Abstract
In ‘The Lady and the Ḥashshāsh’ and ‘The Woman with Five Suitors’, the main theme that runs through both stories is adultery proper. The chapter investigates the utilisation of qubḥ through the theme of adultery in both tales whereby it (the theme) unearths other categories of qubḥ through the sophisticated literary portrayal of lack of reason. The chapter also looks at the common themes in world literature such as profanity, and scatology, and their role in the carnivalesque. However, it points out their different meanings in Arab-Islamic culture.
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Notes
- 1.
Nights 282nd–285th.
- 2.
Nights 593rd–596th.
- 3.
Night 285th.
- 4.
This is not to indicate that ʻishq normally implies ‘lust’ as the story depicts it, but this is how the tale defines its own terms. For a survey of the various Arabic terms and verbs associated with love, see Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Rawḍat al-Muḥibbı̄n wa Nuzhat al-Mushtāqı̄n, 26–53; see also ‘Désir’ and ‘Ichq’ in Malek Chebel, Encylopédie de l’Amour en Islam: erotisme, beauté et sexualité dans le monde arabe, en Pers et en Turquie (Paris: Payot, 1995), 194–7, 334.
- 5.
al-Musawi, The Islamic Context of the Thousand and One Nights, 6.
- 6.
Bellamy, ‘Sex and Society in Islamic Popular Literature,’ 42.
- 7.
Corps et Traditions Islamiques, (Tunis: Noir sur Blanc, 2000), 75.
- 8.
Lisān al-ʻArab, 2:157.
- 9.
Lane, ḥ-m-q.
- 10.
Ibid.
- 11.
al-Ghazālı̄, Kitāb al-Arbaʻı̄n fı̄ Uṣūl al-Dı̄n (Beirut: Dār al-Āfāq, 1979), 57.
- 12.
al-Ghazālı̄, Kitāb al-Arbaʻı̄n fı̄ Uṣūl al-Dı̄n (Cairo: Maktabat al-Jundı̄, 1970), 104–5, quoted in Massimo Campanini, ‘adl’ in The Qur’an: an encyclopedia, 14.
- 13.
Bedhioufi, 124.
- 14.
Ibid., 83–5.
- 15.
Richard Burton explains this as part of the customs in drinking parties, where guests ‘put off dresses of dull colours and robe themselves in clothes supplied by the host, of the brightest he may have, especially yellow, green and red of different shades.’ This naturally alleviates any suspicion of the woman’s motives in the story. Richard F. Burton, The Book of the Thousand and One Nights (Massachusetts: The Burton Club, n.d.), 6:175, fn.1.
- 16.
Night 595th.
- 17.
Fazlur Rahman, ‘Law and Ethics’ in Ethics in Islam, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (California: Undena, 1983), 13.
- 18.
George Makdisi, ‘Ethics in Islamic Traditionalist Doctrine’ in Ethics in Islam, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (California: Undena, 1983), 47.
- 19.
This distinction is noticed in the vocabulary of most aspects of pre-modern Arabic writing, for example, the chroniclers use al-nās and al-ʻāmma to refer to society and class divisions. Elizabeth Greene Heilman, ‘Popular Protests in Medieval Baghdad, 295–334 A.H./908–946 A.D’ (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1978), 153. It is also worth mentioning, according to al-Jāḥiẓ, that if someone behaves foolishly from al-ʻāmma, this person is classified as an aḥmaq, however if this person is from the upper-middle or upper classes, s/he is referred to as raqı̄ʻ, Abū Hilāl al-ʻAskarı̄, al-Furūq al-Lughawiyya (Cairo: n.p., 1934), 81.
- 20.
Sachiko Murata, The Tao of Islam (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 44 quoted in Barlas, ‘Believing Women’ in Islam, 146.
- 21.
Night 595th.
- 22.
Umberto Eco, ‘The Frames of Comic ‘Freedom” in Carnival!, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Berlin, New York and Amsterdam: Mouton Publishers, 1984), 5.
- 23.
William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998), 34.
- 24.
Naturally, as Rosenthal asserts ‘[d]ecorum was demanded in holy places.’ See, Franz Rosenthal, ‘Fiction and Reality: Sources for the Role of Sex in Medieval Muslim Society’ in Society and the Sexes in Medieval Islam (Malibu: Undena Publications, 1979), 3–22.
- 25.
See, Michael W. Dols, Majnūn: The Madman in Medieval Islamic Society, ed. Diana E. Immisch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 325.
- 26.
See, Qays Ibn al-Mulawwaḥ, Dı̄wān Majnūn Laylā, ed. ʻAdnān Zakı̄ Darwı̄sh. (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1994), 228.
- 27.
The motif of women as mentors of men runs in various other stories in The Thousand and One Nights; for a detailed discussion of this theme, especially pertaining to ‘The Story of the Porter and the Three Ladies’, see Sandra Naddaff, Arabesque: Narrative Structure and the Aesthetics of Repetition in 1001 Nights (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 13–38. See also Ferial Ghazoul, ‘The Visual Sign as a Semiotic Signifier in the Arabian Nights,’ The Medieval History Journal 9, no. 1 (2006):167–184 for analysing this theme as it figures in ‘The Story of Azı̄z and Azı̄za’. For a discussion on the theme of women’s knowledge, especially that of Shahrazād and Azı̄za, see Martine Medejel, ‘Savoir des Femmes dans les Nuits: De Schéhérazade à Aziza’ in Les Mille et Une Nuits: Du Texte au Mythe, ed. Jean-Luc Joly and Abdelfattah Kilito (Rabat: Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines, 2005), 167–171. While not engaging in the theme of mentoring men, ‘The Story of Tawaddud’ is also an excellent example of the learnedness of women as a means to resist subjugation of all kinds exemplified in the story as male scholarly hubris.
- 28.
Night 285th.
- 29.
For a discussion on poetry in The Thousand and One Nights, see van Gelder, ‘Poetry and the Arabian Nights’ in The Arabian Nights Encyclopaedia, ed. Ulrich Marzolph et al. (California: ABCCLIO, 2004), 1:13–17.
- 30.
For more on sukhf, see Sarah R. bin Tyeer ‘The Qur’an and the Aesthetics of adab’ in ed. Nuha al-Sha’ar, Qur’an and Adab: The Shaping of a Classical Literary Tradition (Forthcoming 2016).
- 31.
This is not an uncommon portrayal of love as a subject matter in medieval Arabic adab. In his Epistle on the Crafts of the Masters, al-Jāḥiẓ requests members of various trades and crafts to describe a battle scene and also compose a love poem describing the pain of love in their own language. According to Sadan, ‘[f]resh worm-ridden excrement for a sweeper, diarrhoea for a doctor, depilatory paste for a bath-attendant, are some of the cruder examples of the materials employed to symbolize metaphorically the highest of human emotions—that of love and the pain of separation from the beloved.’ The Jāḥiẓian exercise, of course, had a higher purpose other than humour, a by-product for the elite and literati who read these poems. Its ‘aim is to teach these youngsters how to compose poetry like real poets and not like rude craftsmen—and the second (latent) aim is to prove to these young aristocrats that nothing must be excluded a priori from knowledge (i.e. ʻilm), and that everything may be interesting and important, even the most prosaic and tiny facts of life.’ See, Joseph Sadan, ‘Kings and Craftsmen, a Pattern of Contrasts. On the History of a Medieval Arabic Humoristic Form (Part I),’ Studia Islamica 56 (1982):12, 20, fn. 52.
- 32.
Nights 595th–596th.
- 33.
Todorov maintains, ‘[t]he speech-act receives, in the Arabian Nights, an interpretation which leaves no further doubt as to its importance. If all the characters incessantly tell stories, it is because this action has received a supreme consecration: narrating equals living.’ See ‘Narrative-Men,’ 73.
- 34.
Gerhardt, The Art of Storytelling, 401.
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bin Tyeer, S.R. (2016). Of Misplacement of Things, People, and Decorum. In: The Qur’an and the Aesthetics of Premodern Arabic Prose. Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59875-2_7
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