The Arabian Nights - A Companion, page 17
The fame of some of the great criminals of Abbasid Baghdad survived the fall of that city to the Mongols in 1258. In Mamluke Egypt popular stories were produced about villains of both sexes who were alleged to have flourished under the Abbasid caliphate, and some of those stories eventually found their way into the later compilations of the Nights. However, Cairo itself was the scene of many spectacular crimes, crimes which were a cause of marvel and the source of inspiration to storytellers. For example, some time in the year 1264, in the reign of the Mamluke Sultan Baybars, a dresser was summoned to a house at the Bab al-Sha‘riyya on the Khalij al-Masri (a canal that ran through Cairo into the Nile), on the corner of the Husayniyya Quarter. There her assignment was to dress and make up a woman called Ghazia, famed in the city for her beauty and the extravagance of her apparel. The dresser went into Ghazia’s house, but never came out again. However, unknown to the people in the house, the dresser had been accompanied by a female slave, who had been left to wait outside. After waiting a long time, this slave girl went off to report her mistress’s disappearance to the Governor of Cairo. He promptly had the place raided. Inside, they found not only the dresser’s corpse, but a whole cellar full of corpses. The shurta, the police force, arrested the entire gang, and in a series of painful interrogations the gang’s modus operandi was disclosed. Ghazia had made use of an old crone as a bawd or procuress. Ghazia used her beauty and the crone used encouraging words to lure gullible men back to the house. Inside the house, two male confederates would jump on the lusty and unsuspecting victims, killing them and stripping them of everything they had. A fifth confederate, a brickmaker, had a furnace, and at regular intervals the corpses would be taken along to be fed into the furnace. At the end of the investigation, the five were sentenced to death by crucifixion, and the house was confiscated. Somewhat incongruously the house was turned into a mosque, the Masjid al-Khanaqa, or Mosque of the Strangleress.6
In the case of Ghazia, robbery was the motive for murder. In times of famine, however, people were murdered in Cairo for the meat that was on their bodies. Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi, an Iraqi physician who visited Cairo in the years 1200–1201, reported that small children were being boiled or roasted alive while he was there, despite the governor of the city’s decree that any cannibals who were caught would be burned alive. Abd al-Latif’s narrative abounds with tales calculated to make the flesh creep. ‘One night after, a little after the sunset prayer, a young slave played with a newly weaned child which belonged to a wealthy person. While the child was at her side, a beggar, seizing a moment when the slave had her eyes turned from him, slit the child’s stomach and began to eat its flesh raw.’7 Similar stories of kidnap, body-snatching and cannibalism recurred in the 1290s when Egypt was again stricken by severe famine.8
At its best, a good crime was ajib, a marvel and something as wonderful to hear about as rain of blood or the birth of a two-headed calf. This fascination with crimes and their detection spawned a considerable literature, both factual and fiction. Al-Jawbari’s thirteenth-century treatise, the Kashf al-Asrar, or ‘Revelation of Secrets’, has already been referred to.9 It is one of our most important sources on criminal deceits. Al-Jawbari’s book was ostensibly written to warn honest people of the dangers they faced from crooks and charlatans. (The unconvincing piety of this boast can be compared to that of the prologue to the Nights, in which it is claimed that the latter contains ‘splendid biographies that teach the reader to detect deception and to protect himself from it’.) However, there can be little doubt that al-Jawbari’s retelling of famous confidence tricks, set-ups and practical jokes was really put together for the sake of entertaining the reader rather than warning him. A considerable portion of the Kashf al-Asrar is devoted to criminal activities – among them the tricks of bogus holy men, bandits, fraudulent alchemists, horse fakers, muggers, body-snatchers, highwaymen and housebreakers.
‘The Romance of Baybars’, an anonymous late-medieval folk-epic about the legendary exploits of the thirteenth-century Mamluke Sultan Baybars, made only light use of the facts of Baybars’s reign.10 In their place a glorious farrago was conjured up concerning Baybars’s youthful association in Syria and Egypt with all sorts of genial low-life types – wrestlers, grooms, cudgelmen, repentant thieves and, above all, the Isma‘ilis. In historical reality, the Isma‘ilis, Shi‘ite heretics who came to use assassination to promote their aims, were among that Sultan’s greatest enemies. In the ‘Romance’, however, the Isma‘ilis are Baybars’s greatest allies – and very valuable ones too, for they are expert cat burglars and skilled also in the use of drugs for overpowering enemies. The ‘Romance’ celebrates the cunning of the Isma‘ilis and other semi-criminal friends of the Sultan in a struggle against corrupt officials and soldiers who are secret enemies of Islam.
More generally, a cult of cunning and tricks (hiyal) is pervasive in Arab literature, and tales of the cunning thieves or rogues constituted a sub-genre in the broader genre which celebrated the cunning of soldiers, women, uninvited guests and even animals. The celebration of artfulness or tricksiness, whether in the commission of crimes, in arguing points of law or in inserting puns in poems, is one of the most striking features of medieval Arab culture. The anonymous Raqa’iq al-hilal fi Daqa’iq al-hiyal, or ‘Cloaks of Fine Fabric in Subtle Ruses’, written in the Mamluke period, is a fairly typical example of the genre.11 It includes sections on the cunning dodges of jinn, prophets, kings, viziers, lawyers, holy men, and so on. A further specialized sub-genre of the literature of cunning celebrated the disreputable though not exactly criminal activities of the tufayli, the uninvited guest or gate-crasher. In medieval Baghdad, gate-crashing was an organized way of earning a living, and the professional tufaylis formed a kind of guild under the direction of a sheikh, who each evening would allocate selected dinner parties to his following of gate-crashers.12 In the Nights story of ‘Isaac of Mosul and the Merchant’, Isaac sees a singer in the street, falls in love with her and follows her into a house where a dinner is being held. The host, who has spotted that Isaac is a gate-crasher, merely remarks, ‘This is a parasite [tufayli]; but he is a pleasant fellow, so treat him courteously.’
Whereas highwaymen and other robbers outside the towns were usually presented in the Nights tales and in other stories as pretty stupid (Jawan the Kurd, for example, in ‘Ali Shah and Zumurrud’) the urban criminal was generally reputed to be a cunning man. He was admired for his guile and the success which his guile brought him. (Robin Hood and Dick Turpin have comparable reputations in British culture.) Independent stories about real or legendary criminals, among them Mercury Ali, Crafty Dalilah and Ahmad the Sickness, circulated among the people prior to being gathered up into the Nights collection.13 Ali Zaybak, or Mercury Ali, seems to have been a real brigand in eleventh-century Baghdad, before he became the hero of a loosely linked series of fictional exploits, some of which eventually found their way into the Nights. Similarly, Dalilah was already known of in Abbasid Baghdad, for al-Mas‘udi refers to this ‘famous female confidence trickster’ in his tenth-century chronicle Meadows of Gold. Al-Mas‘udi, indeed, incorporated several allegedly true tales of crime and roguery in his chronicle.
Ahmad al-Danaf, or Ahmad the Sickness, like Ali Zaybak, may have been a historical figure. Inconsistent information is given by two Mamluke chroniclers. According to Ibn Taghribirdi, Ahmad the Sickness was the hero of a popular romance current in the fifteenth century, but his story was based on a certain criminal called Hamdi who lived in Cairo in the tenth century. According to Ibn Iyas, on the other hand, the bandit known as Ahmad the Sickness was captured by the Mamluke authorities in i486 and executed by being sawn in half. Most likely the fifteenth-century criminal had taken to calling himself Ahmad the Sickness in reference to his legendary precursor in crime.
A brotherhood of crime flourished in medieval Cairo. With its own hierarchy and a code of honour (of sorts), the Cairene underworld presented a dark mirror to the ruling establishment. It would appear that gangsters sometimes messed and slept together in tibaq, or barracks. A hierarchy of respect among thieves is suggested in the story of ‘The Sandalwood Merchant and the Sharpers’, in which a merchant who has been swindled is advised to visit a certain Sheikh of Thieves, an old man ‘versed in craft, magic and trickery’, pre-eminent among the city’s sharpers for his cunning, who adjudicated and delivered judgement on the exploits of his juniors.
The organization of criminals and rogues was not simply a fictional convention. It reflected elements of historical reality. Guilds were unknown in Mamluke Egypt, but when after the Ottoman occupation in the early sixteenth century guilds were established to regulate crafts and trades, the guilds of the thieves and the beggars were found among their number. In the Ottoman period (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries), Egyptian crime was organized and, to some extent at least, placed under state supervision. There were guilds for every craft in Cairo. Hence, thieves, prostitutes, entertainers, beggars and cheaters at cards had their recognized guilds. In most Ottoman cities it was possible for the victim of a robbery to go to the commander of the janissary regiment garrisoned in the town and report what had been stolen. The janissary commander would in turn contact the sheikh of the thieves’ guild, and the stolen property might be returned – for a price. Thieves’ guilds survived into the nineteenth century in Egypt. Edward William Lane, writing in the 1830s, informed his readers that ‘Even the common thieves used, not many years since, to respect a superior who was called their sheykh. He was often required to search for stolen goods, and bring offenders to justice; which he generally accomplished.’14
In the Middle Ages a great deal of the criminal activity in the cities was controlled by the members of futuwwa lodges. Futuwwa is sometimes translated as ‘chivalry’, though it is more accurately translated as ‘youngmanliness’. The history of futuwwa is somewhat obscure.15 In tenth- or eleventh-century Iraq, lodges were formed initially at least by unmarried young men. These young men, perhaps because they were unemployed or underemployed, or perhaps because they had not accumulated enough capital to marry and therefore felt obliged to seek male companionship, came together in such associations. One was initiated into a futuwwa lodge by drinking a cup of salt water and donning a special pair of trousers, the trousers of futuwwa. Subsequently futuwwa lodges spread throughout the Middle East, and many of them were devoted to respectable and even idealistic purposes. They might help ensure high standards of artisanship and commercial practice; they might devote their resources to offering hospitality to passing strangers; or they might assemble to perform mystical exercises. In medieval Cairo, however, the lodges, or most of them at any rate, came under the control of criminal elements and provided the basis for the organization of protection rackets in the city’s suburbs. Such gangsters proliferated in the Husayniyya, the north-eastern area of Cairo, and they congregated in special meeting places, ‘the halls of futuwwa’. They organized themselves in lodges called ‘villages’. The rogues who called themselves ‘the sons of Husayniyya’ feature prominently in ‘The Romance of Baybars’. Moralists denounced the futuwwa groups for their assemblies during which wine was drunk and where it was suspected that sexual, especially homosexual, activities took place. Members of futuwwa groups carried knives, and having sworn always to help one another, if one of their number should be arrested, then they would mass outside the prison to enforce their fellow’s release. According to one fourteenth-century critic of futuwwa, its members took their vows of brotherhood so seriously that a member of a lodge might force his wife into prostitution in order to support a fellow lodge member who had fallen upon hard times.16
Somewhat similar to the futuwwa lodges were the hunting lodges. Shatir (pl. shuttar) has a range of meanings. Most commonly it means a loose, immoral person, a cunning man, a sharper. The Nights abounds with tales of the ‘sharpers’ or ‘larrikins’. However, in the Mamluke period shatir was also used to refer to archers who were members of hunting lodges. While members of futuwwa lodges tended to rely on the knife and the cudgel, the shuttar were specialists with the crossbow and expert hunters of birds. These hunting clubs, which effectively constituted a disreputable kind of militia, were regularly denounced by the ulema because of the criminal elements who tended to attach themselves to the shuttar. In one version of ‘The Romance of Baybars’, the young Baybars is inducted into a league of men who hunt birds with crossbows.17
In the Nights, shatir tends to be used in the wider sense of ‘crafty rogue’; for example, the Egyptian Ali Zaybak is described as a shatir. Always one step ahead of the police, he is perhaps the greatest of all the shuttar. For Ali Zaybak stealing is an art, and he steals from fellow criminals simply to demonstrate to them his skill in this art. Ahmad al-Danaf, his rival in Baghdad, maintains a barracks in Baghdad from where he directs the activities of his forty shuttar. In a story outside the Ali Zaybak cycle, ‘The tale of Nur al-Din Ali and his Son’, the benevolent pastry cook in Damascus, who takes in Badr al-Din Hassan, is a former shatir and thief: ‘but Allah had made him repent and turn from the evil of his ways and open a cook-shop’. Despite his repentance, it is evident from the story that he was still an intimidating figure and not the sort of person one would want to pick a fight with.
Fidawiyya are defined in Lane’s Arabic–English Lexicon as ‘those who undertake perilous adventures, more particularly for the destruction of enemies of their party; as though they offered themselves as ransoms or victims’. The expression was used to refer to religious devotees, in particular members of the Isma‘ili Assassin sect who were prepared to use murder and to sacrifice their lives in order to further the interests of their particular Shi‘ite sect.18 Although the Isma‘ili Assassins were reputed to carry out their murderous missions under the influence of hashish (and hence the derivation of the western word ‘assassin’ from hashishin), there is no good evidence that this was ever the case. It is more likely that the enemies of the heretical Isma‘ilis, when they called them hashishin, meant that they were low-grade riff-raff. As has already been noted, in ‘The Romance of Baybars’ the sultan was assisted by Isma‘ili heretics, called fidawis, who offered their criminal skills in the service of the Sultan and Islam. In medieval Arabic, however, fidawi could be used much more loosely to refer to any sort of desperado. In the Nights ‘History of the First Larrikin’, when the larrikin (or shatir) encounters forty fidawis, the sense is that he has encountered a gang of criminal vagabonds. In another tale, ‘The History of the Lovers of Syria’, a pirate crew are described asfidawis.
The zu‘ar are a little difficult to distinguish from some of the more disreputable futuwwa lodges. In medieval Cairo, zu‘ar referred to a loose association of criminal bands. They constituted a sort of organized criminal lumpenproletariat which ‘protected’ or controlled the slum areas of Cairo, such as al-Husayniyya, Bab al-Luq and Ard al-Tabala. Members of these bands used to hire themselves out to the emirs as cudgelmen and, like the ayyarun in earlier centuries, they could provide powerful armed militias to whoever was prepared to employ them. Sometimes zu‘ar gangs played at a game called shalaq, or beggar’s bag, a low-life form of rugby in which some of the players might die.19
Then there were the harafish (sing, harfush). Burton, in ‘The Story of the Larrikin and the Cook’ (a tale about one of the destitute whose wits are sharpened by hunger), translates the word harfush as ‘larrikin’ (nineteenth-century Australian slang for an urban layabout) and annotates it as ‘blackguard’. This is a little inaccurate. The harafish were actually beggars who in Mamluke times lived on the patronage of emirs or on hand-outs from mosques. They were sturdy beggars and, like the criminal zu‘ar, could provide powerful armed militias. In Mamluke Egypt there was a Sultan of the Harafish, a King of the Dregs, who spoke to the authorities on behalf of the mendicants and layabouts.20 In Ottoman Egypt there was a guild for beggars, and its members paid tax on their income. Sometimes ju‘adiyya (‘curly-haired ones’) replaces harafish as the word for beggars. In ‘The Story of the Three Sharpers’, the three destitute men who rummage around on rubbish heaps for salvageable scraps are called ju‘adiyya.
The world of the beggar was a highly competitive one, and all sorts of dodges were adopted to stay alive in it. Al-Jawbari tells us that beggars used to take blood squeezed from camel ticks and mix it with gum arabic before smearing it over the eyelids in order to fake the appearance of congenital blindness. Al-Jawbari also gives a recipe for a peculiar concoction which those who wanted to fake the appearance of elephantiasis used to put in their bath. Other beggars pretended that they were mute, or insane, or had been wounded in the war against the infidel. Moralists deplored the habit of some beggars of solemnly cursing those who failed to give them alms. A literary genre developed, known as adab al-kudyah or the etiquette of mendicancy, in which beggars were instructed in how to go about their business and how to trick or wheedle money out of passers-by.21 In al-Hariri’s Maqamat, for example, the aged and wily rogue Abu Zayd preaches to his son on the merits of the beggar’s way of life and exhorts his son to be alert, cunning and always on the move. Literary folk were rather inclined to romanticize the carefree raggle-taggle life of the professional mendicants. Al-Jahiz, who wrote a treatise on vagrants and their tricks, puts these words in the mouth of one old beggar:
Pray listen to me. Do you not know that vagrancy is a noble, enjoyable, pleasing calling? Vagrants enjoy boundless happiness; their task it is to rove the world by stages, and to pace out the earth; they need fear no harm. They go wherever they wish, getting the best there is to be had in every town . . . They are serene and content with their lot, and have no worries about families, possessions, houses or property.22
