The Arabian Nights - A Companion, page 22
The automaton, a creature who is neither living nor dead, features frequently in the Nights as an uncanny accessory in its tales of wonder. The brass oarsman who bears a tablet of lead inscribed with talismanic characters on his breast and who rows the Third Dervish over to the Islands of Safety; the little manikin which a dervish fashions out of beeswax and which plunges into the river to retrieve the sultan’s lost signet ring; the air-driven statues which seem to speak to Omar bin al-Nu’uman and his son in the palace of the Christian princess; and the Ebony Horse, which is powered by wind and, when the right lever is pulled, carries a man through the air: they all simulate life, but there is no life in them. Devised for the most part by masters long dead, they are remnants of a poorly understood and therefore dangerous past. In the idolatrous stone city in ‘Abdullah bin Fazil and his Brothers’, the idols are man-made, but, as the prophet sent by God points out, ‘the Satans clad themselves therewith as with clothing, and they it is who spake to you from within the bellies of the images’.19
In order to find treasure, recourse might be had to oracles and divination. Treasure could be dowsed for, just as one dowsed for water, and the treasure-hunter might have recourse to the linked sciences of astrology and geomancy. In the course of her examination by the sages of the caliph’s court, the learned slave girl Tawaddud, the heroine of the Nights story which bears her name, gives an impromptu lecture on the mansions of the moon, the benevolent and sinister aspects of the planets and the auspicious and inauspicious days of the week. However, she is careful to point out the limits of divination. Foreknowledge of certain things is reserved for God alone. Tawaddud’s reservations about the powers of astrology were shared by many medieval thinkers. In fiction, however, what is prophesied by the astrologers always comes to pass. In ‘The Third Dervish’s Tale’, the prince, hidden on the island, tells Ajib ibn Khasib ‘how the astrologers and wise men, noting my birth date, read my horoscope’ and then told his father that ‘Your son will live fifteen years, after which there will be a conjunction of the stars, and if he can escape it, he will live.’20 But there is no escaping the doom of the astrologers; and, though Ajib ibn Khasib has no wish to kill the prince, he still does kill him, just as the astrologers have foretold.
In both Christian and Muslim lands, astrology was closely linked with geomancy. In the Mamluke lands, diviners usually made use of a combination of geomancy and astrology to formulate their prophecies. ‘I am the ready Reckoner; I am the Scrivener; I am he who weeteth the Sought and the Seeker; I am the finished man of Science; I am the Astrologer accomplished in experience! Where then is he that seeketh?’21 This is the cry of the eponymous hero of ‘The Tale of Kamar al-Zaman’ when, to gain access to the king’s daughter, he dons the guise of a geomancer and wanders through the streets, carrying the precious tools of his trade: ‘a geomantic tablet of gold, with a set of astrological instruments and with an astrolabe of silver, plated with gold’. At its least sophisticated level, geomancy involved the diviner in nothing more than guessing the future from random marks in the sand. In ‘Ali Shar and Zumurrud’, Zumurrud, who pretends to be a geomancer, needs nothing more than a tray of sand and a brass pen to allow her to divine the figure of a baboon from the random markings made by her pen in the sand. However, as both Kamar al-Zaman’s boasting and his impedimenta suggest, geomancy at a more sophisticated level involved complex astrological calculations. A geomantic figure was formed by making four random lines of dots. Then the number of dots in each row was counted to determine whether the row was even or odd. The combination of even and/or odd lines generated one of sixteen possible geomantic figures. The horoscope of the enquirer, the dominant planets at the time of enquiry and other astrological considerations all also played a part in determining the geomancer’s final prognosis.22 (Medieval Muslim and Christian geomancy is not to be confused with Chinese geomancy, which is concerned with ‘the subtle currents in the earth’ and the flow of the occult forces of yin and yang through landscapes and buildings.) In the Nights, geomancy is the most widely employed means of discovering the unknown. Crafty Dalilah casts a geomantic figure in order to discover Mercury Ali’s true identity. Geomancers predict the future of Zayn al-Asnam. Geomancy reveals to the sorcerer that Aladdin is still alive.
Firasa, physiognomic divination, or divination from appearances, was a science or skill on the edge of the occult. Its practitioners might draw on occult lore to perform inexplicable feats of deduction, but they also used common sense and humdrum detective work. The word firasa comes from the same root as faras, meaning horse, and it may be that the skill of firasa was first developed by the bedouin to evaluate horses and see through the deceits of swindling horse-dealers. In later centuries, one of the chief practical uses of firasa was in the examination and assessment of slaves offered for sale in the market.23 In a brilliant and wide-ranging essay, ‘Clues, Roots of an Evidential Paradigm’, the cultural historian Carlo Ginzburg has discussed the related techniques of art connoisseurship, psychoanalysis, detection and firasa. As Ginzburg observes: ‘Ancient Arabic physiognomies was rooted on firasa, a complex notion which generally meant the capacity to leap from the known to the unknown by inference on the basis of clues.’24
‘The King who Kenned the Quintessence of Things’ and the ‘Story of the Sultan of Al-Yaman and his Three Sons’ are both tales about firasa. In the former tale, the king, who has lost his kingdom and has had himself sold as a slave, is able to amaze his successor on the throne by his ability to determine, just by looking, that a certain pearl is rotten inside, that, superficial appearances to the contrary, the older of a pair of horses offered for sale is a better buy, and that, finally, the king, his master, is the son of a baker. In ‘The Story of the Sultan of Al-Yaman and his Three Sons’, three gifted princes, wandering in the wilderness, are able to deduce that a one-eyed, tailless camel laden with halva and pickles has passed that way before them. This early detective story is of considerable antiquity. A variant version appeared in al-Tabari’s tenth-century chronicle of Islamic history. Versions of essentially the same tale feature in Sercambi’s fifteenth-century Novelle, in Voltaire’s Zadig and, most recently, in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. References to firasa abound elsewhere in the Nights. In ‘The Night-Adventure of the Sultan Mohammed of Cairo’, the sultan’s disguise is penetrated by the youngest of the girls he visits, for she looks at him ‘with the eye of the physiognomist’. To the ignorant such deductions must have seemed positively miraculous, but often it was only a matter of close observation coupled with logical reasoning. There was nothing necessarily occult about the process. However, certain Sufi sheikhs taught how interior truths might be deduced by occult intuition, a mystic might transform himself into a ‘spy of the heart’, and firasa might easily shade into thought-reading (ilm al-mukashafa). Outward appearances betrayed inner truths, and it is one of the commonplaces of the Nights that ‘a man’s destiny is written upon his forehead’.
The broad science of divination embraced some quite strange sub-specialisms, such as urinomancy (featured in ‘The Tale of the Weaver who Became a Leach’, where the weaver pretends to skill as a urinomancer, but is actually using the broader skills of the physiognomist), divination from palpitations, divination from wounds, divination from beauty spots and qiyafah or divination of ancestry. Even predicting rainfall from examining the sky’s appearance was classified as divination (perhaps rightly so, for modern attempts to turn meteorology into a fully fledged science are not entirely convincing).
However, astrology and geomancy apart, dream interpretation was probably the most commonly employed technique of unveiling the secrets of the future.25 Despite the weirdly dreamlike quality of so many of the stories within the Nights, the dreams actually featured in the stories are rather simple ones and they are easily interpreted. It is a feature of popular stories that the dreams that the characters have always carry messages that are true. When, in ‘The History of Gharib and his Brother Ajib’, Gharib dreams that he and his companion are swept up from a valley by two ravening birds of prey, the dream’s content is not that of a mystifying riddle with latent sexual content to be teased out and decoded. Rather, the following day Gharib and his companion are in a valley when two great birdlike creatures swoop down and carry them away. Medieval Arab storytellers did not make use of sophisticated dream symbolism. If a sultan in a story is warned of something, then the warning will come true. The dream in medieval Arab fiction was a storyteller’s device, used to foreshadow what is going to happen – and, as such, a special form of literary adumbration or prolepsis. But dreams were not only used to prefigure what would happen later on in the story; as often as not, they also made the story happen. For example, in ‘The Ruined Man who Became Rich Again through a Dream’, the man in question is told to leave his native city of Baghdad and go to Cairo, where he will discover the whereabouts of some hidden treasure. In Cairo he experiences a series of misfortunes and ends up in gaol. There he tells his dream to the police chief. The police chief mocks the idea of veridical dreams and tells the man how he himself has dreamed of a certain house, a courtyard and a fountain in Baghdad and of treasure buried under that fountain. The imprisoned man recognizes that house as his own and, on his release from gaol, he goes back to Baghdad and digs up the treasure. (A variant of the same story in English folklore is known as the story of the Pedlar of Swaffham.)26 In the above story and in numerous others, the dream not only predicts the future, it makes it happen. Most of the dreams in the Nights turn out to be self-fulfilling prophecies.
In medieval Islamic reality, as opposed to fiction, the science of dream interpretation was highly sophisticated, and not all dreams were regarded as being veridical. There were dreams which came from God and which were a portion of prophecy, and it was widely held by Muslims that no dream in which the Prophet appeared could be false or misleading. Then there were enigmatic dreams, which did not come directly from God but might nevertheless, if sensitively interpreted, give useful guidance about the present and future state of the one who had had the dream. Finally, there were very confused dreams, which were the product of nothing more than indigestion or a poor sleeping posture. Much depended on one’s choice of dream interpreter, for the dream was not regarded as having any meaning until it had been assigned one by its interpreter. ‘The dream follows his mouth.’ Once the dream had been interpreted, however, its meaning was fixed. Thomas Mann made play with this ancient Semitic concept in his remarkable novel Joseph the Provider: ‘For it may well be that dreaming is a single whole, wherein dream and interpretation belong together and dreamer and interpreter only seem to be two separate persons but are actually interchangeable and one and the same, since together they make up the whole.’27 Dreams were also ranked according to the status of the dreamer. Thus, a king’s dream was more to be believed than a commoner’s, and a man’s dream was more creditworthy than a woman’s.
According to an ancient Arab tale (not included in the Nights), a man was walking down the street one morning when he saw Death looking at him strangely. In a panic, the man fled his native city, seeking to place as much distance between himself and Death as possible. In the evening he arrived in Samarra, but he found Death waiting for him there. The reason Death had looked so strangely on the man in the morning was that he was surprised to see him in that place, for Death knew that they had an appointment in Samarra that night. Here complementary actions combine to bring about the predestined fate. The structure of the story of ‘The Appointment at Samarra’ is essentially the same as that of ‘The Ruined Man who Became Rich Again through a Dream’, discussed above. Such tales offer perfect examples of the mysteriously satisfying symmetries of fate and fiction.
Qada and qadar play a determining role in the Muslim universe. Qada means decree, or fate in general (which is God’s decree), while qadar is a particular application of qada. Although it has been contested by many Muslim thinkers and some sects, the notion of predestination, of the control of the lives of men and women by God’s decree, has been fairly widely accepted by Sunni Muslims. If God’s will is omnipotent, then human will counts for nothing – or rather, a man’s will is determined by God’s will, so that, somewhat subtly, a person of his or her free will chooses the fate that God has already predetermined for that person. The damned are damned because God has predetermined their damnation. ‘God has set a seal on their hearts and on their hearing, and on their eyes is a covering, and there awaits them a mighty chastisement’ (Koran, II, 7); and ‘God leads astray whomsoever He will’ (Koran, XIII, 27). According to Islamic folklore, when God made Adam, he took out all Adam’s future descendants (they looked like little ants) and divided them into those with good futures and those with evil futures. The good were replaced on the right side of Adam’s body and the evil on the left side.
The above is rather by way of an excursus, for the way that fate performed in medieval Arab fiction owed little to speculative theology. Al-Tanukhi’s Faraj ba‘d al-Shidda, or ‘Relief after Distress’, a tenth-century collection of stories to illustrate the workings of divine providence, was compiled with the aim of inspiring its audience to bear their tribulations with fortitude and pious resignation.28 The Nights contains many stories and fables which share this ‘you-can’t-beat-fate’ attitude and advocate a sort of religious quietism. In the fable of ‘The Fishes and the Crab’, the fishes, threatened by the drying up of their pool, go to the crab for advice. The crab urges resignation, for ‘Know ye not that Allah (extolled and exalted be He!) provideth all His creatures without account and that He foreordained their daily meat ere He created aught of creation and appointed to each of His creatures a fixed term of life and an allotted provision, of His divine All-might?’And, as the trapped sparrow in one of the fables observes, ‘It availed me not to beware of the stroke of fate and fortune, since even he who taketh precaution may never flee from destiny.’ However, seeking to avoid fate makes for a better story than listening to the wise old crab and waiting for the rain to fall again. In most Nights stories, the protagonists refuse to heed the warnings of the wise old sages and astrologers, and they make their bids to beat fate.
To resign oneself to God’s will is evidently laudable. Sometimes, however, one feels that the doctrine of predestination is being used to serve less laudable aims, and resignation to divine decree can serve as an apologia for idleness. Certainly, some of the stories in the Nights can be read in this way. ‘The History of Khawajah Hasan al-Habbal’, for example, is about the debate between two neighbours about whether hard work or luck makes man rich. Inevitably, it concludes that ‘wealth cometh not by wealth; but only by the Grace of Almighty Allah does a poor man become a rich man’.29 More generally, it is striking how many of the stories in the Nights (stories designed to entertain the idlers of Cairo’s cafés) feature heroes who are idle and feckless, but who attain great fortunes through amazing good luck. Aladdin is perhaps the best-known example of these unimpressive heroes. Destiny is capricious and favours the humble, the talentless and the lazy. Consider also Ali Baba, Ma’aruf the Cobbler and a string of poor fishermen who haul up bottled jinn, talking fish and magic rings. What could be more chancy than casting one’s net upon the waters? Fate, or destiny, under God, is the poor man’s omnipotent ombudsman. ‘Think not, O King, that thou art safe from the shifts of Time and the Strokes of Change which come like a traveller in the Night,’ warns the wazir in ‘The Tale of Kamar al-Zaman’. Destiny, like death, is a great leveller, and ‘Death, the Destroyer of all Delights’ is everybody’s destiny. We are all eventually pulled through that dark and infinitely small hole.
‘Character,’ as the German poet Novalis cryptically observed, ‘is destiny.’ Novalis probably meant that each individual, through exercise of his particular qualities and in pursuit of his own particular ambitions, is the architect of his fortunes and misfortunes. In the Nights, however, the sense of this equivalence of character and destiny is reversed; for, as Todorov has observed in an essay on ‘Les Hommes-Récits’, ‘characters’ like Sinbad and Ali Baba seem to have no character, no inner depth and no psychological consistency. They are what they do, or, rather, they are what fate (working hard on behalf of the storyteller) makes them do.30
From the stories of the Nights we learn that fate is ‘that which is written on the forehead’. Indeed, fate is written all over the place. Mektub, it is written. Fate is a thoroughly literary affair. Each man has his story, and it is written on him. The poet Zuhayr ibn Abi Salama once compared fate to ‘a night-blind camel’. It may be true that in real life fate is blind. But when we turn to fiction, we find that the blindness of fate is a thoroughly misleading metaphor. As we shall see, fate is far from blind. It watches over everything and meticulously arranges it all. There is no random fumbling on the part of fate. Though fate is always omnipresent and active, it is discoverable only by certain clues, such as marks on the forehead or in the sand, or by the operation of amazing coincidence (ittifaq). Though largely invisible, Fate is a leading character in the Nights. As we have already seen, in ‘The Second Dervish’s Tale’, Fate, helped along by the astrologers, is the architect of the misfortunes of Khasib and the prince he slays. Similarly, in ‘The Story of King Ibrahim and his Son’, the king is warned by his astrologers that his new-born son, when he reaches the age of seven, will be attacked by a lion, and moreover that, if the boy survives the lion’s onslaught, he will grow up to slay his own father, the king. The king has his son secluded and carefully guarded against such an eventuality. But seven years later, ‘the time of the Fate foreordered and the Fortune graven on the forehead’ arrives. The son’s nursemaid is slain by a lion, and the son vanishes. He reappears later inadvertently to slay his father. With his (rather prolix) dying breaths, the king forgives his son, for as he tells his courtiers, ‘Know that what Allah hath writ upon the forehead, be it fair fortune or misfortune, none may efface, and all that is decreed to a man must perforce befall him.’
