Arabian Nights, The: A Companion by Irwin Robert

Author:Irwin, Robert [Irwin, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780857730060
Publisher: IB Tauris
Published: 2003-10-24T04:00:00+00:00

Essentially the same pneumatic image can be reconstructed from the Nights. When, in ‘The Tale of Omar bin al-Nu’uman’, the Muslim warrior Sharrkan wrestled with the Christian princess Abrizah, he found that his fingertips ‘sank into the soft folds of her middle, breeding languishment’. Sharrkan was so overmastered by desire that he lost this wrestling bout, for Abrizah took advantage of his fainting passion, threw him and ‘sat upon his breast with hips and hinder cheeks like mounds of sand’. Great attention was paid to women’s bottoms. When Hasan of Basra spied upon the princesses in the pool, he saw that the most beautiful of them ‘had thighs great and plump, like marble columns twain or bolsters stuffed with down from ostrich ta’en’. The male bottom too: Prince Kamar al-Zaman’s waist ‘was more slender than the gossamer and his back parts than two sand-heaps bulkier, making a babel of the heart with their softness’. The piously superstitious warned men against sitting on a place recently warmed by a female bottom, fearing that some sort of illicit sexual pleasure might be derived therefrom. The sixteenth-century Egyptian religious scholar Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti argued that in paradise people would have no behinds.12 In some areas of the Middle East until quite recent times, women might choose to overeat systematically (the practice of tasmina) in order to acquire the sexually attractive fat.13 A woman could draw attention to her bottom by adopting a distinctive waggling gait known as the ghunj – a term also used for the waggling of the hips during sexual intercourse. Sleepiness was also considered to be sexually attractive, and drowsy charms and languorous airs are frequently commended in the poems embedded in the Nights.

However, sexual tastes in the medieval Islamic world were not absolutely uniform, and rival ideals coexisted. The plump, panting languid woman faced plenty of competition from her more active sisters – in both fiction and fact. Indeed, one of the striking features of the Nights (especially if one compares it with western literature in the same period) is how active and vigorous the heroines of the stories are and, contrariwise, how passive and idle many of the nominal heroes are. How could Kabbani have missed Tawaddud, who defeats the court sages in an intellectual form of strip-poker; Dunya, who kicks the vizier in the groin; Budur, who, having become a king (sic), revenges herself on her enemies and threatens her lover with sodomization; Marjana, who rescues Ali Baba and engineers the death of the forty thieves; or Miriam the Girdle-Girl, who rescued her lover from captivity in Christendom – not to mention such warrior-princesses as Princess al-Datma and Abriza, and the legions of Amazon warrior-women who troop through the pages of the Nights, as well as the specialized variant the kahramat (armed female harem guards)? The taste for boylike women (ghulumiyyat) in fiction may have reflected the actual sexual tastes of Cairo men. According to the fifteenth-century historian and moralist al-Maqrizi, the women of his day, finding

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