‘It is not nikāḥ in the ordinary sense of the word, or debauchery, nikāḥ wa lā sifah, but a sexual pleasure tolerated by God at a particular moment. It is the hiring for money of a woman with a view to sexual pleasure that must last for three days and three nights, after which the two parties separate and their situation is regularized by a deed of nikāḥ.’36 And it is a quranic text that warranted this tolerance:
Lawful for you,
Beyond all that, is that you may seek,
using your wealth, in wedlock and not
in licence. Such wives as you enjoy thereby,
give them their wages apportionate; it is no
fault in you in agreeing together,
after the due apportionate.37
In other words, there is a price and a gift, but at the centre there is pleasure, tamattu‘, mut‘a.
The Prophet himself was very attentive to the art of coupling, the art of sexual pleasure. For sexual bliss was a way of living in the hereafter by anticipation and I have already demonstrated the extent to which orgasm and paradise were co-extensive. Kissing, the right words, scent, fore- and afterplay are themes on which the Prophet laid particular stress, unhesitatingly setting an example, and thereby inaugurating a whole art of sexual pleasure that is regarded as one of the most complete and most systematic.
It was he who founded in law a veritable erotology, a full, positive science of pleasure in all its physical and psychical forms, to which the next chapter will be devoted. If eroticism invades literature, art, everyday life, it is because it is integrated in the Islamic view of the world and is situated at the heart, not at the periphery, of ethics.
A typically Arab notion sums up this fundamental feature: mujūn, the object both of disapproval in its inevitable excesses and of envious admiration on the part of those who are incapable of abandoning themselves to a happiness that can lead to a permanent, socially recognized commitment. Observe the ambiguous and equivocal richness of the root ma ja na, which signifies, according to the Lisān al ‘Arab.38 the density, the depth, the lack of shame, the frivolity, the gratuity, the art of mixing the serious and the lighthearted, pretended austerity, true banter. Mujūn is the art of referring to the most indecent things, speaking about them in such a lighthearted way that one approaches them with a sort of loose humour. In principle mujūn ought not to go beyond words. In fact it is fantasy present through words. It is oneirism, collective experience and liberation through speech.
One will understand the import of mujūn better if one considers the following two examples taken from two of the greatest fuqaha of the period. In the commentary by Sheikh Salaheddin Assafadī on Tughrā-y’s Lamiat al-‘Ajam, the venerable sheikh, wearied no doubt by the austerity of the poem and by the conventional thoughts that, he was developing, makes a mujūn digression, no doubt to poke fun at his students and readers, but also to make his commentary less rebarbative! The theme of the flight of time provides him with an opportunity of evoking the theme of memory and of the pleasant moments of life. There follow five pages39 of concentrated and agreeable writing that constitute a veritable anthology of salacious anecdotes, riddles, plays in verse, in short, everything that had been written by poets of former times on . . . the size of the holes of women and boys!
This is how a qāḍi filled a minister’s evenings. The vizir Abu Abdallah al-‘Aredh invited the famous faqih Abu Hayan al-Tuahīdī to give a series of learned talks on various subjects. We come, in due course, to the eighteenth evening.
Once the minister said to me: ‘Let us devote this evening to mujūn. Let us take a good measure of pleasant things. We are tired of serious matters. They have sapped our strength, made us constipated and weary. Go, deliver what you have to say on that point.’ I replied: ‘When the mujjān had gathered together at the house of Kufa to describe their earthly pleasures, Kufa’s fool, Hassan said: “I shall describe what I myself have experienced.” “Go on,” they said to him. “Here are my pleasures: safety, health; feeling smooth, shiny, round forms; scratching myself when I itch; eating pomegranates in summer; drinking wine once every two months; sleeping with wild women and beardless boys; walking without trousers among people who have no shame; seeking a quarrel with sullen people; finding no resistance on the part of those I love; associating with idiots; frequenting faithful fellows like brothers and not seeking out the company of vile souls.” ’40
And the text of the eighteenth night is extended by ten pages of mujūn that made even the publishers blush. Take this note:
It will not pass unperceived that the author presents in this night mujūn of the lowest kind and recounts unseemly anecdotes. Were it not for scientific honesty and a concern to serve history scrupulously we would have omitted most of this text and contented ourselves only with what conformed to good taste.41
All is relative! And in fact the western or westernized reader is often shocked by so many obscenities so apparently unworthy of a respectable faqih and a grave minister! Here is a sample.
At Bassorah there was an effeminate man who liked to organize orgies and with this end in view invited couples (of all kinds) to his house. Now he was madly in love with a young man who shaved himself (mahlūb). Our effeminate constantly pursued him with his assaults until he had completely seduced him.
When the people moved closer,
And the talk ripened
And feet touched feet,
And saliva had covered the inside,
And the rods beat the eggs,
And the spears began to gambol,
Then the generous one was patient and, losing all fear,
Became submissive, obedient, all rebellion gone,
The guests then departed, at peace,
Taking away with them the best catches,
Breasts unburdened,
Fiery hearts quenched,
All desire stilled.
All inclination to flee the lover was forever killed,
The ropes were put end to end,
And the union was tied with an indissoluble knot.42
It is difficult, in translation, not to soften the impact of the original. It cannot in any case convey the formal beauty of the Arabic text, which is all the more striking in that it is quite simply a pastiche of the Quran, of the Sura ‘The Earthquake’ itself!43
Orientalists do not usually translate these texts . . . or they do so into Latin. They regard this kind of mujūn as worthless, vulgar obscenity. Yet it forms an essential part of adab, the teaching of which must have provided the students of the period with an enjoyable and relaxing break. One may, paraphrasing Mauss, speak of ‘education through jokes’. Indeed Tauḥīdī himself stressed this, by way of self-justification, at the end of this celebrated eighteenth night – and the vizir did not fail to draw favourable conclusions from so much mujūn.
Give priority to the art of mujūn, he advised him. I would never have thought that it could have furnished a whole session. One may have serious reproaches to make to this kind of discourse. Wrongly, for the soul needs gaiety (bishr). I have been told that ’Ibn Abbas was fond of saying, as he sat in the midst of his listeners, after long, thorough commentaries upon the Quran, the sunna and the fiqh: ‘Now tell me something spicy’ (aḥmiḍu). I think all he wanted to do by this was to give balance to the soul so that it might recover enough energy to resume the examination of serious things and to make it receptive and attentive to what would be addressed to it.44
The B‘uyid minister al-Muhallabi had a salon in which he would receive the fuqaha one day, the qāḍi another and the philosophers (mutakallimūn) another. In these gatherings, wine, mujūn and erudition were all partaken of.45 Yaqūt even relates how two nights a week were reserved to mujūn.
One then threw off all shame, all restraint. One abandoned oneself to revelry, drunkenness and hubris. These kadis were the finest flower of the fiqh of the period! Ibn Ma‘rūf, Tannūkhi Ibn Qārịa . . . all had fine, white, long beards, like the vizir al-Muhallabi himself. When they w
ere all beginning to enjoy themselves, when the company became pleasant and the ear enchanted, they were all so gay that they generously abandoned the last veils of their shame to the generous workings of wine. Golden goblets filled with glowing red wine were handed round. Everyone wet his beard in the forbidden beverage. When all the liquid had been drunk they sprinkled one another. They then danced, though not before taking off their clothes, though it is true that they kept thick garlands of flowers around their necks.46
Of course women were not absent from these ‘orgies’ any more than were pretty boys. ‘Next day,’ Yaqūt adds, not without a touch of malice, ‘they returned to their usual puritanism, their self-conscious dignity, their scrupulous respect for the external marks expected of qāḍi and to the shame that befits great sheikhs.’47
If such was the feeling of men who were reputed to be pious, if that was their attitude, what must have been the behaviour of people less close to religion, of the young, of the ordinary people?
Each social category had its mujūn! And to judge by the innumerable descriptions in the Book of Songs, the Golden Meadows or The Thousand and One Nights, Arab civilization integrated mujūn as much as faith. The cities had in their suburbs or in the surrounding countryside highly frequented pleasure gardens, with open-air cabarets and cafés set up on the farms attached to Byzantine, Roman, or Persian castles, or even Christian monasteries. In the best viticultural traditions, the monks provided plenty of wine and pretty girls for the ‘joyous companions of sincerity’, the fityāna sidqin of which Abu Nawas speaks.
These taverns were places where many kinds of pleasure were served up without shame and without exclusion. Singers, dancers, gamblers, but also pleasure-seeking young fellows, homosexuals of both sexes, taught the art of pleasure, without let or hindrance, to a youth whom Islam had freed from any sense of shame or guilt.
These cabarets, which the poet Ibn al Mu’tazz called the ‘ephemeral paradises’, were generally set up in large gardens where the limpid water supplied by a canal gushed forth in artificial springs and cascades; large benches covered with matting were arranged under the trembling shade of sycamores, poplars, willows that stood beside cypresses, pomegranate trees, orange trees and palm trees.
The pleasure of going out and breathing fresh air and partaking, in the shade, of roast kid and good wine or mead, while listening to music, was increased by a pleasant outing on a gondola and a return journey by the same means to the city; for these regions were marked by endless canals winding through the plains where barley and wheat stretched as far as the eye could see.48
This evocation of Baghdad at the time of its splendour provides an interesting glimpse into an atmosphere that was to be found equally at Kairwan or Cordoba.
Throughout the whole of the Muslim world, from the end of the Ommiads, a set of permanent characteristics appeared that bore the mark of a mujūn that we still find almost intact in our own time, despite the enormous upheavals to which that society has been subject for centuries. A desperate love of pleasure that spread beyond the courts and wealthier classes of the city, mujūn was an ars vitae, a permanent carpe diem. The Andalusian muwashshaḥ’s aghrim zamānak lā yafūt had and still has its counterpart throughout every section of the population.49
The great monument of mujūn and of Arab eroticism remains incontestably The Thousand and One Nights. Apart from the Quran there are few books in Arabic that are so widely read, so well-known, so popular and so rich. One has to have attended a popular gathering at which extracts are read to grasp the importance and role played by these tales. The erotic vision that emerges from them is so total and so totalizing that it seems inseparable from the socio-cultural context in which it came to birth and in which life integrated Eros, in which everything sang of faith in God, love of life and absolute pleasure. The lyrical vision of life is mingled in it with the fantastic and the marvellous. It is a festival of the real and the imaginary. Dream becomes act and act is transfigured into overflowing oneirism.
The very project of The Thousand and One Nights brings us to the heart of eroticism. Indeed is it not a question of arousing the desire of king Shahryar? What Shahrazād is trying to do is to put off from night to night the execution of the terrible threat that hangs over her. The tales begin with a noble challenge and are presented as a strategic ruse, a response to the inhuman cruelty of a king determined to despise and punish women in general and virgins in particular. Had he not decided once and for all to put to death one virgin each night after satisfying his sexual appetite with her? Indeed the tales begin with a terrible declaration of misogyny. All men are cuckolds, for all women are whores. ‘Trust not at all in women, smile at their promising, for they lower or they love at the caprice of their parts. Filled to the mouth with deceit. . . . Only a miracle brings a man safe from among them.’50 The only solution is to marry, without leaving the wife time to become unfaithful. In order not to become cuckolds husbands have only to become cruel: the alternative of death and love. But by the end of the tales Shahrazād will have substituted an alternative of love and life.
For Shahrazād, then, it is not only a question of saving her own head and that of all the threatened virgins, but also of outwitting destiny, restoring the rights of femininity and demonstrating that nothing can conquer women. Bluebeard must not be allowed to conquer as in the west. The Thousand and One Nights is precisely an attempt to wear down Bluebeard through the power of the imagination, through the enchantment of renewed sexual pleasure. Shahryar, whose sexual appetite is renewed, after having been very well satisfied, was in no doubt that he was giving in against his will to a militant, frenetic, ardent, but effective feminism and . . . in every point in accordance with Islamic teaching.
The myth of Shahryar and Shahzamān, the two brother kings, takes us to the very heart of conversion through love and eroticism. Here are two apparently happy men. They have everything, power, intelligence, money, pleasure, love. Love? No – and that is the point. They thought they had it. But they know what anguish, what ‘spleen’ drove them towards one another. Tawaḥ-ḥashā ba‘ḍahumā ba‘ḍan, as the Arabic text puts it. The brothers want to meet. They both feel a lack of fraternal affection. Here fraternal love prefigures that of the two sisters Shahrazād and Dunyazād. It is as if the brotherly and sisterly relationship was the only pure, full, positive one. Throughout the tales it is this relationship alone that is not affected by crises of one kind or another. On the contrary it always provides a haven in time of danger.
Shahzamān, then, gets ready to go away. But, of course, it is a false departure and he is already cuckolded. He has not yet left when he discovers his misfortune. He takes his revenge there and then by killing the two guilty parties. But the evil is deep-seated: he realizes at last that he lacked love, that is to say, the essential thing, precisely when he thought he was at the peak of happiness.
When he arrives at his brother’s, he soon discovers that they both share the same misfortune, which goes some way towards consoling him! The two go off on a journey and then discover that cuckoldom is universal, that what has happened to them is no fortuitous accident. They realize the reason for their anxiety: woman, whom man hopes to be pure, modest and faithful, is essentially a thieving, libidinous creature, devoid of feeling. ‘They are all whores.’ There is no such thing as love. When one realizes that, everything collapses. Men are left with only one course: female infidelity must be matched by cruelty. This is because unhappy experiences in love not only make men unhappy; they also make them unjust, bloody and terrifying.
We are here at the peak of misogyny. Then Shahrazād appears to reverse the tendency dialectically. For her, it is a question of curing the king. She sets in train a whole therapeutic process through the spicy tale, eroticism, words, fantasy, dream. Shahrazād is self-revelation through the mediation of woman. Woman, who brought man to perdition, can also save him. ‘How beautiful and marvellous is your story!’ Shahryar constantly repeats. This is because Shahrazād is ‘e
ducated’. She has studied the whole of human history, biographical treatises, poetry, the celebrated adab, the fiqh, astronomy. . . . Shahrazād is the Arab Diotima. Still more so perhaps, for she adds eroticism to femininity. To knowledge she adds accomplishments. She reinvents the secret that cures souls: eroticism, which alone soothes crises of conscience and restores trust in life. This conversion to life in a thousand and one sessions is an initiation into knowledge through love. We have to admire the triptych: eroticism, knowledge, imagination. Eroticism directed against misogyny allows us to rediscover the meaning of Allah’s work and, in doing so, the vertigos of knowledge. We pass from extreme hallucination to extreme exaltation. Hence the curative virtue of Shahrazād’s enterprise.
Gaston Bachelard was fond of speaking of rhythmanalysis. ‘There is a place, in psychology, for rhythmanalysis, as one speaks of psychoanalysis. One must cure the suffering soul, in particular the soul that suffers from time, from spleen, by a rhythmic life, by rhythmic attention and repose.’51 Shahrazād is simply doing that! She is an expert in rhythmanalysis. Through her tales she sets up a new relation of capture. She achieves a sort of mental homeopathy. By small doses she arouses dream and desire and always brings rest. This is because Eros does not like to be forced, rushed or constrained. Happy Shahryar who can say, with Bachelard: ‘Our repose was lightened, spiritualized, poeticized, in experiencing those well regulated, temporal diversities.’52 The eroticism of The Thousand and One Nights is a permanent creation that denounces and transcends anxiety and helps one to discover the pleasure of living.
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