3.15.5
“I also observed some Muslim notables who would visit the master of the house and talk with him at their ease — men of considerable dignity and gravitas — and I don’t know what persuaded Metropolitan Jirmānūs Farḥāt to say, in his collected poems,
Meseems, then, I’m Aleppo, by nature refined,
While your nature, in its coarseness, is Damascus.
“The same imbecile would probably say, ‘Your Aleppine’s a dandy and your Damascene’s a dog,’ despite the fact that the Damascenes are more refined by nature than the Aleppines, of purer morals, freer of tongue, hand, and demeanor, more openhanded and generous. The proof of this is that because the Prophet once honored Damascus with the impress of his foot, and because it is the resting place of a number of his Companions and has become a place from which people set off for the Kaaba and has remained, from that time on, a staging post for pilgrims, the Christians who are there occupy spacious houses and capacious dwellings within its walls, unlike the Christians of Aleppo, who are allowed to live only outside the city and enter it only to buy and sell. Furthermore, God has preserved the area of Damascus from the earthquakes that occur frequently in Aleppo as well as from that unpleasant pimpliness that so often disfigures the faces of those affected by it and that is caused by its water. Did the metropolitan perhaps mean to say that it is the Christians of Aleppo, uniquely, who are more refined? Or could it be that he thought it acceptable for us to deprive people of their just deserts to make a rhyme for prose or an assonance? On that principle, one might call a Catholicos garrulous, a prelate a pitchy distillate, a priest a greedy beast, a monk a drunk,170 a Market-man a charlatan, or a Bag-man a reticule-man. As far as language is concerned, there is, I swear, no comparison between the chaste speech of the Damascenes and the lame language of the Aleppines, for Aleppo, bordering as it does the lands of the Turks, has been infiltrated by many foreign words from the latter’s speech. Thus they say anjaq bi-yikfī (‘it’s barely enough’), articulating the j in anjaq as though it were the Turkish jīm,171 yitqallanu meaning ‘he uses it,’172 khōsh khuy,173 and so on, and all this on top of their strange-sounding dialect and the foreign-tinged accent with which they pronounce Arabic words.”
3.15.6
The Fāriyāq and his companion then traveled to Beirut and from there to Jaffa, where the deputy to the British consul (who was not the skilled and sagacious Khawājā Asʿad al-Khayyāṭ)174 invited them and the ship’s captain to join him in taking the drink made of water and sugar known as sherbet (which is a word that has gained fame among Frankish authors too, though they use it in their books only and not in their houses). They went with him and he served each with a cup appropriate to his body size. When the party was over, they set sail for Alexandria and from there to the island, where they were housed in its quarantine quarters. The Fāriyāq sent to his wife to inform her of his arrival and invite her to join him in his isolation, but she said, “I like neither isolation nor idleness.” Afterwards she complied, and the Fāriyāq, regaling himself after the ardors of travel, breathed in the scent of a woman.
CHAPTER 16: ECSTASY
3.16.1
It’s the smell of Umm Dafār, in which all that walks or flies or plows the seas is as one, and it is made plain in the title. Can you smell it?175
CHAPTER 17: AN INCITEMENT TO NUDITY
3.17.1
The two of them176 then entered the town and the Fāriyāq went back to interpreting dreams and physicking the foul of breath. After a short while, a Persian, of whom it was said that he had been a Muslim and become a Christian and that he was a master poet well-known among the scholars of Persia, came to visit the master of the Chamber. The latter therefore took the Fāriyāq to welcome him in the quarantine quarters. He turned out to be a short, squat, round, bearded little fellow, and when he entered the town, he put up at the Chamber. Now the master decided, right at the outset, that he should shave off his beard. The barber was brought and set his razor to work but when he got to the poet’s mustache, the latter covered it with his hands. The master approached him with a book in his hand from which he drew proofs for the necessity of shaving mustaches and they discussed and argued until the master agreed to limit the sacrifice to half.
3.17.2
On another of those ill-omened days, the Fāriyāq went to the Chamber and there found that the master had stripped himself of every stitch of his clothing and set to roaming around the house in that state and inciting people to follow his example, saying, “Dear People, clothes were made to cover the pudenda but he who is pure and innocent of all sin has nothing of which to be ashamed. When Adam was in Paradise, in a state of sinlessness and innocence, he had no need of clothes.” When he went to his wife to persuade her to undress, she told him, “Women are without sin only at night, so they have to be covered by day.” The Persian saw him in this state and asked the Fāriyāq, “What has made our friend change his black clothes today and put on red ones?” The Fāriyāq replied, “He’s a soldier of the Bag and soldiers here wear uniforms.”
3.17.3
The derangement of both husband and Persian increased and became so entrenched that the wife feared they might find themselves together in some tricky situation and get into an argument and a fight. She therefore requested that the Fāriyāq take the Persian into his home. In the midst of all this, the Branch had now caught up with her, coming from the Syrian lands, bringing with him the delirious promise of delicious fruit and a sturdy trunk.177 She therefore put him up in her house, treating him like an honored guest and trying constantly to have the Chamber to herself with him, even at the cost of her husband’s continued derangement and her own loss of her family. The Branch thus stayed there in the lap of luxury, while she stayed with him, her hands fuller than those of Dhāt al-Niḥyayn,178 in the utmost ecstasy, and her husband continued to incite people to nudity, claiming it as a sign of innocence and purity.
3.17.4
The Persian stayed with the Fāriyāq, who accepted him only because of his meekness, weakness, and general taciturnity. Then, one night, after seeing lovely ladies visiting the Fāriyāq’s wife, his tongue was untied and he said things that indicated that it was not by divine guidance that he had become a Christian but that he had been compelled by poverty and hunger. The man went to bed that night with his heart afire with passion and during the night he left his room and set off for that of the Fāriyāqiyyah. Her husband noticed what was going on and set upon him with a rope, and the other was unable to defend himself. In the morning, the Fāriyāq consulted his wife on the matter. She said, “I think this Persian has gone insane because he isn’t married, and the same applies to all other madmen. Didn’t you see how, when he saw the girls at our house yesterday, his face lit up and he started talking?” The Fāriyāq said, “I replied, ‘I don’t believe you’re right this time, for our friend the Bag-man went mad after he got married.’ ‘But,’ she responded, ‘the balance of his mind had been disturbed before that by the dreams, and when he got married he failed to give marriage its due, so marriage got its own back at him, and others should take him as a warning.’ I said, ‘How did you come to know that?’ and she replied, ‘Married men shouldn’t be inquisitive and stick their noses into things that don’t concern them.’ I said, ‘That would be in restraint of men’s daily business.’ ‘There’d be no restraint,’ she said, ‘because I wouldn’t prevent them from going about their work, just from idle conversation and an obsession with dream interpretation. Plumbing the science of the supernatural requires more effort than succumbing to compliance with the super-stupid. If it were up to me, I’d treat all madmen with women, through women, and against women.’ ‘Do all the “particles of attraction”179 belong to women?’ I asked. ‘Indeed,’ she replied. ‘All attraction is to be found in women.’ ‘But you omitted “particles,”’ I said. ‘On the contrary,’ she answered. ‘They’re still there.’180