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

fate. Similarly, in the tale of the paralytic man, he encounters ultimate humiliation in a house full of beautiful women. The story of the lustful and treacherous ‘Arus al-‘Ara’is, a medieval Arab Medea, would seem to be the misogynistic story par excellence, and yet this unusually complex narrative has its ambiguities. For example, after killing the
jinni
, she seems to repent: ‘Alas for all scheming and treacherous women, who keep no covenant of love or pact of faithfulness and who neither abide by nor show loyalty to their lovers.’ At times she uses sex as a lethal weapon, yet at other times she genuinely desires to be loved. It is also conceded that she is the prisoner of fate’s decree, for, almost from the first, we are to understand that she has been born under an evil conjunction of stars. Hers is a grief-after-grief story, as she becomes by turns a villainess and a victim of villainy.
    The storyteller or storytellers show a particular hostility to scheming and deceitful old women. Thus it is an aged bawd who sets up the paralytic man with his ill-fated assignation. Similarly, it is an old woman who sees the glass seller being given a large sum of money and who promises to set him up with her beautiful unmarried daughter, and of course no good will come of that.
    More bizarrely, in ‘Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle’ the queen of the
jinn
crows has responsibility for engineering the parting of couples. The same story features an aged sorceress who tricks the lion and successively cuts off his tail, ears, nose and whiskers. ‘The Talisman Mountain’ features an evil-omened old woman with a face like a vulture.
    Medieval Arab fiction had no kind of monopoly on misogyny. There are at least as many examples in medieval European poetry and stories. To take just examples from English literature, according to the twelfth-century
Valerius’s Dissuasion Against Marriage
by Walter Map, ‘no matter what they intend, with a woman the result is always the same. When she wants to do him harm – and that is nearly always the case – she never fails. If by chance she should want to do good, she still succeeds in doing harm.’ 7 Geoffrey Chaucer, in ‘The Merchant’s Tale’ in
The Canterbury Tales
, cited Ecclesiastes as the authority for Solomon finding one good man among a thousand, but out of all women not a single one. And from ‘The Wife of Bath’s Prologue’ in the same book we learn how the wife in question saw off five husbands. Towards the end of the fourteenth-century English poem
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Gawain sums up the case against women:
Who with their wanton wiles have thus waylaid their knight.
    But it is no marvel for a foolish man to be maddened thus
    And saddled with sorrow by the sleights of women.
    For here on earth was Adam taken in by one,
    And Solomon by many such, and Samson likewise;
    Delilah dealt him his doom; and David later still,
    Was blinded by Bathsheba, and badly suffered for it. 8
Racism
    As is the case with many of the stories in the
Nights
, blacks are presented as violent and often stupid as well. In ‘The King of the Two Rivers’, the king’s son is taken captive by ten villainous Magian blacks, but he succeeds in slitting all their throats while they are asleep. In ‘Muhammad the Foundling and Harun al-Rashid’ it turns out that it is a black furnace-man who is guilty of deflowering Miriam. But racism is most outrageously to the fore in ‘Ashraf and Anjab’, in which thesadistically villainous Anjab is described by Harun al-Rashid as follows: ‘This man is black as a negro … with red eyes, a nose like a clay pot and lips like kidneys’, and his mother is no better looking for she ‘was black as pitch with a snub nose, red eyes and an unpleasant smell’. In ‘Sa‘id Son of Hatim’ the monk Simeon predicts that the shrine of the Ka’ba will be destroyed by drunken and singing blacks. As Bernard Lewis’s
Race and Slavery in the