For such are of no help in love.
God in His mercy makes no finer sight
Than of two lovers on a single bed,
Embracing one another and clothed in content,
Pillowed on one another’s wrists and arms.
When hearts are joined in love,
The iron is cold on which all others strike.
When your age has provided you a single friend,
How good a friend is this! Live for this one alone.
You who blame the lovers for their love,
Have you the power to cure the sick at heart?
This is what took place between Hasan and his cousin, Sitt al-Husn. As for the ‘ifrit, he said to the jinniya: ‘Get up and go in beneath this young man so that we may take him back to where he came from lest morning overtakes us. It is almost dawn.’ The jinniya did this as Hasan slept, still wearing his shirt and nothing else, and taking hold of him she flew off. She continued on her way, while the ‘ifrit kept pace with her, but midway through their journey they were overtaken by the dawn. The muezzin called to prayer and God permitted his angels to hurl a shooting star at the ‘ifrit, who was consumed by fire. The jinniya escaped, but she set Hasan down in the place where the ‘ifrit had been struck by the star, as she was too afraid for his safety to take him any further. As fate had decreed, they had reached Damascus and it was by one of the city gates that she left him, before flying away.
When the gates were opened in the morning, the people came out and there they found a handsome youth clothed only in a shirt and a woollen skullcap. Because of his wakeful night, he was sunk in sleep. When the people saw him, they said: ‘How lucky was the one with whom this fellow spent the night, but he should have waited to put on his clothes.’ Another said: ‘They are poor fellows, these rich men’s sons. This one must have just come out of the wine shop to relieve himself, when his drunkenness got the better of him, and as he couldn’t find the place he was making for, he arrived instead at the city gate, only to find it locked. Then he must have fallen asleep here.’
As they were talking, a gust of wind blew over Hasan, lifting his shirt above his waist. Beneath it could be seen his stomach, a curved navel, and two legs and thighs like crystal. The people exclaimed in admiration and Hasan woke up to find himself by the city gate, surrounded by a crowd. ‘Where am I, good people?’ he said. ‘Why have you gathered here and what have I to do with you?’ ‘When the muezzin gave the call to morning prayer,’ they said, ‘we saw you stretched out asleep, and that is all we know about the business. Where did you sleep last night?’ ‘By God,’ replied Hasan, ‘I slept last night in Cairo.’ ‘You’ve been eating hashish,’ said one of them. ‘You’re clearly mad,’ said another. ‘You go to sleep in Cairo and in the morning here you are asleep in Damascus.’ ‘Good people,’ he replied, ‘I have not told you a lie. Last night I was in Egypt and yesterday I was in Basra.’ ‘Fine,’ said one. ‘He is mad,’ said another, and they clapped their hands over him and talked among themselves, saying: ‘What a shame for one so young, but he is undoubtedly mad.’ Then they said to him: ‘Pull yourself together and return to your senses.’ ‘Yesterday,’ insisted Hasan, ‘I was a bridegroom in Egypt.’ ‘Maybe you were dreaming,’ they said, ‘and it was in your dream that you saw this.’ Hasan thought it over to himself and said: ‘By God, that was no dream, nor did I see it in my sleep. I went there and they unveiled the bride before me, and there was a third person, a hunchback, sitting there. By God, brothers, this was not a dream, and had it been one, where is the purse of gold that I had with me and where is my turban and the rest of my clothes?’
He then got up and went into the city, with the people pressing around him and accompanying him as he made his way through the streets and markets. He then entered the shop of a cook, who had been an artful fellow, that is to say, a thief, but had been led to repent of his evil-doing by God, after which he had opened a cookshop. All the people of Damascus were afraid of him because of his former violence, and so when they saw that Hasan had gone into his shop, they dispersed in fear. The cook, looking at Hasan’s grace and beauty, felt affection for him enter his heart. ‘Where have you come from, young man?’ he said. ‘Tell me your story, for you have become dearer to me than my life.’
Hasan told him what had happened to him from beginning to end, and the cook exclaimed at how remarkable and strange it was. ‘But, my son,’ he added, ‘keep this affair concealed until God relieves your distress. Stay with me here, and I shall take you as a son, for I have none of my own.’ Hasan agreed to this and the cook went to the market and bought fine material for him, with which he clothed him. The two of them went off to the qadi and Hasan declared himself to be the cook’s son. This is how he became known in Damascus, and he sat in the shop taking the customers’ money, having settled down with the cook.
So much for him, but as for his cousin, Sitt al-Husn, when dawn broke and she awoke from her sleep, she did not find Hasan, and thinking that he must have gone to the latrine, she sat for a time waiting for him. Then in came Shams al-Din, her father, who was distressed at what the sultan had done to him and at how he had forced Sitt al-Husn to marry one of his servants, a mere groom and a hunchback. He said to himself that he would kill the girl if she had allowed that damned man to have her. So he walked to her room, stopped at the door and called out to her. ‘Here I am, father,’ she said, and she came out, swaying with joy. She kissed the ground and her face shone with ever more radiant beauty, thanks to the embrace of that gazelle-like youth.
When her father saw her in this state, he said: ‘Are you so pleased with that groom, you damned girl?’ When she heard this, she smiled and said: ‘By God, what happened yesterday was enough, with people laughing at me and shunning me because of this groom who is not worth the paring of my husband’s fingernail. I swear that never in my life have I spent a more delightful night than last night, so don’t make fun of me or remind me of that hunchback.’ When her father heard this, he glared at her in anger and said: ‘What are you talking about? It was the hunchback who spent the night with you.’ ‘For God’s sake, don’t mention him, may God curse his father, and don’t jest. The groom was hired for ten dinars and he took his fee and left. Then I arrived and when I went into the room I found my husband sitting there. This was after the singing girls had unveiled me for him and he had scattered enough red gold to enrich all the poor who were present. I passed the night in the embrace of my charming husband, with the dark eyes and the joining eyebrows.’
When her father heard this, the light before him turned to darkness. ‘You harlot,’ he said, ‘what are you saying? Where are your wits?’ ‘Father,’ she replied, ‘you have broken my heart – enough of this ill humour. This is my husband who took my virginity. He has gone to the latrine, and he has made me pregnant.’ Her father got up in astonishment and went to the latrine, where he found the hunchback with his head stuck in the hole and his legs sticking out on top. He was amazed and said: ‘Surely this is the hunchback.’ He called to the man, who mumbled in reply, thinking that it was the ‘ifrit who was speaking to him. Shams al-Din then shouted to him: ‘Speak or else I shall cut your head off with this sword.’ ‘By God, shaikh of the ‘ifrits,’ said the hunchback, ‘since you put me here I have not raised my head, and I implore you by God to be kind to me.’ ‘What are you talking about?’ said Shams al-Din when he heard this. ‘I am the father of the bride and not an ‘ifrit.’ ‘Enough of that,’ said the hunchback, ‘for you are on the way to getting me killed, so go off before the ‘ifrit who did this to me comes back. What you have done is to marry me to the mistress of buffaloes and ‘ifrits. May God curse the man who married me to her and the one who was the cause of this.’
Morning now dawned and Shahrazad broke off from what she had been allowed to say. Then, when it was the twenty-third night, SHE CONTINUED:
I have heard, O auspicious king, that the hunchback started to talk to Shams al-Din, the father of the bride, saying: ‘May
God curse the man who was the cause of this.’ ‘Get up,’ said Shams al-Din, ‘and come out.’ ‘Do you think that I am mad,’ said the hunchback, ‘that I should go with you without the ‘ifrit’s permission? He told me to come out and leave at sunrise. So has the sun risen or not, for I can’t come out of here until it has?’ Shams al-Din then asked who had put him there. ‘I came here last night to relieve myself,’ the man replied, ‘and suddenly a mouse came out of the water and squeaked, and then it went on growing bigger and bigger until it was as large as a buffalo. It spoke to me in tones that rang through my ears, after which it left me and went away. May God curse the bride and the man who married me to her!’
Shams al-Din went up and removed him from the latrine, after which he ran off, not believing that the sun had risen, and going to the sultan, he told him what had happened to him with the ‘ifrit. As for Shams al-Din, the bride’s father, he went back in a state of perplexity, not understanding what had happened to his daughter, and he asked her to explain the matter again. She replied: ‘The bridegroom, for whom I was unveiled yesterday, spent the night with me, took my virginity and has made me pregnant. If you don’t believe me, here is his turban, in its folds, lying on the chair, and here are his other clothes underneath the bed, with something wrapped up in them, although I don’t know what it is.’ On hearing this, her father came into the alcove, where he found the turban of his nephew, Hasan. He took it in his hands, turned it over and said: ‘This is a vizier’s turban and it is of muslin.’ He then looked and saw an amulet sewn into the tarboosh, which he took and opened, and he picked up the outer clothes, in which he found the purse containing the thousand dinars. Opening it, he found inside it a sheet of paper, which he read and which turned out to be the Jew’s contract of sale, with the name of Badr al-Din Hasan, the son of Nur al-Din ‘Ali, the Egyptian. He also found the thousand dinars.
On reading the paper, he uttered a loud cry and fell down in a faint. When he recovered and grasped what this all meant, he was filled with wonder and exclaimed: ‘There is no god but God, Who has power over all things.’ Then he said: ‘Daughter, do you know who it was who deflowered you?’ ‘No,’ she replied. ‘It was my brother’s son, your cousin,’ he said, ‘and these thousand dinars are your dowry. Glory be to God, but I wish I knew how this came about.’ Then he reopened the amulet and in it he found a note in the handwriting of his brother Nur al-Din. After looking at his brother’s handwriting, he recited:
I see the traces they have left and melt with longing,
And I pour down my tears over their former dwellings.
I ask the One who afflicted me with separation
That one day He might favour me with their return.
On finishing these lines, Shams al-Din read through what was in the amulet and there he found the date of Nur al-Din’s marriage to the daughter of the vizier of Basra, its consummation, the date of Hasan’s birth, and an account of Nur al-Din’s life up until the time of his death. This astonished him; he trembled with joy and, on comparing what had happened to his brother with his own history, he found that they matched exactly, that the consummation of his marriage and that of his brother had happened on the same date, as had the birth of Hasan and that of his own daughter, Sitt al-Husn. Taking the paper, he brought it to the sultan and told him all that had happened from start to finish. The astonished sultan ordered that an account of this should be written down immediately.
Shams al-Din waited, expecting his nephew to come, but he did not come that day, or on the next, or on the third, and after seven days had passed, there was still no news of him. So Shams al-Din said: ‘By God, I shall do something that no one has ever done before,’ and taking an inkwell and a pen, he produced on a piece of paper a sketch plan of the whole house, with the alcove here, such-and-such a hanging there, and so on, including everything in the house. He then folded the paper and gave orders for all Hasan’s things to be collected. He took the turban, the tarboosh, the mantle and the purse, which he locked up in his own room with a lock of iron, setting a seal on it to await his nephew’s arrival.
As for his daughter, at the end of the months of her pregnancy, she gave birth to a boy, splendid as the moon, resembling his father in beauty, perfection, splendour and grace. The midwives cut the umbilical cord, spread kohl on his eyelids and then handed him over to the nurses, naming him ‘Ajib. In one day he grew as much as other children grow in a month, and in a month as much as they do in a year. When he was seven years old, he was handed over to a teacher who was told to give him a good education and to teach him to read. He stayed at school for four years, but he began to fight with the other children and abuse them, saying: ‘Which of you is my equal? I am the son of Shams al-Din of Egypt.’ The other children went together to the monitor to complain of his rough behaviour. The monitor told them: ‘When he arrives tomorrow, I’ll teach you something to say to him that will make him give up coming to school. Tomorrow, when he arrives, sit around him in a circle and say to each other: “By God, no one may play this game with us unless he can tell us the names of his mother and father.” Anyone who doesn’t know these names is a bastard and won’t be allowed to play.’
The next morning, they came to school and when ‘Ajib arrived, they surrounded him and said: ‘We are going to play a game but no one may join in with us unless he can tell us the names of his mother and father.’ They all agreed to this, and one of them said: ‘My name is Majid; my mother is ‘Alawiya and my father is ‘Izz al-Din.’ A second boy did the same and so did the others until it came to ‘Ajib’s turn. He then said: ‘My name is ‘Ajib; my mother is Sitt al-Husn and my father is Shams al-Din of Egypt.’ ‘By God,’ they said to him, ‘Shams al-Din isn’t your father.’ ‘Yes, he is,’ insisted ‘Ajib, and at that the boys laughed at him, clapped their hands, and said: ‘He doesn’t know who his father is; go away and leave us. We will only play with those who know their father’s name.’
At that, the children around him went off laughing and leaving him angry and choked with tears. The monitor told him: ‘We know that your grandfather, Shams al-Din, is not your father but the father of your mother, Sitt al-Husn; as for your own father, neither you nor we know who he is. The sultan married your mother to the hunchbacked groom, but a jinni came and slept with her and you have no father we know of. You won’t be able to compare yourself with the other boys in this school unless you find out who your father is, for otherwise they will take you for a bastard. You can see that the trader’s son knows his father, but although your grandfather is Shams al-Din of Egypt, as we don’t know who your father is, we say that you have no father. So act sensibly.’
When ‘Ajib heard what the monitor and the boys had to say and how they were insulting him, he went away immediately and came to his mother, Sitt al-Husn, to complain, but he was crying too hard to speak. When she heard his sobs, her heart burned and she said: ‘What has made you cry? Tell me.’ So he told her what he had heard from the children and from the monitor, and he asked her: ‘Who is my father?’ She said: ‘Your father is Shams al-Din of Egypt.’ But he said: ‘Don’t tell me lies. Shams al-Din is your father, not mine, so who is my father? If you don’t tell me the truth, I’ll kill myself with this dagger.’ When his mother heard him talk of his father, she burst into tears, remembering her cousin Hasan and how she had been unveiled for him and what he had done with her. She recited these lines:
They stirred up longing in my heart and left.
Those whom I love have now gone far away.
They left and with them has my patience gone.
After this loss, patience is hard to find.
They left, and were accompanied by my joy.
Nothing stays fixed; there is no fixity.
By leaving me, they brought tears to my eyes,
And thanks to this, my tears flow down in floods.
I yearn to see them, and for long
I have been yearning and awaiting them.
I call up pictures of them, and my
inmost heart
Is home to passion, longing and to care.
Your memory has now become my cloak,
And under it I wear my love for you.
Beloved, for how long will this go on?
How long will you stay distant and shun me?
She wept and wailed, as did ‘Ajib, and at that point suddenly in came Shams al-Din. When he saw their tears, his heart was burned and he asked what was the reason for all this grief. Sitt al-Husn told him what had happened to ‘Ajib with the boys at his school, and Shams al-Din himself wept, remembering his brother and what had happened to the two of them, as well as what had happened to his daughter, the real truth of which he did not know. He then immediately got up and went to the court, where he came into the sultan’s presence and told him his story, asking leave to travel to the east in order to make enquiries about his nephew in Basra. He also asked the sultan to give him written instructions addressed to all lands, allowing him to take his nephew with him wherever he might be found. He then burst into tears before the sultan, who was moved with pity for him and wrote him the orders for which he had asked. This delighted Shams al-Din, who called down blessings on his master, and then took his leave.
He immediately went home and made his preparations for the journey, taking with him all that he, his daughter and ‘Ajib might need. They travelled day after day until they arrived at Damascus, which they found full of trees and watered by streams, as the poet has described it:
I passed a day and a night in Damascus, and Time swore
That with a city like this it could make no mistake.
I spent the night while night’s wing paid no heed,
And dawn was smiling with grey hair.
On the branches there dew gleamed like pearls,
Touched gently by the zephyr and then falling.
The pool was like a page read by the birds,
The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1,001 Nights: Volume 1 Page 22