Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange (Hardcover Classics) (3 page)

‘Aja’ib
could have an aesthetic resonance for, if a person or an artefact was perceived of as being beautiful, the common response was not
jamil!
(beautiful!), but
‘ajib!
(amazing!). The compelling power of physical beauty looms large in these stories. In
Tales of the Marvellous
, as in the
Nights
, people are loved for their physical appearance rather than their character. The moon features frequently as a simile for beauty (and indeed Budur’s name means ‘moons’). Beautiful women are conventionally compared to gazelles. It was more common to evoke beauty through metaphor and simile than by close physical description. Beauty was a
blessing from God, and according to the eleventh-century scholar and
Sufi
al-Ghazali God had worked as an artist to design the human form. Yusuf, or Joseph, was the exemplar of male physical beauty in Islamic lore. The Sura of Joseph in the Qur’an describes how a governor of Egypt’s wife, who passionately desired Joseph, accused him of rape, but was found out. Then:

Certain women that were in the city said,

‘The governor’s wife has been soliciting her page; he smote her heart with love; we see her in manifest error.’

When she heard their sly whispers, she sent to them and made ready for them a repast,

Then she gave to each one of them a knife.

‘Come forth, attend to them,’ she said.

And when they saw him, they so admired him

That they cut their hands, saying ‘God save us!

This is no mortal; he is no other but a noble angel.’

In
Tales of the Marvellous
, the tale of ‘Muhammad the Foundling’ is calqued on that of the Qur’anic Joseph, for the devastatingly handsome Muhammad is, like Joseph, falsely accused of rape, though the fact that his shirt is torn at the back, not the front, suggests that he is innocent. Though handsomeness in a man is a sign of nobility and virtue, a woman’s beauty is a much less reliable guide to her inner qualities. The beauty of ‘Arus al-‘Ara’is lures men to their deaths. Similarly, in ‘The Six Men’, the hunchback weaver sees ‘a woman rising like a full moon on a balcony’ and he recollects that ‘she was so very lovely that … my heart took fire’, but that vision of loveliness will lure him to his doom and, in the stories that follow, the paralytic and the glass seller with the severed ear will similarly be betrayed by female beauties. In Arabic
fitna
means sedition or civil discord, but it also means seduction, temptation or distraction from the service of God.

In
The Waning of the Middle Ages
the Dutch historian Jan Huizinga wrote of the medieval sensibility as follows: ‘the outlines of all things seemed more clearly marked than to us. The contrast between suffering and joy, between adversity and happiness, appeared more striking. All
experience had yet to the minds of men the directness and absoluteness of the pleasure and pain of child-life.’
⁵
So it is with the characters in
Tales of the Marvellous
. Tuhfa faints from longing for Talha, while Talha, for his part, rubs his cheeks in the dust when he learns that she has been sold to another man, and then his grief becomes so extreme that he is taken for mad and is locked up in an asylum. ‘Umair, on hearing verses that speak so strongly of his own emotional state and his love for Budur, gives a loud cry and tears his clothes before collapsing unconscious. People beat their cheeks from despair. They faint from surprise. They tear their clothes from heightened passion. They also fall off their chairs from laughing.

Misfortune breeds misfortune. The authors of the tales in
Tales of the Marvellous
delighted in being cruel to their characters, and Schadenfreude is definitely one of the dark literary pleasures provided by this collection. Hands and feet are lopped off, eyeballs plucked out, lips cut away, penises slit off, people burned alive, women raped, cripples and blind men mocked and robbed, and the ugly have their deformities seized upon and exaggerated. Here political incorrectness has gone mad, and there is ‘Laughter in the Dark’. In fact, as in fiction, public executions were popular entertainments. But the good suffer almost as much the bad in these ruthless stories. Read what Kaukab, Ashraf and the various lovers of ‘Arus al-‘Ara’is have to undergo. Thomas Hardy would have approved, for he wrote: ‘Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society; and we can’t get out of it if we would.’

As a character in A. S. Byatt’s long short story ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’ observes,

It has to be admitted … that misogyny is a driving force of pre-modern story collections … from Katha Sarit Sagara, The Ocean of Story, to
The Thousand and One Nights
, Alf Layla wa-Layla. Why this should be so has not, as far as I know, been fully explained, though there are reasons that could be put forward from social structures to depth psychology – the sad fact remains that women in these stories for the most part are portrayed as deceitful, unreliable, greedy, inordinate in their desires, unprincipled and simply dangerous, operating powerfully (apart from sorceresses and female ghouls and ogres) through structures of powerlessness.
⁶

In ‘Julnar’ the sorceress Queen Lab’s voracious sexual desire leads her to sleep with one man after another, before turning them into animals (perhaps metaphorically as well as literally). Yet even her passion pales beside that of ‘Arus al-‘Ara‘is.

The depiction of women as man-eaters is one side of misogynistic fantasy; the other is their portrayal as the victims of rape. In the story ‘Sakhr and al-Khansa’ ’, Miqdam, the chieftain of one tribe, steals into another tribe’s encampment and ‘seeing al-Khansa’ alone and defenceless, he lusted after her, and although she defended herself she had not the power to stop him from raping her’. But all is square when Sakhr, the brother of al-Khansa’, rapes Haifa’, the sister of Miqdam. Rape also features prominently in ‘The Talisman Mountain’ and in ‘ ‘Arus al-‘Ara‘is’. (The latter story includes the rape of a mermaid.)

As already noted, women are frequently portrayed as deceitful. In the tale of the tailor, included in ‘The Six Men’, a female customer lures the tailor to her house with the promise of sex, but there he suffers an evil fate. Similarly, in the tale of the paralytic man, he encounters ultimate humiliation in a house full of beautiful women. The story of the lustful and treacherous ‘Arus al-‘Ara’is, a medieval Arab Medea, would seem to be the misogynistic story par excellence, and yet this unusually complex narrative has its ambiguities. For example, after killing the
jinni
, she seems to repent: ‘Alas for all scheming and treacherous women, who keep no covenant of love or pact of faithfulness and who neither abide by nor show loyalty to their lovers.’ At times she uses sex as a lethal weapon, yet at other times she genuinely desires to be loved. It is also conceded that she is the prisoner of fate’s decree, for, almost from the first, we are to understand that she has been born under an evil conjunction of stars. Hers is a grief-after-grief story, as she becomes by turns a villainess and a victim of villainy.

The storyteller or storytellers show a particular hostility to scheming and deceitful old women. Thus it is an aged bawd who sets up the paralytic man with his ill-fated assignation. Similarly, it is an old woman who sees the glass seller being given a large sum of money and who promises to set him up with her beautiful unmarried daughter, and of course no good will come of that.

More bizarrely, in ‘Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle’ the queen of the
jinn
crows has responsibility for engineering the parting of couples. The same story features an aged sorceress who tricks the lion and successively cuts off his tail, ears, nose and whiskers. ‘The Talisman Mountain’ features an evil-omened old woman with a face like a vulture.

Medieval Arab fiction had no kind of monopoly on misogyny. There are at least as many examples in medieval European poetry and stories. To take just examples from English literature, according to the twelfth-century
Valerius’s Dissuasion Against Marriage
by Walter Map, ‘no matter what they intend, with a woman the result is always the same. When she wants to do him harm – and that is nearly always the case – she never fails. If by chance she should want to do good, she still succeeds in doing harm.’
⁷
Geoffrey Chaucer, in ‘The Merchant’s Tale’ in
The Canterbury Tales
, cited Ecclesiastes as the authority for Solomon finding one good man among a thousand, but out of all women not a single one. And from ‘The Wife of Bath’s Prologue’ in the same book we learn how the wife in question saw off five husbands. Towards the end of the fourteenth-century English poem
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Gawain sums up the case against women:

Who with their wanton wiles have thus waylaid their knight.

But it is no marvel for a foolish man to be maddened thus

And saddled with sorrow by the sleights of women.

For here on earth was Adam taken in by one,

And Solomon by many such, and Samson likewise;

Delilah dealt him his doom; and David later still,

Was blinded by Bathsheba, and badly suffered for it.
⁸

As is the case with many of the stories in the
Nights
, blacks are presented as violent and often stupid as well. In ‘The King of the Two Rivers’, the king’s son is taken captive by ten villainous
Magian
blacks, but he succeeds in slitting all their throats while they are asleep. In ‘Muhammad the Foundling and Harun al-Rashid’ it turns out that it is a black furnace-man who is guilty of deflowering Miriam. But racism is most outrageously to the fore in ‘Ashraf and Anjab’, in which the
sadistically villainous Anjab is described by Harun al-Rashid as follows: ‘This man is black as a negro … with red eyes, a nose like a clay pot and lips like kidneys’, and his mother is no better looking for she ‘was black as pitch with a snub nose, red eyes and an unpleasant smell’. In ‘Sa‘id Son of Hatim’ the monk Simeon predicts that the shrine of the Ka’ba will be destroyed by drunken and singing blacks. As Bernard Lewis’s
Race and Slavery in the Middle East
put it when discussing the role of blacks in
The Thousand and One Nights
, it ‘reveals a familiar pattern of sexual fantasy, social and occupational discrimination, and an unthinking identification of lighter with better and darker with worse’.
⁹
But, exceptionally,
Masrur
, who features in both the
Nights
and
Tales of the Marvellous
as the caliph Harun al-Rashid’s black headsman and faithful companion, is presented in a favourable light.

In ‘Anjab and Ashraf’ and other tales ugliness is a shorthand way for the storyteller to indicate a villain. One finds the same kind of thing in the novels of Sax Rohmer, Dennis Wheatley and Ian Fleming (and their villains often have the double misfortune of being foreign). Names may also provide clues for readers who want to know which side they should be on. In ‘Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle’, Mukhadi‘, the name assumed by Mahliya when she is pretending to be her vizier, means ‘impostor’. Dickens indulged the same kind of signalling with, for example, Gradgrind in
Hard Times
and Wackford Squeers and Lord Verrisoft in
Nicholas Nickleby
.

The wonders on offer in
Tales of the Marvellous
somewhat resemble those found in
Ripley’s Believe It or Not
, a cartoon feature that ran in the
New York Evening Post
in the 1920s and 30s and which compiled bizarre events and items of information so strange as to seem incredible. In
Tales of the Marvellous
the
jinn
are the chief engineers of the bizarre.
Jinn
is the collective plural of
jinni
, and a female
jinni
is a
jinniya
.
‘Ifrit
and
marid
appear to be synonyms for
jinni
, though there may be an implication that they are exceptionally powerful
jinn
(
‘ifrit
and
marid
are each mentioned just once in the Qur’an). According to the Qur’an, the
jinn
were created from smokeless flame. Since
jinn
were referred to several times in the Qur’an there could be no question for the believing Muslim but that they really existed. They can fly through the air and
travel at great speed. They can conjure things out of nothing and they are shape-shifters. (As a young man visiting a Sufi shrine in Algeria, I once encountered a
jinni
in the form of a cat.) For some reason the shape that a
jinni
chooses to shift into is often hideous – as in ‘The Talisman Mountain’, in which the queen summons up three
jinn
, ‘each eleven feet tall, with ugly shapes, eyes set lengthwise, hooves like those of cattle and talons like those of wild beasts’.

Some
jinn
are believing Muslims, and there is one such in the story of ‘Abu Muhammad the Idle’. Good believing
jinn
feature in ‘Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle’. The
jinni
in ‘ ‘Arus al-‘Ara’is’ is fairly virtuous until, corrupted by ‘Arus al-‘Ara’is, he is persuaded to destroy a city (like many
jinn
, he is not that bright). ‘Sul and Shumul’ not only features
jinn
, but even presents a remarkably mild and benign
Iblis
(the Devil), something that is without parallel elsewhere in medieval Arab fiction. According to some authorities, Iblis was a fallen angel, but according to others he was to be numbered among the
jinn
.

As the story of ‘ ‘Arus al-‘Ara’is’ suggests, sex between humans and
jinn
was possible and indeed, in non-fiction, both medieval legal texts and guides to the etiquette of love envisaged this possibility. Under Muslim law
jinn
could own property and men and women could marry them (as Sul does in one of the tales in
Tales of the Marvellous
). The fictional expert on the
Nights
in ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’, commenting on the interventions of the
jinn
in the
Nights
story of ‘Qamar al-Zaman and Budur’, had this to say: ‘It is as though our dreams were watching us and directing our lives with external vigour whilst we simply enact their pleasures passively in a swoon. Except that the djinns are more solid than dreams …’
¹⁰