The Arabian Nights - A Companion, page 20
However, the woman replies by describing the beauties of the ideal girl, calling to her support the numbers of kings and rich men who have squandered fortunes to acquire beautiful women. She points out that, in the saying of the Prophet already quoted by the man, boys are praised only by being compared to houris, who are female. In any case, the Koran unequivocally condemns homosexuality: ‘What do you come to male beings, leaving your wives that your Lord created for you? Nay, but you are a people of transgressors’ (XXXVI, 165). Also, a woman has more to offer in the way of pleasure, since she can be taken both ways; and the first wispy beards of young men are unattractive. The woman quotes another saying of the Prophet: ‘Three things I have valued in this world, perfume, prayer and women.’ Finally, she winds up by reciting some rather explicit verses about the messiness of anal intercourse.
Grosso modo, the debate reverberates throughout the Nights. Some stories cheerfully celebrate homosexual seductions, particularly those in which Abu Nuwas features as the raffish hero. Abu Nuwas was a historical figure, a familiar of the court of Harun al-Rashid and a poet famous above all for his verses in praise of wine (khamriyyat) and beautiful boys (mudhakkarat). He is the hero of a number of (fictional) adventures in which his sexual tastes may be sometimes a subject for teasing, but never for vilification. On the other hand, some tales present the paedophile as a villain, and Ali Zaybaq, Nur al-Din Ali and Ala al-Din Abu Shamat, among others, are menaced by sinister male seducers. In ‘The Rogueries of Dalilah’, Hajj Muhammad, who as the slang had it loved ‘to eat both figs and pomegranates’ (i.e. he was a bisexual), is described as ‘a man of ill-repute’. A leitmotif in the Nights is the seclusion of a beautiful boy by his parents in order to protect him from lascivious men. Although Princess Budur, disguised as a man, makes a stirring speech in favour of homosexuality to Kamar al-Zaman, whom she threatens to bugger, the interest of the story at this point lies in Kamar al-Zaman’s fear and shame at the prospect of being homosexually raped. The pursuit of beardless boys by likeable or villainous rogues features fairly frequently in the Nights (just as it does in al-Tayfashi’s work of literary erotica). However, love or buggery between two mature men is not, I think, dealt with anywhere in the Nights.
Lesbians do not seem to have been persecuted in medieval Islamic societies. However, lesbianism, or ‘rubbing’ (musahaqa), was associated with witchcraft in the popular mind. Leo Africanus reported that there was a notorious circle of lesbian witches operating in Fez at the end of the fifteenth century.19 The anonymous storytellers of the Nights went along with popular prejudice, and the presentation of lesbianism in the stories is consistently hostile, with the lesbians usually doubling as witches. The dowager witch, poisoner and wrestler Zat al-Dawahi in ‘The Tale of Omar bin al-Nu’uman and his Sons’ is identified as a lesbian who used saffron to add spice to her masturbatory sessions. The description of her is not a flattering one: ‘wanton and wily, deboshed and deceptious; with foul breath, red eyelids, yellow cheeks, dull brown face’. Unfortunately for Zat al-Dawahi, her smelly armpits made her unpopular among the young women of the harem. Shawahi, the ‘lady of calamities’ in the story of ‘Hasan of Bassorah’, is again a witch as well as a lesbian.
Although cross-dressing features in a number of stories, this is as a literary device and not as a statement of sexual preference. (Shakespeare, of course, used transvestism in the same way.) Budur disguised herself as a man, and Zumurrud did similarly, but they did so in order to travel in security and to advance their fortunes. Niama bin Rabia put on women’s clothes, but he did so only in order to gain access to his beloved, who was immured in a harem. Bestiality features in a handful of the foulest and most vulgar tales. Necrophilia is something that ghouls indulge in, but the wide range of fetishes and perversions which feature commonly in western pornography seem to have been unknown to the Arab storyteller.
In ‘The Story of the Porter and the Three Ladies’, the women interrogate the porter about the correct name for their private parts; each time he gets the answer wrong, the porter is slapped and pinched. In the Barber cycle, in ‘The Tale of the Second Brother, Babaqa the Paraplegic’, Babaqa is led on and slapped about by the mysterious lady and her maidservants, before being thoroughly humiliated and cast out into the street. Al-Tayfashi devoted a chapter in his treatise to the subject of slapping, arguing, among other things, that it was good for the health of the recipient.
While there are a handful of stories in the Nights which focus on the joys of wedlock and domesticity, illicit sexual adventures, involving adulteresses, prostitutes, concubines and singing girls, furnish more of the staple fare of the Nights. In those stories it is often the singing girl (qaina, pi. qiyan) who is provided with the wittiest lines and most appropriate verses. The stories of ‘Harun al-Rashid and the Two Slave-Girls’ and ‘Harun al-Rashid and the Three Slave-Girls’ commemorate the bawdy wit of these accomplished entertainers. In historical fact, singing girls were much in demand at the court of the Abbasid caliphs and in the houses of other rich men, particularly as after-dinner entertainers and as a female counterpart to the learnedly witty nudama, or cup-companions. The most famous essayist of the Abbasid period, al-Jahiz, wrote a treatise sarcastically entitled In Praise of Singing Girls in which he warned against those wily, greedy, faithless seductresses, who stole first a man’s senses and then his money: ‘As soon as the observer notices her, she exchanges provocative glances with him, gives him playful smiles, dallies with him in verses set to music, falls in with his suggestions, is eager to drink when he drinks, expresses her fervent desire for him to stay a long while, her yearning for his prompt return, and her sorrow at his departure.’20
These accomplished courtesans, who may remind one of the ancient Greek hetairai, or of the Japanese geisha girls, might be free women or slaves. They usually accompanied their singing on the lute. The slave girl Tawaddud, at the end of a gruelling interrogation which ranged widely through the Muslim sciences, was presented with a lute by Harun al-Rashid: ‘She laid her lute in her lap and, with bosom inclining over it, bent to it with the bending of a mother who suckleth her child; then she preluded in twelve different modes, till the whole assembly was agitated with delight, like a waving sea.’ The annals of the Abbasid court abound with anecdotes illustrating the wit and learning of the singing girls, and though Tawaddud was a heroine of fiction her accomplishments can easily be paralleled by those of historical courtesans. For example, Mahbuba, before she was acquired by the Caliph al-Mutawakkil, had been trained by her first master. According to the chronicler al-Mas’udi, he ‘had taken great care with her education, cultivated her mind and had enriched her with knowledge on the most varied subjects. She composed poetry which she sang to her own accompaniment on the lute and, in a word, she excelled in all those things which distinguish people of talent.’21 Singing girls also flourished in the Mamluke period. Many of the songstresses were black, like Ittifaq, who started out as a concubine in the harem of the Egyptian Sultan al-Nasir Muhammad in the early fourteenth century. Ittifaq, who was famed not just for her beauty, but also for her intelligence and her singing voice, went on to marry successively four sultans and a vizier.22 However, not many female singers enjoyed such distinguished careers, and in the Mamluke period there was an overlap between the profession of singer and that of prostitute. Both were taxed at the Daminat al-Maghani, or Tax Farm of the Singers.
In the early sixteenth century, any woman who wanted to become a prostitute registered her name at the above-mentioned office, and as long as she paid her taxes she could ply her trade undisturbed. Medieval Egypt knew three types of prostitute (or baghiya): the ‘wild cow’ who had her own room, the ‘free cow’ who went to the client’s room and the ‘milk cow’ who had sex out of doors. Many of the Cairene prostitutes worked the funduqs, or travellers’ hostels. However, a large group had their beat in and around the wax candle market, in the shadow of the Mosque of Aqmar. In ‘The Story of the Chief of Police of Cairo’, the policeman, seeking information about two criminals who frequent prostitutes, makes his enquiries among ‘the taverners, and confectioners, and candle-makers and keepers of brothels and bawdy houses’. Prostitutes could be identified by their custom of wearing red leather trousers and carrying little daggers. They used to cough to attract the attention of clients. In the port of Alexandria many of the prostitutes were reported to be of European origin.23 In ‘The Tale of Harun al-Rashid and Abu Hasan, the Merchant of Oman’, the latter visits a brothel in Baghdad, ‘a tall and goodly mansion, with a balcony overlooking the river-bank and pierced with a lattice-window’, and a standard tariff of between ten and forty dinars a night is quoted.24
Syphilis seems to have first appeared in Egypt in the first decade of the sixteenth century. The chronicler Ibn Iyas called it the al-habb al-Franji, or the European pimple. However, although coffee, tobacco and artillery feature in some of the later additions to the Nights, venereal disease does not, and its absence contributes to the sense of freedom and amorality in so many of the stories. Medieval Muslims were none the less far from free of fear and superstition regarding sexual matters. It was believed that worms in the vagina caused nymphomania, that intercourse with a menstruating woman gave a man leprosy and that sex with old people was also dangerous. The beautiful young slave girl Tawaddud warned her audience on the danger of sex with ‘old women, for they are deadly’, and she was able to quote several authorities in support of this. Men travelling in the desert also feared the udar, a monstrous creature which raped men and left them to die of worm-infested anuses.25 Only marginally more rational were the widespread fantasies on the part of medieval Arabs about the sexual powers of black men and their lusting after Arab women. Blacks were believed to be exceptionally virile, and fears of black virility are evident in the frame story of the Nights about the cuckolding of Shahriyar and Shahzaman. In Race and Slavery in the Middle East, Bernard Lewis comments that ‘King Shahzaman and King Shahriyar were clearly white supremacists, with sexual fantasies, or rather nightmares, of a sadly familiar quality.’26 Sexual and racist paranoia is fairly widespread throughout the Nights (see, for example, ‘The Tale of the Enchanted King’ and ‘The Story of the Three Apples’ among many others).
Turning away now from the perverse and fantastic, to consider more ordinary sexual practices, the well-off seem to have slept in separate beds. Wives in medieval Egypt were accustomed to demand money for coming to their husbands’ beds and granting them sex – the haqq al-firash, or bed fee. Coitus interruptus was sanctioned by most Islamic jurists, but some also argued that the woman was entitled to financial compensation if early withdrawal was practised. People slept either naked or in their daytime clothes. Anal intercourse with women was vigorously disapproved of by the religious and therefore presumably sometimes practised by the less religious. More detailed information about normal copulation is hard to glean from the Nights, because of the linguistically ingenious and metaphorical modes of describing the sex act favoured by the storytellers, as they move smoothly from the description of foreplay to word-play. What we are offered are displays of rhetorical skill, not documentary accounts of fucking.
In the typical ideally romantic tale, the hero falls in love with a princess, merely by seeing her portrait, or just by hearing her name. They are predestined to love one another. Fate brings them together, and fate separates them. The hero, who swooned when he first saw the princess, swoons again when he discovers she has vanished. He will, or should, recite verses of lamentation. Then there are adventures, perhaps featuring storms, pirates, infidel armies and sorceresses. The princess may fall sick and begin to starve herself to death. The hero may think of suicide, but in the end fate reunites the lovers, and they live happily together until they are ‘overtaken by the breaker of ties and the destroyer of delights’. It is all rather silly; but such stories, despite their patent lack of realism, may have served an educational purpose, and those who listened to these tales were instructed in the symbolic language of love – a surreptitious code devised to get round the proscriptions of society. In ‘The Tale of Aziz and Azizah’, for example, the woman’s putting her finger into her mouth signifies that the man she gazes on is like her own body’s soul to her; and when she strikes upon her breast with her palm and outstretched five fingers, it means that the man should come back in five days.
More generally, stories like ‘The Tale of Taj al-Muluk and the Princess Dunya’, ‘The Tale of Ali bin Bakkar and Shams al-Nahar’ and ‘Masrur and Zayn al-Mawasif set forth an adab of love, in which amorous young men and women were instructed in how to feel and behave.27 Such stories not only provided a vocabulary of gestures, flowery compliments and verse couplets through which sexual attraction could be expressed, but they also gave guidance on how to dress and what gifts to offer the loved one. In ‘Uns al-Wujud and the Vizier’s Daughter Rose-in-Hood’, Rose-in-Hood’s nurse tells her that love is a sickness which can only be cured by passionate enjoyment:
‘And how may one come by enjoyment?’
‘By letters and messages, my lady; by whispered words of compliment and by greetings before the world; all this bringeth lovers together and makes hard matters easy.’
However, it was not always so easy to cure the sickness of love. In ‘The Lovers of Banu Tayy’, the pining and ill-starred bedouin drops dead even while he is running towards his beloved (who, like Juliet, belongs to the wrong tribe). Members of the pre-Islamic bedouin of the tribe of Banu Udhra, martyrs to chastity, espoused the cult of a platonic sort of thwarted love from a distance, even unto death, and a handful of stories in the Nights explore similarly gloomily romantic themes.28 However, most of the romantic tales in the Nights, while they borrow plot motifs, gestures and postures from the old Udhrite literary tradition, tend to end happily, with the lovers brought together in the same bed after all their turbulent and improbable adventures.
8
The Universe of Marvels
The pen is the most powerful sorcerer
Balinus1
In an essay on ‘Narrative Art and Magic’, Jorge Luis Borges contrasted the slow-moving and realistic psychological novel with the adventure novel and the short story. The two latter, he argued, are ruled by a quite different sort of order, ‘one based not on reason but on association and suggestion – the ancient light of magic’.2 Certainly, the medieval storyteller and the sorcerer worked in parallel trades, manipulating words and phrases to achieve their effects, and the medieval Islamic sorcerer was pre-eminently a man with a book. In ‘Judar and his Brethren’, the Maghribi sorcerers dispute the possession of a volume entitled Fables of the Ancients, ‘whose like is not in the world, nor can its price be paid of any, nor is its value to be evened with gold and jewels; for in it are particulars of all the hidden hoards of the earth and the solution of every secret’. In ‘The Tale of the Wazir and the Sage Duban’, the sage, who has been condemned to death by beheading on the orders of the foolish king, bequeaths to the king a book which, he claims, has the power to make his severed head speak. However, in reality, his legacy to the king is a poisoned book, and the king dies when he licks his ink-stained fingers. (Centuries later, the device of the poisoned book was to resurface in Umberto Eco’s novel, The Name of the Rose.)
The storyteller and the sorcerer are professionals who know the power of the phrase, the word and the letter.3 Knowledge of the name, the mot juste, can mean the difference between life and death. Ali Baba escapes from the perilous cave because he remembers the magical password ‘Open sesame’; his brother does not and consequently perishes. The study and manipulation of words may confer knowledge of the future, as in ‘The History of Mohammed, Sultan of Cairo’, where the Maghribi sorcerer in the market-place has before him some leaves with writing on them which he uses to make predictions about the bystanders. Letter magic, ilm al-huruf, was one of the most important sub-sciences in Islamic occultism. In ‘The Story of the Sage and the Scholar’, for example, the sage controls the jinn and performs supernatural feats by virtue of his knowledge of the magical powers of letters. Finally, of course, the storyteller and the sorcerer, rivals in the market-place, are both traders in illusion. The sorcerer who has mastered the art of illusion, ilm al-simiyya, is able to offer his customers and victims visions of what is not – that is, he has become a creator of fictions.
Serious treatment of magic in the mainstream of modern European fiction is rare, and when magic does feature it often does so as a transparent metaphor. For example, Balzac’s The Ass’s Skin and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Bottle Imp, both tales which are ostensibly about the wish-conferring powers of a magical object, are really parables about the price paid for success and the diminishing options in life as one grows older. On the whole, stories about magic now seem to be considered to be most suitable for children. Edith Nesbit’s cycle of stories about the Bastable children, C.S. Lewis’s Narnia cycle and Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea Trilogy were all written for children (though adults may read them with guilty pleasure). Tanya Luhrmann in her penetrating and wide-ranging anthropological account of modern British witchcraft, Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft, observes that ‘Magical books encourage an embracing, dream-like absorption, a dissociated daydream of dragons, powers and higher realms. This sense of imaginative absorption, quite apart from any themes which it encompasses, is one of the most striking elements in magical fiction.’4 Cardinal Newman remarked in his autobiographical Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864): ‘I used to wish the Arabian Tales were true: my imagination ran on unknown influences, magic powers and talismans.’ It is a childhood dream of omnipotence. However, what also emerges from Luhrmann’s survey of the modern witch is that novels about magic (by Dennis Wheatley, Dion Fortune and others) are widely read by practising occultists and enjoyed by them as fictions, yes, but as fictions about something that is real. For them, a story about magic is not per se purely fantasy.
