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

by Malcolm C (Tr Lyons

  Tales of the Marvellous is probably the oldest surviving story collection with material in common with the Nights. (Indeed Tales of the Marvellous seems to be the oldest of all Arab story collections that have been discovered so far.) The following stories are found in both collections, though in slightly different forms: ‘The Six Men’, ‘Budur and ‘Umair’, ‘Abu Muhammad the Idle’ and ‘Julnar’. Moreover, ‘The Forty Girls’ in Tales of the Marvellous gives an extended version of the core of ‘The Story of the Third Dervish’ in the Nights. The motif of the lady kept in a casket by a jinni is common to both the frame story of the Nights and ‘ ‘Arus al-‘Ara’is’ in Tales of the Marvellous. ‘Talha, the Son of the Qadi of Fustat’ is very similar to two stories in the Nights in which a feckless spendthrift is rescued by his resourceful slave girl: ‘ ‘Ali Shar and Zumurrud’ and ‘‘Nur al-Din and Miriam the Sash-Maker’. Additionally, we know from the list of contents given in the opening pages of Tales of the Marvellous that the missing second part contained ‘The Story of the Ebony Horse’, and that too is also found in Galland’s translation of the Nights and in Egyptian manuscripts which postdate Galland.

  Setting aside the actual duplication of stories and story motifs in the two collections, there is a broader family resemblance, for Tales of the Marvellous, like the Nights, contains all sorts of tales that are drawn from a variety of sources, many of which are anonymous. But Tales of the Marvellous lacks the elaborate overall framing device that distinguishes the Nights and it does not offer anything to match the mise en abîme of story within story within story, in which Sheherazade’s talking for her life frames the story of ‘The Hunchback’ and this in turn frames the stories of the stories of the Christian, the inspector, the Jewish doctor and the tailor, and then the tailor’s story encompasses that of the barber, who relates the sad stories of his six brothers. But ‘The Six Men’ in Tales of the Marvellous, with its perfunctory opening frame, in which the king lies sleepless for lack of stories, may have furnished the basis of the more elaborately framed stories of the barber’s six brothers in the Nights. Also ‘Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle’ contains boxed within it the story of the enchanted gazelle. As in the Nights, the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid features in several stories, though usually as a witness rather than a protagonist: ‘Muhammad the Foundling’, ‘Budur and ‘Umair’, ‘Abu Muhammad the Idle’, and ‘Ashraf and Anjab’. More surprising is the appearance of Harun’s cousin Muhammad ibn Sulaiman, the governor of Basra, in several stories: ‘Budur and ‘Umair’, ‘Ashraf and Anjab’ and ‘Abu Muhammad the Idle’.

  Several of the tales in Tales of the Marvellous do have a rudimentary frame in which a ruler who is bored or depressed consequently needs to be told a story in order to rescue him from his mood. At the end of the narrative we are to understand the fact that the story did the job with the ruler and the storyteller was well rewarded is a guarantee of its merit. Exceptionally ‘ ‘Arus al-‘Ara’is’ (‘The Bride of Brides’) contains an unusually complex set of framed stories, as, after a king’s baby daughter dies, a blind man sets out to comfort him by telling the story of ‘Arus al-‘Ara’is, which will surely lead the king ‘to hate scheming women and treacherous girls’. The blind man heard the story of ‘Arus al-‘Ara’is from his father, who heard it from his grandfather, a police chief, who heard about it from a man who was in prison for attacking women and who would rather stay there than re-encounter ‘Arus al-‘Ara’is. The prisoner then tells how, before he met ‘Arus al-‘Ara’is, he set out travelling as a merchant and after strange and supernatural adventures at sea he alone survived a shipwreck and came to be marooned on an island. After ten days a jinni arrived on the island with a lady in a glass chest. After spying on them and witnessing strange things, the merchant was eventually detected in his hiding place by the lady and he was forced to supply her with a ring, which she used to kill the jinni. A little later ‘Arus al-‘Ara’is tells the man the story of her birth, her subsequent adulterous and murderous career and how, after engineering many deaths, she was locked in a chest and pushed out to sea. Eventually the jinni rescued her from the wooden chest only to keep her captive in a glass chest. One of the stories she tells the merchant, purportedly to explain the making of the wooden chest she was cast out to sea in, is a story lifted from the Arabic Alexander Romance. In that story a king was trying to build a city on a coast, but night after night monsters came out of the sea to destroy it, until that king had talismanic images carved to repel the monsters, making it possible to complete the building of Alexandria. During her enforced sojourn with the jinni he told many stories of the wonders of the sea, and some of these she also relates to the marooned merchant. She also tells of how she got the jinni to use magic sand to destroy her home city and of her affair with another castaway and what happened to him after he raped a mermaid. Then she transmits the jinni’s story of how his father was killed by the monstrous daran and tells more about her time with her demonic captor and how she earlier tried to use the daran to kill him but failed. Finally, we are back in real time as, once her narrative has finished, the besotted merchant decides to stay with her and bring her to his home town. Though more sexual and homicidal adventures ensue, once they have left the island we have found our way out of the series of bizarrely boxed stories (though we never get back to the blind man who was relating all this to the bereaved king). The story describes itself as ‘a long, remarkable and curious story’, and it certainly is that.

  Although there are many overlaps and similarities between Tales of the Marvellous and the Nights, there are also subtle and not so subtle differences. The stories in the Nights often pretend to have a didactic aim, and in some cases that is clearly actually the case. The exordium of the manuscript of the Nights used by Galland boasted (not very convincingly) of its instructional purpose: ‘the purpose of writing this agreeable and entertaining book is the instruction of those who peruse it, for it abounds with highly edifying histories and excellent lessons for the people of distinction, and it provides them with the opportunity to learn the art of discourse, as well as what happened to kings from the beginnings of time’. Tales of the Marvellous makes no such claim, but only promises wonders and strangeness. Then, though both collections contain plenty of marvels and magic, arguably Tales of the Marvellous offers madder marvels, which come on thick and fast. There are other more incidental differences. The Umaiyad caliphs and their governors and generals feature more prominently in Tales of the Marvellous than in the Nights, and so do Christians. The fact that protagonists in Tales of the Marvellous frequently invoke the name of ‘Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, as well as the fact that ‘Ali is given a heroic role in two of the stories, might suggest that the compiler had Shi‘i sympathies. On the other hand there is no sign of any particular hostility towards the Umaiyad caliphs, which one might have expected from a Shi‘ite.

  Relief after Grief

  Besides belonging to the category of ‘aja’ib, many of the stories in Tales of the Marvellous can also be described as belonging to the genre of faraj ba‘d al-shidda, or ‘relief after grief’. In this kind of story the protagonist or protagonists undergo many hardships or tests before attaining success and happiness. The most famous collection of such stories was made by the Iraqi judge and anthologist al-Tanukhi (940–94). ‘Relief after grief’ can be seen as a quasi-religious genre in which the protagonists’ patience and trust in God will ultimately be rewarded by Him. (It is easy for a modern, secularized reader to miss how the tales of marvels, magic, adventure and thwarted love in both Tales of the Marvellous and the Nights are suffused with an Islamic religiosity.) In Tales of the Marvellous the characters who suffer before attaining a happy end are often separated lovers. Examples of the tribulations endured by lovers and their ultimate happy reunion include ‘The King of the Two Rivers’, ‘Talha, the Son of the Qadi of Fustat’, ‘Sul and Shumul’, ‘Miqdad and Mayasa’ and ‘Budur and ‘Umair’. In the opening of this last stor
y the restless and depressed caliph Harun al-Rashid demands to be told ‘a story of infatuated lovers and of a happy outcome to affliction’. Of course, just as the protagonists in this kind of story must bear their hardships with patience (sabr), so too must those who read or listen to these tales. It is striking how anxious the compiler is to signal in the titles to the tales those stories which, after troubles, will end happily. The description ‘relief after grief’ occurs repeatedly in the titles of a majority of the stories (but this excessive repetition has not been reproduced on the English contents page).

  Patience must be the correct response to a tale of suspense. In Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit, the rabbit is told by his mother: ‘You may go into the fields or down the lane, but don’t go into Mr McGregor’s garden.’ The person who reads this does not want the rabbit to go into Mr McGregor’s garden for he knows that if the rabbit does so something bad will happen to him, and yet at the same time he does want the rabbit to break the interdiction, for otherwise there will be no story. So it is with ‘The Forty Girls’ in Tales of the Marvellous, where the prince is told by the sorceress that he may explore every room but one. It is as if he is compelled by that very interdiction to go through the forbidden door. Prolepsis is a closely related way of generating narrative suspense. Thus, if at the beginning of a story an astrologer predicts some dreadful thing, the reader or listener waits and, as he waits, he wants and does not want the predicted disaster to happen.

  Love

  Delaying the climax is the stock-in-trade of the love stories. These tend towards the lachrymose, and verses mostly of a melancholy kind adorn these stories. Poetry was the language of love, for prose was seen as a poor vehicle for the expression of the emotions. Poetry both conveyed passion and served to instruct lovers on the etiquette of love. In medieval Arab storytelling love comes at first glance (a second glance would count as ogling and would therefore be sinful). It is even possible to fall in love by report as in ‘Julnar’, in which Badr falls in love with Jauhara as soon as he hears her described. Or one might fall in love through seeing a portrait, as with Mahliya, when she sees a painting of Mauhub. Regular dating and the slow growth of love over weeks, months or years was not envisaged by the storytellers. Although passion is celebrated, the sexual act is not lingered over. Customarily in these romances love is fated, as are the painful separation and ultimate blissful reunion.

  The ninth-century lexicographer al-Asma‘i,4 who travelled among the Bedouin in order to clarify the meanings of Arabic words, reported that ‘some of the Arabs say “ ’Ishq (passion) is a kind of madness” ’. The Qanun, the famous medical textbook by the eleventh-century philosopher and physician Ibn Sina (Avicenna), discussed lovesickness as a delusionary form of madness akin to melancholia. The plight of several lovers in Tales of the Marvellous seems to bear out Ibn Sina’s diagnosis. In ‘Budur and ‘Umair’, we are introduced to the case of Budur, whose ‘letter comes from one who spends her nights in tears and her days in torture. All day she is bewildered and all night she is sleepless. She takes no pleasure in food, cannot take refuge in sleep, does not listen to rebuke and cannot hear those who speak to her. Longing has mastered her …’ For the most part, the exalted code of love was reserved for the nobly born; it was not for bakers, washerwomen, porters and seamstresses. In ‘The Six Men’ in Tales of the Marvellous there is nothing noble about the hunchback tailor’s attempt to have sex with the merchant’s deceitful wife, and he does not get to spout poetry, but is handed over by the merchant to the police chief so that he can be flogged. Similarly, the paralytic’s desire for a beautiful young woman results in him ending up with dyed eyebrows, shaven and naked in the street, an object of mockery.

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

  Certain women that were in the city said,

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

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

  Then she gave to each one of them a knife.

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

  And when they saw him, they so admired him

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

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

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

  Heightened Pleasures and Pains

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

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

  Misogyny and Rape

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

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

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

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