One Thousand and One Nights

by Richard Burton

  300 Translators understand this of writing marriage contracts; I take it in a more general sense.

  301 These lines are repeated from Night Ixxv.: with Mr. Payne’s permission I give his rendering (iii. 153) by way of variety.

  302 The comparison is characteristically Arab.

  303 Not her “face”: the head, and especially the back of the head, must always be kept covered, even before the father.

  304 Arab. “Siwák”=a tooth-stick; “Siwá-ka”=lit. other than thou.

  305 Arab. “Arák”=tooth stick of the wild caper-tree; “Ará-ka” lit.=I see thee. The capparis spinosa is a common desert-growth and the sticks about a span long (usually called Miswák), are sold in quantities at Meccah after being dipped in Zemzem water. In India many other woods are used, date-tree, Salvadora, Achyrantes, phyllanthus, etc. Amongst Arabs peculiar efficacy accompanies the tooth-stick of olive, “the tree springing from Mount Sinai” (Koran xxiii. 20); and Mohammed would use no other, because it prevents decay and scents the mouth. Hence Koran, chaps. xcv. 1. The “Miswák” is held with the unused end between the ring-finger and minimus, the two others grasp the middle and the thumb is pressed against the back close to the lips. These articles have long been sold at the Medical Hall near the “Egyptian Hall,” Piccadilly. They are better than our unclean tooth-brushes because each tooth gets its own especial rubbing’ not a general sweep; at the same time the operation is longer and more troublesome. In parts of Africa as well as Asia many men walk about with the tooth-stick hanging by a string from the neck.

  306 The “Mehari,” of which the Algerine-French speak, are the dromedaries bred by the Mahrah tribe of Al-Yaman, the descendants of Mahrat ibn Haydan. They are covered by small wild camels (?) called Al-Húsh, found between Oman and Al-Shihr: others explain the word to mean “stallions of the Jinns “ and term those savage and supernatural animals, “Najáib al-Mahriyah”nobles of the Mahrah.

  307 Arab. “Khaznah”=a thousand purses; now about Ł5000. It denotes a large sum of money, like the “Badrah,” a purse containing 10,000 dirhams of silver (Al-Hariri), or 80,000 (Burckhardt Prov. 380); whereas the “Nisáb” is a moderate sum of money, gen. 20 gold dinars=200 silver dirhams.

  308 As The Nights show, Arabs admire slender forms; but the hips and hinder cheeks must be highly developed and the stomach fleshy rather than lean. The reasons are obvious. The Persians who exaggerate everything say e.g. (Husayn Váiz in the Anvár-i-Suhayli): —

  How paint her hips and waist ? Who saw

  A mountain (Koh) dangling to a straw (káh)?

  In Antar his beloved Abla is a tamarisk (T. Orientalis). Others compare with the palm-tree (Solomon), the Cypress (Persian, esp. Hafiz and Firdausi) and the Arák or wild Capparis (Arab.).

  309 Ubi aves ibi angel). All African travellers know that a few birds flying about the bush, and a few palm-trees waving in the wind, denote the neighbourhood of a village or a camp (where angels are scarce). The reason is not any friendship for man but because food, animal and vegetable, is more plentiful Hence Albatrosses, Mother Carey’s (Mater Cara, the Virgin) chickens, and Cape pigeons follow ships.

  310 The stanza is called Al-Mukhammas=cinquains; the quatrains and the “bob,” or “burden” always preserve the same consonance. It ends with a Koranic lieu commun of Moslem morality.

  311 Moslem port towns usually have (or had) only two gates. Such was the case with Bayrut, Tyre, Sidon and a host of others; the faubourg-growth of modern days has made these obsolete. The portals much resemble the entrances of old Norman castles — Arques for instance. (Pilgrimage i. 185.)

  312 Arab. “Lisám”; before explained.

  313 i.e. Life of Souls (persons, etc.).

  314 Arab. “Insánu-há”=her (i.e. their) man: i.e. the babes of the eyes: the Assyrian Ishon, dim. of Ish=Man; which the Hebrews call “Bábat” or “Bit” (the daughter) the Arabs “Bubu (or Hadakat) al-Aye”; the Persians “Mardumak-i-chashm” (mannikin of the eye); the Greeks and the Latins pupa, pupula, pupilla. I have noted this in the Lyricks of Camoens ().

  315 Ma’an bin Zá’idah, a soldier and statesman of the eighth century.

  316 The mildness of the Caliph Mu’áwiyah, the founder of the Ommiades, proverbial among the Arabs, much resembles the “meekness” of Moses the Law-giver, which commentators seem to think has been foisted into Numbers xii. 3.

  317 Showing that there had been no consummation of the marriage which would have demanded “Ghusl,” or total ablution, at home or in the Hammam.

  318 I have noticed this notable desert-growth.

  319 ‘The “situation” is admirable, solution appearing so difficult and catastrophe imminent.

  320 This quatrain occurs in Night ix.: I have borrowed from

  Torrens () by way of variety.

  321 The belief that young pigeon’s blood resembles the virginal discharge is universal; but the blood most resembling man’s is that of the pig which in other points is so very human. In our day Arabs and Hindus rarely submit to inspection the nuptial sheet as practiced by the Israelites and Persians. The bride takes to bed a white kerchief with which she staunches the blood and next morning the stains are displayed in the Harem. In Darfour this is done by the bridegroom. “Prima Venus debet esse cruenta,” say the Easterns with much truth, and they have no faith in our complaisant creed which allows the hymen-membrane to disappear by any but one accident.

  322 Not meaning the two central divisions commanded by the

  King and his Wazir.

  323 Ironicč.

  324 Arab. “Rasy”=praising in a funeral sermon.

  325 Arab. “Manáyá,” plur. of “Maniyat” = death. Mr. R. S. Poole (the Academy, April 26, 1879) reproaches Mr. Payne for confounding “Muniyat” (desire) with “Maniyat” (death) but both are written the same except when vowel-points are used.

  326 Arab. “Iddat,” alluding to the months of celibacy which, according to Moslem law, must be passed by a divorced woman before she can re-marry.

  327 Arab. “Talák bi’l-Salásah”=a triple divorce which cannot be revoked; nor can the divorcer re-marry the same woman till after consummation with another husband. This subject will continually recur.

  328 An allusion to a custom of the pagan Arabs in the days of ignorant Heathenism The blood or brain, soul or personality of the murdered man formed a bird called Sady or Hámah (not the Humá or Humái, usually translated “phnix”) which sprang from the head, where four of the five senses have their seat, and haunted his tomb, crying continually, “Uskúni!”=Give me drink (of the slayer’s blood) ! and which disappeared only when the vendetta was accomplished. Mohammed forbade the belief. Amongst the Southern Slavs the cuckoo is supposed to be the sister of a murdered man ever calling or vengeance.

  329 To obtain a blessing and show how he valued it.

  330 Well-known tribes of proto-historic Arabs who flourished before the time of Abraham: see Koran (chaps. xxvi. et passim). They will be repeatedly mentioned in The Nights and notes.

  331 Arab. “Amtár”; plur. of “Matr,” a large vessel of leather or wood for water, etc.

  332 Arab. “Asáfírí,” so called because they attract sparrows (asáfír) a bird very fond of the ripe oily fruit. In the Romance of “Antar” Asáfír camels are beasts that fly like birds in fleetness. The reader must not confound the olives of the text with the hard unripe berries (“little plums pickled in stale”) which appear at English tables, nor wonder that bread and olives are the beef-steak and potatoes of many Mediterranean peoples It is an excellent diet, the highly oleaginous fruit supplying the necessary carbon,

  333 Arab. “Tamer al-Hindi”=the “Indian-date,” whence our word “Tamarind.” A sherbet of the pods, being slightly laxative, is much drunk during the great heats; and the dried fruit, made into small round cakes, is sold in the bazars. The traveller is advised not to sleep under the tamarind’s shade, which is infamous for causing ague and fever. In Sind I derided the “native nonsense,” passed the night unde
r an “Indian date-tree” and awoke with a fine specimen of ague which lasted me a week.

  334 Moslems are not agreed upon the length of the Day of Doom when all created things, marshalled by the angels, await final judgment; the different periods named are 40 years, 70, 300 and 50,000. Yet the trial itself will last no longer than while one may milk an ewe, or than “the space between two milkings of a she-camel.” This is bringing down Heaven to Earth with a witness; but, after all, the Heaven of all faiths, including “Spiritualism,” the latest development, is only an earth more or less glorified even as the Deity is humanity more or less perfected.

  335 Arab. “Al-Kamaráni,” lit. “the two moons.” Arab rhetoric prefers it to “Shamsáni,” or {`two suns,” because lighter (akhaff), to pronounce. So, albeit Omar was less worthy than Abu-Bakr the two are called “Al-Omaráni,” in vulgar parlance, Omarayn.

  336 Alluding to the angels who appeared to the Sodomites in the shape of beautiful youths (Koran xi.).

  337 Koran xxxiii. 38.

  338 “Niktu-hu taklidan” i.e. not the real thing (with a woman). It may also mean “by his incitement of me.” All this scene is written in the worst form of Persian-Egyptian blackguardism, and forms a curious anthropological study. The “black joke” of the true and modest wife is inimitable.

  339 Arab. “Jamíz” (in Egypt “Jammayz”) = the fruit of the true sycomore (F. Sycomorus) a magnificent tree which produces a small tasteless fig, eaten by the poorer classes in Egypt and by monkeys. The “Tín” or real fig here is the woman’s parts; the “mulberry- fig,” the anus. Martial (i. 65) makes the following distinction: —

  Dicemus ficus, quas scimus in arbore nasci,

  Dicemus ficos, Caeciliane, tuos.

  And Modern Italian preserves a difference between fico and fica.

  340 Arab. “Ghániyat Azárá” (plur. of Azrá = virgin): the former is properly a woman who despises ornaments and relies on “beauty unadorned” (i.e. in bed).

  341 “Nihil usitatius apud monachos, cardinales, sacrificulos,” says Johannes de la Casa Beneventius Episcopus, quoted by Burton Anat. of Mel. lib. iii. Sect. 2; and the famous epitaph on the Jesuit,

  Ci-git un Jesuite:

  Passant, serre les fesses et passe vite!

  342 Arab. “Kiblah”=the fronting-place of prayer, Meccah for Moslems, Jerusalem for Jews and early Christians. See Pilgrimage (ii. 321) for the Moslem change from Jerusalem to Meccah and ibid. (ii. 213) for the way in which the direction was shown.

  343 The Koran says (chaps. ii.): “Your wives are your tillage: go in therefore unto your tillage in what manner so ever ye will.” Usually this is understood as meaning in any posture, standing or sitting, lying, backwards or forwards. Yet there is a popular saying about the man whom the woman rides (vulg. St. George, in France, le Postillon); “Cursed be who maketh woman Heaven and himself earth!” Some hold the Koranic passage to have been revealed in confutation of the Jews, who pretended that if a man lay with his wife backwards, he would beget a cleverer child. Others again understand it of preposterous venery, which is absurd: every ancient law-giver framed his code to increase the true wealth of the people — population — and severely punished all processes, like onanism, which impeded it. The Persians utilise the hatred of women for such misuse when they would force a wive to demand a divorce and thus forfeit her claim to Mahr (dowry); they convert them into catamites till, after a month or so, they lose all patience and leave the house.

  344 Koran lit 9: “He will be turned aside from the Faith (or Truth) who shall be turned aside by the Divine decree;” alluding, in the text, to the preposterous venery her lover demands.

  345 Arab. “Futúh” meaning openings, and also victories, benefits. The lover congratulates her on her mortifying self in order to please him.

  346 “And the righteous work will be exalt”: (Koran xxxv. 11) applied ironically.

  347 A prolepsis of Tommy Moore: —

  Your mother says, my little Venus,

  There’s something not quite right between us,

  And you’re in fault as much as I,

  Now, on my soul, my little Venus,

  I swear ’twould not be right between us,

  To let your mother tell a lie.

  But the Arab is more moral than Mr. Little. as he purposes to repent.

  348 Arab. “Khunsa” flexible or flaccid, from Khans=bending inwards, i.e. the mouth of a water-skin before drinking. Like Mukhannas, it is also used for an effeminate man, a passive sodomite and even for a eunuch. Easterns still believe in what Westerns know to be an impossibility, human beings with the parts and proportions of both sexes equally developed and capable of reproduction; and Al-Islam even provides special rules for them (Pilgrimage iii. 237). We hold them to be Buffon’s fourth class of (duplicate) monsters belonging essentially to one or the other sex, and related to its opposite only by some few characteristics. The old Greeks dreamed, after their fashion, a beautiful poetic dream of a human animal uniting the contradictory beauties of man and woman. The duality of the generative organs seems an old Egyptian tradition, at least we find it in Genesis (i. 27) where the image of the Deity is created male and female, before man was formed out of the dust of the ground (ii. 7). The old tradition found its way to India (if the Hindus did not borrow the idea from the Greeks); and one of the forms of Mahadeva, the third person of their triad, is entitled “Ardhanárí”=the Half-woman, which has suggested to them some charming pictures. Europeans, seeing the left breast conspicuously feminine, have indulged in silly surmises about the “Amazons.”

  349 This is a mere phrase for our “dying of laughter”: the queen was on her back. And as Easterns sit on carpets, their falling back is very different from the same movement off a chair.

  350 Arab. “Ismid,” the eye-powder before noticed.

  351 When the Caliph (e.g. Al-Tá’i li’llah) bound a banner to a spear and handed it to an officer, he thereby appointed him Sultan or Viceregent.

  352 Arab. “Sháib al-ingház”=lit. a gray beard who shakes head in disapproval.

  353 Arab. “Ayát” = the Hebr. “Ototh,” signs, wonders or

  Koranic verses.

  354 The Chapter “Al-Ikhlás” i.e. clearing (oneself from any faith but that of Unity) is No. cxii. and runs thus: —

  Say, He is the One God!

  The sempiternal God,

  He begetteth not, nor is He begot,

  And unto Him the like is not.

  It is held to be equal in value to one-third of the Koran, and is daily used in prayer. Mr. Rodwell makes it the tenth.

  355 The Lady Budur shows her noble blood by not objecting to her friend becoming her Zarrat (sister-wife). This word is popularly derived from “Zarar”=injury; and is vulgarly pronounced in Egypt “Durrah” sounding like Durrah = a parrot (see Burckhardt’s mistake in Prov. 314). The native proverb says, “Ayshat al-durrah murrah,” the sister-wife hath a bitter life. We have no English equivalent; so I translate indifferently co-wife, co-consort, sister-wife or sister in wedlock.

  356 Lane preserves the article “El-Amjad” and “El-As’ad;” which is as necessary as to say “the John” or “the James,” because neo-Latins have “il Giovanni” or “il Giacomo.” In this matter of the article, however, it is impossible to lay down a universal rule: in some cases it must be preserved and only practice in the language can teach its use. For instance, it is always present in Al-Bahrayn and al-Yaman; but not necessarily so with Irak and Najd.

  357 It is hard to say why this ugly episode was introduced.

  It is a mere false note in a tune pretty enough.

  358 The significance of this action will presently appear.

  359 An “Hadís.”

  360 Arab. “Sabb” = using the lowest language of abuse. chiefly concerning women-relatives and their reproductive parts.

  361 The reader will note in the narration concerning the two Queens the parallelism of the Arab’s style which recalls that of the Hebrew poets. Strings of bla
ck silk are plaited into the long locks (an “idiot-fringe” being worn over the brow) because a woman is cursed “who joineth her own hair to the hair of another” (especially human hair). Sending the bands is a sign of affectionate submission; and, in extremes” cases the hair itself is sent.

  362 i.e., suffer similar pain at the spectacle, a phrase often occurring.

  363 i.e., when the eye sees not, the heart grieves not.

  364 i.e., unto Him we shall return, a sentence recurring in almost every longer chapter of the Koran.

  365 Arab. “Kun,” the creative Word (which, by the by, proves the Koran to be an uncreated Logos); the full sentence being “Kun fa kána” = Be! and it became. The origin is evidently, “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light” (Gen. i. 3); a line grand in its simplicity and evidently borrowed from the Egyptians, even as Yahveh (Jehovah) from “Ankh”=He who lives (Brugsch Hist. ii. 34).

  366 i.e. but also for the life and the so-called “soul.”

  367 Arab. “Layáli”=lit. nights which, I have said, is often applied to the whole twenty-four hours. Here it is used in the sense of “fortune” or “fate ;” like “days” and “days and nights.”

  368 Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr a nephew of Ayishah, who had rebuilt the Ka’abah in A.H. 64 (A.D. 683), revolted (A.D. 680) against Yezid and was proclaimed Caliph at Meccah. He was afterwards killed (A.D. 692) by the famous or infamous Hajjáj general of Abd al-Malik bin Marwan, the fifth Ommiade, surnamed “Sweat of a stone” (skin-flint) and “Father of Flies,” from his foul breath. See my Pilgrimage, etc. (iii. 192-194), where are explained the allusions to the Ka’abah and the holy Black Stone.