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

by Malcolm C (Tr Lyons

  Prophecy

  One of the conventions of medieval Arab storytelling is that if an astrologer makes a prophecy, it invariably becomes true. One cannot beat fate. Unusually, the astrologer’s prophecy in the opening of ‘The King of the Two Rivers’ does not in the end come true, though it serves to get the story moving. Also the prince’s prediction that he will attack his father with a great army is never fulfilled, though it serves to explain why he was sent out in the desert. ‘Abu Disa’ sends up astrology mercilessly. The message of that story is perhaps that as long as one trusts in God everything will work out all right. In one of the more bizarre scenes in ‘Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle’, set in a church in Baalbek (in what is now Lebanon), the pagan god Baal addresses Mauhub with the following words:

  Great king and leader, you will meet sorrows, difficulties and dangers, grave matters, the revelation of hidden secrets, heavy cares and troubles following one after the other. All this will be thanks to a beautiful gazelle acting as a lover wounded at heart. Take your time in dealing with this affair, Mauhub, and now, farewell, great king.

  Here prophecy serves as prolepsis, since it promises ordeals and adventures to come.

  According to Ulrich Marzolph, who has made a close study of these tales, ‘Sa‘id Son of Hatim al-Bahili’ ‘is the most remarkable story in the collection’.15 It certainly is rather strange, and I believe that it has no other close parallel in Arab literature. A narrative to comfort a sleepless caliph, it starts off as a fairly conventional tale about the wonders of the sea and the conquest of part of India but then turns into something quite different, for the Muslim expeditionary force encounters an incredibly ancient hermit, Simeon, who declares himself to be the disciple and former companion of the biblical prophet Daniel. However, while Daniel is long dead, Simeon has succeeded in living on into Islamic times.

  Setting the meeting with Simeon aside for a moment, it should be noted that in the Old Testament and the Apocrypha Daniel was noted for his prophecies. He retained this reputation in medieval Islamic times, and all sorts of prophetic treatises were spuriously attributed to him. According to Islamic tradition, Daniel acquired his knowledge of the future in a place known as the Cave of Treasures. Several of the prophetic treatises attributed to Daniel attach their predictions to astrological and meteorological phenomena such as eclipses, thunderstorms, rainbows and oddly shaped clouds. But the prophecies of Daniel that Simeon preserves in his story have little or nothing in common with this sort of divination. His prophecies can be classified as malahim.

  In Arabic malahim literally means ‘slaughterings’, and its singular form is malhama. The term is used to designate prophecies that treat of such grand matters as the rise and fall of dynasties, future wars with Christians, the Muslim conquest of Constantinople and Rome, the coming invasion of Gog and Magog, the Last Battle and the End of the World. These treatises drew widely on Jewish and Christian material and they were often attributed to monks. For example, The Vision of the Monk Bahira, which seems to have been produced in the eighth century, was very popular. There was a proliferation of apocalypses in the late Umaiyad period (early eighth century). In general, things were predicted to get worse before they got better. Armand Abel, who made a special study of malahim prophecies, remarked that these popular fantasies were really more interesting than ‘the bourgeois Arabian Nights’.

  Simeon’s prophecies are a bit of a dog’s dinner, as they seem to be drawn from a variety of ill-assorted sources and times. Some of the events ‘predicted’ had already happened at the time this story was put together, while others have yet to happen (and probably never will). The prophecies are obscurely and allusively pitched in a manner that anticipates those of the sixteenth-century French astrologer Nostradamus. But Simeon’s predictions are moralistic, since the dreadful things that are to come are divine punishment for the decline of Muslim piety and practice.

  At times Simeon seems to be prophesying events during the Arab–Byzantine wars of the tenth century. The Qarmatians sacked Mecca in 930 and stole the Black Stone from the shrine in Mecca. Dailam is a mountainous region in northern Iran, south of the Caspian Sea. Although the Abbasid caliphs sent several expeditions there, it was never really under their control. Then in 945 Dailamite Buyid warlords established a protectorate over the Abbasid caliphs. Simeon foresees four rival caliphates existing simultaneously. From the tenth to late twelfth centuries there were three competing caliphates: the Abbasid caliphate in Bagdad, the Fatimid caliphate in Cairo and the Umaiyad caliphate in Cordova. But it is hard to think of a fourth caliphate. Hajaj ibn Yusuf never killed an Abbasid ruler in Mecca. Though the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was demolished by the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim in 1009, it was not actually burned down.

  Other ‘predictions’ seem to refer to events in the thirteenth century, while yet others cannot be confidently attached to any real events. In 1236 Cordova fell to the army of Ferdinand III of Castile, although the Christian Reconquista of Spain was not completed until 1492. The ‘Persian’ invasion is predicted to happen more than 600 years after the death of the Prophet. So that would place it in the mid to late thirteenth century and therefore what might be being ‘prophesied’ was the Mongol invasion of Iraq, their killing of the last Abbasid caliph in Bagdad and then their invasion of Syria, which was launched from Persia. Ghadanfar is the name of a fictional character in the popular chivalrous romance of ‘Antar, which is set in the period just before and during the rise of Islam. In ‘Antar, he is the son of the heroic Arab warrior ‘Antar by a Christian princess, and for much of the epic he fought as a crusader against the Muslims. But Simeon calls him ‘al-Farisi’ (the Persian), and that makes no sense at all.

  Earlier in the story of ‘Sa‘id Son of Hatim al-Bahili’ the infidel king told his people not to fight the Muslim expeditionary force. ‘For five hundred years,’ he told them, ‘their empire has been advancing victoriously, so make peace with them and do not resist them or they will conquer you.’ What kind of chronological sense is that? The Muslim conquests began in the early seventh century. So are we to understand that the Muslim encounter with the infidel king and with Simeon took place in the twelfth century? If so, how could the story of the expedition have been told to Hisham ibn ‘Abd al-Malik, who was Umaiyad caliph from 724 to 743?

  Coincidence and Fate

  In ‘Talha, the Son of the Qadi of Fustat’ what was the chance of Salih (Tuhfa’s former protector in Damascus) ending up begging at her husband’s house in Cairo? Or in ‘Muhammad the Foundling and Harun al-Rashid’ the chance of the caliph happening to go to the very bathhouse where Khultukh happened to be working? Fate guides Badr and Jauhara to the same island. The broad comedy of the bogus astrologer ‘Usfur depends heavily on a ludicrous sequence of coincidences. But perhaps the message is that ‘Usfur’s aggressively nagging wife is right, for if you trust in God everything will be well. And as the king observes towards the end of the story, ‘When God grants good fortune to one of his servants, He makes all things serve him, and when fortune comes, it acts as teacher to a man.’ Of course coincidences (ittifaqat) made the storyteller’s work easier, but there was a pious subtext, as medieval Muslims were inclined to detect the hand of God behind such occurrences. Abu Mansur ‘Abd al-Malik al-Tha‘alibi’s tenth-century treatise, the Lata’if al-ma‘arif (The Book of Curious and Entertaining Information) included chapters ‘Concerning curious coincidences and patterns in names and patronymics’ and ‘Concerning interesting and entertaining pieces of information about various unusual happenings and strange coincidences’. Coincidences were indications of a divinely ordained destiny at work. As the film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini remarked of the Nights, ‘The chief character is in fact destiny itself.’16 It is fate that turns men’s lives into stories.

  The article devoted to ‘Religion’ in The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia touches on fate and remarks that ‘religious belief in the stories appears as the belief in fate. Although fate rules the hero’s lif
e, there is no story in which God intervenes directly to steer the course of the narrative. Fate acts as God’s representative.’17 But this is one respect in which Tales of the Marvellous does differ from the Nights, for God intervenes directly in ‘The King of the Two Rivers’ by restoring Kaukab’s hands and feet. In ‘Abu Muhammad the Idle’ He responds to the princess’s prayer and saves her from rape by the jinni. In ‘Miqdad and Mayasa’ He sends the archangel Gabriel to instruct ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib to free Miqdad from captivity. A deus ex machina indeed!

  Dreams of Opulence

  An obsession with fabulous wealth pervades these stories. When the lost prince entered the castle of the forty girls, ‘he found that it had a huge door with plates and ornamental patterns of gold and silver. It was covered with hangings and in the entrance hall there were various types of singing birds.’ The story goes on to list the extravagant accessories – the gold, silver, crystal ware, silks, aloes wood, ambergris and so on – as well as the rich food. In the Third of the Four Quests, a man describes how he acquired seventy of the al-andaran stones: ‘each of which was worth a qintar of gold. In the crown that they formed were set three hundred pearls, rubies and emeralds, worth qintars of gold, and various types of chrysolite, pearls and gold from the best mines were picked out for it.’ Though we cannot be sure of the exact composition of the readership of Tales of the Marvellous, it is a fair guess that evocations of extravagant decors and costumes were as much to be marvelled at by those readers, who surely did not dine in marble halls, as the monstrous beasts that the storyteller had conjured up from the sea.

  Christianity

  As already mentioned, another respect in which Tales of the Marvellous differs from the Nights is that Christian themes feature prominently in the former. Christians appear in the Nights, but as the authors of The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia note, there ‘Christians and their roles serve as a negative stereotype’.18 This is not the case in Tales of the Marvellous, and although its compilers appear to have been Muslim, they were thoroughly familiar with Christian doctrines and practices, and these feature prominently in ‘Sul and Shumul’, ‘Sa‘id Son of Hatim al-Bahili’ and ‘Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle’. (It is a little strange that in the last story Mauhub, a Christian, should be receptive to a prophecy delivered by the pagan deity Baal.) ‘Sul and Shumul’ also survives in a manuscript in Tübingen dating from the fourteenth century and it was probably composed in Syria. Part of the Tübingen manuscript has been broken up into nights, evidently in preparation for the insertion of the story into The Thousand and One Nights, though it never reached its intended destination. (sul is Arabic for ‘question’, and shumul means ‘reunion’). In ‘Sul and Shumul’ and in several of the other stories Christian monks and hermits feature as conveyors of knowledge and wisdom. The man who went on the First Quest was a Christian who was recruited to the treasure hunt in a church, and only after the Quest was over did he convert to Islam. In general, these stories betray no hostility to Christianity, except that in ‘Sa‘id Son of Hatim’, the monk Simeon denounces the Jews and Christians for having corrupted and altered their scriptures, in particular by removing all references to the future coming of Muhammad and the truth of his message. (This alleged tampering with the Torah and the Gospels has been and continues to be a common feature of Muslim polemic against Christians and Jews.) Because the Jews and Christians had corrupted the divine revelation, ‘the Great and Glorious God afflicted them with wars and discords, bringing ruin and destruction on them, forcing them to pay tribute as subjects’. Under Muslim rule Christians were protected and free to practise their religion as ‘People of the Book’ (ahl al-kitab), but they did indeed pay a special tribute known as jizya. Simeon’s status in this story is a curious one, for he was a Christian monk and former disciple of Jesus ‘on whom be peace’, who, having lived to witness the mission of the Prophet, has become a Muslim hermit.

  The Rewards of Idleness

  The first of the four treasure hunters makes this confession:

  As a young man I enjoyed myself, squandering my goods and my wealth and consorting with kings while for me the eye of Time slept. But Time then woke to betray me, destroying what I had and after I had spent three days at home without food, I left to escape the gloating pleasure of my enemies, without any notion of where to go.

  In ‘Talha, the Son of the Qadi of Fustat’, the young man swiftly squanders his inheritance and has to be rescued by his faithful and far more competent slave girl. In ‘Abu Muhammad the Idle’ the protagonist’s comically extreme idleness makes Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov seem like a go-getter, but, of course, everything works out fine for him after he gets someone else to spend a few coins on his behalf. The young idler who squanders his inheritance but who wins through to a fortune that is not really deserved makes several appearances in the Nights, and indeed ‘Abu Muhammad the Idle’ is included in the Nights. The latent message may be that man proposes, but destiny decrees. Or perhaps it is that feckless men will always find capable women to look after them. The prince in ‘The Forty Girls’ would have achieved nothing without the continuous guidance and prompting of the sorceress disguised as a horse.

  Bedouin Stories

  Two Bedouin stories, ‘Miqdad and Mayasa’ and ‘Sakhr and al-Khansa’ ’, are included in Tales of the Marvellous. Miqdad is known to history. Since Miqdad grew up in jahili, or pre-Islamic times, but lived on into the Islamic era, he is counted among the mukhadram, those people, especially poets, whose lifespans extended across both eras. The word mukhadram derives from the verb khadrama, ‘to cut the ear of one’s camel’. God knows why. Miqdad was one of the earliest to convert to Islam and he died in 653 or 654. In the fiction of ‘Miqdad and Mayasa’ he is portrayed engaging in single-handed combat against preposterous odds. Though he shows a remarkable ability to chant poetry as he fights, it is a matter of record that in early Arabian tribal conflicts warriors did chant poetry as they went into battle. Al-Khansa’ (‘Snub Nose’), together with her beloved brother Sakhr, are also known to history. She was a seventh-century poet who specialized in laments for the dead. She converted to Islam and died after 644. Sakhr really was one of her brothers, whom she commemorated in elegies after he was killed in tribal warfare, but of course the details given by the story are fiction and improbable fiction at that. The Nights similarly contains tales of Bedouin derring-do and love, such as ‘The Lovers of the Banu Tayy’ and ‘The Lovers of Banu ‘Udhra’. These fantasies evolved out of the well-established genre of the ayyam al-‘Arab, or ‘the [battle] days of the Bedouin Arabs’, stories which, in a mixture of verse and prose, celebrated the wars and skirmishes of the pre-Islamic tribes. A third story, ‘Sul and Shumul’, starts off as a Bedouin tale but then mutates into something quite different. The youth of the two lovers should be noted, for Sul and Shumul are only fourteen.

  Most of the tales contained in Tales of the Marvellous should not be classed as folklore. Moreover, they do not have the appearance of stories that first circulated orally before being written down, and neither are there indications that they were part of the professional storytellers’ repertoire and were told in the market place or on street corners. Instead the tales, which display creative ingenuity and even at times erudition, must be classed as literature. Perhaps we should regard them as very early and impressive examples of pulp fiction.

  Notes

  1 Paul Bowles’s introduction to his translation of Larbi Layachi’s, A Life Full of Holes (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964), published under Layachi’s pseudonym Driss ben Hamed Charhadi, p. 10.

  2 The titles of the stories in the missing second volume are as follows: ‘Salma and al-Walid’, ‘The Thief of the Barmecides’, ‘Jamila the Bedouin’, ‘Sa‘da and Hasan’, ‘Fawz and al-‘Abbas’, ‘The Female Singer Hawza’, ‘The Drinker Ahmad’, ‘Ardashir Son of Mahan’, ‘The Golden Pigeon’, ‘Ahmad al-‘Anbari’, ‘The Ebony Horse’, ‘Al-‘Aquluqi (The Attendant)’, ‘Badr and the Vizier’, ‘Shams a
l-Qusur’, ‘Salman’, ‘The Island of Bamboo’, ‘The Island of Diamonds’, ‘The Confused King’, ‘King Shaizuran’, ‘Bayad and Riyad’, ‘Tahir Son of Khaqan’, ‘Abu’l-Faraj al-Isfahani’, ‘The Slave Girl Who Swallowed the Piece of Paper’.

  In a minority of cases the stories that go with these titles can be identified. ‘The Ebony Horse’ is found in late manuscripts of the Nights. ‘Badr and the Vizier’ appears under the title ‘The Story of King Badr al-Din Lulu and his Vizier Atamulk, Surnamed the Sad Vizier’ in a compilation of stories put together by François Pétis de la Croix under the title Les Mille et Un Jours. First published in 1712, this collection, which drew on diverse sources, has been edited and republished by Paul Sebag (Paris: Phébus, 2003). ‘The Golden Pigeon’ features in at least two Arabic manuscripts. The love story of ‘Bayad and Riyad’ similarly survives in two manuscripts, in this case originating in Spain or Morocco.