The Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature

by Robert Irwin

  Tanukhi’s Indian tale in Faraj ba‘d al-Shidda, trans.

  D. S. Margoliouth, in Lectures on Arabic

  Historians (Calcutta, 1930), pp. 142–6

  The next stories also come from Faraj ba‘d al-Shidda.

  My sources for this story are: ‘Ali ibn Muhammad al-Ansari and ‘Ubayd Allah ibn Muhammad al-‘Abqasi (the wording of the story is theirs); they were told it by Abu’1-Fath al-Qattan, who had it from a member of the merchant classes who lost all his money and became doorkeeper in Baghdad to Abu Ahmad alHusayn b. Musa al-Musawi the ‘Alid, naqib of the Talibis; this man was told the story by his maternal uncle, a money-changer.

  The lads and I were at one of our mate’s for a drinking-session; we had brought along a pretty little slave-boy, and as we were eating water-melon, each of us had a knife. The boy started fooling around with one of us, trying to take his knife away from him; the man pretended to be angry with him, made a feint with the knife, and accidentally stabbed him through the heart. He died instantly.

  We all made as if to escape, but the man who was giving the party told us not to be such heels and that it was sink or swim together. So we slit open the boy’s belly and threw his guts into the latrine, cut off his head and limbs and, taking one each, went off in different directions to dispose of them. I got given the head, which I wrapped in a cloth and bundled into my sleeve.

  I had not gone far when I walked straight into the arms of the muhtasib’s men. They immediately latched on to my sleeve and said they were looking for counterfeit coins, and that the muhtasib’s orders were for all parcels to be sealed and brought to him for inspection. I tried wheedling and I tried bribery, but to no avail; they frogmarched me off towards the mubtasib‘s office. I realized that I was done for, for I could see no way out. But then I caught sight of the gate of a narrow alley, quite small enough to be mistaken for a house door, and saw my chance.

  ‘If you only want to seal my bundle,’ I said to the men, ‘why are you hanging on to my arm and sleeve as though I were a thief ? I’m willing to come with you to the muhtasib; let go of me!’ So they let go and marched me along between them instead. As we passed the gate, I broke into a run, darted through, locked it, made sure it was fast, ran down to the end of the alley, where I found the drain of a privy with its cover raised for cleaning, chucked the cloth and its contents into the drain, came out at the other end at a run, and kept on running until I reached home, where I thanked God for saving my life and swore never to drink wine again.

  ‘Ubayd Allah b. Muhammad [al-Sarawi] told me this story, which was told to him by Abu Ahmad alHusayn b. Musa al-Musawi, the ‘Alid and naqib:

  One day, when we were gossiping together, an old servant of mine told me he had once vowed by divorce never to go to another party, attend a funeral or leave anything to be looked after. Why was this? I asked him; he replied:

  I once sailed down to Basra from Baghdad; the evening I arrived, I was walking up the waterfront when I bumped into a man who hailed me as X, kept beaming at me, and started asking after people I didn’t know and begging me to come and stay with him. Being a stranger and not knowing my way around, I thought I might as well spend the night at his house and put off looking for somewhere to stay until the next day, so I played along with him and he dragged me off to his house (I had a stout travelling-pack, and a lot of money in my sleeve-pocket). There I found a party in full swing with everyone drinking – clearly the man had gone out to relieve himself, mistaken me for a friend of his, and been too drunk to realize his error. The guests included a man with a pretty little slave-boy. Soon everyone lay down to sleep, and I squeezed in among them. Presently, I saw one of the guests get up, go over to the slave-boy, bugger him, and return to his place, which was next to the boy’s owner, who immediately woke up and went over to the boy to bugger him.

  ‘What are you doing?’ says the boy. ‘You were here not a minute ago, buggering about.’

  ‘No I wasn’t,’ says the man.

  ‘Well, someone was, and I thought it was you, so I never lifted a finger – it never occurred to me that anyone would dare to horn in on you.’

  The man gave a snort of rage and got up again, drawing a knife from his belt.

  I was shaking with fright, and if the man had come close enough to see how I was trembling, he would certainly have thought I was the culprit and killed me. However, the Lord had other plans for me, so he began his search for the guilty party with the man lying next to him (who was feigning sleep in the hope of saving his skin), feeling his heart to see how hard it was beating. Satisfied, he put his hand over his mouth and stabbed him. The body twitched and was still. Leading his slave, the man opened the door and stole off.

  I was terribly frightened. I was a stranger; when the owner of the house woke up and failed to recognize me, he was bound to think I was the murderer, and I would be put to death. Leaving my pack behind, and pausing only to collect my cloak and shoes, I slipped out and walked and walked with no idea of where to go. It was the middle of the night, and I was terrified of meeting the night-watch. Suddenly, I spotted the furnace of a bath-house, as yet unlit, and thought of hiding there until the bath-house opened. I crept inside and settled myself in the hearth of the furnace. But before long, I heard hooves, and a man’s voice saying: ‘I can see you, you bastard!’ Into the furnace came the man – and there I was, half-dead with fright, not daring to move – and, finding nothing, poked his head into the hearth and brandished a sword; but since I was out of reach, I sat tight. Having drawn a blank, the man went out again and came back with a girl, thrust her into the furnace, slit her throat and departed, leaving the corpse behind.

  Pulling off the anklets which I saw glittering on her legs, I made off, and wandered around in a daze until I came to the door of a bath-house which had opened; in I went, hid the anklets in a bundle with my clothes, which I gave to the bath-house keeper, and stayed in the baths until morning. Then I set out with my bundle and was about to take to the road when I realized I was near the house of a friend of mine, and made my way there instead. I knocked at the door; he opened it, was delighted to see me and asked me in, whereupon I thrust my bundle of valuables into his house, and begged him to hide the anklets. At the sight of them, his face changed.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.

  ‘Where did you get these anklets?’

  I told him my night’s adventures and he disappeared into the women’s quarters. Re-emerging, he asked me if I would recognize the murderer. Not by sight, I said, as it had been too dark to see his face, but I would know his voice if I heard it again.

  Leaving orders for a meal to be prepared, he went out about his business, but soon returned in the company of a young soldier whom, with a nod to me, he engaged in conversation.

  ‘That’s the man,’ I said.

  We sat down to eat; wine was brought, the soldier was plied with it, got drunk and fell asleep where he sat, whereupon my friend locked the door and slit his throat.

  ‘The girl he murdered was my sister,’ he explained. ‘This man debauched her, and though I had heard some gossip to that effect, I didn’t believe it. Still, I threw my sister out and refused to have anything to do with her. Apparently she ran off to him – though I had no idea what was going on until he killed her – but when I recognized the anklets, I went and asked the women what had become of her, and they told me she was at So-and-So’s. I said I had forgiven her, and they were to send for her and have her fetched home. From their stammered replies, I realized he had killed her, just as you said. So I killed him. Now let’s go and bury him.’ So we stole out at night and buried him, after which I made my way back to the waterfront and fled to Baghdad, swearing never to go to another party or ask anyone to look after anything for me.

  As for funerals: once, when I was in Baghdad, I went out on some business one hot day at noon and ran into two men carrying a bier. I said to myself, ‘This must be the funeral of some pauper from out of town; I’ll do my soul a bit o
f good by helping these two to carry the bier,’ and put my shoulder to it, relieving one of the bearers – who immediately vanished without a trace.

  ‘Bearer! bearer!’ I shouted; but the other man said:

  ‘Keep walking and shut up. The “bearer” ‘s gone.’

  ‘I most certainly will not; I’m going to drop it right here,’ I retorted.

  ‘You most certainly will,’ returned the other, ‘or I shall scream blue murder.’

  Somewhat abashed, I reminded myself of the good this would do my soul, and together we carried the bier to the funeral mosque; but no sooner had we set it down than the remaining bearer disappeared. ‘What’s the matter with these bastards?’ I said to myself. ‘Well, I certainly mean to earn my reward. Here, gravedigger,’ I called, fetching some money out of my sleeve, ‘where is he to be buried?’

  ‘Search me,’ he said; so I had to give him two dirhams to dig a grave; and just as the bier was poised over it for the corpse to be emptied in, the gravedigger leapt back and dealt me such a clout that my turban was knocked sideways.

  ‘Murderer!’ he screamed.

  This fetched a crowd, who all wanted to know what he was shouting about.

  ‘This man,’ says the gravedigger, ‘brings me this corpse, with no head to it, and asks me to bury it,’ and as he twitched back the shroud, they saw that the body was indeed headless.

  Not only was I utterly flabbergasted, but the crowd nearly beat me to death, before carrying me off to the chief of police, where the gravedigger told his tale, and, as there were no witnesses to the crime, I was stripped for whipping to make me confess. So bemused was I that I still had nothing to say for myself; but luckily, the chief of police had an intelligent clerk who, noting my perplexity, asked him to wait while he conducted an investigation; he thought I was innocent. His request was granted; he interrogated me in private and I told him exactly what had happened, adding and omitting nothing. He then had the corpse removed from the bier which, on examination, proved to bear the legend: ‘property of Such-and-Such a mosque in Such-and-Such a quarter’. He proceeded to the mosque, in disguise, with his men, and found a tailor, whom he asked whether they had a bier, pretending that he needed it for a funeral, and was told that the mosque did own a bier, but that it had been taken away to be used that morning and not returned.

  ‘Who took it?’ asked the clerk.

  ‘The people who live over there,’ said the tailor, gesturing towards a house. The clerk sent his men to raid it, and found a group of unmarried men, whom he arrested and sent to the police station. He then reported to his chief, who questioned them, and to whom they confessed that they had fallen out over a pretty little slave-boy and had killed him, thrown his head into a pit they had dug in the house, and carried him out headless on the bier; the two bearers were two of their number, and had fled on a pre-arranged signal.

  The men were executed; I was released; and that is the reason I have sworn never to attend another funeral.

  Julia Ashtiany, ‘Al-Tanukhi’s Al-Faraj ba‘d al-Shidda as a

  Literary Source’, in Alan Jones (ed.), Arabicus Felix: Essays in

  Honour of A.F. L. Beeston on his Eightieth Birthday

  (Reading, Berks., 1991), pp. 108–11

  COMMENTARY

  People who claimed descent from the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib enjoyed special privileges and were represented by an officer known as a naqib. One of his chief duties was to check that the genealogies of those claiming such a distinguished descent were genuine.

  A muhtasib was an urban officer charged with a range of duties, including the inspection of weights and measures, the quality of goods sold in the market-place and the enforcement of public morals, as well as with policing duties.

  Tanukhi also wrote Nishwar al-Muhadara (‘Desultory Conversations’), which he presented as a response to the dying of the arts of conversation in his time: ‘I was present at some salons in Baghdad and I found them empty of those with whom they had been crowded and whose conversations had made them brilliant. I met only with the relics of those old men.’ Writing in 971, he looked back to the great old days of caliphs’ parties. Stressing that he had relied overwhelmingly on oral sources, Tanukhi tells us that he drew on the wit and wisdom of kings, fools, men of miscellaneous knowledge, booksellers, storytellers, sharpers, knife men, thieves, chess-players, hermaphrodites, contortionists, melancholies, jugglers and diviners, among many others. The three stories which follow are part of Tanukhi’s desultory conversational repertoire, and come from the same published source.

  The following is a curious device put in practice by a thief in our time. I was informed by Abu’l-Qasim ‘Ubaidallah b. Mohammed the Shoemaker that he had seen a thief caught and charged with picking the locks of small tenements supposed to be occupied by unmarried persons. Entering the house he would dig a hole such as is called ‘the well’ in the nard game, and throw some nuts into it as though someone had been playing with him, and leave by the side a handkerchief containing some two hundred nuts. He would then proceed to wrap up as many of the goods in the house as he could carry, and if he passed unobserved, he would depart with his burden. If, however, the master of the house came on the scene, he would abandon the booty and endeavour to fight his way out. If the master of the house proved doughty, sprung upon him, held him, tried to arrest him, and called out Thieves!, and the neighbours assembled, he would address the master of the house as follows: You are really wanting in humour. Here have I been playing nuts with you for months, and, though you beggared me and took away all I possessed, I made no complaint, nor did I shame you before your neighbours; and now that I have won your goods, you begin to charge me with larceny, you mean and wretched creature! Between us is the gambling-house, the place where we became acquainted. State in the presence of the people there or of the people here that I have cheated, and I will leave you your goods. The man might continue to assert that the other was a thief, but the neighbours supposed that he was unwilling to be branded as a gambler, and in consequence charged the other with theft; whereas in reality he was a gambler and the other man was speaking the truth. They would endeavour to make peace between the two, presently the thief would walk away with his nuts, and the master of the house would be defamed.

  COMMENTARY

  Nard is Arabic for ‘backgammon’. Since it was common for players to gamble on the outcome, the pious stigmatized the game as ‘a work of Satan’. Harun al-Rashid once lost all his clothes gambling on backgammon. The board, its dice and counters frequently featured in poems and prose as images of inscrutable fate.

  He informed me that he knew of another whose plan was to enter the residences of families, especially those in which there were women whose husbands were out. If he succeeded in getting anything he would go away; if he were perceived and the master of the house came, he would suggest that he was a friend of the wife, and some officer’s retainer; and ask the master to keep the matter quiet from his employer for the sake of both; displaying a uniform, and suggesting that if the master chose to dishonour his household, he could not bring him before the Sultan on a charge of adultery.