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THE COMING DARK AGE
Newsletter
February, 2004
1. INTRODUCTION
This month's edition describes some of the stories from the Thousand
And One Nights, since these contradict the idea of Islam as an
inevitably backward force in world affairs (an idea that has been
promulgated by Francis Fukuyama to name just one example). Past
editions of the newsletter are at the following address:
http://www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk/Newsletter.htm
I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the
latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be
interested.
Marc Widdowson
2. THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS - ISLAM IN THE MIDDLE AGES
Islam or the Islamic world tends to be presented as a backward,
'medieval' society, which has not caught up with 'modern times' like
the west. Yet in the actual Middle Ages, the Islamic world was a
powerhouse of science and technology. Muslims were in control of a vast
empire stretching from Spain to Pakistan. This was also a culturally
tolerant society. Jews flocked to Muslim rulers, fleeing the pogroms
and other atrocities to which they were regularly subjected by mobs of
fanatical Christians. When London and Paris were little more than
villages, characterised by sprawling cottages and streets of mud,
Baghdad was a large and sophisticated metropolis, well lit at night,
and home to a university and astronomical observatory. Here Muslim
scholars studied classical Greek texts, and Muslim engineers made many
new discoveries that would eventually prove essential for the European
industrial revolution.
The Thousand and One Nights is a collection of stories dating from this
period. The accompanying legend is that the [historical] Islamic caliph
Haroun ar-Rashid slept with a new virgin every night and had her killed
in the morning. One night it was the turn of Scheherazade. She
enchanted the caliph with a story, but didn't finish it before the
dawn. As he wanted to hear the end, the caliph granted her another
night. She finished the story but started another one. And so it went
on, for a thousand and one nights, until Haroun ar-Rashid finally
granted Scheherazade her life and freedom, and renounced his beastly
practice of slaughtering virgins after he had deflowered them. Of
course, this is complete nonsense, but it is a good hat on which to
hang an otherwise disparate collection of stories, somewhat like
Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales'.
The more familiar stories from the Arabian Nights are adventure yarns
like Sinbad the Sailor, and Aladdin. But there are others in different
genres, which provide a fascinating insight into medieval Islamic
society. (These stories date from around 1000.) For example, in Sinbad
the Porter (no relation to the Sailor), three young women have been
shopping in town and they hire a porter to carry their purchases back
to their house. Since he seems a pleasant enough fellow, they invite
him inside. They then get to drinking and telling jokes, flirting with
the porter, and the time slips by. Soon it is evening, and one of the
young women goes down to the pool in the middle of the courtyard, takes
off all her clothes, and bathes herself, splashing water over the
porter and her companions. She then comes out of the pool, points
between her legs, and asks the porter "What is this called?" He says
"your womb", but she slaps him. He then says "your vulva", but she
chides him for using such an ugly word and one of the other girls
pinches him. "Your cunt" he says, but again they slap him and tell him
off. So he continues, through "your clitoris, your pudenda, your pussy"
and so on, until he has been slapped, punched and boxed numerous times.
Eventually, he begs to be told, and the girl replies "The basil of the
bridges", then puts her clothes back on. This is then repeated with the
other two girls. His guesses again cause him to be punched and slapped
(all in good fun), until finally the ladies tell him that the relevant
parts are called 'the husked sesame' and 'the Inn of Abu Masrur'
respectively. Now the porter himself takes his clothes off, bathes and
sits on one of the young women's laps. They are delighted that he is
such a good sport. He points between his legs and asks them to name
what they see. "Your cock" says one, and he says "no this is an ugly
word". Another says "Your penis" to which he replies "May God put you
to shame". Then they try "your dick, your testicles, your prick" and so
on, but he rejects each suggestion and they are all laughing until they
fall on their backs. Eventually the women give up, and he tells them.
"It is the smashing mule." They ask him to explain himself and he
replies "It is the one who grazes on the basil of the bridges, eats the
husked sesame, and gallops in the Inn of Abu Masrur." They almost faint
with laughing. That is just the beginning. It goes on from there,
though turning into a rather darker story.
Another story is that of the young man and the barber. A young man has
formed a liaison with the vizier's daughter. One day she sends him word
that her father is going to be out of town for the weekend, and that
she will leave a certain window open, for him to come to her so that
they can spend a night of passion. Anxious to appear his best the young
man sends his servants into town to fetch a barber who will cut his
hair, and he tells them to get him a barber who can cut his hair in
silence - not one of those annoying barbers who prattle on incessantly.
The servants come back with a barber who says he is just the man.
However, the barber looks at the young man and says he looks ill. Then
he starts doing some astrological calculations - a load of mumbo-jumbo
- from which he deduces that the young man is going to some kind of
rendezvous, which he says, judging from the position of the stars,
appears to be ill-advised. The young man tells the barber to stop
raving and just get on with cutting his hair or he will send for
another barber. The barber replies that the young man has been very
lucky to have hired him, for he is not just skilled in cutting hair,
but also a physician, astrologer, alchemist, logician, mathematician
and much else besides. He says that the young man would be mad not to
heed his advice, and then he sends the young man's servants to fetch a
bowl of water and other paraphernalia so that he can tell his fortune
properly. He promises after he has done this he will get on and cut the
young man's hair. The young man tells his servants he has decided not
to have his hair cut after all. He tells them to give the barber four
dinars and send him on his way, but the barber urges the young man not
to spurn his assistance. "I knew your father," the barber says, "and
performed many services for him, for which he rewarded me handsomely."
And so it goes on. The barber makes a fuss about everything, and turns
out to be one of the most prattlesome, annoying individuals ever to
have existed. He succeeds in extracting from the young man the fact
that he is meeting a young lady, and he forces himself on him as a
helper, saying that he is good in such situations. Of course, the
barber's "help" succeeds in ruining the whole thing, and culminates in
the young man breaking his leg as he leaps from a window in a ruckus
entirely due to the barber's meddling. Again, that is just the
beginning of other stories in which the annoying, meddlesome barber has
other adventures.
Husain Haddawy's translation in the Everyman Library is particularly
good and unexpurgated.
The overall point is that all this surely gives a rather different
impression of Islamic society than the benighted, 'medieval' mindset
conveyed by people like the Taliban and the Wahhabi. The latter are
actually products of the 20th and 21st centuries, reacting against
economic and political conditions of the western-dominated world,
especially as that world begins to crumble into a dark age.