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THE ODE OF ABŪ SHĀDŪF WITH COMMENTARY

11.0

All of which paves the way for the woes that on our own poet were inflicted, and the accidents of fate, both overt and covert, with which he was afflicted and which were the reason for his composing this ode, and of his complaint, profuse and extended, against all that fate on him bestowed. Thus he says:

TEXT

11.1

yaqūlu abū shādūfi31 min ʿuẓmi mā shakā

mina l-qilli jismū mā yaḍāl naḥīf

Says Abū Shādūf: from all he has suffered

of want, his body’s ever skinny

COMMENTARY

11.1.1

These words are metered³² and tuned,³³ have feet, and may be crooned.³⁴ The meter’s the one that’s both “Long” and “Extended”³⁵—and impaired and distended. Those who claim its meter’s “the Perfect” say it goes “without intellect, without intellect (mutahābilun mutahābilun),”³⁶ while those who compare it to that called “the Exuberant” say, “This is the meter luxuriant!” and those who assign it to “the Diffused” say, “It’s flabby and confused!” while those who compare it to the Meter of the Chain³⁷ say it goes “featherbrain, featherbrain (halhalah halhalah),”³⁸ and those who compare it to other metrical clocks use, to represent it, “You’re a donkey or an ox.” Its usual tune goes to the measure “If you chew a bit of soap, it’ll make you like leather.”³⁹ Its feet, of which we’ve already made mention, appear as follows, when in articulation:⁴⁰

yaqūlu abū shā dūfi min ʿuẓmi mā shakā

nabūlu ʿalayhā fī l-ḍuḥā maʿ ghurū bihā

and the whole of the Ode is in the same mode, namely:

nabūlu ʿalayhā fī l-ḍuḥā maʿ ghurūbihā

We urinate upon it in the forenoon and at sunset.

Now that you know the meter and tune, the feet and the croon, let me embark on the exposition of the verse according to its rhythmic pattern, or in firecracker fashion.

11.1.2

Thus we declare:

yaqūlu (“Abū Shādūf says”)—i.e., he intends to initiate speech (qawl) external to himself that will contain an explanation of his state and evidence of the accidents of Time with which he was inflicted, and the occasions for woe and grief with which he was inflicted. The word qawl has paradigms and etymologies. The paradigm is qāla, yaqūlu, qawlan, and maqālatan, to which may be added qullatan (“water pitcher”)⁴¹ and qaylūlatan (“midday snooze”).⁴² It is derived from qaylūlah or from qulal (“water pitchers”) or from aqwāl (“sayings”) or from qālū (“they said”) or qulnā (“we said”).⁴³

11.1.3

I have added these facetious paradigms and silly etymologies simply as a point of departure for the account that I shall relate to you of an encounter I once had with one of those persons who claim learning while in fact they are ignorant, to wit that, when I went on pilgrimage to God’s Holy House⁴⁴ in the year 1074⁴⁵ and had reached the port of al-Quṣayr and was waiting there for the ships to leave, I stayed for a few days at a hostel on the sea, preaching to the people. One day, as I was reciting the Qurʾan there, explaining the words and their meanings to the people to make them clear, a sorry sight to see, accoutered for travel by sea, engaged in buffoonery and deliration, and cant and speechification,⁴⁶ there came towards me—let no one doubt my say-so!—a man round as a halo, tall and cretinous, gross and hebetudinous, with a turban huge as the Primordial Lump, and a woolen shawl draped over his chump. Clearly up to no good, he sat himself down and fixed me with a frown, while his determination to involve me in trouble and contention plainly could be read, since he could barely wait for me to say the word “Said …” And so it was as I’ve described, and in the manner that I’ve implied, for no sooner had I begun to give my lesson, and declared, “Said the Prophet, upon him peace and benison …” than he asked me in tones unrefined, “What’s the meaning of ‘said’ when it’s declined?” When I heard his query, and understood his ignorance and inanity, I realized that in learning he was so far from an adept as to be quite unaware of the difference between word and concept. So I said to him, “From qāl both nouns and verbs we may decline: qāla, yaqūlu, qawlan, and maqālatan or qullatan or qaylūlatan in fine—and if you like I’ll make you up, for sure, in addition to these six, thirty more!” Said he to me, “In what standard text is this declension shown?” Said I, “In the collected works of Ibn Sūdūn!” Then he accepted my words—he was that ignorant and benighted—and I realized that he couldn’t tell the name from the thing cited. Thenceforth, after all the pretension and bluster, he followed me as a sheep its master, and submitted in his comings and goings to my sway, till he departed and went his way.

11.1.4

If it be said, “How come you set out to confuse this inquirer with such paradigms and etymologies, and you gave him such good measure of imbecilities, when you should have stuck to what they’d say in a grammar book, instead of ladling out such gobbledygook?” we reply, “All well and good, but that only goes for those who understand scholarship as one should. As for the dumb ignoramus, who’s gross and pertinacious, his ignorance calls for nothing better than whatever nonsense one may churn out, and the haughtiness befitting the condition of such a lout. Thus the reply that I have given above—taken as it came—was quite appropriate to a question so inane. The problem’s now revealed, the silliness no longer concealed.”

11.1.5

A Silly Topic for Debate: What’s the explanation for the fact that the poet starts his verse in the present tense and does not use the past, unlike, for example, the author of The Thousand Lines on Grammar,⁴⁷ God have mercy on him, when he writes, “Muḥammad, Mālik’s son, has said … etc.?”⁴⁸ The Facetious Answer: It is the past tense of the verb, namely, qāla, from which the present tense, namely, yaqūlu, is generated, and from yaqūlu comes the verbal noun qawl, as already noted in tracing the origins of these verbs and nouns; thus the poet simply settled for using the derived rather than the base form. Or it may be that he wanted to enumerate the changes and vicissitudes of fate that had befallen him and, not having mentioned them earlier using past-tense forms, he determined to narrate them using the present-tense form, namely, yaqūlu, albeit this has past meaning formally speaking and present meaning in reality. As the poet says:

So qāla’s past, yaqūlu’s present,

Though the last is its past in reality.⁴⁹

And Abū l-Ṭayyib al-Mutanabbī,⁵⁰ may God excuse him his sins, says:

If what he intended were a present verb,

It would be past before any could negate it

—meaning, “If he intends to do something in the future, he completes the action before anything can ‘negate’ it,” that is, can intervene between him and its doing and silence the vowels of his verb.⁵¹ End. Also, if he were to introduce the past form, the meter would be broken, even if the meaning remained as before. Thus the answer now is right; the truth has loomed into sight.

11.1.6

Abū Shādūfi: this is his kunyah, but it took him over and became his primary name, as happened in the case of Maʿdīkarib, Baʿlabakk, Baraqa Naḥruhu, and so on.⁵² His real name was ʿUjayl, diminutive of ʿijl (“calf”), or so it is reported, the reason for his being so named being that, when his mother gave birth to him, she threw him in the cow’s trough, and then the calf came along and licked him, so they called him that for a few days, until he became known by the kunyah in question. The reason for his becoming known by the latter is variously explained. One version has it that when the times turned against him, as described above, he hired himself out to water the crops using the device made by the country people, called the Abū Shādūf.⁵³ The way this works is that they construct two pillars of mud next to the river and excavate a hole like a small pit between them; on the two pillars they place a small beam and also, at right angles, another, resembling the arm of a pair of scales; to the land end of the last they attach a weight, and to the river end, a bucket or scoop,⁵⁴ with which they raise the water. A man stands on the riverside and pulls the end of the crossbeam downward, and the bucket or scoop falls and scoops up the water; then he lets go, the other end descends under its weight, and the bucket or scoop rises and, with the aid of the man, empties into the pit; the water then runs on to the crops and so on, as we have ourselves observed on numerous occasions. The whole assemblage, consisting of the device itself with the pillars, is called abū shādūf, which is derived from shadf, which means “scooping” (gharf). It says in The Blue Ocean and Piebald Canon, shadafa, yashdufu, shadfan means gharafa, yaghrifu, gharfan. As the poet says:

If you see water, scoop (ushduf) carefully,

For that, to the thirsty, more comfortable is and more pleasant!

11.1.7

Thus the poet, because he cleaved to this device and became almost inseparable from it, came to be known by its name, according to the rule of “naming the condition after the position.” Another version has it that his mother gave birth to him next to an abū shādūf and he was therefore named after it, but this is refuted by what has already been said, to the effect that his original name was ʿUjayl. The two versions may be reconciled by saying that after his mother had given birth to him next to the abū shādūf, she took him and placed him in the trough and the calf licked him and he became known as described above. Thus there is no contradiction between the accounts. It is also said that he was so named because he did so much scooping of water with this device—so much, indeed, that it got to the point that anyone who asked after him would be told, “he’s busy shadf-ing” that is, “scooping”; then they added the alif and waw to the word and said shādūf.⁵⁵ With constant repetition, they have come to think of the crossbeam as though it were the child and the pillars as though they were the father, so that now they call the device “the father of the crossbeam (abū shādūf)”; and they applied the name to the poet himself because he was always next to the device and they identified him with it, and thus it became a proper name by which he was addressed, as already explained. End.

11.1.8

A Silly Debate: What is to be learned from the fact that the bucket or scoop never leaves the beam, which resembles the arm of a pair of scales; and does the latter play the role of father to the former, just as, as pointed out earlier, the two pillars play the role of father to the crossbeam of the shādūf; and is it the case that the bucket or scoop adheres to the beam merely out of necessity and, once disconnected from it, ceases to perform its function; and, as such, may it be said to be attached to it only when needed and not otherwise? We declare: the fatuous response is that the beam cannot dispense with the bucket or the scoop and neither can dispense with the beam, and so together they play the role of child to the beam, and the beam plays the role of father for the reason given, since both of them—the bucket and the scoop—are in a stable relationship with the beam. Now the contention’s straightened out, the silliness shown up for what it’s about.

11.1.9

A Useful Note: the word ab (“father”) is derived from āba, meaning “he returned.”⁵⁶ Ibn Zurayq,⁵⁷ God have mercy on him, says in an ode:

He never returns (āba) from one journey but feels an urge

To be on his way again, that only his will can purge.

That is, “he never comes back from one journey but the urge to undertake a second disturbs him.” It is the same with a father, because he is always coming back to his child and missing him and looking about for him. Others say that the word is derived from ubuwwah (“fatherhood”), just as akh (“brother”) is derived from ukhuwwah (“brotherhood”). Says the poet:

A man’s ab from āba derives,

And a man’s akh from ukhuwwah likewise.

The paradigm is āba, yaʾūbu, awban, active participle ābin.⁵⁸

11.1.10

Ibn Sūdūn⁵⁹ claims that abū, the construct form of ab, is really a perfect-tense defective verb,⁶⁰ being originally abūsu (“I would kiss”), and he cites as evidence the verse that says:

“They said, ‘Your sweetie hides his mouth affectedly from view;

What would you attempt, if he should show it?’ Said I, ‘abū …’⁶¹

“that is, abūs (‘I would kiss’), the s having been dropped for two reasons, the first being to deceive the listener, this being the proper thing to do in literary opinion and the more conducive to safety from tattletales and nosy parkers, and the second because its numerical value is sixty,⁶² and sixty kisses, according to some, is excessive.”

These are his words as explicitly stated in his collected works. End.

11.1.11

Personally, I would say that the opinion of such people, as transmitted by Ibn Sūdūn, is invalid, because, once the lover succeeds in winning his beloved, his heart will never be satisfied with sixty or even a hundred kisses, especially if the beloved in question is graceful of form, comely of feature, to his lover obedient, sincere, and compliant, whose genial body has not been denied, and who to his lover has been gathered like a bride, the lover of his beloved being thus fully possessed, the place free of tattletale, nosy parker or other pest. Then for kissing there is no number firm—it knows no bounds nor any term. As the poet says:

“One kiss!” I asked the full moon high in the sky.

“By Him who draped the clouds,”⁶³ he said, “I will comply!”

But when we met with none about,

I reckoned wrong and lost all count!

11.1.12

And I myself said on the same theme:⁶⁴

I saw upon his cheek a stippled mark that beauty held—

He whom an earring had made yet sweeter to behold.

“I want a kiss,” I said. Said he, “When we’re alone!”

And on that “stipulation” I kissed a thousandfold!

—unless the place be unsuitable for a lover and the object of his adoration, in that there’s a fear of tattletales or of observation, in which case any hugging and kissing will depend on how comfortable the lover feels—as to whether it be quite a lot or almost completely missing—though there are a few who have, in this regard, no doubt or fear and will kiss their loved ones in front of anyone who’s there, and, even though the latter turn and flee, chase after him relentlessly. As the poet says:

Would that you’d seen me and my darling

When, like a deer, he from me fled

And ran away, and I gave chase;

Would you’d seen us when after hot pursuit he said,

“Will you not leave me be?” and I said, “No!”

And he, “What would you of me?” and I, “You know!”

And he then stayed aloof and shyly turned his back,

And proudly turned, not to me, but away—

For then I almost kissed him, right in front of everyone.

Ah, would I now could do what then I should have done!

11.1.13

An amusing story has it that Abū Nuwās was one day walking in the streets of Baghdad when he saw a beautiful youth and kissed him in front of everyone. He and the youth were brought before the judge Yaḥyā ibn Aktham, and the youth brought charges against Abū Nuwās. After bowing his head in silence for a moment, the judge recited:⁶⁵

If you object to being groped and kissed

Don’t go to market without a veil;

Don’t lower lashes o’er a forelock

And don’t display upon your temple a scorpion curl,

For as you are, you slay the weak, drive the lover to delirium,

And leave the Muslims’ judge in dire travail!

The youth in turn bowed his head in silence for a while and then recited:⁶⁶

We had hoped to see justice between us,

But after hope there followed despair.

When will the world and its people go right

If the judge of the Muslims fucks boys in the rear?

11.1.14

min ʿuẓmi mā shakā (“from all that he has suffered”): that is, from the thing, or indeed the things, he has to complain of. He expresses his complaint out loud in the hope that the Almighty will release him from his sufferings and restore him to his former life of ease, for when things are at their worst they are not far from getting easier, and though the gate be strait, it opens onto larger spaces. Says the poet:

How many a night of woes like ulcers

I have tended, till I won through to day!

The blows of fate pass young men lightly by

And dissipate, and in their thoughts they do not stay.

There are different categories of complaint. There is the complaint to God, which is praiseworthy, and the complaint to one of His creation, which is blameworthy, unless the complainer place his trust entirely in the Almighty and rely on Him, seeking His help to repel whatever misfortunes may have befallen him—in which case there is no harm, though it is preferable for him to have patience and resign himself to God’s will, in which case God will grant him relief. The Almighty has said, «And give good tidings to the patient!»⁶⁷ and also, «Verily, along with hardship there shall be ease.»⁶⁸ Among the verses of Master Yaḥyā al-Buhlūl,⁶⁹ may the Almighty benefit us through him, are:

When things get tough,

Think on «Have we not dilated …?»!⁷⁰

Remember one “hardship” between two “eases”⁷¹

And neither mourn nor feel elated!

11.1.15

Next the poet decided to enumerate the things that had befallen him, one after another, beginning with the worst and the most important, so he says:

11.1.16

min al-qilli (“of want”), with an i after the q and no vowel after the l;⁷² that is, my gravest and greatest complaint is of qill (“want”), which is a paucity (qillah) of food and drink (the ah having being dropped for the meter)⁷³ and also of inadequate clothing and of the great toil and exhaustion required by the struggle to make a living. In the Tradition it says, “Poverty may bring one to the verge of denying one’s faith,” meaning that it may come close to forcing one to deny his faith because it leads to dissatisfaction with providence and displeasure with his material state and this may drag him into denying his faith. Ibn Daqīq al-ʿĪd, God have mercy upon him, said of poverty:

By my life, poverty has dealt me a cruel stroke,

And reduced me with it to confusion and dismay.

If I go public with my plaint, I violate my privacy;

But if I don’t confess my need, I fear I’ll die!

And it is said that four sayings were written on the crown of Chosroes Anūshirwān: “Justice If It Lasts Brings Prosperity”; “Injustice If It Lasts Brings Ruin”; “The Blind Man Is as Dead Though He Be Not Buried”; and “Poverty Is the Red Death.”⁷⁴ The people of the countryside use the word to cast aspersions on a poor man. They say that so-and-so is fī qill (“in a state of want”), and sometimes they add another word and say fī qill wa-ʿatrah, that is, in a state of struggle and exhaustion and the performance of foul deeds and awful doings. It is an expression used by the people of the countryside. One of their poets says:

Abū Jāmūs—his state

Makes people weep; he’s quite lost face:

He runs around and finds nothing,

And lives in want and disgrace (fī qillah wa-fī ʿatrah).

11.1.17

The word qill is of the measure of ghill (“rancor, spite”) or ẓill (“shadow”) and derives from qalqalah (“agitation, convulsion”) or from qullah (“water pitcher”), with u after the q, or from qawlaq (“leather money pouch”). The word ʿatrah, with a after the ʿ and no inflectional vowel at the end, is of the measure of zubrah (“small penis”); take a zubrah and weigh it against a ʿatrah, and you’ll see there’s no difference at all. The word means “the performance of acts of corruption and deficiency in religion” and so on. They say, “So-and-so is an ʿitr,” that is, one who does such things.⁷⁵ As for ʿathrah, with th, it is the singular of ʿatharāt (“slips, mistakes, sins”), which belongs to the chaste language, in which case the meaning would be that the sins of one who is mired in such a state are many; thus the sense is the same. Qill occurs in the language of the Arabs, as in the anecdote that a city man invited a Bedouin to a meal, and brought him out a bowl of food and a little bread. As often as the Bedouin took a mouthful, the city man would say to him, “Say, Bedouin, ‘In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate!’” and he kept repeating the same until the Bedouin was abashed and got up without eating his fill and left. Then, a few days later, the Bedouin left his dwelling and saw his city friend, so he took him and sat him down in his house and brought out a large bowl full of bread and meat with broth and said to him, “Eat, city man, and knock it back! There’s no blessing in paucity (qillah)!” that is, “there’s no blessing in paucity of food when accompanied by stinginess, whether you say ‘In the name of God’ or not, even though He be the source of that blessing, for what matters is an ungrudging spirit, even though its owner be poor,” for generosity comforts the heart and covers many a flaw. As the poet says:⁷⁶

If your flaws are become well known to men,

And you’re inclined to find for them a cover,

Assume a mantle of liberality, for any flaw,

They say, by liberality may be covered over

—and, as the common saying has it, “Whatever the flaw, generosity covers it.”

11.1.18

A Silly Debate: What is the wisdom in deriving qill from qawlaq, or from qullah, or from qalqalah, and how do they fit with one another, and what do these words mean? The Fatuous Response: qawlaq⁷⁷ is the name for a leather thing that is made to keep money in and tied onto the belt on the right thigh; some coffee waiters and others use it. The derivation of qill from qawlaq comes from the latter’s crampedness and its lack of room, since qill denotes a cramped life and lack of ease; thus it fits the meaning from that perspective. As for its derivation from qullah (“water pitcher”), with u after the q, this could be for one of several reasons. It may be because water is retained within it, in which case want and lack of good fortune are analogous to the presence or absence of the water. Alternatively, the fit may lie in the actual narrowness of the qullah and the fact that the water has to pass through narrow holes in order to come out,⁷⁸ and that, when submerged in water, it makes a gurgling sound, as though it were complaining to the water. As the poet says:

The mug makes a gurgle because it’s in pain:

It protests to the water what it suffered from the flame.

This process of firing implies distress and hardship, so it fits with the derivation of qill from that perspective. The third opinion states that it is derived from qalqalah (“agitation, convulsion”). From this point of view qill would be from the agitatedness (qalqalah) of events, that is, the speed with which they move, their intensity, and the distressing circumstances to which they give rise and so on. As the poet⁷⁹ says:

Stir (qalqil) your stirrups in the steppes (falā)

And leave the pretty girls at home.

Like dwellers in the grave to me are those

Who never from their homelands roam.

—that is, move your stirrups “in the falā,” which means the wide-open spaces. The meaning is: “Go east and west, and acquire whatever will relieve you of having to beg from others, and be not a burden upon them, and do not humiliate yourself before them, and leave the ghawānī—plural of ghāniyah, which means ‘a female possessed of beauty’; that is, abandon any such and do not allow yourself to be distracted by her from seeking your livelihood, for that distraction may lead to inactivity and idleness, in which case you will not find the wherewithal to spend on her and her heart will turn to someone else, with all sorts of evil consequences. If, on the other hand, you bestir yourself and leave her and then come back with all the things she needs to assuage her hunger and clothe her nakedness, she will stay with you just as your heart would desire and in perfect felicity. And even if you benefit little from your efforts and journeys, what you get will still be better for you than doing nothing.” As the poet says:

Man must work for what he needs,

And Fate is not obliged to help.

In one of the Revealed Books, the Almighty says, “My slave, I created you from motion; move and I will provide for you!” and the proverb says, “In activity is blessing,”⁸⁰ and the Imam al-Shāfiʿī,⁸¹ may the Almighty be pleased with him, says:

Leave your lands and seek advancement!

Go abroad, for there are five good things in travel:

Escape from care and a way to earn your living,

Knowledge, savoir faire, and the friendship of the noble.

Though some say travel means abjection in exile,

And loss of one’s friends and meeting with trouble,

Still better a young man die than live

In ignominy ’midst jealousy and tittle-tattle.

Thus the answer now is clear, all can agree, and the nature of this derivation’s plain to see.

11.1.19

jismū (“his body”): the pronoun suffix refers to the poet, that is, “his body” means “his person,” the word being derived from tajassum (“corporeality”) or from al-mujassimah (“the Corporealists”), which is a sect that holds to the doctrine of incarnation and corporealization,⁸² may the Almighty disfigure them, or from jism al-ʿāshiq (“the body of the lover”), when the latter is worn thin by separation from the beloved and the poet can find neither medicine nor doctor for it.

11.1.20

mā yaḍal (“is ever”): a rural phrase, meaning mā yazālu, as discussed in Part One.⁸³ That is, his body is never free of want, toil, and discomfort.

11.1.21

naḥīf (“thin”): of the measure of raghīf (“loaf”); it is properly naḥīfan, with an alif of prolongation, the latter having been dropped for the meter.⁸⁴ The meaning is that his body became weak and thin from the succession of cares that afflicted it, and the injury and hardship that it had to put up with in the course of making a living and so on—for care weakens and sickens the body, unlike ease and abundance of comforts, from which it will be evident that the bodies of the rich and affluent are in general vigorous, attractive, and graceful, because of the excellence of their food and drink and the cleanliness and fineness of their clothes, and they do not, as a result, suffer any of the ill effects of care. Imam al-Shāfiʿī, may the Almighty be pleased with him, said, “He whose garments are clean has few worries,” and it says in the Tradition, “One’s garments should give glory to God”; if they get dirty, this glorification is brought to a halt. The body, in fact, is like a crop of plants: so long as its owner is careful to water it and tend it and clean out the weeds, it remains full of vigor and glows with good looks, but when he ceases to attend to it, diseases attack it and things take a turn for the worse. In the absence of sickness, on the other hand, slenderness and trimness of the body are desirable characteristics in both women and men, and one possessed of such characteristics is referred to as ahyaf (“slender waisted”). As the poet⁸⁵ says:

Two slender-waisted creatures,

One girl, one boy,

At backgammon played.

Said she, “I am a turtledove!”

“Hush!” said I. “You are the moon above!”

—and even more expressive are the words of the poet who said:

A slender-waisted lass—should she tread on the lids of one with eyes inflamed,

No pain from her footfall would he feel.

Light-spirited—should she, of her levity, desire

To dance on water, not a drop would wet her heel.

11.1.22

A Silly Topic for Debate: “Why did the poet say naḥīf rather than saqīm (‘sick’), though the latter is more appropriate in meaning and more elegant in expression and is found in the Mighty Qurʾan, in the words of the Almighty, «And he cast a glance at the stars, then said, ‘Lo! I feel sick (saqīm)!’»⁸⁶ that is, ‘I feel sick at your worship of idols’?” We declare, the fatuous response is that the poet avoided the latter word because it includes the meaning of the word that rhymes with it, namely, qaṭīm, and qaṭīm is, in the language of the country people, a passive sodomite, and, in another dialect, an unmarried man;⁸⁷ if he had used the word in the verse, they might have attributed passive sodomy to him, with harmful consequences. Or it may be said that, in this, he was following the rules of rhyme for poetry, so there is no problem. Our words are now clear, the silliness made to appear.

11.1.23

Next the poet sought to tell of a further misfortune by which he was smitten and which was a product of the aforementioned want, abasement, and lack of wherewithal. He says:

TEXT

11.2

anā l-qamlu wa-l-ṣībānu fī ṭawqi jubbatī

shabīhu l-nukhālah yajrufūhū jarīf

Me, the lice and nits in the yoke of my gown

are like bran that they shovel willy-nilly

COMMENTARY

11.2.1

anā (“me”): meaning “Me, Abū Shādūf, I inform you in addition, good friends, and I complain to you” of

11.2.2

(a)l-qaml (“lice”)—the well-known type that makes the rounds among people, not the type mentioned in the Mighty Qurʾan, for the latter is a type of worm or tick, according to some of the commentators.⁸⁸ (Useful note: al-Damīrī, in his Life of Animals,⁸⁹ mentions, on someone’s authority, that the tick lives seven hundred years, which is remarkable. End.)⁹⁰ Lice are born from the sweat and dirt of the body. The word is derived from taqammul (“infestation with lice”) or from the taqmīl (“licing”) of yarn, when the latter is dyed and sized and placed in the hottest sun, so that it dries and develops white spots that look like lice; thus one speaks of “liced yarn.” The paradigm is qamila, yaqmalu, qamlan (“to be infested with lice”); qaml is a collective noun, the female being a qamlah (“a louse”);⁹¹ the male is perhaps called a qāmil. The poet says:

I never had a male louse (qāmil) in my clothes but it seemed to me

To creep like a male scorpion (ʿuqrubān) as it moved.

The word ʿuqrubān is of the pattern of thuʿlubān, which means “fox” (thaʿlab). As the poet says:

Is there a lord on whose face the dog-foxes pee?

Contemptible indeed is he on whom the foxes pee!

The dual⁹² may be used as a form of address, as it is in the Mighty Qurʾan when the Almighty addresses the Guardian of the Fire, saying, «Throw (dual) into Hell …»⁹³ and as in the words of al-Ḥājjaj, “Boy, strike (dual) his neck!.”⁹⁴ As for the poet’s words in the first verse, “creep like a male scorpion,” this is the case because the louse is conventionally likened to the scorpion and the flea to the elephant, because the former stings while the flea bites. If it be said, “If the louse resembles the scorpion and the flea resembles the elephant, why is the louse not as large as the scorpion and its sting like the scorpion’s sting, and, by the same token, why is the flea not the size of the elephant and why does it not behave like one?” the reply would be that, because the louse is generated by and never leaves the human body for a specific beneficial purpose ordained by the Divine Wisdom, namely, the removal by sucking of corrupt blood, even though it may sometimes do harm too, it is in accord with the wisdom of the Almighty that it should be small and also that its sting should cause hardly any pain, because, were the louse the size of a scorpion, a human would have to be the size of a camel and would live in dread of seeing one and being tortured by its sting—but Almighty God is generous to mankind. Likewise, the flea, given that the Almighty has formed it to live in the creases of clothes and other tight places, is small like the louse because, if it were the size of an elephant, a human would have to be the size of a mountain. The word burghūth (“flea”) is the singular of barāghīth, and the female is a burghūthah; it is derived from birr (“charity”) plus ghawth (“help”).⁹⁵ Al-Jalāl al-Suyūṭī,⁹⁶ God have mercy on him, said:

Hate not the flea—

Its name is Charity,

And though you know it not

It also helps a lot:

In sucking bad blood

Its charity lies;

By rousing you at dawn for prayer

Its help it supplies.

The poet’s mention of the louse spares him the need to mention the flea, because the latter is subordinate to the former.

11.2.3

A Question: “Where is the wisdom in the fact that the flea can jump while the louse cannot?” The answer: “The louse, being born of the sweat and effluvia of the body, is correspondingly weak, and it is, moreover, female,⁹⁷ and the female is weaker than the male. The flea, however, being born of the earth, is of a stronger clay, which is why it resembles the elephant, which is the animal with the largest body. Thus, its strength is inborn, which allows it to jump.” The situation’s now revealed, the problem no more concealed.

11.2.4

Some say the flea is more harmful than the louse. The poet says:

I complain to you of certain fleas with which I am afflicted.

On my heart a choking cup these have inflicted.

While I chase one, another comes to bug me,

And so goes the night, in hunting and ven’ry.

And how well the poet put it, when he said:

Gnats, fleas, and bedbugs clung tight to me:

They thought my blood wine and held its taste most dear.

The fleas would dance to the piping of a gnat,

While the bedbugs kept mum so the others could hear.

11.2.5

One of our hashish-eating brethren—may God prolong through the eating of hashish their conviviality and stifle with a jar of wine on sleeping their raucous hilarity—informed me that, if one drops a little hashish before sleeping, followed by a few jars, and then sleeps, he doesn’t feel the pain of fleas, or anything else, especially if he uses candy after eating the hashish, for hashish produces strange reactions and creates amazing effects, and the only thing that spoils it is eating sour things. As the poet says, incorporating words of Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s, may God be pleased with him:

O you who’re stoned on dope for lack of wine

(That vap’rous draft around whose fires men meet),

When you are high, I do advise you, Don’t

Consume what’s sour, do eat what’s sweet!

11.2.6

My mother, may God excuse her sins, told me a riddle about fleas that I didn’t understand until I had mastered the sciences and spent time among people with a command of the best language. It goes as follows: yā shī min shī aḥmar ḥimmayr waraq al-jimmayr jarū warāh khamsah miskūh itnayn (“Something from something else!⁹⁸ Red as red can be, red as the leaves of the heart of the palm tree! Five ran after it, two caught it!”). It may be interpreted as follows: yā shī (“O thing”): yā (“O”) is the vocative particle, that is, “O man, interpret to us a name that comes from something obscure and is” aḥmar ḥimmayr (“dark, dark red”): ḥimmayr (with double m, i following the ḥ, and no vowel on the y) being the diminutive of aḥmar (“red”), and meaning “of intense redness”;⁹⁹ waraq al-jimmayr (“leaves of palm hearts”): that is, like the leaves of palm hearts in color, jimmayr being the diminutive of jummār (“palm hearts”), which are the core of the palm tree, while the “leaves” are the fibrous integument that is wrapped around them; jarū warāh khamsah (“five ran behind it”): namely, the fingers; miskūh itnayn (“two caught it”): two of the latter, namely, the index finger and the thumb. There is diacritical paronomasia between ḥimmayr and jimmayr.¹⁰⁰ End.

11.2.7

The noxious effects of fleas may be prevented by using incense mixed with dried bitter-orange peel on sleeping. Lice may be killed with a woolen thread pounded with henna and mercury and hung around the neck. As for the beneficial qualities of lice, the author of The Book of the Physick of the Poor¹⁰¹ mentions that, if a migraine sufferer takes a louse from a head that is free of pain and puts it in a grilled bean and seals the latter with wax and hangs it at the point of the migraine, his head will get better, if the Almighty wills.

11.2.8

wa-l-ṣībānu (“and nits”): joined to al-qaml (“the lice”) by the conjunction wa- (“and”), these being the seeds that are born of the latter; in other words, the poet joined the branch to the root, since the former is a concomitant of the latter. They are generally found in the greatest numbers on the heads of children, because children’s bodies are tender and should be treated with fats and henna and by combing the hair and so forth. They are very prone to cause itching in the body but are less harmful than lice, because they are weaker and have softer bodies. The origin of the word is ṣibyān (“boys”) (with the b before the y), plural of ṣabī.¹⁰² Subsequently, they decided to avoid that plural, lest nits be confused with human children; so they put the y after the b and said ṣibyān. The word is derived from ṣābūn (“soap”) because of the whiteness of the creatures, or from muṣībah (“disaster”), or from the Bridges of al-Ṣābūnī. The paradigm is ṣabyana, yuṣabyinu, ṣibyānan.¹⁰³

11.2.9

The poet is silent on another form of the offspring of the louse, namely, the nimnim (with i after the two n’s and no vowel after the two m’s),¹⁰⁴ the latter, too, being a concomitant of the former and the branch being subordinate to the root, as previously stated. The word nimnim is of the measure of simsim (“sesame”) and is a derivative of namnamah (“wren”) or of nammām, a sweet-smelling plant.¹⁰⁵ If, on the other hand, we spell it as namnam, it would be a compound made of an imperative verb, as though one were ordering someone to go to sleep twice.¹⁰⁶ Al-Ḥarīrī,¹⁰⁷ God excuse him his sins, said in similar vein:

Perform an act for whose same seed you will be praised,

Thanking Him who gives, be it but a sesame seed!

This is close to the art of word puzzles¹⁰⁸ such as tājin and tāfiyah and yāsamīn¹⁰⁹ and the verse that says:

I saw a marvel in your houses—

An old man and a maiden in the stomach of a bird!¹¹⁰

And another says:

Red of cheek, of a crimson

That all rouge to emulate must try;

Fangless, eyeless,

But with fang and eye.¹¹¹

11.2.10

The word namnam¹¹² is used in the language of small children:¹¹³ when a child wants to eat, he says namnam, or buff (with u after the b and no vowel after the f), for children utter different words from those used by adults, as may be observed. As for the language children use before they start to talk, some say it is Syriac. When a child wants water, he says unbūh (with u at the beginning, no vowel after the n, ū after the b, and no vowel after the h). If he puts out his hand to something dirty to take it, he is scolded with the word kukhkh (with k and kh), and if he is on the point of taking something that might harm him, he is rebuked with the word aḥḥ (with alif and ḥ). If he takes something that pleases him and plays with it, they call it (or he calls it) daḥḥ (with d and ḥ) with no following vowels.¹¹⁴ They call (or he himself calls) food when he has had enough of it baḥḥ (with b and ḥ). If his mother wants to scare him or stop him from bawling, she says, “Quiet, or the biʿbiʿ (‘bogeyman’) will eat you!” (with i or u after the two bs and no vowel after the ʿs). Biʿbiʿ is derived from baʿbaʿah, which is the sound of the camel.¹¹⁵ Among aḥḥ and daḥḥ and baḥḥ there is mutational paronomasia of the first letter.¹¹⁶ The child addresses his mother as māmā, his father as bābā, his little brother as wāwā,¹¹⁷ and so on. A poet has gathered these expressions together in a verse from a mawāliyā in which he flirtatiously addresses a little boy:

You who stole my heart and soul, Ouch! It hurts!

You make friends with others, but when it’s me, your love’s “all gone!”?

I feed you din-dins and tidbits and you say “All gone!”

Am I a “Bogeyman”? Am I “Yuck,” little baby, while another’s “Yumyum”?¹¹⁸

And Ibn Sūdūn, may the Almighty have mercy on him, says, in similar vein:¹¹⁹

Because of my mother’s death I find sorrows wring me (taḥnīnī).

How often she suckled me tenderly (taḥnīnī),

And, as she brought me up, how often she indulged me,

So that I turned out just as she made me.

If I said namnam, she’d bring food and feed me.

If I said unbūh, she’d bring water to give me.

The words taḥnīnī (“wring me”)¹²⁰ and taḥnīnī (“tenderly”) constitute “perfect paronomasia,”¹²¹ the first being from inḥināʾ (“bending”), the second from taḥannun (“tenderness”) and “having pity” (shafaqah), as is clear.

11.2.11

One also speaks of ʿidhār munamnim (“creeping fuzz”) on a young man’s cheek, meaning that the down resembles the creeping of the nimnim or of the nammām plant as it sprouts. Comparing it to the creeping of the nimnim, I wrote:

The down crept o’er his cheeks; it seemed to me

To be nimnim moving lazily.

11.2.12

Some have added a fourth type of vermin and named it liḥḥīs (with i after the l and double ḥ), of the measure of baʿbīṣ or liqqīs, baʿbīṣ being taken from baʿbaṣah, which is “the insertion of a digit between the buttocks of another,” while liqqīs is from liqāsah (“licking”); one says, “The dog licked (laqisa) the dish,” meaning “it licked it clean (laḥisahu) with its tongue.”¹²² Thus there is a kind of resemblance to the liḥḥīs; or it may be that the word is formed according to the analogy of Fuṭays.¹²³ The words liḥāsah and najāsah are of the same pattern; one says, “So-and-so is laḥis,” that is, “one who has committed something resembling impurity (najāsah) or who talks a great deal to no effect.”¹²⁴ Thus liḥāsah and najāsah have the same underlying meaning. In The Blue Ocean and Piebald Canon it says, “There is no difference between liqāsah and liḥāsah, and undoubtedly najāsah enters into it too,” and this is the more correct formulation. One also says, “You are taʿīs laḥis,” that is, you resemble a dog licking a dish, or you lick shit with your tongue, or you talk raving nonsense (tatalaḥḥas bi-l-kalam) and cannot tell a thing from its name. Taʿīs has the same meaning, making all of them closely similar expressions, which is why the liḥḥīs are so harmful.¹²⁵ In The Blue Ocean and Piebald Canon it says:

And I suffer torments from the harm the liḥḥīs do to my head,

And a boiling and an itching in my clothes and in my body.

The paradigm¹²⁶ is laḥḥasa, yulaḥḥisu, talḥīsan.

11.2.13

If it be said, “This liḥḥīs added by the people you refer is insignificant, almost to the point of nonexistence, and this is why the poet, like others, leaves it out, so why do you raise the issue at all?” we would reply, “True. However, even if we grant that it is so minute that it barely exists, nevertheless it becomes, in bulk, unmitigated harm and injury and on this basis is to be associated with lice, and indeed it should be counted among the latter’s offspring, just like the nits and the nimnim mentioned above. Alternatively, the issue is raised by analogy to those who add a fourth category to the parts of speech and name it ‘the residual,’ meaning by this the verbal substantive, namely, ṣah (‘Hush!’) in the sense of uskut (‘Be silent!’).”¹²⁷ Thus the situation now’s revealed, the silliness no more concealed.

11.2.14

fī ṭawqi jubbatī (“in the yoke of my jubbah”): that is, I speak of those lice and nits that are existing or well established in its yoke. Ṭawq (“yoke”) is of the pattern of jawq (“band of musicians”), as used in the expressions jawq al-ṭabbālah (“the band of drummers”) and jawq al-maghānī (“the singing band”) and so on. It is the name given to anything that encircles the neck, of a garment or of anything else, be it made of iron, silver, gold, brass, or the like.¹²⁸ The Almighty says, «That which they hoard will be their collar on the day of resurrection,»¹²⁹ meaning that the wealth that they store up in this world and on which they do not pay tithes and which they do not use for good works will be placed around their necks like a collar, and they will be tormented by it in the Fire. The word ṭawq is derived from ṭāqah (“aperture”) or from ṭawāqī (“skullcaps”), because of its roundness, or from the Khān of Abū Ṭaqiyyah in Cairo. The paradigm¹³⁰ is ṭawwaqa, yuṭawwiqu, taṭwīqan. The women of the countryside make their neck rings of silver, calling them also ḍāmin, and they regard them as the best of ornaments. The type of collar that is placed on the necks of men in prison is called a ḍāminah; one says, “So-and-so is in the ḍāminah” meaning that this iron device that is on his neck is a guarantee (ḍāminah) for him that he will not be able to get away, just like the man who acts as a guarantor (ḍāmin) for another and produces him when he is summonsed.

11.2.15

jubbatī (“my jubbah”): of the measure of shakhkhatī (“my pissing”) and liḥyatī (“my beard”), or so it is if the form refers to oneself; but, if it refers to someone else, you say jubbatak (“your jubbah”) on the pattern of shakhkhatak (“your pissing”) or liḥyatak (“your beard”), for example. If you were describing it and said jubbatak ḥamrah (“Your jubbah is red”), you could change the dots and it would become khanatak Ḥamzah, meaning “a man named Ḥamzah fucked you.”¹³¹ jubbah is the singular of jubab, derived from jabb, which means “cutting,” because the tailor tailors (yajubbu) the jubbah, that is, cuts (yaqṭaʿu) it and pieces it together. One also says jāba l-fayāfī (“he traversed open country”),¹³² meaning “he cut across it (qaṭaʿahā),” and in this vein I said:

I traverse (ajūbu) the open spaces, greedy for your arms,

And cross (aqṭaʿu) a land of which I have no knowledge.

The paradigm is jabba, yajubbu, jabban, and jubbatan.¹³³

11.2.16

There are two types: the rural and the urban. The rural type is of thick, coarse wool, closed in front like a thawb. They make the sleeves wide, especially their poets. Indeed, they are known for the excessive width of their sleeves, for the men’s sleeves are made of cut-off sacks and are as wide as those of poets, or wider.¹³⁴ As for their women, their sleeves are wide enough to accommodate a man, who can go in through one and come out by the other; thus a man may have intercourse with his wife via her sleeve without needing to raise the rest of her shift, as I myself have experienced, for I married one of these women and had intercourse with my wife via her sleeve on several occasions—so glory to Him who made them unkempt, even with regard to their sleeves and other raiment, for these are things by them desired, and consistency is required. As the proverb has it, “They saw an ape getting drunk on a dung heap and said, ‘For so pellucid a wine what better match than a youth so fine?’ And they saw a buffalo blinkered with a reed mat and said, ‘For so elegant a girl, what better match than so divine a veil?’”¹³⁵ As the poet says:

I saw a leper deep down in a well

And another with vitiligo whose shit on him fell.

Said I, “Behold what your Lord hath wrought—

The like of a thing attracts its own sort!”

The urban sort is the one used by the people of the cities, especially scholars and sophisticates. It is of soft, fine wool, and they make it tight at the armpits and open in front. They call it a jubbah mufarrajah (“an open jubbah”) (with double r) because it has been opened (infarajat) at the wearer’s front and what is beneath may be seen. They add a silk or other trimming, so that the beholder is amazed by the sight and the wearer finds it a true delight—glory be to Him who has embellished such people with elegant raiment, bestowed on them every kind of pleasant form as adornment, and made their women an embellishment! As the proverb has it, “The foundation is according to the builder, and all things resemble their owner,” for men grow up according to their God-given natures to be as they ought, and the like of a thing attracts its own sort. In the same vein, I myself said:

I saw on his cheek both water and fire¹³⁶

And, strewn about, those roses fair.

Said I, “Behold what my Lord hath wrought—

The like of a thing attracts its own sort!”

11.2.17

Next, the poet, realizing that the lice, nits, and other vermin present in the yoke of his jubbah were too many to be counted, decided to liken them to something resembling them in quantity and color, so he said:

11.2.18

shabīhu l-nukhālah (“are like bran”), which is the husks of wheat and barley that come to the top of the sieve when they are bolted. More information on this, and the etymology, are to come. This simile yields the likeness of the comparator from two perspectives. The first is that lice are white, and so is bran. The second is that, when they accumulate in heaps, they appear to the eye to be a lot, just as bran does. In other words, this is an appropriate comparison. The word nukhālah is derived from nakhl (“palm trees”) or from munkhal (“sieve”). In The Blue Ocean and Piebald Canon it says:

The noun nukhālah is derived, as they recall,

From munkhal and nakhīl¹³⁷ and, finally, from minkhāl.¹³⁸

Barley bran is the best for one because, if it is steeped in water and heated and someone suffering from chest pains drinks it, it will cure him, if the Almighty so wills.

11.2.19

yajrufuhū (“they shovel”): that is, the lice and the nits and their aforementioned relatives.

11.2.20

jarīf (“willy-nilly”): originally jarfan, because it is a verbal noun with the alif omitted, the ī being added for the sake of the rhyme; or it may be a rural form; in either case there can be no objection.¹³⁹ It is derived from jarf or from mijrafah (“shovel”) or from jarrāfah (“shovel-sledge”). If it be said, “The poet ought to have referred the pronominal suffix of yajrufuhū to the nearest antecedent, namely, nukhālah,¹⁴⁰ and this would have been more appropriate,” we say, “He may have avoided using a feminine pronominal suffix for the meter, because, if he had used one, the line would no longer have scanned;¹⁴¹ or it may be a case of truncation,¹⁴² as in the line¹⁴³

Gently now, Fāṭim!¹⁴⁴ A little less disdainful:

Even if you would cut my rope, do it kindly!

“—or he may have been referring it to the ‘husks of wheat and barley,’ which are called collectively nukhālah, in which case it should be taken as an example of the suppression of the first term of a genitive construct,¹⁴⁵ so there can be no objection.” And if it also be said, “One might understand from the poet’s words that the lice and nits were confined exclusively to the yoke of his jubbah and there were none of them whatsoever on his body, in which case what would be the point in his complaining about them?” we would reply, “The answer may be that one might say that his words ‘in the yoke of my jubbah’ mean that most of the lice were accumulated in and had risen to the yoke of his jubbah and then, in their abundance, came to resemble bran when shoveled and that it does not necessarily follow from this wording that the rest of his body was free of them. Indeed, if they were present in the yoke of his jubbah in such quantities, then, a fortiori, there should be some on the rest of his body, for the body is where they live and derive their nourishment, by sucking blood and imbibing the body’s wastes. In fact, it is the way of lice to spread first in the clothes, then expand throughout the body, sucking out the bad blood; and those that have had their fill climb up to the top of the body and stay there to take the air and rest, just as humans, for example, having eaten their fill, rest by keeping quiet and sleeping. This is their habitual way of behaving, according to custom, so the answer now is clear.”

11.2.21

Question: How come the poet does not raise a complaint against bedbugs, ants, and gnats and omits all mention of them, despite the fact that each of these is responsible for great harm and injury? This question may be answered from several perspectives. The first is that bedbugs, though plentiful—as the proverb has it, “The bedbug gives birth to a hundred and says, ‘So few children!’”—in general favor only cities because of their tall buildings, the large quantities of timber there, and the plaster and lime with which they are coated, because it is in these things that they live and breed; whereas the country villages have no tall, costly construction. If they were to be found in a village, it would be in the house of the bailiff or the tax farmer, for example, to which the poet would never have access and in which he would never sleep. In fact, their houses are mostly made out of slabs of dung mixed with urine and of daub, to which dung cakes are sometimes added. As a result, they are unacquainted with bedbugs and do not see them and tend not to frequent the same places. Ants, though found in the villages of the countryside, nevertheless favor only those places in which there are fatty things such as clarified butter and oil, and they like sweet things, such as honey and sugar; they come to these and feed off them simply by smelling them, as mentioned by the author of The Life of Animals,¹⁴⁶ resembling in this the cumin plant, which can live simply on the prospect of being watered. As the poet¹⁴⁷ says:

Don’t treat me like the cumin in its plot,

Whom promises content though it be watered not!

Our poet never saw any trace of ants in his house because it contained so few fats and sweets, or, rather, because there were none of these whatsoever. As a result, ants would have no way of getting to him, whether via his clothes or his home, and this would be the reason for their failure to affect him. As for gnats, though these are found in the villages of the countryside, they come just on certain days and then go away again, unlike lice and nits, whose harm is constant and unremitting, in clothes and elsewhere, as mentioned above; and the harm done by something that hurts a little and is absent a lot is insignificant, and this may be the reason for his omitting to complain about the lot of them. Thus the answer’s clear.

11.2.22

Useful Note: If colocynth is steeped in water in which yarn has been thoroughly soaked and the place is sprinkled with that water while it is hot, it will kill the bedbugs and not one will be left, and if ants appear in a place where there are bedbugs, they eat them. As the poet says:

My body couldn’t take another bug,

Their bite was giving me such pain.

I brought the ants. They helped me out—

They spared not one and let not one remain.¹⁴⁸

Ants are repelled by the smell of tar, gnats by the smoke made by burning bran.

11.2.23

A Silly Topic for Debate: What is the wisdom in the fact that, if a louse bites a man or a flea or any other harmful creature stings him, the pain spreads through the body, outside and in, until it comes to embrace the liver, the lungs, the heart, and so on, even though the louse, the flea, and the rest do not have access to the inside of the body, unless one of them should enter through one of the orifices; and if, on some rare occasion, it should enter, it usually dies immediately, even before it reaches the interior of the body, as indeed a flea has often entered my own ear and stayed a while moving about and doing damage and then quickly come out or died? What is the explanation for this? The fatuous reply to this silly enquiry is: it may be said that the body experiences pain to the same degree internally and externally because the spirit circulates within it the way sap circulates in a green branch. Thus, if any damage is done to the body’s surface, the spirit feels pain and the pain spreads to the whole body, outside and in. Let me draw you a facetious example, to wit, if a man is imprisoned in a small closet, for example, that is too small to hold anyone else and has no outlet and the man is locked up there for a long time, his body weakens, changes, and sickens and he feels pain both externally and internally, especially if he is pressed by the urge to urinate and does so until he fills the place, or if he farts there too and the resulting odors rise upwards and then, finding no escape, come back down on his beard and mustache, causing him grievous harm, especially if he is the owner of a long, broad beard (as long as its breadth has not rendered its length odious, in which case the damage will be less, or it has not become less commode-ious, in which instance it is the same for both cases).¹⁴⁹ Thus the situation’s now revealed, the silliness no more concealed.

11.2.24

Next the poet embarks on the description of another disaster that afflicted him—one yet more damaging, taken as a whole, than lice and nits, for it comes to him from the direction of his relatives. He says:

TEXT

11.3

wa-lā ḍarranī ʾillā-bnu ʿammī Muḥaylibah

yawmin tajī l-wajbah ʿalayya yaḥīf

And none has harmed me as much as the son of my paternal uncle, Muḥayliba—

the day the wajbah comes, he heaps upon me more than my lot.

COMMENTARY

11.3.1

wa-lā ḍarranī (“and none has harmed me”): that is, harmed me over and above what has already been mentioned.

11.3.2

ʾillā-bnu ʿammī (“as much as the son of my paternal uncle”): that is, my father’s brother, ʿamm (“paternal uncle”), being derived from ʿumūm (“generality”) because his competence encompasses both his own children and those of his brother, for he is like a father to them, if their actual father is not present. This is why the Arabs call the paternal uncle “father.” One of the commentators on the words of the Almighty «When Ibrahim said unto his father Āzar,»¹⁵⁰ says, “What is meant is ‘his paternal uncle.’” Or the word is derived from ʿimāmah (“turban”) because of the latter’s being high above the head, like a crown—as it says in the Tradition, “Turbans are the crowns of the Arabs”—for the paternal uncle has an exalted position with regard to his brother’s children because of his responsibility for and guardianship of them.

11.3.3

Muḥaylibah: diminutive of maḥlabah, which is a vessel made of red earthenware with a concave belly and a narrow neck; it has one handle but is sometimes made with two, if it is large.¹⁵¹ It is so called because milk is milked (ḥalb) into it, according to the rule of “naming the container after the thing contained.”

11.3.4

A Brief Overview: Vessels prepared for milking are of different sorts. There is the maḥlabah, and there is the miḥlāb, which is itself of three sorts—small, large, and medium; the miḥlāb is taller than the maḥlabah and has a wider mouth and more slender belly; its bottom is like that of the jar in which the water is raised on a waterwheel (qādūs),¹⁵² being very small. There is also the rubʿ, which is a small vessel that holds, as a unit of measurement, one quarter of a maḥlabah. And there is the qarrūfih (with a after the q, double r, i after the f, and no vowel on the h at the end).¹⁵³ This resembles the miḥlāb in having a small base, but has a narrow neck and a very wide belly, like the maḥlabah; it has either one or two handles. The largest of the milk vessels is the qisṭ, which is a large jar. There is also another vessel, called the kūz, with which milk is sold in the cities, as we have observed; it is crudely made and holds little. Muḥaylibah is of the measure of mudawlibah (“causing to go round and round”), miḥlāb of the measure of dūlāb (“waterwheel”), and qisṭ of the measure of qibṭ (“Copts”). It is called a qisṭ because it is divided up (muqassaṭ) by weight or volume. The word rubʿ is of the pattern of surʿ (“reins”), and kūz is of the pattern of būz (“muzzle”) because its wide mouth resembles the muzzle of a cow or a calf; kūz is derived from kazz which means “to bite” (ʿaḍḍa);¹⁵⁴ one says the earth “bit” (kazzat) on the plow, when it seizes (ʿaḍḍat) it with the share, and the child “bit” (kazza) on his finger, when it takes it between its teeth (ʿaḍḍahu); so I find in The Blue Ocean and Piebald Canon. If milk or water is put in the kūz, it gurgles and moans, complaining of the pain of the fire and all that it suffered when being turned into pottery.

The mug makes a gurgle because it’s in pain:

It protests to the water what it suffered from the flame.

This would be according to the analogy of Fuṭays.¹⁵⁵ These vessels are well known to the people of the countryside, as are others, among them the zīr (“water jar”)¹⁵⁶ and the tumnah (“one-eighth measure”) and so on.

11.3.5

If it be said, “The definition and, in some cases, the etymologies of the names maḥlabah and miḥlāb and the rest such as qisṭ, rubʿ, and kūz have been given, but what is the meaning of qarrūfih, and how did this strange word come to be applied to this vessel and what was the occasion for that?” we reply that this question may be answered from a number of perspectives. The first is that this vessel was made at the time of the qirr (with i after the q and no vowel after the r),¹⁵⁷ which means “extreme cold”; then they completed (wafaw) its firing in the summer, and so it was called qirrwafih, that is, the firing of this vessel was accomplished (wafiya) and it was finished; then they put a ū after the double r of qirr and made a name for it out of all these letters and said qarrūfih. In this case it would be composed of a noun and a verb.¹⁵⁸ The second is that, when it had just been invented and the milker put it between his legs and directed the milk into it, the milk started to rise and make a lot of froth, so the milkman became afraid that the milk would overflow the vessel and called out to the milk qarr fīh qarr fīh (“Stay in it! Stay in it!”), that is, “Remain in it and be settled!” Then they added a w to the word between the imperative verb and the prepositional phrase, omitted the ī because it was awkward to pronounce, realized the w as ū,¹⁵⁹ and said qarrūfih, and that became its name. The third perspective is that the clay of which it was made was originally taken from a place close to the Qarāfah (“cemetery”) of Cairo, so they started saying “a qarāfī vessel,”¹⁶⁰ then derived this name for it from that sense and said qarrūfih. The fourth is that it is derived from qirfah (“cinnamon”) (with i after the f), which is a spice with a delicious taste and smell that is used in fine dishes and sumptuous foods, for milk too, when fresh from the cow, has an appetizing smell and sweet taste—as the Almighty has said, «pure milk, palatable to the drinkers»;¹⁶¹ then they added a ū to it and made that its name. And fifthly, names cannot be etymologized, so there is no need for these fatuous investigations and inane fabulations. Thus the answer now’s clear, the truth made to appear.

11.3.6

Various accounts are given for how the poet’s paternal cousin came by this name. The first is that, when his mother gave birth to him, she heard one person say to another, “Fetch the milk crock!” so she named him thus, taking a good omen from the word and making it into a diminutive, seeing that the child was small. A second version has it that his mother had borne another boy before him and called him Miḥlāb, but he died. When she gave birth to this child, she did not want to call him by his brother’s name, so she made the word feminine¹⁶² and made it a diminutive and said muḥaylibah, and by this he was known. A third account has it that someone visited her with a new milk crock (maḥlabah) at the moment when she gave birth, so she took this as a good omen and said, “I shall call him Muḥaylibah.” This is the extent of what I have learnt from these fatuous investigations and inane fabulations.

11.3.7

yawmin (“on the day when”): with in following the m, for the meter.¹⁶³ Yawm (“day”) is a name for the whiteness of daylight that is illumined by the rays of the sun and during which one may undertake a legally meaningful fast, as is well known.¹⁶⁴

11.3.8

tajī (“comes”): from the verbal noun majīʾ (“coming”), which means arriving at a place.

11.3.9

al-wajbah (“the wajbah”): this takes effect from the moment of the coming, or arrival, of the bailiff or the tax farmer or the Christian in the hamlet or the village, at which time it is distributed among the peasants on the basis of how many carats or feddans, etc., of land each one works. Some are obligated to provide it one day a month, others once a week, and still others once every three days, etc., according to how many or few are the peasants and how extensive or limited is the land. It must be provided every day throughout the stay. Under this system, a man sees to the provisioning of the bailiff and the Christian, if the latter is present, and of all those belonging to the tax farmer’s entourage, and undertakes to provide them with their food and drink and everything they need in the way of fodder for their animals and whatever dishes of meat or fowl they may have a liking for. If the man is poor, they impose this on him by force, or else the bailiff imprisons him and beats him severely. Sometimes a man will flee because he does not have enough to offer, and the bailiff then sends for his children and his wife and demands it from them with threats. A wife may pawn some of her jewelry or her clothes for a little money and use the proceeds to buy poultry or meat, and cook it and prevent her children from touching it for fear of what will happen to her if it is not enough for them. Sometimes a peasant will raise chickens and eat none of them and make himself and his children go without for fear of being beaten or imprisoned, and things such as chickens and butter and flour he will keep aside in readiness for this disaster, doing his own cooking with sesame oil and eating barley bread, and he may put his seed wheat aside for them and eat salty cottage cheese and put himself to the expense of buying sweet fresh cheese and send this with the wajbah, all for fear of what may happen to him because of these matters.

11.3.10

It is called wajbah because it has come to be like a duty (wājib) that the tax farmers impose on the peasants, for it has to be done for the bailiff in the village or the Christian or the tax farmer, if he comes, as stated above. While some tax farmers have waived it, they have replaced it with an agreed sum of money and added that to the land tax, forcing them to pay it to the bailiff in the village, the money being taken from them annually. It is a form of injustice, and eating such food is forbidden by religion so long as the peasants do not give it of their own free will and cheerfully,¹⁶⁵ the tax farmer keeping them happy by granting them a little land or something else in return. Some tax farmers have given it up altogether and impose nothing on them, neither for the bailiff nor anyone else, although they may volunteer something of their own free will. In that case, it is not forbidden and it is permitted to eat it. Similar to the wajbah is the fine imposed on the landless and putting them to work without pay, as long as this is without their consent, in return for covering their lodging and compensation for leaving their crops and so on. Anything that involves injury to others is forbidden. The poet says:

Be as you wish, for God is kind—

No harm shall befall you if you sin.

Two things alone you must eschew in full—

Ascribing partners to God¹⁶⁶ and doing injury to men.

11.3.11

If it be said, “If an emir, or someone else, on assuming the right to farm the taxes of a village, finds the wajbah or the fine on the landless or any other form of injustice on the ledgers of those who held the tax farm before him and so imposes that on the people of the village as was done under earlier determinations by the surveyors according to established custom, is the sin then his or that of the person who introduced the practice before him, or both of theirs together?” the answer is to be found in the Tradition of the Prophet, upon whom blessings and peace, that says, “He who introduces into this affair of ours that which is not in it is rejected,” meaning, whoever introduces something that was not present in the time of the Prophet, upon whom blessings and peace—such things being called “innovation”—is rejected, that is, refused, meaning invalid and not to be taken as an example. This shows clearly that there is no difference between someone’s introducing the practice himself and someone else having preceded him in this. Thus the sin pertains to everyone who acts in accordance with this practice or orders others to act in accordance with it, for everyone who performs an act that is not stipulated by the Law is a sinner, as stated in the words of the Prophet, blessings and peace upon him, “He who introduces into it an innovation or provides accommodation for an innovator, upon him be the curse of God.” The substance of the Tradition constitutes a response to those whose minds are corrupt and to government accompanied by ignorance, oppression, and other things of the same sort that are not in accordance with the Law. Thus the answer now is clear, the truth made to appear.

11.3.12

The poet’s words tajī l-wajbah contain an elegant literary device called “distribution,” which consists of the poet’s “distributing” one of the letters of the alphabet in each, or most of, the words of a line of verse, as in the following verse by al-Ṣafī al-Ḥillī, may God have mercy on him, from his Embellished Ode in the Prophet’s Praise (Al-Badīʿiyyah):¹⁶⁷

Muḥammadu l-muṣṭafā l-mukhtāru man khutimat

Bi-majdihī mursalū l-raḥmāni li-l-umamī

Muḥammad, the Named, the Nominated,

With whose majesty the messengers of the Merciful to men were made complete

—where he repeats the letter m in every word of the line. Our poet managed to work the letter j into just two words.

11.3.13

In the same vein is what happened once concerning a man who was a fryer of fish by trade. He was in love with a beautiful woman and had a young servant boy who was extremely quick-witted and a master of correct speech. One day he sent this boy to her to ask her to come to his home. The boy went to her home and told her that his boss wanted her. She accepted and was about to set off with him when her husband turned up. The boy made himself inconspicuous, took off without anyone noticing him, and made his way back to his boss, whom he found frying fish, as was his wont, with people all around him placing their orders. So as to make the man understand the situation while concealing it from those present the boy accosted him with words rhymed and metered. He said to him, Yā muʿallimī fuq lī, min dha l-samak fa-qlī. Jat tajī fa-jā. Law lam yajī la-jat. Wa-lākin tartajī lammā yarūḥ tajī (“Boss, hear my cry! Of this fish now fry! She was going to come, but he came. Had he not come, she would have come. But she hopes, when he goes, to come”).

11.3.14

These words are to be explained as follows:

yā muʿallimī fuq lī (“Boss, hear my cry!”): that is, “Boss, hearken to what I say, and listen well to it and understand it!”

11.3.15

min dha l-samak fa-qlī (“Of this fish now fry!”): he came up with these words to make the people around think that he wanted a portion of fish or that he was asking him to hurry up with the frying (note the “augmentative consonantal paronomasia” between the words fuq lī (“hear my cry”) and fa-qlī (“now fry”)!).¹⁶⁸

11.3.16

jat tajī (“She was about to come”): that is, she wanted to come and obey your summons

11.3.17

fa-jā (“but he came”): that is, her husband, at the moment that she wanted to go; then he said

11.3.18

law lam yajī (“Had he not come”): that is, her husband,

11.3.19

la-jat (“she would have come”), which is originally la-jāʾat, which the boy elided for the meter; that is, she would have presented herself and not disobeyed your order. He continues by saying:

11.3.20

wa-lākin tartajī (“But she hopes”): that is, her coming will be in accordance with her hope (rajāʾ), which means the occurrence of a thing agreeably to the will of the one who requests it

11.3.21

lamma yarūḥ (“when he goes”), meaning her husband, and leaves the place free

11.3.22

tajī (ilayk) (“to come (to you)”); and what you want will come to pass. The relevant citation lies in his words jat tajī fa-jā, etc., for he repeats the letter j in every word, as you can see.

11.3.23

If it be asked, “Is it forbidden by religion for the peasants to honor the Christian by coming and entertaining him and sending him the wajbah when he comes to a village to collect its taxes, abasing themselves in front of him and obeying his every command and prohibition, most of them indeed being at his service, and are they sinning in so doing, or what is the situation?” we reply, “The response is that a Muslim is forbidden to serve an infidel, just as he is forbidden to honor him, submit to him, or abase himself before him, and the one who does so sins in that respect, unless he does so out of fear of some harm or injury from him as a result of the infidel’s being set in authority over him and given charge of his affairs, or is compelled to have recourse to him in a matter such as the Christian’s collection of taxes in the villages of the countryside and elsewhere, for they monopolize this business; indeed, some tax farmers hand control of everything to do with the village to the Christian, who rules it through beating and imprisonment and the like, so that the peasants are so frightened that they never come before him without trembling.

11.3.24

“As it happened in the days of the Master and Initiate of the Almighty, Shaykh Taqī al-Dīn Ibn Daqīq al-ʿĪd, God benefit us through him, when the sultan handed over control of the entire province of Egypt to a certain Christian for the collection of taxes. The latter used to visit the province with a great procession of servants and retainers and pass through the settlements collecting their taxes. He would ride his horse and dismount only when he had to eat and drink and stop for the night, so evil was he and so great the harm he brought. His horse had stirrups of steel plated with gold, to which he had attached two iron spikes that projected about a hand’s breadth. He would summon someone and the man would come, trembling with fright, and stand next to his horse, while the Christian, from the back of his horse, would speak roughly and brutally to him, telling him, ‘Pay the taxes you owe this minute!’ If the man did as he was told that was that, but if he did not he would strike him with the spikes, stabbing him or slashing his sides, so that he died. Such was his way with Muslims, God’s curse upon him! It happened that this same Christian went to the village of Shaykh Ibn Daqīq al-ʿĪd, God have mercy upon him, and summoned one of the shaykh’s followers who had a balance to pay on the tax on land that he cultivated. When the man came before him, he said to him, ‘Pay what you owe!’ but the man replied, ‘Give me till the end of the day.’ The Christian was about to put his stirrups to work and strike him with the spikes and kill him when the man turned and fled, the Christian in hot pursuit, until he came to the shaykh and threw himself down before him. The shaykh, who at the time was burning lime in a kiln (for that was his profession when he was young), asked what was the matter and the man told him the story. Before he knew what was happening, the Christian was towering over him. ‘Give him till the end of the day!’ the shaykh told him. However, the Christian replied to the shaykh with angry words, at which the shaykh became filled with fury and zeal for the defense of the Muslims and attacked him, grabbing him by the neck of his garments, so that he became like a sparrow in the shaykh’s hand. Then he said to him, ‘Accursed wretch! Your life has been long and the harm you do to the Muslims has become excessive. Now your name is expunged and every trace of you obliterated!’ and he bore down on him until his back snapped and he threw him into the oven of the kiln, where he was consumed. Then he directed a look of fury at the men who were with the Christian and God cast terror into their hearts and they turned and ran till they reached the sultan and told him of the matter. Incensed, the latter sent for the shaykh, who proceeded until he reached the audience chamber. When he presented himself before him, the sultan said to him, ‘What drove you to burn the Christian?’ ‘And what,’ replied the shaykh, ‘drove you to put him in authority over the Muslims and order him to do them harm?’ At this the sultan’s fury increased, and he was about to strike the shaykh a blow on the head, when the shaykh made a sign to the chair on which the sultan was seated and it moved beneath him and he was spilled onto the ground in a swoon, and the chair itself started to spin through the Citadel with a humming sound, rumbling like thunder. The soldiers leapt up in confusion and the Citadel with all the troops that were in it shook, while they cried, ‘Spare us! Spare us!’ Then the shaykh made a sign with his hand, and everything returned to its place, after which he gestured towards the king, who awoke from his swoon and, when he had revived, kissed the shaykh’s hands and said to him, ‘Pardon, My Master! Ask of me what you will!’ The shaykh replied, ‘All I want from you is that you never again set a Christian in authority over the Muslims. Should you do so, you will perish.’ ‘I hear and obey!’ said the sultan. Then the shaykh descended from his presence, to the accompaniment of the utmost honor and love, and proceeded to his village. Thereafter, this practice remained in abeyance for a while, and no Christian was set in authority over the Muslims with regard to the collection of taxes or other matters, until the rulers were forced to have recourse to them for their acuteness and talent for accounting; so they put them in charge of these matters up to our day. Similarly, the Jews have taken over the practice of medical science, so that the two groups have come to hold sway over our money and our lives. How well the poet put it when he said:

A curse on both Christians and Jews!

They’ve got what they wanted by stealth:

They’ve made themselves doctors and clerks

To divide up our lives and our wealth!

11.3.25

“Thus one is permitted to associate with them and obey them if he fears that they might harm him or his dependents in any matter, religious or secular, that depends on such contact and that he is compelled to undertake. Under such circumstances, there is no harm in making friends with them. Master ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Dīrīnī, God benefit us through him, was punished for frequenting the Christian of his village, and he said:

They blame me, my friends, for befriending Copts,

Though never, by God, did I love them in my heart!

But I’m one of those who hunts for his living in their land,

And hunter and dogs cannot live apart!

“On the other hand, the person who has intercourse with them on the basis of affection and friendship for no compelling worldly objective or fear of any harm that they might do should probably be counted among those referred to in the words of the Prophet, may God bless him and give him peace, ‘He who loves a people shall be marshaled with them on the Day of Judgment.’”

11.3.26

ʿalayya (“to me”): meaning to himself and no other.

11.3.27

yaḥīf (“he does wrong (to me)”): that is, he turns against me and treats me unjustly, charging me with more than I can bear. This injury was more severe for him than the others, namely, the previously described harm caused by the lice and the nits and so on, because it originated with his relatives. The poet says:

Relatives (aqārib) are like scorpions (ʿaqārib), so avoid them,

And depend not on father’s or mother’s brothers.

How many of the first will bring you grief

And how devoid of good are the others!

Observe how this clever poet used ʿamm (“father’s brother”) and khāl (“mother’s brother”), changing the letters on the first to make it into ghamm (“grief”) and employing the second to mean that they are “devoid” (khālī) of boons, and how he managed to work in both paronomasia and punning.¹⁶⁹

Another poet said:

The enmity of kith and kin

Is like a fire in a forest when there’s wind.

11.3.28

ʿAlī,¹⁷⁰ God honor his face, said, “Enmity is among relatives, envy among neighbors, and affection among brothers.” The origin of the enmity among relatives is to be found in the story of Qābīl’s murdering Hābīl,¹⁷¹ as a result of which enmity among brethren and relatives has continued down to these days of ours, the root cause of it all being envy—and “may the envious not prevail!”¹⁷² In the Tradition it says, “Two alone are to be envied: a man on whom God bestows wealth and who uses it to defeat his perdition through good works, and a man on whom God bestows knowledge and who instructs others in it.” The poet says:

Though they envy me, I blame them not—

Good men before me have felt the evil eye.

Let me keep mine and them keep theirs,

And he who is the more vexed by what he finds can die!

And another said:

May your enemies not die but live

Till you have had the chance to make them livid,

And may Fate not deprive you of an envier,

For the best are those who’ve been envied!

11.3.29

Next the poet moves on from complaining about his paternal cousin Muḥaylibah to complaining about the latter’s nephew Khanāfir, who brings him even more trouble than his cousin. He says:

TEXT

11.4

wa-ʾayshamu minnū ʾibnu-khūhu Khanāfir

yuqarriṭʿalā bayḍī bi-khulbat līf

And more inauspicious than him is the son of his brother Khanāfir.

He draws tight around my balls a palm-fiber knot

COMMENTARY

11.4.1

wa-ʾayshamu (“and more inauspicious”): from shuʾm (“calamity”) or from tayshimah.¹⁷³ The word is originally ashʾam,¹⁷⁴ on the pattern of ablam (“more/most stupid”) or aqṭam (“more/most given to passive sodomy”). The proverb says, “More of a jinx (ashʾam) than Ṭuways,”¹⁷⁵ and one says, “So-and-so is mayshūm (‘possessed of the power to jinx’)” or dhū tayshimah, that is, possessed of strength and tyrannical powers and capable of doing great harm to others. Shūm wood¹⁷⁶ is so called because of its strength and hardness. The Arabs use “jinxing and infamy” (al-shuʾm wa-l-luʾm) in their flytings.

11.4.2

It is said that Jaʿfar al-Barmakī built a magnificent palace and embellished it with all kinds of silks and so on and stayed there some days. Gazing one day through one of its windows, he beheld a Bedouin writing on the wall of the palace two lines of verse, as follows:

Palace of Jaʿfar, may ill fortune and infamy engulf you,

Till the owls in your corners make their nest!

When the owls nest there, from sheer delight,

I’ll be the first to offer condolences, if under protest!¹⁷⁷

—so Jaʿfar said, “Bring me that Bedouin!” When the man was in front of him, he asked him, “What has driven you to do as you have done, and what has made you call down ruin upon our palace?” The man told him, “Poverty and need have driven me to it, and a brood of young lads that I have sired, like the chicks of the sandgrouse,¹⁷⁸ that whimper from the pangs of hunger. I came to beseech your charity and plead for your favor and I have dwelt a month at the gate of this palace, unable to come in to you. When I despaired, I called ruin down upon it and said, ‘So long as it remains prosperous, I shall benefit nothing by it. But if it turns to ruins, I may pass by and take from it a piece of wood or some of its embellishments that I can make use of.’” Jaʿfar smiled and said, “Our ignorance of your presence has prolonged your waiting and caused harm to your children. Give him a thousand dinars for seeking us out, and a thousand dinars for dwelling so long at our gate, and a thousand dinars for calling ruin down upon our palace, and a thousand dinars for our clemency towards him, and a thousand dinars for a brood of young lads that he has sired, like the chicks of the sandgrouse!” And the Bedouin took the five thousand dinars and retired, giving thanks.

11.4.3

minnū (“than he”): with double n, for the meter;¹⁷⁹ that is, “stronger and more extreme than him” in the harm he does me and his oppression of me.

11.4.4

ʾibnu-khūhu (“is the son of his brother”): that is, of the brother of Muḥaylibah, the latter being his brother on both his mother’s and his father’s side. He should have said akhīhi, as a genitive construct, but his tongue gave him no help in producing such a form because he was from the countryside, and it would have broken the meter, too.¹⁸⁰

11.4.5

Next he states his nephew’s name, by saying

Khanāfir: derived from khanfarah (“snoring”) of the measure of kharkharah (“snorting”) or barbarah (“jabbering”). One says, “So-and-so slept and snored (khanfar),” meaning that he stored up the breath in his throat and expelled it through his nostrils in such a way as to make a loud breath accompanied with snoring and snorting. Said the poet:

He snored on sleeping through his nostril

And thus he got this name—Khanāfir.

He was so called because he snored so much when sleeping. The paradigm is khanfara, yukhanfiru, khanfaratan, active participle khanfūr,¹⁸¹ of the measure of khanshūr (“tough guy”), while Khanāfir is of the measure of ʿabāyir, plural of ʿabūrah (“sheep”). His brother’s¹⁸² name was Qādūs (“waterwheel jar”), of the pattern of buʿbūṣ (“goosing”); this Qādūs fathered two boys, Muḥaylibah and Fasāqil, and this Khanāfir was the latter’s son, meaning the poet suffered harm from both his paternal cousin¹⁸³ and his paternal cousin’s son.¹⁸⁴

11.4.6

Next the poet makes plain the harm that he suffered from the latter by saying: yuqarriṭ (“he draws tight”): with u after the y, of the measure of yuḍarriṭ (“he farts audibly and repeatedly”).¹⁸⁵ Yuḍarriṭ has two forms, as already stated.¹⁸⁶

As the poet has it:

There the snitches all farted together,

So their farts wafted everywhere about.

The word yuqarriṭ is used here in the sense of constricting (taqrīṭ) strongly and forcibly with a rope. Qarṭ with a after the q and no vowel after the r refers to the qarṭ of the crops, namely, taking the ears and leaving the roots in the ground. One says, “So-and-so cut off the ears of so-and-so’s crop (qaraṭa zarʿa fulān).” With u after the q, it is the name of a small ring of silver that is put in the ear of a young boy—a praiseworthy custom, especially if the boy is beautiful, for it adds to his good looks and clothes him in cuteness. Abū Nuwās¹⁸⁷ says in the opening line of one of his odes:

An earringed¹⁸⁸ boy who hastens to the drinking companions

With a carnelian in a white pearl

—that is, this graceful beauty and charming form, adorned with and characterized by this silver earring, now hastens towards the drinking companions, with a wine in his hand whose color resembles that of a carnelian, in a cup resembling in purity of substance and refinement of form a white pearl, and gives them to drink from what is in his hand and passes the wine among them, beguiling them with his slender figure and charming talk … and so on to the end of the poem.

11.4.7

ʿalā bayḍī (“around my balls”): that is, the poet’s balls, not those of the person actually reciting the verse, nor the “balls” of anything else such as a chicken, a bird, or the like.¹⁸⁹ Testicles are called “eggs” because they resemble them if you peel the skin off them. The word is derived from bayāḍ (“whiteness”) or from abū buyūḍ (“the one with the eggs”), an animal resembling a spider,¹⁹⁰ or from bayḍat al-qabbān (“the ‘egg’ of the steelyard”, i.e., the counterweight).

11.4.8

A Silly Topic for Discussion: What is the wisdom in bayḍ (“balls”) also being called khiṣyatān (“testicles (dual)”),¹⁹¹ and what points of resemblance are there between the two in name, and what is their etymology and what does it mean? The Facetious Answer is that the singular of khiṣyatān is khiṣyah with i after the kh; and likewise the dual of khiṣā (“testicles (plural)”) is khiṣwān, and one of them is a khiṣy/khaṣī,¹⁹² and if you were to take one khaṣiy, for example, and add another, you would have taken a pair of balls (khiṣwayn), no doubt about it! Understand this well! The same thing may also be called khiṣw, with w instead of a, which is also a word for the penis,¹⁹³ for the latter is like a father to the two testicles, because it never leaves them, and they are as two daughters to it; thus its name is derived from that of the subordinate entity because it is never separated from the latter. From this it follows that the two testicles are in a position of permanent submission to the male organ, while the latter is in a position of high standing over them and they likewise are in a position of dependence while it is in a position of upward mobility; and, additionally, they are in the position of annexation, while it is in the position of the elevated and erected vowels.¹⁹⁴ Further, the male organ has the power to open locked doors, assault fortresses, and knock at smooth domes, while the testicles politely wait for him at the entrance, which is a sign of the filial piety due to a father. In illustration of which, it once came about that a certain poet sought out a king in order to plead for his charity and found him to be in his garden. The poet stood by the gate and tried to gain entrance, but the guard prevented him. The poet then looked behind the wall of the garden and found a water channel running towards, and ending at a point beneath, the wall, where it debouched into a large basin, next to which he beheld the king sitting. So he took a piece of paper and wrote on it this verse:¹⁹⁵

Everyone else, like a penis, has gone in,

But this slave, like the testes, is left lying at the door.

Then he folded it and put it in a Persian reed, sealed it with wax, and threw it into the channel, whence the water carried it until it cast it at the feet of the king. The king picked it up, broke the seal, and pulled out the piece of paper. When he read the verse he smiled and called out to him, “Come in, testicles!” to which the poet replied, “This is just evidence of your great capacity, God preserve you!”¹⁹⁶ The king was well pleased with the aptness of the joke and rewarded him, and the poet retired, giving thanks.

11.4.9

Apropos of the aptness of these words, I am reminded of what happened once when Sultan Qānṣawh al-Ghawrī, God have mercy upon him, got angry with a man and wanted to kill him. Some of those present interceded on his behalf, and the sultan imposed on him instead a fine of three thousand dinars. The man left the sultan’s presence to get them and one of his friends, encountering him as he was descending the steps from the audience chamber, said to him, “I hear that the sultan has fined you a thousand dinars.” The other replied, “No, may I be divorced—times three!”¹⁹⁷ When the sultan heard of this bon mot of his and how he had used the same word to cover both divorce and money, he pardoned him, forgave him the three thousand dinars, and rewarded him, and the man went his way.

11.4.10

The word khiṣā may also be applied to the male organ, which is also called duldūl (“dangler”),¹⁹⁸ dhanab (“tail”), zubb,¹⁹⁹ ayr,²⁰⁰ ghurmūl,²⁰¹ and other names too. However, the best known are five, which I have mentioned in my treatise Meadows of Intimate Vim concerning What Transpired ’twixt the Prick and the Quim, namely:

They give me different names, some quite popular:

Ayr, zubb, duldul,²⁰² and dhakar there are.²⁰³

The fifth of these names I’m called is khiṣā—

When I get stiff, you’d think I was a shillelagh!

It is given the nicknames the One-Eyed, the Snub-Nosed, the Plugger, the Extender, and the Demolisher of Donjons and Conqueror of Castles, along with the kunyahs of Father of Campaigns, Father of Collisions, Father of Disturbances, Father of Earthquakes, and so on. If a man gives it free rein and obeys its whims, it will propel him into the most terrible calamities. Says Ibn ʿArūs, God have mercy upon him:

The people in God are lost,

And praise of noble men spreads far and wide.

Naught hurts me but my belly

And this thing that’s dangling by its side.

The testicles may be likened to two hens. A certain poet made up the following lines to make fun of his shaykh:

O Lord, relieve us of our woe—O Lord!

O Lord, seize upon our shaykh, of facial hair galore!

His testes when he’s bended o’er

Are like two chickens pecking grain up off the floor.

11.4.11

To sum up, khuṣā with u²⁰⁴ and khiṣā with i, and likewise with w instead of the ā,²⁰⁵ are names common to the male organ and the testicles, this falling under the rubric of “naming a thing according to its neighbors.” The word khiṣyatayn is of the pattern of ḍarṭatayn (“two audible farts”) or shakhkhatayn (“two pisses”), so it contains both farts and pisses for sure. Both words²⁰⁶ are derived from khuṣṣ (“hovel”) with u, or from a village named al-Khuṣūṣ,²⁰⁷ or, for example, from the word ikhṣā (“bad dog!”) that they use for dogs. The paradigm is khaṣā, yakhṣū, khaṣāʾan.²⁰⁸ As the poet says:

Khaṣā, yakhṣū are the base forms of khiṣyatayn.

khaṣāʾ is correct in the verse of al-Ṭunayn.²⁰⁹

This brings these fatuous discussions and inane problems to an end.

11.4.12

bi-khulbat līf (“a palm-fiber knot”): that is, a strong knot going twice around his balls with a rope made of plaited palm fiber (līf), which is so called because it is wrapped (multaff)²¹⁰ around the bases of palm fronds. This knot is called a khulbah because it grasps (takhlibu) a thing that can then only be released from it with difficulty. In the jargon of shepherds, if they want to tie something tightly, they say, “Secure it with a clove hitch (khulbat watid, literally, ‘peg knot’)”, that is, wrap the rope around it twice and tie it tightly so that it cannot come undone. It is derived from the khalb (“reaping”) of crops, or from the mikhlāb (“talon”) of birds, or from “deceptive” lightning (barq khullab), with u after the k and double l, meaning lightning that brings no rain.²¹¹ Says Ibn al-ʿArabī, God benefit us through him:

All those who seek Your favor have been granted rain;

Your lightning has failed in its promise to me alone.

11.4.13

Next the poet mentions the reason his hair has turned prematurely white. He says:

TEXT

11.5

wa-min nazlati l-kushshāfi shābat ʿawāriḍī

wa-ṣāra li-qalbī lawʿatun wa-rajīf

And from the descent of the Inspectors, my side whiskers have turned white

and my heart is afflicted with pangs and trembling.

COMMENTARY

11.5.1

wa-min nazlat (“And from the descent of”): nazlah²¹² is the instance noun from nuzūl (“descending”) and is applied to a large company if it alights at a place and remains there a while. Thus one speaks of nazlat banī fulān (“the settlement of the tribe of So-and-so”) and nazlat al-ʿarab (“the settlement of the Bedouin”) and nazlat al-ghawāzī (“the settlement of the Ghawāzī”); hence also the village known as al-Nazlah.²¹³ Nuzūl means “the descent of something from higher to lower” and its opposite is ṣuʿūd, which means “ascent from lower to higher”; one says, “He ascended (ṣaʿada) to the top of the mountain and descended (nazala) to the lowest part of the land.” Describing a mettlesome steed, Imruʾ al-Qays²¹⁴ says:

At once wheeling and turning, advancing and retreating,

Match for a boulder that the flood throws down from above.

11.5.2

al-kushshāfi (“the Inspectors”): plural of kāshif, so called because he inspects (yakshifu) the region placed under his charge and does away with whatever corruption and unauthorized imposts may exist there, and dams the waterways, strengthens the dikes, and rids the place of robbers; such was the custom of every Inspector in former times. He would behave righteously and make a progress around the settlements, and when he approached a village the drums would beat and those who had introduced unsanctioned practices and the corrupt would feel frightened and run away in fear of him and sometimes fall into his hands, in which case he would punish them as they deserved, whether by execution, imprisonment, beating, or fines. Then he would descend on the village, if it was his custom to stop there, and its shaykhs would come and stand before him in the utmost terror and fear, while he interrogated them concerning their affairs and asked them who was corrupt and who had introduced unsanctioned practices, and enjoined them to apprehend the latter if they were not in the village. Afterward they would hurry to bring him the customary food, drink, and presents. If any conflict had arisen among them in a village, or any killing, or they had shown disobedience to their Master, he would attack them on the viceroy’s orders, lay waste to the village, kill those of them who deserved to be killed, and destroy the rebels and tyrants.²¹⁵ However that may be,²¹⁶ his presence in charge of the provinces constitutes a mercy, a shield, and a discovery of afflictions, provided no injury is done to people at his hands or at the hands of his soldiers by way of seizure of their property, harassment, or commanding them to provide food and drink beyond their capacity to do so. Should such things occur, it should be considered injustice and, as such, forbidden by religion, and whatever is taken should be returned to its owner (unless he had provided it of his own free will in the first place, in which case there is no objection).

11.5.3

His saying “the Inspectors,” even though there would not be more than one of them, should be taken as implying the suppression of the first term of a genitive annexation,²¹⁷ whose implied sense would be “from the continuous descents of inspector after inspector, accompanied by the terror and fear that afflict me as a result of the beating of the drums, the stamping of the horses’ hoofs, the Inspector’s awe-inspiring demeanor when on progress and descending on the village, and the thudding of my heart at the sight of the soldiers, the retainers, and the torturers, and my fear that he should cause me injury on this account.”

11.5.4

shābat ʿawāriḍī (“my side whiskers have turned white”): because of my inability to face the Inspectors and my having nothing for them to take from my house such as dung cakes for the kitchen or anything else. Consequently, my limbs tremble, my heart flutters, and white hairs sprout before their time. White hairs are a sign of the Almighty’s favor, with which He honors one of His slaves. The first to grow white hairs was Ibrāhīm the Beloved,²¹⁸ blessings and peace be upon him. Half his beard turned white, and he said, “Lord, what is this?” The Lord said, “It is a token of your venerability in this world, and a light for you in the next.” So Ibrāhīm said, “Lord, give me more of this venerability!” and he awoke the next morning and the whole of his beard had turned white. In the Tradition it says, “Verily, God would feel ashamed to treat harshly hairs that had turned white in Islam.” White hair has many virtues, among which are that it is a sign of venerability in a person, as already mentioned, and a sign of dignity for him, and that it reminds him of his approaching end, for it is the harbinger of death. A poet says:

When a man’s skin turns black and his hair turns white,

And his robe’s too long in front,

And he takes short steps as he walks along,

Tell him then that he’s close to defunct.

And another, putting it excellently, said:²¹⁹

The smile of white hairs on the young man’s cheeks

Forced tears from his eyelids to race.

And who would not weep for himself

When white hairs laugh in his face?

11.5.5

The lines contain “antithesis” in the wording,²²⁰ as you will have noticed. Women, however, dislike white hair. Hārūn al-Rashīd asked his wife, “What kind of men do you women find attractive?” She replied, “One whose cheek is like my cheek and whose member is like my forearm.” “And if his beard grows?” he asked. “He should keep his eyes to himself, and be ready with his wealth!” she said. “And if his hair turns white?” he said. “He must either put up with strife, or offer to divorce his wife!” she said—for this is something they condemn and the company of pretty women is denied to such men, especially if their money’s tight, in which case their outlook’s not bright. As the poet²²¹ said:

Ask me how women are, for I’m

Well versed in women’s ways, a physician.

When a man’s hair turns white or his money runs out,

Let him abandon all hope of their affection.

11.5.6

How much worse, then, for the man who has both—white hair and poverty! Such a one might as well not exist, as far as they are concerned. Al-Qāḍī al-Fāḍil,²²² God have mercy on him, said:

She wondered, when my wealth took off

Right when my hair had lost its hue—

“This thing I see,” she said, “what is’t?

Is it dust from some mill that I have in view?”

Said I, “Be not amazed! This is

The powder that from time’s mill does accrue.”

—that is, her mood darkened when she saw that white hair resembling mill dust had appeared upon his face and altered his beard, and she wondered at its sudden onset, a wonderment that necessarily plunged her into gloom and “rolled up the carpet of her conviviality.” Then he answered her by saying, “Be not amazed” at how fast it has appeared—for the wondrous events that the passing of time brings and the disasters that result from these, which may be likened in their turning to a mill, have caused the appearance of these flecks that you see; so do not blame me, and patiently endure this misfortune that has befallen you. A poet²²³ has compared the onset of white hair in the beard to the bird called the vulture because of the latter’s whiteness²²⁴ and compared the remaining part, in its blackness, to the “Ibn Dāyah” (“Son of a Midwife”), which is the black crow. He says:

When I saw the vulture mourn Ibn Dāyah

And roost in its two nests,²²⁵ my heart felt pain at his loss.

11.5.7

Others have likened its onset to the appearance of the light of morning and have said that the way it “catches fire” in the blackness is like fire catching in thick, dry firewood. Ibn Durayd, may the Almighty have mercy upon him, says at the start of his maqsūrah:²²⁶

Ah Gazelle, so like the oryx

’Twixt al-ʿAqīq and al-Liwā grazing,²²⁷

See you not how my head’s color has mimicked

The dawn’s gleam ’neath the skirts of darkness trailing,

And how the whiteness in the blackness has caught

Just as fire in a saxaul log breaks out blazing?

Methought it was some pitch-dark night

In whose expanse the morn, unloosed, turns all to light!

11.5.8

Similes of this sort for white hair are legion. The word shayb (“white hair”) is derived from the shaybah (“artemisia”) that is sold at the druggist’s, because of its whiteness and the fineness of its roots and the way its hairs become entangled with one another, which is why they say, “They saw impurity in the artemisia” as a proverb.²²⁸ The paradigm is shāba, yashību, shayban (“to turn white (of hair)”). The fact that he mentions that the sides of his beard turned white first is an indication that he was a man of stature and nobility, for the first thing to turn white on a noble man is the sides of the beard, and on an ignoble man the hair between the lower lip and the chin. The poet says:

White hairs on the noble start at the whiskers,

On the vile above the chin.

White hairs on the head by worry are fed

And white hairs on the chest are a sin!

11.5.9

However, his restriction of mention of white hairs to those on the sides of his beard is arbitrary: they would begin at the edges and then progress ineluctably to the rest of his beard. In other words, he stated the root and the secondary phenomena follow as a matter of course. As for his adding the feminine marker -t to the verb, he follows in this the language of the country people, of whom the poet was one; and, in addition, had he said shāba ʿāriḍī or shābū ʿawāriḍī, the meter would have been thrown off. Thus he acted in accord with both his own speech habits and the meter.²²⁹

11.5.10

A Silly Topic for Debate: What makes him refer to the nazlah (“descent”) of the Inspectors instead of their nuzūl, when a slow-witted listener might imagine that the former refers to the nazlah that afflicts a person when he catches cold that is, “catarrh,”²³⁰ and then descends (yanzilu) in the head and gives rise to sneezing and sickness and so on, the treatment for which is to anoint the forehead with egg white mixed with mastic, which alleviates it? And what is the wisdom in his immediately following a reference to the sides of the beard with one to the heart, which is located far from the former and has no meaningful connection with them? Should he not rather have talked about his mustache and the hair on his lower lip, after the manner of the poet who said:

Up the ass of an unleashed bitch

Shove your mustache, plus the tuft below your lip!

Then lick her shit, good Connoisseur,

And spoon it, sip by sip!?

We respond: the reply is that nazlah is of the measure of ʿijlah (“female calf”) and nuzūl is of the measure of ʿujūl (“calves”), and ʿujūl is a plural, so he used the lesser to stand for the greater; likewise the female²³¹ is more refined in form and feature than the male (albeit the male is more honorable)—not to mention that, to a peasant, the female calf or cow is more useful than the male calf or the ox. From this it may be deduced that the poet loved females rather than males, in contrast to the school of reprobates like us—for we follow the words of Abū Nuwās:²³²

I wonder at one who has sex with girls

When there’s a beardless boy in sight.

Aren’t we all agreed from the start

Your stallion’s the better mount in a fight?

11.5.11

As for his mentioning the heart in the same breath as the sides of the beard, this amounts to no more than a shift in wording while the meaning remains the same, from the perspective that the spirit diffuses itself throughout the body, so that, if the heart experiences anxiety and suffering, this is diffused throughout the body and white hairs sprout in response to it; in which case, it would be a matter of “what is in proximity to a thing lends it its own stamp.” Or perhaps it should be taken in the sense that people use when they say “my heart’s hairs turned white,” in which case it would be a metaphorical whitening of the hair, and there would be no grounds for objection. Thus the problem is now revealed, such silliness no more concealed.

11.5.12

The word ʿāriḍ is derived from the ʿarḍī (“headcloth, turban”)²³³ that one wraps around the head or from the ʿarīḍah (“crossbar”) of a door, or from the ʿarūḍ (“prosody, verse-making”) that afflicts a person as a result of being touched by the jinn,²³⁴ or from the ʿāriḍ (“bank of clouds”) that brings rain, or from the ʿāriḍ (“flank”) of a mountain. As the poet says:

Halt in the Qarāfah²³⁵ ’neath the flanks of al-ʿĀriḍ

And say, “Peace be upon you, O Ibn al-Fāriḍ!”

Or it may be so called because of its being spread sideways (taʿarruḍ) on the face. The paradigm is ʿaraḍa, yaʿriḍu, ʿarḍan, active participle ʿāriḍ (“to happen, to present, to expose”).

11.5.13

wa-ṣāra (“and (my heart) is”): of the measure of fāra (“it boiled over”), from ṣayrurah (verbal noun of ṣāra), or from the ṣārī (“mast”) of a boat, or from the ṣurr (“purse”) that is transferred every year to the Two Sanctuaries.²³⁶

11.5.14

li-qalbī (“(to) my heart”): meaning the poet’s heart and not anyone else’s, as will be obvious to anyone with a fatuous mind.

11.5.15

lawʿatun (“pangs”): these are an intense burning and yearning of the heart from the agony of passionate love, or fear, or separation from the beloved and so on. As I said in the same vein:

Woe is me and alack for my pangs! Enough

That I endure deep wrenching sighs in my sorrows!

11.5.16

wa-rajīf (“and trembling”): of the pattern of raghīf (“loaf”); that is, a trembling, the pain of which cannot be stilled and the motion of which cannot be quieted, resulting from the terror that has afflicted me from the descending of the Inspectors and my fear of them, as previously described.

The paradigm is rajafa, yarjufu, rajfan (“to tremble”), like gharafa, yaghrufu, gharfan (“to ladle”).

11.5.17

Next, the poet begins to talk of another disaster with which he and his fellow peasants are afflicted and which is the most severe of the grave matters that affect them. He says:

TEXT

11.6

wa-yawmin yajī l-dīwānu tabṭul mafāṣilī

wa-hurru ʿalā rūḥī mina l-takhwīf

And on the day when the tax collectors come, my joints give way

and I void my loose bowels over myself from the terror they’re creating

COMMENTARY

11.6.1

wa-yawmin (“and on the day when”): with nunation²³⁷

11.6.2

yajī (“comes”): the time for the collection of the taxes by

11.6.3

al-dīwānu (“the tax collectors”): This is one of those things of which they say, «And ask the village!»²³⁸ that is, the people of the village. What happens is that, when the Christian arrives at the village or hamlet and divides up the tax into individual portions among the peasants according to the determinations made by the surveyors and the laws that are customarily followed and starts collecting them, fear, beatings, and the imprisonment of those who are unable to pay their taxes mount. A peasant may borrow money at excessive interest or take money against his crop before its ripening at a lower price than it will fetch when it is ripe, or sell his animal that provides milk for his children, or take his wife’s jewelry—by force if need be—to pawn or sell, and pay the proceeds to the Christian or whoever is charged with collecting the tax. If he cannot come up with anything and cannot find anyone to give it to him, and the tax farmer or the bailiff fears that his impoverishment may lead to his land going to ruin and being lost to the village tax rolls, the latter will take the peasant’s son and keep him as a pledge until he pays his taxes, or, if he has no son, his brother, or any of his relatives, or he may be put in prison to be beaten and punished so that the ordinances of the Almighty may be implemented against him. Some save themselves and flee under cover of night and never return to their homes, leaving their family and birthplace because of the oppressiveness of the taxation and the difficulty of their lives. As a poet said:

Life’s bane is separation

From loved ones and from birthplace.

11.6.4

There is no escape, in any case, from paying the tax, even if that results in affliction and woe, for, as the well-known and widespread proverb says, “The sultan’s taxes are extracted from between the nail and the quick,” and the peasant remains in severe distress so long as he has any tax to pay, and the day he pays it off is, in his eyes, a feast day.

11.6.5

To sum up, peasants are of two sorts, one blameless and noble, one feckless and false. The first is intelligent and prudent, skilled at choosing to whom to entrust his affairs and at exercising leadership. Sober minded, he is as regular in his prayers and other religious duties as he is in attending to his crops and fields. He has no time for lounging by the wall and is eager to defend the interests of his family, while avoiding all that is base and mean. He supervises the planting himself and is present in person at the harvesting and picking. He resorts to neither surveyor nor sharecropper, and has recourse to neither cowman nor hired laborer. On the contrary, he directs all his affairs himself and knows the problems and underlying causes involved in each case. He pays regular visits to the bailiff and his Master and does not busy himself with destruction or corruption. If he takes money from a moneylender, he doesn’t spend it on something perverse but rather on the well-being of his crops and animals and on servicing his obligations. He makes it his purpose to pay back his creditors and has compassion for the poor and the humble. He looks out for the well-being of his oxen, and respects his neighbor’s field. He makes it his purpose to pay his taxes, and puts his trust in the High, the Exalted. He shuns the twirling of mustaches and sitting about on stoops, is blessed by the Divine Reckoner, and pays his taxes to the sultan. If the moneylender comes to him he pays him his due in full, and if he asks for a second loan, the moneylender gives it to him. His children live in comfort, and his Master is pleased with him. He lives in ease and piety, and the Lord of the Worlds is pleased with him.

11.6.6

As for the second sort, he is brainless and of service to none, naked and destitute. He neither prays nor observes any religious practices, nor is he obedient to the Lord of the Worlds. He lacks taste and understanding, is ever on the lookout for what’s evil and disgusting, plays manqalah by day, and by night takes out his crowbar.²³⁹ He spends little time in the fields, preferring to loaf by the wall. He is a mustache-twirler, a low earner, a scrounger, a ranter, a …,²⁴⁰ and a braggart. Should any money come his way, he distributes it to blackguards and clods. He spends no time with bailiff or Master, but is sunk in perversity and corruption. His oxen starve, his horses waste away. He spends all his money on hubbub and hullabaloo, and his crops aren’t worth a fart. He spends without logic and is broke, penniless, indebted, detested by his Master, sunk in his error and corruption. Though his Master were to whip him and break his bones, he would not leave off gallivanting in the houses and alleys. If his Master exhorts him to do what’s right, he sets his heart on decamping, allowing his land to go to ruin. Forever caught up in spite and sorrow, imprisonment and beating have no effect on him. Haughty and perverse, an instigator of evil as great as the War of al-Basūs, incapable of paying what he owes, ever a thousand or two in arrears, a source of strife in his community, all his life he’s in woe and misery. He does not repay the moneylender, and his judgment is unsound. His children are naked and his ways demented. He is the object of general loathing and “the like of a thing attracts its own sort.” Thus his life brings no good, and no one weeps for him on his death, for his sleeves are long and he is a braggart, one who brings little joy to his household, a blackguard, a shit eater, without prospects in this world or the other. As it has been said:

This is one who, alive, is of interest to none

And who goes unmourned by his kin when he dies.

11.6.7

The first to establish apparatuses for the collection of taxes was Our Master ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb, may God be pleased with him, and the first such apparatus in Egypt was created at the direction of Our Master ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ when he conquered Egypt,²⁴¹ though it was not organized in a uniform manner. In his time, the land tax was low and so, when he conquered it (whether by treaty or by force of arms, according to the different opinions),²⁴² he collected enormous wealth from it, beyond counting, in the form of treasures and other things. Hishām ibn Ruqayyah al-Lakhmī says²⁴³ that when ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ conquered Egypt he said to the Copts of Egypt, “I will kill anyone who conceals from me a hoard of treasure that he possesses and that I subsequently manage to obtain.” He also mentions that ʿAmr was told that a Copt from the Ṣaʿīd called Buṭrus was in possession of a hoard, so he summoned and questioned him but the man denied it. Then he imprisoned him and every so often ʿAmr would ask concerning him, “Have you heard him asking for anyone?” “No,” they said. “But we have heard him ask about a monk from al-Ṭūr.” So ʿAmr sent to Buṭrus and took his seal and wrote to the monk in Coptic as though he were Buṭrus, urging him to tell him about his money and the place in which it was kept. He wrote what he wanted and sent it with a Copt whom he trusted. The messenger returned with a Syrian pitcher sealed with lead, which ʿAmr opened, finding inside a sheet on which was written, “Your money is beneath the big fountain.” He had the water blocked off and removed the tiles that were at the bottom, and there he found fifty-two sacks of red gold coined at the mint of Egypt. So he took the money and had Buṭrus beheaded at the door of the mosque. The End.

11.6.8

The poet’s application of the term “the moneys collected” to the tax-collection apparatus (dīwān) because the latter is their destination is an example of “nomination by destination.” It is called a dīwān because it is there that religion (dīn)²⁴⁴ is upheld through the exposition of the Truth and the exaction of the rights of the oppressed from the oppressor; or because of the presence there of what the king has registered (dawwanahu); or because it brings together different types,²⁴⁵ in the same way that a book bringing together the odes, strophic poems, and epigrams of an individual poet is called a dīwān. Whatever the case, the descent of the tax collectors on a village is a terrifying matter for the peasants and a disaster for the impoverished, and the poet, God have mercy on him, was one of the impoverished and penniless who are behind on the sultan’s taxes, as will appear below in his words “Almost all my life on paying the taxes and their woes …” and Fate and Time had turned on him and driven him to this state, as already mentioned. Consequently, he says of himself, “If the tax collectors arrive, or are on the verge of arriving, fear enters into me, terror overwhelms me, the mightiest of disasters catches me by surprise, and a great agitation overtakes me because of my lack of any money to provide towards the sultan’s taxes, or for fear of punishment and imprisonment.” For this reason:

11.6.9

tabṭul (“give way”): that is, go loose, cease to function, and become almost useless.

11.6.10

mafāṣilī (“my joints”): plural of mafṣil, which denotes a little gap between two bones, held together by sinews; should these sinews cease to function and go loose, they no longer do their job and the limb becomes nearly useless. The term mafṣil was employed by Abū Nuwās²⁴⁶ in the verses he composed on his deathbed:

Naught remains but a faltering breath

And an eye with pupil pale

And a passionate lover whose heart with fire

Still burns, yet cannot tell the tale.

No limb has he, no joint (mafṣil)

Without travail.

His elegy is spoke by those who revel in his state—

Alas for him whose elegy the malign orate!

11.6.11

Moving on, our poet draws attention to what befell him as a result of his inability to pay the tax that he owed, of the Christian’s refusal to grant him a delay or take pity on him, and of the inevitable consequences in terms of the weakening of his joints from the great fear and agitation and the loosening of his bowels, as generally happens to certain people.

11.6.12

He says: wa-ahurru ʿalā rūḥī (“and I void my loose bowels over myself”): that is, over my own person, not over the spirit (rūḥ) that courses through my body,²⁴⁷ from the great agitation and the affliction of

11.6.13

al-takhwīf (“the terror they’re creating”): that is, the terror being created by the followers of the Christian or the bailiff, and the fear that affects me, meaning that my bowels go soft as a result of the spasms caused by this affliction and the severity of the resulting agitation, so that the excrement comes out soft, like semi-liquid mud, when before it was so hard that if you flung it against a wall it would bounce back in your face. As a result, it runs over my person and my clothes, and my fear is so acute that it makes it spurt out too rapidly for me to control its eruption. Hirr (“tomcat”) is the singular of hirār,²⁴⁸ of the pattern of jirār, plural of jarrah (“jar”), deriving from the expressions harr ʿalayka al-ḥimār (“The donkey voided its loose bowels all over you!”) or harr ʿalā liḥyatika al-kalbah (“The bitch voided her loose bowels all over your beard!”) or harr ʿalā dhaqinika (“He voided his loose bowels all over your beard!”), for example. One also says harr al-turāb (“The dust piles collapsed”) and harr al-raml (“The sand piles collapsed”), when they accumulate in heaps and flow spontaneously downward. Thus, if you look at piles of sand, you will observe hurār there for sure.²⁴⁹ Or it may be derived from the hirrah (“she-cat”) that hunts the mouse and which in the Hijaz they call bussah, with u after the b, and in the language of the people of Egypt, quṭṭah. The paradigm is harra, yahirru, hirāran.²⁵⁰

11.6.14

Next, the poet calls attention to the fact that the only course left open to him after his joints have gone weak and his bowels loose because he is so scared is to flee from the events that afflict him and disappear. So he says:

TEXT

11.7

wa-ahrab ḥidā l-niswān wa-ʾaltaffu bi-l-ʿabā

wa-yabqā ḍurāṭī shibha ṭablin ʿanīf

And I flee next to the women and wrap myself in my cloak

and my farts are like a loud drum

COMMENTARY

11.7.1

wa-ahrab (“And I flee”): that is, I and no other person

11.7.2

ḥidā (“next to”): originally with long -āʾ and dh,²⁵¹ but used here in the form with d in accordance with the dialect of the countryside, but he has shortened it for the meter. To be ḥidhāʾ a thing means to be alongside it or facing it.

11.7.3

(a)l-niswān (“the women”): that is, with them or facing them. The word also has the plurals nisāʾ and niswah,²⁵² derived from taʾannus (“friendliness”), or uns (“friendliness”), or muʾānasah (“intimacy”), since, when Adam, God’s blessings and peace be upon him, saw Eve, he felt friendly towards her (anisa ilayhā) and ran to her. Consequently, one finds that men run after women and are drawn to them, for they are the acme of desire, the fragrant nosegays of men’s hearts. It is said that a man once passed a beautiful woman and recited:

Women are devils created for us—

God save us from those devils’ ways!

To which the woman replied:

Women are nosegays created for you—

And all of you love to sniff nosegays!

Niswān is of the pattern of jirwān (“puppies”), niswah of the pattern of qahwah (“coffee”) or ʿajwah (“pressed dates”), and nisāʾ of the pattern of kisāʾ (“clothes”); fusāʾ (“silent farting”) may also be a contributing element.

11.7.4

The meaning is: “I am afraid for myself and am frightened at what has befallen me, so while in this state I go off quickly, and ‘flee,’ that is, make a quick departure, towards ‘the womenfolk,’ and hide myself among them” or “I sit next to them or facing them,” as in the proverb “Half of valor is knowing when to flee.” Even ʿAntarah, for all his strength and courage, fled, saying, “I would rather be reproached for this than be killed!” for if anyone is in fear of an oppressor or of one who might do him harm and he is able to free himself from his clutches by fleeing, he may do so. The Almighty has said, «Cast not yourselves into perdition!»²⁵³

11.7.5

If it be said, why did the poet choose to take refuge with the women rather than the men, even though women are incapable of fending off harm and injury or of protecting any person who might be taken from their midst because of their weakness and inability to fight, we would reply that the answer may be from either of two perspectives. First, that, when this disaster took him by surprise and the tax collectors arrived unexpectedly and his joints went loose and he suffered an attack of the trots, he shat all over himself, as explained above, and was unable to stand up or make his way towards any man with whom he might hide himself or towards any place far from the village in which he might conceal himself, because he was so scared and was shitting on himself so much—and indeed farting on himself, the latter being, as we shall see, a concomitant of the former—and when he saw these women near him, or near the place where he was, he concealed himself among them. Second, it may be understood from what he says that he was weakhearted and a coward, incapable of standing up to or trading blows with others, or of any other type of men’s business, and that he was afraid that if he went to any of the people or to any of his relatives, they would direct the Christian to him, and the latter would take him and use him ill, and take his revenge on him; for the peasants give one another no quarter and do not maintain kindly relations among themselves, especially where relatives are concerned, as previously noted²⁵⁴—and everything has a foe of its own kind. As the poet says:

Everything has a foe of its own kind—

Even iron is attacked by the file!

11.7.6

Additionally, women are not implicated in this business, so no one who saw them congregated in a place would suspect that they had a man in their midst, unless some circumstantial evidence should happen to give him away, and propriety would probably prevent anyone from searching them. Our Master Ḥassān,²⁵⁵ God be pleased with him, hid among the women during certain raids because of his cowardice and lack of courage, as mentioned in the various biographies of the Prophet. Thus the answer now is clear.

Subsequently, since his taking refuge among the women required something to actually conceal him from his enemies and hide him from sight, he says:

11.7.7

wa-ltaffu bil-ʿabā (“and wrap myself in my cloak”): that is, “when I am seated in the midst of the women, or next to them, or opposite them, I wrap myself in my cloak (ʿabā), or I lie down after wrapping myself in it, in order by so wrapping myself to rid myself of my fears”—for one who is frightened will conceal himself in anything that he sees, be it a cloak or a robe or anything else that may hide him from sight. He may even go so far as to dress himself as a woman and so disappear from the sight of his enemies and be saved by the Almighty.

11.7.8

It once fell out that a certain king was searching everywhere for a rebellious subject in order to kill him and was told, “He is in such and such a village.” So he sent one of his officers after him with a contingent of soldiers, who entered the village and surrounded it. When the man realized that they wanted to take him to the king, he put on women’s clothing and went out among a throng of women, all of them wailing and weeping and shrieking. “What’s the matter with those women?” asked the officer. “Ask them what they’re doing!” So a company approached them and questioned them, and they replied, “A relative of ours has died in another village and we wish to go to him,” and they allowed them then to pass and they proceeded—the fugitive, unknown to the officer, among them—until the man had passed through the soldiers and gone his way and the Almighty saved him.

11.7.9

A similar incident once befell me when I was in a ship traveling from my town, Shirbīn, to Cairo.²⁵⁶ We were passing by a village called Masīd al-Khiḍr²⁵⁷ when a good-looking youth appeared, handsomely dressed in the uniform of an emir’s servant, who cried out to the ship’s captain, “Take me with you!” and beseeched and implored him in great distress to take him on board. The captain, however, refused, fearing that someone might be coming after him looking for him or following his tracks. At the same time, there were three women in the boat, one of them elderly. “Captain,” said the last, “a young man in distress asks you to take him with you, and you do not accede to his plea or have mercy on him? Pull in to the shore, take him, and I’ll come up with a trick to hide him from those who’re looking for him. I’ll conceal him among my daughters and no one will know who he is!” So the captain did as she said and took the youth on board. Once on the ship, he informed us that he was in the service of an emir and that he had duped him and fled and that he was certain to come after him. “Take off your clothes!” the woman told him, so he took them off. Then she took them and hid them among her things and dressed him in women’s clothes and sat him next to her. While we were thus engaged, an emir appeared riding a horse, spurring it on for all he was worth, men and slaves behind him, till they drew abreast of the ship and he said to the captain, “Pull in to the shore so I can search you! A serving boy of mine has just now fled, taking with him a thousand dinars that he stole.” The woman told the captain, “Pull in and don’t be afraid!” so the captain pulled in to shore and everyone on the ship was frightened at what was going on. The emir and his helpers boarded and searched the ship, while the woman exclaimed, “We saw nothing of the sort! What we did see was a young man in the distance running in such and such a direction.” Propriety and lack of grounds for suspicion prevented the emir from searching the women, so he left the boat empty-handed, but the young man stayed with us on the boat until it reached Cairo, and he went off to his family, safe and sound.

11.7.10

The poet, seeing this cloak (ʿabāʾah),²⁵⁸ enveloped himself in it and wrapped it around himself. Laff (“wrapping”) means enveloping oneself in something and wrapping it around oneself several times. In the language of the country people, the word is also applied to eating: one says, “So-and-so ‘wrapped’ (laff) a crock of lentils” or “a crock of bīsār,” meaning “he ate it.” And one says dāhiyah taluffak (“May a disaster consume you!”), for example. The poet enveloped himself in the aforementioned ʿabāʾah so as to trick anyone who saw it into thinking that it was just a folded cloak and not suspect that there was anyone inside it. The ʿabāʾah is a long, wide garment made of wool with varicolored stripes, which the country people use as something to lie on in summer and as a cover in winter.²⁵⁹ Thus it is well suited to both seasons and is the most sumptuous bedding and covering that they have. The term ʿabāʾ is used in the verse of Our Master al-Ḥusayn, may the Almighty be pleased with him:

Wearers of the ʿabāʾ are we, the five of us;²⁶⁰

We hold sway over east and west!

11.7.11

ʿAbāʾah is derived from ʿabb al-māʾ (“he gulped the water”) because it “gulps it up” (taʿubbuhu) if it is thrown into it, or from the ʿubūb (“billows”) of the river in the days of the Nile flood,²⁶¹ or from the abū ʿubayyah (“the one with the little cloak”), a nickname that the women of the countryside give to certain small chicks. The paradigm is ʿabba, yaʿubbu, ʿabban.

11.7.12

wa-yabqā (“and (my farts) are”): that is, are while I am in this state in which I find myself, namely, that of having loose bowels and with my sloppy stools running all over me from the insecurity and the terror while I am wrapped and enveloped in that cloak …

11.7.13

ḍurāṭī (“my farts”): that is, the sounds made by the wind resounding harmoniously in the belly as a result of eating lentils and bīsār, when expelled by the pounding of my members and the shaking of my heart, are …

11.7.14

shibha (“like”): that is, resemble the sounds made by the beating of …

11.7.15

ṭablin (“a drum”): meaning a hide mounted on wood or copper beaten during processions and on joining combat; it makes a loud noise and creates great terror and is permitted by religion in all its forms except for the kūbah, which is a small drum with a narrow neck also known as the darābukkah (“goblet drum”), and the ṭabl al-riqq (“tambourine”), which is used by singers—these belong to the category of instruments employed for frivolous purposes. Likewise, all types of wind instruments, except the trumpet, are forbidden by religion.²⁶²

11.7.16

ʿanīf (“loud”): that is, beaten hard; one says someone “dealt harshly with” (ʿannafa) another, meaning that he beat him or disciplined him. The meaning is that the sound of that wind that exits from his belly and is called farting resembles the sound of a drum beaten vigorously and forcefully, according to which analysis the adjective would refer to the one beating rather than the thing beaten.²⁶³ Or it may be that by “a loud drum” he means a big one, such as the kettledrum or the like, since he knows no other.

11.7.17

To give a brief overview of this word, farts fall into four categories: first, the fart that emerges delicately, with a feeble sound, and is of extended duration; second, the fart that circulates, rumbling, in the belly, then emerges as wind with no sound; third, the fart that emerges mixed with feces and makes a sound like a water pitcher when it is full; and fourth, the fart that emerges violently, with a loud noise that strikes terror into the heart, this last being the one to which the poet so frankly draws our attention. And each of these four categories has a cause by which it is occasioned.

11.7.18

The first is caused by refined airs that are generated in a person’s belly, then emerge, as per their particular state and degree of feebleness, from between the buttocks, with a sound as delicate as they are refined, their delicacy being attributable to the refinement of the dish consumed. As the poet says:

The fart of the beloved emerged delicately

And with refinement, for his food was refined.

This type of fart emanates from people with refined bodies and from eaters of light foods.

11.7.19

The second is the fart that circulates, rumbling, in the belly, and sometimes comes to a stop right in the middle of it, not moving until the sufferer has almost perished, then proceeds with distentionary strength and loud rumbling to the extremities of the belly. This sort causes injury. It is known to physicians as an “unripened fart” and is generated by coarse foods. If it ripens, it emerges at speed, and if any part of it emerges before it has ripened, it does so as an inaudible fart, in which case the subsequent emergence of the audible fart is of rare occurrence. The poet says:

He eats any-old-how all day,

And at night you find his belly rumbles.

11.7.20

A man once went to a doctor and told him, “I feel the collywobbles and a rumbling in my belly.” The doctor told him, “As to the collywobbles, I couldn’t venture an opinion, but as to the rumbling, it’s an unripened fart.” If the wind circulates in the belly without rumbling but with acute pain, it is called colic and is treated by consuming a quantity of wormwood or thyme boiled with sugar for breakfast; it may last an entire day or an entire night. It happened that Ibn al-Rāwandī, may God excuse his sins, was afflicted by such a colic for an entire night and passed the time imploring the Almighty to send him relief in the form of a single fart, but such was not vouchsafed to him. First thing in the morning he went out supporting himself on a stick he had and heard a man saying, “Lord, send me a thousand dinars!” Ibn al-Rāwandī said to him, “You crass fool! All night long I’ve been asking Him for a single fart and He didn’t give it to me, and you think He’s going to send you a thousand dinars?” Then he left him and went his way. For these reasons it is called “low-emission colic.”

11.7.21

The third is the fart that emerges mixed with feces and is caused by the winds mixing and blending with the excreta just before they emerge, the two coming together as one relieves himself, especially if the bowels are loose. As a result, noises that are staccato and non-legato are to be heard, resembling the gurgling of a water pitcher when full. These are caused by emissions from the bloating of the stomach and relaxation of the bowels consequent to taking food that is too easily digested, followed by its copious, rapid descent. As the poet says:

When a man’s in a shithouse all on his own,

The emissions of his bloat will surely be heard.

Thus the man of good sense will pretend he heard naught,

While the moron can have the farts up his beard!

11.7.22

Sometimes a fart will emerge with a delicate sound like the mewling and humming that a spindle makes as women spin with it. Such a sound once emerged from a certain poet and when his companions chided him for it he said:

This is a child of my belly who came out crying,

“I’ve lost me a spindle. It’s quite disappeared.”

And if anyone says to me, “Stifle your farts!”

I’ll bury my shit deep in his beard!

The poet makes the stomach the mother and the fart within it the daughter who leaves her mother and who starts crying and mewling like a spindle on being separated from her. From this it is to be understood that he is to be excused, and he who does not excuse him is ignorant of his state and the poet’s shit will be in his beard.

11.7.23

A fart may come without warning, as when one lifts something heavy, or makes a great leap, or stands up suddenly, but in such cases the sound is not as long as in the others, and such a fart is less harmful than the preceding. For instance, it happened that a Bedouin poet once let out a sudden loud fart, and his companions reproached him. The Bedouin then proceeded to recite the following:

I farted but by that did nothing unknown to mankind,

Nor did my anus commit some sin of which I should repent.

Since all the world’s anuses are given to farting,

Who can reproach me for such an event?

11.7.24

And once two men went before a judge, and one of them stepped forward and made his complaint against his companion and presented his story. While he was speaking, however, he farted, so he turned to his backside and said to it, “Either I speak or you do!”

11.7.25

Nifṭawayh relates, on the authority of Ḥakīm ibn ʿAyyāsh al-Kalbī, that delegations from Quraysh and the Bedouins met with ʿAbd al-Malik. While the latter was holding audience, a Bedouin of whom ʿAbd al-Malik was particularly fond came in. ʿAbd al-Malik was delighted and said, “A happy day indeed!” and seating the man next to him called for a bow, with which he took a shot. Then he passed it on to the next man on his right, who in turn took a shot, until it came around to the Bedouin. When the Bedouin pulled hard on the bow, he farted, and threw it down in embarrassment. ʿAbd al-Malik said, “The Bedouin has put us to shame! We were too greedy for his company, but I know that the only thing that will settle his problem is food.” Then he called for the food tray to be brought and said, “Come forward, Bedouin, and fart!” though what he meant to say was “and eat!” The Bedouin said to him, “I have already done so!” to which ʿAbd al-Malik responded, “We belong to God and to God we shall return! We have indeed been tested today! By God, I shall make it something to remember! Page, bring me ten thousand dirhams!” The page brought them, and ʿAbd al-Malik gave them to the Bedouin, who, when he received them, was consoled and rejoiced and forgot what he had let slip. At this Ḥakīm ibn ʿAyyāsh al-Kalbī recited:

A farter from ʿAbd Qays lets one rip,

And the Commander gives him a ten-thousand-dinar tip?

Some fart, to net so much!

Some fart, to make a pauper rich!

We all would happily fart as one

If that fart would net one tenth of that sum.

If a thousand per thousand’s the going rate,

Just hear me fart, God set the Commander straight!

ʿAbd al-Malik smiled and rewarded Ḥakīm ibn ʿAyyāsh with a like amount.

11.7.26

And it is said that al-Ṣaghīrī²⁶⁴ approached an emir when the latter was holding a salon and wanted to speak but farted instead and turned away in embarrassment. One of those who heard him then said:

Tell al-Ṣaghīrī when he turns away fast

At a fart like a flute playing to the oud,

“’Tis but a wind you cannot control,

Since you’re not Sulaymān son of Dāʾūd!”²⁶⁵

11.7.27

These are all examples of savoir faire and of how to draw a veil over the faults of others and find excuses for a member of a gathering if he farts unavoidably, to spare him the embarrassment and the ridicule of the unforgiving that he would otherwise have to endure. This is why they tell the following riddle about a fart:

One newly born, whose mother never bled,

Who has no life and does not stir.

All guffaw, though she’s not seen,

But her owner doesn’t laugh—he’s too ashamed of her.

If, on the other hand, the farting is a deliberate act on someone’s part and not because of an indisposition or an illness, then it’s disgusting and bad-mannered and shows contempt for those sitting in the gathering, and the one who farts there behaves inappropriately even if he is trying, for example, to be funny.

11.7.28

We have observed in the villages of the countryside that, if a person farts unexpectedly at a gathering, he suffers enormously at the others’ hands, and they force him to prepare them food. Sometimes they make him a mark in whitewash or lime on the wall next to where he was sitting so that everyone may see and know that he farted on that spot. On occasion he may even leave the village because of the reproach they heap on him for what he did, all of which arises from the coarseness of their natures, the worthlessness of their characters, their intolerance of farters, and their indifference to their embarrassment. However that may be, anyone who farts involuntarily is to be excused, especially if stifling the wind would cause him discomfort, even if he is in company. In such circumstances there is nothing wrong with his farting there, and he should be forgiven by reason of his indisposition.

11.7.29

I saw in a book that the reason that Ḥātim, God benefit us through him, was given the nickname “the Deaf”²⁶⁶ is that a woman came to ask him about something and, when she spoke, an audible wind came out, so she was embarrassed and fell silent. Ḥātim told her, “Raise your voice when you speak, for I am deaf!” as a way of sparing her embarrassment. The woman rejoiced and was convinced that he had not heard her fart. Then he became known for that, God be pleased with him.

11.7.30

And once it happened that I loved a youth,²⁶⁷ comely of person, refined of personality, honeyed of tongue, tender of limb, most wonderful in beauty, most winsome in coquetry. Infatuated with his charms, hankering for his arms, ever alert to be alone with him for a space and for fortune to cast us together in some place, I happened across him in a meadow whose fragrant plants exuded balm, whose birds filled the air with song under many a towering palm, where proudly he strolled in garments of glory with to his gait a delectable twist—and how much sweeter a chance encounter than any tryst! I greeted him in open fashion, revealed to him my passion, and asked him to sit down, with which request he complied—and ah, how sweet it is when lovers sit side by side! Then, after we’d settled ourselves and taken our place, and I wanted to take advantage of his compliant grace, among those meadows all in bloom, and all that fragrance and perfume, and to enjoy his converse sweet and pure, and accents of supreme allure, along came a bunch of those whose persons are coarse and natures gross, who sat down without invitation, and plunged without manners into conversation. The youth felt shy and hung his head, assailed by rage and dread, but as he made a move to flee a sound escaped, involuntarily. They mocked him then and left without more ado, making disparaging comments as they did so. He looked at me, his eye with kohl bright, his face a lovely sight, and said, “What say you to the chidings of those boors?” And thus did I recite:

11.7.31

They chided the beloved, unaware

Of what he meant by what he did

When he displayed his scorn for his companions,

Showing that from him their churlishness was no way hid,

And thought it best to speak sweetly with them,

Employing a subtle utterance, like honey,

Though this was lost on them, since they

Were men of coarseness and ennui.

He called out to them from his buttocks

With a delicate sound, unpremeditated—

11.7.32

Something to match their condition

And their most lowly state;

And so they left a gathering

That gazelle and ghazal did unite—

May we ne’er be deprived of a fart

That can put such ills to flight!

It came out sweetly, and cleared the place

Of censors and their displeasure,

So praise be to God for getting rid

Of a burden that’s now gone forever!

11.7.33

So fart, sing, and be happy,

And roam, brave lad, and be gay,

In a meadow, oh so lovely,

Where joy has come to stay!

So long as you’re willing to have him,

Your slave will ne’er avert his face—

But, by the Chosen One, swear

That you’ll take none else in my place!

11.7.34

At this he smiled, revealing teeth like a pearly line, his willowy body close to mine, and said, “Nay, by Him who split the grain²⁶⁸ and planted in your heart love’s tree, I’ll never break this oath of mine—no third shall come between us till the end of time!” And so we remained, he with me, till he joined the Lord of Majesty.²⁶⁹

11.7.35

An amusing story relates how Sultan Qānṣawh al-Ghawrī was walking in disguise one day with his vizier in the streets of Cairo when he heard one singer say to another, “You dare to boast of your superiority to me, So-and-so, when I know how to produce the musical modes from my ass?” The sultan said to his vizier, “Bring the man to me!” So the vizier brought him before him and the sultan related to him what he had heard him say and said to him, “Seeing is believing! Make good your claim!” “Please let me off, Your Majesty,” the man replied, “for in the heat of an argument a man may say anything!” However, the sultan answered, “Prove your claim or I’ll kill you!” “Will you grant me immunity from punishment?” said the man. “That is yours,” said the sultan. “Let it be in an empty place,” said the man. “So be it,” said the sultan. So the sultan decamped to the reception hall, had the man brought, spoke kindly to him, and told him, “Proceed at your leisure!” (Sultan al-Ghawrī was well-versed in this art and had written several treatises on it).²⁷⁰ “What mode would you like?” said the man. “Ḥijāz,²⁷¹ for example,” said the sultan. So the man worked his buttocks and produced it, and then continued to make one mode after another until he had run through them all, along with their transitions,²⁷² omitting none and leaving no room for criticism. The sultan was delighted and said, “Such as you must surely be the master of Egypt in this art!” Then he awarded him a thousand dinars and appointed him chief of all the singers of Egypt, and it is said that he is the ancestor of the Awlād al-ʿAtr Troupe that is famous today.

11.7.36

Once I met a man called Māḍī the Farter, God have mercy on his soul. He was extremely meticulous in his religion and pious, as well as refined and musical, and he knew the Qurʾan very well by heart. His farts were made by artifice, in that he did them with his armpit, but he could still make any mode whatsoever that way and work variations and so on on them. He was a source of amazement to all who saw him and hearing him would make a stone laugh. He was famous among the emirs and received by the mighty, may God excuse him his sins.

11.7.37

A bit of facetious useful knowledge that I heard from a profligate: Satan, God curse him, farts five farts every day and distributes them among five individuals. The first of these is the man who puts his wife on a mount and takes her around to visit the tombs of the saints and the cemeteries. The second is the man who sees two people delighting in one another’s company and inserts himself between them; such people are known as a “parasites of friendship.” The third is the man who sees two people fighting and inserts himself between them so that most of the blows fall on him, according to the proverb “The peacemaker gains nothing but torn clothes.” The fourth is the man who walks in the highway looking this way and that for no reason. And the fifth is the man who is a prisoner of his wife. Many more could be added to the list.

11.7.38

If it be said that a fart is a sound, and sound has been defined as “air compressed between what is pulled and what it is pulled out of,” or “between what strikes and what is struck”—while, in this case, there is no striker and nothing struck, the fart merely emerging from the anus at the parting and articulation of the buttocks—so what is the explanation, we would reply that it may be said that this phenomenon, namely, the fart, can be integrated only under a second definition, which is that sound is air that forms waves on the collision of two bodies. Thus the answer now is clear.

11.7.39

And if it be said that there is a problem with the poet’s words, “and my farts are like a loud drum,” to wit that, if his farts resembled the sound of heavy drumming, everyone who heard them would come to him and they would discover him, his presence would become known, and the Christian and others would be informed about it, so there would be no point in his hiding among the women or in wrapping himself in the ʿabāʾah, so what is the wisdom in this, we would reply that the poet mentions that he would fart in this manner only after wrapping himself in the ʿabāʾah. Thus, even if his farts were forceful and loud, nothing would be heard once he had wrapped himself in the ʿabāʾah. Thus the meaning is that, absent any envelopment and wrapping, his farting would be heard like the sound of drums. As it stands, however, the situation would be similar, for example, to that of a man imprisoned in a deep pit who has drums with him on which he beats: scarcely any of the sound would be heard, even if he were beating on them hard, for the ability to hear the sound would be confined to the man himself, or to those standing at the opening of the pit or close to it—the ʿabāʾah playing the role of the pit, albeit narrower, because he is enveloped and wrapped up in it—and even if the farting were strong on the inside, the noise would emerge only feebly to the outside. Or it may be that the whole thing should be treated under the rubric of “impossible rhetorical exaggeration,” similar to the example given by al-Ṣafī al-Ḥillī in his Embellished Ode in the Prophet’s Praise (Al-Badīʿiyyah), when he says:²⁷³

A champion so strong that were the night to seek his aid

Against the morn, mankind would live in darkness!

11.7.40

Or it may be said that, even if this farting were to be heard as described, no one would imagine that it was a man who was hiding; rather, it might be thought that it was a man or a woman relieving him or herself, in which case there would be no reason to think that there was anything suspicious. In any case, there is nothing problematic in the poet’s words, and the answer now is clear.

And I would like to add that I am the only person to have set forth such an interpretation, made such a classification of farting, and defined it in such terms, so far as I am aware.

11.7.41

Next the poet draws attention to the fact that his life has been expended in puerility and passed in futility, because he is so poor and earns so little. He says:

TEXT

11.8

wa-yā dawba ʿumrī fī l-kharāji wa-hammihī

taqaḍḍā wa-lā lī fī l-haṣād saʿīf

Almost all my life on the tax and its woes

Has been spent, and I have no helper when the harvest comes!

COMMENTARY

11.8.1

wa-yā dawba (“almost all”): wa- (“and”) is the conjunction that coordinates the words with what goes before, yā is the vocative particle, and dawb is a term that has facetious etymologies²⁷⁴ and a variety of meanings. It may derive from the daʾb (“ongoing concern”) of a person, that is to say, his affairs, and the circumstances in which he is involved. Thus the meaning would be, “You are aware, my brethren, that my ongoing concern, throughout

11.8.2

“ʿumrī (‘my life’): has lain (in addition to the worries that afflicted me previously) in the computation of, worrying over, and great suffering concerning how much

11.8.3

“of al-kharāji (‘the tax’) and what springs from hammihī (‘its woes’), that is, the land tax (kharāj al-arḍ), namely, the tax that is entered against my name in payment for cultivation of the land and for what it produces every year, for these do not cover the tax I owe, because the latter is great, while farming produces little, and because I am so weak and poor and have few to help me in sowing and harvesting. Consequently, my life

11.8.4

“taqaḍḍā (‘has been spent’): in this state,” etc.

11.8.5

Or it (yā dawba) may be from nocturnal “creeping up” (dab) on a beardless youth, when he lies down in the midst of a throng, meaning that the profligate has not been able to get at him; in such cases, the man bides his time until the boy is asleep and then “creeps up” on him unawares, the boy feeling nothing until most, or all, of the penis has entered.²⁷⁵ Then the boy submits until the profligate has gotten what he wants, either for fear of anyone stirring or because scared of causing strife. Sometimes the boy will then reproach him gently, or chide him lightly, and the other will say, “God has decreed it so, and I am your slave,” for example, or “I’m dying for love of you” and so on, until things are sorted out to everyone’s satisfaction. A poet has said in a mawāliyā:

I crept up at night on a boy most cute

And rode like a hawk with his back in my clutch.

Waking, he asked, “Who’s this who’s won his suit?”

Said I, “A blind man, poking with his crutch!”

11.8.6

The meaning would be “at any time, the worry and fatigue associated with the land tax and the calculation of it may creep up on me and deny me any ease in my daily life or pleasure in my days and so on as long as I live, just as the profligate creeps up on the beardless boy, who feels nothing until the man is on his back and has had his way with him, as described above.” Or it may be from the spreading (dabīb) of the poison of the scorpion, in the sense that preoccupation with making this sort of calculation night and day engenders a depression that diffuses itself to the heart and spreads itself there, just as the scorpion’s poison spreads throughout the entire body. Or it may be derived from dubb (“bear”), with u after the d, an animal with a massive body, thick hair, and slow reactions, than which there is no more slow-witted beast, albeit its powers of comprehension are greater than others’—as the proverb says, “Better the slowness of the bear than the quickness of the monkey.” One of its remarkable traits is that, if it sees a hunting party coming, it rubs its hair against gum from trees so that the gum mixes with the hair, then rolls in the sand until the hair becomes as hard as rock. Thereafter, neither arrow nor anything else has any effect on it, and the hair protects it.

There is a kind of ease and a way of testing people’s thinking to be found in reacting slowly to things. As the poet says:

Affect slowness, weighing thus men’s minds,

And these will reveal to you things you never knew!

11.8.7

In this case, the meaning would be “Excessive worry from calculating the money that I owe in tax and weighing out the tax in kind²⁷⁶ have brought me to a state that resembles that of the bear in the slowness of its reactions and its sluggishness in bestirring itself, because of the low earnings and small profit that are to be gotten from farming and my extreme poverty and the unceasing demands upon me from one moment to the next, for I am denied the good things of this world and my situation benefits me nothing.” As a certain poet²⁷⁷ has said:

I’m left with neither work nor leisure—

Our earnings are from a bargain vexed;

And the outcome of it all and the upshot

Is naught in this life and naught in the next!

—for I can see no profit in farming, starting from the lack of seed and my inability to improve the land, for only the strong, affluent peasant can cultivate the land, especially in view of the abusive levies,²⁷⁸ tax augmentations, and customary dues that are entered nowadays against the peasants, and the “obligations.” For, though it is written that it is “nine-tenths of all blessing,” farming falls short of such a yield because of the pervasive injustices. In earlier times, the peasant did not have “customary dues” or “charges” or “obligations” or any of the other things that exist today imposed upon him. On the contrary, a person would farm the land, the tax calculated on it would be light, and he would know nothing of the wajbah, the fine on the landless, and the rest. Blessing was unconfined, all the land was under cultivation, and the people enjoyed the greatest good fortune, affluence, and profit.

11.8.8