The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night Volume X Part 9

The perfect woman has seven requisites. She must not always be merry (1) nor sad (2); she must not always be talking (3) nor silently musing (4); she must not always be adorning herself (5) nor neglecting her person (6); and, (7) at all times she must be moderate and self possessed.

The legal status of womankind in Al-Islam is exceptionally high, a fact of which Europe has often been a.s.sured, although the truth has not even yet penetrated into the popular brain. Nearly a century ago one Mirza Abu Talib Khan, an Amildar or revenue collector, after living two years in London, wrote an "apology"

for, or rather a vindication of, his countrywomen which is still worth reading and quoting.[FN#343] Nations are but superficial judges of one another: where customs differ they often remark only the salient distinctive points which, when examined, prove to be of minor importance. Europeans seeing and hearing that women in the East are "cloistered" as the Grecian matron was wont and ; that wives may not walk out with their husbands and cannot accompany them to "b.a.l.l.s and parties"; moreover, that they are always liable, like the ancient Hebrew, to the mortification of the "sister-wife," have most ignorantly determined that they are mere serviles and that their lives are not worth living. Indeed, a learned lady, Miss Martineau, once visiting a Harem went into ecstasies of pity and sorrow because the poor things knew nothing of--say trigonometry and the use of the globes. Sonnini thought otherwise, and my experience, like that of all old dwellers in the East, is directly opposed to this conclusion.

I have noted (Night cmlxii.) that Mohammed, in the fifth year of his reign,[FN#344] after his ill-advised and scandalous marriage[FN#345] with his foster-daughter Zaynab, established the Hijab or veiling of women. It was probably an exaggeration of local usage: a modified separation of the s.e.xes, which extended and still extends even to the Badawi, must long have been customary in Arabian cities, and its object was to deliver the s.e.xes from temptation, as the Koran says (x.x.xii. 32), "purer will this (practice) be for your hearts and their hearts."[FN#346] The women, who delight in restrictions which tend to their honour, accepted it willingly and still affect it, they do not desire a liberty or rather a licence which they have learned to regard as inconsistent with their time-honoured notions of feminine decorum and delicacy, and they would think very meanly of a husband who permitted them to be exposed, like hetairae, to the public gaze.[FN#347] As Zubayr Pasha, exiled to Gibraltar for another's treason, said to my friend, Colonel Buckle, after visiting quarters evidently laid out by a jealous husband, "We Arabs think that when a man has a precious jewel, 'tis wiser to lock it up in a box than to leave it about for anyone to take." The Eastern adopts the instinctive, the Western prefers the rational method.

The former jealously guards his treasure, surrounds it with all precautions, fends off from it all risks and if the treasure go astray, kills it. The latter, after placing it en evidence upon an eminence in ball dress with back and bosom bared to the gaze of society, a bundle of charms exposed to every possible seduction, allows it to take its own way, and if it be misled, he kills or tries to kill the misleader. It is a fiery trial and the few who safely pa.s.s through it may claim a higher standpoint in the moral world than those who have never been sorely tried. But the crucial question is whether Christian Europe has done wisely in offering such temptations.

The second and main objection to Moslem custom is the marriage-system which begins with a girl being wedded to a man whom she knows only by hearsay. This was the habit of our forbears not many generations ago, and it still prevails amongst n.o.ble houses in Southern Europe, where a lengthened study of it leaves me doubtful whether the "love-marriage," as it is called, or wedlock with an utter stranger, evidently the two extremes, is likely to prove the happier. The "sister-wife" is or would be a sore trial to monogamic races like those of Northern Europe where Caia, all but the equal of Caius in most points mental and physical and superior in some, not unfrequently proves herself the "man of the family," the "only man in the boat." But in the East, where the s.e.x is far more delicate, where a girl is brought up in polygamy, where religious reasons separate her from her husband, during pregnancy and lactation, for three successive years; and where often enough like the Mormon damsel she would hesitate to "n.i.g.g.e.r it with a one-wife-man," the case a.s.sumes a very different aspect and the load, if burden it be, falls comparatively light. Lastly, the "patriarchal household" is mostly confined to the grandee and the richard, whilst Holy Law and public opinion, neither of which can openly be disregarded, a.s.sign command of the household to the equal or first wife and jealously guard the rights and privileges of the others.

Mirza Abu Talib "the Persian Prince"[FN#348] offers six reasons why "the liberty of the Asiatic women appears less than that of the Europeans," ending with,

I'll fondly place on either eye The man that can to this reply.

He then lays down eight points in which the Moslem wife has greatly the advantage over her Christian sisterhood; and we may take his first as a specimen. Custom, not contrary to law, invests the Mohammedan mother with despotic government of the homestead, slaves, servants and children, especially the latter: she alone directs their early education, their choice of faith, their marriage and their establishment in life; and in case of divorce she takes the daughters, the sons going to the sire. She has also liberty to leave her home, not only for one or two nights, but for a week or a fortnight, without consulting her husband; and whilst she visits a strange household, the master and all males above fifteen are forbidden the Harem. But the main point in favour of the Moslem wife is her being a "legal sharer": inheritance is secured to her by Koranic law; she must be dowered by the bridegroom to legalise marriage and all she gains is secured to her; whereas in England a "Married Woman's Property Act" was completed only in 1882 after many centuries of the grossest abuses.

Lastly, Moslems and Easterns in general study and intelligently study the art and mystery of satisfying the physical woman. In my Foreword I have noticed among barbarians the system of "making men,"[FN#349] that is, of teaching lads first arrived at p.u.b.erty the nice conduct of the instrumentum paratum plantandis avibus: a branch of the knowledge-tree which our modern education grossly neglects, thereby entailing untold miseries upon individuals, families and generations. The mock virtue, the most immodest modesty of England and of the United States in the xixth century, p.r.o.nounces the subject foul and fulsome:"Society" sickens at all details; and hence it is said abroad that the English have the finest women in Europe and least know how to use them. Throughout the East such studies are aided by a long series of volumes, many of them written by learned physiologists, by men of social standing and by religious dignitaries high in office. The Egyptians especially delight in aphrodisiac literature treating, as the Turks say, de la partie au-dessous de la taille; and from fifteen hundred to two thousand copies of a new work, usually lithographed in cheap form, readily sell off. The pudibund Lane makes allusion to and quotes (A. N. i. 216) one of the most out spoken, a 4to of 464 pages, called the Halbat al-k.u.mayt or "Race- Course of the Bay Horse," a poetical and horsey term for grape- wine. Attributed by D'Herbelot to the Kazi Shams al-Din Mohammed, it is wholly upon the subject of wa.s.sail and women till the last few pages, when his reverence exclaims:--"This much, O reader, I have recounted, the better thou mayst know what to avoid;" and so forth, ending with condemning all he had praised.[FN#350] Even the divine and historian Jalal al-Din al-Siyuti is credited with having written, though the authorship is much disputed, a work ent.i.tled, "Kitab al-izah fi 'ilm al-Nikah" =The Book of Exposition in the Science of Coition: my copy, a lithograph of 33 pages, undated, but evidently Cairene, begins with exclaiming "Alhamdolillah--Laud to the Lord who adorned the virginal bosom with b.r.e.a.s.t.s and who made the thighs of women anvils for the spear handles of men!" To the same amiable theologian are also ascribed the "Kitab Nawazir al-Ayk fi al-Nayk" = Green Splendours of the Copse in Copulation, an abstract of the "Kitab al-Wishah fi fawaid al-Nikah" = Book of the Zone on Coition-boon. Of the abundance of p.o.r.nographic literature we may judge from a list of the following seven works given in the second page of the "Kitab Ruju'a al-Shaykh ila Sabah fi 'l-Kuwwat al-Bah[FN#351]" = Book of Age-rejuvenescence in the power of Concupiscence: it is the work of Ahmad bin Sulayman, surnamed Ibn Kamal Pasha.

1. Kitab al-Bah by Al-Nahli.

2. Kitab al'-Ars wa al'-Arais (Book of the Bridal and the Brides) by Al-Jahiz.

3. Kitab al-Kiyan (Maiden's Book) by Ibn Hajib al-Nu'man.

4. Kitab al-izah fi asrar al-Nikah (Book of the Exposition on the Mysteries of married Fruition).

5. Kitab Jami' al-Lizzah (The Compendium of Pleasure) by Ibn Samsamani.

6. Kitab Barjan (Yarjan?) wa Janahib (? ?)[FN#352]

7. Kitab al-Munakahah wa al-Mufatahah fi Asnaf al-Jima' wa alatih (Book of Carnal Copulation and the Initiation into the modes of Coition and its Instrumentation) by Aziz al-Din al-Masihi.[FN#353]

To these I may add the Lizzat al-Nisa (Pleasures of Women), a text-book in Arabic, Persian and Hindostani: it is a translation and a very poor attempt, omitting much from, and adding naught to, the famous Sanskrit work Ananga-Ranga (Stage of the Bodiless One i.e. Cupido) or Hindu Art of Love (Ars Amoris Indica).[FN#354] I have copies of it in Sanskrit and Marathi,Guzrati and Hindostani: the latter is an unpaged 8vo of pp. 66, including eight pages of most grotesque ill.u.s.trations showing the various san (the Figurae Veneris or positions of copulation), which seem to be the triumphs of contortionists.

These pamphlets lithographed in Bombay are broad cast over the land.[FN#355]

It must not be supposed that such literature is purely and simply aphrodisiacal. The learned Sprenger, a physician as well as an Arabist, says (Al-Mas'udi p. 384) of a tractate by the celebrated Rhazes in the Leyden Library, "The number of curious observations, the correct and practical ideas and the novelty of the notions of Eastern nations on these subjects, which are contained in this book, render it one of the most important productions of the medical literature of the Arabs." I can conscientiously recommend to the Anthropologist a study of the "Kutub al-Bah."

C.--p.o.r.nography.

Here it will be advisable to supplement what was said in my Foreword (p. xiii.) concerning the turpiloquium of The Nights.

Readers who have perused the ten volumes will probably agree with me that the nave indecencies of the text are rather gaudis-serie than prurience; and, when delivered with mirth and humour, they are rather the "excrements of wit" than designed for debauching the mind. Crude and indelicate with infantile plainness; even gross and, at times, "nasty" in their terrible frankness, they cannot be accused of corrupting suggestiveness or subtle insinuation of vicious sentiment. Theirs is a coa.r.s.eness of language, not of idea; they are indecent, not depraved; and the pure and perfect naturalness of their nudity seems almost to purify it, showing that the matter is rather of manners than of morals. Such throughout the East is the language of every man, woman and child, from prince to peasant, from matron to prost.i.tute: all are as the nave French traveller said of the j.a.panese: "si grossiers qu'ils ne scavent nommer les choses que par leur nom." This primitive stage of language sufficed to draw from Lane and Burckhardt strictures upon the "most immodest freedom of conversation in Egypt," where, as all the world over, there are three several stages for names of things and acts sensual. First we have the mot cru, the popular term, soon followed by the technical and scientific, and, lastly, the literary or figurative nomenclature, which is often much more immoral because more attractive, suggestive and seductive than the "raw word." And let me observe that the highest civilisation is now returning to the language of nature. In La Glu of M. J.

Richepin, a triumph of the realistic school, we find such "archaic" expressions as la petee, putain, foutue a la six- quatre-dix; un facetieuse petarade; tu t'es foutue de, etc. Eh vilain bougre! and so forth.[FN#356] To those critics who complain of these raw vulgarisms and puerile indecencies in The Nights I can reply only by quoting the words said to have been said by Dr. Johnson to the lady who complained of the naughty words in his dictionary--"You must have been looking for them, Madam!"

But I repeat (p. xiv.) there is another element in The Nights and that is one of absolute obscenity utterly repugnant to English readers, even the least prudish. It is chiefly connected with what our neighbours call le vice contre nature--as if anything can be contrary to nature which includes all things.[FN#357] Upon this subject I must offer details, as it does not enter into my plan to ignore any theme which is interesting to the Orientalist and the Anthropologist. And they, methinks, do abundant harm who, for shame or disgust, would suppress the very mention of such matters: in order to combat a great and growing evil deadly to the birth-rate--the mainstay of national prosperity--the first requisite is careful study. As Albert Bollstoedt, Bishop of Ratisbon, rightly says.--Quia malum non evitatum nisi cognitum, ideo necesse est cognoscere immundiciem coitus et multa alla quae docentur in isto libro. Equally true are Professor Mantegazza's words:[FN#358] Cacher les plates du c?ur humain au nom de la pudeur, ce n'est au contraire qu'hypocrisie ou peur. The late Mr.

Grote had reason to lament that when describing such inst.i.tutions as the far-famed of Thebes, the Sacred Band annihilated at Chaeroneia, he was compelled to a reticence which permitted him to touch only the surface of the subject. This was inevitable under the present rule of Cant[FN#359] in a book intended for the public: but the same does not apply to my version of The Nights, and now I proceed to discuss the matter serieus.e.m.e.nt, honnetement, historiquement; to show it in decent nudity not in suggestive fig-leaf or feuille de vigne.

D.--Pederasty.

The "execrabilis familia pathicorum" first came before me by a chance of earlier life. In 1845, when Sir Charles Napier had conquered and annexed Sind, despite a fraction (mostly venal) which sought favour with the now defunct "Court of Directors to the Honourable East India Company," the veteran began to consider his conquest with a curious eye. It was reported to him that Karachi, a townlet of some two thousand souls and distant not more than a mile from camp, supported no less than three lupanars or borders, in which not women but boys and eunuchs, the former demanding nearly a double price,[FN#360] lay for hire. Being then the only British officer who could speak Sindi, I was asked indirectly to make enquiries and to report upon the subject; and I undertook the task on express condition that my report should not be forwarded to the Bombay Government, from whom supporters of the Conqueror's policy could expect scant favour, mercy or justice. Accompanied by a Munshi, Mirza Mohammed Hosayn of Shiraz, and habited as a merchant, Mirza Abdullah the Bushiri[FN#361] pa.s.sed many an evening in the townlet, visited all the p.o.r.neia and obtained the fullest details, which were duly despatched to Government House. But the "Devil's Brother"

presently quitted Sind leaving in his office my unfortunate official: this found its way with sundry other reports[FN#362] to Bombay and produced the expected result. A friend in the Secretariat informed me that my summary dismissal from the service had been formally proposed by one of Sir Charles Napier's successors, whose decease compels me parcere sepulto. But this excess of outraged modesty was not allowed.

Subsequent enquiries in many and distant countries enabled me to arrive at the following conclusions:--

1. There exists what I shall call a "Sotadic Zone," bounded westwards by the northern sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean (N. Lat.

43 ) and by the southern (N. Lat. 30 ). Thus the depth would be 780 to 800 miles including meridional France, the Iberian Peninsula, Italy and Greece, with the coast-regions of Africa from Marocco to Egypt.

2. Running eastward the Sotadic Zone narrows, embracing Asia Minor, Mesopotamia and Chaldaea, Afghanistan, Sind, the Punjab and Kashmir.

3. In Indo-China the belt begins to broaden, enfolding China, j.a.pan and Turkistan.

4. It then embraces the South Sea Islands and the New World where, at the time of its discovery, Sotadic love was, with some exceptions, an established racial inst.i.tution.

5. Within the Sotadic Zone the Vice is popular and endemic, held at the worst to be a mere peccadillo, whilst the races to the North and South of the limits here defined practice it only sporadically amid the opprobrium of their fellows who, as a rule, are physically incapable of performing the operation and look upon it with the liveliest disgust.

Before entering into topographical details concerning pederasty, which I hold to be geographical and climatic, not racial, I must offer a few considerations of its cause and origin. We must not forget that the love of boys has its n.o.ble, sentimental side. The Platonists and pupils of the Academy, followed by the Sufis or Moslem Gnostics, held such affection, pure as ardent, to be the beau ideal which united in man's soul the creature with the Creator. Professing to regard youths as the most cleanly and beautiful objects in this phenomenal world, they declared that by loving and extolling the chef-d'?uvre, corporeal and intellectual, of the Demiurgus, disinterestedly and without any admixture of carnal sensuality, they are paying the most fervent adoration to the Causa causans. They add that such affection, pa.s.sing as it does the love of women, is far less selfish than fondness for and admiration of the other s.e.x which, however innocent, always suggest s.e.xuality;[FN#363] and Easterns add that the devotion of the moth to the taper is purer and more fervent than the Bulbul's love for the Rose. Amongst the Greeks of the best ages the system of boy-favourites was advocated on considerations of morals and politics. The lover undertook the education of the beloved through precept and example, while the two were conjoined by a tie stricter than the fraternal.

Hieronymus the Peripatetic strongly advocated it because the vigorous disposition of youths and the confidence engendered by their a.s.sociation often led to the overthrow of tyrannies.

Socrates declared that "a most valiant army might be composed of boys and their lovers; for that of all men they would be most ashamed to desert one another." And even Virgil, despite the foul flavour of Formosum pastor Corydon, could write:--

Nisus amore pio pueri.

The only physical cause for the practice which suggests itself to me and that must be owned to be purely conjectural, is that within the Sotadic Zone there is a blending of the masculine and feminine temperaments, a crasis which elsewhere occurs only sporadically. Hence the male feminisme whereby the man becomes patiens as well as agens, and the woman a tribade, a votary of mascula Sappho,[FN#364] Queen of Frictrices or Rubbers.[FN#365]

Prof. Mantegazza claims to have discovered the cause of this pathological love, this perversion of the erotic sense, one of the marvellous list of amorous vagaries which deserve, not prosecution but the pitiful care of the physician and the study of the psychologist. According to him the nerves of the r.e.c.t.u.m and the genitalia, in all cases closely connected, are abnormally so in the pathic, who obtains, by intromission, the venereal o.r.g.a.s.m which is usually sought through the s.e.xual organs. So amongst women there are tribads who can procure no pleasure except by foreign objects introduced a posteriori. Hence his threefold distribution of sodomy; (1) Peripheric or anatomical, caused by an unusual distribution of the nerves and their hyperaesthesia; (2) Luxurious, when love a tergo is preferred on account of the narrowness of the pa.s.sage; and (3) the Psychical.

But this is evidently superficial: the question is what causes this neuropathy, this abnormal distribution and condition of the nerves.[FN#366]

As Prince Bismarck finds a moral difference between the male and female races of history, so I suspect a mixed physical temperament effected by the manifold subtle influences ma.s.sed together in the word climate. Something of the kind is necessary to explain the fact of this pathological love extending over the greater portion of the habitable world, without any apparent connection of race or media, from the polished Greek to the cannibal Tupi of the Brazil. Walt Whitman speaks of the ashen grey faces of onanists: the faded colours, the puffy features and the unwholesome complexion of the professed pederast with his peculiar cachetic expression, indescribable but once seen never forgotten, stamp the breed, and Dr. G. Adolph is justified in declaring "Alle Gewohnneits-paederasten erkennen sich einander schnell, oft met einen Thick." This has nothing in common with the feminisme which betrays itself in the pathic by womanly gait, regard and gesture: it is a something sui generic; and the same may be said of the colour and look of the young priest who honestly refrains from women and their subst.i.tutes. Dr. Tardieu, in his well-known work, "etude Medico-regale sur les Attentats aux M?urs," and Dr. Adolph note a peculiar infundibuliform disposition of the "After" and a smoothness and want of folds even before any abuse has taken place, together with special forms of the male organs in confirmed pederasts. But these observations have been rejected by Caspar, Hoffman, Brouardel and Dr. J. H. Henry Coutagne (Notes sur la Sodomie, Lyon, 1880), and it is a medical question whose discussion would here be out of place.

The origin of pederasty is lost in the night of ages; but its historique has been carefully traced by many writers, especially Virey,[FN#367] Rosenbaum[FN#368] and M. H. E. Meier.[FN#369] The ancient Greeks who, like the modern Germans, invented nothing but were great improvers of what other races invented, attributed the formal apostolate of Sotadism to Orpheus, whose stigmata were worn by the Thracian women;

--Omnemque refugerat Orpheus F?mineam venerem;-- Ille etiam Thrac.u.m populis fuit auctor, amorem In teneres transferre mares: citraque juventam aetatis breve ver, et primos carpere flores.

Ovid Met. x. 79-85.

Euripides proposed Laus father of Oedipus as the inaugurator, whereas Timaeus declared that the fashion of making favourites of boys was introduced into Greece from Crete, for Malthusian reasons said Aristotle (Pol. ii. 10), attributing it to Minos.

Herodotus, however, knew far better, having discovered (ii. c.

80) that the Orphic and Bacchic rites were originally Egyptian.

But the Father of History was a traveller and an annalist rather than an archaeologist and he tripped in the following pa.s.sage (i.

c. 135), "As soon as they (the Persians) hear of any luxury, they instantly make it their own, and hence, among other matters, they have learned from the h.e.l.lenes a pa.s.sion for boys" ("unnatural l.u.s.t," says modest Rawlinson). Plutarch (De Malig, Herod.

xiii.)[FN#370] a.s.serts with much more probability that the Persians used eunuch boys according to the Mos Graeciae, long before they had seen the Grecian main.