural of ʿadhāb is of the pattern of rakākāt,²¹⁰

And that sāʾir is not a synonym of bāqī²¹¹

And one shouldn’t say wāʿiẓīhā but mūʿiẓīnahā²¹²

And that any who says addaw rather than waddaw²¹³ is a renegade

And from radda say, if you wish, that the active participle may be formed as

muridd;²¹⁴ so say the Christians of the latter days.

And as to yaẓharu, cancel it and take yabānu²¹⁵ as its equivalent

And ṣirnā banīnan bi-tadhakhkhur²¹⁶ is common

And likewise “a maṣaff gathered glorifying God”²¹⁷

And that a wāw immediately follows ka-mā used as a conjunction²¹⁸

And that idh must take the jussive²¹⁹

And that the use of the relative adjective alladhī after the dual is an impeccable tradition²²⁰

As is writing imperative —ī with the weak verb,²²¹

As told him by that modern, the priest of Choueir,²²²

And that retention of the nūn of — ūna following kay

And an²²³ is widespread — so Zākhir insists.

And that after yuʿṭā to put the subject supplying the agent in the accusative is

A necessity,²²⁴ just as the omission of fa- in the conditional clause is common,

3.19.1

Wonders! Marvels! Prodigies! Miracles! Sensations! Astonishments! Things to gawp at, things to learn from! Things stupendous! Things incredible! Things beyond understanding! Things beyond imagining! The fantastic, the extraordinary, the bewildering, the outlandish, the awesome, the amazing! Bewilderments and puzzlements! Descriptions beggared! Beliefs staggered! Holy mackerel and holy cow! Verily, men delude themselves.

3.19.2

This bitty-buttocked,²⁴⁹ thin-thighed, shrivel-shanked, barely boobed, ant-armed mistress of mine uses pads, stuffing, and balls of yarn to puff out her shift at her breasts so as to make people think she’s big-busted and well-endowed, but from where, my lady, are you supposed to have acquired this ample form, this appetizing flesh, when we can see that your arms are like writing-reeds or prickly artichoke stems, your neck like a stick, your hands like combs, your face like the cake of soap a fuller uses to wash the clothes of army blacksmiths and camel drivers, donkey drivers, and camp followers, your rib cage like a chicken coop, and your shoulders honed and boney, thinned and flattened, delineated and desiccated, weedy and woggly? How could Nature have made such a mistake as to fatten you at those two noble spots and turn a blind eye to the rest?

3.19.3

This short,²⁵⁰ little, teeny, tiny, diminutive, itty-bitty, shrimpy, stunted, stubby, runty, scrunty, strunty, squaddy, knurly, squabby, hodmandod, miniature, minuscule, micromorphic, dwarfish, pygmy, puny, pint-sized, homuncular, hop-o’-my-thumb, gnomish, nanoid, fubsical, sesquipedalian chit of a mistress of mine leaps and bounds, stretches her neck out and holds her head straight, sticks her neck out with head held high, walks like an ostrich, or an estrich, cranes and strams, peers toward things, frisks, prances, rushes like a stream of melting snow — and thinks the onlookers aren’t measuring her inch by inch with their eyes, aren’t groping her span by span and cubit by cubit in their minds, and aren’t thinking over what bed would suit her best.

3.19.4

This black,²⁵¹ sable, ebony, pitchy, inky, tar-bedaubed, raven-like, charcoal-tinted, swarthy, smutty, dusky, sooty, melanic, melanous, melanotic, melanoid, melanistic mistress of mine paints her face with Indian yellow, saffron, ceruse, rouge, and lipstick and then makes a sour face at men and looks at them askance, bestowing on them from on high glances of coquetry and pride. Should any try to see any other part of her body, she turns on them the part that’s painted and rouge-caked, embellished and faked, and makes that the intercessor for the rest of her limbs, causing them to believe that the parts of her that are covered are of a whiter white than the part that’s exposed and that her color by night is more fluorescent than by day, especially if seen in seclusion, when it increases in beauty and profusion. She may tell a long tale of how, when she got up in the morning, she had no time to set herself to rights, that she dressed in a hurry and left, she has no idea how.

3.19.5

This old,²⁵² aged, elderly, decrepit, withered, shrunken, wizened, wrinkly, crabbed, shriveled, long-in — the-tooth, infirm, weak, debilitated, moth-eaten, doddery, tottery, grandevous, gerontic, badgerly, veterascent, senescent, doting, hoary, feeble, ravaged, wasting, superannuated mistress of mine, who kicks up the dirt as she waddles along bowlegged like a geriatric,(1) affects, for all that, girlishness, maidenly ways, and childishness, cinching her robe tight around her waist and smiling if a young man come to visit her in her den.

3.19.6

This beautiful, plump and handsome, graceful, juicy and comely, bonny and bright, lovely (both inwardly and outwardly) and delicate, smooth and black-eyed, virginal, chaste, and big-buttocked, sweet-breathed and pearly-toothed, soft-voiced and small-nosed, silken-breasted, glabrously ribbed, prettily smiling, melodiously speaking mistress of mine, who intoxicates with her coquettish shilly-shallying, enchants with her dallying, captivates the heart of him who never in his life felt desire before, robbing him of his senses and leaving him disturbed, enslaving him and rendering him perturbed, even though he be on his guard against her and call upon his good sense and endurance, his self-discipline and conscience—this mistress of mine you will observe walking with her head averted and eyes lowered from bashfulness, too shy indeed to step out and display her lusciousness, and showing not a sign of flirtatiousness, bedizenment, or finery, or walking with a provocative gait, or dressing flashily, or wearing brocade, or being prideful, or rocking and rolling from side to side as she walks, or being coquettish, or shaking and swaying, or plucking her eyebrows, or taking wide steps like an ostrich, or her beauty flaunting, or reveling in the first flush of her youth or empty vaunting, even though, should she enter the presence of the king, he’d rise to bid her welcome, handing over to her, to honor her, both scepter and baton, and reciting

I hereby ransom you from any fealty to us,

To honor which the very caliph’s throne its head should dip.

Take my crown, but give me in return the lightest kiss

From the edges of your mouth, or tiniest sip!

3.20.1

When the Fāriyāq returned from his time with the aforementioned emir, he informed his wife of the latter’s kindnesses to him and that he had promised him a good post in Cairo. “I’ll go ahead, then,” she said, “while you wait for him here. I miss my parents greatly, so let me go to them.” “So be it,” said he, and when the time for her departure drew close, he set about bidding her farewell, saying, “Remember, wife, that on this island you have a husband who cares for you and a lover who will not forget you,” to which she replied, “O that I might have such a one!” The Fāriyāq resumed, “I asked her, ‘Whom do you mean by “such a one”?’ ‘You, of course!’ she responded. ‘On the contrary, the more obvious interpretation is someone else,’ I said. ‘Must facts always depend on your readings, you Arabs?’ she responded. ‘Is it still your way to go scratching up any secrets that may be in a woman’s breast, breaking open any thoughts that, egg-like, in her head may nest, reviling her on the basis of gossip and delusion, dealing with her on a basis of conjecture and gnawing suspicion, behaving toward her according to misgiving and unsupported claims, without, for each story, confirmation, as well as practicing defamation, subjection to ungrounded accusation, false report and condemnation, instead of turning a blind eye and winking at transgression, overlooking error and granting tender consideration, being discreet and observing one’s marital obligation, kissing and flirtation, hugging and copulation?(1) Were the Almighty to call his servants to account for their thoughtless words as severely as you do,²⁷⁹ there’d be nobody left on the face of this earth.’

3.20.2

“I responded, ‘Most of these misunderstandings are generated by our language, which is so wide that it allows every expression to bear numerous possible meanings.’ She replied, ‘I would rather it were tight!’ ‘That,’ I responded, ‘goes with the other!’²⁸⁰ to which she responded, ‘And the other goes into this!’ ‘And on top of it,’ I said. ‘And underneath it,’ she retorted. ‘Better not to say anything then.’ ‘Not while going to it,’ I said. ‘You men,’ she said, ‘all snort, groan, and talk dirty like women when you’re having sex.’ ‘How come you know that?’ I asked. ‘Back to delusion and suspicion!’ she said. ‘Better,’ said I, ‘we return to saying our good-byes.’ ‘Indeed!’ she responded. ‘I shall travel, leaving behind no man I shall miss.’ ‘Am I,’ I asked, ‘one of the unmissed?’ ‘You’re not “a man,”’ she said. I said, ‘That too is an ambiguous statement. Am I not a man?’ ‘In one of the two meanings,’²⁸¹ she said. ‘Do I still owe you one?’ I asked. ‘More than one,’ she replied. I said, ‘Do you have the accounts for that in your ledger?’ ‘I do,’ she replied. ‘The way you poets drool over poetry deceived us into thinking you were both sayers and doers, but it turns out that the only thing you do well is describe.’ ‘And who are the good doers?’ I enquired. ‘Those who are no good at description,’ she replied. ‘So where does literature get to have its say?’ I asked. ‘In scholars’ sitting rooms, not women’s dressing rooms,’ she replied.

3.20.3

“‘What you’ve just said could lead to the dismemberment of our relationship,’ I said. ‘And your saying that could lead to the dehydration of your member,’²⁸² she countered. ‘How then can we part?’ I asked. ‘If you wish,’ she said, ‘you can make good on your arrears now. If not, leave it till you come to Cairo.’ ‘How,’ I asked, ‘can I make good in hours or days on arrears that have been outstanding for years? I’d hate to be taken before my time with a balance still to pay.’ ‘If you weren’t afraid to meet your obligation, why should it occur to you to fear early obliteration?’ she asked. I replied, ‘You have made one who had forgotten remember, and for long now I had reckoned all people to be like me.’ She said, ‘And you have made one who remembered forget, because I have seen none as ill-used as I.’ I said, ‘Remember the rooftop and forgive!’ She said, ‘There can be no forgiveness without mention of top[pling].’ ‘I meant the old kind of top[pling],’²⁸³ I said. ‘And I want the new,’ she said. I said, ‘There’s a proverb that says, “Blessing lies in what’s old.”’ She said, ‘There’s another that says, “Pleasure lies in everything that’s new.”’

3.20.4

“‘How can we part,’ I said, ‘when there’s ḍighn in your heart?’ ‘And what better than ḍighn?’ she replied. ‘If it’s in the sense of “yearning,”’ I said.²⁸⁴ ‘Indeed!’ she replied. ‘It’s one of the strange words that I’ve learned from you, like ʿIqyawn,²⁸⁵ fiṭaḥl,²⁸⁶ and ḥabrah.’²⁸⁷ ‘Maybe what appealed to you about ʿIqyawn was its closeness to ʿiqyān (“gold”), about fiṭaḥl its closeness to faḥl (“stud bull”), and about ḥabrah its closeness to ḥibarah (“a kind of wrap”).’²⁸⁸ ‘Tooth decay and wraps don’t go together,’ she responded. ‘They can,’ I retorted, ‘for they say that niʿmah (“luxury, comfort”) comes from nuʿūmah (“softness”).’ She replied,²⁸⁹ ‘And they also say that tasdīd (“the plugging of holes”) is from sadād (“proper behavior”).’ I replied, ‘No command prohibiting that has come down.’ She said, ‘It’s by analogy with its opposite.’ I said, ‘That’s seed cast on salty land’ and she said, ‘And that’s cleared land left unplowed.’ I said, ‘We were talking about seed’ and she said, ‘Food doesn’t nourish while it’s still on the palate and drink doesn’t quench till it’s passed down the throat.’” Following this duel of wits, they bade each other farewell and he saw her onto the steamer and then returned to his house gloomy and downcast, for often she had guided him to the right way and shown him the path to the correct opinion.

3.20.5

Before a few days had passed, the metropolitan’s stinks spread once more, this time more harmfully than the first, so he sent another portion to the aforementioned Committee²⁹⁰ and wrote to them saying, “If you don’t put a stop to the pollution of the air here by this stink, everyone with a nostril will complain about you.” When his letter reached them and they submitted it to the scholars in their country, they found that what he said was correct and deemed it proper to stop up the metropolitan’s pores to prevent them from exuding any more of this malignancy. They also decided to bring the Fāriyāq over to them to retranslate the book in question. In addition, the Fāriyāq had written a book on the state of the island’s inhabitants²⁹¹ in which he reproached them for certain customs and religious and secular practices that set them apart from the Christians of his own country. Examples included dunking church bells in baptismal water and giving them the names of saints, taking the figurines and statues from the churches for an outing during the day and lighting candles in front of them, and so forth. The said book also reviled a Muslim whom the metropolitan used to visit. The metropolitan happened to pay the Fāriyāq a visit and saw the book on an occasional table and recognized its author’s handwriting. The man pretended not to notice until the Fāriyāq had left the room, then took the book and cut out of it the pages containing mention of those customs. These he then sent to the head of the infirmary for the foul of breath,²⁹² having written on them in Italian, “Look, dear sir, and see whether or not the writer of these lines is worthy to be under your directorship.” The head, however, given his ignorance of what the pages contained, compounded by his lack of authority to dismiss an employee of the state, was obliged to return them to their author.

3.20.6

By the time the pages were returned to the Fāriyāq, the metropolitan had fled the island and the air had become free of his stink, and had he stayed longer, he would have been punished for the theft in a manner appropriate to such as him. At the same time, the Fāriyāq was invited to travel so as to carry out the mission in question, meaning the translation of the book, and he sent a letter to his wife telling her what had been decided and instructing her to return, since he wanted to remain in England after finishing the book. However, it is customary in the lands of the Franks to draw the language teachers at their universities from their own race only, even if they were ignorant. When the Fāriyāqiyyah returned, the Fāriyāq made ready for the journey. Observe him then putting his copies of the Qāmūs and al-Ashmūnī into his trunk, and observe me, rushing off to see to an urgent need. Allow me then a little time to rest.

END OF BOOK THREE

4.1.1

Only one who has traveled the seas and experienced the misery of their tempests and swells can properly appreciate the ease of life on land. Whenever, then, my dear landlubber of a reader, you feel a need for clean water, tender meat, fresh fruit, succulent greens, or soft bread, you must bear in mind that your seafaring brethren are deprived of all such things, that their vessel never stops moving beneath their feet, tossing them, turning them, and throwing them up and down, that before every mouthful of food they swallow they must first choke, and that before lying down to sleep they must first suffer a bellyache.

4.1.2

Likewise, when food of just one kind is placed before you, think only of that and know well that others too are dining at this hour, and perhaps on something more meager still. If you do so, you will find solace and distraction. If, however, you lift your eyes to the palaces of kings and princes and the mansions of ministers and wonder what they are eating and drinking, you will certainly tire and torment yourself to no avail. Do you really imagine that the aged wine drunk by the prince is more delicious than the water you are drinking, so long as you are informed as to the affairs of this world and the next and are proficient in the management of some business of yours that provides for yourself and your family, so long as your wife sits before you or on your right or left while your small child sits on your knee, singing to you one moment, passing you with his sweet hand anything you may have asked your wife to give you the next, and so long as on your departure, they accompany you to the door and on your arrival, take you upstairs and seat you on the best cushion in the house?

4.1.3

As for you, my dear rich gentleman, you would do better to leave your prosperous city to see with your own eyes what you cannot see in your own country and hear with your own ears what you cannot hear there, to experience how other people live and their customs and ways, to discover their morals and modes of thought and how they govern themselves. After that, you may compare the good things in their land with the bad things in ours. And when you enter their country and are ignorant of their language, don’t insist on learning the dirty words from them first or delight in words for the sake of the things they denote, for every language in the universe has fair and foul given that language expresses the actions, deeds, and thoughts of men, which encompass, as all will agree, both the praiseworthy and the blameworthy. I hold you in too high esteem to imagine that you will be like those travelers who learn of other people’s languages only the names of certain parts of the body and other despicable terms. On the contrary, when you arrive safe and sound in a country you must, before anything else, make for the schools, printing presses, libraries, hospitals, and lecture rooms (by which I mean those places where scholars speak on every art and science; some of these are equipped only for public addresses while others contain every instrument and device required for the science in question).

4.1.4

And when you return, by God’s grace, to your own town, exert yourself to write a book about your travels and publicize it among your countrymen so that they may benefit — but without any intention to make money from the sale of it. Would that you might partner too with some of your fellow rich in establishing a printing press on which to print further books that may be useful to men, women, and children and to each category of person so that they may learn what their rights and duties are, whether those books be written originally in Arabic or translated into it. Be careful, though, that in copying from the non-Arabs, you do not confuse the fair with the foul, the sound with the defective. Great cities are as full of vices as they are of virtues.

4.1.5

True, among those people there are some who will refuse to see anyone when they are at table and, if compelled to do so, will not invite him to taste any of what is before them. Others, though, will invite you to their mansions in the countryside, where you may stay for a week, or two weeks, with everyone at your beck and call. True, some will begrudge a response to your greeting, and if you enter the house of one such who is your friend and his salon is full of friends of his who do not already know you, not one of them will bestir himself to stand and greet you or pay you the slightest attention or even turn toward you. On the other hand, there are those who, once they have gotten to know you, will be as solicitous of your welfare when you are absent as they are when you are present, and if you confide a secret to them, will keep it as long as they live. True, there are those who will call you names as soon as they set eyes on your mustaches, beard, or turban and will tug on the skirt of your robe from behind, but there are also those who have a passionate desire to become acquainted with strangers, are happy to be in their company and to do good to them, and think it a duty to aid and protect them. True, there are those who will mock you when they see you making mistakes in their language, but there are also those who will be intent on teaching it to you without charge, either themselves or via their wives or daughters, and on lending you books and other things that may be of use to you and guide you to whatever may serve your interests and success.

4.1.6

True, there are those who will reckon that you have turned up in their country to compete with them for their livelihoods and therefore scowl in your face and look at you askance, but there are also those who will regard you as a guest in their country to be honored, respected, and defended so that you depart without harboring the slightest hard feeling against their countrymen. True, there are those who will use you as forced labor, to translate for them or teach them, and never say, “Thank you, translator!” or “Thank you, teacher!” but there are also those who will regard it as sinful to speak to you without sending you payment for opening your mouth and closing your lips. True, there are those who, if they are compelled to invite you to eat with them and then notice you coughing, blowing your nose, or flaring your nostrils, will tell their wives, “He must be sick; you don’t have to give him a lot of food” so that you rise from the table starving while they make a great show of you among their guests, claiming that in the year so-and-so and month so-and-so, on such and such a day, they held a great banquet for you, treating that night as though it marked the start of some new historical era. On the other hand, there are also those who, on discovering that you are staying in some village in their country where there is no trade and nothing to be obtained by way of green vegetables or fruit, will send you, from their own gardens and orchards, enough to stop your mouth against any complaint. Thus it was with Mr. Drummond,²⁹³ when the Fāriyāq found himself fated to reside in one such village and his complaints were carried on the wind to people’s ears.

4.1.7

How I wish the presence in your home of a hundred books did not count as less of a witness to good fortune than that of a hundred tobacco pipes or a hundred water pipes, even though the cost of a hundred books is less than that of three pieces of amber!²⁹⁴ Isn’t the presence of a printing press in your country more important than all these cashmere shawls, sables, precious vessels, and expensive pieces of jewelry? If a person looks at a piece of jewelry, he derives no benefit from it either for his body or his brain; his pleasure in it lasts no longer than the month in which he bought it, and after a few months have passed it’s no more to him than scrap metal, the only pleasure to be derived from it being that of selling it. A book, on the other hand, grows more valuable with each passing year, and its benefits multiply. Are not your readings in history, geography, and the literatures of the world an adornment to you among your brethren and acquaintances that surpasses gemstones? If you teach your family and dependents a portion of such things and, from books of medicine, of the principles necessary for the preservation of their health, will you not win reward from God and protection from many an injury that might befall them as a result of their ignorance?

4.1.8

If you say, “We have no books in Arabic suitable for women,” I reply, “Supposing you are right, do not the Franks have books written by refined and virtuous men specially for women and children? Why do you buy fabrics and furnishings from the Franks and not knowledge, wisdom, or literature? Then again, no matter what lengths you may go to in order to shield your wife from seeing the world, you will never be able to hide it from her heart. A woman, wherever and however she be, is this world’s daughter and its mother, sister, and co-wife. Do not say to me, ‘A book won’t set an evil woman to rights but will make her yet more wicked, and if she’s righteous, she doesn’t need one,’ for I will reply that a woman was a girl before she became a woman and a man was once a boy. No one can deny that educating the young is like carving on rock and that if you raise your offspring with knowledge, general education, virtue, and praiseworthy qualities, they will grow up as you have raised them and you will have performed the duty that God has imposed upon you of making them into decent people, in which case you will leave them (after a long life, God willing) with a clear conscience and a mind at ease and serene.”

4.1.9

The only argument left to you is to say, “My father gave me no education, just as my grandfather gave my father none, and I have followed in their footsteps,” but I tell you, the world in your late grandfather’s and father’s day was not as it is now. In their day, there were no steamboats or railway tracks to bring close far-off tracts and create new pacts, to connect the disconnected, and make accessible what was once protected. Then, one didn’t have to learn many languages. It could be said of anyone who knew a few words of Turkish — Welcome, my lord! How nice to see you, my lord! — that he’d make a fine interpreter at the imperial court, and of any who could write a hand worse than the hand with which I have penned this book (not the one you’re actually reading now, for whose typeface I take no responsibility)²⁹⁵ that he was a skilled calligrapher who would make a fine secretary to a king’s council. Not now!

4.1.10

When our friend the Fāriyāq made his decision to leave the island for England, someone told him, “You are going to a land over which the sun never rises”; another, “… to a land where no wheat or green vegetables grow and the only foods to be had are meat and turnips”;²⁹⁶ another, “I fear that you may lose your lungs there for lack of air”; another, “or your intestines for lack of food”; and another, “or your chest or some other part of your body.” When he got there, though, he found that the sun was the sun, the air air, water water, men men, and women women, that the land was populated and the cities well inhabited, the earth plowed and pleasing to the eye, well signposted and marked, resplendent with woods, mighty trees, and forests, green with meadows, proud in its fields, succulent in the green vegetables its soil yields; had he listened to those people, he would have missed seeing all of that. Thus, if you’re afraid that you would hanker for the pleasures of the water pipe or of having your legs massaged before going to sleep, know that the marvels you will see there will make you forget all such luxuries and distract you from everything to which, in your noble position in society, you have become accustomed.

4.1.11

How can you allow yourself to leave this world without ever having seen it when you have the means to do so? Abū l-Ṭayyib al-Mutanabbī has said

And no failing have I seen among men

To equal the falling short of those who have means.

4.2.1

When the time for the Fāriyāq to travel was close, and as soon as he had put his copies of the Qāmūs and al-Ashmūnī into his trunk, he set about bidding his wife farewell.²⁹⁸ He said, “Just think, wife — we’ve lived together a goodly span of time.” “That’s all I think of,” she replied. The Fāriyāq resumed his narrative. “I asked her, ‘Hatefully or gratefully?’ and she replied, ‘Half the latter and half the former.’²⁹⁹ ‘Application of naḥt brings us back to the first,’³⁰⁰ I said, to which she responded, ‘or the first brings us back to another meaning of naḥt.’³⁰¹ ‘Which first did you have in mind?’ I asked.³⁰² ‘You have no business interpreting my intentions,’ she responded. I replied, ‘I’d be content if you’d just explain to me what you did mean,’ and to this she responded, ‘If you think you can belong to both me and others, then it’s “hatefully,” if not, it’s “gratefully.”’

4.2.2

“‘You forbade me before to deal with you on the basis of suspicion,’³⁰³ I said, ‘but now you’re the sinner in that regard.’ ‘On the contrary,’ she replied, ‘I’m the one sinned against.’³⁰⁴ I asked her, ‘Does the word “no” have no place in your mouth?’³⁰⁵ She said, ‘It used to be pronounced “yes.”’³⁰⁶ I said, ‘A no from a woman is a boon,’³⁰⁷ to which she replied, ‘And a yes means pleasure.’ I asked, ‘Have you made the latter your habit?’ to which she replied, ‘Indeed — and become habituated to the rewards.’ I said, ‘That’s not fitting for a woman with children,’ to which she countered, ‘If a woman doesn’t fit properly, she’ll never give birth.’³⁰⁸ I said, ‘It’s the same Matter,’ to which she responded, ‘If the Matter isn’t “copious and inseparable,” it must necessarily take different Forms.’³⁰⁹ I said, ‘And how can it remain inseparable if the Forms are different?’ ‘The individual nature of the Forms is not a problem,’ she replied, ‘for one may stand for all. What we are discussing here is how to define “quantity.”’ ‘And what are the terms of the argument?’ I asked. She said, ‘That in seriousness is humor and in humor seriousness.’

4.2.3

“‘What would you think,’ I asked her, ‘if I got someone to deputize for me in that matter while I’m away?’ She laughed and said, ‘According to my taste or yours?’ ‘To yours, naturally,’ I replied. She said, ‘No man would agree to such a thing unless he was devoid of jealousy, and a man can be devoid of jealousy only if he hates his wife and is enamored of someone else, so you must be enamored of someone else.’ I said, ‘I am neither enamored nor inconstant, but when a man is deeply in love with his wife he hopes to please her in everything, though we must not overlook the fact that jealousy is not always, as people would have it, a product of love: some women’s jealousy regarding their husbands comes from hatred of them and a desire to hurt them. An example would be if a woman were to prevent her husband from going out to a park, a place of entertainment, or a bathhouse along with a number of other married men; she knows that they cannot meet up with women in such places and she only does this to exercise control over him and to stop him from talking about women with his friends and enjoying himself in ways that can do her no harm. It’s the same if she forbids him to look out of his window at a street or a garden frequented by many women, and the same judgment applies to a man if he behaves the same way with his wife. People call such things “jealousy” but in reality they are a form of hatred, or it may be that hatred begins where jealousy leaves off, just as excessive laughter is the first stage of tears. However that may be, a man cannot truly love his wife if he doesn’t allow her to enjoy herself in the way she wants and with whom she wants.’ ‘Does anyone in the world behave that way?’ she asked. ‘Indeed,’ I responded. ‘Many behave so in countries not far from us.’ ‘Good for them,’ she replied, ‘but what about their women? Do they behave the same way with their husbands?’ ‘They have to,’ I answered, ‘to keep things in balance.’ ‘Personally,’ she said, ‘I wouldn’t put up with such evenhandedness. As far as I’m concerned, a tilt is better.’ ‘That’s my opinion too, in certain circumstances,’ I said. ‘And where the circumstances of certain people are concerned,’ she riposted.³¹⁰

4.2.4

“‘Let’s get back to traveling,’ I said. ‘I leave today.’ ‘Indeed,’ she said, ‘—for the lands of the white-skinned beauties.’ ‘Do you talk of men or women?’ I enquired. ‘I talk of one sex,’ she replied, ‘but what worries me is the other.’ ‘And why should that sex be a concern,’ I asked, ‘when it’s you women who, in any circumstances, are the ones pursued, which is why they call a beautiful woman a ghāniyah?;³¹¹ as the author of the Qāmūs says, “the ghāniyah is a woman who is pursued and does not herself need to pursue.”’ She said, ‘Excellent words, but earlier he says, “ʿawānī³¹² is a word for women, because they are mistreated and no one takes their side,” though the dot on the one ought to put in a good word for the other.’³¹³ ‘Love of “dotting,”’ I said, ‘is an ancient habit among you women.’³¹⁴ ‘As “scripting” is among men,’³¹⁵ she retorted, ‘but be that as it may; our being desired is the root of our worries, for the woman who is desired is by definition a woman whose honor is valued and guarded. Woe betide her then if she betrays her guardian and woe betide her if she denies the one who desires her, for then she will spend the night worrying over having denied him and over his disappointment and the fact that she has become a cause of his sleeplessness, anguish, and sorrow, and the woman who chases men ends up unchased.’³¹⁶ I said, ‘Men’s morals are not all the same where that’s concerned,’ to which she returned, ‘I mean the men who desire, and fall in love with the ones they desire, not those fornicating omnivorous fickle-hearted ones whose custom is to take a nibble here and a nibble there and move from one object of desire to another, taking only what is of use to them without caring about what may be of use to others. How few, though, are the former! Is there a single man who can maintain an affection and not deviate from it every day? I swear, were women to desire men as much as men desire women, you wouldn’t find a single man unbewitched.’

4.2.5

“‘Is there a single woman who can maintain affection and not deviate from it each day a thousand times?’ I asked her. ‘All books bear witness to the trustworthiness of men and the treachery of women.’ ‘Weren’t the ones who wrote those books men?’ she countered. ‘They’re the ones who made up those stories.’ ‘But only after investigation and experience,’ I answered. ‘If you go to the arbitrator alone, you win,’ she said. ‘Quite the reverse,’ I said. ‘They have provided testimonies. The words of Our Master Sulaymān, who said, “I have found one righteous man among a thousand but I have not found a single righteous woman” may serve as sufficient proof and evidence.’ ‘Even if Our Master Sulaymān was granted wisdom given to none other,’ she said, ‘his excessive indulgence in women rendered him incapable of distinguishing the righteous among them from the unrighteous. Have you not observed how the musk-seller’s sense of smell weakens from length of exposure to its strong odor until he can no longer distinguish any more delicate scent? As far as providing the testimony of men against women without providing that of women against men is concerned, it is patent injustice and high-handedness.’

4.2.6

“‘Indeed,’ I said, ‘evenhandedness in such citations would be preferable but, glory be, you women level every possible charge against men and then fall over one another to make a fuss over them!’ She responded, ‘Were it not that society works to make them martyrs, women wouldn’t allow such ideas anywhere near their medulla oblongarters.’”³¹⁷ “I laughed,” continued the Fāriyāq, “and said, ‘What kind of a plural is that?’ to which she replied, ‘I made it by analogy.’ ‘Are the original word and that formed by analogy to it equal?’ I asked. ‘There’s no difference,’ she replied. ‘On the contrary,’ I said, ‘they’re entirely different, because lexicon cannot be derived by analogy. If it could, there’d be no conformity between male and female or between female and male,³¹⁸ or between the masculinization of the true feminine³¹⁹ and the feminization of words that have no equivalent.’³²⁰ ‘Another example of men’s high-handedness and confusion of the issue!’ she said. ‘They are virtually incapable of dealing with anything straightforwardly.’ ‘And there you go again!’ I retorted.

4.2.7

“She said, ‘I swear I don’t know what to do about men’ and I said, ‘And I swear I don’t know what to do about women, but let’s get back to saying farewell. I give you my word that I will never be unfaithful to you.’ ‘On the contrary, you will ever be unfaithful to me,’ she said. I said, ‘What reason do you have to be suspicious of me?’ She replied, ‘I observe that men who are in a country where they’re unknown perform the worst abominations. Just look at how the foreigners who come to this island give themselves over to whoring and depravity. The moment one of them sets foot on land, he asks where the brothel is, especially the Syrians,³²¹ and amongst them especially the Christians, and amongst those especially the ones who have acquired a little knowledge of the ways of the Franks and their languages; they come off the ships like hornets, plunging their stingers here, there, and everywhere.’ ‘Perhaps they were like that in their home countries,’ I said. ‘They don’t have the means to behave abominably there,’ she returned. ‘Or perhaps they’re corrupt by nature,’ I said. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘They have a latent disposition to corruption and the moment they smell the Frankish air, it comes to life, which is why you will find that they always drool as they talk of the lands of the Franks and their customs and conditions. If you were to ask one of them about their food, though, he’d say he didn’t like it, or about their music, that it didn’t move him, or about their nobility, that they didn’t invite him to their banquets, or about their bathhouses, that they didn’t appeal to him, or about their weather, that it hadn’t suited him, or about their water, that he’d found it hard to swallow. The sole reason for their constant praise of those lands and for their lauding of the good things in them is abomination.

4.2.8

“‘And you — who can guarantee me that your nature is not corrupt, when every day I hear you muttering about women with quivering flesh, women with firm and swelling flesh, women with fleshy flesh, women with masses of plump flesh, women with pretty white flesh, and tall, full-fleshed women with long necks, all of them phrases that would, I swear, make the Baptist salivate and excite a hermit?’ I said, ‘They’re just words,’ to which she replied, ‘Every war begins with words.’ ‘Would you have me abandon this craft and its obsession, this all-consuming profession?’ I asked. ‘So long as you don’t visualize, while describing, a specific person, I have no objection,’ she answered. I responded, ‘If I don’t visualize a person, my mind will remain a blank.’ ‘In that case,’ she said, ‘it’s a sin.’ ‘And how,’ I asked, ‘may I expiate it?’ ‘By visualizing only me and no one else,’ she replied. ‘But you,’ I responded, ‘are devoid of some of the characteristics that have to be mentioned,’ to which she responded, ‘If a man truly loves his wife, he will find in her everything that is fair and see in each hair of hers a beautiful woman. By the same token, if he loves some other woman, he will, for her sake, love her country, its weather, its water, and the language, customs, and manners of its people.’ ‘Aren’t women the same,’ I asked, ‘when they love a man?’ ‘They’re worse,’ she answered, ‘because they have larger reserves of love and passion.’ ‘And why is that?’ I asked. ‘Because,’ she said, ‘men spend time on things that do not concern them. Thus you’ll find this one seeking position, that one power, and a third delving into religions and all that is obscure, be it profane or divine. Women pay no attention to any of that.’ ‘Would that you might busy yourself with the same concerns as men!’ I said. ‘Would that I had,’ she rejoined, ‘two hearts to devote to these concerns of ours.’³²² ‘Do you, then,’ I asked, ‘see in me everything that is good, as you claim?’ ‘I hold you in high regard,’ she said. ‘In that case,’ said I, ‘let’s get back to saying good-bye — or maybe not: let us, in fact, get back to the matter at hand, for I’d like to settle it before I depart; otherwise, it will preoccupy me throughout my journey and may spoil my work for those I go to serve. If that happens, I shall pin the blame on you and on women in general.’

4.2.9

“‘You should know,’ she said, ‘that women are aware without having to be told that they are the adornment of this universe, and similarly that everything in it was created to be an adornment for women, not men; not because men are innately in no need of such adornment or because women are in need of it in order to look and sound attractive to the eyes of the beholder and the ears of the listener, but because men are not suited to it. Adornment is something one takes, receives, and assimilates and which then becomes an embellishment — modes more appropriate to women than to men. Based on this — which is to say, on the fact that everything in the universe was created for women, in part by design and in part through preference and predilection³²³—one of her beliefs is that the male sex too was created for her, albeit not in the sense that she should be wife to all men, for that would be an impossibility, from two perspectives. One is that no woman could survive such a thing, for the concubine of that certain Jew mentioned in Judges, chapter 19³²⁴ could not survive the men of a single village (Gibeah), few though they were, for a single night; on the contrary, she died the next morning and her master believed she was asleep; the story is mentioned there as a caution to women. The other is that, if women’s right to the exclusive possession and arbitrary disposal of men is admitted, then their right to everything else must be admitted too — though only in the sense that they’re qualified to keep company with all men and be acquainted with what they are up to. Thus they may entertain from one a word of flattery, from another a word of praise, from some other courtship, from yet another conversation, and so on, none of which need stand in the way of her feeling love and affection for her husband. Nay, on the contrary…’”

4.2.10

The Fāriyāq continued, “At this I said, ‘Go straight to the end of this “nay-on-the-contrary”—as far as I can see it’s just the preface to another example of the cunning ways of women and the introduction to another of their wiles.’ She laughed and said, ‘Likely your misgivings about women make you say so. Nevertheless, I’m afraid that fear and trembling will overtake you as you try to understand it and you’ll find yourself unable to leave on time, or will suppose that that’s how I conduct myself where you are concerned. God forbid! Never have I betrayed you, with friend or with foe. Everything I know I have learned from other women, for women hide nothing from one another where love and the ways of men are concerned.’ ‘Be brief, then,’ said I, ‘for I’m disquieted and frightened, and my perspiration level’s heightened.’

4.2.11

“‘Know then,’ she said, ‘that there are two reasons why some women feel no qualms about making love to men other than their husbands. The first is their failure to get from the latter their established due, for men accustom them at the beginning to what they are incapable of giving them at the end, and it’s no secret that there are, among women,³²⁵ the nymphomaniac, who “devours everything,” the sworn virgin, who “abstains completely from intercourse,”³²⁶ the two-timer, who “takes two lovers,” the prick teaser, who “incites without making herself available,” and the bluestocking, who “loves the conversation of men but does not fornicate” (which is the way I am)…’” The Fāriyāq continued, saying, “‘Thank God for that!’ said I, and she said, ‘… and the ball-breaker, “who flirts with you but doesn’t avail you of herself.”

4.2.12

“‘The second reason is her desire to find out what men are about and to put them all, sturdy and weak alike, to the test, simply in order to know, so that nothing about them may escape her. There are those too who suppose, given women’s firmly established belief that men have no interest in anything but flirting with and sweet-talking women, that their husbands will betray them at the first opportunity. Thinking so, any time she finds a means of leaving the strait and narrow, she hurries to seize it, imagining that she is taking revenge preemptively, which is to say before the time otherwise allotted for it — despite which women never lose their love for their husbands. On the contrary, any such straying may be conducive to an increase in love for them on their part.’

4.2.13

“‘May God not send me a love that springs from nymphomania or infidelity!’ I said. ‘How, though, can this promiscuity be conducive to an increase in love³²⁷ when the woman, once she has sampled the thrusting prick, the strong prick, the hard prick, and the huge, mighty-headed prick, will never thereafter be able to limit herself to her husband, given that he can never escape the particular attribute with which he was created? And the man likewise, having once sampled women who are sweet-mouthed and dry-cunted, narrow-quimmed, high-twatted, tight-tunneled, and bulgy-beavered will find his wife ever after diminished.’ She laughed and said, ‘Were these attributes essential in order for a woman to be a woman and their diminution a defect, they wouldn’t be found only in a small number of individuals, for most women are not like that. The reason why affection increases, as women claim, with promiscuity is that the husband, given his long familiarity with and lascivious interest in his wife, and the fact that the touching of one of them by the other no longer produces in the body of either the toucher or the touched any shaking, trembling, or tendency to faint, is able to keep going longer, penetrate more deeply, and maintain a harder erection than the stranger. The two last characteristic abilities³²⁸ will elude the latter, either because of his voracity and discombobulation, or because the woman keeps going back to him after short breaks for more, or because what is forbidden is not always as appealing as what is permitted.

4.2.14

“‘The pleasure she gets from him derives largely from her conceptualization³²⁹ (meaning her conceptualization of him as other than her husband) just as her boredom with her husband derives largely from her conceptualization of him as something familiar. This aside, it is a fact that licit pleasure is more powerful. Conceptualization, however, is almost as important as performance. The proof of this is that if a man believes that a woman other than his wife is going to spend the night with him and then his own wife does so without his knowing, as happened with Our Master Yaʿqūb,³³⁰ peace be upon him, he’ll find that his wife, that night, possesses all the characteristics that he conceives of as being possessed by other women, and the same is true for a woman. Based then on what has been said above about the woman believing that every kind of beauty, adornment, and delight in the universe is most appropriately hers, she will conceptualize, and preoccupy herself with, the attributes of beauty as though they were a universal absolute. Should there, therefore, be a particular example close by, she will deal with it as she would with the universal, to the degree that her thoughts will often go on beyond any one man in his particularity, two or three men pulling them this way and that until she is reduced to a tizzy in her attempts to decide between the beguiling and the yet more beguiling, which amounts in reality to her being surrounded on all sides by sensual pleasure, like someone who wants to drink from three water pitchers and puts them all to his mouth at the same time.’ ‘Your words,’ I said, ‘put one in mind of the lines of the poet that go

If my heart’s distracted by the young ladies

My eye beholds, and whose beauty’s divided, a little to each,

I mount in my fancy a face that attracts me

On a body that suits it and then feel the itch.

4.3.1

Those who are by nature mendacious and given to slander, or who know nothing about women, will be suspicious of this farewell and attribute it to the embroidering and hyperbole of a poet. But who can gainsay one who has made it her habit, practice, custom, convention, utmost goal,³⁴³ wont, way, fashion, and observance to riposte, jest, banter, chaff, rally, sally, and respond with alacrity? Often, indeed, two or three of his friends would gather with the Fāriyāq and take on a topic on which she would rise to their challenge, keep pace with them, oppose them, and out-argue them. No speaker, however persuasive, should she oppose him, could find his tongue, and any master of rhetoric, should she enter the lists against him, would tremble, learning by experience that a woman’s answer is faster than a man’s and that one who has dedicated himself to scholarship may be slower to answer than one who has not, for the former will only venture to answer after cogitation and deliberation.

4.3.2

That said, the utterances that I have reported above from this woman so persuasive (despite her having read not a word in the art of rhetoric) fall far short of the original, for I was incapable, in reporting her words, of reporting likewise the gestures she made along with them and of picturing for the reader eyes that flirt and eyebrows that hint, a nose aquiver and lips that shiver, cheeks that flush, a neck that twists and a hand that gestures, breathing that rises and falls, and a voice that dips low and soars high, to which may be added the wiping of the eyeball to indicate incipient tears, a succession of sighs to symbolize sadness and joy, a display of foolishness to give notice of regret, a movement from side to side to announce grief and pain, and other things of that sort that lent power and rhetorical force to her words. This is the second time you’ve made me regret my ignorance of the craft of photography, the first being in Book One, chapter 14, when fair women in all their diverse beauty were discussed, and I may yet feel the same regret a third time.

4.3.3

Here I have to stand up straight and request permission from the powers that be to declare that it is the custom of all governors and kings, with the exception of the king of the English, to invite no one to enter or exit their lands who has not first paid to their ministries or their agents known as consuls a sum of money in keeping with the fertility or barrenness of their possessions. They do this on the pretext that if a traveler spends one or two hours in their country he is bound to see their spacious palaces and ever-victorious armies or their thoroughbred horses and luxurious vessels, thus putting him on a par with one who enters some place of entertainment, which no one would do without paying a fee.

4.3.4

If anyone objects, saying, “In a place of entertainment we hear the voices of the singers, male and female, and the sounds of the musical instruments, see the decorative lights and varied decorations, the shining faces of the lovely ladies and their dazzling displays, laugh with them when they laugh, are transported when they dance, and fall in love with them when they flirt, but we see none of these things when we view one of your cities; indeed, as soon as we enter them we are fleeced by your merchants, meaning that what we gain from our coming in is but little compared to what they gain in terms of their incomings,” they will tell you, “Your arrival in our country may coincide with a musical performance by our soldiers, and that can be in lieu of any transports you may experience in that place of entertainment. As far as women are concerned we give you permission to enjoy any of them that takes your fancy and run after any of them you wish, so long as you have ready cash. It’s not right, however, for you to liken our cities, graced as they are with our presence, to some place of entertainment, especially as the payment of these fees is an ancient custom followed by our ancestors (God bless the sod!) that has been practiced for so many years and eons that it can no longer be changed. If the king commands something, that thing becomes custom and law, as witness the words of the psalmodist when he says, ‘The king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord,’³⁴⁴ meaning that whenever the king thinks of something the hand of God renders his judgment infallible with regard to it. This is how the divines in our country explain this verse and the reward of any who disagrees is crucifixion.

4.3.5

“But to return to our argument: if the king starts changing customs and exchanging conventions, this may lead to him too being changed. His situation is comparable to that of the rooster that searches for a grain of wheat on the ground and in so doing stirs up the dust till it covers his head (though this is an unworthy comparison). Better then that everything stay as it is. And again, it makes no difference whether the one bound for our country is rich or poor, pious and righteous, a thief and a libertine, a man or a woman — all are obliged to hand over the fee and put up with the fleecing…” “But my lord and master, I am a woman in straitened circumstances obliged to pass through your happy city because my poor dear hubby came to your royal country to conduct some business and the Almighty determined that he should meet his end there, so I left young children I have writhing with hunger in our little cottage and came to see my poor dead hubby (since he can’t see me), not to mention that I’m considered one of those good-looking women who deserve to be looked after and well treated by those in positions such as yours. Why then should I be obliged to bear the fee, not to mention the costs of travel and the loss of my hubby, who was a support to me?” “Return, woman, to whence you came! This is no time for pleas for mercy, for the rules set down in the ledgers of kings admit of no change or modification and no exceptions can be made…”

4.3.6

“And I too, my master, am a poor little fellow whom fate has bombarded with its calamities for reasons known only to God and I have made my way to your country hoping to obtain some minor post that will satisfy my needs. I am no seducer or sower of dissent nor am I one who pokes his nose into the policies of kings and their governance. All that I wish for is to make a living, though I do know something that the inhabitants of your ever-prosperous land do not and my presence here may be of benefit to your happy realm. Should a sublime decree be issued that I be examined and tested as to my claims, you would provide me with a house, to say nothing of issuing the permit for me to enter without a fee…” “You there, policeman, watchman, guard, nabber, grunter, rozzer, runner, cop, slop, constable, catchpole, cozzpot, woodentop, nabman, beagle, derrick, nubbing-cove — put that man in prison! He’s surely a spy come to spy out our land. Search him. No doubt you’ll find papers on him that’ll tell us what he’s up to.”

4.3.7

“And I too, my lord and master, am a poor young laddie. I have come to see my father because he has told me that, on his way home, he entered your country, where the clement climate afflicted him with a malady that prevents him from moving. When my mother, who is also sick from the grief and care that have consumed her as a result of his long absence, learned of his illness, she sent me to him, in the hope that I might serve him and nurse him and his spirits then revive at the sight of me and recover, for when a sick father sees his son the latter takes the place of medicine.” “We’re not children’s nannies and our country’s no schoolhouse that they should come and go without paying a fee. Get on with you and show you’re a man by paying it right away…”

4.3.8

“And I too — O my shield and my refuge, my succor and my resort, my haven and my shelter, my support and my prop, my foundation and my stay, my strength and my security — am a poet and man of letters who wrote a poem in praise of a certain emir, for which he granted me a hundred gold coins. With half of these I bought provisions for my family, with a quarter I covered what I needed to clothe them, and I have a quarter left. Having heard of the merits of your magnificent, splendid, fertile kingdom and of the treasures and curiosities that it contains, to be found in no other country, I desired to let my eyes roam and my mind saunter in the midst of this luxury for a few days. Who knows? Maybe on seeing it, brilliant tropes that no one has beaten me to will come to my mind and from them I shall fashion, before anything else, a brilliant eulogy in praise of your elevated position and gracious condition, broadcast praise of you in every clime, at every time, skillfully describe your noble qualities in books…” “How many a dilettantish and doleful poet we have in our country! How many are their writings and how little their income! Either you pay the fee, or you turn around and go home, or we consign you to the madhouse.”

4.3.9

Rarely, though, does the puissant, magnificent master honor the ears of the wretched pleader with the like of such negative responses, for mere negativity from the great is a boon. Usually it comes with humiliation and a slap to the back of the neck, a punch on the snout, the pulverizing of a tooth, the slitting open of a belly, the slicing off of a leg, or the snapping of a back. For this reason, the Fāriyāq, being one of those who couldn’t spare any of his limbs, when he resolved to travel, requested five consuls to honor his passport with their stamps. The consuls of Naples, Leghorn, and another city in the Papal States, as well as the consuls of Genoa and France stamped it, because the steamer passes by the ports of each of those cities and docks in them for a few hours. The city of Naples is famous for its numerous carriages, ships, gardens, and forests, Leghorn for the sweetness of its air and the height of its buildings, and the same holds true for the city of Genoa. The Fāriyāq said, “In my opinion, the last is better than the other two. The papal city is as disagreeable as can be, since it has none of the glamour of sovereignty or royalty and there is nothing in it to please the eye.”

4.3.10

When the Fāriyāq reached Marseilles, his trunk was taken to the customs office and he was shown by signs that he was to follow it. The customs officers asked him to open it so that they could search through it, but he thought they wanted to look through his notebooks so that they could know what was in them and said, “I haven’t written satires on your sultan or your metropolitan, so why would you look through my notebooks?” but none of them understood him and he understood none of them. When they were done, they gestured to him to close the trunk and he breathed a sigh of relief. Then one of them started feeling his side with his hands, so that the Fāriyāq imagined that he was “rubbing” him,³⁴⁵ in the sense of seeking blessing from him, because he’d found his notebooks in their strange hand. Afterwards, however, he learned that they were searching him to see if he was carrying any tobacco or intoxicating spirits.

4.3.11

Next he traveled from Marseilles to Paris, where he and his trunk were likewise searched at its customs house. The customs officers of the latter city seemed to believe that their colleagues in the former had gone to sleep while on night duty and the devil had urinated in their ears and as a result their eyes had been made too blurry to see what was in the trunk, or that they’d taken a bribe, like other civil servants. He stayed in Paris three days, in the house occupied by the embassy of the Sublime State,³⁴⁶ where he enjoyed the privilege of kissing the hands of the August Ministers and Honored Marshals Rashīd Pasha and Sāmī Pasha. Then he left Paris for London; these two mighty cities will be described later. From London he went to a village in peasant country, where he hung up his hat and where I too shall now call a halt.

4.4.1

In all his life, the Fāriyāq never spent a more unpleasant and arduous time than he did in that village,³⁴⁷ for the villages of England are altogether without places in which to be entertained, to meet, to enjoy oneself, or to have fun; enjoyment and fun are to be had only in the large cities. In addition, such food and drink as are sold in them are no cause for celebration, for anyone who has a chicken or anything special sends it to one of the nearby towns. Anyone who wishes to cut himself off from the world or feels a calling to be a monk should hie himself to them. As for their women, some of them will cure a loss of appetite or even bestow a raging lust, but the outsider is denied access to them. Every cloven hoof stays close to her bull and the only loose, free-ranging beasts are the old ones.

4.4.2

After two months in these calamitous conditions, he moved to the city of Cambridge, wellspring of the clergy and of the science of theology, since most English clergymen go there or to Oxford to learn divinity and apologetics. These two cities are also home to all other students, in all their diversity of class and standing. The celebrated philosopher Newton was the brilliant son of one of the Cambridge colleges. There the Fāriyāq rented, as is the custom, two sets of rooms in a house, where he stayed, translating the rest of the book referred to earlier.³⁴⁸ In the same house there was a full-breasted girl with wide black eyes, which is how most of the maids there are. Every night the Fāriyāq would see her going up to the room of one of the lodgers. Then, after a time not longer than it takes to say “Good evening!” he would hear her produce a kineto-penetrative gasp. The mistress of the house used to see her coming down from the man’s room at ten or so at night but had no interest in her ascents and descents. In the morning, when the girl came to make the Fāriyāq’s bed, he would stare at her and observe her closely but could see no sign to indicate that she was the gasper. He therefore assumed that it was a delusion born of his fervent desire for penetration. Then night would come and the gasp would be there again, and so would his certainty. With morning the staring would be repeated as would the pretence of virtue, and the doubt would be there and so would the confusion, and so on and so forth. Things got so bad that the Fāriyāq’s mind almost became unhinged and started to spoil the translation, which he had long feared might fall victim to shortcomings and mistakes due to some issue related to women.

4.4.3

Here I have to squat down on my haunches and declare: “This feline characteristic (i.e., the ability to take one’s food without being noticed), though its presence may be observed in women in general, is especially pronounced among English women. Such a woman, if distinguished by those features ascribed to the sexually voracious woman in the ḥadanbadā chapter,³⁴⁹ will put on a show during the day of God-fearingness, piety, reticence, and distaste and look at her devotee as though she had no idea who he was, deluding any who are watching her into thinking she is virtuous and has nothing to do with men. She may have memorized religious sayings and devout narrations to fling at people, making them venerate her and believe her to be righteous, and when you enter her home you may find on the table copies of the Old Testament and the Gospels and other books on worship and self-abnegation (the visible edges of whose pages she will sometimes dirty to give the false impression that she studies them frequently) and a man may not be allowed to utter in her presence the name of any of his members. As a result, the pleasure of such women, according to the rule pronounced by the Fāriyāqiyyah, will be incomplete, because it will lack the element of discussion.³⁵⁰

4.4.4

“And we have it on her authority too that any talk of pleasure must be congruent with the reality. If it involves a man of high status at night, it must be discussed with a woman of high status at night, if someone of low status in the morning, it must be discussed with a woman of low status in the morning, and so on and so forth for all the various other times and persons — unless there is reason to fear that the opportunity will be lost: in other words, if it happened at night, for example, but cannot be discussed that same night, it is permissible to discuss it at dawn or in the morning, or if it involves a man of high status but none of his kind is available, it is permissible to discuss it with a man of low status; the pleasure derived from talking about it will not be spoiled thereby. If by any chance she cannot find anyone from any of these categories, she can discuss it with herself. She may do this by inserting her head into an empty water jar, well, pit, vault, or anything of the sort that produces an echo, and speaking with clear and eloquent tongue of everything that happened to her; the responding echo can take the place of an intimate interlocutor. If, on the other hand, the memory is kept in her breast, chestiness and diphtheria are to be feared.

4.4.5

“It is also a rule in her view that the retelling be congruent with the act. Thus, for the pressings, an accentuation of the voice,³⁵¹ for the jabs, a catch in the airflow, for the movements, a vocalic motion, for the moments of inertia, an inert letter, for the prolongations, a prolongation of the a, for the rushed bits, a gabbling of the recitation, for the softenings of the voice, an apocopation, and for the languorous moments, a slowing of pace. Also, that special attention be given to the doubling of the letter dhāl,³⁵² if the retelling is done in this noble language of ours, and that there be a flirtatious flash to the eyes, floods of saliva, and a moistness to the tongue, and that the hands sketch what the words describe. This being established, you will have gathered that the trait mentioned as present in Englishwomen is an infraction of the rules of pleasure, and it may be said that the pleasure they take in visualization is so strong because it takes the place of two other pleasures, or that they put their heads inside a cask or the like.

4.4.6

“And on the authority of the Fāriyāq, we have it that the beauty that is in women, in all its disparate forms, has ways of speaking, calling out, inviting, pointing, and signaling. For example, there is the type that says to the one who gazes upon it, ‘I’m not interested in little sticks’ and the type that says, ‘Seize your opportunity now!’ or ‘Tarrying has its disadvantages’ or ‘You won’t find me wearied by large numbers’ or ‘Let not the shy-eyed one deceive you!’ or ‘Come hither!’ or ‘O who will bring him to me right now?’ or ‘I see none who can satisfy me’ or ‘The best way to mend a slit is to sew it up’³⁵³ or ‘Where oh where is the one who can satisfy me?’ or ‘Where is Ibn Alghaz?’³⁵⁴ or ‘Where is a member of the Banū Adhlagh?’³⁵⁵ or ‘Before me the hard man is humbled’ or ‘After all that effort, who can find fault with you?’ or ‘No conscious effort is entirely wasted’ or ‘Feed and thou shalt be satisfied’ or ‘To taste is to know’ or ‘To touch is to praise’ or ‘The early bird catches the worm’ or ‘If at first you don’t succeed…’³⁵⁶ or ‘Always count twice’³⁵⁷ or ‘Keep in touch with others and others will keep in touch with you.’ There is also the type that looks at you as though to say, ‘Use cunning’ or ‘Make your visits discreet’ or ‘Watch out for the neighbors’ or ‘Slow and steady wins the race’ or ‘Come early as the crow.’”³⁵⁸

4.4.7

The beauty of Englishwomen is of the sort that falls under the heading of “Where is Ibn Alghaz?” “Where oh where is the one who can satisfy me?” and “Before me the hard man is humbled.” You see them turning disdainfully to one side,³⁵⁹ shying, flying, starting, bolting, flinching, fleeing, proudly turning, racing, baulking, jibbing, bounding, leaping, escaping, like a mirage dissipating, while running full tilt, head high, nose in air, chest out, back straight, and even though the divine creative power has uniquely blessed them with buttocks ample and copious (or so it is reported), yet they apply bustles to these, using the latter to make the former large enough to stop any who lies in wait in his tracks, as though dumb-founded by a head-on encounter, after which he cannot stop his knees from knocking together in wonder and awe at such aggrandizement, his teeth from smoking, his tongue from lolling, his uvula from wagging, his neck from twisting, his jugulars from swelling, and his eyelids from reddening, or himself from being overcome by lust and assaulting her, and the said person is taken by an agitation,³⁶⁰ a trepidation, a commotion, a flutteration, a trembling, a shaking, a quaking, a shuddering, a shivering, a quavering, a rocking, a jolting, a jarring, a jerking, a bobbling, a wobbling, a fainting, a giddiness, a dizziness, a light-headedness, a twitching, a tottering, a teetering, a staggering, a faltering, a languorous folding, a stiffening of the joints, a chattering of the teeth, and a rattling of the jaw, and the four humors set him ablaze, each mix³⁶¹ demanding its own bustle. Ideas and misgivings bombard him, hopes and fears pull him this way and that, choking passions make him splutter, he trembles with lustful emotions, and he doubles over with yearning and desire, in accordance with the words of the poet

I knew you as one celebrated for your generosity,

And the throbbings of longing and hope swept me to you

4.5.1

Just as the women of this country are distinguished by this characteristic, so its men are distinguished by that of kindness to the stranger, once they have been introduced to him. Before he’s been introduced, however, if he greets one of them, the response will be a sidelong glance or a brisk nod of the head. Thus it was that one of their students of Arabic, having learned of the presence of the Fāriyāq and having been informed as to his noble pedigree and plentiful property, came to visit him and invited him to go with him to his house, which was some distance from Cambridge, and to stay there as an honored guest. The Fāriyāq accepted the invitation because the inhabitants of the city, despite the large number of schools and places of learning there, were exceptionally unwelcoming to the stranger, especially if he differed from them in dress; they made so much fun of his red cap, for example, that he often hid in his room and would leave it only at night.

4.5.2

On this topic, he wrote

Cast by the tempest on Cambridge’s shore,

Lest I be seen and mocked by the rabble, I kept to my house.

Then, when night had driven me mad,

I’d go out in safety, like a flittermouse.

4.6.1

When the Fāriyāq had finished his work in that city so crammed with beautiful women, he went to Paris, where he stayed for three days, which wasn’t enough to allow him to write a description of it. We therefore decline to provide one at this point, for a proper description should be comprehensive. From there he went on to Marseilles and then to the island, where God, of His all-encompassing bounty, granted him the boon of beholding his wife in the very house in which he’d left her, though he’d expected to find that she’d flown off with a phoenix or the chimera, and he re-consummated his marriage with her for this the sixth time (the second time having been after he arrived back from the Syrian lands, the third after his return from Tunis, the fourth after he emerged from quarantine quarters with the Honorable Sāmī Pasha, and the fifth after her return from Egypt).

4.6.2

Then he recited

He who’d like to keep wanting his wife

Should take many a woman to bed.

Then let him leave her for a little while—

And he’ll find her like a newlywed

4.7.1

Humankind, as the Fāriyāqiyyah said, has a predisposition toward discontent and ennui, and no sooner does it gain the object of its desire than a desire for other objects takes over. Likewise, given that the married man is a fixture around the house and hears nothing from his wife but “Fetch!” “Buy!” “Renew!” and “Repair!” he dearly wishes he might be a bachelor again, even if it means being a monk in a cell. Then, if he leaves the latter and sees men walking side by side with women, whether wedded wives or lady loves, he becomes fed up with his cell, and the longing to have a wife with him and to walk with her like those others (even if their promenading is leading them at that very moment to trial and litigation before His Honor the Judge)³⁹⁴ rises within him. In such cases, the husband who never leaves his nest ought constantly to imagine to himself that he is a stranger in a distant land living with people who dupe him, cheat him, and inflame his senses with their bustles, or that his wife has left him to go to people who will compete to fill her glass and lay her down on an ostrich-feather palliasse, or who, should they flirt with her, will find she tells them “Yes!” and, on making love to her, find that she to them will acquiesce. If he does this, the chant of “Fetch!” and “Buy!” will seem less unbearable. Here is a table, composed on the authority of the Fāriyāq, in which he sets out the conditions under which the married man says,

4.7.2

4.8.1

The Fāriyāq continued to treat the foul of breath but was at his wits’ end, for the treatment did no good. He tried, therefore, to wiggle his way out of this trade, and all the more so as he was by nature given to boredom and disquiet. During this period, it so happened that the August Master, Aḥmad Pasha, Honored Bāy of the Autonomous Province of Tunis, made a trip to France and distributed vast sums of money, that were everywhere spoken of, to the poor of Marseilles and Paris. Then he returned to his seat. It therefore occurred to the Fāriyāq to write him a congratulatory ode, which he did, sending it by hand with someone to deliver to His Excellency. Before only a few days had passed the captain of a warship knocked on his door. When he had come in and settled himself, he told the Fāriyāq, “Your ode has reached Our Most Noble Master and he has commanded me to bring you to him in my ship.”

4.8.2

When the Fāriyāq heard this, he took it as an omen that he was soon to be freed from his trade and declared, “I swear I thought the days had left no market where poetry might find a buyer, but if God wishes good fortune for His slave not even poetry can get in the way of it. Rictulate, dear risible Fāriyāqiyyah, and vociferate (though not in alarm)! Today not even she-wolves could do me harm! Dunk yourself in every ounce of unguent you possess; dab it and daub it, and take silk brocade for your dress! On such a day as this, our copulatorium must be redolent of musk—even its limpest occupant must experience lust! The giddy-pate, on such a day, must run amok and enjoy his luck! On such a day as this, the swooning prude³⁹⁹ faints with pleasure, the stud that shies from service gives full measure, the wide-wooed woofer and back-passage bleeder⁴⁰⁰ bear twins, the single-barreled bawd,⁴⁰¹ followed quickly by the termagant, throw pups despite their sins! Up with you, woman, and from today play the mooning she-camel that lives its false calf to lick, for I see curly shavings on the fire stick!”⁴⁰² The captain, to whom these words sounded like a foreign tongue, asked, “What language is this that you speak? I swear I didn’t understand a word of what you said! Is this the tongue you’ll carry in your head to Tunis? Are these the words with which you will address our master and the great men of his realm?” “No,” replied the Fāriyāq. “It’s just a private language we’ve agreed on between ourselves and use only rarely.” The captain then said, “You must get ready to travel, and you may bring your family with you if you like, for our lord is the most generous of men and such a thing could never upset him.” So the Fāriyāq and his family got ready, embarked on the ship, and after a twelve-day voyage (the wind, as usual, being contrary), reached Ḥalq al-Wād, where the aforementioned master commanded that they be put up at the admiral’s house.

4.8.3

Here we must draw attention to the propensity for generosity with which the Almighty has distinguished the Arabs to the exclusion of all other races, for the invitation of the previously mentioned master was not intended for everyone who trod the boards of the Fāriyāq’s house: on the contrary, it was peculiar to him alone. However, when news of the arrival of his eulogizer, with family, reached his ears, he was not upset and did not say, “What an ill-mannered guest you are and how deserving of a slap on the face for coming to us and bringing others with you!” Likewise, he didn’t say to his captain, “You disobeyed protocol and the orders of your monarch, so we shall strip from your shoulders the epaulettes of your rank that you be a warning to those who take heed!” On the contrary, the captain continued to bear the honor of his epaulettes while the Fāriyāq continued to enjoy his services and was lodged in the most generous style in the admiral’s house and supplied with ample goods and plentiful good things. If a Frankish notable invited someone and that person went and brought with him anyone but his own self, the notable would confront him when they met; in fact, he wouldn’t even meet with him at all. Indeed, when their womenfolk used to invite the Fāriyāqiyyah, they would tell her, “The invitation is for you only,” meaning that she was not to bring her maid and her child with her.

4.8.4

I’d be intrigued to know which of their kings ever sent a warship so that he might bring a poet into his presence and shower him with money and costly gifts. I swear that all anyone who writes eulogies to their kings ever gets by way of reward is patronizing treatment and ridicule. Even though no people are more punctilious in insisting that others thank them and praise them, they turn their noses up at a poet who, in hopes of gaining their favor, eulogizes them.⁴⁰³ For whom, then, is all that money that they store away? Against what disaster do they set it aside, when they are already well-clothed and fed, well-watered and banqueted? Are they afraid they’ll be laid low by a surfeit of children or by poverty, or do they believe that a gift to a poet is an extravagance?

4.8.5

This fact — that generosity is a trait peculiar to the Arabs — explains why no truly glorious and distinguished poets equal to theirs have emerged in any other nation at any place or time, reckoning from the Days of Barbarism to the end of the caliphs and the Arab empire. The Greeks boast of a single poet, namely Homer (Ὅμηρος), the Romans of Virgil, the Italians of Tasso, the Austrians of Schiller,⁴⁰⁴ the French of Racine and Molière, and the English of Shakespeare, Milton, and Byron, while the number of Arab poets who surpass all of these is too large to count. Indeed, over one period during the days of the caliphs there may have been more than two hundred poets, all of them brilliant and outstanding, the reason being that “purses,” as they say, “open throats.” Moreover, there is no comparison between the poetry of the Arabs and theirs: they do not observe the rules for rhyme-consonants and rhymes⁴⁰⁵ and do not have poems with a single rhyme or stylistically exquisite embellishments, despite the large number of metrical infractions with which their verse is stuffed. In fact, their poetry is less demanding than our rhymed prose, and not one of the poets of the Franks would have been good enough to be a boon companion to his king: the highest degree of good fortune and favor any of them may reach is to be licensed to recite some of their verses in certain theaters.⁴⁰⁶ And again, what shame would attach to the august person of the king from taking a poet as the companion of his potations and conversations? Or is one to suppose that the poets of the Franks are so numerous that the king couldn’t make up his mind which to choose? Tell me, what are they, compared to his auspicious treasury? How many prose writers are there now in England, how many poets in France?

4.8.6

And here I must draw attention to a further point: rarely does a poet, Arab or otherwise, come to prominence who pleases all. Some poets like eloquent and ringing words more than innovation in meaning while some concern themselves with meaning more than with words. Some search for the refined word and the harmonious expression, others for amatory or other effect. All these traits are unlikely to consort together in a single poet, just as not every-body’s predilections are likely to be in concert regarding them. Any connoisseur of women who is an oryx bull, rubbery and blubbery, a silver-tongued sweet-talker, a lady’s man, one who delights in their company, their fervent supporter, their friend and companion, their follower, their soul mate, their constant visitor, who dies to talk with them, a beaver-boring beetle,(1) bruising their bungholes wherever they go, sniffing around wherever they pee, will have no interest in derring-do and snicker-snee. He will believe that the words of Imruʾ al-Qays that go⁴⁰⁷

Whenever he whimpered behind her, she turned to him

With half her body, her other half unshifted under me

4.9.1

After the Fāriyāq returned home, an acquaintance came and asked him why he was leaving, so he took him aside and said, his eye trained on the door to his wife’s room, that the Jewesses of Tunis were still beautiful and that their race hadn’t yet been turned into monkeys, as the Christians pretend — that only applied to the men. From behind the door his wife said, “I heard what you said. You’re wrong — it’s the women who were turned into monkeys,” to which he replied, “Since you heard our private conversation and none of my secrets are hidden from you, come and join us, so that we may continue this pleasant discourse.”

4.9.2

“You’re quite right,” she declared, “not the softest whisper escapes my ears, nor the tiniest speck my eyes” and she came out into the middle of the parlor and said, “What I like about the dress of the Tunisian men is that their pantaloons are short, which makes their calves visible.” The Fāriyāq continued, “Then I said, ‘You’re wrong. The dress of the women is more pleasing and alluring; the men’s calves may be covered by socks, not to mention that their pantaloons cover their midriffs and adjacent parts. The calves of the women, on the other hand, are in plain sight and nothing hides their posteriors. You will see a woman walking during the hot weather and everything that’s rounded and domed, concave and coned, well-turned and tumescent may be seen through her mantle.’ She responded, ‘I wish women’s clothes could take the shape of their bodies.’ I said, ‘That would be an abomination, from two perspectives: if the woman wearing them were big-buttocked, big-breasted, and big-thighed, she’d be a source of strife among the people and keep God’s servants from their work, but if she were as wide as she was tall, or ugly, she’d be a plague upon people and force them to take refuge in their houses lest she bring them bad luck.’

4.9.3

“‘Tell me why,’ she said, ‘the men in this country dress in form-fitting garments and no one reproaches them and there’s nothing forbidden about looking at them. Does this mean that everything men do is to be swallowed with ease and everything women do choked on? I swear this dress is better than that worn by men in our country: there you find men who wear pantaloons and walk with their legs held far apart like ewes waiting to be milked, and sometimes these pantaloons get wrapped around them, in front or in back, and prevent them from walking, to say nothing of running. Let us suppose, for example, that a man wearing such pantaloons were at his place of work and someone came and told him, “A bonny, strapping young man came to visit you today at your house, and when he didn’t find you, he stayed to wait for you and he’s still there, right now, and your wife gave him a warm welcome and made him feel right at home, and it was she who insisted he stay and ordered the maid to be sick, or to pretend to be sick, so that you wouldn’t have any misgivings, because if she’d sent her to you and they’d been left alone together, you’d have been suspicious and thought that his visit to her must have been prearranged and that she, and not a longing to see your ugly face, was the object of the visit,” and other things to make the blood boil and the eyelids swell. Under circumstances such as these, how can he rush home with the thing between his thighs knocking him this way and that?’

4.9.4

“Then she laughed and went on, ‘Indeed, and you’ll see a man walking along wearing a jubbah with its skirts sweeping the ground so that everything on it that’s polluting and filthy sticks to them, and when he reaches his house, he fills it with a bad smell, enough of which clings to his wife to make one avert one’s eye from her even if she be a sweet-scented woman, for, as they say, “bad smells drive out good.” Furthermore, out of one jubbah many of those things the Franks wear down to their waists⁴¹⁷ may be made and a man who wears one is left with no shape or style, for it hides his whole figure and neither his midriff nor any other part of him may be seen. God would not have created humans in the form that they have unless He had wanted it to be visible the way it is.’ I replied, ‘I have seen the Franks in their own countries in summer and in winter and, behold, they cover their buttocks with those tight jubbahs of theirs and do not walk around outside with their backsides showing the way the shameless folk on this island do.’ ‘And what of their bellies and thighs?’ she asked. ‘Exposed,’ I said. ‘So that makes up for the other,’ she said, ‘but when both are covered, it’s horrible. I swear, people have yet, to this day, to arrive at a good-looking form of dress that goes with the shape of the body, is suitable for work, and has some style. I don’t like that hat they wear and it’s ill-suited to the face, whether on a woman or a man, because it looks like nothing so much as a bin,⁴¹⁸ basket, caddy, swad, punnet, molly, scuttle, trug, frail, haskie, peck, prog, pancheon, bag, barge, sack, barrel, box, bran-tub, wash-tub, poke, cawl, pandan, vat, piss-pot, chamber-pot, jam-jar, firkin, cask, hamper, pannier, satchel, gunny-bag, leather bottle, leathern pottle, tun, or platter, and all those turbans are even uglier.

4.9.5

“‘And those cloaks that the women of Egypt wear have nothing attractive about them, as well as being expensive. Uglier than all the foregoing is that waistband that the men tie around themselves, for it fills up the midriff and the chest and prevents food from being digested. Uglier still is the tape with which they tie their pantaloons below the knee, because it stops the blood from running properly through the legs. The only good thing about the dress of Frankish women is that it is adapted to the bustle. I have spent many a night puzzling over this and trying to invent attire that looks good and is alluring, graceful, elegant, dignified, and as in harmony with the shape of the body as possible, and so far God has failed to inspire me. Maybe it’ll come to me soon, and I’ll be awarded a place among the creative minds of the age.’

4.9.6

“‘In all this creativity of yours,’ I asked, ‘do you never give a thought to economy?’ ‘Never,’ she replied, ‘because money is never better spent than on a woman.’ ‘Quite the contrary,’ I said. ‘It is never better spent than on a closet such as this,’ and I indicated the bookcase. ‘Can you hug a book at night,’ she answered, ‘and sleep with it under a single blanket?’ ‘When a man sleeps with his wife under a blanket at night,’ I responded, ‘she isn’t bedecked with garments and ornaments. Quite the contrary, she’s naked among some groups, and wears a single shift or is wrapped in a single sheet or blanket among others, thus fulfilling the promise of the verses that go

One dresses his best for most of the day

So that at night of a damsel he may take advantage.

Then, when they’re settled in bed, his ass may be seen,

Bare as a billy goat’s under its little appendage.’

4.9.7

“‘You’re wrong,’ she said. ‘A woman who decks herself out and wears her adornments is alluring by day and arousing for her husband by night.’ ‘Indeed,’ I said, ‘and for her neighbor too.’ ‘Say rather,’ she responded, ‘“and for herself too.”’ ‘I didn’t grasp that final scintillating point,’ I said. ‘Does a woman feel a desire to make love when she sees her own adornments?’ ‘Without a doubt,’ she replied. ‘For adornment is a form (and what a form!) of pulchritude and everything pulchritudinous puts her in mind of a handsome man. Even if she sees a perfect horse, or a precious object, or any of the adornments of earth or sky, the first thing to enter her mind will be a male distinguished by beauty.’ ‘Pulchritude, then,’ I said, ‘is the visualization of something absolute rather than something specific?’ ‘If it’s the thing most attractive to the eye, then it’ll be the thing most readily seized on by the mind,’ she replied. ‘Otherwise, any old thing would do.’ ‘And if we were to suppose that the husband was present and assuming that he was not without at least a touch of beauty, would the thought of him cross her mind?’ I asked. ‘If he could be accommodated within the terms of intercourse and copulation, he might cross it, though not in terms of his specific attributes but as an example of the attributes of the absolute.’⁴¹⁹

4.9.8

“‘I have already noted that point,’ I said, ‘and understood its true meaning. But let me ask you a question, purely heuristically and with no ulterior motive or parti pris: should not a wife put her husband before all others in terms of recall and visualization, given that he has a right to certain prerogatives and privileges, and in view of the fact that he is her shaykh and father, her lawful mate and conjugal benefactor, her bedmate,⁴²⁰ her playmate, her copemate, her messmate, her tentmate, her roommate, her classmate, her pewmate, her bunkmate, her waymate, her cupmate, her tablemate, her couchmate, her watchmate, her clubmate, her intimate?’ ‘Indeed,’ she replied, ‘as well as being her watcher, her insulter, her disturber, her pursuer, her angerer, her attacker, her pesterer, her pouncer, her scrutinizer, her opposer, her clutcher, her jostler, her name-caller, her needler, her hair puller, her tress-tugger, not to mention the one who spies on her, stalks her, raises the alarm against her, beats the clapper-board⁴²¹ to raise the hue and cry against her, tells tales on her, and is her nightmare, not to mention her guard and whistle-blower.’

4.9.9

“I went on, ‘Our master, the author of the Qāmūs, says, “A woman’s dall or dalāl (‘coquettishness’) with her husband is when she shows boldness toward him in terms of flirtatiousness and dressing up, as though she were quarreling with him when there is no quarrel.”⁴²² He says too, “tabaʿʿalat means ‘the woman obeyed her baʿl (“husband”)’ or ‘she put on her finery for him,’” and elsewhere “taqayyaʾat means ‘she displayed herself to her husband and threw herself upon him’ (End).” This goes to show that her husband and none other should be the object of every action a woman takes.’ She replied, ‘Your friend’s⁴²³ linking of these actions exclusively to marriage can be only his personal interpretation, or he was following the lead of some particularly jealous and jaundiced philologists. It is men’s habit to claim that women were created only to please, entertain, and flatter their husbands, and they have created the language in such a way as to serve their exercise of tyrannical power over and violence against women. This is despite the fact that language is a female,⁴²⁴ and had women created it (which would have been more proper, given that all generation and creation must be female in nature), they would have created words denoting men who think only of their wives, and how men should avert their glances from all but these, sicken when they sicken, groan when they groan, dress them and divest them of their clothes, comb their hair and obtain some sweepings from it to gaze on if they are ever away from her, and spend everything they have to keep them happy, as well as denoting men who think their wives are the best of women, whose love for their wives increases the more they contemplate other women or who close their eyes whenever another woman appears before them or faint or fall flat on their faces or are taken by dizzy spells or acute diarrhea, and men who get hold of her picture and put it everywhere on their walls, in their books, and among their possessions, with her shown sometimes standing, sometimes lying down, sometimes stretched out on her back, and sometimes flat out on her front.

4.9.10

“‘Anyway, we have left the language to you and you can do with it as you like, so why can’t you leave us our thoughts and ideas, which are neither voweled nor unvoweled?⁴²⁵ And as to your claim to prerogatives and privilege, let me tell you, as one who feels no need to mumble at you out of hypocrisy or prudishness, that the man has no prerogative over the woman in anything whatsoever, for there is no prerogative belonging to the man the like of which does not also belong to the woman. As to men’s wardship of their wives, I have to draw your attention here to a nice point with which few have engaged, namely that two individuals may be involved in a commercial partnership, for example, or an invitation, or a marriage, with one of the two believing privately that he is doing his partner a favor, while the other, to whom the favor supposedly has been done, inwardly believes and outwardly proclaims that he is hard done by. An example of a marriage of this sort would be if the girl has been in love, before marriage, with a young man but has been unable to marry him, so she marries someone else, from whom she witnesses deeds and habits that she finds unacceptable, and then she happens to think of the other, whom she failed to marry, and says to herself, “He was perhaps innocent of such conduct, and if I’d married him, I’d now be living the happiest of lives,” while at the same time her husband believes that he has done her a great favor in marrying her after she’d failed to marry her first beloved. Men and women must pay close attention to the conditions surrounding a marriage before they insert their heads into its noose. A man should not marry a woman who was in love with another man before him and a woman should not marry a man who avoided marriage out of fear of expenses and impoverishment, or who was in love with another woman when a bachelor.

4.9.11

“‘An example of a commercial partnership of this sort would be if one of the two partners is the one who advances the capital out of his own pocket and puts the burden of responsibility for managing things on his comrade’s shoulders; each of them then believes that he is doing the other a favor. An example of an invitation of this sort would be if someone invites you to lunch in the afternoon while it is your custom to take lunch at noon, or he offers food you find unpalatable (for the belief that what he finds agreeable must be agreeable to others is an entrenched part of everyone’s nature) or a tiny piece of meat, or a mere crust of bread, or the smallest sip of something to drink, unaware that the stomach of a person invited to a feast grows larger at the house of the host and his guts more capacious, or if he invites you to his house and the latter is so far from the city that you are obliged to hire a boat at a cost equivalent to him to that of two lunches and two dinners, or if you are at the house, for example, of some Frankish notable engaged in some business of his, and he is aware that you have gone for a number of hours without eating and he orders his servant to bring you a morsel consisting of bread and of that smegma-like cheese of theirs, at which moment you are hungry enough to eat his brains. Which of you, in cases such as these, is the doer of the favor and which the one to whom the favor is done?

4.9.12

“‘Or it might be that someone is in the service of the emir and the master believes that his servant is indebted to him because he takes his money while the servant believes that his master is indebted to him because he is taking from him his youth and his health, or that someone visits a friend of his to spend the evening in idle chatter while the one visited is suffering from worry and anxiety, so both the visitor and the one visited think that he is the one who is conferring a benefit on his companion — and the same, by analogy, is true of the teacher and the taught, the eulogizer and the eulogized, the singer and the one sung to.

4.9.13

“‘It follows that a man shouldn’t think he is doing his wife a favor just because he is feeding and clothing her. The rights of women are too many to list.’ ‘I have taken that in,’ I said, ‘lock, stock, and barrel. But tell me, what sort of men do women love most?’ ‘If I tell you,’ she replied, ‘you’ll kick up a row.’ ‘Speak,’ I said, ‘and don’t worry! Conversation’s carpet has been unrolled and will not be rolled back up until we reach its end.’ ‘At the End of Days,⁴²⁶ then!’ she replied. ‘So, you must know that the perky-breasted young female loves adolescent boys and juveniles, on condition that they’re good-looking. The young woman loves young men, the same condition pertaining, and may become intimate with an older man in the belief that he will be kinder and more loving. This, however, is not to be called love because it has its origin in self-interest, it being a condition of love that it be devoid of any advantage-seeking — though, sad to say, any lover, should continued lack of access to his beloved and absence of any good from him become a reality, will grow tired of him and may even come to hate him; thus “love,” in my opinion, is synonymous with “benefit.” The young woman who has moved beyond the age of marriage loves both the two previously mentioned sorts and those who are a little older, the same condition pertaining, and the middle-aged woman loves all three plus the older man, the same condition pertaining. The old woman loves the lot.’

4.9.14

“‘What do you think of mustaches?’ I asked. ‘They are an adornment to the mouth in the same way that eyebrows are to the eyes,’ she said. ‘And beards?’ I asked. ‘Old men’s embellishments,’ she said. ‘Side-whiskers?’ I asked. ‘Squeal! An adornment for the looker and the looked-upon alike,’ she answered. ‘What element of beauty do they possess,’ I asked, ‘especially when the mustaches have been shaved off?’ ‘They are,’ she said, ‘what calyxes are to a flower, leaves to a bough, a velvet edging to a robe, a hedge to a garden, a halo to the moon!’”

4.9.15

While they were talking, someone knocked on the door. He opened it and there stood a man with a letter from the aforementioned committee containing an invitation asking both the Fāriyāq and his family to come to them. When he acquainted his wife with this, she almost took flight out of joy and pleasure and said, “How blessed a morning is today’s, how full of promise its sun!” Then she went over to the trunk and packed everything needed for the journey except the Qāmūs. “Not so fast!” said the Fāriyāq. “There is still much to be done before our departure.” She crouched then, like one waiting to pounce, and said, “Tell me what, all at one go, so that I can take care of the greater part myself!” “Calm down and be patient,” he said. “Your recent statements have put my mind in a spin — pray God the translation of the book isn’t spoiled as a result!” Then she left him and busied herself with her own affairs, and I too shall leave him to his obsessing over side-whiskers, for I am not obliged to participate with him in that.

4.10.1

Among the baggage needed for this journey was, over and above the Qāmūs, the following precondition: that if the Fāriyāq were to absent himself from the island for two years, he would, on his return, be reappointed to his original position. He therefore wrote a petition to the ruler and settled down to await the answer. After a few days, the answer arrived accepting the condition. Everything was, he found, prepared for their departure, for his wife had neglected nothing in the interval, and all that was needed was for their passport to be honored by the consul’s stamp and for the final stamping fee to be paid. It remained unstamped, however, by the consul of Leghorn. When, therefore, they reached that port and the Fāriyāq wanted to enter the country, the head of the customs authority prevented him. The Fāriyāq told him, “I will give you here what I should have given the consul on the island.” “No,” said the man. “Here you must give twice as much.” The Fāriyāq refused and decided to return to the ship but a man with a skiff caught sight of him and his wife and when informed of their situation told them, “I’ll get you into the country for half of what that thief of a customs officer demanded from you.” They got into his skiff and he took them by a secret route till they were inside the country. Then they returned to the ship, which took them on to Genoa and then Marseilles, from which they departed for Paris. There the Fāriyāq met Monsieur de Lamartine, the famous poet of the French language, and they stayed for a few days, which considerably trimmed their purse. (Tip: in France, don’t stay at a hotel for the English, and in the latter’s country, don’t stay in a hotel for the former.) Then they departed for London, of which they had dreamed.

4.10.2

When the Fāriyāqiyyah beheld the city with its marvelous curios and exotic, desirable delights, resplendent shops and splendid lights, she said, “My oh my! My dreams fell short of the waking reality! What a wonderful place in which to live, and how nice it would be if we never had to leave! Albeit I note among its women something strange and new.” The Fāriyāq resumed: “I said, ‘Thank God you started with the women, for that augurs well for the book that they want me to translate! But to what novelty do you refer?’ ‘I have heard you declare, on the authority of some leading figure, that “women’s brains are in their vaginas” but I observe that the brains of the women of this microcosm of the world are in their backsides.’ ‘Explain,’ I said. ‘I didn’t catch your drift.’

4.10.3

“She said, ‘If a woman throws herself, recklessly, between the contradictory witnesses of craft and nature, i.e., if she makes, through craft, a great amount out of something which, in the form in which God bestowed it, was of little account, and provokes people to have the vapors (the benefit here going all to the neighbors) or, to put it differently, were she to say, using the wordless language of her body, “I own a source of wind like a twister that sorts ill with the tight-fister, a drum inside which there’s a pipe for every piper to finger, a whistle that whistles in both satiety and hunger, a deep-bottomed tun in need, when it brims, of a bung, a cup that for a cover begs, a hole just right for pegs, a deep cave or narrow but spreading ravine fit to protect a fleeing sultan (he’d never be seen!), a dome with a mighty frieze and nests for both birds and bees, a refuge for the lair-less in the form of a burrow, a shameless, ever-ready, water-holding rock furrow, a hollow pecked out in the dirt where eggs may be laid in one big spurt, a puling purseful of dung kept closed with a thong, a dip like that for the dripping in a mound of crumbled bread and meats that foully fumes (especially when intercourse is foregone in the days before a feast), a waterskin with a tied-up spout whose string, if undone, will bring destruction about, a milkskin which, if it suffer a prick, will turn the air thick (and oh how thick!), a bellows at whose puffing sparks rise high, a scorching wind which, when it blows in the summer, makes men shout, ‘Fly! Fly!’”; i.e., if she is born and finds no coeval with whom to consort and therefore obtains one and puts it behind her to lend her support; i.e., if she makes it her sole custom to turn what’s flat into humps and what’s squashed into bumps; i.e., if she takes those who look at her for fools and signals to them, “I have a fellow on which you may sit, or a pillow”; i.e., if she winks at them as though to say, “Beneath where sprouts the desert rose⁴²⁷ on the desert floor, there lies the precious ore”; i.e., if she stuffs her backside with cushions, then sets off, gazing at it, admiring it, flaunting it, showing it off, coveting it, feeling good about it, and using it to allure, then finds another woman who outdoes her in this regard, and then this other in turn finds another who beats her too in terms of stuffing, it would be more proper to say that their brains are in their backsides.’ (Thus the gist of what she said, though for ‘desert rose’ she said ‘pumpkin,’ for ‘coeval with whom to consort’ she said ‘back-hugger,’ and for ‘backside’ she said ‘booty.’ ‘I.e.’ is as per the original.)

4.10.4

“I replied, ‘It’s a custom with them, and you shouldn’t quarrel with custom. Our women too have many customs that are disliked in this country, such as painting the eyelids with antimony, penciling in eyebrows, coloring, dyeing, tingeing, staining, striping, dotting, plain-staining, or staining with designs the hands, hair, or fingertips with henna or sometimes with saffron, tattooing, depilation, shaving the face or the head with a razor, removing facial hair using a thread,⁴²⁸ plucking out or uprooting the hair, shaving the head, removing the pubic hair, using medicaments to narrow the vulva or using a bung made of perfumed rags for the same purpose or the same using a different verb, douching, cleaning the anus after defecation with water or a stone, cosseting slave girls to make them salable and fattening them up, braiding the hair and intertwining the braids with ribbons, and paring and rounding the fingernails, or the exposing of the breast and wiggling of the hips by those who have been pinched or palpated, had their nipples brushed by someone’s hand or gently tweaked or pawed. To these you may add payment of compensation for rape, the “pelvic egg,”⁴²⁹ circumcision of girls, intercourse with young girls, and other such things.’

4.10.5

“I had barely reached the end of this brief speech before she flew into a rage and bristled her feathers ready for a fight, saying, ‘Your words have sealed your doom, your meddling exposed you for what you are, to me and to everyone in this room. How do you know that they should not moan and sigh if winked at, or pirouette if pinched, or use the scented rag or the raisin pits if the well’s so wide it swallows everything in gulps, or is too deep to fill and gurgles and glups, or if it’s large and flabby and groans like a large door swinging open — tight tunnels being preferred by frequent fuckers — unless you yourself have had experience of them in this regard?’ ‘It’s a widely bruited matter,’ I replied, ‘thoroughly documented, much noted, celebrated, often alluded to, famous — a scandal hidden from none. It’s as though one were to say, “The sky’s above us,” or “The ground’s beneath us,” such things not being considered speech by the grammarians.⁴³⁰ Are you going to get angry over something that can’t even be called speech?’ ‘I don’t care,’ she said, ‘about the speech, my anger is at the deeds. With me you’re all talk, with others all do. This isn’t how married men are supposed to be. It is not with this that the respectable wife is tasked. It’s amazing — you feel no shame in asking, while I feel ashamed at being asked! Would that there were a judge to decide between a man and his wife, so that everyone might know which of the two is the oppressor and which the oppressed!’ ‘Say rather,’ I responded, ‘“Would that there were a woman to judge!” for a male judge, by virtue of his being, thank God, a male, will find for the man over the woman.’ ‘Quite the contrary!’ she said. ‘The male judge will always find the woman to be in the right over the man, especially if she breaks down before him and blubbers, and so will all men, unless it’s their own wives.’ ‘Hats off to you, as a woman expert in the affairs of men, and a man expert in the ways of women! I belong to the school of His Honor, for if I was ever present at a dispute between a man and a woman and saw the man to have a clean-plucked beard and a pocket with a hole in it,⁴³¹ I’d decide the woman was innocent, especially if she burst into tears, in which case I’d be ready to die for her. But hold on! Don’t raise your hackles or growl, or stand tall the better to hurl abuse, strike out, make ready for a fight, or scowl! These days I can do no more than look; where dying for women’s concerned, it’s out of my hands.

4.10.6

“‘Tell me, though, what is this inborn trait of yours, you women, that lets you weep and laugh at the drop of a hat and for any reason? We men weep only for you and laugh only because of you and for your sake.’ ‘The reason,’ she said, ‘is that women are finer by nature, nobler by creation, nicer in understanding, more refined of imagination, softer of heart and more tender, faster to hear and see and more kind, quicker to be moved and more penetrating of mind, lighter of touch, deriving from both this world and the next more pleasure, more eager to learn, bolder to fall in love, greedier to snatch up every precious treasure…’—‘Stop! Stop!’ I said—‘… more serene of thought,’ she said—‘and more ready for conjugal sport,’ I responded—‘… more effective at getting her way’—‘and at saying nay’—‘as a friend more loyal’—‘and more willing the wheels of gossip to oil’—‘… readier to hand out charitable grants’—‘and do the horizontal dance’—‘… more trustful’—‘and more lustful’—‘… more likely to provide the needy with a treat’—‘and more often in heat’—‘… longer of love’—‘and of clitoral glove’—‘… more steadfast in passion’—‘and in swallowing and coition’—‘… more agreeable a scold’—‘and to raise a leg more bold’—‘… more inventive at finding acceptable ways to pass on thoughtful tips’—‘and to lick the leftovers off your lips’—‘… with a voice more melodious’—‘and a beaver less commodious’—‘… quicker to empathize’—‘and to let your legs rise’—‘… sweeter of discourse’—‘and in talking dirty during intercourse’—‘… with teeth yet pearlier’—‘not to mention,’ I said, ‘your vaginal hernia.’

4.10.7

“Then said I, ‘Your first discourse, on backsides, was enough to give Job the hump and make every wrung, strung, and unhung member jump, and now you’ve started praising the virtues of women, as is your wont, and recounting their charms, and you’ll end up by giving away all their secrets. Do you want me to present myself to our friend⁴³² in a state of insanity or imbecility and have the translation of the book go badly?’ ‘If you go mad here,’ she replied, ‘you won’t be able to hide away at home as one can in the Levant (for there are more madmen in the houses there than there are in the monasteries).’ ‘Perhaps that’s what seduced you with such tormenting excitement,⁴³³ so desist from this provoking, inflaming discourse, by Him who gave you that tongue so coarse, and prepare yourself to set off for the one for whom I’ll be working.’ ‘Isn’t he in London?’ she asked. ‘No,’ I replied, ‘in the countryside.’ ‘Woe is me! The countryside and peasants?’ she cried. ‘Who could bear to leave this city to live among savages — for peasants are the same in every country.’ ‘Afterward,’ I told her, ‘we shall move to a city thronging with men.’⁴³⁴ ‘Are there men there who don’t have women?’ she asked. ‘There are women,’ I answered, ‘but they’re few in comparison to the men.’ ‘A few women are a lot,’ she said.”

4.10.8

The next day they set off. When they were on the train, however, and the guard called out the name of the village for which they were bound,⁴³⁵ the Fāriyāq was so preoccupied with their earlier duel of wits that he failed to pay attention and they went for a long way before he asked one of the silent passengers about his destination and the man told him, “You missed it.” Then he got off, regretting his negligence in having failed to remind the guard, and they reached the village only after walking a long way and becoming very tired.

Note: The railway tracks in England are like the lines on the palm of your hand: via them the traveler can go wherever he wants — up or down, east or west.

4.11.1

They now took up residence in that village and the Fāriyāqiyyah began to learn the language of the people. One day her husband said to her, “I want to give you a piece of advice on a matter related to the learning of that magnificent language.” “Out with it!” she replied. “It will be the first piece of advice destined for my ears to have left your mouth.” “And my heart too,” he said. “Speak!” she said. “It is typical of beginners in the science of foreign languages,” he said, “to learn at the very first words relating to the human body, such as sinews, muscles, fleshy parts, and so on.” “I already knew that,” she responded, “so it doesn’t count as advice.”

4.11.2

The Fāriyāq resumed, “I said, ‘Glory be to God, “Man is a creature of haste”!⁴³⁶ I simply wanted to tell you that anyone who wishes to learn this language should begin with the names of things divine, not earthly. The people put on a show of piety and righteousness. Even their prostitutes, flat on their backs, bellow now a prayer, now an obscenity.’ ‘So there are prostitutes here?’ she asked, anxiously. ‘Not at all,’ I replied. ‘The people of the small villages in this country get married just like everyone else and have no opportunity for debauchery. The point is, I’m telling you that they all put on a show of godliness, so, that being the case, you shouldn’t right now be learning the names for the fleshy parts. You’ll learn all that soon enough. In fact, I have no doubt you will learn it without an instructor and memorize it without a prompter, through your own inquiries and inspiration, for your quickness of understanding, acuteness of mind, and genius make everything difficult easy to you.’ ‘I swear,’ she responded, ‘if such words were advice, wisdom would be the cheapest thing there is. Pray tell me, how old are you?’ ‘What has this question to do with what I just said?’ I asked. ‘Which season are we in?’ she asked. ‘Autumn,’ I answered. ‘So it’s the fault of the time of year,’ she said. ‘Are you trying to tell me I’ve reached the autumn of my mind?’ I asked. ‘If you haven’t,’ she answered, ‘how is one to explain this nonsense you’re voiding onto me and calling advice?’ ‘Do what you like, then,’ I said. ‘I’m preaching to the wind and talking to the deaf.’”

4.11.3

One morning, after a few days had gone by, she came to the Fāriyāq and said, “How wonderfully this language falls on the ear and the mind, and how light it is on the tongue! Today I learned by heart a few lines of verse without any difficulty, except that I didn’t understand what they mean. Would you be kind enough to explain them to me?”⁴³⁷ “By all means,” he said. “Right now, if you’d like. Show me your lightning so I can give you my rain!” “How full of nonsense you are!” she said. “All I meant was, ‘Tell me what they mean.’” The Fāriyāq continued, “‘And all I meant was the meaning,’ I said, ‘for I know very well that you didn’t have anything else in mind. But recite to me what you’ve learned.’ So she said

Up up up thou art wanted,

She is weary and tormented,

Do her justice she is hunted

By her husband, she has fainted.

4.12.1

After the Fāriyāqiyyah had stayed a while in the land of the peasants, where there was no solace for the stranger and nothing pleasant but the greenery, her patience wore thin, her heart became oppressed, and she was overcome by ennui and anxiety. One day, she said to her husband, “How strange is this world and its ways, the strangest thing in it being this rational beast that walks upon its surface! How strange that no matter how many nights and days pass over him, his desires delude him, while his hopes beguile and distract him in vain, and no matter how hard he runs to catch up with them, they stay ahead of him and keep the same distance from him as his shadow! Each day he believes that he is smarter than he was the day before and that the next day will be better than this. I used to think, when we were on the island, that the English were the happiest of people and enjoyed the greatest peace of mind. But when we came to their country and lived among them, lo and behold, their peasants turned out to be the most wretched of God’s creatures. Look at the inhabitants of the villages around us and scrutinize them well and you will see that they are no different from savages. A peasant of theirs sets off in the morning to toil and travail, then returns to his house in the evening without having seen any other human being and without any having seen him. At night he lies down to sleep and the next day he gets up early to more of the same, and so it continues. He is like a machine that turns at an even pace: it has neither gain nor pleasure in its turning nor rest when it comes to a stop, for when Sunday — the day for joy and recreation in all parts of the world — comes, the only pleasure the peasant may enjoy is to go to church, where he sits for a couple of hours like a booby, yawning for an hour and sleeping for the rest; then he goes home. They have no places of entertainment or spots where they can pass the evening in conversation and good cheer.

4.12.2

“Nor is the life of the better-off in the countryside any better than that of the peasants, because the only dishes they know are roast meat and those turnips⁴⁴⁹ that are everywhere. But where, in fact, are the better-off in the villages? The only rich people you see are the priest and the stewards who look after the farms and fields on behalf of their owners. They too are no different from the peasants. Despite this, if you enter the palaces of their kings and make a tour of the markets in their cities and see with your own eyes the amazing products, marvelous works of art, stylish machines, valuable stuffs, luxurious clothes, and well-made vessels that are there, especially in London, you will realize that the ones who manufacture these things are the ones who make the world go round while they themselves are deprived of them, for the daily life of the worker is no different from that of the peasant in that he goes and labors all day and has nothing to look forward to at night other than the closing of his eyes. How can it be that this sort of person creates the adornments of this world, makes it a delight to live in, and creates its prosperity, while they themselves are excluded from it and have but little share in it?

4.12.3

“Meanwhile, the cosseted rich do nothing well and sometimes cannot even express themselves properly. If people — God’s creatures on His Earth in all their disparate states and statuses — are like one body with all its different members, noble and lowly, then why does justice not apply among them as it does among the members, given that, if a person eats something or dresses in something, he does so for the good of the body as a whole? Or would the rich claim that, by being more generous to those good-for-nothing weaklings and relieving them of the distress they suffer from the effort of making a living and their inability to raise their children, they would cause them to neglect their work and leave the land uncultivated, so that it become unworkable and turn to desert and they perish of hunger? If that is the case, why do rulers allocate vast sums and magnificent rewards to those whom they appoint to office and promote in rank without fearing that they will spoil their work with their largesse? In fact, if the poor man is compensated by his ruler or master with his provisions — which are a trifle to the latter — he will perform whatever service or work he has to with enthusiasm. He will pray God grant the latter more good fortune and blessings rather than spend his nights, arms raised to heaven, calling down curses on him because of his certainty that he will never give him his due and that what has been taken from him to make him thin and scrawny has gone to others to make them fat and encourage them in their wantonness and arrogance and in the acquisition of purebred horses, fine carriages, and stacks of furniture such as no man should own. Under such circumstances, the rich man eats his food dipped in the curses of the poor.

4.12.4

“Or do they imagine that the Almighty created the poor just to serve them? I swear, the rich need the poor more than the poor need the rich. Or do they refuse to look down, from their sublime and elevated station, on the humble and the obscure for fear lest something of the latter’s misery touch them and do them harm — like one who achieves some lofty height while at his feet lies a vast chasm, which he refuses to bend over and look into lest it make him feel dizzy or nauseous and he fall from his pedestal? Would that I knew whether the rich have ever attempted to make the wretched happy by giving them something of their wealth or reviving them with their aid and then found that they rewarded their kindness with ingratitude, refusal to work, and neglect of their duties before God and nature. Such an idea is simply a delusion that has entered their heads with their wine, the former remaining when the latter departs. Let the rich give the poor the opportunity to taste the sweetness of life and see the world as it really is for just one month out of their lives, or for one day in the year, so that they may die happy and gratified! The rich, rather than fearing that some evildoing may result from the leisure or unemployment of the poor, would do better to fear the evil intentions that they may harbor as a result of their poverty and their hatred of them, for wretchedness is more conducive to evil than happiness. Have you not seen the thousands of girls who run around the markets of London and other prosperous cities in rags? How they crowd around those who come and go hoping to obtain the means to buy food or clothes to make themselves pretty, especially the young ones who are still not fifteen? This, I swear, is no more or less than exploitation of children for sex! How can they blame us for this custom in our countries when it is practiced among us in the form of legitimate marriage and among them in the form of illicit relations? If these girls had sufficient sustenance they would not behave so, because a girl at that age has no desire for a man and no craving for intercourse, especially in cold countries, and many men whose lust for them has brought them great harm would be saved from their wiles and their greedy pursuit of money. Moreover, were the state and the clergy to take it upon themselves to set them up with enough money for them to equip themselves for a legitimate marriage — after first giving them some education and polish — they would bear bonny children and adorn the kingdom with the fruit of their wombs, as it says in the Old Testament.⁴⁵⁰ Contrarily, if they continue to practice fornication, they will give birth only to rascals and scoundrels and will be like green saplings that not only do not bear fruit but also ooze a poison that puts an end to the thirst of any who taste it. How many a girl, I swear, has become pregnant the moment she set foot in the arena of whoredom and has then aborted the fetus from fear of poverty! Some of them, for lack of any shelter, give birth on the city’s streets during the cold nights of winter or spend the night on a single bed with another girl — a custom widespread in London — for lack of means to acquire a bed and a cubbyhole of her own. Under such circumstances, she may fall victim to some harm from her bedmate.

4.12.5

“True, illegitimate children usually grow up to be mighty men and giants, like Jephthah the Gileadite, upon whom the spirit of the Lord descended and who saved Israel from the children of Ammon,⁴⁵¹ or William the Conqueror, who conquered these lands (meaning England); yet it is more right and proper to heed and advance the common good with thrift and moderation than that of the individual with extravagance and misallocation.(1) Should not the owner of fine productive lands who leaves them uncultivated and a place for wild animals to wallow be censured and likewise the owner of fruit-bearing trees who leaves them unfenced, unguarded, and prey to the depredations of every passing fruit fancier? True, it cannot be denied that the existence of rich and poor in this world is as unavoidable as the existence of beauty and ugliness; were it not so, the universe would cease to move and men’s affairs would come to a standstill, or so the theologians assert.⁴⁵² However, we speak here of that poverty that cannot be described as conducive to savagery and wantonness, not of the abject poverty that creates constant worries and sorrows in its sufferer’s heart and that leads him in some instances to cut his own throat or in others to drown or hang himself, as has become commonplace in these countries.

4.12.6

“Is it not a shame upon the men in this land — the land of science, industry, urbanization, and civilization — that they will marry a woman only if she is well-endowed in both senses?⁴⁵³ Uglier still is the fact that the great men here do not marry for love but out of greed for more money: a man whose income is one hundred guineas a day will want to marry a woman whose income is also precisely one hundred guineas; if it’s ninety-nine it won’t do. This is why you often see handsome young men married to ugly middle-aged women. Unfortunately, most of the men here are late marriers, meaning that they don’t marry until they’ve reached later middle age. Thus they spend their youth in fornication and their thirties in looking for a woman possessed of position and wealth while the poor but beautiful woman is left on the shelf, and the men feel no shame at having children when they are old — this despite the fact that the raising of children under a wife’s care is one of the most important reasons for marriage according to the divines and that conception takes place only once every nine months. What I’m getting at is that the children of raddled middle-aged women will not turn out bonny and healthy like those of beautiful young girls. In addition, when a man who gets married at the age of, say, thirty, to a woman aged eighteen, reaches fifty and his wife still has a roving eye and is randy, he will have his children to keep an eye on her. What use is more money to one whom God through His bounty has already made rich? What difference is there between a person who has a hundred guineas a day and one who has fifty, or twenty? Anyone who isn’t satisfied with such an amount will not be satisfied with all the gold in the world. Furthermore, if a woman be rich, trouble is bound to follow on her wealth, because she will resolve to throw banquets, feasts, and parties, to visit and be visited, and to hire servants whose lustiness and blooming good looks appeal to her eye, and the moment she feels an ache or a pain in any of her limbs, she’ll make out that she feels ill and conceive a notion to go abroad, or to the country, and there, while her husband is preoccupied with political affairs or economic issues in his town house, she will closet herself with whomever she wishes and disport herself with whomever she likes, her manservant finding in his hand enough gold coins to shut his eyes, close his ears, and seal his lips.

4.12.7

“Do not these rich persons suffer the same diseases and illnesses as the poor? Does not death surprise them while they are engrossed in their pleasures? Do not many of them die childless as a result of their intemperance, their desires, their avarice, their corruption, and the recklessness with which they pursue their lusts? Or, if they be blessed with children, do not these live out their short lives thin and famished with hunger, a misery to themselves and an inconvenience to their parents? An English writer has said that any vigorous, strong child of their great men or princes one may come across is the result of impregnation by one of their retainers. The children of the peasants, on the other hand, you will find to be bonny and strong, with the appetites of horses, and I swear, if their parents didn’t have this reward from the Almighty, namely the sight of their children around them, in lively good health and full of affection, they would be no better than dead.

4.12.8

“How did this world come to be built on immorality? How is it that a thousand, or two thousand, men must suffer here for one man to be happy? And what a man! He may have a heart but no mercy, two hands but no work, a head but no sense or brains. And how did this come about in this country whose justice is the stuff of proverbs? There can be no denying that the peasants of our country are better off than these people. Indeed, even the shopkeepers here are in a miserable state despite their wealth, for one will spend the entire day and part of the night on his feet. I asked one once and said, ‘Why don’t you sit on a chair, of which you have many?’ and he told me, ‘Those are for the people who honor us by visiting us in order to buy from us. If I were to sit like them, I would become one of them.’ They pass their Sundays benumbed of body and mind, brains and eyes alike in a daze. What a contrast with a shopkeeper at home, who crooks one leg over another for a few hours on his bench, then, towards the end of the afternoon, casts his mantle in a heap behind him, and goes to some pleasure garden, walking proudly. If civilization and knowledge are the cause of these things, then ignorance is bliss.

4.12.9

“Not to mention that the peasants here are not only wretched but also extremely ignorant — though how are they to acquire knowledge when they spend all their time toiling to provide for their families and there are no schools where they live? I used to think that they could all read and write well, but it turns out that they do not even speak their own language well. I read something in a book and hear it from them in a form that contravenes its proper usage, not to mention that most of them have never heard the name of our country or our race. One of them once heard that the king had ordered horses to be sent overseas on ships to make war against his enemy and he said, ‘I’m amazed that people can fight on horses at sea’! It seems to me that in their ignorance they believe everyone else in the world to be less than they, or they think that men in other countries sell their womenfolk, or eat them, or that they live on a diet of roots and greens. If they knew the conditions of other nations and the peculiarities of other lands, they would be aware that even if they had many times what we do, their cold, the unwholesomeness of their air, and the darkness of their skies mean that it would profit them little and that the wealth that they have from manufacturing cannot take the place of the natural wealth that we enjoy by way of sweetness of air and water, clearness of air, sweet-scentedness, healthiness, and wholesomeness of soil, tastiness of food and drink, picnicking in the meadows and gardens, eating next to running waters beneath verdant trees, visits to the bathhouses, and evenings spent in pleasant conversation and listening to musical instruments. Those of them who have visited our country and become familiar with our good fortune and comforts know this.

4.12.10

“The wise person, however, is he who knows how to extract from every reverse some good and, giving thought to all that has befallen him, how to benefit and find lessons for life. I have now learned, from all the loneliness and hardship that I have met with in their country, how to live in ours, should I return to it safely, and how belly laughing, splitting one’s sides, laughing like a horse, laughing for no reason, laughing immoderately, laughing oneself silly, peeing oneself with laughter, chuckling, chortling, checkling, kenching, fleering, cackling, cachinnating, and ‘ho-ho!’ and ‘hee-hee!’ and ‘ha-ha!’ and ‘tee-hee!’ bring the heart greater relief from worry than unbreakable vessels or unshakable buildings. The best of countries, then, is that to whose airs you’ve become accustomed and in which you’ve found someone who is sincere in his love for you — and how can there be sincere love without a baring of secrets and how can secrets be bared and innermost thoughts declared if the tongue isn’t let off its leash to run free in the field of speech? Here people keep everything secret and think that for a person to talk of what he feels, loves, and hates is frivolity and folly. I, though, am like the fox who heard a loud noise coming from a drum that was being beaten by the branches of a tree; when he got to it and went to work on it and tore it open, he found it was empty. No wonder then that I no longer surrender my judgment to my hearing. Or, like one at sea who is thirsty and sees water all around him but cannot use it to quench his thirst, I see that the face of the earth here is green but that nothing of that greenness brings a flush of good cheer⁴⁵⁴ when eaten because it has nothing appetizing about it, which is because everything that grows in their country is forced out of the soil by over-manuring. If there were a sodomite here, we should ask him what their greens taste like.

4.12.11

“All this is aside from their habit of mixing up solid with liquid food and their adulteration and corruption of the palatable foods with which the Almighty has blessed them. Given this, it is only to be expected that the bread, which is the main support of our bodies, has no taste, for they leaven it with a vegetal scum and mix it with those potatoes of theirs, and then, following the leavening, they pat it down. What good is it to one to say, ‘I was in the land of the Franks’ if all he found there was loneliness and adversity? Quite the opposite: recalling it later may cause him to choke in distress. To Cairo! To Damascus! To Tunis this very year! There you will find people to visit you or whom you can visit. There you will find cheerful faces devoid of flattery, and generosity devoid of restraint or artificiality — and any other words for scorn and contumely you’ve mentioned to me. A person cannot live happily if he cannot talk in his own language. Life is not to be valued according to the length of its nights or the number of its days, by views of green land, or by observing instruments and machines. Rather, its value lies in seizing the convivial moment with those who are dear, keeping company with persons of culture of whom one thinks with pleasure whether they be elsewhere or here and whose affection’s sincere whether they’re far or near. This world’s worth lies in exchanging bon mots.”

4.12.12

The Fāriyāq went on, “And I said, ‘And in breathing on your nose!’—and she, ‘In companionable carousal’—‘And olfactory arousal!’—‘In mutual delectation’—‘And degustation!’—‘In shared affection’—‘And lingual refection!’—‘In having fun’—‘And letting saliva run!’—‘In friendship’s charms’—‘And taking you in my arms!’—‘In granting each other’s wishes’—‘And giving you kisses!’—‘In kind consideration’—‘And osculation!’—‘In talking face-to-face’—‘And mutual embrace!’—‘In discussion and debates’—‘And arms around waists!’—‘In talking in tones that are soothing’—‘And lying together in one set of clothing!’—‘In close associations’—‘And sleeping together in a single pair of combinations!’—‘In mutual stimulation’—‘And exploration!’—‘In witty contestations’—‘And conjugal relations!’—‘In jesting’—‘And besting!’—‘In conversation’—‘And copulation!’—‘In banter’—‘And going for a canter!’—‘In joking’—‘And poking!’—and that concluded our merrymaking.”

4.13.1

Al-Hāwif ibn Hifām faid in lifping tones,⁴⁵⁵ “I’d heard so much about women I almost ended up with sciatica, for some say that the life of the married man is better than that of the bachelor, one safer in all it entails than that of shouldering one’s way up to water holes guarded by jealous males, or enduring the pangs of thirst and fire, or exposing oneself to public disgrace and ire; and that, should life’s worries coat one’s heart with rust, a smile from one’s spouse revealing pearly teeth in a line, a sip of saliva like honey, a voice so sweet it obviates the need for musical instruments or sparkling wine will polish off the dust. For among the things with which the Almighty has singled out woman by way of merit, and virtues that He has seen fit to have her inherit, is that no ill temper her sweet voice resists, no anxiety or heartsickness with it coexists. The moment her lips are moved, the heart is soothed, and when with flirtatiousness her eyes are lowered, whoever’s in her presence with pleasures is showered, so that he frolics and rollicks, confines himself to the ‘little nest’⁴⁵⁶ and is refreshed, capers and caracoles, stiffens and comes, dances like a Negro and bangs on drums(1). When she walks through her house in a willowy fashion, the fates declare (with passion), ‘Our lives we’d give for you, you merry coquette! If you’d like us to place your husband on high, like a sun at its highest position, so he can keep you in the most pampered condition, or you’d like him to stay tonight at your side, no stratagem could turn us aside. If you’d like us to seduce him with the notion of travel (for a year or more) to some place (safe or dangerous) far from this shore, all that’s needed from you (you being to us the noblest of those who forbid and command) is a hiss with your tongue or a sign with your hand; a mere wink from your eye would make us comply.’”

4.13.2

He went on, “Likewise I’ve heard it said that a husband — God grant him protection from all that’s unchaste, let him in the greenery of His orchard and the plucking of its apples and pomegranates, and with ever more of His charity and bounty make him blest! — can enjoy with his spouse whatever pleasures he likes. If he wants, he can touch. If he craves intoxication, that too is not too much. If he wishes, he can fondle and trifle, and if he refuses to be unserious, wealth and social standing are at his command imperious. Also, that he has in her a fastness high (but not dry)⁴⁵⁷ in which she may his cares dispel, from which joy and happiness augur well, and a fruitful meadow to which the world beats a path with glad tidings on display and offerings fit to make him laugh. If some affair of his should go awry, with her skill she’ll set it straight and with a gesture she’ll make it right.

4.13.3

“I’ve heard too that if she flirts with him and throws herself upon his neck, dresses up for him and tosses her hair—may God increase him in ease and opulence and you in patience and indulgence! — he’ll think he’s gained the world and all that’s in it, carried off every pleasure and joy that’s there, and that he’s reached the most elevated of stations, that of that most mighty monarch, viceroy to the Creator of Nations.⁴⁵⁸ Should he at that moment the chief judge, passing on his hinny, observe, he’ll suppose him one of those employed by him to follow and serve, and should he a priest or churchwarden behold, the honor of any direct communication he’ll withhold and send in his stead, to the honored first, a male flunky, to the respected second, a lady lackey and tell them, ‘For any who can conquer and subdue, I have a noble commission, for any who inquires as to my well-being or expresses their thanks, a position.’ Should any man bark at him, cut him dead, or call him a name, he’ll come right back at him with rough words and blame, and should anyone — perish the thought! — cuff his occiput, deal his nape a thwack, or subject his feelings to attack, he can run to his wife — God grant her strength! — and she’ll relieve him of all grief, give him from every terror rest, restore his impregnability with her private parts, his prominence with the promontories on her chest, and tell him, ‘Fear not his wiles and his spite: every show of force can be repelled by an equal display of might.’ He then returns to his former haughtiness and pride, his over-weeningness and being snide. Even should he see a princeling or king’s vizier, he’ll think himself too fine to treat him as his peer—for he’s the one in clover and luxuriating in a life of relaxation, coddled and gazed at with adulation. He eats with such pearly teeth and coral lips before him that he thinks pickles are the best of fare, that the most blessed of possessions is a shirt of hair, that water that’s brackish and briny is tastier than the wine at any evening party. And oh! should he spend the night with her on a mattress stuffed with wooden shavings and touch her downy skin — he’ll think them the most luxurious of stuffings, for any injury suffered along with her is transformed into bounty and gain, into revelry and carousal any pain.

4.13.4

“From another, though, I’ve heard it said that the bachelor’s life is the happier, the one in which pleasures are more likely to bloom, for the ladies view him as ever roaming free, and think one rutting bleat from him will dispel all gloom, given that he has none to tie him up each night in order to tup or half the night to keep him up lest he forget he’s now the sheltered spouse of one who wears anklet and blouse. For this he’s beloved of the girls, a prize to which matrons aspire, pointed out by randy widows as an object of desire. When he goes home, his hands are free, his cuffs unsoiled,⁴⁵⁹ there being none to tell him, ‘Hand over!’ or blame him for what’s past, quiz him on things to come, seek to have him in matters vaginal embroiled, tell him ‘Shoo! Shoo! (ḥaf ḥaf!)’ at every amorous clucking (qayq) from some other woman and his every roosterous wing flapping (ḥalj), tie — and how tie! — the piece of skin between his belly and his willy (najf) before he bids her good-bye, or tell him ‘Quaff! To the dregs, the water quaff (nazāfi nazāfi), or else I’ll finish you off!’(1) nor any to weep before him in supplication when he’s powerless to support her, even though to do so be his obligation. You’ll see him ever with a happy, rolling gait, full of joy, throwing himself in women’s way and never walking straight, laying and splaying, keeping company with women who’re ready to pup and feeling them up. As says a proverb that’s making the rounds like a bad penny,⁴⁶⁰ ‘He who has no wife has many.’ The result, it is claimed, is that the bachelor’s stride is vaster, his movement faster, his words less trimming, his cup more brimming, his intonation more melodious, his cravings more imperious, his thrusts more pressing, his delicious wine more refreshing, his lance’s blade of keener bite, his arrow truer in flight, his breath more sugarcoated, his love more devoted, his food tastier and more plenteous, his vital juices more fluid and copious. They forget that the emptying of his basin into more than one plot is the very cause of the dropping of his water table and lust, the weakening of his vigor and thrust—and so on and so forth by way of phrases that shouldn’t be used to describe whore or honest matron, or characterize a man, whether he run or trudge to his damnation.”

4.13.5

Said al-Hāwif, “The two schools being thus equally balanced, the two claims in contention, I said to myself, ‘If only the Fāriyāq were with us today so that to this thorny question he might turn his attention, for he cleaves more closely to women than does even doubt and better knows their ways than any graybeard or youthful gadabout. Of them he’s tasted both sweet and bitter, and of their love he’s been both victim and benefitter. Were he present with us now, all this confusion that we’ve endured would straightaway be cured.’ I went then to one of my friends to apprise him of my dilemma and, no sooner had I knocked upon the door than he fell upon me, in his hand a letter. ‘Good news!’ he said, ‘Good news! Here’s a letter from the Fāriyāq that reached me in yesterday’s mail, written in verse, down to the smallest detail.’ I snatched it from his hand and here’s what it contained:⁴⁶¹

4.13.6

“‘After salutations, be informed that

A procurer’s one who goes

With his bride from one land to another

Where the long-necked lovelies

Swoon to the scent of his money,⁴⁶²

One who, on every beauty shaking with fat,

Sharpens the two fangs with which he bites,

And stiffens the slackness of his spine,

His resuscitator from misery.⁴⁶³

There too are bull camels,

Aroused to mount his recalcitrant she-camel

And to drink up everything

In his trough or his tumbler,

And sometimes they nickname him “pander,”

The ugliest of his evil vocations.

In the end he returns, no

Physician left to him to treat his incurable treachery.

4.13.7

The wise man is he who consults

One well tried in adversities when bewildered,

Especially in the matter of marriage

And how to bear its crushing atrocity.

He who is attracted by its deceptive coloration

And the pleasant taste of its comforts

Let him marry in a small village

That he may deal as he wishes with the contract

For depravity chokes

Any who cranes his neck to lick it.

The stranger⁴⁶⁴ is more harmful than

4.13.8

One indifferent to his reputation among his own folk—

Or perhaps it is not so, for in the state of bachelorhood,

While he is his own master,

Lies protection for his money, his privacy, and his peace of mind.

Again though, the present of him who marries

Augurs better for him than his past

Since, in his state of bachelorhood,

He missed having someone to keep him company.

He must, though, avoid

The harboring of doubts.

Marriage, then, and more marriage! Be not

Distracted from practicing it again and again

So long as the advantages of starting over at it

Do not damage the ending of what was good.⁴⁶⁵

One must, however, be alert

To whatever may turn it into catastrophe.’”

4.13.9

Said al-Hāwif, “Once these lines I’d scrutinized and, with a fair degree of certainty, the truths at which they hinted had surmised, I said, ‘What a paragon! How much insight into women’s affairs he shows, in verse as much as in prose! And how greatly we need from him, concerning these creatures, a fatwah, be it delivered in person or in absentia! Except, though, where he speaks of marriage, of his own state he nothing vouches, as though he thought all else of lesser purport and best consigned to that place where, after passing through the stomach, the food debouches.’ Then I departed singing his praise, all the more desirous of seeing his face.”

(Note: because he was fond of the Fāriyāq, al-Hāwif didn’t take him to task over some of these lines of his, which are awkwardly expressed. It is not my way, however, to pull the wool over the eyes of the reader, with whom I share an old friendship going back to the beginning of this work. Let him, therefore, take note of that fact.)

4.14.1

It is ingrained in the nature of every father to love all his offspring, no matter how many, ugly, or vicious they may be, to think each of them the best of persons, and to envy anyone, other than his own father or son, who is superior to him in praiseworthy qualities and virtues; and when a man grows old and too weak to enjoy the pleasures of this world, it is enough for him to watch his son enjoy them. Likewise, there is no greater pleasure for a married man than to spend the night with his wife on a single bed with, between them, a small child of his who neither keeps him awake with his weeping and crying nor wets him with his little willy. By the same token, nothing pains his heart more than to see that same child sick but unable to give tongue to a complaint so that he may know how to treat him. The physicians themselves are at a loss when it comes to treating small children and rarely find the right cure. It would be better if specialized doctors were to be appointed who could devote themselves to their treatment long-term and that those who excel at it be extolled wherever words are written or printed. It is the father’s duty, as soon as he sees that his child has fallen sick, to pay him close attention, observe his condition and any new developments, and write everything down in a book so that he may be able to give the doctor a clear account of it. Doing so may avoid the need for many a medicine that the doctors will sometimes try out as a way of probing the patient’s condition.

4.14.2

Food is one of the most important matters that should engage the parents’ concern where their offspring are concerned, for, given the child’s lack of awareness of the limits to intake, at which the mature person stops, the most frequent cause of his falling ill is food. It is not a form of tenderness or solicitude for the mother to feed her child whatever he wants; it is better to distract him from it with things such as toys, painted pictures, ornamented devices, and so on — though how pretty the child when he asks his father for something, his cheeks blushing with shyness or timorousness forcing him to lower his gaze, and how lovable he is as he throws his delicate arms around his father’s or his mother’s neck and says, “I want that to eat”! It is equally bad management to deny him what he wants and make him cry over something that can do no harm. I swear that anyone who pays so little attention to keeping his child content that the child cries and his tears flow for any reason other than his being disciplined has no right to be called a parent! The child has to be trained to take light foods six months after birth, breastfeeding continuing for a short while. Solid food nourishes and strengthens him, not to mention that this preserves his mother’s health; indeed, extended breastfeeding of the child will sometimes result in her falling ill and benefit her nothing. This is the method followed by the Franks, who are the people with the most offspring. She should never breastfeed the child if she is choleric, or upset and disturbed, or sick.

4.14.3

Moreover, so long as a man is a bachelor or has never raised a child, he will never feel proper feelings of tenderness for the children of others. Yet more, he will never fully appreciate his own parents who raised him until he became a father and a raiser of children himself. Mothers who breastfeed their children are of necessity more tenderhearted toward them than those who hire wet nurses. Without a doubt, any who have children and read the words of the poet, “And many a mother and child have been torn asunder as are soul and body when they part,”⁴⁶⁶ will not be able to prevent themselves from shedding tears of heartfelt agony and sorrow, and the same if they should read stories in which fathers are stricken by the killing of their innocent little children, such as the killing of the children of Midian at Moses’s command, as recounted in Chapter 31 of the Book of Numbers,⁴⁶⁷ whether the children’s parents are believers or unbelievers. As to those who have not been graced with fatherhood, such as a monk or his like, should they address you as “My dear son” or “My child,” put no trust in their words or faith in their blessings, because only one who has experienced fatherhood can know the affection that goes with filiation.

4.14.4

The Fāriyāq was one of those whom God had given sons as sweet to the taste as candy only for him thereafter to sip the bitterness of parental bereavement. He had a child who reached two years of age and was as though cast from the very mold of comeliness and beauty, having arrived lacking nothing of what is needed to bring refreshment to the eye. Despite his young age, he had the look of one capable of distinguishing those who cheer from those who oppress and would make friends with any who treated him kindly, be it but by a gesture. When his father gazed at him, he would straightaway forget every sorrow and concern, though there would quickly descend upon him then a touch of melancholy since he had a foreboding that the child would not last long before Fate’s dread eye, and he would decide to himself that he was unworthy to enjoy for long that radiant countenance. He would carry him in his arms by the hour, talking to him tenderly and singing to him, until the child became so comfortable with him that he would no longer want anyone else to carry him or entertain him or to eat on his own.

4.14.5

Things went on this way until God, Lord of Death and Life, decreed that the child should be taken by a cough in that village of which we have spoken and, given that the smaller villages of England, like those in other countries, are without skilled doctors and it was essential to seek the advice of some doctor, of no matter what kind, his parents consulted a quack there who advised them to bathe him repeatedly up to the neck in hot water. They followed his advice for some days, the child only growing worse until it eventually reached the point that, when he was put into the water, he would pass out and a heart-shaped blotch as red as blood would appear over his heart. Then the sickness grew worse until the cough settled in his chest and his voice became weak, though at the same time he was overcome by repeated tremors and shakes. He continued to struggle for life for six days and nights, moaning weakly and looking at his parents as though complaining to them of his sufferings. The roses of his cheeks were transformed into jasmine, his eyes, with their startling contrast of black and white, became sunken, and no food or medicine any longer went down his throat without difficulty. While this was going on, the Fāriyāq shed copious tears and prayed fervently to God, saying, “O Lord, turn this torment from my son onto me, if that should please Thee! I have no desire to live without him or strength to watch him in this painful struggle. Let me die before him, though by a single hour, so that I do not see him give up the ghost. Ah, how terrible an hour! But if Your decree must be carried out, let him die now!” It may be that the Fāriyāq was the first father who ever prayed for his son to die, out of pity and tenderness, for the sight of the child dying over a period of six days was too much to bear. After the child died and only sorrow and grief remained in their hearts, they could no longer bear the place where they were living because everything in it reminded them that they had lost him, adding to their distress. They left it therefore and departed suddenly for London, having placed him in a casket; and when they had buried him and had settled in a house, his father recited, in lamentation for his death

4.14.6

You gone, the tears, when I recall you, run

And memory, now that dust conceals you, festers like a wound,

O forsaker of a heart that you have left

Exposed to sorrow’s every flame

(Or so I wrongly thought, but, after you, where is my heart?

Naught’s in my chest but fire—

A meager diet, hard to bear, that has reduced my body

That even so constrains).

What harm to Fate should it have left you to me

As reality and not mere memory?

You lost, nothing more affrights me or delights,

Not of shadows nor of lights.

All one it is to me if night o’ertake me

Or morning come, now you are gone.

Ah how evil was that night, for no desire did it leave me

To see another dawn!

Six nights till then you had me sleepless kept

And on that last, longing for my bed, of a fifth of myself I was deprived.

O little son, they cannot help me to endure,

Those words of theirs “Death’s rule on Man’s imposed.”⁴⁶⁸

4.14.7

No indeed — now you are gone, no consolation’s left to cool my heat:

“This world for permanence can furnish no abode.”

How oft did I cradle you before I departed of a morning

Or left at night, to return to the best homecoming!

How many a night was I kept awake by fear, though

My tears and lack of sleep availed you nothing!

How often did I pray for a cure to your disease, beseeching,

Though unavailing were my prayers!

How many a dark night did I embrace you lest sudden mishap should you befall—

Such were my fears—

The beauty of your face transporting me

To some fresh forenoon garden.

No painter mayhap your portrait for me painted, yet

In these my verses you are portrayed; they are your guardian—

Or if a narrow grave-shelf has hid you,

For me the Earth today is the narrowest of spaces,

Or if from me you have been hidden, yet still

Nothing in my troubled thoughts remembrance of your charms displaces.

4.14.8

Ne’er shall I forget you — or should I do so, I shall be dead, for never have I known

A time when upon your memory I did not dwell;

Your elegy I’ll declaim so long as I remain, and if I die,

Then let the reader my place fill!

What grief! My capacity for patience thereafter was as little as

My ability to conceive of how to bear my loss.

Many gazed upon me, few helped,

And the gloating of my visitors seared my guts,

Leading me to recite a verse uttered by one who’d tasted

The same bereavement and alienation from neighbors as had I:

“I kept company with my neighbors, he with His Lord—

And how different his neighbors from mine!”

What a disaster! It descended, its weight crushing

My shoulders and announcing the snapping of my spine,

On a night when I parted company with the light of my eyes

Forever and he was of me perforce bereft—

Small wonder that, when the darkness of night had passed

From before my eyes, every star had also left.

I would have hoped that happily

He’d outlive me and reach a ripe old age

And wished I might taste my own end before he did his,

But God’s choice and mine were not the same

4.14.9

And ’twas I who laid his head to rest with my own hands, by greater force compelled. Would that

He’d laid my head down in keeping with my hopes!

My eye gazed at him and there was nothing I could do.

O for a look that could have brought about my wishes for delay!

My hand fell short of unhanding from him that which brought about his end;

Verily, incapacity is born of a conviction of inability!

How I grieved for him as his eye complained to me

For he could not himself inform me.

How I grieved for him, laid down upon his bed,

And had I been able, he would have lain on my left arm

But the slightest touch added

To his pain and he would wail at the touch of my hairs

And moan the moan of one who seeks aid, heart throbbing

Like a bird that feels the cold yet passes the night with nowhere to alight,

Till I feared my tears might hurt his body,

When they flowed down over him like falling rain.

What a shudder it was that took him off! It left my

Heart to palpitate and suffer memory’s desolation.

Would that recuperation had then cooled my eye, after

It had heated, with a shaking off that contained consolation.

4.14.10

How I grieved for him, as he embraced me in the darkness

And my sleep, for painful pity, was cut short!

How I grieved for him as my singing lulled him

Though, if I stopped, he craved for more!

How I grieved for him when he took from my hand

And returned what he had taken in his, hoping for more!

How I grieved for him as he gummed my cuff,

Leaving shining pearls and fiery stars!

Ah, what a day, on which death fastened its talons into

Soft clay not made to withstand the hooks of its claws!

What a dire affair! It oppressed me, making death and

Life to me as one until my fated end!

Living was sweet to me when he would wave to me

But now that he has gone is naught but gall.

Neither distance can console me nor length of time

Nor change of days and cities.

My sorrows will never end nor can I die of grief

For thus the Creator’s decree with me must take its course.

4.14.11

Nay, nor shall my tears extinguish my burning fire

Though they pour forth like rain,

For any fire but the fire of a parent’s loss may be extinguished

And any water but that of tears will douse a fire.

Would that tranquillity of life might one day return

And a child, reared by a father sore beset who’d give his life for him!

I would pay with my life for that of my son, facing

My death as one content, freely choosing.

For his sake I would hide away things that could do no harm

But today I do not hide even that which may do harm.

Death and my aspirations, after him,

Are one and the same in terms of what I prefer

So let the days do with me as they will—

After this calamity no further injuries can come.

Let hopes forsake me—

No aims in life are left to me.

Let he who has tasted a bereavement as devastating as mine

Be incapable today of making me endure patiently

But let him weep with me and bear

The excess of my tears from a tear duct overflowing.

Naught demolishes the underpinnings of patience like a child’s loss or

Slices through the back so brutally as its severing sword.

4.14.12

The child dies but once, but

His father dies before him many times.

The wresting from him of his child and his disappearance bring down upon him

Repeated episodes of demise, and what episodes!

How unlikely that any man’s experiences of the loss

Of his desires will resemble mine

Or that in the violence of others’ grief I might find a model

Or in length of life an end deserving of my pursuit!

A person’s care will avail him nothing.

All are headed to an end that’s been measured out.

Death is the end of every living thing — in this

The well-off and the poor are all as one.

Those who went before one day with those

Who followed after will be gathered in one crumbling clay.

The death of a child, however, is a day more dread, for he has known

No space in which to run and strive.

The one who knows the sweet taste of life is he whom

Loss of a child has passed by, not he who is possessed of riches.

Loss of wealth is like loss of hair — you

Lose it and then it sprouts anew, time after time.

Let him be happy then whose children live as long as he does

And may his well remain of what may muddy it ever free!

Some catastrophes may be easily swallowed but some

Leave a lump in the throat on which to choke until the end of time.

4.15.1

Since the Fāriyāq had no choice but to live close to that ill-fated village,⁴⁶⁹ he left with his wife and went to Cambridge. For a long time, they walked around with eyelids half closed and half open, for extreme grief distracts the heart from the natural appetites, or vice versa. Then the knot of sorrow loosened a little from the eyes, though not from the heart because the eyes do not always obey the latter — and how can they when it has been said, “Two weak things will conquer a stronger”?⁴⁷⁰ Each permitted himself first to peer,⁴⁷¹ peek, and peep like a puppy opening its eyes for the first time, then to snatch stolen, furtive glances through narrowed eyes that looked askance, then to watch and observe, then to stare and scrutinize, then to crane the neck, cover one eye the better to see, and to contemplate and meditate. Finally, eyes and hearts made peace and the former began to speak on behalf of the latter, though heartbreak still ruled their depths.

4.15.2

Humans, though, were created “from a drop of mingled fluid,”⁴⁷² composed of a number of varied humors, essences, and contingent characteristics, and they will continue as long as time shall last to combine this with that and mix the serious with the humorous, joy with grief. On one occasion, then, you will find a man content with his lot, on another as greedy as Ashʿab,⁴⁷³ at times joyful, at others miserable, one day rapturous and blithe of heart, on another, or part of it, too despondent to sport or play. He is human in form but a ghoul by nature and this unsteadiness of his is nowhere more visible than in his dealings with women. Thus, if he marries a pretty woman, he says, “Would that I’d married an ugly one and saved myself the attempts of my acquaintances and neighbors to muscle in!” and if he marries an ugly one, he says, “Would that I’d been acute enough to marry a cutie and gain prestige and renown!” If his wife is fair, he says, “Would that she were dark-skinned, for the dark-skinned are livelier and warmer in winter!” and if his wife is dark-skinned, he says, “Would that she were white, for white-skinned women have cooler bodies in summer!” If she is short and generously proportioned, he says, “Would that she were svelte and narrow-waisted, for the narrow-waisted are less expensive to feed!” If he leaves her to go on a journey, he says, “Would that it were she who had traveled!” and vice versa. Only when she is pregnant does he have no desire to be in her place. The same rule applies to too many matters concerning women to count, for even the most seemingly obvious matters relating to them are an unplumbable ocean.

4.15.3

In sum, the heart has many contrasting states and conditions among which it constantly changes, or which keep it in a constant state of change, and, when all’s said and done, its very name—qalb—points to what it is.⁴⁷⁴ One thing only is an exception to this rule and that is man’s unshakable insistence, in every state and under every condition, in every place and at all times, on preferring himself over others. If he leads a dissolute life, he believes that no one is more pious in God’s sight than he. If he is crass and crude, he thinks every elegant wit his inferior. If he’s a miser, he supposes that every letter he utters is the most generous gift and if he is ugly and mean-spirited, he thinks the blame attaches only to those who view him as such. Likewise, just as a man’s eye sees only what is in front of it and not itself, so his mental faculties apprehend all the faults of mankind except his own. Should he travel all the way around the world, he won’t find anywhere the good qualities that are to be found in his city or village, and the good qualities of his town fall short of those of his own house, though none of them are to be found among his family to the same degree as they are in him, from which it may be gathered that he is the best thing in the entire world. If he be a poet, or more accurately a poetaster, the only thing he’ll do well is to sing the praises of misers or write love verses to Hind and Daʿd,⁴⁷⁵ and if he should see scientists and engineers inventing, for example, devices that make it possible to travel five hundred miles in a single day, he’ll reckon that his poetry is more useful and necessary than any of those. If he’s a singer or a player of a musical instrument and sees that a neighbor of his is an experienced physician who treats and, God willing, cures five hundred patients each day, he’ll believe that his trade is more conducive to health and more beneficial and the thought will never occur to him that a person may exist on this earth for a lengthy period without hearing a song or the playing of an instrument.

4.15.4

When, then, will men learn to know themselves and to distinguish between right and wrong? Not to combine the sorrow buried in the heart with peering and staring? Uglier still than these traits is the fact that everyone imagines that everyone else is doing the same and that he is to be excused because all he is doing is keeping pace with them. Exemplary of such ugliness is the woman who wears mourning dress for a dead relative and over the same period flaunts her bold looks and thinks nothing of talking about males, who finds comfort in looking at colors other than black and finds it as music to her ears when someone tells her, “So-and-so is in love with you, and you should be seated on a dais and telling the ladies-(or more accurately, gentlemen-)in-waiting around you what to do and what not to do, and you should never handle anything with this soft hand of yours and never leave your house on this delicate foot of yours, and you have so many suitors in every place and you will never, at any time, be without people to surround you, serve you, indulge you, and make you forget your sadness” as well as other things that are a violation of the respect owed to both death and the dead.

4.15.5

The Fāriyāq resumed,⁴⁷⁶ “In England and elsewhere I have seen many women dressed in mourning garb who were more cheerful, rapturous, blooming, and mirthful than a bride and her mother and I never saw one of them, on laughing, look at her black garments and think to herself that her cackling was out of place. If it is the death of a husband that is involved, however, one inclined to clemency may seek to excuse a woman by saying, for example, ‘Maybe her husband used to betray her on dark nights, and her dislike for black simply reflects her memories of his evildoings toward her in the blackness of those nights,’ or that the days she spent with him were all as black as night. When it comes to offspring or fathers or others of that sort, no woman who wears mourning while showing off and laughing hard can be excused. Moreover, among the Franks a woman wearing mourning dress is as much in demand among and desired by men as a bride, because the studs among them jostle one another to entertain and distract her, well aware of what lies beneath that black and that this is one of those customs whose practice contradicts its theory.

4.15.6

“It appears that the word muḥidd (‘woman dressed in mourning’) in this noble language of ours derives from the hadd (‘edge’) of the knife and from ‘aḥaddahā or ḥaddadahā, meaning “He rubbed it with a stone or a file and it thus became sharp (ḥaddat, taḥiddu).” ’⁴⁷⁷ Thus it is as though the lust of the one looking at a woman who is wearing mourning clothes (ḥidād) were sharpened by his seeing upon her the traces of sorrow, melancholy, and dejection, this being the most attractive state a woman can be in. It also helps him that a certain kind of black cloth is called isbād, a word that also occurs in the sense of ‘shaving of the hair,’ which is also called sabd (and you know better than I the full sense of that word).⁴⁷⁸ The isbād is also called a silāb, while the salīb is a person whose mind has been stolen (mustalab). Thus it seems that if a woman tasallabat, i.e., puts on mourning and dresses in a silāb, she steals (salabat) the mind of any who looks on her, for the moment his glance falls upon her, his heart falls with it and he says to her, or to himself, ‘I would give my life in ransom for yours! I would sell my father and my mother for you! What a wonder you are! God protect you! God grant me a chance to give my life as a ransom for you! If you wish me to be the first to implore you to allow him to wipe this sadness from your breast, I will do so, for I am more able than you to bear adversities. Throw then this piercing pain upon me and be you happy and joyful! I have a large musical instrument⁴⁷⁹ and many entertaining stories with which to release you from this care. If you would visit me once, or allow me to visit you, none of these sorrows would ever cross your mind again. You are soft and plump, and I can see how hard this loss is for you; it can be removed then only by something equally hard. Would that you knew how I grieve and suffer for your sake! I am prepared to deny myself every pleasure to see you part your lips and reveal those delicious glistening teeth of yours and display on your cheeks, when you laugh, that dimple that has so often dented the hearts of your suitors. What heart could forbear to melt before such dejection? What eye would not shed tears onto this black wrap? Sufficient reward it would be for me to take your sorrow upon myself, enough for me that I lift from you the rust of this care!’

4.15.7

“The woman wearing the mourning is the same, for she is conscious, as she walks, of what is going on in the mind of the man who feels such pity for her and so says, to him, or to herself, ‘Indeed, I swear I need you to lift from me the loneliness and sadness that I feel today! I spent last night drowning in the ocean of cogitations and perturbations, and you look to me to be qualified to pick quarrels with me, to spend the evenings chatting with me, to keep me company, to take me by surprise, to come to me early of a morning, to come and live near to me, to engage in give-and-take with me, to walk hand in hand with me, to discuss with me, to share secrets with me, to travel with me, to ramble here and there with me, and to vie with me in quoting poetry.⁴⁸⁰ Praise, then, to God who today has guided me to you and you to me, and decreed that you be mine — for I am a poor dejected woman and must have someone to dispel my grief and cheer me, until, when I have forgotten my sufferings and some disaster falls upon you, it becomes my duty to provide relief (ufarriju) to you, for I possess the very source from which relief (faraj) is derived⁴⁸¹ and through me you will obtain joys most sweet, pleasures most complete. Off with us then to social intercourse and evening prattle, to repartee and to doing battle!’

4.15.8

“This is what comes of wearing mourning and this is why many women prefer to wear black garments — being confident that they will have the same effect of attracting any men they may run across as does mourning dress. This is also why the Franks love the color black for clothes and never go beyond it and why priests’ and imams’ robes are black.”

4.16.1

When the Fāriyāq had finished his work in Cambridge, he went to London intending to return to the island and a shaking fever went with him. One of the kind doctors of that city, however, shook that shaking fever off his back and charged him nothing. Next, the Fāriyāqiyyah came down with palpitations of the heart and tongue, for she had by now become skilled in the language of those people. Then he in turn was afflicted with palpitations of mind and thought, the reason being that, his leave of absence from the island over and the time for him to return nigh, he had decided that if he hadn’t at first succeeded, he wouldn’t if he tried again.⁴⁸² This was because the easy living and comfortable housing conditions that had formerly prevailed there had changed, and this was usual for the Fāriyāq: he never entered a land of plenty that he didn’t leave a barren waste, as noted earlier. Also, he had missed out on certain benefits there which he was now denied in view of the length of his absence.

4.16.2

Taking this into account, he made his way to the city of Oxford, taking with him a letter of introduction to one of its notables and scholars, a clergyman. He believed it would be difficult to make contact with him, for the scholars of that city are not like those of Cairo in their graciousness and warmth of welcome; on the contrary, they are ruder than the common people and think no stranger comes to their country without a beggar’s bag over his shoulder. Thus it was that when the Fāriyāq went one evening to see one of these scholars, someone confronted him at the door to the college and said, “Whom do you want?” “So-and-so,” he replied. “Where do you live?” asked the other. “In such and such a place,” he said. “Do you have money enough to pay the rent?” the man asked. “I’m no metropolitan or monk⁴⁸³ that you should suppose that I come to you as a beggar,” he answered.

4.16.3

After this, when he experienced such difficulty in reaching that honorable and mighty clergyman, and found no one there disposed to be kind — with the exception of a student called William Scoltock⁴⁸⁴ and a shopkeeper from whom the Fāriyāq bought a piece of rope to tie his trunk but who refused to take payment for it, imagining, seemingly, that the Fāriyāq had only wanted to purchase it after consulting God by divination as to whether he shouldn’t use it to hang himself — he returned to London and opened negotiations on the matter with his wife. She told him that the island was less likely to provide a living than Oxford and that “I have become utterly bored with it. We wasted the flower of our youth there and acquired not a single fruit. What then is the point of going back?” At this, he decided to resign from his government position there and wrote a letter to the governor’s private secretary informing him of this.

4.16.4

Then the Fāriyāqiyyah’s palpitations grew worse and he decided that it would be better for them to live in Paris, because of the popular idea that the air of Paris was healthier than that of London, that living there was cheaper and opportunities were more abundant, that the Parisians were more welcoming to the stranger than the English and more charitable, that the Arabic language was more useful there and more widely known, and other delusions of the kind that sometimes enter people’s heads never again to leave them until the soul does so too. Before, however, the Fāriyāq departs that city, we must repeat to you, in compressed form, a description of the good qualities that it contains and of the injustice meted out to its inhabitants — which is to say its fair inhabitants — so that you may decide whether the Fāriyāq’s departure was right or wrong. Let this be too your farewell to the English, for the book is drawing to a close and there is no space left for expatiation since I’m afraid that this last book may come out longer than the first and that that would require my censure, from two perspectives. One is that its readers might say that the author had made the chapters at the beginning short and now was making them long, as though at first he’d been unschooled in writing or he now wanted the saying “mature horses run ever longer heats” to be applied to him.⁴⁸⁵ The second is that they might say, “He’s come close to joining the ranks of those who drive away their listeners by the length of their readings but remains oblivious and unaware, and we’ve grown bored with his words and his saying again and again ‘this is claimed and so is that’ and ‘once it was and now it is not.’ He has taken the reins of debate between his teeth, argued both sides of the issue, and left us no room to review his arguments or object. The reward for a writer who’s a chatterbox is to have his book cast into the tinderbox.”

4.16.5

Said the Fāriyāq, “Picture in your mind that you are living in one of London’s residential quarters, with two rows of houses, parallel, face-to-face, façade to façade, twenty houses to a row, a door to each house, a lintel to each door, and in front of each lintel a step or tiled threshold. Then conjure up before your eye, God guide you right, forty girls, each of them smart and perky-breasted, fat and virginal, corpulent and compliant, big-buttocked and buxom with a twitch to her backside and bustle, with saliva sweet and teeth that glisten, clearness of brow, length of back, and evenness of cheek and possessed of loveliness, wit, and fun, plumpness and facial chubbiness, good looks and tubbiness, freshness and beauty, pulchritude and handsomeness, goodliness and comfiness, tenderness of skin and attractiveness, succulence and juiciness, pretty length of face and dewiness, well-roundedness and willowiness, each of them being white and comely, bright-complexioned, beaming, blonde, strawberry blonde, near-strawberry blonde, chestnut, ash-blonde, dirty blonde, dusky blonde, or dusky chestnut blonde, of a healthy whiteness and white prettiness, the white and the black of her eyes clearly defined and as large as oryxes’, her pupils blue but as though mixed with red, her whites suffused with black, or her pupils blue but as though streaked with red, or wide and black, swan-necked,⁴⁸⁶ her eye sockets wide, her eyes widely spaced, her eyebrows delicate, broad and uncreased of brow, mighty-bodied, fine-bridged, snub-nosed, high-bridged, beautifully black-lipped, or with lips between black and red, or brown-lipped, and each of whom is

4.16.6

4.17.1

The Fāriyāq arrived in that celebrated city on a foggy night and was too bleary-eyed to be able to see its distinguishing features. Then, in the morning, he set off to roam its streets as though he were unemployed and had all the time in the world. He found them to be full of slipways⁴⁹³ and slides, snares, decoys and baits,(1) traps, lures, ropes, nooses, lassos, nets, hooks, and hunters’ hides. It occurred to him then that the mainstay, working gear, support, and central pole of everything in this capital was the presence of a woman. All the eating houses, drinking houses, shops, warehouses, marts, groceries, godowns, depots, countinghouses, butcheries, showrooms, storehouses, workshops, factories, hostels, hotels, boutiques, corner stores, bathhouses, dosshouses, brasseries, bars, magazines, granaries, restaurants, and watering holes were run by women — and what women! — and there wasn’t a stub, a daybook, a tax-book, a list of accounts due, or any calculation involving multiplication (burjān)(2), any jottings sheet, invoice, certificate, product, entry book, accounts ledger, record of charges, deed, abstract, liquid account,⁴⁹⁴ or precautionary blank-filling⁴⁹⁵ that wasn’t handled by a woman. He noted too that the clever man among them placed in his store or workplace a pretty decoy that he could wave at the shoppers and those passing on the street. It made no difference whether the said decoy was a member of his family or a stranger; all that mattered was to slip the noose around their necks.

4.17.2

Furthermore, the women of Paris are distinguished by characteristics shared by no other women among the Franks. For example, they speak with such nasality⁴⁹⁷ and huskiness, such a catch in the throat, so thrillingly, so tunefully, with such vibrato and tremolo, such resonance, such bravura, such lyricism, such intonation, inflection, and modulation, such melodiousness, such tunefulness, such musicality, such mellifluousness, such sweetness, such a lilt and a swing, so excitingly and so movingly that the listener is intoxicated and loses all awareness of whether they are undoing his buttons or his vertebrae. Another aspect of their appeal is that they change their costumes every little while and all the other women imitate them in this. Thus should one of them don, for example, a cloak, or wear her clothes skintight, everyone straightaway cleaves to a love of cloaks, while skintight dressing becomes a custom. From them too is taken the curling of the hair,⁴⁹⁸ its braiding, plaiting, coiling, cutting, gathering, loosening, parting, combing, currying, twisting, tousling, and rumpling, as well as the grooming of the kuʿkubbah and the muqaddimah.⁴⁹⁹ Another thing is that, from their long frequentation of places where people dance, they think that everywhere they set their feet is a dance hall, and you may observe one of these women walking in the markets and streets swaying and bending, loose-limbed and leggy, and how I wish Our Master, the author of the Qāmūs, had known the polka, mazurka, schottische, quadrille, rigadoon,⁵⁰⁰ valse, and other kinds of dance that I might relay the words for them here, to the credit of the walking women of Paris!

4.17.3

A further aspect of their appeal is the sway they hold over the men and the power they have over them in every situation. You’ll find the man walking next to the woman in abject submission⁵⁰¹ and when he’s alone with her at home, she it is who forbids and commands, reigns and remands, while he is servile, bowed, licked, reined in, whipped, checked, humbled, ill-used, cringing, domesticated, ill-treated, abused. They, on the other hand, never cease to crave special foods even when not pregnant and to demand that everything be in full measure, in full supply, shaken down and running over, abundant, complete, full, perfect, replete. Even the French language is built upon these female cravings, for in speaking they drop the ends of all the masculine words and pronounce them in the feminine⁵⁰²—on which topic the Fāriyāq said,

Among the French, the feminine ending

To listening ears must be conveyed.

This points to their women’s desire, by nature,

To make it to the end and obtain satisfaction when getting laid.

Or perhaps it’s a sign of their complete consummation

(If, among veil-wearers, claim to any such thing may be made).

⁵¹⁵

4.18.1

The Fāriyāq then decided to rent an apartment to live in with his family and they saw a number of places, each of which had its drawbacks. During this process the Fāriyāqiyyah got sore feet from climbing staircases, some of which comprised a hundred and twenty steps or more. In the end, they moved into a place but found that the stove didn’t work properly and it was only a few days before she began complaining, saying, “It surprises me how sometimes people are deceived about something and extol it without first making sure they know what condition it’s in, and once they’ve made up their minds about something, it becomes impossible to get them to abandon their delusion. It reaches the point that to change a delusion is more difficult than to change what is known to be true, for when someone knows something to be true he does so because he has determined its truth through scholarship, and scholars by nature always look at the evidence and the counterevidence and never stop searching for what is correct and what is more correct. Delusion, however, enters only the head of the ignoramus, and after it has entered it’s almost impossible for it to exit.

4.18.2

“We may cite by way of example the popular delusion that Paris is the most beautiful city in the world, though I’ve observed here faults I have seen nowhere else. Look at its roads and the blood, filth, and waters of varied colors that flow along them, part green like pond scum, part yellow like turmeric, and part black like coal! All the unclean wastes of the kitchens and sanitary facilities gather there and the smell of them, especially in summer, is even more harmful than the sight. Have no drains or conduits been made underground for them to pass through into a river or something of the sort as in London? Look at the pavement of these same roads, where the carriages and carts have to pass, and you’ll see that its stones have been shaken loose and pushed apart so that when a cart moves over them it seems to be climbing a mountain pass or a flight of steps and it keeps rocking and shaking, the reason being that the cobblestones here are not laid in rows or set snugly next to each other and they grow further apart and looser as the years go by. In London, on the other hand, they’re laid flush with one another and upright and the carts move over them quickly without rattling or shaking. Look too at the pathways alongside the roads here, meaning where people walk: how narrow and dirty they are, and what little purpose they serve! In many of the side streets, it’s impossible for two to walk side by side along one edge of the street; indeed, they’re not to be found at all in many roads or do not go the whole way from the beginning to the end, for you’ll find they’re obstructed in one place, disintegrating in another. Look at how few lights there are in the marketplaces and at how far apart are the lanterns that stick out of the walls! In most streets, one has to walk more than a hundred and twenty paces between one lantern and the next.

4.18.3

“Look at how small the shops are and how poorly lit, and at the wretchedness and hardscrabble existence of the city’s inhabitants! Rarely does one of them have a fire, even though this is the coldest month. Look well at these houses and how high their stories rise and how many steps they have and how dirty and badly arranged are their sanitary facilities and latrines — for in a single house, you may find a number of latrines next to apartments along with a number of outlets for water and sewage, and you may well imagine the disgusting smells that issue from them in the morning! In addition to the fact that these latrines are dirty, squalid, and without water supply, they have no bolts on the inside to prevent anyone from bursting in on a person in his privacy. As a result, someone will often intrude upon another before he has finished his business and he will find himself joined by one whose clothes are beshitten and befouled, or whose shit falls on his heels because he’s in such a hurry, or whose turd gets stuck half in and half out, or who can’t get it out, or who was interrupted while pissing.(1) I asked about the reason for this and was told that if the landlord was a God-fearing man, he’d be uneasy at the thought of installing bolts lest certain of the male and female residents go in together and barricade themselves inside. Nothing filthier is to be seen than the various finger marks on their walls, as though the French liked to wipe their anuses with their fingers. When they clean these latrines at night, they give off a horrible smell that spreads throughout the quarter, and a person has no choice but to sleep with his nostrils plugged.

4.18.4

“In addition, many of these houses — despite the fact that they comprise six or more stories (which, along with the poor paving of streets, produces an undeniably excessive rumbling because of the passing of the carts) and despite the fact that they hold numerous residents (some of whom are lechers, male and female, others doting lovers, male and female) — are unfit for habitation because of their lack of light and air, and it’s difficult to find an apartment in them in which one can relax, for one finds either that it’s close to the latrine, or that the stove doesn’t work properly, or that it has a mouse or a rat, or that one’s neighbor is noisy and rude, singing day and night or playing a musical instrument or closeting himself with prostitutes with hurly-burly, loud laughter, and hilarity. Inside the apartment itself, there are things to make you laugh and things to make you cry. The crudeness with which the doors and windows are made, the paving of the floor with brick, and the way that some of the apartments interconnect with others will make you laugh. Those stoves of theirs that are built in the shape of tombs, the first thing to strike a person when he enters his apartment, will make you cry. As they are, they’re better suited to be cells for hermits than sleeping quarters for married couples. Stranger still is the fact that the doors to the buildings are always open and that the doorkeepers carry on trades and crafts in a closet of their own which they stick to, night and day. Some work as tailors and some make or mend shoes and other things, which means that anyone can go up the stairs with nothing to stop him. Rarely does the doorkeeper take note of anyone from his closet because his eyes are glued to his needle or his awl. This is why there are more incitements to sin in Paris than in London. The only fine houses and wide, handsome streets are of recent date. How can Paris have had any fame in the past when its historic houses and age-old streets repel the eye and made the gorge rise? How can this be compared to the broad, well-lit streets of London and its attractive, spacious shops, glazed with the finest and most expensive glass, or its clean, well-proportioned houses?”

4.18.5

Said the Fāriyāq: “I told her, ‘Or its scrubbers of doorsteps’ to which she replied, ‘Or the pleasuring of its scrubbers.’ Then she continued, ‘Or their elegant apartments or their attractive staircases, ever draped with fine carpets. I swear to God, climbing fifty of their steps is easier on me than climbing ten here. Where too are those shiny, iron-clad, wonderful stoves of theirs that are burnished every morning and the well-glazed windows and transoms? Those kitchens where the gas light burns forever and the hot water is ready and waiting for the residents? And all those charming young maids for whom the mightiest of employers at home would want to work as a manservant or cook?’ ‘Or taster,’ I said. ‘Or licker,’ she said. ‘And where oh where is the beauty of the River Thames and its steamboats that go to the outskirts of London in summer and have music on board? Filled with men, women, and children, they look like meadows adorned with flowers. Where are those gardens they call “squares” of which there are so many in every part of the city and which make anyone living in a room overlooking them feel he has moved to the countryside, though should he take a few steps beyond them he would see crowds of people coming and going? Where are those lights that burn on every street and in every shop, so that if you are at the beginning of the street and you set your eyes on its far end, you wonder at its beauty and radiance and imagine that they must be an array of planets strung on a single string? Only those who haven’t seen London, or who have spent only a few days in it without knowing the language, praise Paris.

4.18.6

“‘And where is the kindly fussing of the landladies and the companionship they show their lodgers, be they foreigners or not? There, if a foreigner takes up residence in a house, he joins the family because all of them, from the mistress of the house to the maid (and what shall teach thee what is “the Maid”?)⁵¹⁶ make a fuss of him, keep him company, serve him, cook for him, buy him what he needs from the market, bring him hot water every morning, light his fire, and polish his shoes. I swear, one who stays with them can learn the English language in no time at all by talking to them. Someone lodging in a house in Paris could die overnight and no one would be any the wiser, for there is an unbridgeable gulf between him and the doorkeeper and in most of the houses here one cannot find a bell to ring to make the doorkeeper come to him.

4.18.7

“‘And how can the shopkeepers of Paris, who, if they had the means to strip a customer, and especially a foreigner, of his skin wouldn’t hesitate to do so, be compared to those of London, with their straight dealing, their honesty in selling and buying, and their friendliness toward and patience with their customers? They have imitated the London shopkeepers by putting price tags on the goods but what difference does it make? A shopkeeper who puts a price of, say, a hundred francs on something will sell it for eighty. They also put in the fronts of their shops types of goods bearing a certain price, but if you want to buy something of that type, they’ll bring you something of inferior quality and swear that it’s the same as the sample and keep prattling and chattering and swearing oaths and perjuring themselves till you buy it, out of embarrassment or to avoid a quarrel. Often they even give the buyer forged coin.

4.18.8

“‘The purveyors of food and drink in this city are even worse cheats and violators than the rest of its inhabitants, for they display a sleight of hand at weighing that I have seen nowhere else, meaning that someone selling you something that has to be weighed will throw it into the pan of the scales swiftly and carelessly, as though he were furious at seeing your face or at the scales, and the second the pan starts to dip will whip it off and hand it to you, and if you send him your servant or your son, he’ll sell him leftovers, showing even greater fury at the scales-pan; and this is over and above their adulteration of foodstuffs and drinks and the way they change prices according to the time of day and the weather. The same sleight of hand is well-known too among those who sell goods by volume and by length.

4.18.9

“‘Concerning what they say about places for promenading and having fun in Paris, such as the gardens of the Palais Royal and surroundings, I swear that no one who has seen the gardens at Cremorne, Vauxhall, or Rosherville⁵¹⁷ in the suburbs of London, not to mention the numerous gardens in its various quarters, will thereafter find it in him to speak of any others. True, the gardens of the Palais Royal here are attractive, despite their small size, which is due to their being in the heart of the city, while the former are at a distance from the center; but what is one to say of the heart of this city? How many reprobates, male and female, does that garden bring together each day! It is in essence a meeting place for fornicators, because women frequent it to hunt for men: the woman sits down on a bench next to a man whom she fancies but doesn’t know; he will have in his hand a book that he’s reading and she will have in hers a handkerchief that she’s embroidering or something else of the sort; he reads a word from the book and for each word gives her a look; she likewise sews a stitch and for every stitch throws him an amorous glance, and by the time they get up, they’re lovers (even if the next day each of them changes his bench and his affections).

4.18.10

“‘As far as beauty is concerned, there is no comparison between that of the women of Paris and that of the women of London. In the first, a woman with lupus⁵¹⁸ and one who might be considered handsome only when there were no others about (al-khafūt)(1) would be regarded here as combining every possible beauty of body and disposition since the short supply of beauty here renders it much esteemed, for when something is in short supply, it comes to be regarded highly and people become more intent on it and their competition over it becomes more intense. The most amazing thing to me is that women of outstanding beauty in London go around in rags while in Paris ugly and misshapen women strut about in silk and cashmere. Dance halls in London open every evening and in Paris three nights a week only, and in most streets in London you can hear singing coming from pretty serving-girls, and musical instruments, night and day, without penalty or fine; in Paris, this is rarely to be found. The most one can say in praise of Paris and its claims to precedence is that it contains elegant places to drink alcohol and coffee where men and women sit inside and out, face to face and back to back. Are a few people sitting on chairs enough to make one judge in its favor or for it to have had over the ages the reputation among both elite and commons of being the most beautiful city in the world? How too can the modest decency of the young Englishmen and their good manners with women, whether indoors or on the streets, be compared to those French youths with their bold eyes who glare and stare(2) into women’s faces, be they respectable ladies or prostitutes, and who when they see a woman bend over to tie her shoelace, surround her, making an annulus around her anus and a ring around her rectum, especially when they go to the pissoirs here and pull out their tent pegs…’”⁵¹⁹ The Fāriyāq: “I said, ‘Keep on talking and say what you want, just don’t stop and stare at the tent pegs.’ ‘You become jealous,’ she asked me, ‘even when I’m only talking? I only paused out of amazement at a world built upon pegging and being pegged. For sure, were I a king or an emir, I would eat nothing that had been touched by the hands of men.’”

4.18.11

While they were thus engaged in conversation, a man knocked suddenly on the door. The Fāriyāq opened it to him, chagrined at his entering to find them talking of tent pegs. The man spoke and said, “I heard of your arrival and am come to you in the hope that I might be able to study with you some text in Arabic. In return, I’ll give you fifteen francs a month.” When the Fāriyāqiyyah heard this, she laughed excessively, as was her wont, and said to her husband, “Here’s your first evidence of the generosity of these friends of ours over whom the world has made such a hullabaloo!” The Fāriyāq told the man, “I don’t want any money from you. Just give me lessons in your language in exchange for lessons in mine.” The man agreed. Some days later, one of Paris’s learned men came to him and said, “I heard of your arrival, and that you’re passionate about poetry. If you were to write a few verses about Paris and speak in them of its charms, it would serve as a recommendation to its people, for people here love praise and flattery, meaning that they love the outsider in their midst to butter them up with praise, just as, if they’re outsiders in countries other than their own, they write in praise of the rulers of that country and gain from them respect and status.” The Fāriyāq did as he advised and wrote a long poem in praise of Paris and its inhabitants that he named “the Presumptive” since for him to praise them before he got to know them was speculation; it will appear later, in Chapter 20, along with its counter-poem, “the Prescriptive,” and a selection of other verses he wrote in Paris. When the learned man examined its tropes, he admired them greatly and translated them into his own language and went on to have the translation published in a newspaper, a copy of which he brought to the Fāriyāq, saying, “I have had the translation of your poem printed in this newspaper, and the Société Asiatique⁵²⁰ (the adjective means ‘pertaining to Asia’) has promised to have the Arabic original printed among its scientific papers, as you are the first poet to write in praise of Paris in Arabic.” The Fāriyāq thanked the man and told him, “I would like a copy of the translation.” The man told him, “It’s sold at such and such a place for around two-thirds of a franc.” So he went and bought a copy himself. A few days later, someone who had read the paper came to him and said, “I read the translation of your poem and I liked it. Would you be willing to exchange lessons with me?” “That’s exactly what I want,” said the Fāriyāq, and the man continued to visit him for a number of days, during which he introduced him to the well-known scholar Monsieur Quatremère,⁵²¹ and that scholar introduced him to Monsieur Caussin de Perceval,⁵²² the teacher of Arabic. Subsequently, he also became acquainted with the other teacher of Arabic, Monsieur Reinaud.⁵²³ However, his acquaintance with them was like the definite article in the sentence “Go to the market and buy meat!”⁵²⁴

4.18.12

Then he was visited by one of those notables whose names are preceded by the article “de,” which is a mark of nobility and honor. This was Monsieur de Beaufort, whose sister had a house in which she gave schooling to a number of the daughters of the leading members of society. One night, when it was time for them to be examined, she held a banquet to which she invited the Fāriyāqiyyah and her husband. The Fāriyāq said to his wife, “Here’s an example for you of the generosity of these people. For a while now you’ve complained of being lonely and of the tightfistedness of the people I’ve come to know, saying, ‘They never invite you, and in England everyone invited you, whether they knew you or not, to the point that it often irritated you since it meant you had to change your clothes and the hour at which you ate lunch and deprive yourself of tobacco!’ So be happy now that our friends are with virtue furnished.” “Indeed,” she replied, “every one of them’s a vaginal furnace.”⁵²⁵ They spent that evening at the house of the sister of the aforementioned “de” under the most felicitous conditions and with the most serene of dispositions, and the Fāriyāqiyyah went home in an altogether different mood, saying, “Beaufort was most gracious and kind, and the Frenchwomen showed me a degree of friendliness and informality I would never have believed! And I liked too all that speaking through their noses and snorting that occurs so much in their speech and to which the French language must owe, in my opinion, its appeal and which is even sweeter and more captivating from the children.” The Fāriyāq went on, “I said, ‘It seems the ancient Arabs liked that kind of twang too, because my Master the author of the Qāmūs says, “nakhima or tanakhkhama means ‘he expelled something from his chest or his nose’” while “nakhama means ‘he sported, or he sang most excellently.’”’ She laughed and said, ‘I think your friend must have been in love with a woman who spoke through her nose, and I’m worried you may catch the same infection. I grant that nasality, or even drawling, or even a sharp tongue may be attractive in young boys and girls, but can a young man really stand a sterterous old woman snorting up his nose or a young woman a senile old man wheezing into her nostrils? And I like the way the common people in Paris don’t make fun of a foreigner when they see that he’s different from them in dress and manners, unlike the London rabble, who lacerate him with their words, one of them sometimes going to the trouble of calling out to him from some distance away till his voice is hoarse just so that he can tell him, “Foreigner, you’re a bloody bastard!” though perhaps I’m mistaken in this.’ ‘On the contrary,’ I said, ‘you’re quite right, for everyone praises the manners of the laborers and other poor people in Paris and their well-spokenness.’”

4.18.13

They went on for a while comparing the good qualities of Paris with those of London. One of the things that the Fāriyāqiyyah hated most about Paris was that the women⁵²⁶ were licensed to enter houses of whatever kind,⁵²⁷ and she claimed that the arrangement for houses in London was better in this respect. The Fāriyāq told her, “It cannot be denied that the houses of London are better arranged from the perspective that their stairs and their inhabitants are few and maintain peace and quiet, that their doorsteps are scrubbed every day and that their kitchens hold tasty cuts of meat, that their interiors are well-proportioned and spread with fine carpets, but they are firetraps [?].⁵²⁸ The houses of Paris, on the other hand, withstand the weather better and look finer on the outside. As for prostitutes being forbidden to enter the former and permitted to enter the latter, this, in my opinion, is evidence of how well-behaved the prostitutes of Paris are, in contrast to those of London, who drink and prostitute themselves shamelessly, which is why they are forbidden to go in to visit the residents. And there is another reason too, which is that the prostitutes of Paris are known to the police stations, where their names are written down. As a result, they don’t dare to behave in a depraved or shameless way, even if they are depraved. The prostitutes of London, on the other hand, are left to their own devices.”

4.18.14

The Fāriyāqiyyah now went through a period during which she suffered from extremely painful palpitations, which would stay with her for several consecutive days before settling. While this continued, she was invited several times to the house of the “de”’s sister and she’d go with her husband, the two of them being most pleased at this generosity, the like of which they had not met with in Paris. Then the Fāriyāqiyah’s sickness took a turn for the worse and she took to her bed, and he brought her two Austrian physicians who treated her for a while, until she got a little better. The “de”’s sister had married a man called Ledos, and when her brother came to visit the Fāriyāq, as he often did, and found the Fāriyāqiyyah moaning and complaining of the pain, he asked her husband, “Have you consulted my brother-in-law about medicine for your wife? He is an expert in the qualities of plants and has cured many of this disease.” So the Fāriyāq went to see the man and asked him to go with him to see his wife. The man told him, “I’m not licensed by the Board to treat patients but I won’t refuse to go with you, in the hope that your wife may be cured at my hands.” Then he went and advised the Fāriyāqiyyah to drink the water of certain herbs, boiled, and sent her six packets of these. When these were used up and the Fāriyāq asked for more, the “de”’s sister, meaning the fake doctor’s wife, came and said, “My husband is charging you fifty francs for the packets.” When the Fāriyāqiyyah heard this, her energy returned to her all at once and she asked her, “Aren’t you ashamed to ask for such a sum for six packets of herbs when your husband isn’t even a doctor?” Her husband then said to her, “But remember that she invited us to drink coffee and tea twice, and provided us, between the one and the other, with confections and cakes, so you mustn’t be rude to her.” After prolonged discussion and punishing struggle, the “de”’s sister agreed to take half the sum mentioned, which the Fāriyāq paid her, and she left, muttering to herself. After this her brother stopped visiting. A quack of this sort on seeing a foreigner will show him a smiling face, make a fuss of him, invite him to his house, and keep on visiting him until such time as he sees him complaining of a cough or anything of the sort, at which point he prescribes medicine for him. Then he’ll charge him an excessive amount for each time they visited one another from the start of their acquaintance, bring neighbors as witnesses that the man used to frequent the man’s house, and claim that his disease is chronic. The standard-bearer for this vile regiment was the quack D’Alex, who lived at 61 Berner’s Street, Oxford Street, in London.

4.18.15

After this the Austrian doctor resumed his treatment of the Fāriyāqiyyah. When she was convalescing, he recommended that she leave Paris, and they decided to send her to Marseilles. At this, she said to her husband, “I would like now to leave this land in which there is no good to be found. Not one of those acquaintances of yours to whom you brought letters of recommendation from London and whom you then came to know here by virtue of your learning has invited you to sit on a chair in his house. You wrote to that Lamartine, to whom you had transmitted a letter of recommendation from Shaykh Marʿī al-Daḥdāḥ in Marseilles, asking him about something, and he never answered you, though if you were to write to the prime minister of England, he’d certainly give you an answer, whether negative or positive. And that quack, the ‘de’’s brother-in-law, made us pay twenty-five francs for six packets of herbs, while this Austrian doctor and his friend have treated me for a long time, have taken a lot of trouble with me, and haven’t charged you a thing, which is how the doctors of London are, may God reward them well.

4.18.16

“Does everyone except the people of Paris treat the foreigner well and show him kindness? I used to hear that there existed somewhere in this world a tribe of people who were full of artifice,⁵²⁹ insincere, double-dealing, doublehearted, two-tongued, two-faced, falsehearted, faithless, fickle, hollow-hearted, glib, inconstant, mealy-mouthed, tongue-in-cheek, capricious, hypocritical, treacherous, shifty, sneaky, and backstabbing, but I didn’t know which tribe they were. Now, direct experience has taken the place of hearsay and I have discovered that these adjectives that I have listed at such length above are but a few of those that may be applied to the people of this city, for their affection is ‘squashy,’ meaning that like squash it grows fast and withers quickly, and their engagements are like those of ʿUrqūb:⁵³⁰ How often have they promised and not come through, raised false hopes and dashed them, sworn oaths and broken them, given undertakings and proven untrue! They’re all ‘hail-fellow-well-met’ to any who’s new to them but when he keeps them company they grow bored and when he’s not among them he’s ignored. What others settle with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no,’ they dither over for days and nights, starting with long confabulations and ending with gross self-contradictions.

4.18.17

“Their tightfistedness where everything but the dance hall’s concerned is proverbial: the fires they light in winter are weaker by far than those of the glowworm (though if they were to light fires like those of the English, you’d find their weather turning darker and grayer than theirs) and in summer they don’t light lamps. These are the only seasons they have, so it’s either freezing cold or burning hot. Note too that a Frenchman will set the pay of anyone who works for him at the same rate in francs as the English would pay in guineas even though their country has higher prices for staples and so on than London. Did you ever see an Englishman counting his pennies the way the French do their centimes? Many English don’t even know how many pennies they have amongst their small change. Yes indeed — not to mention that one of them (i.e., the Parisians) will write you a letter asking you to do something for him and then not pay you for doing it.

4.18.18

“Among the things that make me laugh at their complacent self-regard is that they eat the most revolting of foods and their stomachs are always full of pig fat. Then, when they attend parties or public places, they go to great lengths to dress up and strut about looking as fine as they can. Also, that many of them close up every chink and window in the summer and never open them, to deceive people into thinking that they’ve gone to spend that season on some estate in the countryside as do their aristocrats, that many sustain themselves on bread and cheese by day so that they may appear in the theaters and places of entertainment by night, and that their nobility and those with a ‘de’ before their names eat twice a day and breakfast on shellfish, while everybody else eats three times and the English four. God forbid that all the French are like those of Paris — what a waste it would be if all the praise that has been lavished upon them were to end up like rosewater used to clean a latrine!

4.18.19

“As for the women of Paris and their reputation as examplars of good manners and sophistication, I swear that their front parts stink and they don’t wipe themselves properly(1) and most of them don’t wash under their arms or use sanitary towels or stuff in a piece of cloth or block it with a rag or wash their bottoms or use vulva-tightening preparations or menstrual cloths or cloths or rags to wipe off the menses or remove semen or menstrual bandages. Based on what one can see of them, the only cleanliness they know is that of the blouse, the handkerchief, and the stockings. That is why you see them forever exposing their legs as they walk in the markets, summer and winter, on the excuse of raising their skirts so that any filth there may be on the ground won’t touch them. Those who have good legs show off their legs and their stockings together, and those that have thin shanks show off the second. There are no women in the entire world more haughty, self-admiring, proud, cunning, arrogant, perfidious, competitive, vain, or vainglorious than they, be they ugly or pretty, tall or short (as the majority of them are), old or young, respectable or harlots, bearded and mustached or smooth-cheeked, mannish of aspect and countenance or not (though I have never seen mannish-looking women anywhere but among the women of Paris and London, albeit the latter are not proud and coquettish like Parisian women). They have been driven to this by the extreme lecherousness and lustfulness toward them of the men. You’ll see an upstanding young buck walking with his arm around the waist of some hideous she-ghoul and obeying her abjectly. Men of theirs who take wives in our country target black slave girls, as a way of escaping the imperiousness and profligacy of their own women. I have seen women of the common people among them performing laṭʿ, which means sucking their fingers after eating, and licking off what is on them.⁵³¹ Their noblewomen wash their hands in a cup placed on the table, in the presence of their guests, and rinse their mouths out with water and then spit it into the cup. Is this to be considered a form of good manners or sophistication? Isn’t their doing so more disgusting than the belching that happens among us? Only someone whose eye has accustomed itself to them over time could praise their charms or become infatuated with them.

4.18.20

“But even if we suppose, for argument’s sake, that the women of Paris are sophisticated and smart, what are we to make of the women who come from the provinces, from the small towns by the river, from the villages and hamlets, from the small rural towns, the country estates, the countryside? Some of these countrywomen cover their heads with a kerchief so that all that can be seen is a few hairs at the temples, while others wear a dunce’s cap made of cloth on their heads, with the result that the Parisians can scarcely restrain themselves from laughing when they see one of them, and their accents are uglier still. Many women in Paris sweep the streets and take on men’s work. In Boulogne, Calais, Dieppe, Le Havre, and other port cities, you’ll find women carrying travelers’ baggage on their backs and heads, but there are no female porters to be found anywhere in England except those who carry for men with heavy loads.⁵³² Their clothes, too, are all the same. How, then, can the French claim that they are all civilized? I swear, were the women in our country to go out into the markets unveiled and show off their feet and waists and legs like the women of Paris, no one would think of mentioning the latter in the same breath when beauty and sophistication were the topic of conversation! To Cairo, to Cairo — the land of fun and aspiration! To Syria,⁵³³ to Syria — where virtue and literature are exemplified in combination! To Tunis — the best of abodes, where dwells the most generous of the Arab nation!⁵³⁴ I have had enough of the treatment I’ve met with from the Franks, and feel that a day spent with them is like a year. Let me leave these countries that have sickened my body with their food and drink and the chill of their putrid airs!” The Fāriyāq told her, “If you can stand the journey, then let it be as you wish.” “Death on the road,” she replied, “would be better than staying on forever in the land of the ignoble!” From that moment then, she prepared herself to travel, though the next day she was so weak and in such pain that she could not move — details to follow in the coming chapter.

4.19.1

When the Christians of Aleppo suffered their calamity⁵³⁵ and were subjected to that pillaging of their wealth and property and that rapine, their religious leaders met and took the decision to send agents on their behalf to the lands of the Franks to collect aid from the governments and churches there to assure their survival. The Greek Orthodox Church chose Khawājā Fatḥallāh Marrāsh⁵³⁶ and the Greek Melkite Church chose Metropolitan Atanāsiyūs al-Tutūnjī, author of Al-Ḥakākah fī l-rakākah (The Leavings Pile Concerning Lame Style),⁵³⁷ and with him another man, called Khawājā Shukrī ʿAbbūd. These then set off on a tour of the various countries, ending up in the Austrian Empire, from which they collected a significant sum. They had with them a proclamation from the metropolitans of the two aforementioned churches in Aleppo announcing that they were commissioned by the two sects to act in this matter. When they had finished with Austria, the abovementioned Khawājā Fatḥallāh Marrāsh and his colleague Khawājā Shukrī ʿAbbūd went to Paris, taking the proclamation with them, while the metropolitan stayed behind, intending to meet up with them in England. He did not go with them to France, despite his being the delegate of the Melkite church, which is in communion with the French church, because he had committed there, on a former occasion, such breaches of etiquette and oversteppings of the bounds set for such as him that he had had to be imprisoned and subsequently expelled from the country. He was therefore afraid, things being as they were, that he would be exposed there this time and his bad behavior come back to haunt him. Now, when his colleagues produced their sponsors’ proclamation for the Bishop of Paris and asked him for assistance, the latter was surprised to see the name of Metropolitan al-Tutūnjī mentioned therein but not to see his face, and he asked them, “How is it that the delegate of the Melkite church is not in attendance with you?” The two men made excuses for his absence that the aforementioned did not accept and, recalling what al-Tutūnjī had done before, he sent them away empty-handed.

4.19.2

Khawājā Fatḥallāh Marrāsh and his colleague had been paying visits to the Fāriyāq throughout their stay in Paris, the first, however, visiting the more frequently. The Fāriyāq gave him a warm welcome, even though he knew him to be al-Tutūnjī’s colleague, because he believed him to be a man of learning and insight, not to mention that he was a married man with children and these rarely resort to cheating and skulduggery, for learning refines the mind and children soften the heart. Then the metropolitan became involved in some shady affair in some town belonging to Austria — Bologna, I think⁵³⁸—and was expelled from it at speed and in disgrace and went to England seeking further funds. On the same day, he sent to his two colleagues to join him there. A few days after they had left, the Fāriyāq received a letter from the secretary of the Committee (“committee” meaning “fraternal association”), included with which was a quire from a foreign book that the Fāriyāq had translated into Arabic and which included something displeasing to the Committee. He then realized that one of the metropolitan’s two colleagues must have stolen it from his room during one of their visits at the metropolitan’s behest, that when he met with him in London he had handed it over to him, and that the metropolitan had given it to the Committee in the hope that its members would inflict some injury on the Fāriyāq. The said Committee, however, being committed to a high standard of conduct, had returned the quire to the Fāriyāq, as they had no reason to keep it. The quire arrived on the same day that the Fāriyāqiyyah had determined to travel, and she became so angry and upset that she took to her bed. As for the metropolitan, he was accosted in London by certain leaders of the Roman church, who forbade him to practice the Sassanian trade.⁵³⁹ Things got to such a point that his disgrace and notoriety there created difficulties for the others with those whom they were importuning on church business, for these now reckoned that anyone coming to them from the lands of the East must be a hypocrite.

4.19.3

The Fāriyāqiyyah recovered after a few days and insisted on traveling. Her husband therefore wrote her a letter of recommendation to the August Lord Sāmī Pasha the Grand in Constantinople. Then he sent her off, accompanied by the youngest of their children to keep her company. When the time came for them to part, they bade each other farewell and wept and expressed their emotions until, when their eyes ceased to respond with tears — a state known as “dry eye” or “dry cry” or “the unresponsive eye”—he returned home feeling lonely and downcast. She traveled to Marseilles, where her illness left her and she recovered completely, but she did not abandon her intention of going to Islāmbūl,⁵⁴⁰ confident that their parting could lead only to their imminent reunion. When she made contact with the aforementioned lord and presented her letter of recommendation to his son, Ṣubḥī Bayk,⁵⁴¹ of noble lineage and line (his father being at that moment absent), he honored her lodgings with a visit and showed her every kindness — and this is another example of Eastern generosity that ought to be conveyed to the ears of the Western, Frankish, princes. While this was going on, the Fāriyāq composed a poem dedicated to the aforementioned person in which he praised him for his generosity and friendship. He also composed verses into which he poured all the loneliness he felt at being so far from her. All of these will be presented in the next chapter, which forms the conclusion to the book.⁵⁴²

4.19.4

Next he moved from that house to a room, where he made it his habit to write each day two lines of verse, which he inscribed on its door. Then the Most Noble Master ʿAbd al-Qādir came to Paris, so he dedicated a poem to him too, and was honored by being invited to attend a gathering in his presence. Then his patience wore out due to loneliness, and some acquaintances persuaded him to play at those decorated pieces of paper,⁵⁴³ and he joined the gambling fraternity. More than once, however, his ignorance of the game drove his partner to lose his temper with him, so he made do with just being the ḥurḍah (the ḥurḍah is “the gamblers’ record keeper”).⁵⁴⁴ Then he made the acquaintance of the chief state translator, Conte Desgranges; however, he never crossed the doorstep of any of the other translators, scholars, or teachers of oriental languages because they so begrudged him a share of their milk and honey, their affection, their words, and their meetings that they refused to print his poem in praise of Paris even after they had promised to do so, and their empty promises were made of nothing but envy and bad faith.

4.20.1

All hail, the Fāriyāq! The time has come to part! This is the last chapter of this book of mine, into which I have put enough of your doings to bore me and the readers alike. Had I known before embarking on it that you’d task me with transmitting everything you said and did, I would never have inserted my neck into this noose or taken upon myself such a heavy load. I thought at first that the exiguousness of your body would obviate the need to put together a composition of any great size, such as this, and I swear if you were to tuck it under your arm and walk with it as many steps as it has pages, you’d toss it over your shoulder, complaining of it and of yourself as well since you’re the cause of its existence. My friendship for you will not prevent me, should I examine your situation at some later time, from writing another book about you — but mind you don’t go in for lots more journeys, or nightly and daily molestation of priests and women, for I have grown very weary of talking about such stuff and all I have gotten in return are trouble and toil.

4.20.2

It remains for me now to transmit, on your authority, some of your poems and verses. Before I start, however, I must say something about my own situation. This year,⁵⁴⁵ when I was in London and malign rumors spread of war between the Sublime State and the Russian Empire, I wrote a poem in praise of Our August Lord and Honored Sultan, Sultan ʿAbd al-Majīd — may God remain forever on his side and immortalize his glory and his pride! — and presented it to his honorable and ennobled ambassador, Prince Musurus, who sent it on to His Honor, the Pride of Ministers, Rashīd Pasha, may God grant his every desire. Only a few days had passed before the latter sent to the prince — ambassador to inform him that he had presented the poem to the Sultan’s Presence at a propitious moment and that it had made a favorable impression, and that a Sublime Command had been issued appointing me to the Imperial Translation Bureau. This was the sweetest news that could come to my ears. I must now therefore make ready to travel and assume the honor of that post.

4.20.3

You must know, however, dear reader, that, since my concern and only desire was to see the book printed before I left for Constantinople and since my sojourn in London required the delaying of my departure (for the parts of the book that had been printed were being sent to me there to make final corrections), Khawājā Rāfāʾīl Kaḥlā, who had undertaken to print the book at his expense, suggested that the printing would go faster if I went to Paris myself, and I did so. At that time there was a steamship belonging to the Sublime State in the Port of London that was supposed to set sail soon. I therefore entreated my friend Khawājā Nīnah, who had come with Khawājā Mīkhāʾīl Mikhallaʿ to take care of some business, to let me know when the date of the ship’s departure was announced and inform me of that, so that I didn’t miss the chance of leaving on it. This Khawājā Nīnah had certain things that he needed and wanted from Paris, most of them related to his wife, and he had commissioned an acquaintance there to buy them. Once that person had bought them, he instructed him to give them to me and wrote me a letter in which he said that the ship was about to leave, so it would be better if I were to return to London quickly. I believed what he said and set off in a hurry for London, worried that the ship might have departed without me, and I left the proofreading I was doing to Khawājā Rāfāʾīl to see to. When I reached London, I realized that my friend’s advice had not been given because of any need for me to be there but in order to ensure that I would bring his things with me and so save him the usual costs and customs charges and also so that he could adorn his wife with them before they had time to go out of fashion — for the ship remained in the port for a long while to repair its engines, as the one who gave me that advice had known it would. My coming to London this second time resulted, therefore, in a further delay in the printing, since the sheets had to be sent to me to look at before they were printed, as explained above. Were it not for this, the book would have been produced quickly.

4.20.4

Nevertheless, I thank the Almighty that the womanish matters to which He subjected the book were only such as to delay its printing and not to result in its total cancellation or abrogation, which is something I often worried about, just as the Fāriyāq worried over the misrepresentation of his life story because of similar obstacles. The case lends credence to the Fāriyāqiyyah’s statement in chapter 9 of Book Four⁵⁴⁶ to the effect that two people may be involved in a marriage, a commercial partnership, or something similar, with one of the two believing privately that he is doing his partner a favor; so whenever, my friend, you are given a piece of advice to listen to by someone, pick it apart and probe its depths to discover whether its goal is to help you specifically, or to help the one who is giving you the advice and only him, or to help the two of you equally (but don’t start with this advice of mine since my sole intention in giving it to you is to help you and you alone).

4.20.5

And know, O Fāriyāq, that before your poems and verses are honored by incorporation into this book, I must honor it and its readers too with the aforementioned poem,⁵⁴⁷ which goes

Truth prevails and Right builds.

Falsehood nullifies and Evil destroys.

Injustice comes to an ugly end, its perpetrator

To every ruinous iniquity being ever exposed.

The knave’s discontent springs from those same blessings with which

The noble freeborn man’s enriched and for which he offers thanks.

The Russian tyrants went too far when their large numbers made them feel hubris and they acted haughtily.

They laid plots, but their scheming has come back to cut their own throats

For their necks will be slit by sharp swords.

The aggressors, whom no reason can restrain,

The oppressors, the wrongdoers, the debauched,

Violated the agreements (and so was ever their way)

Out of bad faith, and nursed a baseless grudge,

To the point that their leader deemed that violation of rights

Should be counted a glorious deed, but they do wrong who prefer their own interests.

Does he take the Sublime State to be Sweden

And himself some latter-day Peter?⁵⁴⁸

It is not so! Let him then be deterred and let him know

That its sovereign takes his revenge on whomever he desires!

4.20.6

Muslims, check well,⁵⁴⁹ should you hear

A report about the aggressive Russians, and reflect!

Let not the size of their hordes deceive you:

Great armies cannot harm the Truth.

Believers, this is the struggle to which God calls you, so make haste

To volunteer, that you may receive your divine reward!

This is God’s struggle, which protects your honor.

Contribute to it with every precious thing you have saved up—

In the words “You will not attain piety until you expend

Of what you love”⁵⁵⁰ is the clearest guide—

And hold fast to “the most firm handle”⁵⁵¹ of

Goodly patience in combat and be advised.

“God is greater!” and “There is no god but He!” will relieve you

Of the need to set to against them with trenchant blade.

Meet them, then, with these two cries in struggle and you will triumph

And fall upon them, take the fight to them, and charge against them!

Attack them by sea and by land. Mass against them

In companies and troops of horsemen and peck the feathers off their eagle.⁵⁵²

Were you but a small band of soldiers,

They would not be overcome⁵⁵³—so how can you fail when you are more?

From any bloody tyrant whole nations, nay, fate itself, will be defended

On the day you, O Sultan, bar his path.

4.20.7

You are those who worship God aright, so cleave to

The True Religion, for through you it gains in strength and is restored to its former state.

Protect your households, for the safekeeping of your family

Is a religious duty incumbent upon you that may not be shirked!

Defend your Islam jealously until you raise

Its banners! You must show your pride in it.

Let not the bells be heard in your territories

In place of the call to prayer, and let no mosque pulpit be desecrated!

Let there be heard today in your lands

The cracking of pates by sword blades — or would you be paralyzed?—

For that is sweeter than the song of any singer who entrances

The ears of the people, and they are greedy to hear it.

But God’s strong hand that is with you

Will bring you strength, so you will never retreat

No matter how many soldiers of theirs try your strength,

Even should soldiers fill the entire earth.

In the Portioned Narration,⁵⁵⁴ your Lord has told you,

“It was ever a duty upon us to help” them,⁵⁵⁵ so be reminded!

God will not break his promise to his servants—

They shall remain in his safekeeping, and be victorious.

4.20.8

He was your Lord and has never ceased to be

A stronghold for you. Wherever you may be, He guards.

They may point their lances at you

But never will be able to drive them home.

The cutting sword can do no harm, unless God

Wills. None but Him can induce effect.

Any fire from them, should He wish to extinguish it,

Will turn cold, never to catch again or flare back up.

When He wishes, he will brush aside their throne, and they cannot

Advance that day or delay it.⁵⁵⁶

They attacked protected women of yours

Who for so long had been kept inviolate from any who might debauch them.

Shall some lecherous unbeliever lead them away today in chains

And your swords not drip with blood?

If the touch of it be polluting and filthy,

Then by wading into it, says the law, you may be made clean.

Patience is praiseworthy, but when what is sacrosanct

Is violated, I see no reason for you to be patient.

There is no good in a life that is mingled with humiliation—

Shame on you should you fail or turn your backs!

4.20.9

God has borne witness that He is your Lord

And your supporter, so while praising him, vanquish!

God has promised those of you who struggle on His behalf

“A manifest victory,”⁵⁵⁷ in the Book, so be joyful!

He provides the martyrs with the best of abodes—

Gardens of Eternity⁵⁵⁸ whose dominion is never eclipsed.

The war between you is an ongoing battle, so stand firm,

And victory is the outcome, so be glad!

In the fighters of Badr⁵⁵⁹ is a lesson for you.

O People, let him who would remember remember!

Fight bravely that your Lord may be pleased with you

For he who fights bravely by his detractors is excused.

What a difference between him who comes to the combat as a volunteer

And the one impressed against his will, compelled!

He is led and driven by a master,

Who is coarse, ignoble, tyrannical, unjust

And who can sell him, should he wish, to the slaver,

Along with his son, and take his wife as his concubine.

No honor restrains them nor does any magnanimity

Turn them aside from the debaucheries they inflict on people.

4.20.10

They hasten to commit abominations because

No hope remains that they might be remembered along with men of virtue.

Likewise, the vilest of people, if a praiseworthy deed is beyond them,

Would like to become known by any notorious act.

They have gained fortune, but how often has fortune cut the throat

Of those who win it when they give not thanks.

Maybe their circling eagle⁵⁶⁰ will fall

And a light from the crescent moon⁵⁶¹ will rise over it and dazzle.

The wicked shall not flourish so long as they shall live

Nor shall the arrogant so long as they live in luxury, and never shall God ease their way.

Have they not noted what has come down to them concerning those who oppressed men

Before them out of arrogance, and how they were destroyed,

Or do they think God incapable, since He has left them so long to their own devices,

Of taking His people’s side that they be victorious,

Or of providing against them an army that may not be seen

Or running galleons that cleave no waves,

Or a wailing wind to uproot them

As they sport in security, their minds oblivious,

Or of loosing against them the “birds in flights”⁵⁶² that

Caused their like — may they not be increased! — to perish?

4.20.11

Those who worship the idol can never overcome

A people who are marshaled to the sound of “You we worship.”⁵⁶³

He among mankind whose sincerity of effort pleases God

Deserves all good.

He who does not lend an ear to the advice of his friend

Is guilty of error, and no warner will be of use to him.

He whom the Lord’s gifts have made proud turns violent

In injustice, and out of obstinacy lies and betrays.

He whose God-given allotment of daily bread is not enough to make him rich

And so cranes his neck to look for more loses.

He who foolishly places his trust in an army he has

And not in God will be seized by that against which he was warned.

He who thinks he will be made strong by the force of his intrepidity

And of his weapons and his followers — he is the one who has been duped.

He who challenges the All-Conquering will end up humiliated,

Weakened, and impotent, made abject and defeated.

He who is happy in his day with his disbelief,

The next will receive full measure of the Great Torment.

He who ever should wish for the things of this world

Before those of the next will be carried off by what he prefers.

4.20.12

He whose king among men

Is ʿAbd al-Majīd is the one to whom God grants victory.

Our Most Exalted Sultan, through whom our days

Have been rendered happy and bright — may the ages be his ransom!—

Has spread justice throughout the land. Thus all of us,

In his shadow, feel confidence and joy.

Each nation within his possessions receives aid

From him and gifts that include and embrace all.

His justice and his guarantee of safety never fail them,

Whether they are in hard straits or at ease.

If our enemies take their idol

As master, let us carry out whatever our sultan commands.

We do not hope for proximity to the Merciful

By any means except obedience to him, nor do we pick and choose [which divine commands to obey].

No indeed, nor will we find in anything but service to him

Honor, purity of intention, and justification.

He who pledges allegiance to any but him is an unbeliever, and the aggressor

Against him out of injustice and tyranny is yet more so.

4.20.13

Who is that man who would claim to be like him in exaltedness and glorious feats

And who is it that would deny his most excellent adornments?

Had he demanded [more virtues] from Creation,

He would not have added aught to what we already expect of him.

From the essence of purity was his person shaped

By an All-Capable Lord, who shapes the world according to His wishes.

He put under his charge the affairs of religion and this world together,

For he is imam, ruler, and commander

And he it is whose higher status among other kings

Is honored out of awe and venerated,

And he it is who is beloved among mortals

And exalted and revered and esteemed.

With his name they ward off harm amongst them

And from the pulpits his praise is repeated.

If he speaks, none are exempted from what he says,

And when he acts, he does so as his own master.

The Franks are not partisans of his enemies.

They are not their supporters nor are they their kinsfolk.

4.20.14

Is one who follows the guidance of his Lord

Like one misled, whom an evil sorcerer has seduced?

Or one who possesses a noble character to be compared

To a base pest in nature and to him likened?

Or is one who gives with open hand on the same plane

In beneficence and capability as one who gives grudgingly and is a miser?

More, O Commander of the Believers! — And all who call,

“More, O Commander of the Believers!” are made princes!

Rule in your nobility, excelling in glory all mankind

And any spiteful gelding who hates you!⁵⁶⁴

Your all-encompassing rewards have encompassed our most extreme

Requests and all that we could ever think of,

Until our imaginations have become exhausted from

Asking so much, while you still hand out booty and do not grow angry.

The stammerer, when obliged to speak your praise, speaks fluently;

Even the inanimate comes close to being able to express it.

Your glory has illumined the entire universe

To the point that it is as one to the blind and to the sighted.

The tyrants directed at you an envious look,

Then reluctantly retracted it and grieved.

4.20.15

Their army has no right, by God, to menace

Or to devise plots. Verily your Lord’s devising is greater!

Craft is impossible if it runs

Contrary to His design, and what is fated will be.

Their horde was but fragments blowing in the wind

And the sun is not hidden by motes.

Farūq belongs to no throne but yours; so long as it lives by

The Furqān,⁵⁶⁵ it will not become desolate.

You are he the eulogizing of whose form causes cares

To be lifted from us and our horizon to exude perfume,

And dreams of hopes come true on the morrow of the one

Who diverts himself with them, though the times be contrary and harsh.

The stringing of the pearls in praise

Of you cannot match the precious gifts that are scattered from the clouds of your palm.⁵⁶⁶

No speaker is left among mankind

Who does not tell of the gifts of your beneficence.

God protect Your Sublime Excellence and may

Your slaves forever be safe in His protection,

And may He preserve your Sublime State so long as

Stars travel by night and seas, like your liberality, swell!

I have declaimed two Hijri dates⁵⁶⁷ in

Concluding my praise of you, which is in itself my best reward:

ʿAbd al-Majīd, may God curse his enemy—

Our sultan is the best of those who by fortune are assisted.

4.20.16