The Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature

by Robert Irwin

  Middleton and Garza-Falcon, Andalusian Poems, pp. 74–5

  My life is spent in dissipation and wantonness!

  O joy, I have begun to be a real profligate!

  Indeed, it is absurd for me to repent

  When my survival without a wee drink would be certain death.

  Vino, vino! And spare me what is said;

  Verily, I go mad when I lose my restraint!

  My slave will be freed, my money irretrievably lost

  On the day I am deprived of the cup.

  Should I be poured a double measure or a fivefold one,

  I would most certainly empty it; if not, fill then the jarrónl

  Ho! Clink the glasses with us!

  Drunkenness, drunkenness! What care we for proper conduct?

  And when you wish to quaff a morning drink,

  Awaken me before the volcón!

  Take my money and squander it on drink;

  My clothes, too, and divide them up among the whores,

  And assure me that my reasoning is correct.

  I am never deceived in this occupation!

  And when I die, let me be buried thus:

  Let me sleep in a vineyard, among the vinestocks;

  Spread [its] leaves over me in lieu of a shroud,

  And let there be a turban of vine tendrils on my head!

  Let my companions persevere in immorality, to be followed by every beloved one.

  And remember me continuously as you go about it.

  As for the grapes, let whomsoever eats a bunch,

  Plant the [leftover] stalk on my grave!

  I will offer a toast to your health with the large cup;

  Take your bottle, lift it high and empty it!

  What a wonderful toast you have been honoured by.

  Let whatever you decree against me come to pass!

  By God, were it not for a trick done to me in a matter concerning a woman,

  I would have won bliss. She said [to me]: ‘There is a certain desire which

  I will not grant you, it being a question of my honour.’

  Alas! The price of that was paid out later!

  I, by God, was seated, when there came to me with a garland on her head,

  A Berber girl; what a beauty of a conejo!

  ‘Whoa!’ [said I, ‘She] is not a sera of cardacho,

  But don’t pounce [on her] for neither is she a grañón!’

  ‘Milady, say, are you fine, white flour or what?’

  ‘I am going to bed.’ ‘By God; you do well!’

  I said: ‘Enter.’ She replied: ‘No, you enter first, by God.’

  (Let us cuckold the man who is her husband.)

  Hardly had I beheld that leg

  And those two lively, lively eyes,

  When my penis arose in my trousers like a pavilion,

  And made a tent out of my clothes.

  And since I observed that a certain ‘son of Adam’ was dilated,

  The chick wished to hide in the nest.

  ‘Where are you taking that pollo, for an immoral purpose?

  Here we have a man to whom they say: “O what shamelessness!”

  ‘ I, by God, immediately set to work:

  Either it came out, or it went in,

  While I thrust away sweetly, sweet as honey,

  And [my] breath came out hotly between her legs.

  It would have been wonderful, had it not been for the insults that were exchanged the next day,

  For they began to squabble and to brawl:

  ‘Remove your hand from my beard, O ass!’

  ‘You, throw the frying pan for the tostón!’

  One claws at an eyelid, the other slaps;

  One tears clothes to shreds, the other floors his adversary;

  No matter where I throw green quinces,

  I get hit only on the head by the bastón!

  That is the way the world is! Not that it is my style,

  Yet in this way they managed to humiliate me.

  As for me, O people, although it was a light [punishment],

  Never have I suffered such shame as at present.

  Indeed, my opinion is as follows: You are viewed by the eye of reproof;

  No place in this city is big enough for you to hide.

  Where are the means [of departure] for one such as Ibn Quzman?

  In my opinion nothing is more certain than that [I shall get them].

  O my hope and my well-watched star;

  My life and my beloved one:

  I desire largesse and it is from you that it is desired!

  I am your guarantor for your glory will be guaranteed!

  Your hands have an eminent right to dispose of me,

  And in your honour do I go and stop,

  While your virtues are too excellent for me to describe.

  Drops of water are not to be compared with bursting rain clouds.

  You have shown me a path to prosperity;

  You have adorned me before my enemy and my friend;

  For in you my hand has been attached to a firm rope;

  You who are such that all others are withheld from me.

  O, Abu Ishaq, O lord among viziers,

  Bright flower of this world and lord among emirs!

  The like of you gives new life to poetry for poets,

  While you make public a generosity that was hidden [before your arrival]!

  May you remain happy, achieving your aspirations,

  And may you witness high rank and nobility with affability,

  As long as darkness changes [to light] and the new moon shines,

  And as long as a plant still grows green and branches rise high!

  Monroe, Hispano-Arabic Poetry: A Student Anthology, pp. 260–70

  COMMENTARY

  Ibn Quzman’s verses are interestingly similar to the ‘goliardic’ Latin poems of a secular and profane nature which were produced in western Christendom in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. (On the learned vagabonds who composed verses in praise of wine, women and song, see Helen Waddell’s classic masterpiece, The Wandering Scholars (1927).)

  Jarrón is Spanish for ‘jug’. (Ibn Quzman’s Arabic has it as jurun.)

  Volcón is Spanish for ‘the emptying of cups’. (Ibn Quzman has al-bulqun.)

  Conejo is Spanish for ‘rabbit’.

  Sera of cardacho is conjectural and cannot be translated with any confidence.

  Grañón is boiled wheat-porridge. Ibn Quzman is here writing in a popular idiom, the sense of which has been lost.

  Pollo is a chicken.

  Tostón is Spanish for a piece of toast fried in olive oil.

  Bastón is Spanish for stick.

  Abu Ishaq was presumably a friend and potential patron of Ibn Quzman.

  Wickedness of a much more serious sort was expounded in a sinister text known as the Ghayat al-Hakim, or ‘Goal of the Sage’. This was a sorcerer’s manual which was purported to have been written by a famous eleventh-century Spanish Arab mathematician, al-Majriti. This ascription, which was certainly false, was probably made in order to give the text a spurious respectability. However, the Ghayat al-Hakim does seem to have been put together in Muslim Spain in the mid-eleventh century, though nothing is certain. An abridged and bowdlerized version of the text was translated into Latin under the title Picatrix. There is also evidence that the text was translated into Spanish, though that version has not survived. The author, ‘pseudo-al-Majriti’, also wrote an alchemical manual, the Rutba al-Hakim, ‘The Rank of the Sage’.

  The lengthy text mingles high-flown esoteric speculation and practical (occasionally murderous) spells with tales of the marvellous. Much of the Ghayat al-Hakim can indeed be read as a work of entertainment, as storytelling thinly disguised as magical instruction. There are stories of legendary and fantastic kings of ancient Egypt. There is the story of the young man spirited by enchantment to his lover; of the two men who met while walking on the surface of the Red Sea; of the Kurdish sorcerer�
�s apprentice; of the sinister fate of red-haired men unfortunate enough to fall into the hands of Nabataean sorcerers; and many more.

  As far as the spells are concerned, they rely heavily on a knowledge of astrology and the use of talismanic figures. The author was familiar with the writings of Ibn Washshiyya (see Chapter 4) and shared the latter’s enthusiasm for poisons. There is consistent stress on the marvellous powers of the human body and the usefulness of the body’s constituents for spells. Excrement was a particularly useful material with which to work magic.

  The notion of correspondences and their magical efficacy played an important part in shaping the intellectual world of most medieval Muslims, Christians and Jews. As Michel Foucault put it in The Order of Things: ‘It was resemblance that largely guided exegesis and the interpretation of texts; it was resemblance that organized the play of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art of representing them. The universe was folded in upon itself: the earth echoing the sky, faces seeing themselves reflected in the stars, and plants holding within their stems the secrets that were of use to man.’ The medieval Spanish sorcerer did not conceive of magic as a box of tricks, but rather as the summation of philosophy.

  Mingled in with the Ghayat’s malignant spells and childish promises of wish-fulfilment are pages of high-flown mysticism and humanism. Man seeks through study of the Divine to return to his origins in the Divine. The author insists on the sublimity of the occult science, for magic is the summation of all philosophy. The following is from Chapter 6 of Book One. The Arabic is obscure and the sentence order sometimes seems to have got jumbled, so some of the translation is conjectural. (My English is, I think, somewhat clearer than the original Arabic, which arguably makes it a bad translation.) However, though the text is obscure, it also seems interesting and important.

  Know (may God ennoble you) that wisdom is an exceeding noble thing and that he who studies it partakes of its nobility and distinction. Moreover, within wisdom there are ranks, each one becoming manifest as the previous one is mastered. However, the Perfect Man is he who holds the fruits of wisdom within him, drawing on them whenever he has the desire to do so. It is certain that the noblest of the various definitions of philosophy that have been made is that philosophy treasures wisdom before all other things. He who falls short of this should not be reckoned to be a man, even if in all other respects he resembles a man. This is because he does not comprehend the true nature of his being, which is that man is a microcosm which corresponds to the macrocosm. In essence he is a perfect particular entity, possessed of a rational soul as well as an animal soul and a vegetable soul. He is unique in possessing all three, for animals do not have a rational soul. The possession of a rational soul is crucially distinctive, for it is this which engenders the crafts and it is this which summons unseen things to mind as well as grasping the audible. It is also by this that he sees in his sleep what has happened in his day. He is a small world enclosed in the greater world and through the correspondence of his form to its forms he is in harmony with it and all the elements of existence are conjoined in him. He has what all life forms have, yet he distinguishes himself from them in his knowledge and guile.

  He is capable of six movements. His backbone extends in a straight line down to his thighbones. Man dies naturally and his life is a succession of accidents. He has close-set fingers and palms and a round skull, as well as nails and an index-finger. He can master the sciences and writing and can invent crafts. He can mimic the beasts, but they cannot mimic him. He laughs, weeps and uses tears to express sadness. He possesses godlike powers as well as the capacity to govern politically. He is a statue illuminated from within. His body is a container which his soul inhabits. The line of his body runs straight. He can distinguish between what is harmful to him and what is beneficial to him. He acts purposefully, so that he can do something or refrain from it on theoretical grounds. He invents crafts and creates miraculous and wonderful talismans. He retains intellectual concepts and lets go of the mundane. God has made him the guardian of His Wisdom and the intermediary between His Soul and all of His Creation. Man is the recipient of His Inspiration and the vessel for His sciences and proclamations. Man is both the offspring of the macrocosm and its seal, in such a manner that all concepts are brought together in his construction. Although created things are totally diverse, he comprehends them within himself and he understands them, while they do not understand him. He makes use of them, without being used by them. He uses his tongue to mimic their sounds and his hand to imitate their appearance. His nature is remote from theirs. The beasts are unable to do a single thing which alters either their nature or their voice. The cock can only crow; the dog can only bark; the lion can only roar. Yet the man changes his voice and predisposition at will and mimics whatsoever he wishes and he governs both himself and others.

  Since he is master of his gross body and of his subtle soul, some of him is corporeal and some of him incorporeal. The incorporeal part is alive, while the corporeal part is dead. Half of him is in movement, while the other half is motionless. Half of him is perfectly chiselled while the other is damaged. Part of him is light, part dark. Part of him is interior, part exterior…

  Trans. Robert Irwin from the Arabic text published as Pseudo-Magriti,

  Das Ziel des Weisen, ed. Helmut Ritter (Leipzig, 1933), pp. 42–3

  COMMENTARY

  This chapter goes on to argue, among other things, that a man’s head is shaped to correspond to the dome of the heavens, before going on to speak obscurely of the importance of hidden knowledge.

  Although the unknown author’s presentation of man’s capacities and near-godlike status is set out in a higgledy-piggledy fashion, I do not think it fanciful to see this meditation as a precursor of the famous oration De hominis dignitate (‘On the Dignity of Man’) by a leading author of the Italian Renaissance, Pico della Mirandola (1463–94). Pico, after remarking that he had ‘read in the records of the Arabians, reverend Fathers, that Abdela the Saracen, when questioned as to what on the stage of this world, as it were, could be seen most worthy of wonder, replied: “There is nothing to be seen more worthy of wonder than man.” ‘Pico went on to set out man’s special status in the universe, and his role as God’s intermediary and as a ruler of the lower creation. Later, of course, Pico’s themes were picked up by Shakespeare in the famous soliloquy in Hamlet, beginning ‘What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!’

  However, there is a dark side to the curious specimen of eleventh-century Andalusian humanism translated above, for its high-flown rhetoric was used as part of a theoretical justification for using hair, excreta and other substances in magical spells.

  Although I have translated hikma as ‘wisdom’, it sometimes has the special sense of esoteric wisdom.

  The notion of the ‘Perfect Man’, or al-Insan al-Kamil, who combines the powers of nature with divine powers, also plays a leading role in the thought of the Ikhwan al-Safa’ and of numerous philosophers and Sufis.

  The ‘six movements’ are presumably forwards, sideways, left, right, up and down. But why the author wishes to stress this attribute is not clear – among much else.

  After Alfonso VI of Castile captured Toledo from the poet-king of Seville in 1085, the Ta’ifa kings, led by Mu’tamid, panicked, and sought the help of the Almoravids in resisting the Christian Reconquista. In so doing, they sealed the doom of their dynasties. The Almoravids (or, more correctly, the al-Murabitun) were adherents of militant, literalist Islam, and by the late eleventh century they had taken control of a large part of the Maghreb. Summoned by the temporarily united Ta’ifa kings, and led by Yusuf ibn Tashfin, they crossed over into Spain and in 1086 won a great victory over Alfonso VI at the Battle of Zallaqa. However, in the years that followed, the Almoravids showed themselves to be more active in annexing the t
erritories of the remaining Ta’ifa kings than they were in resisting the Christian advance. (As has already been noted, Mu’tamid was to die in a North African prison in 1095.) The Almoravids were Berber puritans who had no interest in the courtly games and literary heritage of Muslim Spain, and civilizing them proved to be a slow process. Nevertheless, despite the Almoravids’ lack of interest in literature, poets continued to address panegyrics to them in the hope of securing their attention and their money.

  Even before the coming of the Almoravids, there had been a perceptible turning away from a literature that embodied the luxurious values of the Cordovan court and, in reaction to the old ways, many turned to religion and adopted more austere fashions. Some poets rejected the fairy-tale elegance of the court and chose instead to devote themselves to the beauties of nature. Abu Ishaq Ibrahim IBN KHAFAIA (1058–1138/9), nicknamed ‘the Gardener’, was one of those who composed poetry in praise of the Almoravids and in particular of Ibn Tashfin, who had reconquered Ibn Khafaja’s native city, Valencia, from the Christians. But as his nickname suggests, Ibn Khafaja was much more famous for his compositions about gardens and flowers. Although he chose his subject matter from the natural world, this does not mean that there was anything particularly ‘natural’ about his poetry. He was fond of rare words and paradoxes, and his poems are ornate and make great play with antitheses. His landscapes and flowers are subject to human emotions. His poetry was immensely popular and much anthologized. Ibn Khafaja appears to have been an eccentric and solitary figure. In old age, he used to walk out of his village of Shuqr until he reached the solitude of a ravine. There he would stand and shout repeatedly at the top of his voice ‘Ibrahim, you will die!’ until he fell unconscious.

  The two very different poems which follow give some idea of Ibn Khafaja’s range.

  This is the crow of your dusk screeching, chase it away.

  This is the turbulent sea of your night seething, cross over.

  On your night journey take nourishment

  from drops of the pure light of stars;

  wrap yourself in the green leaves of darkness;

  wear the robe of the sword, embroidered with

  drops of blood under swirling smoke;

  throw good deeds against bad and sip