Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange (Hardcover Classics) (5 page)

Setting the meeting with Simeon aside for a moment, it should be noted that in the Old Testament and the Apocrypha Daniel was noted
for his prophecies. He retained this reputation in medieval Islamic times, and all sorts of prophetic treatises were spuriously attributed to him. According to Islamic tradition, Daniel acquired his knowledge of the future in a place known as the Cave of Treasures. Several of the prophetic treatises attributed to Daniel attach their predictions to astrological and meteorological phenomena such as eclipses, thunderstorms, rainbows and oddly shaped clouds. But the prophecies of Daniel that Simeon preserves in his story have little or nothing in common with this sort of divination. His prophecies can be classified as
malahim
.

In Arabic
malahim
literally means ‘slaughterings’, and its singular form is
malhama
. The term is used to designate prophecies that treat of such grand matters as the rise and fall of dynasties, future wars with Christians, the Muslim conquest of Constantinople and Rome, the coming invasion of Gog and Magog, the Last Battle and the End of the World. These treatises drew widely on Jewish and Christian material and they were often attributed to monks. For example,
The Vision of the Monk Bahira
, which seems to have been produced in the eighth century, was very popular. There was a proliferation of apocalypses in the late Umaiyad period (early eighth century). In general, things were predicted to get worse before they got better. Armand Abel, who made a special study of
malahim
prophecies, remarked that these popular fantasies were really more interesting than ‘the bourgeois Arabian Nights’.

Simeon’s prophecies are a bit of a dog’s dinner, as they seem to be drawn from a variety of ill-assorted sources and times. Some of the events ‘predicted’ had already happened at the time this story was put together, while others have yet to happen (and probably never will). The prophecies are obscurely and allusively pitched in a manner that anticipates those of the sixteenth-century French astrologer Nostradamus. But Simeon’s predictions are moralistic, since the dreadful things that are to come are divine punishment for the decline of Muslim piety and practice.

At times Simeon seems to be prophesying events during the Arab–Byzantine wars of the tenth century. The Qarmatians sacked Mecca in 930 and stole the Black Stone from the shrine in Mecca.
Dailam
is a mountainous region in northern Iran, south of the Caspian Sea. Although the Abbasid caliphs sent several expeditions there, it was never really under their control. Then in 945 Dailamite Buyid warlords established a protectorate over the Abbasid caliphs. Simeon foresees four rival caliphates existing simultaneously. From the tenth to late
twelfth centuries there were three competing caliphates: the Abbasid caliphate in Bagdad, the Fatimid caliphate in Cairo and the Umaiyad caliphate in Cordova. But it is hard to think of a fourth caliphate.
Hajaj ibn Yusuf
never killed an Abbasid ruler in Mecca. Though the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was demolished by the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim in 1009, it was not actually burned down.

Other ‘predictions’ seem to refer to events in the thirteenth century, while yet others cannot be confidently attached to any real events. In 1236 Cordova fell to the army of Ferdinand III of Castile, although the Christian Reconquista of Spain was not completed until 1492. The ‘Persian’ invasion is predicted to happen more than 600 years after the death of the Prophet. So that would place it in the mid to late thirteenth century and therefore what might be being ‘prophesied’ was the Mongol invasion of Iraq, their killing of the last Abbasid caliph in Bagdad and then their invasion of Syria, which was launched from Persia. Ghadanfar is the name of a fictional character in the popular chivalrous romance of
‘Antar
, which is set in the period just before and during the rise of Islam. In
‘Antar
, he is the son of the heroic Arab warrior ‘Antar by a Christian princess, and for much of the epic he fought as a crusader against the Muslims. But Simeon calls him ‘al-Farisi’ (the Persian), and that makes no sense at all.

Earlier in the story of ‘Sa‘id Son of Hatim al-Bahili’ the infidel king told his people not to fight the Muslim expeditionary force. ‘For five hundred years,’ he told them, ‘their empire has been advancing victoriously, so make peace with them and do not resist them or they will conquer you.’ What kind of chronological sense is that? The Muslim conquests began in the early seventh century. So are we to understand that the Muslim encounter with the infidel king and with Simeon took place in the twelfth century? If so, how could the story of the expedition have been told to
Hisham ibn ‘Abd al-Malik
, who was Umaiyad caliph from 724 to 743?

In ‘Talha, the Son of the Qadi of Fustat’ what was the chance of Salih (Tuhfa’s former protector in Damascus) ending up begging at her husband’s house in Cairo? Or in ‘Muhammad the Foundling and Harun al-Rashid’ the chance of the caliph happening to go to the very bathhouse
where Khultukh happened to be working? Fate guides Badr and Jauhara to the same island. The broad comedy of the bogus astrologer
‘Usfur
depends heavily on a ludicrous sequence of coincidences. But perhaps the message is that ‘Usfur’s aggressively nagging wife is right, for if you trust in God everything will be well. And as the king observes towards the end of the story, ‘When God grants good fortune to one of his servants, He makes all things serve him, and when fortune comes, it acts as teacher to a man.’ Of course coincidences (
ittifaqat
) made the storyteller’s work easier, but there was a pious subtext, as medieval Muslims were inclined to detect the hand of God behind such occurrences. Abu Mansur ‘Abd al-Malik al-Tha‘alibi’s tenth-century treatise, the
Lata’if al-ma‘arif
(
The Book of Curious and Entertaining Information
) included chapters ‘Concerning curious coincidences and patterns in names and patronymics’ and ‘Concerning interesting and entertaining pieces of information about various unusual happenings and strange coincidences’. Coincidences were indications of a divinely ordained destiny at work. As the film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini remarked of the
Nights
, ‘The chief character is in fact destiny itself.’
¹⁶
It is fate that turns men’s lives into stories.

The article devoted to ‘Religion’ in
The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia
touches on fate and remarks that ‘religious belief in the stories appears as the belief in fate. Although fate rules the hero’s life, there is no story in which God intervenes directly to steer the course of the narrative. Fate acts as God’s representative.’
¹⁷
But this is one respect in which
Tales of the Marvellous
does differ from the
Nights
, for God intervenes directly in ‘The King of the Two Rivers’ by restoring Kaukab’s hands and feet. In ‘Abu Muhammad the Idle’ He responds to the princess’s prayer and saves her from rape by the
jinni
. In ‘Miqdad and Mayasa’ He sends the archangel
Gabriel
to instruct ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib to free Miqdad from captivity. A
deus ex machina
indeed!

An obsession with fabulous wealth pervades these stories. When the lost prince entered the castle of the forty girls, ‘he found that it had a huge door with plates and ornamental patterns of gold and silver. It was covered with hangings and in the entrance hall there were various types of singing birds.’ The story goes on to list the extravagant
accessories – the gold, silver, crystal ware, silks, aloes wood, ambergris and so on – as well as the rich food. In the Third of the Four Quests, a man describes how he acquired seventy of the
al-andaran
stones: ‘each of which was worth a
qintar
of gold. In the crown that they formed were set three hundred pearls, rubies and emeralds, worth
qintars
of gold, and various types of chrysolite, pearls and gold from the best mines were picked out for it.’ Though we cannot be sure of the exact composition of the readership of
Tales of the Marvellous
, it is a fair guess that evocations of extravagant decors and costumes were as much to be marvelled at by those readers, who surely did not dine in marble halls, as the monstrous beasts that the storyteller had conjured up from the sea.

As already mentioned, another respect in which
Tales of the Marvellous
differs from the
Nights
is that Christian themes feature prominently in the former. Christians appear in the
Nights
, but as the authors of
The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia
note, there ‘Christians and their roles serve as a negative stereotype’.
¹⁸
This is not the case in
Tales of the Marvellous
, and although its compilers appear to have been Muslim, they were thoroughly familiar with Christian doctrines and practices, and these feature prominently in ‘Sul and Shumul’, ‘Sa‘id Son of Hatim al-Bahili’ and ‘Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle’. (It is a little strange that in the last story Mauhub, a Christian, should be receptive to a prophecy delivered by the pagan deity Baal.) ‘Sul and Shumul’ also survives in a manuscript in Tübingen dating from the fourteenth century and it was probably composed in Syria. Part of the Tübingen manuscript has been broken up into nights, evidently in preparation for the insertion of the story into
The Thousand and One Nights
, though it never reached its intended destination. (
sul
is Arabic for ‘question’, and
shumul
means ‘reunion’). In ‘Sul and Shumul’ and in several of the other stories Christian monks and hermits feature as conveyors of knowledge and wisdom. The man who went on the First Quest was a Christian who was recruited to the treasure hunt in a church, and only after the Quest was over did he convert to Islam. In general, these stories betray no hostility to Christianity, except that in ‘Sa‘id Son of Hatim’, the monk Simeon denounces the Jews and Christians for having
corrupted and altered their scriptures, in particular by removing all references to the future coming of Muhammad and the truth of his message. (This alleged tampering with the Torah and the Gospels has been and continues to be a common feature of Muslim polemic against Christians and Jews.) Because the Jews and Christians had corrupted the divine revelation, ‘the Great and Glorious God afflicted them with wars and discords, bringing ruin and destruction on them, forcing them to pay tribute as subjects’. Under Muslim rule Christians were protected and free to practise their religion as ‘People of the Book’ (
ahl al-kitab
), but they did indeed pay a special tribute known as
jizya
. Simeon’s status in this story is a curious one, for he was a Christian monk and former disciple of Jesus ‘on whom be peace’, who, having lived to witness the mission of the Prophet, has become a Muslim hermit.

The first of the four treasure hunters makes this confession:

As a young man I enjoyed myself, squandering my goods and my wealth and consorting with kings while for me the eye of Time slept. But Time then woke to betray me, destroying what I had and after I had spent three days at home without food, I left to escape the gloating pleasure of my enemies, without any notion of where to go.

In ‘Talha, the Son of the Qadi of Fustat’, the young man swiftly squanders his inheritance and has to be rescued by his faithful and far more competent slave girl. In ‘Abu Muhammad the Idle’ the protagonist’s comically extreme idleness makes Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov seem like a go-getter, but, of course, everything works out fine for him after he gets someone else to spend a few coins on his behalf. The young idler who squanders his inheritance but who wins through to a fortune that is not really deserved makes several appearances in the
Nights
, and indeed ‘Abu Muhammad the Idle’ is included in the
Nights
. The latent message may be that man proposes, but destiny decrees. Or perhaps it is that feckless men will always find capable women to look after them. The prince in ‘The Forty Girls’ would have achieved nothing without the continuous guidance and prompting of the sorceress disguised as a horse.

Two Bedouin stories, ‘Miqdad and Mayasa’ and ‘Sakhr and al-Khansa’ ’, are included in
Tales of the Marvellous
. Miqdad is known to history. Since Miqdad grew up in
jahili
, or pre-Islamic times, but lived on into the Islamic era, he is counted among the
mukhadram
, those people, especially poets, whose lifespans extended across both eras. The word
mukhadram
derives from the verb
khadrama
, ‘to cut the ear of one’s camel’. God knows why. Miqdad was one of the earliest to convert to Islam and he died in 653 or 654. In the fiction of ‘Miqdad and Mayasa’ he is portrayed engaging in single-handed combat against preposterous odds. Though he shows a remarkable ability to chant poetry as he fights, it is a matter of record that in early Arabian tribal conflicts warriors did chant poetry as they went into battle. Al-Khansa’ (‘Snub Nose’), together with her beloved brother Sakhr, are also known to history. She was a seventh-century poet who specialized in laments for the dead. She converted to Islam and died after 644. Sakhr really was one of her brothers, whom she commemorated in elegies after he was killed in tribal warfare, but of course the details given by the story are fiction and improbable fiction at that. The
Nights
similarly contains tales of Bedouin derring-do and love, such as ‘The Lovers of the Banu Tayy’ and ‘The Lovers of Banu ‘Udhra’. These fantasies evolved out of the well-established genre of the
ayyam al-‘Arab
, or ‘the [battle] days of the Bedouin Arabs’, stories which, in a mixture of verse and prose, celebrated the wars and skirmishes of the pre-Islamic tribes. A third story, ‘Sul and Shumul’, starts off as a Bedouin tale but then mutates into something quite different. The youth of the two lovers should be noted, for Sul and Shumul are only fourteen.