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

by Malcolm C (Tr Lyons

  Deceitful Women

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

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

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

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

  Who with their wanton wiles have thus waylaid their knight.

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

  And saddled with sorrow by the sleights of women.

  For here on earth was Adam taken in by one,

  And Solomon by many such, and Samson likewise;

  Delilah dealt him his doom; and David later still,

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

  Racism

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

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

  More on Wonders: Jinn and Magic

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

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

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

  Transformations

  In ‘Julnar’ Badr is turned into a stork and later he succeeds in turning Queen Lab into a mule. In ‘The Forty Girls’ the prince encounters the sister of the sorceress who has been turned into a horse. The scrawny ape in ‘Abu Muhammad the Idle’ turns out to be a jinni under enchantment. In ‘Mahliya and al-Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle’ a princess in love allows herself to be transform
ed into a gazelle. Towards the very end of the same story Mauhub is turned into a crocodile. Therianthropy, the transformation of a human into an animal, is usually presented by storytellers as a form of imprisonment. Rescue usually comes from anagnorisis (recognition), as when a king’s daughter divines Badr’s humanity beneath his appearance as a stork.

  Sea People

  Medieval Arabs seem to have been fascinated by the people who lived in the sea. Captain Burzug ibn Shahriyar’s Book of the Wonders of India had this to say on the subject: ‘Someone who had been to Zaila and the land of the Ethiopians told me that in the Ethiopian Sea there is a fish just like a human being, in body, hands and feet.’ Lonely fishermen ‘hold congress with the females. From them are born beings that look like men, and live in the water and in the atmosphere.’11 The story of ‘ ‘Abdallah the Fisherman and Abdallah the Merman’ is found in the Nights. ‘The Story of Julnar’ is found in both the Nights and in Tales of the Marvellous. Vengeful mermaids feature in ‘ ‘Arus al-‘Ara’is’. On the other hand, the crew on the Second Quest for treasure enjoy pleasant sex with scaly-skinned but friendly mermaids. More generally, those on the Second and Third Quests for treasure encounter many wonders of the sea, including strange fishes, a boiling sea and an island white as camphor.

  ‘ ‘Arus al-‘Ara’is’ also has a marvels of the sea prelude, and later the jinni who holds her captive likes to entertain her by telling her of the marvels that he has encountered.

  While I was staying with the jinni, one day when he was sitting and telling me about the marvels of the sea and its islands, he told me about a bird like a swift whose excrement if applied to the eyes would produce instant blindness, while on another island was a tree whose fruit if eaten by a woman would cause her to give birth to a son. He told me of herbs that would harm men and others that would help against every illness, of a type of kohl that would clear the sight and another that would blind it …

  The sea also acts as a kind of roulette wheel, its chance operations giving men good fortune or ruining them. Carefully accumulated treasures are lost to the stormy deep, and powerful tides carry men who are close to drowning to strange islands and new fortunes.

  Treasure Hunting

  The fictional treatment of treasure hunting evolved in parallel with non-fictional treatises devoted to the same subject. Matalib, the purported science of treasure hunting, was an established genre of writing, and in medieval Egypt professional treasure hunters had set themselves up as a guild. The fourteenth-century North African philosopher and historian Ibn Khaldun had this to say on the subject:

  It should be known that many weak-minded persons in cities hope to discover property under the surface of the earth and to make some profit from it. They believe that all the property of the nations of the past was stored underground and sealed with magic talismans. These seals, they believe, can be broken only by those who chance upon the necessary knowledge and can offer the proper incense, prayers, and sacrifices to break them.12

  In the course of a sceptical and coruscating account of treasure hunting, Ibn Khaldun wondered ‘why should anyone who hoards his money and seals it with magical operations, thus making extraordinary efforts to keep it concealed, set up hints and clues as to how it may be found by anyone who cares to?’13 Many of the ‘professional’ treasure hunters were really con men who preyed upon the gullible, and Jawbari’s thirteenth-century manual on rogues’ tricks, the Kashf al-Asrar (Unveiling of Secrets), described them as ‘masters of a thousand and one dodges’.14 Additionally, many treasure-hunting manuals are so full of wondrous accounts of magical spells, death-dealing automata and stories about ill-fated earlier seekers after treasure that they should really be reassigned to the category of entertaining fiction.

  In fiction, as in purported fact, one needed more than a good map and a shovel in order to unearth ancient treasures, for the treasure hunter might expect to encounter guardian monsters, killer statues and magical traps, and that is indeed what the participants in the Quests included in Tales of the Marvellous do encounter. As the leader of the First Quest asserts, ‘He who dares wins.’ Their perilous adventures can be compared to those of Indiana Jones, though the supernatural features more prominently in the medieval stories. The treasure-hunting stories bear witness to the awe experienced by the medieval Arabs when they contemplated the wonders of antiquity and they asked themselves what had happened to the fabulous wealth of the ancient Greeks and Romans, as well as of the Pharaohs and Persian emperors – and besides material treasures there was also thought to be a lost knowledge that could only be acquired at a price. The ancients were believed to have anticipated global catastrophes and taken steps to preserve their secrets in some form that would survive fire and water. The pyramids were commonly thought to be storehouses of esoteric wisdom, but in ‘Sa‘id Son of Hatim’ we learn how Adam, foreseeing the Deluge, had his secret knowledge written down on baked clay tablets, which were then sealed in a cave.

  As the stories of dangerous automata suggest, medieval storytellers envisaged advanced technology not as something that would be achieved in the future, but rather as something whose secrets were lost in the distant past. The statue of Memmon, king of Ethiopia, near Thebes in Egypt was reported to sing when struck by the sun’s rays at dawn. It was said that the Greek artificer Daedalus constructed moving statues that were animated by quicksilver and which walked in front of the Labyrinth that he had also constructed. In Tales of the Marvellous death-dealing automata guarded the treasures sought by the protagonists of the Quest stories. Unusually, in ‘Julnar’ the sorceress Queen Lab is mistress of a group of singing automata. Statues were dangerous. They hardly ever featured as objects of art in medieval Arab literature. Instead, some were characterized as evil-averting talismans or guardians of treasure, while others were human beings or animals who had been turned to stone. In several of the tales in Tales of the Marvellous demons enter the statues and speak through them. Stone monks guard treasure in the first of the four treasure-hunting stories. A statue on the Talisman Mountain has the power to immobilize ships. Such things, neither alive nor dead, are intrinsically uncanny.

  Treasure-hunting stories are full of marvels and excitement, but, as with the Nights story ‘The City of Brass’, they also carry a lot of moralizing about the transience of worldly wealth and the vanity of earthly power. For example, the treasure seekers on the First Quest enter a gallery in which there is a sarcophagus in which:

  there was a dead man surrounded by piles of dinars with a golden tablet by his head. This had an inscription: ‘Whoever wishes this rubbish, doomed as it is to perish, let him take what he wants of it, for he will leave it behind as I have done and die as I have died, while his actions will be hung around his neck.’

  Then again, those on the Second Quest encounter a shrouded corpse with a tablet of green topaz at its head, on which was the following inscription:

  ‘I am Shaddad the Great. I conquered a thousand cities; a thousand white elephants were collected for me; I lived for a thousand years and my kingdom covered both east and west, but when death came to me nothing of all that I had gathered was of any avail. You who see me, take heed for Time is not to be trusted.’

  In the fourth story, that of the golden tube, the message in the tube runs as follows:

  ‘In the Name of God Almighty – This world is transient while the next world is eternal. Our actions are tied around our necks; disasters are arrows; people set themselves goals; our livelihood is apportioned to us, and our appointed time is decreed. The world is filled with hope, and good deeds are the best treasures for a man to store up. Toleration is an adornment and hastiness is a disgrace … A man’s wife is the sweet flower of his life and finds acceptance as many such flowers do.’

  A treasure hunter might hope to end up rich: he should certainly end up conventionally pious.

  In Sura 89 of the Qur’an, Muslims and unbelievers are admonished:

  Hast thou not seen how thy Lord did with Ad,r />
  Iram of the pillars,

  the like of which was never created in the land,

  and Thamood, who hollowed the rocks in the valley,

  and Pharaoh, he of the tent-pegs,

  who were all insolent in the land

  and worked much corruption therein?

  Thy Lord unloosed on them a scourge of chastisement;

  surely thy Lord is ever on the watch.

  So also in Tales of the Marvellous a good Muslim should take warning from what befell the great kings in the pagan past.

  The golden tube also contains a promise: ‘Whoever wishes to see a wonder should go to the Scented Mountain.’ One gets the sense that the treasure hunters are not so much seeking tangible treasures but really they are on a quest for adventure and strangeness. The story of a quest for treasure turns out to be the story of the quest for a story. As the man on the Third Quest says, when the centaur tries to bribe him not to see the magical crown, ‘We only want to look at marvels and to see what we have never seen before, and if we see the crown we can put it back in its place.’ (The plot of the Third Quest has a faint but eerie resemblance to Kipling’s story ‘The Man Who Would Be King’).

  The Pagan Past

  The history of medieval Egypt took place in the shadow of the pyramids. Shepherds took their flocks through the outlying rubble of Karnak, and women washed clothes in the shade of the ruins of Philae. Since knowledge of hieroglyphs and the real history of Egypt had been lost, a fantasy history was constructed. The scale of the ruins, far beyond the ability of any medieval sultan to match, suggested the supernatural power and fabulous wealth of the bygone dynasties of pre-Islamic times. One of the glories of Egypt was the number of marvels it contained. At the beginning of ‘Mahliya and al-Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle’ the Arab general ‘Amr ibn al-‘As marvels at a great ruin at Heliopolis in Egypt. He ‘saw a huge old building bigger than any he had ever seen, surrounded by remarkable remains’. This leads him on to ask the hermit Matrun for its story. According to Muslim lore Ikhmim in Upper Egypt was the capital of the country’s sorcerers (though in the story of Mahliya this pre-eminent role has been usurped by Samannud). The sheer wild inventiveness of this story, with its jumbling of Muslim, Christian and pagan beliefs and rituals, cannot pass without comment. Here we have a mechanical vulture, visionary dreams, conversation with a pagan god, magical transformations, thrones of wrath and of mercy, an enchanted gazelle, a herder of giant ostriches, lustful jinn, speaking idols, a queen of the crows, a weeping lion, a fortress guarded by talismans, a crocodile with pearls in its ears, the sacrifice of virgins to the Nile and much else. The narrative is one long carnival of extravagant fantasy. (Al-Maqrizi and other Arab historians told the story of how every year a virgin was sacrificed to the Nile in order to ensure its flooding, until the Arabs conquered Egypt and ‘Amr ibn al-‘As put a stop to the practice. But the story is probably an anti-Coptic libel.)