The Arabian Nights - A Companion, page 21
Similarly, in the pre-modern Middle East, a story about magic and the supernatural may have had a double aspect; it may have been a wonderful piece of nonsense designed to enthral an audience of children, yet, at the same time, the adults listening to the same story could recognize social facts and aspects of everyday reality. There were, after all, practising sorcerers, alchemists and treasure-hunters in medieval Baghdad and Cairo. Geomancers were consulted regarding business trips and the outcome of sporting events. The powers of magic and the jinn were not to be doubted.
They were attested to by the Koran:
they follow what the Satans recited
over Solomon’s kingdom. Solomon disbelieved not,
but the Satans disbelieved, teaching
the people sorcery.
(II, 96)
And again:
Say: ‘I take refuge with the Lord of the Daybreak
from the evil of what he has created,
from the evil of darkness when it gathers,
from the evil of the women who blow on knots,
from the evil of an envier when he envies.’
(CXIII)
In this sort of social and intellectual context, the frontiers between occult fiction and non-fiction were so weak as to be more or less indistinguishable, and we find tales which would not be out of place in the Nights embedded in such ‘non-fictional’ works as sorcerers’ manuals. For example, in an eleventh-century grimoire, or sorcerer’s manual, the Ghayat al-Hakim (’The Goal of the Sage’, later translated into Latin as Picatrix), the story is told of how in old Harran, when the demon worshippers who dwelt there were desirous of knowing what was to happen in the future, they would hunt out a dark-complexioned man with eyebrows that joined together and blue eyes. This man would be overpowered and stripped. The unhappy victim was then plunged into a barrel containing sesame oil with only his head remaining above the surface of the oil. The head inhaled stupefying drugs which were burnt before it while certain rituals were performed. The blue-eyed man was then macerated in the oil for forty days until all the flesh had fallen from his bones. After forty days it was possible to detach the head from the rest of the body at the first vertebra. The head (whose blue eyes no longer blinked) was set in a niche where it gave out prophecies. The philosopher-historian Ibn Khaldun, who gave a condensed account of the procedure, commented: ‘This is detestable sorcery. However, it shows what remarkable things exist in the world of man.’5
Even more striking, some tales of marvel included in the Nights for the purpose of entertainment appear in other books as reports of sober fact. ‘The Caliph al-Maamun and the Pyramids of Egypt’, an account of the inaccessible treasures contained in the pyramids and the magical guardians appointed by the ancients to protect those treasures, is only a retelling of one of the standard wonder-stories about the pyramids found elsewhere in medieval Arab histories and topographies.6 Again, in ‘The Tale of the Warlock and the Young Cook of Baghdad’, a vizier enters a cauldron of water at the urging of the warlock, and during the brief instant he is in the water he experiences years of an alternative life. The vizier’s fictional ordeal is paralleled by the allegedly true experience of the fifteenth-century Egyptian Sultan al-Ashraf Qaytbay. The sultan was visited by the famous Sufi Sheikh al-Dashtuti and fell into an argument with that great saint about whether it was possible for Muhammad to have visited all the heavens on a winged steed in a single night. Al-Dashtuti made the sultan plunge his head into a bowl of water for what seemed to onlookers to be only an instant. But when the sultan raised his head he declared that he had experienced several lifetimes of experience. It is most probable that this story, in its various forms, derives ultimately from an Indian fable, very likely Buddhist, about the illusory nature of time.7
The taste for the fantastic was so pronounced in the medieval Arab lands that it spawned a distinctive genre of literature, that of aja’ib (marvels), and books were written on the marvels of Egypt, of India and of the cosmos as a whole.8 Such books were hugger-mugger compilations of improbable information about the stupendous monuments of antiquity, strange coincidences, the miraculous powers of certain plants, stones and animals, and feats of magic. Many of the marvels first found in ‘non-fiction’ works on cosmography eventually made their way into the Nights. The Sinbad cycle, which is a fictional reworking of mariners’ yarns about the wonders to be found in the Indian and China seas (among them the wak-wak tree with its human-headed fruit, the Old Man of the Sea and the fish as large as an island), is the most obvious example of this process.9
Of course, readers and writers in medieval Christendom also had a taste for marvels and loved to read of monsters, of strange cities and of supernatural events. However, medieval Christendom and Islam did not share the same supernatural world. This is most strikingly apparent in the cases of the ghost and the witch. Ghosts and ghost stories feature prominently in medieval European culture.10 This was not the case in the Islamic lands. In Christendom, ghosts were commonly conceived of as unshriven souls who sought revenge, absolution or Christian burial from the living. The Christian doctrine of purgatory implied that the prayers and acts of the living could aid the dead, and the restless souls who spoke to the living provided valuable testimony about the accuracy of the Catholic Church’s vision of life after death. Purgatory does not feature in the orthodox Muslim’s concept of the afterlife. However, though ghosts had no proper role in the Islamic vision of the world, native Christians in the Middle East believed in them, and it is possible that their fears sometimes infected their Muslim neighbours. In medieval Cairo it was customary to abandon a house where a murder or a suicide had occurred, and let the house fall to ruin, rather than run the risk of sharing the dwelling with a tormented spirit. Felix Fabri, a Christian pilgrim who visited Egypt in the fifteenth century, described a house on the banks of the Nile whose owner had been driven out by ‘nymphs’, nocturnal spirits, which threw out first the owner’s furniture and then the owner and his companions. Despite subsequent attempts to let it, the haunted house had remained untenanted. However, these punctilious ‘nymphs’ did leave a monthly rent for the owner.11 One is tempted to characterize such lodgers as ghosts, but this may be a mistake; for, as Burton observes: ‘Haunted houses [in the Middle East] are there tenanted by Ghuls, Jinns and a host of supernatural creatures; but not by ghosts proper; and a man may live for years in Arabia before he ever hears of the “Tayf”.’12 Tayf may be translated as ‘ghost’. So may khayal. But tayf also carries the sense of ‘fantasy’, and khayal that of ‘shadow’, both words implying that what is seen is not really there.
In the tales of the Nights, the title ‘Ali the Cairene and the Haunted House of Baghdad’ seems to promise a ghost story, but the story itself is no such thing. In the story, a young Egyptian, down on his luck in Baghdad, is offered temporary lodgings by a merchant. The merchant owns two houses, but Ali is warned that one of them ‘is haunted, and none nigheth there but in the morning he is a dead man’. No one even dares enter the house to retrieve the corpses; instead they get the bodies out by hauling them on to another roof with ropes. As an opening for a traditional ghost story this seems promising, but, as the narrative makes clear, the locals believe the place to be haunted by jinn rather than by ghosts. As the story develops, the jinn who haunts the house is never seen. Only the voice of the jinn is heard, and, far from doing Ali harm, the jinn showers him with gold as the chosen one whose coming was expected.13
Medieval Christendom was haunted by fear of the witch. Witches were both numerous and dangerous. They flew by night, they destroyed cattle and livestock, they met in covens and they rendered obscene homage to the Devil. The Christian Inquisition devoted vast resources to hunting down, interrogating and burning witches. In the Middle East, however, there was no institution comparable to the Inquisition (although an ad hoc tribunal, a mihna,14 might occasionally be established to try a heretic). Nor was there an obsessional fear of witches. Nevertheless, there were thought to be witches in the medieval Near East. (Instead of broomsticks, they flew about on jars.) Two types of witch feature in the tales of the Nights, and each type presents a sexual threat to men. First, there is the nymphomaniac man-killer (see, for examples, the sorceress-wife in ‘The Ensorcelled Prince’ or Jan Shah, the 500-year-old queen who forces men to sleep with her and then kills them in ‘The History of Ghaib and his Brother Ajib’). The second type of witch was a lesbian, and as we have already seen, lesbians are several times maligned as witches in the pages of the Nights. Despite all the above, witches played a far smaller part in the demonology of the Arab lands than they did in the Christian West.
On the other hand, some occult pursuits were much more popular in the Middle East than in Europe. In Europe, magic was occasionally used to divine the whereabouts of buried treasure. The Elizabethan magus John Dee and his shady colleague Edward Kelley wasted a great deal of time in quest of the alleged ten great treasures buried in Britain by lords of King Arthur. In the Arab lands, however, treasure-hunting was both a sophisticated occult science and a popular obsession. The number of tales on the subject in the Nights bear witness to this. Of course, a treasure-hunt – the quest and the ordeals endured during the search for the goal – has been a popular theme in western storytelling. One only has to think of such books as The High Quest of the Holy Grail, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Gold Bug, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and such films as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Raiders of the Lost Ark. What is striking about Arab fiction on the subject, however, is the central role of occult knowledge in the search for the treasure.
‘Alaeddin, or the Wonderful Lamp’, is surely the best known of all the Nights tales featuring a treasure-hunt. In the story, the Maghribi (i.e. North African) dervish, who is also a sorcerer, determines by astrology that the boy, Aladdin, is the only person who can bring a certain hoard of treasure out from its hiding place. The sorcerer brings the boy to the astrologically determined place and performs a ritual fumigation with incense in order to create a hole in the ground. Then the sorcerer consults his geomantic tablet. (Islamic geomancy will be discussed later in this chapter.) A copper ring attached to a marble slab is revealed by the cleaving open of the earth. The sorcerer bids Aladdin raise the slab (for it is the boy alone who can do this) and descend into the vaults below. The vaults are filled with treasures, but Aladdin is warned not to touch any of them or he will be turned into black stone – and in fact the sorcerer’s quest is not for mere silver and gold, but for a magical lamp which confers power over a genie. There is no need here to follow the development of this famous story any further.15
The story of ‘Judar and his Brethren’, however, deserves to better known than it is. It is a more interesting story than ‘Alaeddin’ and succeeds better in creating an atmosphere of the uncanny. Judar is a young man who fishes to support his family. One day he goes out to fish on Lake Karun, on the edge of Cairo, but before he can cast his net upon the waters he is approached by a Maghribi who salutes Judar by name and asks him to do him a service. He asks Judar to recite the first chapter of the Koran and to tie him up by his elbows and throw him into the lake. If and only if Judar subsequently sees the two hands of the Maghribi raised above the surface of the water is Judar to use his net to rescue him. If only the Maghribi’s feet appear, then Judar will know that the Maghribi is dead. In that case Judar is to take the Maghribi’s mule and precious saddle-bags to a certain Jew dwelling in Cairo and report to him, whereupon the Jew will give him 100 dinars. In the event, the Maghribi’s bizarre escapological feat fails, and Judar sees the ill-fated man’s feet rising above the surface of the water. So begins a long and complex story of Judar’s involvement with four brother sorcerers from the Maghreb who are using a book known as The Fables of the Ancients to guide them in their quest for the magical treasures of al-Shamardal. Eventually it emerges that, like Aladdin, Judar is the appointed one, and only he can descend underground to retrieve the treasures of al-Shamardal.
Judar’s ordeal is a curious one. In the wilderness, the Maghribi sorcerer (brother of the two magicians who have drowned in Lake Karun) conjures up two jinn who are enjoined to obey Judar and open up to him the treasures of al-Shamardal. Then he instructs Judar on what he must face when the door to the subterranean hoard is revealed. First, the man who opens the door will demand that Judar offers his neck for execution. Judar must agree to this, for only if he does so will the apparition vanish without doing any harm. Secondly, Judar must face a horseman with a lance and Judar must offer his chest to be run through, whereupon the horseman will disappear. At the third door, an archer will threaten Judar. At the fourth door, Judar must offer his hand to be bitten by a lion, and at the fifth he will be challenged by a black slave. At the sixth door, two dragons must be suffered to bite at Judar’s hands. Finally, when he comes to the seventh door, he will see his mother welcoming him, but here he must draw his sword and force her to strip, for only by these means can this apparition be disarmed, and then Judar will able to proceed into the hall of treasures. Having received his instructions, Judar descends and outfaces all his ordeals until he comes to the seventh door, where he confronts the thing which appears to be his mother. Sword in hand, he forces her to strip down to her pants. At this point she (or should it be it?) cries out, ‘O my son, is thy heart stone? Wilt thou dishonour me by discovering my shame?’ Judar hesitates, and in his hesitation he is lost; the supernatural guardians of the treasures set upon him, flog him and expel him from the vaults. A year has to pass before the astrological conjunctions are once again favourable and Judar is able to make the attempt on the treasure again. This time he forces the vision of his mother to strip completely, and, as he does so, the thing turns into a body without a soul. The treasures are now his for the taking.16
Judar’s subterranean ordeals seem vaguely reminiscent of an initiation rite into some sort of secret society, for which courage, readiness to die and a willingness to renounce both one’s family and traditional social constraints are demanded. Alternatively, it is possible to read the story of Judar’s ordeal as a thinly veiled psychodrama about descent into the unconsciousness to face the monsters waiting there before attaining the treasures of maturity. However, it is hard to say whether such subtexts could have been picked up by the story’s medieval audience. There are many tales featuring treasure-hunts in the Nights, among them ‘King Ibrahim and his Son’, ‘The City of Brass’, ‘The City of Labtayt’, ‘The Queen of the Serpents’, ‘Maamun and the Pyramids of Egypt’, ‘Zayn al-Asnam’ and ‘Hasan of Basra’. Most of these stories are of Egyptian origin; for Egypt, where tomb robbers had searched for thousands of years for the lost treasures of the Pharaohs, was pre-eminently the home of mutalibun, or professional treasure-hunters.
Treasure-hunts in medieval Egypt were not just the stuff of fantasy and fiction. In fact, treasure-hunting was both an occult science and a professional occupation. As a science, it demanded from its students a knowledge of ancient lore and sorcery. As a profession, it demanded courage. It was universally recognized that the mutalib (treasure-hunter) was engaged in a high-risk occupation. Al-Jawbari warned in his thirteenth-century treatise Kashfal-Asrar of the real perils that the treasure-hunter might face: ‘Imagine you are in a long narrow passage descending into the deeps of the earth and the passage is lined by sword-bearing statues. Beware! Beat out the ground in front of you with a stick, so that the swords fall on emptiness.’ Al-Jawbari went on to explain how the sword-wielding arms of the statues are activated by tubes of mercury attached to trip-wires. Readers of Kashf al-Asrar are instructed on how to avoid fire-traps by making magical fumigations, and to beat out the ground in front of one with a stick so as to avoid being pitched into a silo of sand by a revolving flagstone. A treasure-hunter needed patience, courage, occult knowledge and artisanal skill. Al-Jawbari spoke from personal experience. He and some friends excavating in a cemetery near Cairo found the gateway to a subterranean passage. They avoided the collapsing staircase by sounding it out with sticks, and they avoided the revolving flagstone by throwing a lump of lead on to it. Al-Jawbari does not say whether they found any treasure.17
While al-Jawbari was himself a mutalib, and respected the skills of the genuine treasure-hunter, he also warned of the dangers posed by confidence tricksters who posed as treasure-hunters, who used spurious maps and talismans, and salted away caches of ‘treasure’ and drugs for separating their clients from their money. In the Nights, ‘The Tale of the Sharpers with the Shroff and the Ass’ concerns a team of rogues who trick a shroff (money-changer) into believing that a donkey belonging to a confederate of theirs is the only creature which can guide them to a certain hoard of treasure. The shroff is persuaded to act on their behalf and offer their confederate a vast sum of money for the donkey, whereupon the sharpsters all disappear with the money.
While there were many frauds associated with treasure-hunting, nobody doubted that there were real fortunes to be won – and real perils to be encountered. Besides the threats posed by booby-traps and by jinn, the mutalib often had to encounter homicidal automata. A great deal of the ancient Greek expertise concerning ingenious mechanical devices (powered by wind, water, weights or springs) had been handed on to the medieval Arabs, and Arab engineers continued to develop and refine devices for telling the time, dispensing drinks and playing music.18 However, in popular belief such automata – primitive robots – were powered by magic, and it was widely believed that ancient kings and wizards had set magically driven automata to guard over their hidden treasure hoards.
