by Robert Irwin
And craves for her tormentor;
If I hide love, I die.
When ‘Oh heart!’ I exclaim My foes mock my distress.
O tearful one who chantest
Of mouldering ditch and line,
Or hopefully decantest,
I have no eyes for thine.
Let yearning glow aflame, Tears pour in vain excess.
Mine eye, love’s attribute venting,
Expended all its store,
Then its own pain lamenting
Began to weep once more.
My heart is past reclaim Or sweet forgetfulness.
I blame it not for weeping
My heart’s distress to share,
As, weary but unsleeping,
It probed the starry sphere.
To count them was my aim But they are numberless.
A doe there was I trysted
(No lion is as tough.)
I came, but she insisted
‘Tomorrow’, and sheered off.
Hey, folks, d’you know that game?
address? And what’s the gal’s
Gibb, Arabic Literature. An Introduction, pp. I T1-12
The zajal was similar to the muwashshah, but it was written in colloquial Arabic and it might even contain a sprinkling of non-Arabic words. The noun derives from the verb zajala, ‘to utter a cry’. (Arabic dictionaries also define zajal as ‘the soft humming sound made by the jinn at night’). Again according to Ibn Khaldun, people ‘made poems of the type in their sedentary dialect, without employing vowel endings. Thus they invented a new form, which they called zajal. They have continued to compose poems of this type down to the present time [the late fourteenth century]. They achieved remarkable things in it. It opened the field for eloquent poetry in dialect, which is influenced by non-Arab speech habits.’
Although the earliest surviving examples of the zajal seem to date from the twelfth century, it may well have developed in tandem with the muwashshah. Because of the nature of Arabic script and syntax, which make it peculiarly difficult to register the colloquial, zajal poems were different to transcribe; perhaps for this reason we find examples of the form only in manuscripts of a relatively late date. The zajal was likely to have more lines than the muwashshah. Like the muwashshah, the zajal had a concluding kharja and the whole poem was composed to be sung.
Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn ‘Isa IBN QUZMAN (d. 1160), the great poet of Hispano-Arabic colloquial, was certainly the most famous composer of zajah. He led the life of a goliard, wandering from town to town in search of patronage. In his poems he celebrated the delights of wine, women and song. However, bitterness and sarcasm alternate with hedonism in Ibn Quzman’s poetry. He was unhappily married and he claimed that he was constantly accompanied on his travels by the Qird, the Ape of Evil Fortune. Ibn Quzman was a keen observer of everyday events in the streets. In his poems he presents himself as a low-lifer, dissolute, ugly and hard-drinking. A literary cult of the low-lifer and criminal had flourished among the educated elite in tenth-century Iraq (see Chapter 5), and it may be that the disparaging self-image that Ibn Quzman presented to his audience was in part a literary affectation, although he did spend time in prison for immorality and impiety. He made use in his zajah of Romance words as well as vernacular Arabic.
As for refined love – let others claim it.
May God, instead, give me contentment:
Kisses, embraces and the rest.
(If you ask any further, you prove yourself nosy.)
A. Hamori (trans.), in Ashtiany et al. (eds.), The Cambridge
History of Arabic Literature: 'Abbasid Belles-Lettres, p. 212
Disparagers of love, now hear my song;
Though you be of a mind to do love wrong,
Believe rne, moonlight is the stuff whereof
My lady’s limbs are made. I offer proof.
Something I saw, full moon in her, alive,
Cool in her balanced body, took me captive;
Her beauty, young, her anklets, with a thrill
They pierced my heart, to cause my every ill.
A lover is a man amazed. Desire
Can drive him mad the moment he’s on fire;
Heartsick, when he has had the thing he wants;
Worse, if he’s deceived by what enchants.
A lover knows he’s not the only one.
His lady’s garden gate, she keeps it open:
A challenge – passion hurts him even more.
Whom will she choose? Whom will she ignore?
I’m of a kind a woman’s body charms
So to the quick, it’s Eden in her arms:
Absolute beauty being all we seek,
We can be melted by a touch of magic.
As for the moon, so for the sun: from both
She draws her power; moon pearls grace her mouth,
Solar fire crimsons her lips, and yet
She’s not ambiguous when her heart is set:
Burning in my reflections, day by day,
In every act of mine she has her say;
Even when, if ever, she’s at peace,
You’ll never find her supine in the least.
Such is my proven moon, my lady love.
Yet of myself she did once disapprove:
Pointing to the marks my teeth had made
Across her breast, then eyeing me, she said:
‘Easy does it, not too quick,
I like it slow, and nothing new.
Custom knows a thing or two,
It’s to custom we should stick:
Festina lente, that’s the trick –
Come at me slow, I’ll come with you.’
Middleton and Garza-Falcon, Andalusian Poems, pp. 74–5
My life is spent in dissipation and wantonness!
o joy, I have begun to be a real profligate!
Indeed, it is absurd for me to repent
When my survival without a wee drink would be certain death.
Vina, uino! And spare me what is said;
Verily, I go mad when I lose my restraint!
My slave will be freed, my money irretrievably lost
On the day I am deprived of the cup.
Should I be poured a double measure or a fivefold one,
I would most certainly empty it; if not, fill then the jarrón!
Ho! Clink the glasses with us!
Drunkenness, drunkenness! What care we for proper conduct?
And when you wish to quaff a morning drink,
Awaken me before the Volcón
Take my money and squander it on drink;
My clothes, too, and divide them up among the whores,
And assure me that my reasoning is correct.
I am never deceived in this occupation!
And when I die, let me be buried thus:
Let me sleep in a vineyard, among the vinestocks;
Spread [its] leaves over me in lieu of a shroud,
And let there be a turban of vine tendrils on my head!
Let my companions persevere in immorality, to be followed by
every beloved one.
And remember me continuously as you go about it.
As for the grapes, let whomsoever eats a bunch,
Plant the [leftover] stalk on my grave!
I will offer a toast to your health with the large cup;
Take your bottle, lift it high and empty it!
What a wonderful toast you have been honoured by.
Let whatever you decree against me come to pass!
By God, were it not for a trick done to me in a matter concerning a
woman,
I would have won bliss. She said [to me]: ‘There is a certain desire
which
I will not grant you, it being a question of my honour.’
Alas! The price of that was paid out later!
I, by God, was seated, when there came to me with a garland on
her head,
A Berber girl; what a beauty of a
conejo!
‘Whoa!’ [said I, ‘She] is not a sera of cardacho,
But don’t pounce [on her] for neither is she a grañón!
‘Milady, say, are you fine, white flour or what?’
‘I am going to bed.’ ‘By God; you do well!’
I said: ‘Enter.’ She replied: ‘No, you enter first, by God.’
(Let us cuckold the man who is her husband.)
Hardly had 1 beheld that leg
And those two lively, lively eyes,
When my penis arose in my trousers like a pavilion,
And made a tent out of my clothes.
And since I observed that a certain ‘son of Adam’ was dilated,
The chick wished to hide in the nest.
‘Where are you taking that polio, for an immoral purpose?
Here we have a man to whom they say: ’O what shamelessness!”,
I, by God, immediately set to work:
Either it came out, or it went in,
While I thrust away sweetly, sweet as honey,
And [my] breath came out hotly between her legs.
It would have been wonderful, had it not been for the insults that
were exchanged the next day,
For they began to squabble and to brawl:
‘Remove your hand from my beard, 0 ass!’
‘You, throw the frying pan for the toston!’
One claws at an eyelid, the other slaps;
One tears clothes to shreds, the other floors his adversary;
No matter where I throw green quinces,
I get hit only on the head by the bastont
That is the way the world is! Not that it is my style,
Yet in this way they managed to humiliate me.
As for me, 0 people, although it was a light [punishment],
Never have I suffered such shame as at present.
Indeed, my opinion is as follows: You are viewed by the eye of
reproof;
No place in this city is big enough for you to hide.
Where are the means [of departure] for one such as Ibn Quzman?
In my opinion nothing is more certain than that [I shall get them].
O my hope and my well-watched star;
My life and my beloved one:
I desire largesse and it is from you that it is desired!
I am your guarantor for your glory will be guaranteed!
Your hands have an eminent right to dispose of me,
And in your honour do I go and stop,
While your virtues are too excellent for me to describe.
Drops of water are not to be compared with bursting rain clouds.
You have shown me a path to prosperity;
You have adorned me before my enemy and my friend;
For in you my hand has been attached to a firm rope;
You who are such that all others are withheld from me.
O, Abu Ishaq, 0 lord among viziers,
Bright flower of this world and lord among emirs!
The like of you gives new life to poetry for poets,
While you make public a generosity that was hidden [before your
arrival]!
May you remain happy, achieving your aspirations,
And may you witness high rank and nobility with affability,
As long as darkness changes [to light] and the new moon shines,
And as long as a plant still grows green and branches rise high!
Monroe, Hispano-Arabic Poetry: A Student Anthology, pp. 260–70
COMMENTARY
Ibn Quzman’s verses are interestingly similar to the ‘goliardic’ Latin poems of a secular and profane nature which were produced in western Christendom in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. (On the learned vagabonds who composed verses in praise of wine, women and song, see Helen Waddell’s classic masterpiece, The Wandering Scholars (192-7)-)
jarrón is Spanish for ‘jug’. (Ibn Quzman’s Arabic has it as jurun.)
Yolcon is Spanish for ‘the emptying of cups’. (Ibn Quzman has al-bulqun.)
Conejo is Spanish for ‘rabbit’.
Sera of cardacho is conjectural and cannot be translated with any confidence.
GraÑón is boiled wheat-porridge. Ibn Quzman is here writing in a popular idiom, the sense of which has been lost.
Pallo is a chicken.
Toston is Spanish for a piece of toast fried in olive oil.
Baston is Spanish for stick.
Abu Ishaq was presumably a friend and potential patron of Ibn Quzrnan.
Wickedness of a much more serious sort was expounded in a sinister text known as the Ghayat al-Hakim, or ‘Goal of the Sage’. This was a sorcerer’s manual which was purported to have been written by a famous eleventh-century Spanish Arab mathematician, al-Majriti. This ascription, which was certainly false, was probably made in order to give the text a spurious respectability. However, the Ghayat al-Hakim does seem to have been put together in Muslim Spain in the mid-eleventh century, though nothing is certain. An abridged and bowdlerized version of the text was translated into Latin under the title Picatrix. There is also evidence that the text was translated into Spanish, though that version has not survived. The author, ‘pseudo-al-Majriti’, also wrote an alchemical manual, the Ruth a al-Hakim, ‘The Rank of the Sage’.
The lengthy text mingles high-flown esoteric speculation and practical (occasionally murderous) spells with tales of the marvellous. Much of the Ghayat al-Hakim can indeed be read as a work of entertainment, as story-telling thinly disguised as magical instruction. There are stories of legendary and fantastic kings of ancient Egypt. There is the story of the young man spirited by enchantment to his lover; of the two men who met while walking on the surface of the Red Sea; of the Kurdish sorcerer’s apprentice; of the sinister fate of red-haired men unfortunate enough to fall into the hands of Nabataean sorcerers; and many more.
As far as the spells are concerned, they rely heavily on a knowledge of astrology and the use of talismanic figures. The author was familiar with the writings of Ibn Washshiyya (see Chapter 4) and shared the latter’s enthusiasm for poisons. There is consistent stress on the marvellous powers of the human body and the usefulness of the body’s constituents for spells. Excrement was a particularly useful material with which to work magic.
The notion of correspondences and their magical efficacy played an important part in shaping the intellectual world of most medieval Muslims, Christians and Jews. As Michel Foucault put it in The Order of Things:‘It was resemblance that largely guided exegesis and the interpretation of texts; it was resemblance that organized the play of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art of representing them. The universe was folded in upon itself: the earth echoing the sky, faces seeing themselves reflected in the stars, and plants holding within their stems the secrets that were of use to man.’ The medieval Spanish sorcerer did not conceive of magic as a box of tricks, but rather as the summation of philosophy.
Mingled in with the Ghayafs malignant spells and childish promises of wish-fulfilment are pages of high-flown mysticism and humanism. Man seeks through study of the Divine to return to his origins in the Divine. The author insists on the sublimity of the occult science, for magic is the summation of all philosophy. The following is from Chapter 6 of Book One. The Arabic is obscure and the sentence order sometimes seems to have got jumbled, so some of the translation is conjectural. (My English is, I think, somewhat clearer than the original Arabic, which arguably makes it a bad translation.) However, though the text is obscure, it also seems interesting and important.
Know (may God ennoble you) that wisdom is an exceeding noble thing and that he who studies it partakes of its nobility and distinction. Moreover, within wisdom there are ranks, each one becoming manifest as the previous one is mastered. However, the Perfect Man is he who holds the fruits of wisdom within him, drawing on them whenever he has the desire to do so. It is certain that the noblest of the various
definitions of philosophy that have been made is that philosophy treasures wisdom before all other things. He who falls short of this should not be reckoned to be a man, even if in all other respects he resembles a man. This is because he does not comprehend the true nature of his being, which is that man is a microcosm which corresponds to the macrocosm. In essence he is a perfect particular entity, possessed of a rational soul as well as an animal soul and a vegetable soul. He is unique in possessing all three, for animals do not have a rational soul. The possession of a rational soul is crucially distinctive, for it is this which engenders the crafts and it is this which summons unseen things to mind as well as grasping the audible. It is also by this that he sees in his sleep what has happened in his day. He is a small world enclosed in the greater world and through the correspondence of his form to its forms he is in harmony with it and all the elements of existence are conjoined in him. He has what all life forms have, yet he distinguishes himself from them in his knowledge and guile.
He is capable of six movements. His backbone extends in a straight line down to his thighbones. Man dies naturally and his life is a succession of accidents. He has close-set fingers and palms and a round skull, as well as nails and an index-finger. He can master the sciences and writing and can invent crafts. He can mimic the beasts, but they cannot mimic him. He laughs, weeps and uses tears to express sadness. He possesses godlike powers as well as the capacity to govern politically. He is a statue illuminated from within. His body is a container which his soul inhabits. The line of his body runs straight. He can distinguish between what is harmful to him and what is beneficial to him. He acts purposefully, so that he can do something or refrain from it on theoretical grounds. He invents crafts and creates miraculous and wonderful talismans. He retains intellectual concepts and lets go of the mundane. God has made him the guardian of His Wisdom and the intermediary between His Soul and all of His Creation. Man is the recipient of His Inspiration and the vessel for His sciences and proclamations. Man is both the offspring of the macrocosm and its seal, in such a manner that all concepts are brought together in his construction. Although created things are totally diverse, he comprehends them within himself and he understands them, while they do not understand him. He makes use of them, without being used by them. He uses his tongue to mimic their sounds and his hand to imitate their appearance. His nature is remote from theirs. The beasts are unable to do a single thing which alters either their nature or their voice. The cock can only crow; the dog can only bark; the lion can only roar. Yet the man changes his voice and predisposition at will and mimics whatsoever he wishes and he governs both himself and others.
