3.19.15
In the meantime, this Metropolitan Atanāsiyūs al-Tutūnjī had become a translator and an Arabizer, a writer and a pen-pusher, though he hadn’t the balls for the job and he didn’t care if in translating into Arabic he made a balls-up. He also believed that no trade was more difficult than another and toiled and moiled,269 strained and heaved, warsled and wrestled, struggled and sprattled, carked and swinked, taved and teveled, bungled and botched, bumbled and stumbled, fumbled and floundered, muddled and marred, fudged and faked, foxed and jouked, pretended and presumed, dissembled and dissimulated, bragged and boasted, stammered and stuttered, twisted and turned, and ducked and weaved, while being “more conceited than a woman with a tattoo on her backside.”(1)
3.19.16
Is there in the universe no glass,270 no mirror, no looking glass, no seeing glass, no pier glass, no pocket glass, no tire-glass, no swing-glass, no peeper, no psyche, no speculum, no reflector in which these mistresses of mine may gaze at their faces and see how they look? Is there in the East no Sībawayhi to deliver a slap to the back of that man’s neck? Is there in the West no Ibn Mālik to cry, “Enough!”, no Akhfash to leap to the defense of this language and crush the head of that gecko? How can a person think himself a scholar when he has been schooled in nothing, or a man of letters when he is barely literate, or a jurisprudent when he has no prudence? Granted, he cannot see his ignorance in the mirror as he does his face, but are not books the mirror of the mind? When he read the books of the scholars and failed to understand them, he should have realized the limits of his learning, but Metropolitan Atanāsiyūs al-Tutūnjī, metropolitan of Syrian Tripoli271 (albeit resident in every land but that) has never opened a work of scholarship in his life. His reading in grammar272 never went beyond the chapter on “the doer and the done,” his reading in metaphor beyond the figure of “stripping,”273 his reading in jurisprudence beyond the chapter on defilements, in prosody beyond “the movable peg,”274 in eloquent style beyond “having the buttock echo the breast.”275 This is the sum total of what he learned and bragged about at the school of ʿAyn Tirāz when he was head monitor there.
3.19.17
As to the reasons behind his flight from there to Rome, from Rome to Malta, from Malta to Paris, from Paris to London, from London to Malta, and then, this year, to London from some cities in Austria where he’d been roaming around with his beggar’s sack over his shoulder, and behind how he was exposed and disgraced there in the newspapers to the point that he was forbidden to practice any longer that profession that had suited him so well for so many years, how he eked out a living during the London season by putting together a troupe of female and male singers from the house of Ashiq Bāsh in Aleppo, how he conned them, in his greed for profit, into going to the season, how he went into it with them and their partners in the first place on an “expenditures and equipment” basis and then took back the money he’d given them and forced them to give him a share of the profits without participating with them in the pains, this being the return for his conning them, and how his ugly scheming became the reason for the two leaders of this troupe sustaining a huge loss, all this there is no space to detail in this work.
3.19.18
Here someone may say, “You, Mr. Author, have reproached people for deluding themselves but it seems to me that in this chapter you too have made a fool of yourself, for you have introduced into it discourse inappropriate to women, surpassing that of even Ibn Abī ʿAtīq and Ibn Ḥajjāj.” In response I would declare: “Two things drove me to do that. One was to show off the beauties of our noble language and the second that I wanted to awaken a desire in those readers who cover the walls of their houses with pipe stems276 to buy a book in that language. Dear reader, then, and dear listener, dear shame-faced abstainer277 and dear blind-eye turner,278 tell the troublemaker among you, ‘To the bitter, nothing is sweet.’”
3.19.19
To proceed: I now throw myself at the feet of that sexually voracious mistress of mine, that beetle-bodied mistress of mine, that flat-breasted, small-buttocked mistress of mine, and that soot-bedaubed mistress of mine and ask them all to excuse the tyranny of the pen, for I shan’t be able to sleep tonight if they are angry.
(1) The words for old women are too many to count.
(1) A muttashimah is “a woman who has tattooed her backside so that it may be more comely for her” and one says proverbially that someone is “more conceited than a woman with a tattoo on her backside.”
CHAPTER 20: A METROPOLITAN THEFT
3.20.1
When the Fāriyāq returned from his time with the aforementioned emir, he informed his wife of the latter’s kindnesses to him and that he had promised him a good post in Cairo. “I’ll go ahead, then,” she said, “while you wait for him here. I miss my parents greatly, so let me go to them.” “So be it,” said he, and when the time for her departure drew close, he set about bidding her farewell, saying, “Remember, wife, that on this island you have a husband who cares for you and a lover who will not forget you,” to which she replied, “O that I might have such a one!” The Fāriyāq resumed, “I asked her, ‘Whom do you mean by “such a one”?’ ‘You, of course!’ she responded. ‘On the contrary, the more obvious interpretation is someone else,’ I said. ‘Must facts always depend on your readings, you Arabs?’ she responded. ‘Is it still your way to go scratching up any secrets that may be in a woman’s breast, breaking open any thoughts that, egg-like, in her head may nest, reviling her on the basis of gossip and delusion, dealing with her on a basis of conjecture and gnawing suspicion, behaving toward her according to misgiving and unsupported claims, without, for each story, confirmation, as well as practicing defamation, subjection to ungrounded accusation, false report and condemnation, instead of turning a blind eye and winking at transgression, overlooking error and granting tender consideration, being discreet and observing one’s marital obligation, kissing and flirtation, hugging and copulation?(1) Were the Almighty to call his servants to account for their thoughtless words as severely as you do,279 there’d be nobody left on the face of this earth.’