1.12.10
“If anyone invites their monks — who have to put up with lentils and abstain from meat — to a feast, you can hear the roar as they swallow, for they dive into their food, gnaw on the bones using their whole mouths, lick their lips by sticking out their tongues like snakes, fill their waterskins to the brim, and drink them dry until their eyes start from their sockets. The thing that I hold most against them, though, is that you can hardly say hello to one of them without his stretching his hand out for you to kiss, and often enough it’s defiled and filthy — how am I to kiss the hand of one who is more ignorant than me and good for nothing? See how many monasteries there are in our land and how many monks each monastery holds — and yet I haven’t come across a single one of them who excels in scholarship or has left behind him anything to boast of.
1.12.11
“On the contrary, all you hear of them are things that are a disgrace to the mind and morals of mankind. I was in the service of Baʿīr Bayʿar for a time and discovered that one of these preachers had acquired as much control over his daughter as a husband over a wife. Among the things he’d ask her were, ‘Do your buttocks shake and your breasts quake?’ What has a monk got to do with the quivering of women’s buttocks and the jiggling of their breasts? Another was head of a monastery. He conceived an affection for a girl in a village near to the monastery and it wasn’t long before she conceived a child by him. Because his brother was highly regarded by the ruler, the girl’s father was afraid to stand up to him and expose him; indeed, it has become an accepted fact in the minds of the ignorant people of our land that it’s a sin to disclose a matter of this sort that might expose one of these so-called ascetics to scandal. I swear by God, concealing such things is a sin, for exposure would deter others!
1.12.12
“I know another, too, who came to our village pretending to be at death’s door. To show how righteous and pious he was, he wore his sleeves long and had pulled his cowl down till almost nothing could be seen but his mouth and beard. The first thing he did was to set himself up as a preacher to the local laity, and he took to preaching and sermonizing and uttering warnings of coming judgment in a basso profundo, weeping as hard as he could the while, tear ducts overflowing, for he had put something pungent, I know not what, on the handkerchief with which he wiped his face. Eventually he ended up spending days and nights in seclusion with a pretty young widow of the princely class, justifying himself by saying that she was making plenary confession to him, meaning starting from the time when her breasts swelled and her hair sprouted and going all the way up to that very day.
1.12.13
“And I know of another who went to Rome. Being a simpleton, he would go to bed in his monk’s habit just as he did at his monastery and thus dirty the sheets, so the owner of the house forbade him to do so. When the monk discovered that all the priests of Rome, from the cardinals to the monks, slept naked, with nothing to cover their shame but a thin linen sheet, he renounced his faith and started declaring that everything, sinful or not, was permitted. Observe, then, how none of these ‘contemplative’ worshippers of God turns out to be anything but base and hypocritical or ignorant and hysterical. A righteous man among them is rarely to be descried and with regard to scholarship they’re all equally deprived.
1.12.14
“There’s nothing, nothing at all, wrong with becoming a monk of one’s own free will; it is a praiseworthy path — on condition that one is over fifty and that those who join the monastic ranks be people of virtue and knowledge who occupy themselves with scholarship and improving the writing skills of their brethren and acquaintance, spurring them to noble morals and the adoption of praiseworthy qualities, writing useful books and laying down for their people the roads that lead to good fortune and salvation, triumph and a happy termination, unlike those ignoramuses who know nothing but mortification of the flesh and ragged clothes. To demonstrate their ignorance it’s enough to say that I asked the most zealous of them to lend me the Qāmūs and he thought I said jāmūs, while another thought I said kābūs, and a third qāmūṣ. Set to, then, my friend, and have done with them: God guide you right, or you’ll end up as a man of neither this world nor the next, for God doesn’t give a fig for the religion of the ignorant. Then, when you reach sixty, you’ll find the monastic life awaiting you.”
1.12.15
“How am I to get free?” the man asked him. “If you have belongings in the monastery,” said the Fāriyāq, “I’ll help you carry them.” “I have nothing but what you see upon me,” said the other. “Let’s be off, then,” said the Fāriyāq, “for the monks are presently occupied with their prayers,” and they set off through the door of the monastery, and no one noticed. When they had gone a little way, the Fāriyāq congratulated his friend on his escape from the noose of ignorance and told him, “I swear, if I were to free a monk or a novice, or at least a nun or a novice nun, every time I ate lentils, I’d want to eat nothing else so long as I should live, even if the lentils consumed my body. May God reward the monastery well!”
CHAPTER 13: A MAQĀMAH, OR, A MAQĀMAH ON “CHAPTER 13”
1.13.1
A while has passed now since I tasked myself with writing in rhymed prose and patterned period, and I think I’ve forgotten how to do so. I must therefore put my faculties to the test in this chapter, which is worthier than the rest — because it’s higher in number than the twelfth and lower than the fourteenth — and I shall continue to do so in every chapter branded with this number till I’ve finished my four books. The total number of maqāmahs in it will therefore, I believe, be four. Thus I declare:
1.13.2
Faid al-Hāwif ibn Hifām in lifping tones:219 “Sleepless I lay on a night on which the stars were concealed, the clouds revealed, a night never-ending, full of worries to anguish trending. Now on my back to sleep I tried, now on any other side, placing before my eyes the image of a person drowsing or yawning or snoring, or of another into a drunken stupor falling. Imagination, they say, is conducive to the doing of the thing for which you burn, and stimulates the achievement of that for which you yearn, despite which sleep to my eyes not a drop of salve applied, not a yawn spread wide my mouth, from top to bottom or from side to side. Meseemed the people of the earth, without exception, were fast asleep, while I alone among them all no repose could reap, that all my neighbors were at rest, while I alone remained distressed. So I arose to take a nip and took indeed a sip, but all this brought was an oscitation, something barely more than a lapse of attention, after which I awoke once more quite overwrought, in a desperate agony of thought, cares thronging toward me from every side, my worries ranging far and wide. All things possible and impossible to my mind occurred, every situation over which I’d ever worried (if only once and many years before) recurred.