Leg over Leg: Volumes One and Two

NOTES

1Buṭrus Yūsuf Ḥawwā: one of a group of Lebanese merchants living in London, on whom al-Shidyāq depended for financial and moral support during his third sojourn there, between June 1853 and the summer of 1857, during which period he was also visiting Paris to oversee the printing of Al-Sāq; Ḥawwā provided al-Shidyāq with employment as a commercial agent in his offices.

2“that house” (hādhā l-bayt): i.e., either the Ḥawwā family or the trading house it owned.

3“the oddities of the language, including its rare words” (gharāʾibi l-lughah wa-nawādirihā): works on oddities and rarities of the “classical” or literary Arabic language form a well-established genre of Arabic letters, originally intended to clarify the use of unusual words in the Qurʾān and hadith.

4“morphologically parallel expressions” (ʿibārāt muraṣṣaʿah, from tarṣīʿ, literally, “studding with gems”): a device used in rhymed prose (sajʿ), e.g., ḥattā ʿāda taʿrīḍuka taṣrīḥan wa-ṣāra tamrīḍuka taṣḥīḥan (“until your obscurity reverted to plain statement and your deficient rendering became sound”).

5“substitution and swapping” (al-qalb wa-l-ibdāl): on the evidence of his work devoted to the topic, Sirr al-layāl fī l-qalb wa-l-ibdāl, the author includes, under qalb, not only palindromes (the conventional definition of the term; see Julie Scott Meisami and Paul Starkey, Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, 2 vols. (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 2:660) but also the substitution of one letter in a word by another without change of meaning (see, e.g., Sirr 46, bāḥah and sāḥah (“open space, plaza”)); by “swapping” the author means variation of the dots used to distinguish certain consonants over an identical or nearly identical ductus to produce different, related, words.

6Unless otherwise noted, definitions added by the translator have been taken, here and throughout the translation, from Muḥammad ibn Yaʿqūb al-Fīrūzābādhī (= Fīrūzābādī), al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ, 2nd ed., 4 vols. (Cairo: al-Maṭbaʿah al-Ḥusayniyyah, 1344/1925–26) (see Glossary), from which only one of what are frequently several possibilities has been chosen.

7Muntahā l-ʿajab fī khaṣāʾiṣ lughat al-ʿArab: this work is also mentioned by the author in his Sirr al-layāl fī l-qalb wa-l-ibdāl (Mattityahu Peled, “Enumerative Style in Al-Sāq ʿalā al-sāq,” Journal of Arabic Literature, vol. 22, no. 2 (1991), 132); it was multi-volumed and may have been lost in a fire (Mohammed Bakir Alwan, “Aḥmad Fāris ash-Shidyāq and the West” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1970), app. B).

8i.e. “space for the avoidance of falsity.”

9The author’s implicit claim appears to be that the uncommon “second” or “augmented” form of the quadriliteral verb is associated with intensity.

10Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī (d. 911/1505): a prolific polymath, much of whose 500-work oeuvre compiles material taken from earlier scholars.

11Al-Muzhir fī l-lughah: the full title of the work is Al-Muzhir fī ʿulūm allughah wa-anwāʿihā (The Luminous [Work] on the Linguistic Sciences and Their Branches).

12Aḥmad ibn Fāris (d. 395/1004), known as al-Lughawī (“The Linguist”), wrote on most areas of lexicography and grammar. It may be that the author’s choice of the name “Aḥmad” on his conversion to Islam was an act of homage to this scholar.

13i.e., the author does not regard such a straightforward figurative usage as a distinguishing characteristic of Arabic.

14By “the Fāriyāqiyyah” the author has been generally assumed to mean the Fāriyāq’s wife, but Rastegar makes the point that, “while the noun is feminine, it is not simply a feminization of his name (which would be Fāriyāqah). Fāriyāqiyyah should more correctly be translated as ‘Fāriyāq-ness,’ although as a grammatical formulation, it is feminine. Within the text, it is not always clear that it refers to his wife (although at times it clearly does)” (Kamran Rastegar, Literary Modernity between the Middle East and Europe: Textual Transactions in Nineteenth-century Arabic, English, and Persian Literatures, 105–6). The Fāriyāqiyyah does not appear again until Volume Three.

15Rāfāʾīl Kaḥlā of Damascus: a litterateur and collaborator of al-Shidyāq’s in Paris, who paid for the printing of Al-Sāq.

16“the table enumerating synonyms”: i.e., the “Enumeration of Synonymous and Lexically Associated Words in This Book” (in fact, a list of the lists of synonyms, etc.) that occurs near the end of Volume Four and to which the author added further items.

17See 2.3.3.

18“had not been mentioned” (lam takun shayʾan madhkūran): cf. Q Insān 76:1.

19“dots that shine”: perhaps refers to the manuscript writers’ tradition of embellishing dots and other diacritical points with colored ink or even gold leaf.

20“with pulicaria / Plants…..” (bi-l- * rabalāti….): Pulicaria undulata (rabal) is a plant with medicinal properties that grows in the region; however, rabalāt may also mean “the fleshy thighs of women,” in which case it would prefigure “From them will come to you the scent of statuesque slave girls” three lines further on.

21“statuesque slave girls… plump slave girls” etc.: this list of desirable women is not simply a high-flown metaphor for the joys that the book holds, since the same (mostly rare) words used occur also in the main text.

22“And be not lazy in pursuing and realizing cunsummation” (wa-lā tatarakhkhā ʾan tudrika l-khurnūfā): the 1855 edition reads ḥurnūfā, a word not attested in the dictionaries; we have preferred to read khurnūfā (=khurnūfah) (“vagina”), supposing its usage here to be figurative, i.e., “the desired goal”; it then parallels the phrase used thirty-four lines later fa-tukhṭiʾa l-khur… fah (the ellipsis is the author’s) (“and so miss… summation”).

23Shiẓāẓ: a thief of proverbial skill.

24“I guarantee… hunger” etc.: i.e., the book will distract you from all pleasures and keep you awake at night, but everyone will realize that the book is the cause.

25“… summation” (al-khur… fah): see n. 22 above.

26“cutting character” (ḥarf bātir): or, punningly, “cutting edge.”

27“will pull back from you blinded” (yakuffu ʿanka kafīfā): or, punningly, “will pull back from you entirely.”

28“Isn’t ‘of a certain stamp’ the same in meaning as * ‘Of a certain type,’ with the addition of the thwack of a stick?” (a-wa-laysa inna l-ḍarba mithlu l-ṣanfi fī l-maʿnā wa-qarʿu ʿaṣan ilay-hi uḍīfā): ḍarb has “blow, stroke” as its basic meaning but also a subsidiary meaning of “type, kind” (synonym ṣanf); hence, things that are of a certain ḍarb may be conceived of (jokingly) as delivering a certain percussive force. The overall sense of these two couplets seems to be “Do not be offended if the contents of the book, and (perhaps especially) the various lists that I have compiled, is somewhat rebarbative.”

29“It does not strike the noses of mortals”: i.e., its injurious consequences harm none but me.

30“Raising a Storm” (Fī ithārat riyāḥ): compare the earlier description of the book as falling “like the wind in the valley when / Stirred up” (0.4.9); the first chapter of each of the four books of which the work is composed bears a title that, like this one, has little to do with the events recounted in that chapter but denotes the initiation of some energetic activity. For further discussion of chapter titles, see the Translator’s Afterword (Volume Four).

31“How many a pot calls the kettle black!” (wa-muḥtaris min mithlihi wa-hwa ḥāris): “From many a one such as he does he guard himself though he is himself a guardian,” a proverb “alluding to him who finds fault with a bad man when he is himself worse than he” (Edward Lane, An Arabic-English Lexicon, 8 vols., London: Williams and Norgate, 1863 (offset ed. Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1968), s.v. muḥtaris).

32“You’ve made a bad business worse!” (ʿāda l-ḥays yuḥās): “The sloppy date mixture has been made sloppier,” said when someone is called upon to make good something done badly by another and makes it worse (Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad al-Maydānī, Majmaʿ al-amthāl, 2 vols. (Cairo: al-Maṭbaʿah al-Khayriyyah, 1310/1892–93), 1:316).

33“Make the most of what you’re given!” (khudh min Jidhʿ mā aʿṭāk): “Take from Jidhʿ whatever he may give you.” The pre-Islamic Ghassanid Arabs had been obliged to pay a certain king protection money; when the king died and his son came to collect his money from a Ghassanid named Jidhʿ, the latter beat him with his sword and pronounced the words in question, after which the Ghassanids stopped paying the tax (al-Maydānī, Majmaʿ, 1:156).

34“So what are you going to do about it?!” (shaḥmatī fī qalʿī): “My fat is in my shepherd’s bag.” The wolf, asked what he would do if he came upon sheep guarded by a shepherd boy, replied that he would fear the boy’s arrows that were in his shepherd’s bag, but when asked, “What if the shepherd were a girl?” replied as given, meaning “I should do with them as I liked” (al-Maydānī, Majmaʿ, 1:246).

35To confound his putative critic, the author produces four impeccably classical proverbs, each of which consists of the words ʿalā ẓalʿika “regarding thy limping” preceded by an imperative verb: irbaʿ ʿalā ẓalʿika (“Restrain thyself because of thy limping,” i.e., “Do not overreach yourself”), irqa ʿalā ẓalʿika (“Ascend thou the mountain with knowledge as to thy limping,” i.e., “Do not make idle threats”), irqaʾ ʿalā ẓalʿika (apparently meaning “Be gentle with thyself, and impose not upon thyself more than thou art able to perform… or abstain thou, for I know thine evil qualities or actions… or… rectify thou, or rightly dispose, first thy case, or thine affair”), and qi ʿalā ẓalʿika (“Be cautious as to thy limping,” i.e., “If you live in a glass house, don’t throw stones”) (see Lane, Lexicon, s.v. ẓalaʿa).

36“Another of Khurāfah’s tales, Umm ʿAmr!” (Ḥadīthu Khurāfah yā Umma ʿAmr): Khurāfah was a man of the tribe of ʿUdhrah who claimed to have been carried off by the jinn but whose tales of which were, on his return, dismissed as lies; thus khurāfāt has come to mean in modern usage “superstitions, fables, fairy stories.” Umm ʿAmr (“Mother of ʿAmr”) is an epithet of the hyena; her frequent apostrophization in proverbs and anecdotes appears to be related to the conventional view of the hyena as “the stupidest of beasts” (see al-Maydānī, Majmaʿ, 1:160); thus the sense is something like “It’s all a pack of lies, you imbecile!”

37abīlīn, pl. of abīl, “one who beats the nāqūs,” a plank beaten with rods to summon Christians to prayer.

38“the Great Catholicos” (al-jāthilīq al-akbar): the leader of Eastern Orthodox Christians living under Muslim rule.

39“the Supreme Pontiff” (al-ʿasaṭūs al-aʿẓam): the Pope of Rome.

40“Ascribing partners to God” (al-shirk): i.e., polytheism.

41“pronounce letters like Qurʾān readers” (tuqalqilūn): qalqalah is “a quality unique to recitation [consisting of] the insertion of [ǝ] (schwa) after syllable-final [q], [d], [ṭ], [b], and [j]” (Kristina Nelson, The Art of Reciting the Qurʾan (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2001), 22). Such a pronunciation would sound bizarre in non-Qurʾanic contexts.

42“falter” (taḥṣarūn): the repetition is the author’s.

43“tightened” (mufarram): cf. the Qāmūs, “al-farm… is a medicament with which a woman becomes narrower” and Lane, Lexicon, “farama… to constrict the vulva with raisin stones.”

44“in two different forms” (al-ʿakhtham wa-l-khathīm): while the second word reads in the text wa-l-khashīm, this word, which is not found in the lexica, must be a misprint for wa-l-khathīm, which the Qāmūs gives as a synonym of the former.

45“the just plain large one” (al-ʿumāriṭī): defined in the Qāmūs as farj al-marʾah al-ʿaẓīm (“a woman’s large vagina”).

46“the buttocks but with a slightly different spelling” (al-būṣ): the author has already used al-bawṣ above; the Qāmūs gives both spellings.

47al-ḥāriqah: literally “the woman who rubs, or burns.” The Qāmūs gives other possibly appropriate meanings, such as “the woman who is so overcome by lust that she grinds her teeth one upon another out of fear lest that lust take her to the point of neighing and snorting.”

48“the woman whose vagina is wide open and the woman whose vagina is open wide” (al-khijām wa-l-khajūm): according to the Qāmūs, the two forms are synonymous.

49“the woman with the tiny vagina a man can’t get at (again, but a different word)” (al-marfūghah): cf. twenty-one items earlier (al-marṣūfah).

50al-maṣūṣ: also (the Qāmūs), the “vagina that dries the liquid from the surface of the penis.”

51al-bayẓ: also (the Qāmūs) “the water of the woman or man.”

52“the clitoris said with a funny accent” (al-ʿuntul): “the clitoris (baẓr); a dialectal variant of ʿunbul” (Qāmūs).

53“a man’s practicing coitus with one woman and then another before ejaculating and a man’s practicing coition with one woman and then another before ejaculating” (al-fahr wa-l-ifhār): the Qāmūs states that these two verbal forms from the same root are synonymous.

54“a little-used word for plain copulation” (al-nashnashah): defined in the Qāmūs simply as nikāḥ (“copulation”).

55“a noun meaning copulation from which no verb is formed” (al-ʿaṣd): the definition in the Qāmūs runs al-nikāḥ lā fiʿla lahu.

56“dashing water on one’s vagina”: the next word in the text—al-ʿaṣd—has occurred eight items earlier (see n. 55); here the author may have intended al-ʿazd, which is synonymous with the former (though it has a verbal form).

57“the flesh of the inner part of the vulva” (al-kayn): this is followed in the text by al-ṭuʾṭuʾah, for which no meaning has been found.

58“the vulva said four other ways”: the author supplies four more items (bizbāz, fāʿūsa, khurnūf, mashraḥ) that the Qāmūs defines simply with the words farj and ḥir (“vagina” and “vulva”).

59“the flabby vagina”: in the text al-ghuḍāriṭī, which is not to be found in the Qāmūs (or other dictionaries) and is probably a misprint for al-ʿuḍāriṭī, in which case it is a repeat from above; this possibility seems stronger, given that the following word is also a repeat (see the following note).

60“the vagina that dries the liquid from the surface of the penis” (al-maṣūṣ): a repeat from above where, however, the second sense given in the Qāmūs seems more appropriate.

61“another name for the vagina” (al-ṭanbarīz): defined in the Qāmūs simply as farj al-marʾah (“a woman’s vagina”).

62“the bizarrely spelled” (al-khafashanfal): the word, defined simply as “a woman’s vagina,” is of a particularly unusual form and without related words that might throw further light on its meaning.

63“the ‘nock’” (al-fūq): after the notch in the end of the arrow that fits the bowstring.

64“and the vagina again in another exotic spelling” (al-qaḥfalīz): as alkhafashanfal, see preceding note.

65“instruments of erection” (adawāt al-naṣb): adawāt is a grammatical term (literally, “instruments”) applied to particles (prepositions, adverbs, conjunctions, and interjections) that govern other words; adawāt al-naṣb (e.g., an, lan, idhan, kay) require that words they govern end in a naṣb; however, naṣb, in its non-grammatical sense, means “lifting up, erecting,” and the author puns on this.

66“the thrower, the catapult,” etc.: many of the items in this and the next list appear to be epithets.

67khabanfatha: defined simply as “a name for the anus” (Qāmūs).

68“the fontanel” (al-rammāʿah): so called “because of its elasticity” (Jamāl al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Mukarram al-Ifrīqī Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-ʿArab, http://www.baheth.info/).

69“the dry and sweaty smelling” (al-ṣumārā): cf. al-ṣamīr “the man whose flesh is dry on his bones and who gives off a smell of sweat” (Qāmūs).

70“the draining vent” (al-ʿazlā or al-ʿazlāʾ): literally, the mouth at the bottom of a waterskin used to drain off the last remains of the water.

71“the black one” (al-saḥmāʾ): in the text this is followed by al-funquṣah, for which no meaning has been found.

72“the bunghole and the butthole” (al-burʿuth wa-l-buʿthuṭ): two further words meaning “anus,” with no further senses and with no other members to their respective roots.

73adawāt al-jazm: particles (see n. 65) that govern words ending with a closed syllable (jazm), e.g., negational lā, lam; in its non-grammatical sense, jazm means “cutting off or amputation,” whence the expression in the Qāmūs, jazama bi-salḤihi “he voided part of his excrement, part thereof remaining” or simply “he cast forth his excrement” (Lane, Lexicon).

74“another word for the penis”: al-suḥādil defined simply as dhakar (“penis”).

75“the strong, crafty wolf” (al-ḍabīz): such is its definition in the dictionaries, with no indication that it may be used figuratively.

76“the thimble” (al-qusṭubīnah): this and the next item refer presumably to the glans penis.

77“the prick” (al-qahbalīs): a word not found in the dictionaries, though the related qahbalis occurs, defined in the Qāmūs as zubb (“penis,” a vulgarism).

78the qaṣṭabīr: an orphan word, the only one in its root and cited in only one dictionary (Qāmūs), where it is defined simply as “penis” (dhakar).

79“the tassels” (al-jazājiz): assuming that their use in the sense of “penises” derives from the underlying meaning of “tassels of colored wools with which the [women’s] camel-litter is decorated” (Lisān); singular jizjizah.

80adawāt al-jarr: particles that govern words ending in i, i.e., prepositions that govern the genitive case; in its non-grammatical sense, jarr means “drawing toward, attracting,” prepositions being so called because the governed word is “attracted to,” or governed by, them.

81“to shtup” (ʿazaṭa): described in the Lisān as “seemingly a metathesis of” (kaʾannu maqlūbun min) ṭaʿaza (the next to preceding item in this list).

82“another word of similar form but dubious status” (ʿazlaba): the author of the Lisān writes, “I cannot confirm it” (lā aḥuqquhu).

83“to bridge” (qanṭara): assuming the use of this denominal verb in the phrase qanṭara l-jāriyah (“he had intercourse with the slave girl”) derives, perhaps via a visual image, from the base sense of the noun qanṭarah (“bridge”).

84“to fuck hard” (qasbara): assuming the verb derives from the nouns qisbār or qusburī meaning “a hard penis.”

85“to fill her up” (qamṭara): cf. (Lisān) “to fill a water skin” and “to tie off a water skin with its thong.”

86“to kick her” (laṭaza): if we assume that this sense derives from that of “to kick (its calf), of a she-camel.”

87“and a variant of the same” (lamadha): the latter is a dialectal form of the preceding, i.e., lamaja (Lisān).

88i.e., beginning with the first letter of the Arabic alphabet and ending with the last.

89Meaning here the Arabs of the Arabian Peninsula in the days before, during, and shortly after the appearance of Islam, that is, the speakers of the pure Arabic language before its corruption by contact with other peoples and its decadence as the result of the passage of time.

90The Qāmūs equates the two words at the point in its entry from which the author takes this definition; elsewhere, however, he defines khajawjāh as “a wind that blows constantly,” thus supporting the author’s argument.

91“his ‘ocean’” (qāmūsuhu): see Glossary.

92“the zaqqūm tree”: a tree that grows in Hell and whose fruit are exceedingly bitter (Q Wāqiʿah 56:52).

93“she is to be excused because she was unaware that I, in fact, was only feigning sleep”: the argument seems to be circular, i.e., she is to be excused for not visiting him while asleep because, in fact, he was not asleep.

94“paronomasia”: (tajnīs (or jinās), literally “making similar”): perhaps the most used rhetorical figure, it consists of deploying in proximity two words that are identical, or almost so, in the ductus but differ in vowelling and diacritics (e.g., “handsome” and “coarse” or “his deeds” and “his money”)

95i.e., Buṭrus Yūsuf Ḥawwā, to whom the book is dedicated.

96Saʿd al-Dīn Masʿūd ibn ʿUmar al-Taftazānī (d. between 791/1389 and 797/1395) was the author of commentaries (Al-Muṭawwal, Al-Mukhtaṣar) on al-Khaṭīb al-Qazwīnī’s Talkhīṣ al-miftāḥ (The Summary of the Key) that were accepted for centuries as “the primary authoritative texts for the advanced study of rhetoric” (Meisami and Starkey, Encyclopedia, 2:751).

97Abū Yaʿqūb Yūsuf ibn Abī Bakr al-Sakkākī (d. 626/1229) is best known for his Miftāḥ al-ʿulūm (The Key to the Sciences). His definitions and formulations “became standard in the science of Arab rhetoric” (Meisami and Starkey, Encyclopedia, 2:679).

98Abū l-Qāsim al-Ḥasan ibn Bishr al-Āmidī (d. 370/980), whose Al-Muwāzanah bayna Abī Tammām wa-l-Buḥturī, which compares the poetry of Abū Tammām and al-Buḥturī, is “one of the most important monuments of Arabic literary criticism” (Meisami and Starkey, Encyclopedia, 1:85).

99Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAlī ibn Aḥmad al-Wāḥidī (d. 468/1076), commentator and literary critic.

100Abū l-Qāsim Maḥmūd ibn ʿUmar al-Zamakhsharī (467–538/1075–1144), best known for his commentary on the Qurʾān, also wrote in the fields of rhetoric, grammar, lexicography, and proverbs (Meisami and Starkey, Encyclopedia 2:820); the author may have had particularly in mind his Maqāmāt, which are written in “carefully crafted sajʿ” (Devin Stewart, “Maqāma,” in Arabic Literature in the Post-classical Period, edited by Roger Allen and D. S. Richards, vol. 6 of The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 155).

101Abū Ḥātim Muḥammad ibn Hibbān al-Bustī (270–354/884–965), also known as Ibn Hibbān, was best known as a traditionist, but one of his few surviving works is a literary anthology, Rawḍat al-ʿuqalāʾ wanuzhat al-fuḍalāʾ (The Meadow of the Sagacious and Promenade of the Virtuous) (Meisami and Starkey, Encyclopedia, 2:334).

102Abū l-ʿAbbās ʿAbdallāh ibn al-Muʿtazz (247–96/861–908) was a poet and critic who wrote Kitāb al-badīʿ (The Book of Rhetorical Figures), the first treatise covering this area of Arabic poetics (Meisami and Starkey, Encyclopedia, 1:354).

103Kamāl al-Dīn Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad ibn al-Nabīh (ca. 560–619/1164–1222), a poet, probably included in the list because of his love of morphological parallelism (see, e.g., lines 14 to 18 of the poem starting afdīhi in ḥafiẓa l-hawā aw ḍayyaʿā (http://www.adab.com/modules.php?name=Sh3er&doWhat=shqas&qid=55259, accessed March 15, 2012)).

104The author probably means Jamāl al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Shams al-Dīn ibn Nubātah (known as al-Miṣrī, “the Egyptian”) (686–768/1287–1366), a poet known for his love of punning (tawriyah) and a writer on literature and stylistics to whom he refers later (Volume Four, 4.17.5). However, the latter’s ancestor, Abū Yaḥyā ʿAbd al-Raḥīm ibn Muḥammad ibn Nubātah (known as al-Khaṭīb, “the preacher”) (d. 374/984–85), whose sermons in rhymed prose were regarded as models of stylistics, may be intended.

105ghāniyah (“beautiful woman”): the Qāmūs states that the ghāniyah may be so called because she is “the woman whose beauty is such that she may dispense with adornment” (al-ghaniyyatu bi-ḥusnihā ʿan al-zīnah).

106“the Fāriyāq”: the name of the author’s alter ego, formed by combining the first part of his first name and the last part of the last, thus Fāri(s al-Shid)yāq.

107“monopods… monopodettes” (nisnās… nasānis): according to the dictionaries (which have some difficulty in distinguishing between the two), the nisnās is, among other things, “an animal numbered among the monsters, that is hunted and eaten, has the form of a person with one eye, a leg, and a hand, and speaks like a person” (Lisān) whereas the nasānis may be either the same as, or the plural, or the feminine, of the former.

108al-ḥinn: a species of jinn or their dogs, or half-men half-jinn (see Volume Two, 2.4.44).

109Kufah and Basra: cities in Iraq from which emerged the two main contending schools of Arabic grammar. The author is unlikely to have meant this to be taken literally.

110The Arabic letters ḥ-m-q used in the text spell out the word ḥumq, meaning “stupidity.”

111i.e., in Lebanon.

112By the Arabic language the author means literary or formal Arabic; Syriac is the liturgical language of the Maronite church.

113“his Frankish brethren” (ikhwānihi al-ifrinj): i.e., the Roman Catholics of Europe.

114“turning triliteral verbs into quadriliterals and vice versa”: in another work the author provides the example of allowing the use of rafrafa instead of raffa in the sentence raffa l-ṭāʾir janāḥayhi (“the bird flapped its wings”) (Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq, Kitāb al-jāsūs ʿalā l-qāmūs (Constantinople: Maṭbaʿat al-Jawāʾib, 1299/1860–1), 13).

115For example, by saying wathiqa fī-hi (“he trusted him”) instead of wathiqa bi-hi or istaʾdhana bi-hi (“he asked permission to do something”) instead of istaʾdhana fī-hi.

116“Durrat al-thīn…”: the author mimics the extravagant rhymed book titles typical of his day.

117“the country’s ruler”: Emir Bashīr II al-Shihābī (1767–1850), ruler of Mount Lebanon, with interruptions, from the 1780s until 1840.

118“Abtholutely not” (tuʿ tuʿ): though the lexica do not appear to recognize this item as an interjection, the verb taʿtaʿa is defined as faʾfāʾ (“lisping”) or ratratah (“tripping over the letter t”), among other meanings.

119The interjection way way should perhaps be understood here as a reference to the words of the Qurʾān (Q Qaṣaṣ 28:82) waykaʾanna llāha yabsuṭuka l-rizq (“Alas we had forgotten that it is God Who increases the provision [of those of his servants whom He will]”) (Maududi), where way is considered by Sībawayh to be a separable particle meaning waylaka (“Alas for you!”) (see Qāmūs s.v. way).

120“the ten head wounds” (al-shajjāṭ al-ʿashar): the significance of the categorization lies in the various penalties owed the victim under the rule of qiṣāṣ (“retribution”), the first five requiring no qiṣāṣ, the second from five camels to a third of the monetary penalty for murder. Al-Shidyāq in fact increases the number to eleven by adding one category (the first) in an attempt to correct an error in the original, which appears to be the Lisān (the Qāmūs contains no similar passage).

121“The Great Christian Master Physician” (al-sāʿūr al-akbar): meaning, perhaps, al-Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq (194–260/809–73), the translator of Galen.

122“If it be said (fa-in qīla)… I reply”: the author deploys a technique known as fanqalah (derived from the preceding Arabic words), common in Arabic exegetics and literary criticism, by which the author poses, and then responds to and dismisses, an objection to an argument he has put forward.

123ṭanāṭīr: cone-shaped woman’s headdresses, singular ṭanṭūr; “The height and composition of the tantour were proportional to the wealth of its owner, with the most splendid tantours made of gold and reaching as high as thirty inches. Some were encrusted with gems and pearls. The tantour was a customary gift presented to the bride by her husband on their wedding day” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tantour, accessed April 20, 2012, with illustration; see also R. P. A. Dozy, Dictionnaire détaillé des noms des vêtements chez les Arabes (Amsterdam: Jean Müller, 1843; offset, Beirut: Librairie du Liban, n.d.).)

124qarn: cf. Latin cornu, French corne, etc.

125ṣābūn: cf. Latin sāpon-, English “soap,” French savon.

126qiṭṭ: cf. Latin cattus, English “cat,” French chat.

127mazj: not in fact cognate with English “mix” or French mélange, etc.

128Cf. “the horns of the righteous shall be exalted” (Ps. 75:10) and “in my name shall his horn be exalted” (Ps. 89:24), etc.

129“the word itself is not derived from any verb” etc.: typically, Arab scholars of the classical period regarded nouns as derived from verbs; in this case, however, there is no verb with a meaning related to the noun qarn in either its literal or figurative senses.

130Jirmānūs (Germanus) Farḥāt (1670–1732) was a Maronite cleric, grammarian, lexicographer, poet, and educator from Aleppo; his Bāb al-iʿrāb ʿan lughat al-Aʿrāb is an updating of the Qāmūs. Jirmānūs’s efforts, portrayed as part of a “revival” of literary Arabic are sometimes better understood in the context of the transition from Syriac, the original spoken and literary language of many Levantine Christians. On Farḥāt’s life and works, see Kristen Brustad, “Jirmānūs Jibrīl Farḥāt,” in Essays in Arabic Literary Biography 1350–1850, edited by Joseph Lowry and Devin J. Stewart (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2009), 242–51.

131Abū l-ʿIbar, etc.: one of the most famous buffoons and comic poets of his age, whose real name was Abū l-ʿAbbās Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-Hāshimī (ca. 175–250/791–864). Having changed his kunyah (“patronymic”) from Abū l-ʿAbbās to Abū l-ʿIbar (“Father of Warnings” or “of Tears”), he thereafter added a letter with each succeeding year, ending with the nonsensical appellation given above. His works include a comic sermon on marriage. See further Meisami and Starkey, Encyclopedia, 1:37.

132“from the drain” (mina l-balūʿah): the sense is not obvious but perhaps recalls some anecdote concerning Abū l-ʿIbar.

133The humor of many of the following anecdotes seems to lie in the unexpected and, especially, ridiculous nature of the protagonist’s actions and reactions and the crossed purposes at which he always seems to be with his interlocutors.

134The joke being perhaps that the response fails to answer the question either way.

135The formulation of the question seems to imply a fuller version, such as “If he grew large, I’d ask him ‘Why…’ etc.” This would be ridiculous, since the man cannot control how he grows and hence cannot be blamed for it.

136The humor may lie in the phrase “to see her” (li-anẓurahā), which might be taken to mean “to cast the evil eye on her.”

137“May God be protected from every eye!” (tabāraka llāhu min kulli ʿayn): the man confuses the verbs bāraka and tabāraka.

138Buhlūl, ʿUlayyān: moralizing “wise fools” of the early Abbasid period (see Naysābūrī, ʿUqalāʾ).

139Ṭuways: Abū ʿAbd al-Munʿim ʿĪsā ibn ʿAbdallāh (10–92/632–711), nicknamed Ṭuways (“Little Peacock”), a celebrated singer and mukhannath (“effeminate”) of Medina during the early days of Islam, known for his comical sayings.

140Muzabbid: Muzabbid al-Madanī, a much-cited early Medinan comic.

141The Fāriyāq: the author seems to have forgotten that the Fāriyāq is already speaking.

142“waist-bands” (himyān): i.e., sashes, in which money was carried.

143“The Fāriyāq’s father was one of those who sought to depose the emir” etc.: Yūsuf, Fāris’s father, though employed by Emir Bashīr II al-Shihābī, became involved in a 1819 Druze revolt against him, led by his relatives Emir Ḥasan ʿAlī and Emir Sulaymān Sayyid Aḥmad and caused by his ever more oppressive tax levies. With the failure of the uprising, Yūsuf fled along with these to Damascus, where he died in 1821 (on the political situation in Mount Lebanon in the early nineteenth century and the Shidyāq family’s role in it, see Ussama Makdisi, The Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008)), 72–76, al-Maṭwī, Aḥmad, 47–48, and Paul Starkey Fact and Fiction in al-Sāq ʿalā l-Sāq, in Robin Ostle, Ed de Moor, and Stephan Wild (eds.), Writing the Self: Autobiographical Writing in Modern Arabic Literature (London: Saqi Books, 1998), 36).

144“a tambour” (ṭunbūr): a long-necked fretted lute. According to Starkey, the author uses “the ṭanbūr as a symbol of art, of freedom, almost of life itself” (Starkey, Fact and Fiction, 36).

145“their Frankish shaykhs”: i.e., the clergy of the Roman Catholic church, with which the Maronite church is in communion.

146“schlup-flup” (khāqibāqi): “the sound of the vagina during intercourse” (Qāmūs).

147“A Priest and a Pursie, Dragging Pockets and Dry Grazing” (Fī qissīs wa-kīs wa-taḥlīs wa-talḥīs): the priest is mentioned at 1.5.8, the pursie at 1.5.10; taḥlīs does not occur in the dictionaries but may be based on maḥlūs (a word already used, see 1.1.6) which, according to the Qāmūs, means “scantly fleshed” (of the vagina), in which case it would relate to the figurative use of “pursie” (see n. 10 below) in such sentences as “When my pursie grew light while within your Happy Purlieu, which is to say, when it grew to be a drag…” and/or on iḥlās meaning “bankruptcy”; talḥīs is likewise absent from the dictionaries but may be based on laḥisat al-māshiyatu l-arḍ (“the herds grazed the land to the roots”), in which case it would refer to the Fāriyāq’s general state of penury.

148“whose name rhymes with Baʿīr Bayʿar”: i.e., Amīr [= Emir] Ḥaydar [ibn Aḥmad al-Shihābī] (1763–1835), cousin of Emir Bashīr II, ruler of Mount Lebanon (see 1.1.20, n. 117). The book referred to in the following lines as “ledgers” is Ḥaydar ibn Aḥmad’s Al-Ghurar al-ḥisān fī taʾrīkh ḥawādith al-zamān, a history of Lebanon from the earliest times to the Egyptian invasion of 1831.

149Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869), writer, poet, and politician; for these quotations, see Alphonse de Lamartine, Oeuvres de A. Lamartine: Méditations Poétiques (Paris: Charles Gosselin, 1838), 21, 23–24, and 25. The author’s translations of Lamartine and Chateaubriand that follow are discussed by Alwan, who characterizes them as “smooth, readable, and reasonably accurate” (Alwan, Aḥmad, chap. 3).

150ʿAntar ibn Shaddād: a pre-Islamic poet whose life gave rise at a later date to a popular epic of chivalry.

151The name of the deity is used to express deep feeling incited by music or poetry.

152Poetry’s Destiny, etc.: Lamartine’s essay is entitled Des destinées de la poésie and contains the words “je vois… des générations rajeunies… qui reconstruiront… cette oeuvre infinie que Dieu a donné à faire et à refaire sans cesse à l’homme, sa propre destinée. Dans cette oeuvre la poésie a sa place.” (Lamartine, Oeuvres 56).

153François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848): writer, politician, diplomat, and historian, considered the founder of Romanticism in French literature, who lived in America from 1791 to 1792. The originals of the two passages quoted below are to be found at Chateaubriand, Oeuvres complètes de Chateaubriand, vol. 6, Voyages en Amérique, en Italie, au Mont Blanc: Mélanges littéraires (Paris: Garnier, [1861]), 54 and 62.

154When Bilqīs, Queen of Sheba, visited Sulaymān from her kingdom in Yemen, he had a splendid pavilion built for her reception (Q Naml 27:44).

155The verses are by Hammām ibn al-Salūlī (d. 100/718).

156“a Magian”: a Zoroastrian, and thus supposedly a worshipper of fire.

157“pursies, and other things that have similar-sounding names” (li-l-akyās wa-li-mā jāʾa ʿalā waznihā wa-rawiyyihā): literally, “purses, and things that have the same syllabic structure and rhyme-letter”; the author probably intends the Arabic reader to think of aksās (“cunts”), just as the translator hopes the English reader will think of “pussies.”

158Mount Raḍwā: a mountain in Medina.

159“Words… Matter… Form”: the terminology is Aristotelian and was adopted by Muslim philosophers writing on physics, psychology, and metaphysics, with “Matter” meaning the substratum from which any entity is formed (thus, the soul is the matter from which the body is formed, wood the matter from which the chair is formed). The application of this analogy to the relationship between speech and meaning may be original to the author, whose intention seems to be to give a twist to the widely accepted notion that man is superior to other beings by virtue of having the capacity to speak, his point being that, if you have little to say, any such superiority is moot.

160Abū Dulāmah: buffoon poet to the first three Abbasid caliphs (d. 161/777–78).

161“al-Kuʿaykāt… al-Rukākāt”: comic names, meaning “Cookies” and “Simpletons” (or “Cuckolds”) and perhaps joking allusions to the village of al-Shuwayfāt (Choueifat) — which is next door to al-Ḥadath, where the author lived in his youth and which has long been a transit point for trade among Beirut, the south, and Mount Lebanon — and another location as yet unidentified.

162“capital (and assets)” (raʾs al-māl wa-dhanabuhu): literally, “the head of the money (raʾs al-māl) and its tail,” the author playing with the literal meaning of the Arabic expression meaning “(financial) capital.”

163“faces radiant” (wa-l-wujūhu nāḍirah): cf. Q Qiyāmah 75:22 wujūhun yawmaʾidhin nāḍirah “Some faces will be radiant on that Day.”

164“those lands” (tilka l-bilād): i.e., Lebanon, or Mount Lebanon.

165“every judge” (kullu qāḍin): or “each party to the transaction.”

166“her c…” (mabā…): the missing Arabic word is mabālahā.

167Diʿbil: Diʿbil ibn ʿAlī al-Khuzāʿī (148–246/765–860), a poet of invective (hijāʾ) and philologist who lived in Kufa.

168“‘O feeder of the orphans’… etc.” (a-muṭʿimata l-aytāmi ilā ākhirihi): a reference to the widely cited but unattributed verse a-muṭʿimata l-aytāmi min kaddi farjihā * a-lā lā taznī wa-lā tataṣaddaqī (“O you who feed the orphans from the labor of your vagina, * I say to you, [better that] you neither fornicate nor give alms!”), i.e., it is better to do nothing than to seek to do good through illicit means.

169“Unseemly Conversations and Crooked Contestations” (Muḥāwarāt khāniyah wa-munāqashāt ḥāniyah): alternatively, Muḥāwarāt khāniyyah wa-munāqashāt ḥāniyyah (“Inn-style Conversations and Tavern-style Discussions”).

170“which is why it’s called qahwah”: the author links qahwah (“wine”) to the verb aqhā (ʿan al-ṭaʿām), “to be put off (one’s food),” though the roots are different.

171Daʿd, Laylā: women’s names.

172“his ankleted honies”: i.e., the women of his household.

173“Each day some new matter he uncovers” (fa-huwa kulla yawmin fī shān): Q Raḥmān 55:29.

174“the two best things” (al-aṭyabayn): i.e., eating and coitus.

175Al-Qāsim ibn ʿAlī al-Ḥarīrī (446–516/1052–1122), Iraqi prose writer, poet, and official, wrote fifty immensely popular maqāmāt, which he compiled into a work of the same name.

176“the Nawābigh”: Al-Kalim al-nawābigh, a brief homily written in a mannered, ornamental style.

177“his grandfather” (jaddihi): i.e., his mother’s father, Yūsuf Ziyādah Musʿad, of ʿAshqūt (al-Maṭwī, Aḥmad 1:49), his father’s father, Manṣūr, having died in 1793.

178“she… degree… awry… eye”: despite his protestations, the author slips into rhymed prose at this moment of heightened emotion, possibly without noticing, and continues to do so at similar moments throughout the chapter.

179“she had an eye that was ‘dried up’” (dhābilatuhu): meaning, presumably, that her eye had lost its moistness by having taken on that “sleepiness” that is said to characterize “bedroom” eyes.

180“the whole entry… too noble to speak of”: the entry for the root ḥ-sh-f includes words meaning “it (a camel’s udder) became contracted and withered” and “dry bread” and “the worst quality of dates,” as well as ḥashafah, “the head of the penis.”

181“such a contrast…”: ṭibāq (“antithesis”), consisting of the “inclusion of two contraries in one line or sentence” (Meisami and Starkey, Encyclopedia, 2:659), is a rhetorical staple of traditional Arabic poetics.

182“or I do on their behalf”: by implying that he wrote the lines himself, the author may be seeking to undermine the sometimes spurious authority lent to ideas stated in prose by topping them off with a couple of lines of verse, a standard technique used by writers of earlier generations.

183Both are labial consonants.

184“for a boy I teach”: the author refers to the practice of addressing the beloved as though she were a male (tadhkīr), a feature of Arabic poetry and song from the earliest times until today.

185The author deploys two contradictory arguments: that tadhkīr is used because some “men who can see no good in women” prefer to do so, and that it reflects an underlying grammatically masculine referent, namely the word shakhṣ; thus, according to the second argument, when the poet refers to “he” or “him,” he really means “that person” and is thinking of a female. The French and Italian equivalents of shakhṣ that the author has in mind are, presumably, personne and persona.

186“Ibn Mālik’s Sharḥ al-Mashāriq”: the author’s name as given by al-Shidyāq is apparently a mistake for (ʿAbd al-Laṭīf ibn Firishtah ʿIzz al-Dīn ibn Amīn al-Dīn) Ibn Malak (d. after 824/1421), whose Mabāriq al-azhār (fī) sharḥ Mashāriq al-anwār, a hadith collection with extended commentary, was regarded as a classic and reprinted several times in the nineteenth century (Encyclopaedia of Islam, edited by P. J. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W. P. Heinrichs et al., 2nd ed., 12 vols. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1960–2005), 2:923–24); it has, however, proven impossible to confirm the reference in the absence of any mention of the hadith from the commentary on which this passage is presumably taken.

187“Hind… Zaynab”: generic female names.

188“the ‘novel’ style”: poetry in the style called badīʿ, i.e., that relying largely on rhetorical and technical artifices.

189“That Which Is Long and Broad” (Fī l-ṭawīl al-ʿarīḍ): perhaps an allusion to the long, broad path facing the grammarian.

190“Zayd struck ʿAmr” (ḍaraba Zaydun ʿAmran): Zayd and ʿAmr are generic names used in sentences constructed to demonstrate grammatical rules.

191“the daughter of Abū l-Aswad al-Duʾalī” etc.: al-Duʾalī (d. 69/688) is known as “the father of Arabic grammar”; the story goes that his daughter said to him mā ajmalu l-samāʾ (“What is the most beautiful thing in the sky?”) when she intended mā ajmala l-samāʾ (“How beautiful the sky is!”), and he corrected her, thus starting the process of the recording and codification of “chaste speech.”

192“‘the ship sails’ or ‘the mare runs’”: these are two-step metaphors because the ship is propelled by the wind, which in turn blows at God’s behest, while the mare runs because she is made to do so by her rider, who is himself a creature propelled by God.

193“aeolian” (ʿiqyawniyyah): for a definition of the noun ʿiqyawn from which this adjective derives, see Volume Two (2.14.43).

194From this point, the nomenclature leaves the realm of reality and devolves into a series of fanciful and bizarre-sounding terms based largely on onomatopoeia (farqaʿiyyah, qarqaʿiyyah, etc.) or, toward the end of the list, hapax legomena known only from a single line of ancient verse (jaḥlanjaʿiyyah, ʿuṭrūsiyyah) or having only a precarious foothold in the language (such as shunṭafiyyah, of which the Qāmūs says, “a colloquialism, mentioned by Ibn Durayd, who does not explain it”).

195“tongue-smacking” (ṭaʿṭaʿiyyah): according to the Qāmūs, ṭaʿṭaʿah is a sound one makes by “sticking the tongue against the hard palate and then masticating [? yanṭiʿ] because of the good taste of something he is eating, so that a sound may be heard from between the palate and the tongue.”

196“panthero-dyspneaceous” (khuʿkhuʿiyyah): the word khuʿkhuʿ refers to a certain plant and thus does not lend itself to an onomatopeic interpretation; it may, however, be related to the verb khaʿʿa “to make a sound from the back of its throat when it has run out of breath running after its enemy (of a leopard).”

197“the skrowlaceous” (ʿuhʿukhiyyah): of this word the Lisān says, “Al-Azharī said, ‘We heard Khalīl ibn Aḥmad say, “We heard a hideous word, not to be permitted by the rules of word formation: a Bedouin was asked about his she-camel, and he said, ‘I left her grazing ʿuhʿukh.’ I asked reliable scholars, and they denied that this word could belong to the language of the Arabs.”’” The Qāmūs says that the word, meaning a certain medicinal plant, is a deformation of khuʿkhuʿ (see n. 196 above) and, as such, does not offer an obvious onomatoeic association.

198“skraaaghhalaceous” (ʿuhkhaghiyyah): the word is not found in the dictionaries.

199“the transtextual and the intertextual” (kashaʿthajiyyah wa-kashaʿẓajiyyah): the Qāmūs says of these words only that they are “recently coined” (muwalladān), without definition.

200“A book’s prologue” (khuṭbat al-kitāb): the invocation with which pre-nineteenth-century Arabic books usually begin, which weaves a statement of the work’s concerns into an encomium of the Prophet Muḥammad, his Companions, etc.

201“opposition” (ṭibāq): al-Ḥillī describes ṭibāq as consisting of “using two words of opposite meaning, so that it is as though the poet were opposing (ṭābaqa) the one to its opposite” (al-Ḥillī, Sharḥ 72).

202Al-Farrāʾ: Abū Zakariyyāʾ Yaḥyā ibn Ziyād al-Farrāʾ (144–207/761–822), a grammarian of the Kufan school, most famous for his grammatical commentary on the Qurʾān, entitled Maʿānī al-Qurʾān.

203ḥattā: a particle (meaning approximately “until”) whose usage is complex.

204“*nna”: a particle (approximately “that”) whose initial vowel varies according to environment.

205“connective fāʾ” etc.: on the copula fa- (consisting of the letter fāʾ plus a) and its multiple uses and significations, see e.g., W. A. Wright, Grammar of the Arabic Language, 3rd ed., rev. W. Robertson Smith and M. J. de Goeje (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), whose index cites ten distinct usages.

206al-Yazīdī: Abū Muḥammad Yaḥyā ibn al-Mubārak al-Yazīdī (d. 202/817 or 818) was the author of several works on grammar and lexicography; these have not survived, although anecdotes about him abound in anthologies (Meisami and Starkey, Encyclopedia 2:812).

207“connective wāw” etc.: on the copula wa- (consisting of the letter wāw plus a) and its multiple uses and significations, see e.g., Wright, Grammar, whose index cites five distinct usages.

208“the right-related… uses of lām”: on the particles li- and la- (consisting of the letter lām plus i or a), see e.g., Wright, Grammar, whose index cites seven distinct usages.

209al-Aṣmaʿī: Abū Saʿīd ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Qurayb al-Bāhilī al-Aṣmaʿī (122–213/740–828) was one of the most influential early lexicographers and philologists. Sixty of his works are extant, although it is not clear if any dealt with the orthographic issue raised here.

210“aw… am”: two particles that may be translated “or.”

211“[the words] qāʾil or bāʾiʿ”: because the proscribed orthography—qāyil and bāyiʿ—might be taken to represent a colloquialized pronunciation.

212“when pronounced without vowels at the end” (sākinan): the author implies that most writers do not know enough grammar to use correct desinential inflections and their “concoctions” are therefore less offensive to the ear when read without them, in keeping with the adage sakkin taslam (“read without endings and be safe”).

213“the ‘doer’ and the ‘done’”: in Arabic grammatical terminology, the subject of a verb is referred to as the fāʿil (“doer”), the object as the mafʿūl (“done”). In the following, the author plays, as many have done before, on these and other, non-grammatical, meanings of the same words, e.g., “doer” in the sense of “manual worker” and “fucker,” and “done” in the sense of “fucked.”

214“‘raised’… ‘laid’”: the vowel u, called “raising” (rafʿ), is the marker of the subject, while a, called “laying” (naṣb), is, among other things, that of the object.

215“the doer of the…” (fāʿil al-… ): perhaps meaning, in grammatical terms, “the subject of the verb” (fāʿil al-fiʿl), which in non-grammatical language would mean “the doer of the (dirty) deed.”

216“who are steadfast” (min al-qurrāʾ al-ṣābirīn): evocative of a number of passages in the Qurʾān, e.g., sa-tajidunī in shāʾa llāhu min al-ṣābirīn (“and, God willing, you will find me steadfast”) (Q Ṣāffāt 37:102).

217“switching persons” (al-iltifāt): a rhetorical figure consisting of an “abrupt change of grammatical person from second to third and from third to second,” as in the words of the poet Jarīr “When were the tents at Dhū Ṭulūḥ? O tents, may you be watered by ample rain!” (Meisami and Starkey, Encyclopedia 2:657).

218māghūṣ: a nonce-word apparently used to mean “bore, pest.”

219“Faid al-Hāwif ibn Hifām in lifping tones” (ḥaddasa l-Hāris ibn al-Hithām): the author substitutes the letter s for th, h for ḥ, and th for sh; without these substitutions, the sentence would read ḥaddatha l-Ḥārith ibn Hishām. The name evokes those of the narrators of the best known maqāmāt series, by al-Hamadhānī, whose narrator is called ʿĪsā ibn Hishām, and those by al-Ḥarīrī, who names his narrator al-Ḥārith ibn Hammām. At the same time, the name in its “lisped” form may be translated as “Masher, son of Pulverizer.”

220The Balancing of the Two States and Comparing of the Two Straits (Kitāb Muwāzanat al-ḥālatayn wa-murāzanat al-ālatayn): the title may be intended to evoke the Kitāb al-Muwāzanah bayna Abī Tammām wa-l-Buḥturī of al-Āmidī (see 1.1.11 above), although the latter compares not good and evil but the literary accomplishments of two poets and does not employ the “facing tables using a columnar system” referred to below.

221Abū Rushd “Brains” ibn Ḥazm (Abū Rushd Nuhyah ibn Ḥazm): the name evokes two of the best known writers of the Maghreb — Ibn Rushd, known in the West as Averroës (520–95/1126–98), and Ibn Ḥazm (384–456/994–1064) — although the significance of the choice of these writers is not obvious. Nuhyah, literally “mind,” is not part of the name of either writer.

222“by even a jot” (naqīran): an echo of Q Nisāʾ 4:53 and 124.

223“those who hold to the humoral theory” (al-ṭabāʾiʿiyyīn): i.e., those who hold to Galen’s theory that one’s physical state is determined by the balance therein of the humors (al-ṭabāʾiʿ—phlegm, blood, yellow bile, and black bile).

224“by insisting on the impossible and making from the non-existent something necessarily existent” (bi-farḍ al-mustaḥīl wa-jaʿl al-maʿdūm ka-l-mawjūd al-wājib): the terms “(im)possible” and “necessary” pertain to Aristotelian logic (see also above 1.6.4, n. 159) and were introduced into Islamic philosophy by al-Fārābī (ca. 259–339/872–950). Al-Fārābī postulated that it is inconceivable to posit the impossible (e.g., a square circle), while the author’s jurisprudent insists that to do so constitutes the very essence of his trade.

225“I added him then to the three, making him number four” (fa-ṣayyartuhu rābiʿa l-thalāthah): an echo of Q Kahf 18:22 sa-yaqūlūna thalāthatun rābiʿuhum kalbuhum “Some will say, ‘They were three, the fourth was their dog’” (in reference to “the people of the cave”).

226“mindful men” (dhī ḥijrin): an echo of Q Fajr 89:5.

227“A Sacrament” (Sirr): the allusion may be either to the sacrament of confession (1.14.4) or to the secret (also sirr) referred to at the end of the chapter (1.14.9).

228“its number”: i.e., the number thirteen.

229“seized by their forelocks” (yuʾkhadhu bi-l-nawāṣī): Q Aḥzāb 33:37.

230“the ‘buttocks’ of ‘Halt and weep’” (aʿjāz qifā nabki): qifā nabki (“Halt and weep”) are the opening words of the celebrated “suspended ode” (muʿallaqah) of the pre-Islamic poet Imruʾ al-Qays; the word “buttocks” occurs later, when the poet says “I said to the night, when it stretched its lazy loins followed by its fat buttocks, and heaved off its fat breast, ‘Well now, you tedious night, won’t you clear yourself off, and let dawn shine?’” (Arthur J. Arberry, The Seven Odes: The First Chapter in Arabic Literature (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1957), 64). The author links, bathetically, the misfortunes of the speaker with those of one of Arabic literature’s most heroic figures.

231karshūnī: Arabic written in Syriac script.

232“soul (nafs)… breath (nafas)… breathes (yatanaffas)”: the author plays with the fact that the words for “breath” and “soul” are spelled the same when vowels are not indicated, with a resulting potential for confusion; the reference to orifices and “a certain school” may be no more than a joke to the effect that some people count farting, belching, hiccupping, etc. as “points of exit and entry” for the breath.

233“open his wife’s womb”: see, e.g., Gen. 30:22: “And God remembered Rachel, and God hearkened to her, and opened her womb.”

234“long converse and closeness in bed” (qurb al-wisād wa-ṭūl al-siwād—literally, “closeness of pillow and length of converse”): Bint al-Khuss (a semi-legendary figure dating to perhaps the third century before Islam and famed for her ready wit) was asked, “Wherefore didst thou commit fornication?” and this phrase was her response (Lane, Lexicon, s.v. sāwada; al-Maydānī, Majmaʿ, 2:37).

235“the two cs”: in the Arabic, “the two ks” (al-kāfayn). Since there appears to be no conventionally recognized “two ks,” the meaning is open to speculation. In the opinion of the translator, the phrase is probably code for al-kuss wa-l-kutshīnah (“cunt and cards”), the topics of this chapter.

236The following catalog lists activities, such as gambling, dishonest dealing, speculation, and usury that are forbidden in Islam.

237“such people”: meaning presumably, and presumably ironically, ships’ captains.

238irtisām…: the following list of 104 words is, in effect, redundant, because all but fifteen of them are repeated, with definitions, in a table at the end of the chapter (1.16.9 ff.); on the author’s evolving approach to the formatting of such lists, see the Translator’s After-word in Volume Four. Words that are not repeated in the table, and that thus remain unglossed, are tashāʾum, taṭayyur, tafāʾul, taḥattum, tayammun, tasaʿʿud, tamassuḥ, kahānah, intijāʾ, ṭalāsim, ʿazāʾim, ruqā, tamāʾim, ʿūdhah, and siḥr; these items are glossed here, in the end-notes. Presumably the author did not regard them as rare enough to need definition.

239tashāʾum: “to draw an evil omen.”

240taṭayyur: “to draw auguries.”

241tafāʾul: “to draw a good omen.”

242taḥattum: “to believe in the inevitability of a thing.”

243tayammun: “to draw a good omen.”

244tasaʿʿud: “to draw a good omen.”

245tamassuḥ: “to seek blessing from holy men by drawing the hands over them” (Lisān: “blessing is sought from so-and-so by drawing of the hands [over the object of veneration] (yutammasaḥu bi-hi) because of his merit and [the devotedness of] his worship, as if one were drawn closer to God by proximity to him”).

246ʿāṭis: defined in the list of definitions at the end of the chapter under al-ʿāṭūs, following the Qāmūs.

247“qaʿīd or dākis”: defined in the list of definitions at the end of the chapter under the entry for kādis, following the Qāmūs.

248kahānah: “soothsaying, divination.”

249intijāʾ: the author does not include this in his list of definitions below, nor does it appear in a relevant sense in the dictionaries, but al-intijāʾ is described by some of these as synonymous with al-tanājī, or “talking to one another in secret,” and there may be a reference here to Q Mujādilah 58:9: “O believers, when you conspire (idhā tanājaytum), conspire not together in sin and enmity and in disobedience to the Messenger, but conspire together in peace and God-fearing” (58:9; Arthur J. Arberry, The Koran Interpreted (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 570); see also tanajjā above and in the list of definitions.

250ṭalāsim: “talismans.”

251ʿazāʾim: “spells.”

252ruqā: “incantations, charms.”

253tamāʾim: “amulets.”

254ʿūdhah: “spell.”

255siḥr: “magic.”

256ṣadā: in the list of definitions at the end of the chapter, this word is defined under the entry for al-kādis, following the Qāmūs.

257“those lands” (tilka l-bilād): presumably, the lands to which he was bound before the ship turned back.

258“the mankūs”: “three lines following one another immediately, then one on its own” (Lisān).

259The wording seems to be the author’s, not that of a dictionary, and he interprets ḥazā as being of the root ḥ-z-w rather than ḥ-z-y, an alternative given by the Lisān but not the Qāmūs; al-taḥazzī is the noun formed from the reflexive variant of the verb.

260“a tree”: presumably of the kind also called ratīmah.

261“or etc.”: indicating that the entry in the Qāmūs continues with other less relevant definitions.

262“on the pattern of kataba” (ka-kataba): a word having the same pattern of consonants and vowels as that of the subject of the definition is used to disambiguate its spelling, a necessary procedure given that short vowels and other morphological features are not always indicated in writing and, if indicated, are vulnerable to error; the meaning of the word used (kataba “to write”) is irrelevant.

263“the minor magician who claims powers of divination and knocks small stones together” (al-ḥāzī al-mutakahhin al-ṭāriq bi-l-ḥaṣā): the Qāmūs quotes an authority to the effect that the ḥāzī “has less knowledge than the ṭāriq (‘one who bangs small stones together’), and the ṭāriq can scarcely be said to divine; the ḥāzī speaks on the basis of supposition and fear.”

264al-naffāthāt fī l-ʿuqad: the phrase is taken from Q Falaq 113:4 and means literally “the women who blow on knots.”

265“too well-known to require definition” (m): here, as frequently elsewhere, the Qāmūs uses the abbreviation m, standing for maʿrūf (“well known”).

266“a separate book”: unidentified, but not, as one might expect, his Al-Jāsūs ʿalā l-Qāmūs (the verb iḥtawā is dealt with there but in terms of transitivity versus intransitivity, not root-assignment or semantics).

267Q Insān 76:10.

268“of moon and of money-wagering” (al-qamar wa-l-qimār): perhaps because exposure to moonlight was considered by the ancient Arabs to be hazardous, as, of course, is wagering.

269“cold talk” (al-kalām al-bārid): idiomatically, “rudeness.”

270“an instrument containing drink, or… one containing meat” (adātun fī-hā sharāb… ukhrā fī-hā laḥm): i.e., a bar or a restaurant, amenities that the author puts on the same level as bed-warmers and hot-water bottles by referring to each as an adāh (“instrument, device”).

271“their precipitation is bottom up, or in other words from the heads of people who are themselves ruled to the heads of those who rule” (lafẓuhā min siflin ilā ʿilwin ay min ruʾūs nāsin masūdīn ilā ruʾūsi nāsin sāʾidīn): apparently meaning that judges, being themselves subjects of the ruler, cannot impose the law upon him.

272“a certain vagabond was once the guest of people who failed to honor and celebrate him”: perhaps a reference to the author’s treatment in Malta, or Egypt, versus that which he received in England or France.

273“here”: i.e., in this book.

274“Old Testament”: see 1.16.2, n. 233.

275The reference is unidentified.

276“opener of the womb”: the referent has changed, being now the firstborn child and not God; for the two different usages, see, e.g., Gen. 29:31 and Exod. 13:2.

277“the secret’s being revealed” etc.: cf. 1.14.9 above.

278The following list reflects the medical science not of the mid-nineteenth century but mainly of the pre-Islamic and early Islamic periods, whose language provides the corpus for the Qāmūs. It thus includes terms not recognized by modern science, some of which are based on medieval understandings of camel and horse, rather than human, anatomy.

279“the Joker”: or “the Liar.”

280“The name of al-Farazdaq’s devil”: pre-Islamic and early Islamic Arabs believed that major poets had their verses dictated to them by personal devils; Hammām ibn Ghālib al-Farazdaq (ca. 20–110/640–728) identified his demon as bearing the name ʿAmr.

281“al-Shayṣabān”: a name of the Devil (as the two following items), but also the name of a forefather of a certain tribe of the jinn and as such repeated below.

282“The Corrupter… Cut-nose”: unlike the preceding, the majority of which are proper names, the following five items are common epithets of Satan.

283arḍ khāfiyah: on khāfiyah in the sense of “jinn (collectively),” see further down this list.

284“with or without nunation” (wa-qad yuṣraf): certain indefinite nouns are inflected with terminations ending in the letter nūn (n), a feature known as nunation, others with terminations not ending in nūn, and a few according to either regime; thus Wabār when fully inflected may be pronounced (in the nominative) either Wabārun or Wabāru.

285“Wabār ibn Iram”: Iram was one of the five sons of Sām, son of Nūḥ; among his descendants was Wabār, forefather of the tribe of ʿĀd, which God destroyed for practicing false belief in the sanctuary of the Kaaba.

286“The name of one of the jinn who gave ear to the Qurʾān”: a reference to “Remember how We sent to you a band of the jinn who wished to hear the Qurʾān and as they listened they said to one another, ‘Be silent and listen’….” (Q Aḥqāf 46:29); the jinn heard Muḥammad reciting during his retreat from al-Ṭāʾif and became believers.

287“mārid”: a sub-species of jinn, literally “the rebellious.”

288“I can’t find it in the Qāmūs”: it does in fact appear there, although without a definition, being glossed simply as synonymous with ʿaḍrafūṭ (see below); other dictionaries (e.g., the Lisān) define it as meaning “old woman.” As the author points out, the word also occurs in the Qāmūs as the word used to disambiguate the pronunciation of most of these (in Arabic terms) bizarre-sounding words.

289“the lexicographer” (al-m.ṣ.): an abbreviation for al-muṣannif.

290“fading mirage”: and twelve other definitions (in the Qāmūs), including “ghoul” and “devil.”

291“the ant mentioned in the Qurʾān”: “… and when they came to the Valley of the Ants, one ant said, ‘Ants! Go into your dwellings lest [Sulaymān] and his hosts inadvertently crush you’” (Q Naml 27:18).

292“the jumper” (al-waththāb): neck-muscle spasm.

293al-Hirāʾ: “a devil charged with [causing] bad dreams” (Qāmūs).

294“Muḥammad or Maḥmūd”: names specific to Muslims, while the emir was a Christian.

295“unbored pearls”: virgins, in conventional poetic imagery.

296“the letter nūn”: twenty-nine of the sūras (“chapters”) of the Qurʾān commence with one or more letters of the alphabet of unknown significance. The Fāriyāq takes the nūn preceding the verse quoted here (Q Qalam 68:1) to stand for naḥs (“bad luck”).

297“his confidant… polemics… ecclesiastical bigwig”: the “confidant” (najī) was his elder brother Asʿad, whom the author visited, with other members of his family, following his adoption of Protestantism and who talked to him at length about his beliefs (al-Maṭwī, Aḥmad, 1:69); by “polemics” (qīla wa-qāla) the author means “religious controversy and debate”; the “ecclesiastical bigwig” (aḥad… min al-jathāliqah) must be the Maronite patriarch, to whom Asʿad frankly declared his beliefs in the hope of securing internal reform.

298“saddlebag” (khurj): this introduces the theme of “the Bag-men” (al-khurjiyyūn), the author’s term for Protestant missionaries (see Glossary).

299“one of the big-time fast-talking market traders” (mina l-ḍawāṭirati l-kibār): see Glossary.

300“God’s horsemen against the infidel!” (yā khayla llāh ʿalā l-kuffār): the first half of the cry used to assemble the first Muslims before battle and subsequently used as a pious invocation to action on behalf of Muslims in danger.

301“They shall roast in Hell!” (innahum ṣālū l-nār): Q Ṣād 38:59.

302“I shall bring you the little squit ‘before ever thy glance is returned to thee’” (anā ātīka etc.): the wording evokes the Qurʾān (Q Naml 27:40), when a member of Sulaymān’s council volunteers to bring him the Queen of Sheba’s throne.

303“who had a speech defect involving the letter f… Boss of the the Market Difgwace” (wa-kāna bi-hi faʾfaʾah): the defect called faʾfaʾah is defined as “repeating and over-using the letter fāʾ in speech” and causes the Fāriyāq to say shaykh al-fusūq (literally “the Boss of Disgrace”) for shaykh al-sūq (“the Boss of the Marketplace”).

304“Shouldn’t the addition of these eighty require the eighty-lash penalty?” (fa-lā takun ziyādatu hādhihi l-thamānīna mūjibun li-ḥaddi l-thamānīn): the addition of fāʾ to sūq (see preceding endnote) produces fusūq; the numerical value of the letter fāʾ in the counting system known as ḥisāb al-jummal is eighty; and the penalty specified in the Qurʾan for the fāsiq (“committer of fusūq” or depravity) is eighty lashes (cf. Q Nūr 24:4).

305“Emotion and Motion” (Fī l-ḥiss wa-l-ḥarakah): both emotion and motion (of the heart) are mentioned in the opening passage.

306“the Vizier of the Right-hand Side… the Vizier of the Left-hand Side” (wazīr al-maymanah… wazīr al-maysarah): terms derived from popular conceptions of the organization of the courts of the caliphs, but meaning here, presumably, the primary organs on the right- and left-hand sides of the body, respectively.

307“I came not to send peace, but a sword”: Matt. 10:34.

308“he exerted himself to save the Fāriyāq from the hands of the arrogant”: following his brother Asʿad’s arrest by the Maronite patriarch in March 1826 (see n. 314, below), the author himself sought refuge with the Protestant missionaries with whom Asʿad had consorted, and these hid him in Beirut before sending him abroad in December of the same year.

309“the Island of Scoundrels” (Jazīrat al-Mulūṭ): i.e., Malta, normally Māliṭah.

310“the golden calf” (al-baʿīm, literally, “the idol”): presumably a reference to the “idolatry” implied by the presence of statues of the Virgin Mary and saints in Maronite churches.

311“ignoble and, beside that, basely born” (ʿuṭullin wa-baʿda dhālika zanīm): Q Qalam 68:13.

312“there is therein no crookedness” (ghayru dhāti ʿiwajin): an echo of Q Zumar 39:28 (“[an Arabic Koran,] wherein there is no crookedness” (Arberry, Koran, 473).

313“Sh…! Sh…!” (al-khur! al-khur!): the passenger thinks the Fāriyāq is trying to say “The shit! The shit!” (al-khurʾ! al-khurʾ!), when, in fact, he is trying to say, in his delirium, “The saddlebag! The saddlebag” (alkhurj! al-khurj!).

314Asʿad: Asʿad al-Shidyāq (1798–1830), the third eldest brother in the family (the author being the fifth and youngest), became convinced of the truth of Protestantism after associating with American evangelical missionaries in Beirut and was detained on charges of heresy by Maronite patriarch Yūsuf Ḥubaysh at his palace at Qannūbīn, where he died after some six years of maltreatment. For a detailed account of the events leading to and surrounding Asʿad’s death and their significance, see Makdisi, Artillery, and Alwan, Aḥmad, chap. 1.

315Qannūbīn: a valley in northern Lebanon, site of numerous Christian monasteries, including a former seat of the Maronite patriarch.

316Mikhāʾīl Mishāqah (1800–1888 or 1889): first historian of later Ottoman Lebanon, who converted from Greek Catholicism to Protestantism in 1848.

317“the Mutawālīs”: the Twelver Shiites of Lebanon.

318“the Anṣārīs”: a Shiite sect with distinctive teachings and cosmology, with followers in Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere in the region.

319“Some of them… have written histories”: the material that follows, even though attributed below by the author to several writers, appears to be taken mostly — and in some cases word for word — from Voltaire’s Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations, chaps. 35–37 (see, e.g., http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Essai_sur_les_mœurs, accessed 6 March 2013).

320“Pope Amadeus VIII, known as the Duke of Savoy”: the name and number refer, in fact, not to a pope but to Duke Amadeus VIII of Savoy (1383–1451), who did, however, become antipope, assuming the papal name of Felix V, when elected by the dissident rump of the Council of Basel. The spelling Armadiyūs in the Arabic is an error.

321“the Council of Basel was convened specifically to depose Pope Eugene”: the Council of Basel was convened in 1431 to limit the powers of the papacy. Pope Eugene IV (r. 1431–47) sought to disband the council, a rump of which remained at Basel and elected the antipope Felix V.

322Nicholas I (r. 858–67) excommunicated the Bishop of Cologne over the latter’s support for Emperor Lothar II’s petition for an annulment of his marriage that would allow him to marry his mistress.

323“Ambrose, governor of Milan”: Aurelius Ambrosius (Saint Ambrose) (ca. 340–97) became Bishop of Milan after originally being governor of Emilia and Liguria, with headquarters at Milan. The author’s reference to his “unsoundness” of belief may derive from the fact that Ambrose was neither baptized not formally trained in theology when elected bishop by popular acclaim, but his later contributions to theology resulted in his being numbered among the four Latin Fathers of the Church.

324“Pope John VIII… Photius”: Pope John VIII (r. 872–82) recognized the reinstatement of Photius as the legitimate patriarch of Constantinople after he had been condemned by Adrian VII. Photius (ca. 810–93) gained, lost, and regained the patriarchate of Constantinople against a background of the struggle between rival candidates for the Byzantine throne, a struggle in which the Western church attempted to intervene. The Western church eventually anathematized Photius, while the Eastern canonized him.

325“Pope Stephen VII… Formosus”: under pressure from a leading Roman family supportive of Pope John VIII and opposed by Formosus, then Bishop of Porto, Stephen VI (r. 896–97) had the remains of Formosus (pope, r. 891–96, and Stephen’s last predecessor but one) exhumed, put him on trial, and sentenced him to the punishments described.

326i.e., Pope Sergius III (r. 904–11).

327Marozia (ca. 890–936): a Roman noblewoman who, with her mother Theodora, was actively involved in the affairs of the papacy, as described in what follows. The accession to the papacy of her bastard son, grandson, two great grandsons, and a nephew has led hostile commentators to refer to the period of her ascendancy as a “pornocracy” (rule by prostitutes).

328According to most accounts, it was Pope John X rather than Sergius III who awarded Marozia, rather than her mother Theodora, the unprecedented title of senatrix (“senatoress”) of Rome.

329Later, Pope John XI (r. 931–35).

330“Hugh, King of Arles”: i.e., Hugh of Arles (before 885–948), who was elected King of Italy.

331Pope John X (914–28) was a protégé of Theodora (see n. 327) and perished as a result of the intrigues of her daughter Marozia.

332i.e., Leo VI (reigned for seven months in 928).

333i.e., Stephen VII (r. 928 (?) to 931), hand-picked by Marozia as a stopgap until her son could assume the papacy as John XI.

334“her husband”: Alberic I, Duke of Spoleto; it is not usually reported that she poisoned him.

335i.e., the aforementioned Hugh of Arles, King of Italy.

336i.e., Alberic II (912–54), who had his mother imprisoned until her death.

337Stephen VIII: reigned 939–42.

338“disfigured his face”: perhaps a reference to the claim that Stephen VIII was the first pope to shave and that he ordered the men of Rome to do likewise.

339John XII reigned from 955 to 964, dying at the age of twenty-seven.

340i.e., Otto I (912–73), who in 962 made a pact with Pope John XII that made the Western Roman Empire guarantor of the independence of the Papal States. Soon, however, the pope, fearful of the power thus bestowed, began to intrigue with the Magyars and the Byzantines against the Western Empire. Otto returned to Rome in 963, convened a synod of bishops, and deposed the pope.

341Leo VIII was an antipope from 963 to 964, when he was illegally elected by the 963 synod that illegally deposed John XII, and a true pope from 964 to 965, having been legally re-elected following the death of John XII.

342Crescentius: i.e., Crescentius II (d. 992), son of Crescentius I and not, as the author states, of John X and Marozia, was a leader of the Roman aristocracy who made himself de facto ruler of Rome, was deposed by Otto III, rose again in rebellion, appointed an antipope (John XVI), and was eventually defeated and executed.

343Benedict: Pope Benedict VII (d. 983); other sources do not confirm that he died in prison; the author appears to have confused him with John XIV (see below).

344John XIV: pope from 983 to 984, who was imprisoned by the antipope Boniface VII in Sant’Angelo, where he died.

345Boniface VII: ruled as antipope (974, 984–85) under the patronage of Crescentius and the Roman aristocracy.

346Gregory: i.e., Pope Gregory V (ca. 972–99), cousin and chaplain of Otto III; although he consistently supported the emperor, his death was not without suspicion of foul play.

347Otto III (980–1002): son of Otto II, in 996 he came to Rome to aid Pope John XV (985–96) (see below) against Crescentius, whom he eventually killed.

348“played a trick on him”: Otto III promised Crescentius the right to live in retirement in Rome but reneged and had him murdered and hung from the walls of Sant’Angelo.

349Pope John XV (r. 985–86) succeeded Pope Boniface VII; according to other accounts he died of fever, while it was the antipope John XVI, appointed by Crescentius, who, on the latter’s defeat, had his eyes put out and nose cut off before banishing him to a monastery.

350Benedict VIII: reigned 1012 to 1024.

351John XIX: succeeded his brother Benedict VIII and reigned from 1024 to 1032.

352Benedict IX: said by most sources to have been between eighteen and twenty years of age when he succeeded his uncle, John XIX, he is the only pope to have reigned three times (1032–44, 1045, 1047–48) and to have sold the papacy (to Gregory VI in 1045), although he later attempted to reclaim it.

353Meaning presumably Sylvester III and the restored Benedict IX.

354“with his concubine” (maʿa surriyyatihi): thus the Arabic, although one wonders if maʿa sariyyatihi (“with his detachment of soldiers”) is not what is meant.

355“one of the kings of France”: i.e., Robert II (972–1032), who was excommunicated by Pope Gregory V when he insisted on marrying his cousin, a marriage denied by the pope on grounds of consanguinity.

356Gregory VII: reigned from 1073 to 1085. His attempts to strengthen papal hegemony against the Holy Roman Empire culminated in the Investiture Controversy (over the right to appoint bishops), which led, in 1076, to his excommunication of Emperor Henry IV, who was accused of being behind his brief abduction.

357Henry IV (r. 1056–1106) had declared Pope Gregory VII deposed at the synod of Worms, held a week before his own excommunication.

358“Countess Matilda”: Matilda of Tuscany (1055–1115), a leading noblewoman and heiress, who supported Pope Gregory VII during the Investiture Controversy.

359Canossa: Matilda’s ancestral castle.

360Urbanus II (r. 1088–99) in fact succeeded the short-reigning Victor III rather than Gregory VII directly.

361“the two sons of Henry IV”: i.e, Conrad (1074–1101) and his brother Henry (1086–1125), later Emperor Henry V (r. 1106–1125); Conrad joined the papal camp against his father in 1093; Henry was crowned King of Germany by his father to replace Conrad but soon revolted against his father, whom ultimately he deposed.

362Henry VI (r. 1190–1197) was in fact the son of Emperor Frederick I, while Frederick II was his son.

363Pope Celestine: i.e, Celestine III (r. 1191–98).

364Innocent III: reigned 1198–1216.

365Pope Innocent IV (r. 1243–54) summoned the Thirteenth General Council of the Church at Lyons in 1245 in order to further his attempts to recover from the Holy Roman Empire territories in Italy that Innocent believed belonged by right to the papacy. The Council formally deposed the emperor, although to no practical effect.

366Frederick II: reigned 1212–1250.

367Lucius II: during his reign (1144–45), the Senate of Rome established a Commune of Rome that demanded the pope abandon all secular functions; the pope died leading an army against the Commune.

368“Clement XV”: a mistake for “Clement V” (r. ca. 1264–1314).

369Vienne: on the Rhône in southern France and site of the Council of Vienne, called by Clement V from 1311 to 1312 to address accusations against the Templars, partly in response to the desire of Philip IV of France, Clement’s patron, to confiscate their wealth.

370“Pope Urban”: i.e., Urban VI (r. ca. 1318–89), who in 1384 tortured and put to death certain of his cardinals who wished to declare him incompetent.

371John XXIII: i.e., the antipope John XXIII (r. 1410–15), whose seat, during the Western Schism, was in Rome.

372John XXIII was deposed, along with other claimants to the papacy, by the Council of Constance, which was called by Emperor Sigismund; he was accused of heresy, simony, schism, and immorality.

373Sijjīn: a valley in Hell.

374“over your eyes there is a covering” (ʿalā abṣārikum ghishāwah): cf. Q Baqarah 2:7.

375“the Five Stars” (al-nujūm al-khamsah): the planets known to Islamic astronomy (Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury), called khunnas because they return (takhnusu) in their courses.

376“the Mijarrah—‘the gateway of the sky, or its anus’” (mijarratuhā—bāb al-samāʾi aw sharajuhā): the Lisān explains the first part of the gloss by the resemblance of the Milky Way to an arch.

377“the rujum—‘the stars used for stoning’” (rujumuhā—al-nujūmu llatī yurmā bihā): the stars with which God stones Satan, who is commonly referred to as al-rajīm for this reason; in popular belief, shooting stars (see, for Egypt, Lane, Manners, 223).

378“the Two Calves” (al-farqadayn): stars γ and β in Ursa Minor (the Little Dipper); also known as Pherkad and Kochab (al-kawkab).

379“all those gazettes” (fī hādhihi l-waqāʾiʿ al-ikhbāriyyah): no doubt a reference to Al-Waqāʾiʿ al-Miṣriyyah, on which see further n. 132 to 2.11.5 below.

380“Friends of God” (awliyāʾ Allāh): individuals believed to be chosen by God for special favor; sometimes they manifest unusual spiritual powers.

381“to bring about divorces” (li-l-taṭlīq): a reference, perhaps, to the notary (maʾdhūn) who gives formal recognition to a divorce.

382“as a legitimizer” (li-l-taḥlīl): if a Muslim man divorces his wife three times — thus irrevocably — and then regrets his act, he may hire a man (known as a muḥallil, approx. “legitimizer”) to marry her and then divorce her, rendering remarriage legally possible.

383Though the references in the following passage are, in some cases, at least, to recognized rhetorical figures, their precise meaning is less important than the impression of erudite obfuscation that they convey.

384“the method of the sage” (uslūb al-ḥakīm): taking advantage of an inappropriate or unanswerable question to open a more important discussion.

385“person-switching” (iltifāt): a rhetorical figure consisting of an “abrupt change of grammatical person from second to third and from third to second,” as in the words of the poet Jarīr “When were the tents at Dhū Ṭulūḥ? O tents, may you be watered by ample rain!” (Meisami and Starkey, Encyclopedia, 2:657).

386“tight weaving” (iḥtibāk): a rhetorical figure defined, in a widely taught formulation (http://www.alfaseeh.com/vb/showthread.php?t=9355), as “the omission from the earlier part of the utterance of something whose equal or equivalent comes in the later, and the omission from the later of something whose equal or equivalent comes in the earlier”; an example is the Qurʿānic verse “a company that fights for God and a disbelieving company” (Q Āl ʿImrān 3:13), meaning “a [believing] company that fights for God and a disbelieving company [that fights for the Devil].”

387“an Arabized word”: via Latin, from Greek manganon.

388“like common caltrops” (ʿalā mithāl al-ḥasak al-maʿrūf): i.e., like star-weed (Centaurea calcitrapa), whose spiked seed-cases pierce sandals and feet when stepped on.

389“a padded outer garment… a weapon… thick shields”: the confusion as to the word’s meaning seems to stem from its foreign, probably Persian, origin.

390“a device for war worn by horse and man alike”: cataphract armor.

391al-ʿadhrāʾ: literally, “the virgin”—“a kind of collar by means of which the hands, or arms, are confined together with the neck” (Lane, Lexicon).

392Jadīs and Ṭasm: related tribes of ʿĀd, a pre-Islamic people destroyed, according to the Qurʾan, for their ungodliness.

393al-ʿAbbās ibn Mirdās: an early Meccan convert to Islam who burned al-Dimār, the idol of his clan.

394ʿAmr ibn Luḥayy: a leader of Mecca in the Days of Barbarism, and supposedly the first to introduce the worship of idols into the Arabian Peninsula.

395“Ilyās, peace be upon him”: Ilyās (Elias) is regarded in Islam as a prophet.

396“ʿUrwah’s hadith ‘al-Rabbah’” (ḥadīth ʿUrwatin al-Rabbah): the tradition recounts that a recent convert to Islam, ʿUrwah ibn Masʿūd, was refused entry to his home unless he first visited “al-Rabbah” (literally, “the Mistress”), “meaning al-Lāt, which is the rock that [the tribe of] Thaqīf used to worship at al-Ṭāʾif” (see Ibn al-Athīr, Al-Nihāyah, 1:56).

397Dhāt ʿIrq: a place, 92 kilometers north of Mecca.

398“Furdūd, Pherkad… Kuwayy”: names of stars in this list that have accepted English names (all but one of which in fact derive from Arabic) are printed in regular font, while those impossible to identify from the extensive list provided by the Wikipedia article “List of Arabic Star Names” are transcribed in italics.

399“instruments that…”: see the Translator’s Afterword (Volume Four) on the choice of synonyms in this passage; note that, while the Arabic list contains forty-eight items, only forty-five are represented in the translation, because three (daghz, zazz, and waqz) could not be found in the dictionaries.

400“headgear of a generic nature” (ʿimārāt): ʿimārah is defined in the Qāmūs as “anything worn on the head, be it a turban (ʿimāmah), a cap (qalansuwah), a crown (tāj), or anything else.”

401“watermelon-shaped… cantaloupe-shaped… caps” (bi-arāṣīṣ… bi-arāsīs): while the author, in this footnote, specifies the shape of the former, the dictionaries say of the latter merely that it is “a cap” (qalansuwah); however, it seems to be a variant of the first.

402“judges’ tun-caps” (danniyyāt): so called from their resemblance to a dann or large wine barrel.

403“antimacassars” (ṣawāqiʿ): cloths worn by a woman on her head to protect her veil from grease (Qāmūs).

404“pass their hands over what is in front of the latter” (yatamassaḥūna bi-mā amāmahu): the significance is unclear; the Qāmūs cites the usage yutamassaḥu bi-hi (“people pass their hands over him/it,”) and says that it means yutabarraku bi-hi li-faḍlihi (“blessing is derived from him because of his/its virtue”). This brings to mind the habit of visitors to certain mosques of passing their hands over the grills enclosing saints’ tombs in the belief that they will thus obtain barakah (“grace”).

405“underwear” (andarward): the English word is probably intended; andarward may be due to a mishearing by the author or possibly a joke (andar-ward “under-roses”).

406i.e., must never stop calling out pious phrases to warn those around him of his presence or that he is “coming through.”

407“As God wills!… O God!” (mā shāʿa llāh… Allāh): typical expressions of delight, pleasure, and appreciation, all of which invoke God’s name to protect the one praised from the possible effects of envy.

408“her peepings through her fingers against the sun to see…, her shading of her eyes against the sun to see and her peering through her fingers against the sun to see” (istikfāfihā… wa-stīḍāḥihā wa-stishfāfihā): all defined in the Qāmūs as synonyms.

409“a fourth way of walking, with further letters changed” (wa-qahbalatihā): again, defined in the Qamūs as “a way of walking.”

410“a fifth way of walking, with further letters changed” (hayqalatihā): again, defined in the Qamūs as “a way of walking.”

411“her walking with tiny steps” (khadhʿalatihā): the Qāmūs defines again as “a way of walking”; however, a second sense given is “cutting a watermelon etc. into small pieces.”

412“her marching proudly (spelled two ways)” (tabahrusihāwa-tahabrusihā): synonyms, meaning tabakhtur (“strutting”), according to the Lisān (s.v. tabahrasa).

413“the same said another way” (wa-unufihā): synonym of the preceding item, according to the Qāmūs.

414“two lines”: four hemistichs, each hemistich starting here on a new line.

415The word muʿqanafishan has not been found in any dictionary, but cf. ʿaqanfas, variant of ʿafanqas “ill-tempered, base” (ʿasir al-akhlāq laʾīm).

416“bardhaʿahs… ikāfs… qitbahs… bāṣars”: all types of saddle.

417“with a thread of paper” (bi-khayṭin min al-kāghid): perhaps referring to the domination of the bureaucracy by Turks.

418“leading… ‘leading’ him” (yaqūdu… yaqūdūna lahu): the author plays with two senses of the verb, qāda “to lead” and qāda li- “to pimp for.”

419“bakalım kapalım (‘let’s see-bee’)”: the phrase is constructed by adding a non-existent word kapalım to the genuine word bakalım (“let’s see”) thus mimicking such genuine Turkish rhyming couplets as the preceding.

420“Ghaṭāliq…”: most of the supposed Turkish of the following lines is in fact nonsense, though it does contain distinctive Turkish features, such as the ending — lik /lıq; the first hemistich of the last line does make sense in Turkish (“They’re like donkeys too, by God!”), and the second hemistich of the same line can be read as near-meaningless Arabic (“Their troubles are their confusions”).

421“head… tail”: by “head” the author may mean the promontory of Raʾs al-Tīn (“the Head(land) of the Figs”) and by “tail” the land end of that promontory, where the popular quarter of Anfūshī, home to the city’s fish market, is situated.

422Qayʿar Qayʿār: an invented name that may be translated as something like “Plummy Pompous,” from the literal senses of qayʿar and qayʿār, both of which mean one who “speaks affectedly and from the back of his mouth” (tashaddaqa wa-takallama bi-aqṣā famihi). If we follow the clues offered by the similarly coded name Baʿīr Bayʿar (= al-Amīr Ḥaydar (1.5.2)), we may suppose that the first name of this individual may have been Ḥaydar, while the second may have been Bayṭār or another name of the same pattern. However, it is also possible that a European was intended (see next endnote).

423“the Himyaritic lands” (al-bilād al-ḥimyariyyah): i.e., southern Arabia, though the orthography also allows the reading al-bilād al-ḥamīriyyah, meaning “the lands of the donkeys,” and it is unclear whether the Fāriyāq is referring to an Arab or a “Frank”; some phrases and topoi in the passage that follows are reminiscent of those used when Franks are lampooned for their bad Arabic, as in the following chapter.

424“the science of ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’” (ʿilm al-fāʿil wa-l-mafʿūl): i.e., Arabic grammar.

425“chronograms” (ʿilm al-jummal): each letter of the Arabic alphabet has a conventionally assigned numerical value under a system known as hisāb al-jummal. The construction of chronograms capable of being read both as words and as dates became a common feature of congratulatory poetry starting in the ninth/fifteenth century. For examples, see Volume Four, section 4.20.13.

426ʿĪsā: a proper name, cognate with “Jesus.”

427“within this p’tcher” (fī hādhā l-kuzz): kuzz appears to be a nonce-word derived from the common word kūz by shortening the vowel and doubling the second consonant, the charlatan teacher’s idea being that the word needs to contain a doubled consonant (shadda, a word conveying the idea of “tightening”) to fit with something that is “confined”; the same logic might apply to zanbīl / zabbīl below, though both forms in this case are genuine.

428“khams daqāʾiq… and not khamsah daqāʾiq”: the humor lies in the author’s attribution of an irrelevant cause to a grammatical rule, the rule in this case being that a feminine noun (here the implied daqīqah, singular of daqāʾiq) is preceded by the shorter, masculine, number form when counted.

429“because each is a ‘congregator of fineness’ (jāmiʿ al-nuʿūmah)”: the language is that of rhetorical theory, which would claim that the words for “flour” and “minutes” share the same consonantal root (d-q-q) because flour consists of finely ground grain while minutes are fine divisions of hours, and the phrase might more accurately be rendered “because they share the common factor of fineness”; however, the wording is primarily a set-up for the play on words that follows a little later.

430“The first six have ‘parts’ at either end” (al-sitt al-ʾūlā fī-hā farq): i.e., “have distinct beginnings and endings”; however, sitt (“six”) also means in the Egyptian dialect “lady, mistress” (from sayyidah), while farq (“dividing, partitioning”) also means a “parting” as a way of dressing the hair; thus, the words are a set-up to allow the joke that follows.

431“Nuʿūmah Mosque” (jāmiʿ al-nuʿūmah): while jāmiʿ is, as the shaykh will explain, an active participle, of the verb jamaʿa, yajmaʿu (“to gather together, collect, congregate”), it is also used in common parlance as a substantive meaning “mosque.”

432“ʿUdhrah… Virgin… must be stretched out” (ʿUdhrah… ʿadhrāʾ… yajibu madduhā): the learned monk wrote of a tribe famous for the celebration by its poets of passionate but unconsummated love; however, the ignorant Qayʿar Qayʿār, seeing ʿUdhrah, thinks that the monk intended ʿadhrāʾ (“virgin”), which should be pronounced with a long vowel at the end (madd), though in the colloquial it is pronounced with a short vowel. Thus, while stating a correct grammatical rule (the word for “virgin” should be written with —āʾ at the end), he demonstrates that “a little learning is a dangerous thing.”

433“daʿawtu ʿalayh… ṣallaytu ʿalayh”: the use of a preposition after a verb in Arabic, as in other languages, may modify the sense of the verb. Thus plain daʿawtu and ṣallaytu both mean “I prayed,” but daʿawtu ʿalayh means “I cursed him” whereas ṣallaytu ʿalayh means “I prayed for him.”

434“tashīl… ishāl”: verbs with the consonant-vowel patterns CVCCVCV (verbal noun form taC1C2īC3) and VCCVCV (verbal noun form iC1C2āC3) may have causative or declarative sense relative to the semantic area of the three-consonant root. Thus, from the root s-h-l, associated with “ease,” are created the verbs sahhala (tashīl) and ashala (ishāl). Each, however, has a different denotation. Thus, sahhala means “to make easy, facilitate,” while ashala means “to be struck with diarrhea.”

435Many of the words used in the letter are double entendres or malapropisms, as follows: “sodomitical”—ibnī “filial” may be read as ubnī (from ubnah (“passive sodomy”)); “penetrated it”—awlajtu should mean “I caused to enter” and is often used in connection with sexual intercourse, but here is used intransitively; “the shittiest part”—ukhrāh “its end” is both a deformation of ākhiratihi and also may be read akhraʾihi (from kharāʾ (“excrement”)); “excrements”—al-fuḍūl may mean either “(bodily) wastes” or “merits, favors”; “creator of pestilence”—al-fuṣūl may mean either “chapters” or “plagues”; “a ‘congregator’ of both the branches of knowledge and its roots”—the word jāmiʿ appears to be used here simply to maintain the running joke relating to “congregator/mosque,” which is resumed in the immediately following passage; “long of tongue”—ṭawīl al-lisān may intend “eloquent” but idiomatically means “impertinent”; “with ’ands too short to”—qaṣīr al-yadāni ʿan commits, for the sake of the rhyme, the gross grammatical error of al-yadāni for al-yadayni; “of broad little brow”—reading wāsiʿ al-jubayn (counterintuitively in the diminutive) for the expected wāsiʿ al-jabīn (“broad of brow”); “wide waistcoated”—reading ʿarīḍ al-ṣudar (from ṣudrah “waistcoat”) for the expected ʿarīḍ al-ṣadr (“wide of breast, magnanimous”); “deeply in debt”—reading ʿamīq aldayn for the expected ʿamīq al-dīn (“deeply religious”); and “of ideas bereft”—reading mujawwaf al-fikar for mujawwif al-fikr (“pentrating of thought”), itself probably a spurious locution.

436“The Extraction of the Fāriyāq from Alexandria, by Sail” (Fī-nqīlāʿ al-Fāriyāq min al-Iskandariyyah): the base sense of inqilāʿ is “to pull up by the roots,” but the references to sailing in the first paragraph indicate that the author is simultaneously implying the concoction of a humorous new sense derived from qilʿ “sail,” which has the same root as inqilāʿ.

437al-Ṣāḥib ibn ʿAbbād: 326–85/938–95, vizier to the Būyid rulers of Iran; the verses evoke such Qurʾanic passages as “And unto Solomon (We subdued) the wind and its raging” (Q Anbiyāʾ 21:81).

438The priest substitutes letters he can pronounce for those he cannot. Thus he says hāʾ (h) for ḥ (ḥāʾ) as in al-rahmān for al-raḥmān (“the merciful”), for ʿayn (ʿ) as in hitābukum for ʿitābukum (“censuring you”), for khāʾ (kh) as in al-mihaddah for al-mikhaddah (“the bolster”), and for the glottal stop (ʾ) as in rahzan for raʾsan (“resolutely”); hamzah (ʾ) for ʿayn (ʿ) as in al-ʾālam for al-ʿālam (“the world”); kāf (k) for qāf (q) as in akūl for aqūl (“I say”), for khāʾ (kh) as in akshā for akhshā (“I fear”), and for ghayn (gh) as in mashkūl for mashghūl (“busy”); sīn (s) for ṣād (ṣ) as in nasārā for naṣārā (“Christians”) and for thāʾ (th) as in akassir for akaththir (“I repeat often”); dāl (d) for ḍād (ḍ) as in al-hādirīn for al-ḥāḍirīn (“those present”); tāʾ (t) for ṭāʾ (ṭ) as in tūlihi for ṭūlihi (“its length”); and zayn (z) for dhāl (dh) as in lazzāt for ladhdhāt (“pleasures”) and for ẓāʾ (ẓ) as in mawhizatī for mawʿiẓatī (“my counsel”); s for th and z for dhāl are also common “errors” of native speakers. Sometimes the same letter is used with different values in the same word as in al-akdak for al-aghdaq (“the most bountiful”), or all the letters in a words are changed, as in al-sukh for al-ṣuqʿ (“the region”). These changes sometimes result in the production of meaningful words (e.g., kalbukum (“your dog”) for qalbukum (“your heart”)) but more often in nonsense, e.g., rahmān and rahīm.

439“the Arabic-language-challenged… Sponging… Aleppine” (al-Ḥalabī al-Bushkānī… al-Immaʿī… ): names of prominent persons are often followed by a series of attributive adjectives ending in — ī (nisbahs) indicating pedigree, place of origin, place of residence, legal school, etc.; here only al-Ḥalabī (“of Aleppo”) is a real nisbah; the rest are made by adding — ī to words associated with gluttony, parasitism, and ignorance of Arabic.

440Metropolitan Atanāsiyūs al-Tutūnjī (or Athanāsiyūs al-Tūtunjī) (d. 1874), Melkite bishop of Tripoli from 1836, was dismissed for scandalous behavior and spent some time in England in the early 1840s seeking to promote union between the Anglican and Eastern churches. The author hated him because he denigrated the translation of the Book of Common Prayer on which the author was then engaged for the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) and suggested that he could do better. He did in fact produce a specimen, which al-Shidyāq saw, whereupon he sent the SPCK (in March 1844) “an Arabic Poem expressing the ungenerous behaviours of the Society for Promotion of Christian Knowledge… in having employed in my stead an ignorant person [i.e., al-Tutūnjī] — not withstanding I have addressed them in two letters respecting the numerous grammatical mistakes he has committed” (letter in English in the Church Missionary Society; I am indebted to Geoffrey Roper for this information); subsequently, the SPCK changed its view and reinstated al-Shidyāq as their translator. The author alludes to this imbroglio and a further spat between him and al-Tutūnjī in Book Three (3.18.1).

441Al-Ḥakākah fī l-rakākah (The Leavings Pile Concerning Lame Style): we have failed to identify the original of the work whose title is parodied here; according to Georg Graf, al-Tutūnjī wrote only on theological and ecclesiastical matters (see Graf, Geschichte, 3:278), but this and further references here (3.5.14, 3.18.1) imply that he was active in the teaching of language and translation.

442“or…”: the Qāmūs continues “to ʿAdawl, a man who used to make the ships, or to a people who used to camp in Hajar.”

443The verse is attributed to ʿAlī ibn al-Jahm (ca. 188–249/804–63).

444“their cousins”: i.e., the Roman Catholic Maltese.

445Khalīl ibn Aybak al-Ṣafadī (d. 764/1363): a litterateur whose works include Lawʿat al-shākī wa-damʿat al-bākī (The Plaint of the Lovelorn and Tears of the Disconsolate), which describes the agonies of love.

446“his ‘stable management (of affairs),’ his ‘leadership qualities,’ and his ‘horse sense’” (al-siyāsah wa-l-qiyādah wa-l-firāsah/farāsah): the humor lies in the fact that each word has one meaning appropriate to the donkey-boy’s supposed elevated state and another appropriate to his actual occupation; thus siyāsah, whose original sense is “the management of animals” also means “the management of men,” and thence “rule,” while qiyādah originally meant “the leading of horses, or caravans” and thence “command (e.g., of an army)”; firāsah means “horsemanship,” while farāsah (the two forms being indistinguishable in unvowelled writing) means “intuitive perception.”

447ʿanmī: after the red fruit of the ʿanam (pomegranate) tree.

448[?]: ghurmah, a word not found in the dictionaries.

449Sūrat Nūn: i.e., Sūrat al-Qalam (sura 68), which begins with the initial nūn and is thus appropriate for a nūnah (“cleft in the chin”).

450“I am copying them from one who looked deeply into every veiled face(t)” (nāqilan lahu ʿamman tabaṣṣara l-wajha l-maḥjūb): meaning that definitions that the author provides above are those of the author the Qāmūs, who, as a lexicographer, has looked deeply into every facet of the meaning of each word just as, as a man, he has looked deeply into the veiled faces of women (wajh means both “face” and “facet”).

451“hasn’t seen her as did Our Master Yaʿqūb”: cf. Gen. 29:10–11 “Jacob saw Rachel… and Jacob kissed Rachel.”

452“Professors Amorato…” (al-Ṣabābātī…): given their form, it is clear that these fictitious but contextually appropriate names are intended to represent scholars, as are those a few lines below.

453“the letter ṣād… the letter mīm” (al-ṣādī wa-l-mīmī): ṣād was used conventionally, because of its shape, as a coded reference to the vagina and mīm to the anus.

454Cairo (Miṣr): the author uses the word, as Egyptians often do, to refer to the capital city rather than the country as a whole.

455“answering to the needs of hot-humored men (contrary to what ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī has said)”: in his brief description of Cairo, al-Baghdādī (557–629/1162–1231), a scholar from Baghdad, writes that “you rarely find among them diseases exclusively of the bile; indeed, the most prevalent types are those of the sputum, even among the youth and the hot-humored (al-shabāb wa-l-maḥrūrīn)” (al-Baghdādī, Ifādah, 18), a comment to which the author gives an insinuating twist not intended by the original.

456The precise meaning or historical referent of a number of these teasingly described “curiosities” is unclear, and most of interpretations offered in the following notes are tentative.

457“on the ceiling or the walls”: perhaps a reference to depictions of women (or goddesses or nymphs) on the walls and ceilings of buildings done in the European style.

458“the treatment of the feminine as masculine and of the masculine as feminine” (tadhakkur al-muʾannath wa-taʾannuth al-mudhakkar): while the comment appears to refer to a linguistic practice, it is hard to know exactly which, as there is no whole-scale reversal of, for instance, noun gender in Egyptian Arabic vis-à-vis literary Arabic; perhaps the author has in mind the word raʾs (“head”), which is most often masculine in literary (and Levantine) Arabic but is feminine in its Egyptian form (rās), or the use of ḥabībī (“my dear,” masculine) as a term of endearment among women or bāsha (“pasha”) by men as a flirtatious term of address to a woman.

459“in their bathhouses they constantly recite a sura or two of the Qurʾan that mention ‘cups’ and ‘those who pass around with them,’” a reference to either Sūrat al-Zukhruf (Q Zukhruf 43:71 “yuṭāfu ʿalayhim bi-ṣiḥāfin min dhahabin wa-akwāb”—“There shall be passed among them platters of gold and cups”) or similarly Sūrat al-Insān (Insān 76:15); the author may be implying that the presence in the bathhouses of young boys offering refreshment stimulates the patrons into uttering these verses. Lane, in fact, states that it is considered improper to recite the Qurʾan in a bathhouse, as such places are inhabited by jinn (Lane, Manners, 337).

460“many of the city’s men have no hearts” etc.: perhaps meaning that they prefer sex to love.

461“they took to lopping off their fingers” (fa-jaʿalū yashdhibūna aṣābiʿahum): perhaps a reference to the chopping off of the index finger of the right hand by young men so as to render themselves incapable of pulling a trigger and hence unfit for military service, which was introduced by Egypt’s ruler, Muḥammad ʿAlī, in the 1820s.

462“veil their beards” (yubarqiʿuna liḥāhum): according to the Qāmūs, the expression means “to become a passive sodomite” (ṣāra maʾbūnan).

463“Sons of Ḥannā”: if the correction of the original from Ḥinnā is correct, this probably is a reference to Copts (Ḥannā is a common name among Christians).

464“a way of writing that is known to none but themselves”: Ottoman financial documents were written in a script known as qirmah (perhaps from Turkish kırmak “to break”), developed from the ruqʿah script, that was indecipherable to the uninitiated and so small that upward of thirty words and figures might be inscribed within an area of 1.5 square centimetres; it was not, in fact, peculiar to Egypt, but was introduced there by the Ottoman authorities (see El Mouelhy, “Le Qirmeh,”).

465“his family wail and keen over him in the hope that he will return to them”: perhaps the author is implying jokingly that such excessive (as he sees it) mourning must be intended to ensure the return of the deceased with gifts from the next world.

466“ignoble birds… may pretend to be mighty eagles” (al-bughāth… yastansir): a well-known idiom describing presumptuous behavior by the lowly.

467“the exiguously monied one (meaning the owner of the money)” (al-muflis ay ṣāḥib al-fulūs): the author knows that the reader is likely to understand muflis in its common sense of “bankrupt,” whereas he is using it in its original dictionary definition of “endowed with copper coins (after having owned silver coins)” (Qāmūs).

468“the rise in her fortunes came from her setting herself down” (ṭāliʿuhā min maḥallihā): it is supposed that unmarried guests at weddings often to meet their own future spouses there.

469“‘a kind of joking back and forth that resembles mutual insult’” (mufākahah tushbihu l-sibāb): this definition of mujārazah is from the Qāmūs; from the description, anqāṭ resemble the twentieth-century pun-based qāfiyah, on which see Amīn, Qāmūs, 317–18.

470“Its viceroy” (wālīhā): Muḥammad ʿAlī Pasha, who ruled as an autonomous viceroy on behalf of the Ottoman sultan from 1805 to 1848 and laid the foundations of the modern Egyptian state.

471By the time of the publication of Al-Sāq, the author had attracted the favorable notice of the ruler of Tunis by writing odes in his praise and had twice visited the city, in 1841 and 1847 (see 3.18.3, 4.8.2). Later (1857–59), he would take up residence in Tunis and work for its government.

472“a poet of great skill”: identified by one scholar as Naṣr al-Dīn al-Ṭarābulsī (1770–1840), a Catholic from Aleppo who immigrated to Egypt in 1828 and came to direct the Arabic-language section of Al-Waqāʾiʿ al-Miṣriyyah, where the author was later employed (al-Maṭwī, Aḥmad, 1:76); elsewhere (2.10.1), the author refers to him as “Khawājā Yanṣur.”

473al-Āmidī: see 1.11.1. Al-āmidī’s detailed comparison of the poets al-Buḥturī and Abū l-Tammām distinguishes between the maṣnūʿ (“artificial”) and maṭbūʿ (“natural”) in poetry, but al-Āmidī’s concern is style rather than, as here, the motivation of the poet.

474Āmid: a city in southeastern Turkey, now called Diyarbakır.

475al-Bustī: Abū l-Fatḥ al-Bustī (335–400/946–1009), poet and prose stylist.

476Abū l-ʿAtāhiyah: a poet of Baghdad mainly known for his pious and censorious verse (131–211/748–826).

477Abū Nuwās: one of the most famous poets of the Abbasid “Golden Age,” especially in the fields of wine poetry and the love lyric (ca. 130–98/747–813).

478al-Farazdaq: Tammām ibn Ghālib, known as al-Farazdaq (“the Lump of Dough”), a satirist and panegyrist (d. 110/728 or 112/730).

479Jarīr: one of the greatest poets of the Umayyad period (ca. 33–111/653–729).

480Abū Tammām: Abbasid poet and anthologist (ca. 189–232/805–45).

481al-Mutanabbī: celebrated panegyrist and lampoonist (ca. 303–54/915–65).

482“Our Master Sulaymān’s ring”: this magic signet ring, sometimes referred to as a seal, allowed Sulaymān to command demons and talk to animals.

483“Zayd… ʿAmr”: Zayd and ʿAmr are names used to demonstrate grammatical points in examples memorized by school children.

484“a grave offense against him” (mina l-mūbiqāti lahu): perhaps because to do so might imply jealousy, or because both beauty and riches are regarded as gifts of God rather than qualities implying merit.

485“flap of skin” (zanamah): the author appears to have in mind the following among a number of definitions of this word given in the Qāmūs: “something cut off the ear of a camel and left hanging, done to the best bred.”

486“it is incorrect to refer to the son of a marquis as a ‘marquisito’ or as being ‘marquisate’” (lā yaṣiḥḥu an yuqāla li-bni l-markīzi muraykīzun aw markīzī): i.e., it is incorrect to refer to the son of a marquis with a diminutive noun or a relative adjective derived from “marquis,” meaning, perhaps, that European titles — which are, unlike oriental titles, hereditary — can be applied to only one holder at a time.

487On whom see 2.3.5: the Melkites of Tripoli numbered “barely ten” (Graf, Geschichte, 3:277).

488The author’s distinction recognizes the fact that such titles are informal terms of respect rather than titles awarded by an authority.

489“Muʿallim… muʿallim or muʿallam”: muʿallim means literally “teacher” and is used as a term of polite address to Christians and others; read as muʿallam, the same word means “taught.”

490“they apply the term Khawājā to others”: i.e., to other Christians (from Persian khōjā (“teacher”)).

491“God relieve you (or shrive you or deceive you),” etc. (maṣaḥa llāhu mā bi-ka… aw masaḥa aw mazaḥa…): sirāṭ and zirāṭ are recognized variants of ṣirāṭ (“path”), as busāq and buzāq are of buṣāq (“the best camels”); but masaḥa (“to wipe”) and mazaḥa (“to joke”) are not variants of maṣaḥa and have unrelated, comically inappropriate, meanings.

492ʿAzrāʾīl: the angel of death.

493“kubaybah… kubbah”: both are dishes made of cracked-wheat kernels, with meat, onions, etc., but the first form is Egyptian, the second Levantine (“kibbeh”).

494“kubbah… patootie… kubbah… pastries!” (fī ʿijānak… kubbah… ʿajīnī): a pair of puns as (1) kubbah means, as well as a certain dish, a “boil” or “bubo” and is used in curses, and (2) ʿijān (“anus”) is from the same root as ʿajīn (“pastry”); the foreign doctor confuses the two meanings in the first case and mishears in the second.

495“like a rugged boulder hurled from on high by the torrent” (ka-julmūdi ṣakhrin ḥaṭṭahu l-saylu min ʿali): a hemistich from the muʿallaqah of the pre-Islamic poet Imruʾ al-Qays (translation Arberry, Seven Odes, 64).

496“One of these giaours (plural of cure)” (aḥada hādhihi l-ʿulūj (jamiʿi ʿilāj)): the plural of ʿilāj (“cure, treatment”) is in fact ʿilājāt, whereas ʿulūj, though from the same root, is the plural of ʿilj (“infidel”); again the doctor confuses the words.

497“Tell the emir that I am, thank God, a bachelor” etc.: a reference to the exchange at the end of 2.10.3.

498“his consul’s office”: in Egypt, legal cases involving a foreigner and an Egyptian could be tried in the foreign plaintiff’s consular court.

499“his turban in Lebanon and its ill-fated fall”: see Volume One (1.2).

500Baḥth al-maṭālib: in full Kitāb Baḥth al-maṭālib fī ʿilm al-ʿArabiyyah (The Book of the Discussion of Issues in the Science of Arabic), by Jirmānūs Farḥāt, a grammar published for the first time under al-Shidyāq’s supervision in Malta in 1836; on Farḥāt, see Volume One (n. 130 to 1.3.2).

501“with no vowel on the rhyme consonant” (sākinat al-rawī): see Volume One (n. 24 to 1.11.8).

502“wa-ʿawlajtu fī-hā”: the metropolitan’s solecism lies in his use of awlajtu, a Form IV, or rubāʿī (mazīd), verb, intransitively, i.e., to mean “I entered,” when it should only be used to mean “I caused (something) to enter, I inserted (something).” For the original letter, see 2.2.15.

503“from habba meaning ‘to rise’” (min habba idhā qāma): the root h-b-b is used in two distinct semantic areas: “to rise,” as in habbat al-rīḥ “the wind rose,” and hibāb, “soot”.

504“Take heed” etc.: Matthew 24:4–5 in the King James Version, with a difference in the translation of the last clause between the Arabic, reflected above, and the English, though it would seem that the translators of the English were as much in error, from the author’s perspective, as those of the Arabic.

505“Let the deacons be the husbands of one wife”: 1 Timothy 3:12: again, the English translators are as guilty as the Arab.

506“Panegyricon” (mamdaḥ): an invented word, literally “a place for eulogizing,” by which the author means the offices of the Egyptian government’s official gazette and the first daily newspaper to be printed in Arabic, namely Al-Waqāʾiʿ al-Miṣriyyah, which was issued for the first time in December 1828 and on which al-Shidyāq worked from January 1829; in its early years, the gazette contained material in both Turkish and Arabic.

507“neglected” (uhmilat): a play on words, as undotted letters are known technically as muhmalah.

508“how can the witness of the instrument itself — the reason for the discounting of its owner’s witness — be valid”: the speaker implies that musicians are not considered ʿudūl (men of probity) and that their testimony cannot be accepted in a court law.

509“demolish the castles where you store your peddlers’ goods, as well as any king’s trumpet!”: perhaps a reference to the destruction of the walls of Jericho by the trumpets blown at Joshua’s command (Joshua 6:20).

510Allāh!: see Volume One (n. 151 to 1.5.3).

511“his ode known as Al-Ghabab”: the reference is to a line in an ode in which al-Mutanabbī mocks his former patron, Sayf al-Dawlah, saying, “He who rides the bull after riding fine horses * Ignores its cloven hoofs and its wattle (aẓlāfahu wa-l-ghabab)” (Mutanabbī, Dīwān, 432).

512“‘nation’ ought to have been put in the dual” (ummatu ḥaqquhā an takūna ummatā): because the “nation of men-and-jinn” could logically be considered two nations.

513al-thaqalayn… thaqīlah… thiqal: the author plays with the root th-q-l, whose basic sense is of heaviness; al-thaqalayn is an idiom meaning “mankind and the jinn,” an appellation explained as being “because, by the discrimination they possess, they excel other animate beings” (Lane, Lexicon).

514“the rule of taghlīb”: taghlīb (“awarding of precedence”) is a stylistically elegant usage according to which the dual form of one noun is used to indicate both that noun and another with which it is closely associated, e.g., al-qamarān (literally, “the two moons”), meaning “the moon and the sun” and al-aṣfarān (literally, “the two yellow things”), meaning “gold and silver”; the argument here, therefore, turns the convention upside down and claims that, since māshiyayn (“two persons walking on foot”), were it an example of taghlīb, would give precedence to the prince, the singular (māshiyan) may be assumed to mean “the prince and others.”

515“the body (singular) of each of the two” or “the bodies (plural) of each of the two,” (jismuhumā aw ajsāmuhumā): i.e., the prince and the squadron should be regarded as consisting of either two entities with one body each or of two entities with a plurality of bodies. Objection may be made that it would be simpler and more natural to take sariyyah as the feminine singular equivalent of sarī, in which case the translation would run, “The prince repaired with the princess” etc. To this the riposte would be that, had the critics entertained this possibility, they would have proposed the dual form of the noun (jismāhumā) as being (along with the singular) the “more chaste” option, rather than the plural (ajsāmuhumā).

516“the poet”: ʿAdī ibn Zayd al-ʿIbādī (d. ca. AD 600).

517“Objection was made that aẓāfir should not be inflected” (fa-ʿturiḍa ʿalay-hi ṣarfu aẓāfir): i.e., aẓāfir is normally diptote (i.e., should be read here as aẓāfira) but in these verses has to be read as triptote (aẓāfirin), a bending of the rules that is permitted, as the author says, for the sake of the meter (Wright, Grammar, 2:387) and which is determined by the form of the following word, (ẓafirat).

518“for the sake of the paronomasia”: i.e., because aḥlas and malḥūs, while having different meanings, share the same triliteral root (ḥ-l-s).

519“Except for the words ‘in glory’”: tanawwarā, repeated at the end of each hemistich of the first line (“to reveal a brighter fate” and “was made depilate”), is an example of both “perfect paronomasia” (identicality of form with difference of meaning) and “antithesis” (the use of two contrasting ideas in one line); al-shiʿr (“poetry”) and al-shiʿrāʾ (“pubic hair”) are examples of near-perfect paronomasia and antithesis; mafkharā (“in glory”) stands out as neither paronomasia nor antithesis.

520“the word qaḥaba”: this, in the unchaste or vernacular language, means “to whore.”

521“the repetitive form” (al-takthīr): i.e., fassā versus fasā, the former indicating repeated performance of the action indicated by the latter.

522“ẓallām li-l-ʿabīd”: the phrase occurs several times in the Qurʾan (e.g., Q Āl ʿImrān 3:182); ẓallām, from ẓālim, is the nominal equivalent of the verbal intensive.

523This apparently irrelevant aside may perhaps be explained by the fact that the author contracted a venereal disease while in Malta.

524“at this point”: i.e., at the thirteenth chapter of each book.

525“Hie ye to security!” (ḥayya ilā l-falāḥ): a phrase in the call to prayer.

526“a turban of different fashion”: in Egypt, men of different religious communities wore turbans of different colors and, sometimes, shapes (see Lane, Manners, 31).

527“pilgrims from ʿArafāt”: the gathering on Mount ʿArafāt outside of Mecca is the final rite of pilgrimage, after which the pilgrims disperse to their separate countries.

528“You are to me as my mother’s back!” (anti ʿalayya ka-ẓahri ummī): i.e., “intercourse with you is as forbidden to me as it is with my mother,” a pre-Islamic divorce formula; the “back” is specified rather than the belly because intercourse with a woman is likened to riding an animal (see Lane, Lexicon, s.v. ẓāhara).

529“Your nose-rope is on the top of your hump!” (ḥabluki ʿalā ghāribiki): meaning “Go wherever you want” because when a she-camel that is wearing a nose-rope is sent out to graze, the rope is thrown on top of her hump, for if she can see the rope, she will not want to eat anything (al-Maydānī, Majmaʿ, 1:132); the expression is associated with divorce.

530“Return to your covert!” (ʿūdī ilā kināsiki): as though she were a gazelle or an oryx that had made itself a shelter against the heat.

531“(un)buckle to her will and her every demand fulfil” (yuwāṭiʾahā ʿalay-hi wa-yujāmiʿahā): the verbs wāṭaʾa and jāmaʿa both mean both “to agree with” and “to copulate with.”

532“legal dalliance” (al-mutʿah): a marriage legally contracted for a set period, usually short.

533“How many a heart has been tied to the rack… or gold coins expended” (wa-la-kam taṣaddaʿat qulūb… wa-danānīra nuqidat): evocative of Q Takwīr 81:1–14.

534“Verily… it is a great woe” (innahā la-iḥdā l-kubar): Q Muddaththir 74:35.

535“ill you answered though well you heard!” (asaʾta jābatan baʿda an aṣabta samʿan): a distortion of the proverb asā’a samʿan fa-asāʾa jābatan, “he answered ill because he heard ill.”

536In fact, none of the obscure words explained in this chapter occur in the preceding.

537The author uses the double entendres implicit in the terminology of grammar (fāʿil “actor/subject of a verb”; mafʿūl “acted upon/object of a verb”; fiʿl “act/verb”; rafʿ, literally “raising,” i.e., the vowel ending — u when used to mark the nominative case; naṣb, literally “erecting,”) i.e., the vowel ending — a when used to mark the accusative case to describe sexual acts (a common conceit). The thrust of the argument laid out below is that there is no word for marriage that does not derive from other words that originally refer to something else; thus, the rites and institutions that have developed around it are historically contingent and further (2.14.5), religion’s, or the state’s, interference in what is a private contract is without justification.

538Abū l-Baqāʾ: Ayyūb ibn Mūsā Abū l-Baqāʾ al-Kaffawī (ca. 1027/1618 to ca. 1093/1682); his Kitāb al-Kulliyyāt is a dictionary.

539“noun nikāḥ” etc.: the issue here is that this word, which is the preferred legal term for sexual congress, is regarded by some as embarrassingly direct.

540“mysterious letters” (asrār): letters of unknown signification that occur at the beginning of certain suras of the Qurʾan (see Watt, Bell’s Introduction, 61–65).

541“Nūn. By the Pen and all that they write!” (nūn wa-l-qalami wa-mā yasṭurūn): Q Anfāl 8:1.

542kāf-hāʾ-yāʾ-ṣād: letters occurring at the beginning of Sūrat Maryam (Q Maryam 19:1).

543alif-lām-fāʾ: letters occurring at the beginning of Sūrat al-Baqarah (Q Baqarah 2:1).

544ḥāʾ-mīm: letters occurring at the beginning of suras 40–46.

545“an active participle of the verb ḥ-y-y… an imperative verb formed from kāna”: i.e., if is written backwards the result, , may be broken down (ignoring short vowels) into , to be understood according to the orthography used here as (“alive, quick,” an epithet of God) from (or ) and (“Be!”) from .

546“the letter nūn followed by the letter kāf”: i.e., nik, meaning “fuck!”

547“the alif and the ḥāʾ”: i.e., āḥ, which could also be understood as the exclamation “Ah!”

548“by keeping only the end”(bi-ḥaythu yaslamu l-ṭaraf): i.e., by removing the initial syllable nik- from nikāḥ, leaving (by re-interpretation of the remaining ductus) aḥḥ, which is an “exclamation expressing… pleasure during sexual intercourse” peculiar to women (Hinds and Badawi, Dictionary).

549“mustaqbiḥah and mustafẓiʿah”: see 2.5.5 above; in fact, it is heads rather than bonnets that are so described.

550On ʿUlayyān, see Volume One (n. 138 to 1.3.13); however, no anecdote involving a chicken occurs in al-Nīsābūrī.

551“bag” (haqībah): literally, “a bag carried behind the saddle” and also, punningly, “posterior.”

552“well-known”: the Qāmūs defines a girl who is raṭbah as being rakhṣah and defines rakhṣ as “smooth.”

553“mentioned under burquʿ”: there is no entry for burquʿ; however, shanab (“lustrousness of the teeth”) is referred to in the earlier passage describing the charms of al-mutabarqiʿāt (“women who wear the burquʿ”) (2.4.5), as are khanas and dhalaf, which are likewise linked below to burquʿ.

554ʿanaṭ and ʿayaṭ are synonyms.

555“synonym abārīq”: thus in the text, but, as the Qāmūs makes clear, abārīq is in fact the plural of ibrīq, which is synonymous with barrāqah.

556“having a certain quality welcomed in a woman during copulation”: this definition of ḥārūq is explained in the definition of al-ḥāriqah that precedes it in the Qāmūs and to which the author has referred earlier; see Volume 1 (n. 47 to 1.1.6).

557Ṣāliḥ is a prophet referred to in the Qurʾan (e.g., Q Aʿrāf 7:77); the People of the Cave (ahl al-kahf) are mentioned in the eponymous eighteenth sura of the Qurʾan.

558“or…”: the entry in the Qāmūs continues “a house roofed with a single piece of wood, synonym azaj.”

559“or…”: the entry in the Qāmūs continues “a place where people gather and sit for so long as they are gathered there.”

560“they”: i.e., pastoralists of the Arabian peninsula.

561“or…”: other definitions given in the Qāmūs are “a village, or a granary, or flat land, or houses of the Persians in which are drink and entertainment.”

562“or…”: the entry in the Qāmūs continues “for the harvester of truffles.”

563“a kind of building”: according to the Lisān, “a house built in elongated form, called in Persian ūsitān.”

564“or…”: the Qāmūs continues “a day on which they eat and drink.”

565al-Muqtadir: i.e., the Abbasid caliph Jaʿfar al-Muqtadir (ruled three times between 295/908 and 317/929).

566“a pool of lead” (birkatun mina l-raṣāṣ): more often described as having been of mercury.

567Al-Nuʿmān: i.e., al-Nuʿmān ibn Imruʾ al-Qays (r. AD 390–418), king of al-Ḥīrah, in the area of ancient Babylon in Iraq; the palace in question was named al-Khawarnaq.

568Uḥayḥah: Uḥayḥah ibn al-Julāḥ was a pre-Islamic leader of the Aws tribe of Yathrib (now Medina).

569al-Mutawakkil: an Abbasid caliph, r. 232–47/847–61.

570Dawmat al-Jandal: a town in northwestern Arabia.

571Khayzurān: mother of the caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd.

572ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ: a leading general of the Muslim conquests in the time of the Prophet Muḥammad and after (b. before AD 573).

573Wajj: a wadi east of Mecca and northeast of al-Ṭāʾif.

574“on which Adam… fell”: i.e., after being cast out of heaven, the mountain being situated in modern Sri Lanka.

575al-Jazīrah: the plain lying between the Tigris and the Euphrates, in Upper Mesopotamia.

576“the lote-tree beyond which none may pass” (sidrat al-muntahā): see Q Najm 53:14; this tree “stands in the Seventh Heaven on the right hand of the throne of God; and is the utmost bounds beyond which the angels themselves must not pass; or… beyond which no creature’s knowledge can extend” (Sale, Koran, 427 n. 1).

577Ibn Hishām: ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Hishām (d. 218/833), an Egyptian scholar of South Arabian origin, who wrote, in addition to the authoritative sīrah, or biography, of the Prophet Muḥammad, for which he is best known, a collection of biblical and ancient Arabian lore entitled Kitāb al-Tījān fī mulūk Ḥimyar (The Book of Crowns concerning the Kings of Ḥimyar); in the Qāmūs the name of the dead queen is given as Tājah, in the Tāj as here

578Ḥimyar: a kingdom of ancient Yemen that flourished between the first and fourth centuries AD.

579“the battle of Badr”: Ramaḍān 17, 2/March 13, 624, a victory for the Muslim forces of Medina over the pagans of Mecca.

580ʿAlī: ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib (d. 40/660), the Prophet Muḥammad’s cousin, foster-brother, and son-in-law.

581ʿĀd: an ancient people of Arabia, mentioned in the Qurʾan (Q Aʿrāf 7:65, Hūd 11:59, etc.).

582“nās, nasnās, and nasānis”: since nās ordinarily means “people” the implication is that there are three kinds of humanoid — (ordinary) people, nasnās, and nasānis.

583Yājūj and Mājūj: Gog and Magog.

584“or the remainder of the bearers of the Proof, which no part of the earth is without” (wa-baqiyyatu ḥamalati l-ḥujjati lā takhlū l-arḍu minhum): a Tradition mentioned by al-Jawharī (see Lisān, s.v. r-b-ḍ).

585“an ant who spoke to Sulaymān” (namlatun kallamat Sulaymān): a reference to Q Naml 27:18 “when they came on the valley of the ants, an ant said….”; since the ant did not in fact address Sulaymān directly, the verb has to be taken as meaning “spoke in the presence of.”

586“the ant mentioned in the Qurʾan”: see Q Naml 27:18.

587“Ibn Sīnā… the Shifāʾ”: ʿAbdallāh ibn Sīnā (d. 428/1037), a philosopher of medieval Islam, known in the west as Avicenna.

588“cup his ears with his hands”: in the manner of a muezzin making the call to prayer.

589“‘Waḍḍāḥ’s Bone’” (ʿaẓmu Waḍḍāḥin): “A certain game of the Arabs… in which they throw in the night… a white bone and he who lights upon it overcomes [sc. beats] his companions” (Lane, Lexicon).

590“ʿuqqah”: the dictionaries offer no further definition.

591“on which one plays” (yuḍrabu bihi): i.e., not ʿūd in any of its other senses (such as “stick” or “a certain perfume”).

592“honey” (ʿasal): all references to “honey” (in its complete form ʿasal abyaḍ or “white honey”) may be taken in the alternative sense of “molasses” (in its complete form ʿasal aswad or “black honey”).

593“ḥays”: dates mixed with clarified butter and curd.

594al-Maʾmūn: Abbasid caliph, r. 189–218/813–33.

595“fatty dishes or…”: the author appears to have misread the Qāmūs, which gives a different definition for makhbūr (al-ṭayyib al-idām or “good-tasting condiments”) and in which khubrah is not a synonym of makhbūr but constitutes a new lemma, with tharīdah ḍakhmah as one of its definitions.

596“sikbājah”: not in the Qāmūs but presumably the same as sikbāj.

597“ruṭab dates”: i.e., dates that are fresh but soft and sugary (and neither fresh and astringent nor dried).

598“wars”: a plant, Memecylon tinctorium, grown in Yemen, from whose roots a yellow dye (“Indian yellow”) is made.

599al-Faḥfāḥ and al-Kawthar: rivers in Paradise.

600“tasnīm”: the beverage of the blessed in Paradise.

601“among whom pass immortal youths….”: a collage of verses taken from three chapters of the Qurʾan, namely al-Wāqiʿah, al-Raḥmān, and al-Insān (Q Wāqiʿah 56:17–18, 20–21, 28–34; Raḥmān 55:46, 48, 62, 64, 66, 68, 70, 11–12, 76, 54, 15 (note that here the author incorrectly writes furushin for sururin); Insān 76:17–19, 21); the translation is Arberry’s, with minor adaptions.

602“zaqqūm”: see Volume One (n. 92 to 1.1.9).

603“and shade from a smoking blaze” (wa-ẓillin min yaḥmūmin): Q Wāqiʿah 56:43.

604“fire from a smokeless blaze” (mārij mina l-nār): Q Raḥmān 55:15.

605“it was wholesome, healthy, and of beneficial effect” (ṣāra marīʾan hanīʾan ḥandīda l-mighabbah): the quotation is from the Qāmūs, though the designation of the verb as the etymon of the noun appears to be the author’s.

606 “the glottal stop (hamz) in it is for purposes of elision (waṣl) and the elision (waṣl) in it is for purposes of compression (hamz)” (hamzuhā li-l-waṣl wa-waṣluhā li-l-hamz): the author plays with orthographic terminology, exploiting the fact that imraʾah begins (unusually for a concrete noun) with a glottal stop (hamz) that is elided when preceded by a word ending in a vowel and as such is distinguished from its non-elidable cousin by a sign called waṣl, while hamz also has the non-grammatical sense of “compression,” here to be understood as “sexual intercourse.”

607“its plural” etc.: no plural is made from imraʾah; words for “women” are from the root n-s-w and have different forms (e.g., niswah, nisāʾ, niswān).

608“in one language the word denotes ‘man’s woe’ and in another ‘pudendum’”: i.e., in English, “woman” is a phonetic anagram of “man’s woe” and in Ottoman Turkish the word for both “woman” and “pudendum” was (realized in modern Turkish as avrat for the former, avret for the latter).

609“qarīnah… whose etymology is well known”: probably an allusion to qarn (“horn”), from the same root, and its figurative reference to cuckoldry.

610“or vice versa”: i.e., perhaps, when she returns to her parents’ home in a fit of anger at her husband.

611See 2.16.65 below.

612“ḥadādah”: a word whose semantic link to others with the same root is left unexplained by the lexicographers; thus ḥadādatuka means “your wife” (Qāmūs), but why it does so is not clear. The same is true of niḍr, jathal, and ḥannah below.

613“ʿirs”: from the verb ʿarisa bi- meaning “to cleave to.”

614“shāʿah”: because, according to the Qāmūs, she takes her husband’s part (li-mushāyaʿatihā l-zawj).

615“the accession of women to the throne of England was an unalloyed blessing”: perhaps because the reign of Elizabeth I witnessed the irreversibility of Protestantism as the national creed.

616 “the two queens of England”: presumably, Mary and her successor Elizabeth I, the first queens regnant of England, the first of whom was Catholic, the second Protestant.

617“Irene, wife of Leo IV, and Theodora, wife of Theophilus”: Irene was Byzantine empress regnant from AD 797 to 802, while Theodora was regent for her son from AD 842 to 855. The significance of their being opposed here is not clear, since both, as anti-iconoclasts, took the same position with regard to the most important theological issue of their day.

618Chapter 15: the dots seem to imply a silent dialogue between the author and his pen, in which the former tries to persuade the latter to move on to a new topic while the latter refuses, insisting that the renewed discussion, instead of taking place “at some other point” (fī mawḍiʿin ākhar) as promised at the end of the preceding chapter, should, in fact, take place “right there” (fī dhālika l-mawḍiʿ), as indicated by the hand, namely immediately, in the following chapter. The extreme shortness of the chapter, the dots, and the pointing hand have been noted by scholars as examples of the influence of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (see, e.g., Alwan, Ahmad, chap. 3, sect. 11).

619“the mark of clemency” (simat al-ḥilm): a pun, in that the phrase may also be read as simat al-ḥalam (“the mark of the nipple”).

620Zubaydah daughter of Jaʿfar (d. 216/831) was cousin and wife of Hārūn al-Rashīd, fifth Abbasid caliph; this poem, which appears in many classical anthologies, is interpreted in those as illustrating (on the poet’s side) the danger of misusing a rhetorical feature and (on Zubayda’s) insight and generosity; thus, al-Nuwayrī (667–732/1279–1332) writes in his Nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab, “When the poet recited the above, the slaves leapt up to beat him, but Zubayda said, ‘Let him be! He must be rewarded well, for he who means well and makes a mistake is better than he who means evil and is correct. He heard people saying, “Your nape is comelier than others’ faces and your left hand more generous than others’ right hands,” so he supposed that what he had written was of the same sort. Give him what he hoped for and teach him what he did not know’” (http://www.alwaraq.net/, accessed 8 July 2012). The author’s different interpretation (“his description was not wrong”) implies that Zubaydah accepted the validity of the poet’s comparison, in the sense, perhaps, that even with the tips of her toes she gave more than others gave with their whole hands.

621“ruḍāb”: literally, “saliva.”

622Genesis 36:20, “These are the sons of Seir the Horite, who inhabited the land; Lotan, and Shobal, and Zibeon, and Anah”; 36:24 “And these are the children of Zibeon; both Ajah, and Anah: this was that Anah that found the mules in the wilderness, as he fed the asses of Zibeon his father”; 36:29 “These are the dukes that came of the Horites; duke Lotan, duke Shobal, duke Zibeon, duke Anah.”

623“… or a kind of ornament for the hands or the feet”: the entry in the Qāmūs reads “quffāz…: something made for the hands that is stuffed with cotton and that women wear against the cold [sc. ‘gloves’], or a kind of ornament for the hands or the feet,” etc.

624“… or decorative earrings”: the entry in the Qāmūs reads “sals…: the string on which the white beads worn by slave girls are strung, or decorative earrings.”

625“the Ring of Power” (khātam al-mulk): a magic ring by which jinn and other forces may be commanded.

626“rāmik”: described in the Qāmūs as being “something black that is mixed with musk.”

627“thamīmah”: defined in the Qāmūs as synonymous with taʾmūrah.

628“or….”: the Qāmūs continues with further unrelated definitions.

629“shiʿār”: defined in the Qāmūs as “any item of apparel worn under the dithār.”

630“armaniyyah”: literally, “the Armenian [garment]. but not further defined.”

631“in an entry of its own”: i.e., under m-r-j-l; in fact, available editions of the Qāmūs do not include mumarjil but read, under r-j-l, al-mumarjal — thiyābun fīhā ṣuwaru l-marājil; for more on the confusion around these and similar terms, see Lane, Lexicon, s.v. mirjal.

632“from a certain governor”: i.e., from a provincial governor whose name was al-Qasṭalānī (“the Castilian”).

633 Cf. Qāmūs (s.v. a-w-m): “Ām, a town whose name is used to describe clothes.”

634“bizyawn”: defined in the Qāmūs as “a kind of sundus.”

635“so as to give them a place in the list appropriate to the underlying gist” (li-yuṭābiqa l-dhikru l-fikr): i.e., because they are put on before anything else.

636“ḥarr/ḥirr”: with the first vowelling, the word means “warmth,” with the second, “vagina”.

637“in kind… kind… kinds” (al-ʿayn… mina l-ʿayn… bi-l-maʿnayayn): the author plays with two senses of ʿayn, namely “kind” (as opposed to “cash”) and “eye,” and rhymes the word with maʿnayayn (“two senses”).

638“he has to dissolve any knots with puffs” (yaḥulla ʿuqdatahu bi-nafāthāt): a reference to Q Falaq 113:1–4—qul aʿūdhu bi-rabbi l-falaq min… sharri n-naffāthāti fī l-ʿuqad (“Say, ‘I seek refuge with the Lord of the daybreak… from the evil of those who blow on knots’”), the Qurʾanic reference being to witches who performed magic using this method.

639“as al-Farrāʾ has on ḥattā”: Yaḥya ibn Ziyād al-Farrāʾ (144–207/761–822) was a leading grammarian; ḥattā is a conjunction and preposition with multiple functions.

640“Juḥā’s dream”: Juḥā is the protagonist of jokes and anecdotes, in which he often plays the role of the “wise fool.” A version of this story goes: “Juḥā told the following story: ‘When sleeping I had a dream the first half of which was true, the second half untrue.’ ‘How can that be, O Abū Ghuṣn?’ he was asked. He said, ‘As I slept I seemed to behold myself come across a purse full of gold, silver, and golden coins, and when I picked it up, I defecated on myself from the effort of lifting it, it was so heavy. When I woke up, I found I was covered with filth and wetness, and the purse was no longer in my hands!’” (http://www.belkhechine07.com/joha.doc, accessed on 27 June 2012).

641“a leading scholar of the language…”: i.e., Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī (see Volume One, 0.4.10).

642 “why have you foresworn writing [in general] but not [writing] about women”: in what follows, the author answers that first part of the question but appears to forget the second.

643“most people… [believe muʾallif] refers to taʾlīf (‘making peace’) between two persons”: muʾallif in the sense of “author” etc. was a nineteenth-century neologism.

644“repugnant to some people, especially women”: because “shaykh” also means “old man.”

645“and how he stuffs them then” (fa-zaʿabahā ayya zaʿbin): the phrase could also be understood “and how he stuffs her then!”

646Shaykh Muṣṭafā: according to one scholar, a teacher at the mosque-university of al-Azhar but not further identified (al-Maṭwī, Aḥmad, 1:79), the same applying to the Shaykh Aḥmad, Shaykh Maḥmūd, and Shaykh Muḥammad mentioned later (2.18.3, 2.18.4, 2.19.9); however, it is possible that the author simply chose these common names to hide the identity of little-known scholars, as one might say “Tom, Dick, and Harry.”

647“Zayd and ʿAmr”: two characters used to illustrate points of grammar; for example, the sentence ḍaraba Zaydun ʿAmran (“Zayd struck ʿAmr”) illustrates the typical verb-subject-object order of the Arabic sentence.

648“happened to be asked… if he could study”: presumably, the Fāriyāq’s acquaintance asked him for an introduction to the shaykh.

649“Baḥth al-maṭālib”: see n. 126 to 2.11.3.

650“to write him a license to teach the book” (an yaktuba la-hu ijāzata iqrāʾihi): traditionally, scholarly knowledge was acquired through the study of individual books at the hands of a shaykh, with the student reading the work out loud to the teacher, who corrected and commented. When the student had acquired full mastery of the text, the shaykh would write him a licence (ijāzah) to teach it in the same fashion to others, just as the shaykh had earlier received a licence from his teacher, and so on.

651Al-Talkhīṣ fī l-maʿānī: probably the commentary of Masʿūd ibn ʿUmar al-Taftazānī (d. between 791/1389 and 797/1395) on the Talkhīṣ al-miftāḥ fī l-maʿānī wal-l-bayān wa-l-badīʿ by Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Qazwīnī, known as Khaṭīb Dimashq (666–739/1268–1338), the “basic textbook for rhetorical studies in the madrasas of the later Middle Ages up to modern times” (Meisami and Starkey, Encyclopedia, 2:439).

652“al-Akhḍarī’s Sharḥ al-Sullam”: ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Muḥammad al-Akhḍarī (920–83/1512–75) wrote this commentary on his own Al-Sullam al-murawnaq fī l-manṭiq.

653“the yellow air” (al-hawāʾ al-aṣfar): summer cholera.

654“greater affirmative universal” (kulliyyah mūjibah kubrā): presumably meaning, in the terms of Aristotelian logic, a “universal” statement of the form “all S are P.”

655“and not numbered among the dead” (wa-lam yaqḍi mina l-qaḍāyā); or, punningly, “and had not yet run out of syllogisms.”

656“the Kanz”: probably the Kanz al-daqāʾiq of ʿAbdallāh ibn Aḥmad al-Nasafī (d. 710/1310).

657“the Risālah al-Sanūsiyyah”: probably the Ḥāshiya (marginal commentary) of Ibrāhīm ibn Muḥammad al-Bājūrī (or al-Bījūrī) (1189–1276/1784–1859) on the Matn al-Sanūsiyyah of Muḥammad ibn Yūsuf al-Sanūsī (after 830-95/1426–90).

658“the Center of This Book”: as the thirty-ninth chapter of a work consisting of eighty, this section is, in fact, slightly off-center.

659“hamqāq”: according to the Qāmūs, “seeds found in the mountains of Balʿamm that are fried and eaten to increase the capacity for intercourse.”

660mughāth: Glossostemon bruguieri, a plant with therapeutic and nutritional properties.

661“the caliphal palace” (dār al-khilāfah): i.e., the place where, like the caliph, or successor to the Prophet Muḥammad, the man in question carries out his duties.

662“everyone suspected… a sin that they would carry… till the Day of Judgment” (fa-ẓanna l-nās… wa-taqalladū ithmahu… ilā yawmi l-dīn): the passage evokes the words of the Quran inna baʿḍa l-ẓanni ithm (“Indeed some suspicion is a sin”) (Q Ḥujurāt 49:12).

663“for he was hors de combat and wasn’t up to doing anything anyway” (fa-innahu kāna muʿaṭṭalan wa-fiʿluhu mulghan ʿani l-ʿamal): probably an allusion to the fact that he was receiving treatment for a venereal disease (see n. 149 to 2.12.18).

664Probably Al-Qawl al-wāfī fī sharḥ al-Kāfī fī ʿilmay al-ʿarūḍ wa-l-qawāfī, a commentary by ʿAlī ibn ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Nabtītī (d. ca. 1065/1655) on a work by Yaḥyā ibn ʿAlī al-Tabrīzī (421–502/1030–1109).

665“a loft…”: see 1 Kings 17:19–20.

666“a wall” (judāran): “Now Absalom in his lifetime had taken and reared up for himself a pillar, which is in the king’s dale: for he said, I have no son to keep my name in remembrance: and he called the pillar after his own name: and it is called unto this day, Absalom’s place” (2 Sam. 18:8).

667Bion: Bion of Borysthenes (ca. 325–250), who is said to have attached himself to all the contemporary schools of philosophy in succession and to have attacked everyone and everything.