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The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10

R >> Richard F. Burton >> The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10




Femina nulla bona est, et si bona contigit ulla
Nescio quo fato res male facta bona est.

In the Psalms again (xxx. 15) we have the old sneer at the three
insatiables, Hell, Earth and the Parts feminine (os vulvae); and
Rabbinical learning has embroidered these and other texts,
producing a truly hideous caricature. A Hadis attributed to
Mohammed runs, "They (women) lack wits and faith. When Eve was
created Satan rejoiced saying:--Thou art half of my host, the
trustee of my secret and my shaft wherewith I shoot and miss
not!" Another tells us, "I stood at the gate of Heaven, and lo!
most of its inmates were poor, and I stood at the gate of Hell,
and lo! most of its inmates were women.''[FN#340] "Take care of
the glass-phials!" cried the Prophet to a camel-guide singing
with a sweet voice. Yet the Meccan Apostle made, as has been
seen, his own household produce two perfections. The blatant
popular voice follows with such "dictes" as, "Women are made of
nectar and poison"; "Women have long hair and short wits" and so
forth. Nor are the Hindus behindhand. Woman has fickleness
implanted in her by Nature like the flashings of lightning (Katha
s.s. i. 147); she is valueless as a straw to the heroic mind
(169); she is hard as adamant in sin and soft as flour in fear
(170) and, like the fly, she quits camphor to settle on compost
(ii. I7). "What dependence is there in the crowing of a hen?"
(women's opinions) says the Hindi proverb; also "A virgin with
grey hairs!" (i.e. a monster) and, "Wherever wendeth a fairy face
a devil wendeth with her." The same superficial view of holding
woman to be lesser (and very inferior) man is taken generally by
the classics; and Euripides distinguished himself by misogyny,
although he drew the beautiful character of Alcestis. Simonides,
more merciful than Ecclesiastes, after naming his swine-women,
dog-women, cat-women, etc., ends the decade with the admirable
bee-woman, thus making ten per cent. honest. In mediaeval or
Germanic Europe the doctrine of the Virgin mother gave the sex a
status unknown to the Ancients except in Egypt, where Isis was
the help-mate and completion of Osiris, in modern parlance "The
Woman clothed with the Sun." The kindly and courtly Palmerin of
England, in whose pages "gentlemen may find their choice of sweet
inventions and gentlewomen be satisfied with courtly
expectations," suddenly blurts out, "But in truth women are never
satisfied by reason, being governed by accident or appetite"
(chaps. xlix).

The Nights, as might be expected from the emotional East,
exaggerate these views. Women are mostly "Sectaries of the god
Wuensch"; beings of impulse, blown about by every gust of passion;
stable only in instability; constant only in inconstancy. The
false ascetic, the perfidious and murderous crone and the old
hag-procuress who pimps like Umm Kulsum,[FN#341] for mere
pleasure, in the luxury of sin, are drawn with an experienced and
loving hand. Yet not the less do we meet with examples of the
dutiful daughter, the model lover matronly in her affection, the
devoted wife, the perfect mother, the saintly devotee, the
learned preacher, Univira the chaste widow and the
self-sacrificing heroic woman. If we find (vol. iii. 216) the sex
described as:--

An offal cast by kites where'er they list,

and the studied insults of vol. iii. 318, we also come upon an
admirable sketch of conjugal happiness (vol. vii. ? 43); and, to
mention no other, Shahryar's attestation to Shahrazad's
excellence in the last charming pages of The Nights.[FN#342] It
is the same with the Katha whose praise and dispraise are equally
enthusiastic; e.g., "Women of good family are guarded by their
virtue, the sole efficient chamberlain; but the Lord himself can
hardly guard the unchaste. Who can stem a furious stream and a
frantic woman?" (i. 328). "Excessive love in woman is your only
hero for daring" (i. 339). "Thus fair ones, naturally feeble,
bring about a series of evil actions which engender discernment
and aversion to the world; but here and there you will find a
virtuous woman who adorneth a glorious house as the streak of the
moon arrayeth the breadth of the Heavens" (i. 346). "So you see,
King, honourable matrons are devoted to their husbands and 'tis
not the case that women are always bad" (ii. 624). And there is
true wisdom in that even balance of feminine qualities advocated
by our Hindu-Hindi class-book the Toti-nameh or Parrot volume.
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 assured, 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 "balls 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 sexes, which extended
and still extends even to the Badawi, must long have been
customary in Arabian cities, and its object was to deliver the
sexes from temptation, as the Koran says (xxxii. 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 pass 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
noble 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 sex 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 "nigger it with a one-wife-man," the case assumes 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,
assign 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 puberty
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,
pronounces 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-Kumayt 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 wassail 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
entitled, "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 breasts 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 pornographic 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 illustrations
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.--Pornography.



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 naive 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 coarseness 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
prostitute: all are as the naive French traveller said of the
Japanese: "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 coeur 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 institutions
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
serieusement, 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] passed many an evening in the townlet, visited
all the porneia 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 shores 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,
Japan 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 institution.

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 noble, 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'oeuvre, 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,
passing as it does the love of women, is far less selfish than
fondness for and admiration of the other sex which, however
innocent, always suggest sexuality;[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 association 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 rectum
and the genitalia, in all cases closely connected, are abnormally
so in the pathic, who obtains, by intromission, the venereal
orgasm which is usually sought through the sexual 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 passage; 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]

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