Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange (Hardcover Classics) Read Online Free

Customarily in these romances love is fated, as are the painful separation and ultimate blissful reunion.
    The ninth-century lexicographer al-Asma‘i, 4 who travelled among the Bedouin in order to clarify the meanings of Arabic words, reported that ‘some of the Arabs say “
’
Ishq
(passion) is a kind of madness” ’. The
Qanun
, the famous medical textbook by the eleventh-century philosopher and physician Ibn Sina (Avicenna), discussed lovesickness as a delusionary form of madness akin to melancholia. The plight of several lovers in
Tales of the Marvellous
seems to bear out Ibn Sina’s diagnosis. In ‘Budur and ‘Umair’, we are introduced to the case of Budur, whose ‘letter comes from one who spends her nights in tears and her days in torture. All day she is bewildered and all night she is sleepless. She takes no pleasure in food, cannot take refuge in sleep, does not listen to rebuke and cannot hear those who speak to her. Longing has mastered her …’ For the most part, the exalted code of love was reserved for the nobly born; it was not for bakers, washerwomen, porters and seamstresses. In ‘The Six Men’ in
Tales of the Marvellous
there is nothing noble about the hunchback tailor’s attempt to have sex with the merchant’s deceitful wife, and he does not get to spout poetry, but is handed over by the merchant to the police chief so that he can be flogged. Similarly, the paralytic’s desire for a beautiful young woman results in him ending up with dyed eyebrows, shaven and naked in the street, an object of mockery.
    ‘Aja’ib
could have an aesthetic resonance for, if a person or an artefact was perceived of as being beautiful, the common response was not
jamil!
(beautiful!), but
‘ajib!
(amazing!). The compelling power of physical beauty looms large in these stories. In
Tales of the Marvellous
, as in the
Nights
, people are loved for their physical appearance rather than their character. The moon features frequently as a simile for beauty (and indeed Budur’s name means ‘moons’). Beautiful women are conventionally compared to gazelles. It was more common to evoke beauty through metaphor and simile than by close physical description. Beauty was ablessing from God, and according to the eleventh-century scholar and Sufi al-Ghazali God had worked as an artist to design the human form. Yusuf, or Joseph, was the exemplar of male physical beauty in Islamic lore. The Sura of Joseph in the Qur’an describes how a governor of Egypt’s wife, who passionately desired Joseph, accused him of rape, but was found out. Then:
Certain women that were in the city said,
    ‘The governor’s wife has been soliciting her page; he smote her heart with love; we see her in manifest error.’
    When she heard their sly whispers, she sent to them and made ready for them a repast,
    Then she gave to each one of them a knife.
    ‘Come forth, attend to them,’ she said.
    And when they saw him, they so admired him
    That they cut their hands, saying ‘God save us!
    This is no mortal; he is no other but a noble angel.’
    In
Tales of the Marvellous
, the tale of ‘Muhammad the Foundling’ is calqued on that of the Qur’anic Joseph, for the devastatingly handsome Muhammad is, like Joseph, falsely accused of rape, though the fact that his shirt is torn at the back, not the front, suggests that he is innocent. Though handsomeness in a man is a sign of nobility and virtue, a woman’s beauty is a much less reliable guide to her inner qualities. The beauty of ‘Arus al-‘Ara’is lures men to their deaths. Similarly, in ‘The Six Men’, the hunchback weaver sees ‘a woman rising like a full moon on a balcony’ and he recollects that ‘she was so very lovely that … my heart took fire’, but that vision of loveliness will lure him to his doom and, in the stories that follow, the paralytic and the glass seller with the severed ear will similarly be betrayed by female beauties. In Arabic
fitna
means sedition or civil