Are fishermen rude?
There are a lot of stories featuring rude fishermen in this third volume of The Thousand Nights and One Night.
We have Abdullah, the fisherman who catches a merman (also called Abdullah), rather like the fisherman who caught a genie in the first volume. Abdullah is the politest of the fishermen and maintains a good relationship with the merman, and a good relationship with those around him. His local baker, another Abdullah, trusts him so much that he lets the fisherman have bread on credit - though I have noticed that bakers in these stories are far kinder than millers in European tales. Abdullah eventually goes into the underwater world for a little explore. These people with fish tails find him extraordinary because “never in their lives had they seen a bottom, or anything that looked like a bottom’. He ends up feeling extremely self-conscious and breaks off ties with the merman.
Another fisherman, Khalifah, is extraordinarily rude to everyone. He pushes people out the way, frequently threatens to bugger them and is generally brusque and rough. He’s even rude to Haroun Al-Rashid, and Al-Rashid isn’t even in his usual merchant disguise, he’s fully dressed in his royal finery but Khalifah gets him doing chores and threatens him when he’s too slow. In some stories this may mean beheading or a spike up the arse, but Al-Rashid finds it hilarious and blesses the rude fisherman with riches.
There’s another fisherman in ‘The Diwan of Easy Jests’, an interlocked set of silly tales. This fisherman is a pot-head with a keen sense of the absurd. He tells a number of stories, many of them involving the religious arbitrators, the kadi, and donkeys. He is then given the job of wazir, where he enacts skewed pot-head justice through the kingdom.
This volume has two mer-people tales, as the one following Abdullah is a story of a king marrying a mermaid and his son sparking a full on mer-war. You know that Samandal is an evil mer-king because he laughs evily till he farts and has ‘prodigious’ testicles that hang to his knees. His daughter has a bottom splendid enough to merit a whole paragraph.
‘The Tale of Hasan of Basrah’ has an impressive build-up, with a whole frame story dedicated to a quest to find the last and greatest story never heard, and Hasan’s being the result. He’s tricked out of his house by an evil Persian sorcerer and taken by a winged horse to the top of a mountain. He immediately pushes the sorcerer off the mountain, job’s a good ‘un. Naturally he finds a golden palace full of beautiful spirits. He finds a secret door that leads to another palace with even more beautiful women who are birds when they wear feathered cloaks. Rather like a typical selkie myth, he hides the cloak. Also inevitably, she gets it back, so he goes on a desperate quest to win her back. The element I most enjoyed in this story was the woman who loved him but helped him win the selkie-woman because of her love for him. It’s a trope in one of the earlier stories and it’s one I appreciate. What’s most interesting about this story is that it is written differently to many of the other tales, with more addresses to the reader and self consciously luscious writing.
A number of the stories in this volume were more self-consciously muslim. While most of the stories call on Allah and assert Muhammad as his prophet, a number of these tales were more emphatically didactic. ‘The Tale of Young Nur and the Warrior Girl’ was the most bloodily emphatic. The warrior girl was a princess of Constantinople and so a heathen Christian but she converts to Islam because of the quality of Nur’s kindness and love-making. When she is captured and taken back to Christendom, she is baptised in the blood in one hundred muslim men. Of course Nur follows her and they meet in a church where he is hiding as a monk. They have sex in the church, described as “the holiest act in that dark place” and the reader is exhorted to “be ever preserved from chastity, that impure thing.” From the perspective of the tale, a monk’s devotion to chastity is one of his most irredeemable qualities.
Sex appears in many of the tales, but is most interestingly described in ‘The Tale of Kamar and Halimah, the Expert’, where she teaches him the grammar, verbs and nouns of sex and they perform “the battle of legs and thighs” where his “pilgrim’s stick tapped many times down the road that night”. There have been numerous times across the volumes where characters have been proud of the proverb that no muslim woman will die a virgin. In some ways this is expressed as a proud enjoyment of Allah’s gifts but it does lead to a lot of 13 year old ‘women’ being described as ‘ripe’ and that remains queasy no matter how many times it pops up. (Another proverb that popped up was “A camel boy never achieves pilgrimage until he has buggered his camel” - no idea what that one is supposed to mean.)
“The Tale of the Sleeper Wakened” has Haroun Al-Rashid in his habitual disguise and meeting a man who will only have people round for dinner and acknowledge them once because they disappoint him on further meetings. He decides to have fun with the man, drugs him, takes him to the palace and gets everyone to act like he’s the ruler. Then he drugs him and takes him back. Understandably, this makes the man go insane for a while and Al-Rashid feels bad about it and sets him up for life.
Finally, this is the volume with Aladdin in it, or Ali Al-Din. He actually has two genies in this story, one in a ring and one on the lamp. This is very handy for when one of his genies is out of commission. He also has all the wishes he requires and no magic carpet - that’s actually in a separate tale. This story was actually a little hacked up in my copy, with some of the story missing and some of it printed twice - it was actually handy that this tale is one I already knew.
After over 1,700 pages of tales, (not counting the other books of tales I’ve read this year), I’m not getting tale-fatigue but I am getting tale-overload. I’m having to rely on my notes more to extract individual tales as they have become a thick, steaming, aromatic soup of stories in my head. I have another 500-odd pages to go, so I expect the soup to become even thicker.
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