Night and Horses and the Desert

by Robert Irwin

  Again, I was once in Konya …

  ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jawbari, Kashf al-Asrar, trans. Robert Irwin

  (Damascus, n.d.), pp. 22-3

  COMMENTARY

  The ancient city of Harran, in the Euphrates basin, is in present-day eastern Turkey.

  The year 613 in the Muslim calendar corresponded to April 1216-April 1217 in the Christian calendar.

  The use of a toothpick (siwak) was part of piety, for, according to a saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, ‘Cleanse your mouths with toothpicks; for your mouths are the abode of guardian angels; whose pens are the tongues, and whose ink is the spittle of men; and to whom naught is more unbearable than the remains of food in the mouth.’ According to the tenth-century belletrist Muhammad ibn Isma'il al-Tha'alabi, Abraham was the first person to trim his moustache, part his hair and use a toothpick. According to al-Washsha, use of the toothpick ‘whitens the teeth, cleans the brain, perfumes the breath, puts off choler, drives out phlegm, strengthens the gum, cleans the sight and renders food more tasty’. Despite all this, public use of the toothpick was seen by some as anti-social and the 'Abbasid poet Ibn al-Mu’tazz characterized an undesirable table companion as one who ‘continually picks his teeth with, a toothpick’. Some Muslims believed that prayer was more efficacious after the use of the toothpick.However, it is debatable whether the toothpick should be used during the fasting hours of Ramadan.

  Friday, in Arabic yawm al-jum'a, literally ‘the day of assembly’, is the day when all adult males are supposed to assemble for the noon prayer in the main mosque of the town or region.

  A mihrab is a niche in the wall of the mosque indicating the direction of prayer (towards Mecca).

  Regarding the ape’s hose, sar-muza is an imported Persian word, meaning ‘hose placed over boots’.

  It is quite common for Muslim worshippers to place a handkerchief (or mandil) on the ground where their head will touch during the prostrations of prayer.

  Mamluks (slave soldiers) who were beautiful attracted high prices in the slave markets and homosexual love affairs between master and slave sometimes occurred.

  Jawbari’s reminiscence should be compared to ‘The Second Dervish’s Tale’ in The Thousand and One Nights, in which a prince is transformed into an ape by a wrathful demon but demonstrates his underlying human nature by his skill at calligraphy.

  A French translation by René Khawam exists of a somewhat longer version of the Kashf al-Asrar (Le Voile arraché, 2 vols., Paris, 1980), with a longer and slightly different text of this story. Khawam does not identify his source text, but it is probably a manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.

  Like Jawbari, Ibn Daniyal claimed that his writings about villainy served a moral purpose. Shams al-Din Muhammad ibn Daniyal was born in Mosul in 1248 and worked as an oculist in Cairo, where he died in 1311. He is the only playwright to be included in this anthology. Live theatre scarcely existed in the medieval Near East. Although there is evidence of plays (usually of a fairly crude and bawdy nature) being performed in Arab cities, no scripts of those plays seem to have survived, apart from three which Ibn Daniyal produced for shadow-theatre performances.

  Egyptian shadow-theatre seems to have offered popular entertainment for the masses, but there is some evidence that members of the elite also enjoyed such performances. It is said that Saladin once persuaded al-Qadi al-Fadil to watch a shadow play, at the end of which the pompous minister remarked, ‘I have had a lesson of great significance. I have seen empires coming and going, and when the screen was folded up, I discovered that the Prime Mover was but one.’ (For pious moralists like al-Fadil everything in life had a moral, if only one could discover it.)

  Ibn Daniyal himself was a member of the Egyptian elite and a friend of senior mamluk officers. He was a literary disciple of ‘Imad al-Din al-Isfahani and he wrote didactic poetry in classical Arabic on the history of the qadis (judges) in Egypt and on medicine. His use of low-life dialect and Middle Arabic forms in his plays was therefore for artistic effect. In his preface to the text of his plays, he claimed that they were works of literary art, which could only be understood by men of adab. There are indeed a number of similarities between the plays of Ibn Daniyal and the Maqamats written by, among others, Hamadhani and Hariri. Like those Maqamats, Ibn Daniyal’s plays deal with low life but enjoy a high literary status, and, again like them, they are written in a mixture of verse and rhymed prose. In his preface Ibn Daniyal addresses a certain 'Ali ibn Mawlahum who, he says, requested his play scripts: ‘So I let my thoughts range through the wide fields of my profligacy and I was able to fulfil your request without the slightest delay. I have composed for you some licentious plays, pieces of high not low literature, which, once you have made the puppets, divided the script into scenes, assembled your audience and waxed the screen, you will find to be entirely novel and truly superior to the usual shadow play.’

  The first of his three plays, Tayf al-Khayyal, ‘The Imaginary Phantom’, recounts the attempts of a disreputable hunchbacked soldier called Wisal (the name means ‘sexual congress’) to find a bride. He is assisted by Umm Rashid, a dishonest marriage-broker. Poorly served by Umm Rashid, Tayf al-Khayyal ends up with a hideous bride, who wants to beat her husband and who farts a lot; but she dies, in time for Wisal to repent his dissolute ways.

  The next play, 'Ajib wa-Gharib, has no plot worthy of the name. The ‘play’ merely consists of a parade of low-life characters who come on stage to describe their various professions. The play’s title can be translated as ‘Marvellous and Strange’, but 'Ajib and Gharib are also the names of two of the leading figures in the parade. 'Ajib is a low-grade, unlicensed popular preacher. Gharib is a wizard, who rubs along precariously by writing out spells, handling animals, and faking illnesses. He is versed in most of the arts of the Banu Sasan. Other characters include a snake-charmer, an astrologer, a juggler, a sorcerer trading in amulets, an acrobat, a lion-tamer, and so on. The last characters to appear are a camel-driver who wants to go to the Holy Places, and a lamp-lighter (masha'ili) who is the jack of all pariah trades. He sings a song about Christianity and a mocking lament for the good old days of debauchery now brought to an end by the puritan legislation of the Mamluk sultan Baybars (reigned 1260-77). In the passage which follows, the masha'ili starts to describe not only his job, but also what he gets up to when he is moonlighting. Having entered the maydan, or square, carrying his brazier, he describes his work as a lamp-lighter and lamp-bearer and then goes on to describe the different sorts of patter he uses when begging from Muslims, Christians and Jews.

  He ends his appeal to the Jew as follows:

  Bestow on me a favour with a red copper penny,

  Like a glowing coal in my brazier,

  And do not say to me ‘Away!’ and do not delay like a miser.

  You think perhaps that I am a boor. No, by 'Ali! No, by 'Ali!

  (Curses against him who does not give.)

  So it is, and of how many sewers have we not emptied the bottom

  with the mattock,

  As though we were doing the work of the aperient remedy in their interior.

  Our trade is a laudable one, where the sewer is like a full belly.

  And when you find one who is led around like a criminal on an ass

  with a white hind-foot,

  Whose eye weeps, as though it had been rubbed with pepper,

  Then we strike his neck with whips,

  We cry with a voice which shocks even the deaf:

  That is the reward of the man who says what he does not do.

  And when we act as criers, how often have we ordered people (by

  order of the Government) what they should do in the future,

  You people who have assembled, do so and so, but he who does not do it,

  Let him not be surprised at what he shall receive [as punishment] from him, who instructed me [the Emir].

  In the same way we cry out when a man has lost something.

 
He who directs us to it, we grant him a gift,

  And God’s reward, oh honourable gracious Sirs.

  And we flay the skin from the carcase, whether it be from bullock

  or from camel,

  So that it may act as a protection against harm for the feet,

  And you see no men who are not provided with shoes.

  And how many of the crafty people have we punished with

  flogging, robbers of all kinds, who come by night like approaching disaster.

  Who in their cunning know the house better than its owner.

  Such a man climbs up to the house like a travelling star,

  Enterslightly by its narrow side, like a sustained breath,

  With courageous heart, without fear because of his cunning,

  He creeps slowly into the house like an ant,

  Comes to the sleepers in the middle of the night, soft as a Zephyr,

  Till his protective covering fails him.

  We seize him so that he is like a chained horse.

  Sometimes we sever his hand from the wrist,

  And sometimes we hang him on the cross, when he is guilty of murder.

  And in playing with dice we are famous as a proverb.

  They gleam in our hands like assembled jewels.

  Our man is at peace [has won], he sweeps it together, that for himself, that for me.

  From the other they have taken everything, so that he must despise himself,

  Saying: Oh, had I been satisfied with my first winnings!

  And how often have I thought that I would never lose my position!

  And if they, the dice, were lucky stars in their changing influence over the dynasties.

  And how much trade do we do with best fresh plants,

  Hashish of the colour of down on a shining cheek,

  Which is made into pills, perfumed with ‘Anbar, spiced and roasted for us,

  Or with indigo which is handed round in the beggar’s bowl for those drunk with hashish.

  We sell that to the people when it is cheap for the price of an ear of corn.

  We are the sons of Sasan, descended from their kings, who possessed golden ornaments.

  Our qualities are these in detail and in general.

  They are shortly related in a qasida, which suffices and need be no longer.

  Our might is on the peak of two mountains in Mosul.

  We are honoured there as the sun is honoured in the Zodiac of the Ram,

  And I pray to God, as prays a suppliant, a petitioner,

  That he may forgive these sins and the bad speech.

  When he has set forth his qualities and filled his fodder bag he turns and departs.

  Paul Kahle (trans.), Journal of the Royal Asiatic

  Society (1940), pp. 30–32

  COMMENTARY

  The masha'ili's performance is followed by that of a camel-driver, before Gharib reappears at the end of this disreputable cavalcade to wind up the play. According to Ira Marvin Lapidus’s Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, Mass., 1967) the masha'iliyya were ‘the night-watchmen and torch-bearers who cleaned the latrines, removed refuse from the streets, and carried off the bodies of dead animals, served as police, guards, executioners and public criers, and paraded people condemned to public disgrace whose shame may have consisted in part in being handled by such men. At the same time, the masha'iliyya made use of their intimacy with nightlife to become involved in gambling, theft, and dealing in hashish and wine.’

  I have no idea why the drinkers of hashish were presented with indigo.

  Kahle has omitted some of the obscenities in his translation, particularly those hurled at any who are too mean to respond to the begging patter.

  The whole speech rhymes in lam.

  Finally, ‘Al-Mutayyam wa’l-Da'i' al-Yutayyim‘, ‘The Man Distracted by Passion and the Little Vagabond Orphan’, is a play about unfulfilled homosexual love. In the first part, al-Mutayyam laments his frustrated love for the beautiful boy, Yutayyim. Mutayyam is interrupted by an old and ugly lover, who recites a poem in praise of small things. Then Mutayyam and the beloved boy Yutayyim meet for a cockfight, a ram fight and a bullfight. After the boy has departed, Mutayyam has a bull slaughtered for a homosexual feast. His guests make speeches on various naughty things like wine, masturbation, and gluttony. The host had been hoping to attract Yutayyim to the feast, but the Angel of Death arrives instead and Mutayyam repents (thereby giving the play a belated and perfunctory moral gloss).

  Ibn Daniyal’s portrayal of conmen working the market-place in his play 'Ajib wa-Gharib catered for the contemporary interest in stories of cunning exploits (hiyal). The heroes of popular epics and stories often relied more on crafty eloquence than they did on swordsmanship. The Raqa’iq al-Hilal fi Daqaiq al-Hiyal, ‘Cloaks of Fine Fabric in Subtle Ruses’, catered to the same sort of taste. This anthology is anonymous, but it can tentatively be dated to the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century.

  We are told how the King of the Greeks of Byzantium used cunning when he invaded Ifriqiya and the population learned of this well enough in advance for them to organize resistance and entrench themselves in a city that he besieged for a long time to no avail. The city gate withstood all his attacks. Among the citizens there was a man called Aqtar who was very daring and courageous. Anyone who fought him was invariably killed. The King of the Greeks was told of this.

  He had a commander named Arsilaous, unsurpassed for his bravery throughout the world. Following an outburst of anger from the King, he had refused to take any part in the war. The King had asked him to, but he did not obey. The King then said:

  – Spread the rumour that our enemy Aqtar has captured the brother of Arsilaous.

  The latter was distressed when he heard the news. He looked everywhere for his brother, but could not find him. Then he asked for his weapons and went out against Aqtar. He fought against him and took him prisoner and led him before the King of the Greeks. The latter put Aqtar to death. The people of Ifriqiya and all their supporters were terror-stricken when they found out that their hero was gone. The King of the Greeks, with Arsilaous, attacked the city, inflicting heavy losses on the enemy and conquering the region.

  René Khawam (trans.), The Subtle Ruse: The Book of Arabic

  Wisdom and Guile (London, 1976), pp. 185–6

  COMMENTARY

  Evidently what we have here is a distorted and much simplified version of the story, in Homer’s Iliad, of the anger of Achilles and his eventual fight with Hector (Aqtar). As far as one can tell, neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey was translated into Arabic in the medieval period and the Arabs were much less familiar with the name of Homer than they were with those of the Greek philosophers. Nevertheless, a handful of scholars in the 'Abbasid period had been aware of the contents of the two epics, and fragments of Homer resurfaced in such popular stories as ‘The Seven Voyages of Sinbad’. In Homer’s Iliad the focus was on the anger of Achilles; here, in this dim reminiscence of the Trojan War, the point is the cunning of the Greek king.