5
The Wandering Scholars (c. 900–c. 1175)
The tenth century, which was a great century for Arabic poetry and prose – especially prose – was at the same time the century in which Persian politicians and writers assumed an unprecedented importance in Islamic culture. The Buyids were a clan of Persian mercenaries from the Caspian region. In 945 they established themselves as protectors of the puppet 'Abbasid caliphs and Baghdad became the capital of what was in effect an Iranian monarchy. The heyday of Buyid power and cultural patronage was under 'Adud al-Dawla (reigned 949-83). The Buyids were Shi'ites who governed in the name of a Sunni caliph, and in general they tolerated and employed Sunni Muslims. Although the Buyids were soldiers and of Persian origin, they promoted literature written in Arabic. Hamadhani, Mutanabbi and Tanukhi were among the writers who benefited from their patronage. The government of the caliphate was shared out among members of the Buyid clan in Rayy, Shiraz, Isfahan and Hamadhan.
The rise of Persian as a literary language effectively began in the ninth century and this rise may be linked to the growing political importance of Persians in government. The Persian Samanid rulers of Transoxania and Khurasan (819–905) sponsored works written in Persian. The most important work to have been commissioned by a Samanid prince was undoubtedly Firdawsi’s Shahnama, an epic poem devoted to Persian legends and history. Although the eastern lands subsequently fell under the domination of the Ghaznavid Turks and later the Seljuk Turks, Persian literature continued to evolve and from the eleventh century onwards important Persian prose works in such genres as history and belles-lettres started to appear. Despite these developments in this period, most Persians with literary or scholarly ambitions still preferred to write in Arabic.
Although the Buyids controlled the heartlands of the 'Abbasid caliphate, many of the outlying provinces had become covertly or overtly independent. Transoxania and Khurasan, for example, had fallen under the control of the above-mentioned Persian dynasty, the Samanids, and from 969 until 1171 Egypt was ruled by an Arab Shi'ite dynasty, the Fatimids. Although Baghdad remained the most important centre of literary production, cities like Rayy, Hamadhan, Aleppo, Isfahan and Cairo were increasingly prominent as centres of patronage and literary production. As we shall see, the Hamdanid dynasty of Arab princes in Aleppo and Mosul were particularly keen to attract writers to their courts. The dispersal of centres of patronage meant that this was an age of wandering scholars and goliard poets.
This was a culture of the majlis – of soirées at which the assembled poets, wits and scholars were expected to sparkle in the presence of their wealthy host and patron. In an age before print-runs, royalties and advances were thought of, most writers had to earn their living by saying or writing things that would please someone wealthier than themselves. Patrons enjoyed the panegyrics that were addressed to them. Whether anyone else did is unclear. It was a competitive culture which favoured those who were fast and fluent on their feet and ever ready to produce elegantly turned compliments and insults. One was as good as one’s last riposte or improvised couplet. One also needed a strong head for alcohol. It must have been pretty ghastly.
The cultural efflorescence in the tenth century in the Near East has been characterized as a ‘Renaissance’ (by Adam Mez, George Makdisi and Joel Kraemer, among others). But Renaissance, as the term has been used by Western historiographers since at least the time of Jacob Burkhardt (1818–97), refers in the strictest sense to a rebirth or revival of classical Antiquity and a rediscovery of the literature and art of Greece and Rome. In medieval Christendom, a return to the ‘humanities’, that is Greek and Latin literature, encouraged the production of writings that were centrally concerned with man rather than God. Now it is true that it is easy to underestimate the degree to which Arabic culture and, more specifically, its literature was the natural heir to the Hellenistic civilization of late Antiquity. It is also true that in the tenth century certain individual Arab and Persian scholars interested themselves in particular Greek thinkers. For example, Miskawayh was strongly influenced by Aristotle and more generally by Greek thought. However, much of the magnificent literature produced in the tenth century has no real precedent in pre-Islamic times, and when we study the golden age of Arabic literature in and around the tenth century, for the most part we are studying not a ‘rebirth’ but a ‘birth’.
As in the heyday of the 'Abbasids, libraries and bookshops continued to be important as intellectual meeting-places. ‘But when I had returned from abroad to my native town, I happened to be in its public library, the haunt of the literary, and the rendezvous of all, whether residents or travellers, when there came a man in rags, with a short thick beard.’ Thus Harith, one of the protagonists in Hariri’s Maqamat (on which more below), described visiting a public library in Basra. The library, featured in the picaresque narrative, then becomes the setting for a literary debate between Harith’s acquaintance Abu Zayd and a group of learned men. The Suq al-Warraqin, or bookdealers’ market, in tenth-century Baghdad contained one hundred booksellers. Some of these shops doubled as literary salons and, for example, Ibn al-Samh’s bookstore provided a rendezvous for philosophers. Medieval bookdealers often branched out into the manufacture of paper and the copying of manuscripts. Some shops doubled as subscription libraries; a twelfth-century Jewish physician who also ran a bookshop in Cairo kept a notebook in which he recorded, among other things, the loan to one of his clients of a copy of The Thousand and One Nights. The proliferation of subscription libraries lending copies of non-scholarly works to people who could not afford to have their own manuscripts may have been a factor behind the explosion in prose fiction in this period. In comparison with poetry or non-fiction, the status of prose fiction was not high. Fiction in this period tended to be written in relatively simple prose and this was looked down on by connoisseurs of the ‘high style’, with its studied parallelisms, balanced antitheses, rhymed prose and metaphors. Muhammad ibn Ishaq Ibn al-Nadim, the tenth-century bookdealer and cataloguer (who has already been referred to in the previous chapter) seems to have had a grudging attitude towards prose fiction.
The first section of the eighth part of the eighth chapter of the Fihrist, or ‘Index’, by Ibn al-Nadim gives one an idea of the shape of medieval Arabic popular fiction as perceived by him – this is a tiny section of the whole book.
The First Section with accounts of those who converse in the evenings and tellers of fables, with the names of the books which they composed about evening stories and fables.
Thus saith Muhammad ibn Ishaq [al-Nadim]: The first people to collect stories, devoting books to them and safeguarding them in libraries, some of them being written as though animals were speaking, were the early Persians. Then the Ashkanian kings, the third dynasty of Persian monarchs, took notice of this [literature]. The Sasanian kings in their time adding to it and extending it. The Arabs translated it into the Arabic language and then, when masters of literary style and eloquence became interested, they refined and elaborated it, composing what was similar to it in content.
The first book to be written with this content was the book Hazar Afsan, which means ‘a thousand stories’. The basis for this [name] was that one of their kings used to marry a woman, spend a night with her, and kill her the next day. Then he married a concubine of royal blood who had intelligence and wit. She was called Shahrazad, and when she came to him she would begin a story, but leave off at the end of the night, which induced the king to spare her, asking her to finish it the night following. This happened to her for a thousand nights, during which time he [the king] had intercourse with her, until because of him she was granted a son, whom she showed to him, informing him of the trick played upon him. Then, appreciating her intelligence, he was well disposed towards her and kept her alive. The king had a head of the household named Dinar Zad who was in league with her in this matter. It is said that this book was composed for Huma’i, the daughter of Bahram, there being also additional information about it.
Thus saith Muhammad ibn Ishaq [al-Nadim]: The truth is, if Allah so wills, that the first person to enjoy evening stories was Alexander, who had a group [of companions] to make him laugh and tell him stories which he did not seek [only] for amusement but [also he sought] to safeguard and preserve [them]. Thus also the kings who came after him made use of the book Hazar Afsan, which although it was spread over a thousand nights contained less than two hundred tales, because one story might be told during a number of nights. I have seen it in complete form a number of times and it is truly a coarse book, without warmth in the telling.
Thus saith Muhammad ibn Ishaq [al-Nadim]: Abu 'Abd Allah Muhammad ibn 'Abdus al-Jahshiyari, author of The Book of Viziers, began the compiling of a book in which he was to select a thousand tales from the stories of the Arabs, Persians, Greeks, and others. Each story was separate, not connected with any other. He summoned to his presence the storytellers, from whom he obtained the best things about which they knew and which they did well. He also selected whatever pleased him from books composed of stories and fables. As he was of a superior type, there were collected for him four hundred and eighty nights, each night being a complete story, comprising more or less than fifty pages. Death overtook him before he fulfilled his plan for completing a thousand stories. I saw a number of the sections of this book written in the handwriting of Abu al-Tayyib [ibn Idris], the brother of al-Shafi'i.
Before that time there was a group of people who composed stories and fables in the speech of humans, birds, and beasts. Among them there were 'Abd Allah ibn al-Muqaffa'; Sahl ibn Harun; 'Ali ibn Da’ud, the secretary of Zubaydah; and others besides them. I have dealt thoroughly with these authors and what they composed in the appropriate places in this book.
There is the book Kalilah and Dimna about which they have disagreed. It is said to be the work of the Indians (Hindus), information about that being in the first part of the book. It is also said to be the work of the Ashkanian kings to which the Indians made false claims, or of the Persians and falsely claimed by the Indians. One group has said that the man who composed parts of it was Buzurjmihr, the wise man, but it is Allah alone who knows about that.
There was the book Sindbadh al-Hakim, which is in two transcriptions, one long and one short. They disagreed about it, too, just as they disagreed about Kalilah wa-Dimnah. What is most probable and the closest to the truth is that the Indians composed it.
The Fihrist by al-Nadim, trans. Bayard Dodge, vol. 2, pp. 712–15
COMMENTARY
Ibn al-Nadim refers to fictions as ‘evening stories’ (asmar), as one was not supposed to spend the daylight hours on such idle stuff.
The Ashkanian dynasty is nowadays more commonly known as the Parthian dynasty. The Parthians ruled over Iran from 249 B.C. until A.D. 224, when they were replaced by the Sasanians. The Sasanian dynasty ruled Iran from c. 224 until the Islamic Arab invasions of 637-51.
Although Ibn al-Nadim is clearly discussing a Persian prototype of The Thousand and One Nights, there are certain obvious differences. In the Arab version that has come down to us Shahrazad was not a concubine of royal blood, but a vizier’s daughter, while Dinar Zad (Dunyazade) was not the household manager, but Shahrazad’s sister.
Bahram was the name of five rulers of the Persian dynasty. Probably Ibn al-Nadim intends to refer to Bahram V, also known as Bahram Gur, who ruled from 420 to 438 and to whom many legends and anecdotes were attached. Huma’i was the name of Bahram’s wife, as well as of his daughter.
In medieval Arabic and Persian literature, Alexander, the Macedonian emperor and would-be world-conqueror (356-323 B.C.), was the hero of all sorts of fantastic adventures. Firdawsi, Persian author of the famous epic poem the Shahnama, even presented Alexander as a Persian emperor.
It is a matter of conjecture, but in my opinion when Ibn al-Nadim referred to the lack of warmth in Hazar Afsan, he was not referring to lack of emotional warmth, but to lack of stylistic adornment in the prose.
Jahshiyari (d. 942/3?) was an official of the 'Abbasid court. His History of the Viziers, which has survived, particularly praises the Barmaki viziers. His collection of stories divided into ‘nights’ does not seem to have survived. Most of medieval Arabic literature is lost – and most of what has survived has not been edited, or even looked at for centuries. Ibn al-Nadim’s Fihrist has become for the most part a catalogue of lost books.
Ibn al-Muqaffa' and his Arabic version of the collection of animal fables known as Kalila and Dimna have been discussed in the previous chapter. Buzurjmihr, also known as Burzoe, was allegedly the sage who brought the animal fables from Persia to India. Burzoe was the vizier of the Persian ruler Chosroes I Anurshirwan (reigned 531-78).
Sahl ibn Harun (d. 830) wrote under the patronage of Harun al-Rashid and the Barmakis. Among other things, he wrote al-Namir wa’l-Tha'lab (‘The Panther and the Fox’), a collection of animal fables along the lines of Kalila wa-Dimna, which has been translated into French.
'Ali ibn Da’ud was a contemporary of Sahl ibn Harun. He was famous chiefly for the letters he composed. No animal fables by him have survived. Zubaydah (literally ‘Little Butter-Pat’) was the best known of Harun al-Rashid’s wives.
On no account should Sindbadh al-Hakim, or ‘Sindbad the Sage’, be confused with Sinbad or Sindbad the Sailor. Ibn al-Nadim is referring to the Book of Sindbad, also known as The Story of Seven Viziers. In this story collection a prince has been wrongly denounced by a wicked stepmother and sentenced to death by his father. However, seven viziers then tell stories in a (successful) attempt to delay the execution and save the prince’s life.
While we can only guess at the nature of the audience for prose fiction, it is quite clear that much of this fiction was created, or at least assembled, by members of the literary elite (such as the Jahshiyari mentioned above). The tenth century saw a proliferation of storybooks. However, although this was effectively the beginning of Arabic fiction, fiction did not advertise itself as such. Rather, since there was a strong prejudice in pietistic circles against telling stories which were not actually true (what after all was the point of that?), compilers of anthologies usually presented their tales as true narratives about people who had really existed. Collectors were at pains to stress that they had not invented their stories. They also tended to take pride in having collected their material from oral sources. Thus Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani’s anthology about songs, the Kitab al-Aghani, was criticized by a later compiler of anecdotes because Abu al-Faraj copied things directly from books, whereas the proper method was to collect information from oral sources and present the reader with a chain of transmission from attested authorities: ‘He used to go into the bazaar of the booksellers, when it was flourishing and the shops were filled with books, and he would buy numbers of volumes which he would carry home. And all his narratives were derived from them.’
Abu 'Ali al-Muhassin al-TANUKHI, the man who delivered that criticism of al-Isfahani, was born in Basra in 940 and died in Baghdad in 994. He was of humble birth, but when he was charged with this, he quoted the riposte of a certain Arab tribesman when taunted for his lowly origin: ‘My family line begins with me; yours ends with you.’ Tanukhi lived and worked for some years as a qadi (judge) in Baghdad and he served various masters on political missions, as well as waiting on his patrons as a courtier and conversationalist. However, he fell out of favour with the Buyid 'Adud al-Dawla in Baghdad and, like so many writers of the period, he was intermittently persecuted for his opinions. His most famous work was an anthology entitled Faraj ba'd al-Shidda (‘Relief after Distress’), a collection of tales about people who win through to wealth or happiness or love after initial difficulties. Although Tanukhi was not the first author to produce a book with this title and theme, his compilation was the most famous work in this genre; he assembled an unprecedentedly large collection of anecdotes. It is easy to imagine how such a topic might have appealed to the pious, with its implicit injunction to bear up and put one’s trust in God, although many of the protagonists who are shown as experiencing ‘relief after distress’ in Tanukhi’s stories were wily rogues, whose relief when it came was really quite undeserved. (The preoccupation with wily rogues pervaded other genres of prose fiction in this period.) Despite Tanukhi’s insistence that he had gathered true stories which had been authenticated by their transmitters, it is perfectly clear that some of these anecdotes were really short stories. The Indian story which follows comes from Faraj ba'd al-Shidda:
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.
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 al-Husayn 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 of 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, melancholics, 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.
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.
The next story is one of a series told about men who were unsure what to do with inherited fortunes.
q Gate seeing a slave clearing the way for a rider, raised my head and beheld my friend on a fine horse with a light silver-mounted saddle, fine clothes, splendid underwear and fragrant with scent – now he was of a family of clerks and formerly in the days of his wealth, he used to ride the noblest chargers, with the grandest harness, and his clothes and accoutrements were of the magnificent style which the fortune inherited by him from his parents permitted. When he saw me, he called out: Fellow! – I, knowing that his circumstances must have improved, kissed his thigh, and said: My lord, Ab
so-and-so! – He said Yes! – What is this? I asked. He said: God has been merciful, praise be to Him! Home, home. – I followed him till he had got to his door, and it was the old house repaired, all made into one court with a garden, covered over and stuccoed though not whitewashed, one single spacious sitting-room being left, whereas all the rest had been made part of the court. It made a good house, though not so lordly as of old. He brought me into a recess where he had in old times sought privacy, and which he had restored to its pristine magnificence, and which contained handsome furniture, though not of the former kind. His establishment now consisted of four slaves, each of whom discharged two functions, and one old functionary whom I remembered as his servant of old, who was now reestablished as porter, and a paid servant who acted as s
I am rather sceptical about the story of … the affairs of the glass; for even a madman in my opinion would scarcely go to that length.
Tanukhi, Nishwar al-Muhadarah, trans. D. S. Margoliouth
as Table Talk of a Mesopotamian Judge (London, 1922),
COMMENTARY
A sa’is is a stableman or groom in Arabic. However, the word has gained wider currency and according to Hobson-Jobson, The Anglo-Indian Dictionary (1886), ‘syce’ is the term universally in use in the Bengal Presidency for a groom.
Nadd is an incense compounded of aloes wood, ambergris, musk and frankincense.
Abu’l-Hayyan al-TAWHIDI was born sometime between 922 and 932 (and the place of his birth is even more vague than its date) and died in 1023. He was a wandering scholar who sought instruction and later employment in Baghdad, Mecca and Rayy, where he worked as scribe, chancery-man and courtier. Tawhidi was a jackdaw of ideas and a polymathic scholar who specialized in memorizing and writing down the conversations of the salons of the elite for the edification of those not present. A fan of Jahiz’s elegant essays, Tawhidi was himself an elegant writer, though his style was more heavy and elaborate than that of Jahiz. Tawhidi had a conservative temperament and he believed that novelties were for women and children only.
He made a habit of consorting with criminals and other low-life types in an age when it was fashionable to study the techniques and argot of such folk. However, although these were certainly qualities which would recommend him to a patron, he had a scurrilous tongue and made enemies easily. Railing against everyone and everything, he passed from one patron to another. Akhlaq al-Wazirayn, ‘Morals of the Two Wazirs’, was written after he parted company with one of his most distinguished patrons, the cultured Wazir Sahib ibn 'Abbad (938-95).
Ibn 'Abbad, ‘the Supremely Capable One’, had started out as a secretary, working under various Buyid princes, before rising to high office. Reputedly his diwan, or government department, paid the salaries of 500 poets to sing the vizier’s praises, but if Ibn 'Abbad was a vain man, he had plenty to be vain about. Besides his career as a statesman, he was also a polymath, writing treatises on theology and history. He compiled a dictionary, wrote poetry and kept a literary diary. He was a bibliomaniac who owned a vast library (a significant part of which of course consisted of those commissioned panegyrics in praise of himself). It is reported that he turned down one official appointment because shifting his library would have required the services of 400 camels. The arrogant vizier insisted on treating Tawhidi as a mere scribe rather than as a social equal and they quarrelled when Tawhidi refused to make a copy of thirty volumes of the vizier’s letters. Akhlaq al-Wazirayn, a work of retrospective revenge, is such a venomous book that there was supposed to be a curse on anyone owning it. Ibn 'Abbad was depicted as a vainglorious plagiarist. The book also satirizes another scholar-statesman, Ibn al-'Amid, who had been both Ibn 'Abbad’s mentor in the arts of politics and literature and a previous patron of Tawhidi’s.
Here, in a passage from Akhlaq al-Wazirayn, Tawhidi relays the self-description of al-Aqta' al-Munshid al-Kufi, a thief and vagabond and hence well qualified to become one of the protégés of Ibn 'Abbad. (For more on Ibn 'Abbad, see below, pp. 178, 179.)
Bosworth, The Mediaeval Islamic Underworld, p. 74
It is ironic, given Tawhidi’s interest in thieves, that in 971 he was reduced to destitution when robbers ransacked his house and killed his servant-girl. From 980 onwards Tawhidi was in the service of a senior administrator, the Marshal of the Turks and later vizier in Baghdad, Ibn Sa'dan (d. 992/3). It is clear that the latter was more prepared to treat Tawhidi as an equal and the two men spent many evenings of mingled pleasure and edification together. Indeed Ibn Sa'dan (inspired possibly by the example of Tanukhi’s Nishwar al-Muhadara) asked Tawhidi to write up a record of some of their soirees. The Kitab al-Imta' wa al-Mu’anasa, ‘Book of Enjoyment and Conversation’, relates the conversations of thirty-seven evenings in the course of which the two men covered a great range of literary and intellectual topics, as well as indulging in frivolous gossip. They talked, among other things, about hadiths (orally transmitted traditions concerning the Prophet and his companions) and particularly hadiths and poetry about the merits of conversation. Much political gossip was exchanged. The two men held a munazara debate on the respective merits of Arabs and Persians, and discussed the markets of the Jahili Arabs and the wise sayings of the Greeks.
Tawhidi also entertained Ibn Sa'dan with bawdy talk. Courtiers and professional cup companions were expected to be versed in mujun – that is, entertaining discourse about sexual matters in which refinement and vulgarity were mingled. Tawhidi relates how one evening Ibn Sa'dan, having summoned him to lecture at an evening majlis, demanded a change of subject matter.
Abdelwahab Boudiba, Sexuality in Islam (London, 1985;
translated from the French by Alan Sheridan), p. 128
Usually, however, the soirees dealt with more edifying matters, as in this tale:
Rosenthal, The Classical Heritage in Islam, pp. 258-9
The story of the cranes of Ibycus is found in Greek legend, but Tawhidi’s source, Abu Sulayman, has given it a pious Muslim’s gloss (though in truth the fable seems designed to illustrate the nature of self-fulfilling prophecy rather than divine Providence). Subsequently the tale was recycled in late compilations of The Thousand and One Nights as ‘The Fifteenth Constable’s History’, and a recent variant of essentially the same story-motif featured in the film LA Confidential. Time and again the conversation in Ibn Sa'dan’s house came round to the life and opinions of Tawhidi’s philosophical guru, a certain Abu Sulayman al-Sijistani (the narrator of the previous story), who wrote little or nothing himself, but who certainly influenced almost everything that Tawhidi wrote. This was a century in which Islam’s leading intellects interested themselves more intensely than ever before or since in Greek thought and literature. Abu Sulayman was a leading figure in the dissemination of Greek ideas and, more generally, in teaching tolerance for the ideas of other cultures and creeds. Tawhidi reported that Abu Sulayman was once asked how he could reconcile being a Muslim with his belief that all religions were equally capable of defending themselves. In reply, Abu Sulayman produced a parable in which he compared himself to a man who has been allotted a leaky apartment in a caravansary, or hostel. Having noted that all the other rooms were leaky too, he concluded that he might as well stay in the one he had been allotted. Islam was the religion in which Abu Sulayman had been raised and he was going to stick with it because, though other religions were no worse, they were no better either.
Tawhidi and his teachers and friends were interested in Greek philosophy and Sufism, and in reconciling Sufism with Neoplatonism. Abu Sulayman and his ideas also feature prominently in Tawhidi’s Muqabasat, or ‘Borrowings’. In what follows, Abu Sulayman austerely counsels his disciples against immersion in transitory pleasures – wise words perhaps, but they must have put a damper on the picnic.
A group accompanied him of the elegant people (ziraf) of the quarter and young men (fityan) of the neighbourhood, each one suitably and thoroughly educated. When they paused for a breather, the lad launched into his specialty, reaching his peak. His companions were carried into ecstasy and swung rhythmically, enraptured.
Abu Zakariyya’ al-Saymari said: ‘I commented to a bright companion of mine, “Do you see what is being accomplished by the pathos of this voice, the dew of this throat, the redolence of this melody, and the expiration of these musical notes?”‘
He said to me: ‘If this fellow had someone to train and tend him, and guide him in harmonious modes and various melodies, he would become a wonder and a temptation; for his nature is extraordinary, his artistry is marvellous, and he is thoroughly fragile and delicate.’
Abu Sulayman suddenly interrupted: ‘Discuss with me what you were saying about nature. Why does it need art? For we know that art imitates nature, and wishes to adhere and draw nigh to it because it falls beneath it. This is a sound opinion and well-expounded proposition. [Art] only imitates [nature] and follows in its track because its level is beneath [that of nature]. Yet you claimed that nature did not suffice for this youth, and that it needed art so perfection might be derived from it and so that the ultimate may be attained with its assistance.’
We answered: ‘We don’t know. It is really a question.’
He replied: ‘So give it some thought.’
So we returned to him and said: ‘It’s beyond us. If you would favour us with an explanation and embark upon expounding a useful lesson, this would be accounted a boon and supreme merit of yours.’
Abu Sulayman said: ‘Nature only needs art in this place [i.e. the world] because here art receives dictation from soul and intellect, and it dictates to nature. And it has been ascertained that nature’s level is beneath the level of soul and intellect, and that it loves soul, receives its impressions, follows its command, takes upon itself its perfection, operates by its direction, and writes by its dictation. Music advenes to the soul and is present therein in a subtle and noble manner. And if the musician happens to have a receptive nature, responsive manner, suitable disposition, and a pliant instrument, he pours out over it, with the aid of intellect and soul, an elegant cast and wonderful harmony, giving it a beloved form and remarkable embellishment. His faculty herein is by means of communication with the rational soul. Nature consequently needs art because it attains its perfection through the rational soul by means of skilful art, which takes by dictation what it lacks, dictating what advenes to it, seeking perfection through what it receives, bestowing perfection to what it bestows.’
Al-Bukhari – he was one of his pupils – said to him: ‘How grateful we are to you for these resplendent gifts, and how we praise God for these constant useful lessons He gives us through you!’
Abu Sulayman said: ‘I have acquired this from you, and have been inspired and guided by you [literally ‘I struck flint at your stone and directed myself by the light of your fire’]. If the heart of one friend is open to another, the truth glows between them, the good enfolds them, and each becomes a mainstay to his companion, a helpmate in his endeavour, and a potent factor in his attaining his wish. There is nothing surprising in this: souls ignite one another, minds fertilize one another, tongues exchange confidences; and the mysteries of this human being, a microcosm in this macrocosm, abound and spread.’
The one who speculates in this mode must only tend his soul, seeking his felicity, concerned with his condition in proceeding to his aim, not diverting himself for conspicuous radiance, splendour of beauty, and momentary pleasure. With these premises he will reach these aims, harvest these fruits, and find this tranquillity, raised beyond these particles of dust and squalor. The beginning and end of this matter are through God and from God.
God, purify our hearts from all kinds of corruption; endear to our souls the ways of righteousness. Be our guide and guarantor of our salvation through Your grace and goodness, from which nothing of Your creation, supernal and infernal, is devoid, and which do not elude anything of Your work, hidden and manifest. He through whom all (or: the universe) is one and who is unified in all.
Kraemer, Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam, pp. 162–4
Tawhidi wrote a treatise on penmanship, in which he took a somewhat philosophical approach to the art of calligraphy. He also wrote a treatise on friendship, al-Sadaqa, though it is doubtful whether such a cantankerous man was qualified to write on such a subject. ‘In truth, man is a problem for man’, as Tawhidi himself observed. After the disgrace and execution of Ibn Sa'dan in 984, Tawhidi was once again without a patron and consequently reduced to destitution. He thereupon wrote to protest on behalf of the poor against the rich and lamented his own misery and poverty. ‘Often I have prayed in the mosque without noticing my neighbour and, whenever I did notice, I found him a shopkeeper, a tripe-man, a dealer in cotton or a butcher who sickened me with his stench.’ Towards the end of his life, he turned to Sufic asceticism and burned his books, ‘for I have no child, no friend, no pupil, no master and would not leave my books to people who would trade with them and smirch my honour. How am 1 to leave my books behind to those with whom I have lived for twenty years without receiving love or regard; by whom, often and often, I have been driven to privation and hunger and galling dependence or reduced to the necessity of bartering away my faith and honour.’ The fasad al-zaman, or rottenness of the age, was a recurrent theme in the writings of Tanukhi, Tawhidi and many other writers in this period. Although this was a golden age for thought and literature, one of its characteristics was that it perceived itself as being in a cultural decline. Ruined palaces, abandoned cities and tombstones furnished the metaphorical stock-in-trade for eloquent laments.
One of the reasons that Tawhidi had found favour, albeit only temporarily, with Ibn 'Abbad was the former’s familiarity with the underworld and the culture of the mendicant and the destitute. Despite Ibn 'Abbad’s exalted rank and erudition, he prided himself on his familiarity with thieves’ cant and with pornography. That was the fashion. He maintained that ‘the only enjoyable form of copulation is with men’. He was the patron of Abu Dulaf, a vagabond scholar, mineralogist and poet, who was the author of the Qasida Sasaniyya, a celebration in verse of a life of crime and mendicancy. Ibn 'Abbad also hired a one-armed gangster to recite religious poetry in his house. As for Tawhidi, the learned secretary made a cult of the figure of the wandering stranger alone and destitute in the world. Referring to this, Yaqut, a thirteenth-century compiler of a dictionary of literary men, called him ‘the mainstay of the Banu Sasan’, but who were the Banu Sasan? For reasons which are mysterious, Banu Sasan, or ‘Children of Sasan’, was the term used to designate the loose community of low-life entertainers, spongers, beggars and thieves. Their achievements were commemorated in popular epics and lengthy poems.
The values and devices of the Banu Sasan also figured in the new genre of maqamat literature. Maqamat (sing. maqama) is usually translated as ‘sessions’, or ‘seances’, but literally (if inelegantly) it means ‘the places of standing to speak’. Customarily a poet, scholar or storyteller who held the floor at a majlis would stand to speak. The earliest specimen of what is called maqamat literature was produced by Badi' al-Zaman al-Hamadhani (969-1008). Badi' al-Zaman, which means ‘Wonder of the Age’, was not what his mother called him, but was rather the title he won for himself by writing his Maqamat. Ahmad ibn al-Husayn al-HAMADHANI was born in Hamadan in western Persia. However, in later life he retained no fondness for the city of his origin: ‘In ugliness its children are like its old men, and, in reason, its old men are like its children.’
Although he was born in Persia, he may well have been an Arab. Hamadhani travelled first to the Persian city of Rayy, where he wrote under the patronage of the Wazir Sahib Ibn 'Abbad. (He is alleged to have left after being mocked for farting in the wazir’s majlis.) Thereafter he travelled from city to city in search of patrons. At the end of his life al-Hamadhani settled in Herat in Afghanistan. There in 1008, at the age of forty, he is said to have been taken for dead and buried alive. Cries were heard coming from his tomb in the night. In the morning the tomb was reopened and he was found dead, but clutching his beard.
There is nothing very like the maqamat genre in Western literature. The individual maqamas should not be read as short stories, as they are insufficiently and inconsistently plotted. Language and the display of language skills take precedence over story-telling in each of the episodes. In Hamadhani’s Maqamat, the episodic story, such as it is, is narrated by the fictional Isa ibn Hisham and often deals with his encounter with a certain Abu al-Fath of Alexandria, a disreputable vagabond scholar. Abu al-Fath appears in a sequence of disguises, for example as a lunatic or as a blind man, the disguises being designed to help him to get money. Ibn Hisham’s function then is to penetrate the succession of disguises and to bear testimony to the old man’s cunning and eloquence – above all the eloquence, for Abu al-Fath, despite his rags, is a master of the intricacies of Arabic rhetoric. Hamadhani’s Maqamat is divided into fifty-two ‘standings’, each one devoted to a different theme. In the thirty-fifth maqama, for instance, Iblis, the Devil, puts forward a claim to have inspired a vast amount of ancient Arab poetry. Another maqama, set notionally in the city of Rusafa, is devoted to the tricks and slang of rogues and beggars. Another features a cursing match. Viewed as a whole, the Maqamat offered its readers riddles, puns, word-hoards of remarkable obscurity and veiled allusions to other authors.
Hamadhani was interested in many of the things that Jahiz had dealt with in the previous century (for Jahiz had written essays on rhetoric, as well as on robbers and vagrants and their tricks). However, Hamadhani disapproved of Jahiz because Jahiz disapproved of saj', whereas Hamadhani was an innovator in employing saj' for continuous narrative. (Previously saj' tended be used in correspondence and sermons.) Hamadhani’s use of rhymed prose facilitated a style which made heavy play with parallelisms, echoes and antitheses. The contorted prose style enforced by rhyme, as well as Hamadhani’s delight in the lexically obscure or obsolescent (nawadir), means that he is impossible to translate satisfactorily into English. Though his work was intensely admired in the tenth century, even then Hamadhani had his critics; for example, the satirical poet Abu Bakr al-Khwarizmi thought that Hamadhani’s stuff was like the tricks of a juggler.
Some of the stories featured in the Maqamat had appeared in earlier anthologies of anecdotes put together by Tanukhi and others, but Hamadhani’s framing structure, which made use of recurring protagonists, was novel. A wanderer himself and one who lived on his wits, Hamadhani celebrated the lives of mendicant rogues, gatecrashers, wits and storytellers. He was neither the first nor the last to do so. It was claimed that he wrote some four hundred maqamas, but only fifty-two have survived.
Bernard Lewis, Islam: From the Prophet Muhammad to the
Capture of Constantinople, vol. 2, pp. 262–8
COMMENTARY
This maqama can be read as a parody of the descriptive mode, wasf, which was so fashionable in the 'Abbasid period.
Madira is a dish which is made with sour milk. In In a Caliph’s Kitchen. Medieval Cooking for the Modern Gourmet (London, 1989), David Waines gives a recipe for a madira whose ingredients include lamb, goat’s yoghurt, an aubergine, an Indian gourd, an onion, a lemon, asparagus, mint, coriander and cumin.
Raqim and his companions feature in Muslim and Christian legend as the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, who, fleeing from religious persecution, took refuge in a cave where they slept for 309 years. The dog who accompanied them was called Kitmir. The names of the Seven Sleepers and their dog commonly featured on evil-averting talismans.
Despite the enormous reputation of Hamadhani’s Maqamat, in the twelfth century its fame was overtaken by Hariri’s somewhat similar work, also entitled Maqamat. The latter book is, together with Kalila wa-Dimna by Ibn al-Muqaffa', the most famous work of prose fiction produced in the Arab world. Many people did not bother to have the book on their shelf, since they already knew it by heart. It has had less appeal to readers in the West in modern times and D. S. Margoliouth, the author of the relevant article in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, wrote as follows: ‘The reasons for this extraordinary success … are somewhat difficult to understand and must be accounted for by the decline of literary taste.’
Abu Muhammad al-Qasim ibn 'Ali al-HARIRI (1054-1122) was born in Basra. He was a scholar with private means and he led a quiet life on an estate outside the city. His Maqamat was allegedly written under the patronage of a vizier who served first the 'Abbasid caliph al-Mustarshid and later the Seljuk Sultan al-Mas'ud. However, although Hariri claimed that his book was written at the behest of ‘one whose suggestion is a command and whom it is a pleasure to obey’, one should bear in mind that this was not an age when writers were supposed to write to please themselves. If they had no patron or potential recipient for what they were about to write, then they invented one. Structurally Hariri’s Maqamat resembles that of his predecessor. It consists of fifty maqamas, each notionally set in a different part of the Islamic world. In each of these places Hariri’s narrator, al-Harith, encounters the wily old rogue Abu Zayd who is spinning a yarn in order to extract money from the gullible. Abu Zayd, who is often in disguise, is a master of the Arabic language and (in the words of R. A. Nicholson) he offers his bemused listeners ‘excellent discourses, edifying sermons, and plaintive lamentations mingled with rollicking ditties and ribald jests’. In the sixth maqama alternate lines are written in letters which have or do not have the dots that define letters of the Arabic alphabet. The sixteenth maqama is devoted to palindromes. The seventeenth is full of riddles. The nineteenth is about the language of food. The twenty-second is a munazara debate on the respective merits of accountants and secretaries. The forty-ninth celebrates the gloriously disreputable life of the Banu Sasan. Only in the fiftieth and final maqama does Abu Zayd repent.
Abu Zayd, liar and cheat though he is, is steeped in the Qur’an. The Maqamat abounds in direct quotations and allusions to the text. Not only is Abu Zayd well-versed in the Qur’an, most of what he says, as opposed to practises, is thoroughly edifying. Like the jackal Dimna in Kalila wa-Dimna by Ibn al-Muqaffa', Abu Zayd is an unworthy narrator. Abu Zayd discourses in saj' and this contributes to the difficulty of the text. Hariri’s prose is even more elaborate and opaque than Hamadhani’s. (Imagine trying to read a Times crossword puzzle as if it were a short story.) It is impossible fully to understand Hariri’s Maqamat without a commentary, and indeed after the Qur’an this book has attracted more commentaries than any other Arabic book. (It was common to bind in the commentary with the text of the Maqamat.) Abu Zayd’s taxing use of the Arabic language was not a contingent feature of the Maqamat, for Hariri designed the book as a teaching vehicle which would give instruction on the difficult points in Arabic grammar and vocabulary. Although this was an age in which there was considerable prejudice against fiction, Hariri was able to defend his book by pointing to its use in teaching. Indeed the Maqamat was and is used to teach knotty linguistic points and bright children who had succeeded in memorizing the Qur’an were often given the Maqamat to memorize next. Most of the chapters in the Maqamat are named after places in the Islamic world. The chapter extracted below is known as the ‘Damascus Maqama’. The translator, R. A. Nicholson, has taken the trouble to imitate the rhymes of the original.
I went from 'Irak to Damascus with its green watercourses, in the day when I had troops of fine-bred horses and was the owner of coveted wealth and resources, free to divert myself, as I chose, and flown with the pride of him whose fullness overflows. When I reached the city after toil and teen on a camel travel-lean, I found it to be all that tongues recite and to contain soul’s desire and eye’s delight. So I thanked my journey and entered Pleasure’s tourney and began there to break the seals of appetites that cloy and cull the clusters of joy, until a caravan for 'Irak was making ready – and by then my wild humour had become steady, so that I remembered my home and was not consoled, but pined for my fold – wherefore I struck the tents of absence and yearning and saddled the steed of returning.
As soon as my companions were arrayed, and the agreement duly made, fear debarred us from setting on our way without an escort to guard us. We sought one in every clan and tried a thousand devices to secure a man, but he was nowhere to be found in the hive: it seemed as though he were not amongst the live. The travellers, being at the end of their tether, mustered at the Jairun gate to take counsel together, and ceased not from tying and unbinding and twisting and unwinding, until contrivance was exhausted and those lost hope who had never lost it.
Now, over against them stood a person of youthful mien, garbed in a hermit’s gaberdine: in his hand he held a rosary, while his eyes spake of vigil and ecstasy; at us he was peering, and had sharpened his ear to steal a hearing. When the party was about to scatter, he said to them, for now he had laid open their secret matter, ‘O people, let your cares be sloughed and your fears rebuffed, for I will safeguard you with that which will cast out dread from your breasts and show itself obedient to your behests.’ Said the narrator: We demanded of him that he should inform us concerning his gage, and offered him a greater fee than for an embassage; and he declared it was certain words rehearsed to him in a dream of the night, to serve him as a phylactery against the world’s despite. Then began we to exchange the furtive glance and wink to one another and look askance. Recognizing that we thought poorly of his tale and conceived it to be frail, he said, ‘Why will ye treat my solemn assurance as an idle toy and my pure gold as alloy? By God, I have traversed many an awesome region and plunged into deadly hazards legion, and it hath enabled me to do without the protection of a guide and to dispense with a quiver at my side. Furthermore, I will banish the suspicion that hath shaken you and remove the distrust that hath o’ertaken you by consorting with you in the desert lands and accompanying you across the Samawa sands. If my promise prove true, then do ye make my fortune new; but if my lips forswear, then my skin ye may tear and spill my blood and not spare!’
We were inspired to give his vision credit and allow the truth to be as he said it, so we refrained from harrying him, and cast lots for carrying him; and at his bidding we cut the loops of delay and put aside fear of harm or stay. When the pack-saddles were tied and the hour of departure nighed, we begged him to dictate the words of the magic ritual, that we might make them a safeguard perpetual. He said, ‘Let each one of you repeat the Mother of the Koran at the coming of eve and dawn; then let him say with a tongue of meekness and a voice of weakness, “O God! O quickener of bodies mouldering in their site! O averter of blight! O Thou that shieldest from affright! O Thou that dost graciously requite! O refuge of them that sue for favour in Thy sight! O Pardoner and Forgiver by right! Bless Mohammed, the last of Thy prophets for ever, him that came Thy message to deliver! Bless the Lights of his family and the Keys of his victory! And save me, O God, from the intrigues of the satanical and the assaults of the tyrannical; from the vexation of the insolent and the molestation of the truculent; from the oppression of transgressors and the transgression of oppressors; from the foiling of the foilers and the spoiling of the spoilers; from the perfidy of the perfidious and the insidiousness of the insidious! And, O God, protect me from the wrong-doing of them that around me throng and from the thronging around me of them that do me wrong; and keep me from the hands of the injurious, and bring me out of the darkness of the iniquitous, and in Thy mercy let me enter amongst Thy servants that are righteous! O God, preserve me from dangers on my native soil and in the land of strangers, when I roam and come home, when I go in quest and return to rest, in employment and enjoyment, in occupation and vacation! And guard me in myself and my pelf, in my fame and my aim, in my weans and my means, in my hold and my fold, in my health and my wealth, in my state and my fate! Let me not decline toward fortune’s nadir, or fall under the dominion of an invader, but grant me from Thyself a power that shall be my aider! O God, watch over me with Thine eye and Thine help from on high; and distinguish me by Thy safeguarding and Thy bounteous rewarding; and befriend me with Thy favour and Thy blessing alone, and entrust me not to any care but Thine own! And bestow on me a happiness that decayeth not, and allot to me a comfort that frayeth not; and relieve me from the fears of indigence, and shelter me with the coverlets of affluence; and suffer not the talons of mine enemies to tear, for Thou art He that hearkeneth to prayer.”‘
Then he looked down with an unroving eye, and uttered not a word in reply, so that we said, ‘An awe hath astounded him, or a faintness hath dumbfounded him.’ At last he raised his head and heaved his breath and said, ‘I swear by heaven with its starry train, and by the earth with its highways plain, and by the streaming rain, and by the blazing lamp of the Inane, and by the sounding main, and by the dust-whirling hurricane: truly this is the most auspicious of charms and will stand you in better stead than the men-at-arms: he that cons it at the smiling of the dawn dreads no calamity ere evening’s blush comes on; and he that murmurs it to the scouts of darkness as they advance is ensured for the night against any thievish chance.’
Said the narrator: So, for our part, we learned it till we knew it by heart, and we repeated it each man to his neighbour, lest we should forgot it and lose our labour. Then we marched, speeding the beasts along by prayers, not by the drivers’ song, guarding bundle and bale by holy words, not by men in mail; and our friend, although his attention we never lacked, was not claiming the fulfilment of our pact, until, when the house-tops of 'Ana rose in the distance, he cried, ‘Now, your assistance! your assistance!’ whereupon we brought to him of our goods both the concealed and the revealed, and the corded and the sealed, and said, ‘Take at thy choice, for thou wilt not find amongst us a dissentient voice.’ But all his delight was for the light and the fine, nothing pleased his eye but the coin: ’twas a full load he shouldered and bore, enough to keep want from his door; then off he skipped as the cutpurse skips, and away he slipped as quicksilver slips. We were distressed by his defaulting and amazed at his bolting, and we sought everywhere for a clue and inquired after him from false guides and true, till we heard that since foot in 'Ana he set he had never quitted the cabaret. The foulness of this rumour egged me on to test the ore of its mine and meddle with what is not in my line. Long before sunrise I repaired to the tavern in disguise, and lo, amidst jars and vats, there was the old varlet in a robe of scarlet, and around him cupbearers beaming and candles gleaming and myrtle and jessamine and pipe and mandolin: now he would be broaching the jars, now waking the music of guitars, now inhaling sweet flower-smells, now sporting with the gazelles. When I struck upon his guileful way and the difference of his to-day from his yesterday, I said, ‘Woe to thee, O accursed one! So soon hast thou forgotten the day of Jairun?’ But he guffawed with a will and began merrily to trill:
‘I ride and I ride through the waste far and wide, and I fling awaypride to be gay as the swallow;
Stem the torrent’s fierce speed, tame the mettlesome steed, that wherever I lead Youth and Pleasure may follow.
I bid gravity pack, and I strip bare my back lest liquor I lack when the goblet is lifted:
Did I never incline to the quaffing of wine, I had ne’er been with fine wit and eloquence gifted.
Is it wonderful, pray, that an old man should stay in a well-stored seray by a cask overflowing?
Wine strengthens the knees, physics every disease, and from sorrow it frees, the oblivion-bestowing!
Oh, the purest of joys is to live sans disguise, unconstrained by the ties of a grave reputation,
And the sweetest of love that the lover can prove is when fear and hope move him to utter his passion.
Thy love then proclaim, quench the smouldering flame, for ’twill spark out thy shame and betray thee to laughter:
Heal the wounds of thine heart and assuage thou the smart by the cups that impart a delight men seek after;
While to hand thee the bowl damsels wait who cajole and enravish the soul with eyes tenderly glancing,
And singers whose throats pour such high-mounting notes, when the melody floats, iron rocks would be dancing!
Obey not the fool who forbids thee to pull beauty’s rose when in full bloom thou’rt free to possess it;
Pursue thine end still, though it seem past thy skill: let them say what they will, take thy pleasure and bless it!
Get thee gone from thy sire if he thwart thy desire; spread thy nets nor enquire what the nets are receiving;
But be true to a friend, shun the miser and spend, ways of charity wend, be unwearied in giving.
He that knocks enters straight at the Merciful’s gate, so repent or e’er Fate call thee forth from the living!’
I said to him, ‘Bravo, bravo, for thy recitation, but fie and shame on thy reprobation! By God, whence springeth thy stock? methinks thy riddle is right hard to unlock.’
He answered, ‘I do not wish to explicate but I will indicate:
I am the age’s rarity, the wonder of mankind,
I play my tricks amongst them all, and many a dupe I find;
But then I am a needy wretch whom Fortune broke and beat,
And father, too, of little ones laid bare as butcher’s meat.
The poor man with a family – none blames him if he cheat.’Said the narrator: Then I knew he was Abu Zaid, the rogue of his race, he that blackens the face of hoariness with disgrace; and I was shocked by the greatness of his iniquity and the abomination of his obliquity. ‘Old man,’ I said, ‘is it not time that thou draw back from thy course of crime?’ He growled and scowled and fumed, and pondered a moment and resumed, ‘’Tis a night for exulting, not for insulting, and an occasion for wine-quaffing, not for mutual scoffing. Away with sorrow till we meet to-morrow!’ So I parted from him, in fear of a row, not because I relied on his vow; and I passed my night in the weeds of contrition for having gained admission to the daughter of the vine, not to a mosque or a shrine. And I promised God Almighty that nevermore would I visit a drinking-shop, not though the empire of Baghdad were given me as a sop, and never see the vats of wine again, even if the season of youth might be mine again.
Then we saddled the camels tawny-white in dawn’s twilight, and left Abu Zaid in peace with his old tutor, Iblis.
Nicholson, Translations of Eastern Poetry and Prose, pp. 119–24
COMMENTARY
‘The Mother of the Qur’an’ is the name given to the first sura of the Qur’an.
Iblis is the Devil.
The nadim was a professional companion or friend. But many authors wrote on less formal ties of friendship. Much of Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ ’s treatise entitled Adab al-Kabir dealt with the importance of choosing the right friends and counsellors. Much of his animal-fable book Kalila wa-Dimna deals with such matters as trust, co-operation, reciprocity and the limits of loyalty. The Sufi thinker Ghazzali (on whom see Chapter 7) wrote a treatise on the duties of brotherhood. The historian Miskawayh (see below) wrote about business and travelling friendships in his Kitab Tahdhib al-Akhlaq (‘The Training of Character’). The exchange of letters between brethren or friends constituted a literary genre known as ikhwaniyyat. A preoccupation with brotherly co-operation between men provides part of the context for the coming together of a secretive literary and scientific brotherhood based in Basra in the tenth and eleventh centuries known as the IKHWAN AL-SAFA', or ‘Brethren of Purity’. (Tawhidi was acquainted with members of this secretive group, as is clear from his al-Imta'wa-Mu’anasa.)
The Ikhwan al-Safa’ probably took their name from the opening of the ‘Ring Dove’ chapter of the Kalila wa-Dimna, in which King Dabshalim asked the sage Bidpai if he could tell him anything about the Brethren of Purity. Whereupon the sage told him a story about how birds and animals co-operated to free themselves from the snares of a huntsman. The Ikhwan explicitly cited this story to illustrate the importance of mutual help and, generally, their work reveals a close familiarity with the writings of Ibn al-Muqaffa'. (These included Ibn al-Muqaffa‘’s translation into Arabic of a version of the life of the Buddha.) The Ikhwan produced an encyclopedia, which was cast in the form of letters (hence its title, the Rasa’il), and which covered all the sciences, including, among other topics, lexicography, grammar, prosody and metre, business, occult science, agriculture, religion, dream interpretation, mathematics, logic, music, astronomy, meteorology, mineralogy, botany and zoology. The authors, who made a point of stressing their eclecticism and tolerance, drew on a wide range of material not only from the Islamic lands, but also from India, Greece and elsewhere. Pythagorean doctrines shaped the Ikhwan’s approach to such subjects as mathematics and music. The Ikhwan, who may have been Isma'ili Shi'i sympathizers, also seem to have shared the rationalistic attitudes of Ibn al-Muqaffa'. No doubt inspired by him, the Ikhwan made use of fables as a vehicle for instruction; besides drawing on Kalila wa-Dimna, they took Indian and Christian folklore as source material. Additionally they made up some stories and, like Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Sina later, they put fiction to the service of philosophy. They held that ‘religious law is medicine for the sick, whereas philosophy is medicine for the healthy’. In the case of the Ikhwan, the aim was to use philosophy to purify religion of its corrupt accretions. Despite their rationalist tendencies, the Ikhwan believed that the first goal to be striven for was happiness in the next world. Happiness in this world came next. Salvation would be achieved by right living and right thinking. The highest level of enlightenment was only achievable after the age of fifty.
In the extract presented here, the Ikhwan pay tribute to Ibn al-Muqaffa' by making the jackal, Kalila, advocate for the animals in the case they bring against mankind at the court of the King of the Jinn. Besides condemning man’s cruelty towards animals and his ecological heedlessness, the Ikhwan were of course concerned to present a more anthropocentric critique of the corruption and injustice of the age they wrote in. What follows is from the first two chapters of the narrative of the court case brought by the animals and birds against mankind. (Despite making many good points, the animals lose in the end.)
It is said that when the race of Adam began to reproduce and multiply they spread out over the earth, land and sea, mountain and plain, everywhere freely seeking their own ends in security. At first, when they were few, they had lived in fear, hiding from the many wild animals and beasts of prey. They had taken refuge in the mountaintops and hills, sheltering in caves and eating fruit from trees, vegetables from the ground, and the seeds of plants. They had clothed themselves in tree leaves against the heat and cold and spent the winter where it was warm and summer where it was cool. But then they built cities and villages on the plains and settled there.
They enslaved such cattle as cows, sheep, and camels, and such beasts as horses, asses, and mules. They hobbled and bridled them and used them for their own purposes – riding, hauling, plowing, and threshing – wore them out in service, imposing work beyond their powers, and checked them from seeking their own ends, where hitherto they had roamed unhindered in the woodlands and wilds, going about as they wished in search of pasture, water, and whatever was beneficial to them.
Other animals escaped, such as the wild asses, gazelles, beasts of prey, and wild creatures and birds which once had been tame and lived in peace and quietude in their ancestral lands. They fled the realms of men for far-off wastes, forests, mountain peaks, and glens. But the Adamites set after them with various devices of hunting, trapping, and snaring, for mankind firmly believed that the animals were their runaway or rebellious slaves.
The years went by, and Muhammad was sent, God bless and keep him and all his House. He called men and jinn to God and to Islam. One party of jinn answered his call and became good Muslims. In the course of time a king arose over the jinn, Biwarasp the Wise, known as King Heroic. The seat of his kingdom was an island called Balasaghun in the midst of the Green Sea, which lies near the equator. There the air and soil were good. There were sweet rivers, bubbling springs, ample fields, and sheltered resting places, varieties of trees and fruit, lush meadows, herbs, and flowers.
Once upon a time in those days storm winds cast up a seagoing ship on the shore of that island. Aboard were men of commerce, industry, and learning as well as others of the human kind. They went out and explored the island, finding it rich in trees and fruit, fresh water, wholesome air, fine soil, vegetables, herbs and plants, all kinds of cereals and grains which the rainfall from heaven made grow. They saw all sorts of animals – beasts, cattle, birds, and beasts of prey – all living in peace and harmony with one another, demure and unafraid.
These folk liked the place and undertook to settle there. They built structures to live in. Soon they began to interfere with the beasts and cattle, forcing them into service, riding them, and loading them with burdens as in their former lands. But these beasts and cattle balked and fled. The men pursued and hunted them, using all manner of devices to take them, firmly convinced that the animals were their runaway and recalcitrant slaves. When the cattle and beasts learned that this was their belief, their spokesmen and leaders gathered and came to set their complaint before Biwarasp the Wise, King of the jinn. The King, accordingly, sent a messenger to summon those persons to his court.
A group from the ship, about seventy men of diverse lands, answered the summons. When their arrival was announced, the King ordered that they be welcomed with decorum and shown to their lodgings. After three days he brought them into his council chamber. Biwarasp was a wise, just, and noble king, open-handed and open-minded, hospitable to guests, and a refuge to strangers. He had mercy for the afflicted and did not allow injustice. He ordained what was good and would not tolerate what was evil but interdicted all wrong doing. His sole hope in all this was to please God and enjoy His favor. When the men came before him and saw him on his royal throne, they hailed him with wishes of long life and well-being. Then the King asked through his interpreter, ‘What brought you to our island? Why did you come uninvited to our land?’
One of the humans answered, ‘We were drawn here by all we have heard of the merit of the king, his many virtues – goodness, nobility of character, justice, and impartiality in judgment. We have come before him that he might hear our arguments and the proofs we shall present, and judge between us and these escaped slaves of ours who deny our authority, for God upholds the righteous cause and will render right triumphant.’
‘Speak as you wish,’ said the King, ‘only make clear what you say.’
‘I shall, your Majesty,’ the human spokesman answered. ‘These cattle, beasts of prey, and wild creatures – all animals in fact – are our slaves, and we are their masters. Some have revolted and escaped, while others obey with reluctance and scorn servitude.’
The King replied to the human, ‘What evidence and proof have you to substantiate your claims?’
‘Your Majesty,’ said the human, ‘we have both traditional religious evidence and rational proofs for what I have said.’
‘Let us have them,’ said the King.
Then a spokesman of the humans, an orator, descended from 'Abbas, God’s grace upon him, rose, mounted the witness stand, and said, ‘Praise be to God, Sovereign of the universe, hope of those who fear Him and foe to none but the unjust. God bless Muhammad, seal of the prophets, chief of God’s messengers and intercessor on the Day of Judgment. God bless the cherubim, His upright servants, all who live in heaven and earth who are faithful, and all Muslims. May He in His mercy place you and us among them, for He is the Most Merciful.
‘Praised be God who formed man from water and his mate from man, multiplied their race and lineage, mankind and womankind, gave honor to their seed and dominion over land and sea, and gave them all good things for their sustenance, saying, “Cattle He created for you, whence you have warmth and many benefits. You eat of them and find them fair when you bring them home to rest or drive them out to pasture.” He also said, “You are carried upon them and upon ships,” and, “horses, mules, and asses for riding and for splendor.” He also said, “so that you might be mounted upon their backs and remember the goodness of your Lord.” And there are many other verses in the Qur’an and in the Torah and Gospels which show that they were created for us, for our sake and our slaves and we their masters. God grant pardon to you and to myself.’
‘Cattle and beasts,’ said the King, ‘you have heard the verses of Qur’an this human has cited as evidence for his claims. What say you to this?’
At that the spokesman for the beasts, a mule, got up and said, ‘Praise be to God, One, Unique and Alone, Changeless, Everabiding and Eternal, who was before all beings, beyond time and space and then said, “BE!” – at which there was a burst of light He made shine forth from His hidden Fastness. From this light He created a blazing fire and a surging sea of waves. From fire and water He created spheres studded with stars and constellations, and the blazing lamp of the heavens. He built the sky, made wide the earth and firm the mountains. He made the many-storeyed heavens, dwelling place of the archangels; the spaces between the spheres, dwellings of the cherubim. The earth he gave to living things, animals, and plants. He created the jinn out of the fiery simoom and humans out of clay. He gave man posterity ‘from vile water in a vessel sure,’ allowed man’s seed to succeed one another on earth, to inhabit it, not to lay it waste, to care for the animals and profit by them, but not to mistreat or oppress them. God grant pardon to you and to myself.
‘Your Majesty,’ the mule continued, ‘there is nothing in the verses this human has cited to substantiate his claims that they are masters and we slaves. These verses point only to the kindness and blessings which God vouchsafed to mankind, for God said that He made them your servants just as he made the sun, the moon, the wind and clouds your servants. Are we to think, your Majesty, that these too are their slaves and chattels and that men are their masters? No! God created all his creatures on heaven and earth. He let some serve others either to do them some good or to prevent some evil. God’s subordination of animals to man is solely to help men and keep them from harm (as we shall show in another chapter) not, as they deludedly suppose and calumniously claim, in order that they should be our masters and we their slaves.
‘Your Majesty,’ the spokesman of the beasts continued, ‘we and our fathers were the inhabitants of the earth before the creation of Adam, forefather of the human race. We lived in the countryside and roamed the country trails. Our bands went to and fro in God’s country seeking sustenance and caring for themselves. Each one of us tended to his own affairs, kept to the place best suited to his needs – moor, forest, mountain, or plain. Each kind saw to its own. We were fully occupied in caring for our broods and rearing our young with all the good food and water God had allotted us, secure and unmolested in our own lands. Night and day we praised and sanctified God, and God alone.
‘Ages passed and God created Adam, father of mankind, and made him His viceregent on earth. His offspring reproduced, and his seed multiplied. They spread over the earth – land and sea, mountain and plain. Men encroached on our ancestral lands. They captured sheep, cows, horses, mules, and asses from among us and enslaved them, subjecting them to the exhausting toil and drudgery of hauling, being ridden, plowing, drawing water, and turning mills. They forced us to these things under duress, with beatings, bludgeonings, and every kind of torture and chastisement our whole lives long. Some of us fled to deserts, wastelands, or mountaintops, but the Adamites pressed after us, hunting us with every kind of wile and device. Whoever fell into their hands was yoked, haltered, and fettered. They slaughtered and flayed him, ripped open his belly, cut off his limbs and broke his bones, tore out his eyes; plucked his feathers or sheared his hair or fleece, and put him onto the fire to be cooked, or on the spit to be roasted, or subjected him to even more dire tortures, whose full extent is beyond description. Despite these cruelties, these sons of Adam are not through with us but must claim that this is their inviolable right, that they are our masters and we are their slaves, deeming any of us who escapes a fugitive, rebel, shirker of duty – all with no proof or explanation beyond main force.’
2
When the King heard this, he ordered a herald to carry the news throughout the kingdom and summon vassals and followers from all tribes of the jinn – judges, justices, and jurisconsults. Then he sat down to judge between the spokesmen for the animals and the advocates of men. First he addressed the leaders of the humans: ‘What have you to say of the injustice, oppression and usurpation with which you are charged by these beasts and cattle?’
‘They are our slaves,’ said the human representative, ‘we are their owners. It is for us as their lords to judge them, for to obey us is to obey God, and he who rebels against us is transgressing against God.’
The King replied, ‘Only claims which are grounded in definite proof are acceptable before this court. What proof have you of your claims?’
‘We have philosophical arguments and rational proofs in support of the soundness of our claims,’ said the human.
‘What are they? Will you present them?’ asked the King.
‘Certainly,’ the man said. ‘Our beautiful form, the erect construction of our bodies, our upright carriage, our keen senses, the subtlety of our discrimination, our keen minds and superior intellects all indicate that we are masters and they slaves to us.’
The King turned to the spokesman of the beasts. ‘What have you to say to the evidence he has introduced?’
‘There is nothing in what he says to prove what the human claims.’
‘Are not standing upright and sitting straight the qualities of kings and bent backs and lowered heads the attributes of slaves?’ asked the King.
‘God assist your Majesty to the truth,’ the animal spokesman replied. ‘Heed what I say and you shall know that God did not create them in this form or shape them in this way to show that they are masters. Nor did He create us in the form we have to show that we are slaves. Rather He knew and wisely ordained that their form is better for them and ours for us. Since God created Adam and his children naked and unshod, without feathers, fleece, or wool on their skin to protect them against heat and cold, since He gave them fruit from trees as their food and leaves of trees for their clothing, and since the trees stood upright, spreading up into the air, He made man stand erect so it would be easy for him to reach the fruit and leaves. By the same token, since He gave us the grass on the ground for our food, He made us face downward so it would be easy for us to reach it. This, not what he alleged, is the reason God made them erect and us bent downward.’
‘What then do you say of God’s words, “We formed man at the fairest height”?’ asked the King.
The spokesman replied, ‘The heavenly books have interpretations which go beyond the literal and are known by those whose knowledge is deep. Let the King inquire of scholars who know and understand the Qur’an.’
So the King asked the learned sage, ‘What is the meaning of “the fairest height”?’
‘The day God created Adam,’ he replied, ‘the stars were at their zeniths, the points of the signs of the zodiac were solid and square, the season was equable and matter was prepared to receive form. Thus his body was given the finest form and the most perfect constitution.’
‘This would suffice to give a ground for their boasts of honor and excellence,’ said the King.
The wise jinni said, ‘ “At the fairest height” has another meaning in the light of God’s words, “who created, fashioned, and proportioned you as He pleased.” This means, He made you neither tall and thin nor short and squat but at a mean.’
The spokesman for the animals said, ‘He did the same for us. He did not make us tall and thin, nor short and squat, but in due proportion. So we share equally with them in this.’
‘How is it that animals are so well proportioned and so evenly formed?’ the human asked. ‘We see that the camel has a massive body, long neck, small ears, and a short tail; the elephant, an enormous bulk, great tusks, broad ears, and tiny eyes. The cow and buffalo have long tails and thick horns, but no tusks. Rams have two big horns and a thick tail, but no beard; goats have a fine beard, but no fat tail, so their private parts are exposed. Rabbits have a small body but big ears, and so it goes. Most animals – wild beasts, beasts of prey, birds, and crawling creatures – are irregularly built and misproportioned.’
‘On the contrary, O human,’ said the animal spokesman, ‘you have missed the beauty and wisdom of their creation. Do you not realize that a slight to the work is a slight to its Maker? You must start with the knowledge that all animals are the work of the wise Creator, who made them as He did with reason and purpose, for their own good and protection from harm. But this is understood only by Him and by those whose knowledge is deep.’
‘Tell us and inform us then,’ said the human, ‘if you are the scholar and speaker of the beasts, why does the camel have such a long neck?’
‘To match his long legs,’ he replied, ‘so that he can reach the grass on the ground, to help himself rise with a load, and so that he can reach all parts of his body with his lip to scratch and rub them. The elephant’s trunk takes the place of a long neck. His large ears serve to shoo flies and gnats from the corners of his eyes and mouth – for his mouth is always open, he cannot close it fully because of his protruding tusks. But his tusks are his defense against predators. The rabbit’s large ears provide cover, a blanket in winter and a shade in summer; for his skin is tender and his body, delicate. And so we find that God made the parts, limbs, and organs of every species adapted to its needs in seeking the beneficial and shunning the harmful. This is the idea to which Moses alluded (peace be upon him) when he said, “Our Lord who gave its nature to every thing and guided all things.”
‘As for your boasts of the beauty of your own form, there is nothing in that to support your claim that you are masters and we slaves. For beauty of form is only what is desired in the male and female of each species that attracts them to one another to mate, copulate, and produce offspring and progeny for the survival of the species. Thus beauty of form is different in every species. Our males are not aroused by the beauty of your females, nor our females by the charms of your males, just as blacks are not attracted by the charms of whites nor whites by those of blacks, and just as boy-lovers have no passion for the charms of girls and wenchers have no desire for boys. So, Mr Human Being, you have no grounds for boasting of superior beauty …’
Goodman, The Case of the Animals versus Man before
the King of the Jinn, pp. 51–9
COMMENTARY
So ends Chapter 2. There are another twenty-eight chapters to go.
The Green Sea is the Indian Ocean.
To be descended from 'Abbas ibn 'Abd al-Muttalib ibn Hashim was a claim to distinction, for the latter was both the uncle of the Prophet and the ancestor of the 'Abbasid caliphs.
As we shall see later, an aversion to causing cruelty to animals led the poet al-Ma'arri to become a vegetarian and to suggest that animals who had suffered in this world would be compensated in Paradise. A preoccupation with the merits of animals is also found in the work of Ibn al-Marzuban. Hardly anything is known about Abu Bakr Muhammad IBN AL-MARZUBAN (d. 921), the author of Fadl al-Kilab 'ala Kathir Miman Labisa al-Thiyyab, The Book of the Superiority of Dogs over Many Who Wear Clothes’. He was an expert on philology and religious science who lived in Baghdad. It is possible that Ibn al-Marzuban intended his book as a reply to Jahiz’s argument in the Kitab al-Hayawan that man by virtue of his reason is indeed superior to animals. The last section of the book is extracted below.
He is always loyal to me and protects me;
He guards my wife, when my friend betrays me.
How amazed I am that a friend should violate my honour!
How amazed I am that my dog should give me protection!He parted company with his friends and took his dog as a drinking companion and friend. He became a legend among the Arabs. He also recited these lines:
A dog is indeed better than a faithless friend
who seduces my wife when I am away!
As long as I live I shall keep my dog as a drinking companion
and I shall give him my affection and my unadulterated friendship!Ibn Da’b told a similar story: Hasan b. Malik al-Ghanawi had friends and drinking companions and one of them abused his trust. Now at the door of his house he kept a dog he had personally reared. The man came one day to Hasan’s home and went in to the wife. She said: He has gone on a long journey. Would you like to stay so that we can enjoy ourselves together? He replied: Yes, indeed! So they ate and drank and he began to make love to her. As he lay on top of her, the dog leapt on them and killed them both. When Hasan returned and saw them in that state, it was clear what they had been up to and he recited the following poem:
After showing my friend pure friendship, he was struck
down in the house of shame, exposed by his treachery.
After being like a brother to me, he seduced my wife and betrayed me;
but my dog left him in the embrace only of the grave!!!Al-Asma'i also recounted a story like this: Malik b. al-Walid had some friends. He was never parted from them and could not do without them. One of them sent a message to his wife and she responded favourably. He came one night and hid in one of Malik’s chambers with his wife, though Malik himself knew nothing of this. As the man was making love to her, one of Malik’s dogs leapt on them and killed them both. Now Malik was at the time too drunk to know anything, but, when he recovered, he stood over them and recited the following poem:
A dog you keep protects you better,
as long as he lives, even if he lives till the Day of Judgement,
Than a friend who betrays you,
your property and your wife, after you have given him pure friendship.Another poet said:
If I say to a dog: Damn you, clear off!
you look at me reproachfully,
As if afraid I shall treat you the same.
You do not come anywhere near that of which he is capable!The same story was told of Sa'sa'ah b. Khalid who had a friend from whom he was never separated. But one day Sa'sa'ah came and found him dead on his bed with his wife and realized that they had both betrayed him. He recited the following verses:
Treachery is in the nature of all riff-raff,
while the dog is always faithful to you.
So shun vile men and look after your dog;
Then you will indeed be safe from treachery and trickery!Now a friend of mine said: I was out one night, drunk, and I went into one of the gardens for a certain purpose! I had with me two dogs I had reared personally, and I was carrying a stick. But I fell asleep. All of a sudden the dogs were barking and howling and I was awakened by their noise. I could see nothing untoward, so hit them and drove them away. I went off to sleep again. Then they started to make a noise once more and to bark, waking me up. Again I could see nothing amiss, so I jumped up and drove them away. The first thing I felt after that was their falling on me and shaking me with their fore- and hind-legs, as someone awake shakes a sleeping man when something terrible happens. I jumped up and there was a black snake which had come up close to me. I leapt on it and killed it, then went off home. Next to God, the two dogs were the cause of my survival!
Abu Rafi' also said: A man had some people drinking with him one day and saw one of them eyeing his wife, so he said:
Eat with gusto! But may you never drink with enjoyment!
Be off, you ignoble wretch!
I have no affection for a drinking companion who makes eyes
when he is alone with his friend’s wife.To conclude this book, here is one more story. A friend of mine told me that the wife of one of his friends had died and left a young son. He also had a dog whom he had personally reared. One day he left his son in the house with the dog and went about his business. After a while he returned and saw the dog in the porch, his face and the whole of his muzzle dripping with blood. The man thought that the dog had killed his son and eaten him. Before he went into the house, he attacked the dog and killed him. Then he went in and found the boy asleep in his cradle. At his side were the remains of a viper as long as a plank of wood which the dog had killed and some of which he had eaten. The man was full of remorse for having killed the dog and gave him a proper burial.
Smith and Haleem, The Book of the Superiority of Dogs over
Many of Those Who Wear Clothes, pp. 30–34
COMMENTARY
As so often in Arabic literary compendia, one has the impression that many of the anecdotes have no other function than to provide a context for the poetry.
The translators of this work note that effectively the same story was told in thirteenth-century Wales about Prince Llewelyn and his hound Gelert. Llewelyn returned from hunting one day to be greeted by his hound who was all bloody; assuming that the dog had killed his infant son, he killed the dog, only to discover that his son was unharmed and that the dog had killed a wolf. This tale, which is very ancient and widely diffused, probably originated in India (and there the dog started out as a mongoose).
‘b.’ is a standard European abbreviation for ‘ibn’.
Mas'udi believed that the writing of history was the crown of literature, and it is possible – even easy – to read for pleasure much of the history produced in this period. This particularly applies to the voluminous chronicle produced by Mas'udi himself. Abu al-Hasan ibn al-Husayn AL-MAS'UDI (896-956) was a Shi'i Muslim of Iranian origin. He made a special study of old Persian books and he travelled widely in Persia and northern India. However, he was also interested in Byzantium and the non-Islamic world in general, and a keen interest in human geography informed his wide-ranging chronicle. Mas'udi was astoundingly prolix. Barbier de Meynard’s nineteenth-century edition of the Arabic text of Mas'udi’s chronicle the Muruj al-Dhabab, ‘The Meadows of Gold’, ran to nine volumes. Yet Mas'udi claimed that the Muruj was a mere abridgement of the longer Akhbar al-Zaman, or ‘Historical Annals’, which has not survived. In addition, Mas'udi wrote the Kitab al-Tanbih, the ‘Book of Notification’, which has survived and which is a treatise on cosmography, chronology and world history, plus thirty-four other works, none of which is extant.
Apparently the Akhbar al-Zaman consisted of an account of the soirees of the 'Abbasid Caliph al-Mu'tamid, a discussion of the qualities of the ideal nadim, a polemic on alcoholism, guidance on the correct formulae for invitations, descriptions of the various types of singing, rules of comportment, the ways of laying the table, cookery, anecdotes about ancient kings, and so on. Al-Radi (reigned 934-40) was the last 'Abbasid caliph to have nudama (cup companions) in attendance at his dinner table and, by the time Mas'udi wrote the Muruj, the golden age of nudama culture was coming to an end. Nevertheless, Mas'udi’s monumental work is steeped in the matter and manner of the culture of the nudama and this gives it a somewhat wistful, antiquarian flavour. In the Muruj, learning and entertainment are artfully interwoven and both are given a literary polish. Although Mas'udi disapproved of Jahiz’s polemical positions, he modelled his style and discursive manner of presentation on that of Jahiz, and he became like Jahiz a master of the digression.
Mas'udi has already been extensively quoted in previous chapters, most notably regarding Yahya al-Barmaki’s symposium on love, as well as the story of Iblis as Ibrahim al-Mawsili’s music teacher. In the extract from the Muruj which follows he deals with the soirees of the Caliph al-Mu'tamid (reigned 870-82) and the great work which he claims to have written, but which has not come down to the present day.
Lunde and Stone, The Meadows of Gold, pp. 325–6
COMMENTARY
Nabidh means ‘(alcoholic) spirits’. It could be made from dates, grapes, raisins or honey. Casuists argued that nabidh was not wine and therefore not proscribed by Islam, but most religious folk shunned it.
Regarding the poem itself, the translators point out that as ‘so often in Mas'udi the poem is very bad, but seems to be in direct contrast with what has already been said’.
Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Yahya AL-SULI (d. 946) was a friend of Mas'udi’s. His chief work, the Kitab al-Awraq fi Akhbar Al al-'Abbas wa-Ash'aribim, or ‘Book of Pages on the History of the 'Abbasids and their Poetry’, is an agreeably gossipy sort of chronicle of the doings of the court and al-Suli has been described by Cahen as ‘a Middle-Eastern Saint-Simon’. Like Saint-Simon, he was a brilliant stylist and an obsessive about such matters as court protocol. In the latter half of the book Suli gives examples of poetry composed by members of the 'Abbasid dynasty. Suli was of Turkish descent, but he wrote in Arabic and lived in Baghdad. His skill as a chess-player made him a favoured nadim of the Caliphs al-Muktafi and al-Muqtadir. He also acted as tutor to young 'Abbasid princes, particularly in the subjects of history and poetry. In the last year of his life he got into trouble as a result of his involvement in politics and he died in hiding. Apart from his literary chronicle, Suli also wrote literary critiques of leading poets, including Abu Tammam, Abu Nuwas and Buhturi. An anecdote from al-Suli’s Awraq, concerning the young prince al-Radi and the eunuchs, has already been cited in the previous chapter.
The third historian to deserve consideration as a producer of works of literary merit in Arabic was also a Persian. (This was an age when, under the Buyids, Persian was effectively an official language of government and when chronicle-writing was closely tied to court patronage and interests.) Abu 'Ali Ahmad ibn Muhammad MISKAWAYH (c. 936-1030) was born in Persia and fiercely proud of his ancestry. Nevertheless, he made his career in Baghdad as a courtier who attended upon various viziers and also worked as a scribe, librarian, resident philosopher, and as a kind of gossip columnist. Like several other leading literary figures, he wrote a cookery book. Miskawayh’s Uns al-Farid, or ‘Companion of the Lonely’, was a choice collection of anecdotes. His Kitab Tahdhib al-Akhlaq, or ‘Training of Character’, dealt with business- and travelling-friendships and how to choose friends who would be appropriate for one’s enterprise.
However, Miskawayh was chiefly famous for the Tajarib al-Ummam wa-Ta'aqib al-Himam, ‘The Experiences of the Nations and the Results of Endeavours’, which was a would-be universal history running up to A.D. 980 (‘would-be’, because although Miskawayh was very well informed about Islamic history and quite well informed about early Christian and Jewish history, he really had very little knowledge of Chinese, Indian or medieval European history.) Miskawayh believed in history as a source of ethical messages and as a guide to life. How should cities be governed? How can happiness be attained? How should one prepare for death? He hated uninterpretative history, and when he came to consult the books of his predecessors he complained that they were ‘full of information which was like entertaining stories and idle talk [khurafat] which had no use except to make one fall asleep’.
In the Tajarib, Miskawayh showed himself to be uninterested in religious history. This was because he thought ordinary people could not learn from the deeds of the Prophets or from miraculous events. He believed that proper history began with the chronicles of the old Persian kings and he went on to interpret the deeds of the Persian kings and later the Arab caliphs in the light of Greek philosophy. It was from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics that he had learned that man was a political animal, that society exists to enable humans to achieve human happiness, and that wise conduct usually lay between two extremes. Miskawayh designed his history as a mirror-for-princes, as a guide for the ruling elite. When he wrote about his own times, he wrote as someone close to or even involved in the events concerned and he was lavish in dishing out praise and blame – especially the latter. Margoliouth (who does not seem to have liked many of the Arab writers on whom he based his academic career) observed that his ‘narrative is largely a narrative of ambition, intrigue and treachery, with few redeeming features’. However, Miskawayh was a fine writer and there are many set-piece prose passages, particularly concerning the last hours of prominent figures – among them Hallaj, Ibn al-Furat and Ibn Muqlah.
At one stage in his career Miskawayh had worked as the Vizier Ibn al-'Amid’s librarian.
The talents and virtues which this man displayed were of a sort that made him outshine his contemporaries, that the enemy could not resist or the envious fail to acknowledge. No-one rivalled his combination of qualities. He was like the sun which is hidden from no-one, or the sea ‘about which one may talk without restraint’. He is the only person whom I ever saw ‘whose presence outdid his report’. For example: he was the best clerk of his time, and possessed the greatest number of professional attainments, command of the Arabic language with its rarities, familiarity with grammar and prosody, felicity in etymology and metaphor, retention by memory of pre-Islamic and Islamic collections of poems. I was once told the following by the late Abu’l-Hasan 'Ali ibn Qasim: I used, he said, to recite to my father Abu’l-Qasim difficult poems out of the ancient collections, because the Chief Ustadh was in the habit of asking him to recite them when he saw him, and on such occasions the Ustadh would regularly criticize some mistake in the reading or vocalization such as escaped us. This annoyed me and I wanted him to master a poem which the Chief Ustadh would not know or at least be unable to criticize anywhere. I was unable to compass this until I got hold of the Diwan of Kumait, a very copious bard, and selected three of his difficult odes which I fancied the Chief Ustadh had not come across. I helped my father to commit these to memory, and took pains to present myself at the same time. When the eye of the Chief Ustadh lighted on him, he said: Come, Abu’l-Qasim, recite me something that you have learned since my time. – My father commenced his recitation, but as he was proceeding with one of these poems, the Chief Ustadh said to him: Stop, you have omitted a number of verses out of this ode. He then recited them himself; I felt more ashamed than ever before. He then asked my father for some more, and he recited the next ode, and made as before some omissions, which the Ustadh also corrected. My informant concluded: Then I became conscious that the man was an inexhaustible, unfathomable sea. – This is what I was told by this person who was a learned clerk.
As for what I witnessed myself during the time of my association with him, and I was in attendance on him for seven years day and night, I may say that no poem was ever recited to him but he knew its author’s collection by heart, no ancient or modern poem by anyone deserving to have his verses committed to memory ever came to him as a novelty, and I have heard him recite whole collections of odes by unknown persons such as I was surprised that he should take the trouble to learn. Indeed I once addressed a question to him on the subject. Ustadh, I said, how can you devote your time to acquiring the verse of this person? – He replied: You seem to suppose that it costs me trouble to learn a thing like this by heart. Why, it impresses itself on my memory if I casually hear it once. – He was speaking the truth, for I used to recite to him verses of my own to the number of thirty or forty, and he would repeat them to me afterwards as a sign of approval. Sometimes he would ask me about them and desire me to recite some of them, and I could not repeat three successive lines straight off without his prompting. Several times he told me that in his young days he used to bet his comrades and the scholars with whom he associated that he would commit to memory a thousand lines in one day; and he was far too earnest and dignified a man to exaggerate. I asked him how he managed it. He replied: I made it a condition that if I were required to learn by heart a thousand verses of poetry which I had not previously heard in one day, it must then be written out, and I would then commit to memory twenty or thirty lines at a time, which I would repeat and so have done with them. What, I asked, do you mean by ‘having done with them’? He replied: I would not require to repeat them again after that. He went on: I used to recite them once or twice, and then return the paper, to engage upon another, and so get through the whole on one day.
As for his composition it is known from the collections of his letters. Every professional letter-writer knows how high a level he attained. The same is the case with his poetry, both sportive and earnest. It is poetry of the highest order, and the most exalted style. In Qur’anic exegesis, retention in the memory of its difficulties and ambiguities, and acquaintance with the different views of the jurists of the capitals he also reached the highest level. When, abandoning these studies, he took to mechanics and mathematics, there was no-one to approach him in them. As for Logic, the various branches of philosophy and especially Metaphysics, no contemporary ventured to profess them in his presence unless he came to acquire information or aimed at learning rather than discussing. I myself saw at his court Abu’l-Hasan 'Amiri, who had journeyed from Khorasan to Baghdad, and was on his way home deeming himself an accomplished philosopher, having commented on the works of Aristotle wherein he had grown old. When he got insight into the attainments of the Chief Ustadh and became conscious of their vastness, of the brilliancy of his acumen, and of the accuracy wherewith he remembered what was written, he bowed down before him, recommenced his studies under him, and regarded himself as only fit to be his disciple. He read many difficult books with the Chief Ustadh who expounded them to him and enabled him to learn their contents.
The Chief Ustadh was sparing of words and disinclined to talk except when questions were asked him, and he found someone capable of understanding him. Then he would become vivacious, and things would be heard from him which were not to be had of anyone else, with eloquent expressions, choice phraseology, and subtle sentiments, with no hesitation or difficulty. I saw at his court a number of persons who endeavoured to win his favour by various accomplishments and forms of knowledge, and none of them could refrain from expressing his admiration for the proficiency of the Chief Ustadh in the very line which he had come to exhibit, and declare plainly that he had never seen his equal, and did not believe that his equal had been created.
He was so courteous, good-natured and simple-minded that when any specialist in any study or science presented himself, he would quietly listen and express approval of all he heard from him after the fashion of one who knew no more of that particular subject than enough to enable him to understand what was being communicated. Only after long association, involving the lapse of months or years, if it chanced that such a person asked a question of the Chief Ustadh, or something was said about the subject in his presence and he was desired to supplement it, did his tide swell, and his genius luxuriate, abashing the person who deemed himself master of the subject or matter. Many a self-conceited individual was put to shame in his presence, but only after he had given them free field and free rein, spared them till they had exhausted their stores, and rewarded them liberally for their performances.
Such then was his proficiency in recognized studies and sciences; in addition he was sole master of the secrets of certain obscure sciences which no-one professes, such as Mechanics, requiring the most abstruse knowledge of geometry and physics, the science of abnormal motions, the dragging of heavy weights, and of centres of gravity, including the execution of many operations which the ancients found impossible, the fabrication of wonderful engines for the storming of fortresses, stratagems against strongholds and stratagems in campaigns, the adoption of wonderful weapons, such as arrows which could permeate a vast space, and produce remarkable effects, mirrors which burned a very long way off, unheard-of sleight of hand, knowledge of the refinements of the art of modelling and ingenuity in the application of it. I have seen him in the room where he used to receive his intimate friends and associates take up an apple or something of the sort, play with it for a time, and then send it spinning having on it the form of a face scratched with his nail, more delicately than could have been executed by anyone else with the appropriate instruments and in a number of days.
H. F. Amedroz and D. S. Margoliouth, The Eclipse of the
'Abbasid Caliphate, vol. 5 (Oxford, 1920-21), pp. 293–8
COMMENTARY
In the remainder of Miskawayh’s obituary of Ibn al-'Amid the historian goes on to deal with the latter’s statecraft and military skill, and his shaping influence on the Buyid ruler 'Adud al-Dawla.
The flattering phrases in inverted commas are stock ones.
Ustadh is another word for master or chief.
Ibn Zayd al-Asadi al-Kumayt (c. 679-744) was a noted poet. However, little of his Diwan has survived to the present day.
Abu 'Ali al-Husayn ibn 'Abd Allah IBN SINA (980-1037), also known in the medieval West as Avicenna, was born in Turkestan and died in Hamadhan. He enjoyed immense fame as one of the Arab world’s greatest philosophers and physicians, and his compendious treatises on these subjects were translated into Latin and much studied in the West, where they had an important role in determining the shape of medieval scholasticism. Ibn Sina carefully studied Aristotle and other Greek philosophers, but he strove to take their thought further and, of course, to reconcile it with the Islamic revelation. Many of his works are now lost, but some 250 treatises and letters have survived. Like the Ikhwan al-Safa’ and many other philosophers, including Ibn Tufayl (see Chapter 6), Ibn Sina made occasional use of fiction or fantasy as a teaching device. So his philosophical work included ‘short stories in which personal and spiritual self-realization is expressed in symbolic form’, as Julian Baldick has noted. In the story of Hayy ibn Yaqzan, ‘Life, Son of Certainty’, he described how Hayy, a man growing up on a desert island, deduced the nature of the universe and the gnostic truth behind mere appearances. Thereafter two angels instruct Hayy in the nature of the universe. There is a fantastical, science-fiction quality to some of what they describe, such as the Spring of Life, the Muddy Sea in the far west, and the land of Perpetual Darkness. And there is the realm of terrestrial matter: