Read Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange (Hardcover Classics) Online
Authors: Malcolm C (Tr Lyons
Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange (Hardcover Classics)
Translated by Malcolm C. Lyons
Introduced by Robert Irwin
TALES OF THE MARVELLOUS
AND
NEWS OF THE STRANGE
4. The Story of the Four Hidden Treasures and the Strange Things That Occurred.
The Story of the Second Quest, with Its Marvels and Terrors.
The Story of the Third Quest, for the Crown.
The Story of the Fourth Quest, for the Golden Tube.
5. The Story of the Forty Girls and What Happened to Them with the Prince.
6. The Story of Julnar of the Sea and the Marvels of the Sea Encountered by Her.
7. The Story of ‘Arus al-‘Ara’is and Her Deceit, As Well As the Wonders of the Seas and Islands.
9. The Story of Abu Disa, Nicknamed the Bird, and the Marvels of His Strange and Comical Story.
13. The Story of Sakhr and al-Khansa’ and of Miqdam and Haifa’. With Poetry and Prose.
15. The Story of Muhammad the Foundling and Harun al-Rashid.
16. The Story of Ashraf and Anjab and the Marvellous Things That Happened to Them.
Wonders
Here are wonders and mysteries indeed. The first mystery is the name of this book. The medieval Arabic manuscript which contains
Tales of the Marvellous
has lost its first page, and consequently the title of this story collection is not known for certain. But the opening lines of its page of contents, after praising Allah and the Prophet and his Companions, boasts that this book contains ‘tales of the marvellous and news of the strange’ (‘al-hikayat al-‘ajiba wa’l-akhbar al-ghariba’).
‘Ajiba
is an adjective which means ‘marvellous’ or ‘amazing’, and its cognate plural noun
‘aja’ib
, or marvels, is the term used to designate an important genre of medieval Arabic literature that dealt with all manner of marvels that challenged human understanding, including magic, the realms of the
jinn
, marvels of the sea, strange fauna and flora, great monuments of the past, automata, hidden treasures, grotesqueries and uncanny coincidences.
There are many instances of the marvellous and the supernatural in the Qur’an. For example, in the Sura of the Cave (18) the story of the Men of the Cave is cryptically alluded to:
Or dost thou think the Men of the Cave
And Er-Rakeem were among Our signs a wonder?
The Men of the Cave are usually identified with the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, Christians who took refuge in a cave from persecution at the hands of the Emperor Decius and awoke many years later. (Er-Rakeem is perhaps the name of the dog who accompanied them.) More generally the Qur’an repeatedly called upon believers to marvel at what God had created – as in these lines from the Sura of the All Merciful (55):
He let forth the two seas that meet together,
Between them a barrier they do not overpass.
O which of your Lord’s bounties will you and you deny?
From them come forth the pearl and the coral.
O which of your Lord’s bounties will you and you deny?
His too are the ships that run, raised up in the sea like landmarks.
O which of your Lord’s bounties will you and you deny?
Creation is filled with clear signs for ‘those who will reflect’. And, of course, the Qur’an itself is one of God’s marvels. Extraordinary things were signs of God’s creative power. To marvel at God’s creation was then a pious act.
Marvels featured prominently in both medieval non-fiction and fiction; the literature of the marvels of the sea constituted an important sub-genre of
‘aja’ib
. For example, the late tenth-century
‘Aja’ib al-Hind
(
Marvels of India
), attributed to the sea captain Burzug ibn Shahriyar, presented alleged facts about the Sea of Fire, whales, mermaids, cannibals, cattle-eating snakes, ritual suicides and so forth. In practice, the wonders of the sea also encompassed the wonders of India. Tall stories from the Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean, the Indian subcontinent and the Spice Islands provided entertainment, as well as occasions for pious reflection. Later whole encyclopedias of marvels were to be compiled from shorter works on the subject. The most famous of these was
‘Aja’ib al-makhluqat wa gharaib al-mawjudat
(
Marvellous Things of Creation and Wondrous Things of Existence
) by Zakariyya al-Qazwini (d.1283). Such purportedly factual reports were to furnish the basis for the adventures of Sindbad the Sailor and other fictions. The first page of
Tales of the Marvellous
, in praising God, stated:
His miracles have spread everywhere, his marvellous works on land and by sea, the marvels of his perfect works in every direction and every country, all these attest that the blessed and most high God is One, Eternal, Unique, and Master of All. Consider that, then, ye who know how to see.
‘Sa‘id Son of Hatim al-Bahili’ explicitly begins as a marvels-of-the-sea story, as the
Umaiyad
caliph tells his vizier: ‘I want you to bring me an Arab seafarer who can tell me about the wonders and the perils of the sea and to do it now. It may be that this will cure my sleeplessness.’ (But this story soon changes into quite a different yet still marvellous
narrative.) In the third of the Quest stories, the narrator who had left his own country in search of marvels ends up in
Serendib
, where he encounters an idol worshipper who tells him: ‘I am a man who searches for wonders and marvels just as you do.’ The Talisman Mountain, which features in the story of that name in this collection, is a variant on the fateful Magnetic Mountain that appears in mariners’ yarns and in
The Thousand and One Nights
as the ‘Story of the Third Dervish’.
In the Sindbad stories (which Antoine Galland translated from a separate Arabic manuscript but which he probably also knew from a seventeenth-century Turkish manuscript of
The Thousand and One Nights
and which he added to his French translation of the Arabic manuscript of
The Thousand and One Nights
) it is not only the monsters that are marvellous in Sindbad’s travels, but also the trees and plants, and the amazing natural wealth of the islands and littorals of the Indian Ocean. ‘O which of your Lord’s bounties will you and you deny?’ There is perhaps a further latent sense in all this. Just as Sindbad felt moved to admire the handiwork of God who created him, so the storyteller’s audience were being called upon to admire the inventiveness of the world conjured up by Sindbad’s real creator, the storyteller. Marvels were, of course, the stock-in-trade of
The Thousand and One Nights
, and most of the marvels related therein, such as the lady in the casket, the
jinni
in the bottle or the flying horse, were pure fictions. Yet some of them were based on what purported to be fact. For example, the story of the expedition to the City of Brass and the account of how the
Abbasid
caliph
al-Ma’mun
tried to pull down the pyramids of Egypt are found not only in the
Nights
, but also in serious works of non-fiction, such as al-Mas’udi’s tenth-century chronicle
Muruj al-Dhahab
(
The Meadows of Gold
). We should also bear in mind that the boundaries between fact and fiction were not as clearly drawn then as now. It was common in the medieval Arab literary world to present fantasy as fact. Even in modern times there are those who have been reluctant to recognize fantasy stories as fictions. In 1962 the American novelist Paul Bowles got to know Larbi Layachi, a watchman in Tangier. When Bowles explained how the plots of films were usually made up, Layachi was particularly struck by the fact that it was not forbidden to lie when making a film. Then something else struck him:
What the Manuscript Is‘And books, like the books you write,’ he pursued. ‘They are all lies too?’
‘They’re stories, like
The Thousand and One Nights
. You don’t call them lies, do you?’‘No, because they’re true. They happened long ago when the world was different from the way it is now, that’s all.’
I did not pursue the point.’
1
The German Arabist Hellmut Ritter discovered the unique manuscript of the
Hikayat
in a library in Istanbul (MS Aya Sofia MS no. 3397) and publicized his discovery at a conference of Orientalists in 1933. The anonymous manuscript is not complete, for, besides the title page, the second half is missing.
2
Originally the collection should have contained forty-two tales ‘from a well-known book’. It seems fairly clear from the internal evidence provided by the stories that this collection was first put together in the tenth century. But the manuscript itself is clearly of a later date and hitherto it has been dated by scholars to the fourteenth century on the basis of its calligraphy. Recently Jean-Claude Garçin has tentatively redated the manuscript to the sixteenth century. The name of the patron for whom the manuscript was copied is given at the bottom of the surviving volume. Unfortunately, that name is partly illegible, but it is obvious that the name is Arab rather than Turkish and that the exalted personage is addressed as
‘al-muqam, al-karim, al-‘ali, al-sami
, effectively ‘your highness’. During the period of
Mamluk
Turkish and Circassian rule in Egypt and Syria (
c
.1250–1517) such entitulature would have been strictly reserved for high-ranking mamluk officers. Therefore Garçin believes that the manuscript should be dated to the sixteenth century, when protocols were looser and an Arab notable might be addressed in such a grand manner. But there can be no certainty about the dating. Internal evidence suggests that the manuscript was produced in Egypt or Syria.
According to the tenth-century book cataloguer Ibn al-Nadim, the writer al-Jahshiyari set out to compile an anthology of a thousand stories from all sorts of Arabic, Persian and Greek sources. But when he died his compilation only comprised 380 stories, and it was subsequently lost. The immensely prolific and learned Syrian literary scholar Salah al-Din al-Munajjid (1910–2010) sought to attribute the authorship of the
Tales of the Marvellous
to al-Jahshiyari, though not only did he not provide any evidence for this attribution, but some of the events cryptically alluded to by the prophetic hermit in ‘Sa‘id Son of Hatim al-Bahili’ clearly postdate al-Jahshiyari’s death in 942 or 943.
Some of the tales in
Tales of the Marvellous
, particularly those about the tribulations of lovers, carry a heavy freight of poetry. ‘Budur and ‘Umair Son of Jubair al-Shaibani’, ‘Sul and Shumul’, ‘Miqdad and Mayasa’ and ‘Sakhr and
al-Khansa’
’ rely heavily on ‘other men’s flowers’. The poetry is there to adorn the story, or in some cases perhaps to delay the progress of the narrative. It never seems to advance the story. Though the poetry is not particularly distinguished, its presence in
Tales of the Marvellous
is one indication that the collection had pretensions to be something more literary than a collection of folktales. Additionally rhymed prose (
saj‘
) is sometimes used in the stories for rhetorical effect, though this has not been registered in the English translation. (Richard Burton’s attempt to render rhymed prose in his translation of the
Nights
has served as a sufficient deterrent here.)
Though the
Tales of the Marvellous
are indeed astounding, they are not flawless. They are written in a vulgar style, and their Arabic is sometimes incorrect. The diacriticals that are used to distinguish some letters from others have often been omitted. Where the words are vowelled, the vowels are sometimes incorrect. Occasionally the scribe has not understood what he was transcribing, and often the odd sentence or two has been skipped. For example, in ‘Talha, the Son of the
Qadi
of
Fustat
’ there is no account of Tuhfa’s departure from Cairo and her arrival in Damascus. In the same story, the marriage of Talha and Tuhfa happens at the beginning of the story and at its end. Similarly, in ‘The Forty Girls’, the prince sleeps with the sorceress on the first night and finds her to be a virgin. Then, after he has slept with the other thirty-nine girls, he encounters her as if for the first time and again finds her to be a virgin! In several stories there is an unheralded switch from third to first person. This occurs, for example, in the first and second of the treasure-hunting stories. In the First Quest, the emir listens to the treasure hunter’s story, but towards the end the story has burst out of its frame, and he has become part of that story. Similar flaws can also be found in the
Nights
, for some of its stories lack both internal logic and plausible motivation.
In
Tales of the Marvellous
the leader of the Third Quest starts off as an idolater, but when in danger prays to Allah, but subsequently reverts to being an idolater. In ‘Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle’, Haifa’, the princess, who was turned into a gazelle, is described as the daughter of King Jairun, but later she identifies herself as the daughter of King Mulahhab. And so on.
It is unfortunate that the first of the stories in the collection, ‘The King of the Two Rivers’, is so seriously damaged by narrative inconsistencies, gaps and indecipherable words in the manuscript that it has not proved possible to make complete sense of the tale. Right at the beginning the astrologer’s prophecy is missing, even though we can guess from what follows that his words boded no good for Prince Kaukab. Also, we cannot know what the circumstances were that led to the evil chamberlain’s dismissal from the territory of
Jaihun
. Nevertheless, the somewhat gruesome tale is worth persisting with.
‘The King of the Two Rivers’ and the tales that follow are full of surprises and proto-surrealist imagery. In this enchanted world the frontier between men and other creatures is more fluid than in the place we live in today, for in these tales a man might easily be transformed into a beast, a hideous
jinni
can take on a pleasing human form, and people are confronted by statues that walk and wield swords. With the text of
Tales of the Marvellous
we have something that is very old and yet is quite new to us. The stories are windows on to a world whose strangeness is heightened by the passage of the centuries. We are confronted by a past in which people did things very differently indeed and, in confronting this past, we should beware of what the social historian E. P. Thompson termed ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’.
3
The variety of the stories – comedy, romance, derring-do and fantasy – is beguiling, and so is the energy of their telling and the unpredictability of their narrative pathways.
Tales of the Marvellous
has many affinities with
The Thousand and One Nights
, and it is likely that close study of the two texts in the future may provide clues about their parallel histories. The oldest substantially
surviving manuscript of
The Thousand and One Nights
dates from the late fifteenth century (and not from the fourteenth century as earlier scholars believed), and it was this manuscript which served (with the introduction of the Sindbad stories) as the basis of the first seven volumes of Antoine Galland’s translation into French, which were published over the years 1704–17. It was his translation that rescued the
Nights
from the obscurity that it had fallen into in the Arab lands and assured its lasting reputation throughout the world. In 1949 an expert in papyrology, Nabia Abbott, published two fragmentary sheets of paper, dating from the ninth century, which carried the title
The Book of the Tale of the Thousand Nights
and then a few lines of the opening frame story of the
Nights
in which Dinazad asks Shirazad (sic) to tell her stories giving examples of various qualities and characteristics. It seems likely that the Arabic story collection had a Persian precursor and possible that the Persian book in turn might have had a Sanskrit precursor, though neither of these has survived. As for the Arabic
Thousand and One Nights
, stories continued to be added to the original core group of stories throughout the Mamluk and Ottoman periods (thirteenth through to nineteenth centuries).
