Ahmad al-Shidyaq: Leg over Leg: Volumes Three and Four

The Library of Arabic Literature series offers Arabic editions and English translations of significant works of Arabic literature, with an emphasis on the seventh to nineteenth centuries. The Library of Arabic Literature thus includes texts from the pre-Islamic era to the cusp of the modern period, and encompasses a wide range of genres, including poetry, poetics, fiction, religion, philosophy, law, science, history, and historiography.

Books in the series are edited and translated by internationally recognized scholars and are published in parallel-text format with Arabic and English on facing pages, and are also made available as English-only paperbacks.

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Philip F. Kennedy

General Editor, Library of Arabic Literature

This paperback edition differs in a few respects from its dual-language hardcover predecessor. Because of the compact trim size the pagination has changed, but paragraph numbering has been retained to facilitate cross-referencing with the hardcover. Material that referred to the Arabic edition has been updated to reflect the English-only format, and other material has been corrected and updated where appropriate. For information about the Arabic edition on which this English translation is based and about how the LAL Arabic text was established, readers are referred to the hardcover.

What Manner of Creature Might He Be

OTHERWISE ENTITLED DAYS, MONTHS, AND YEARS SPENT IN CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF THE ARABS AND THEIR NON-ARAB PEERS BY

The Humble Dependent on His Lord the Provider

Fāris ibn Yūsuf al-Shidyāq

The writings of Zayd and Hind these days speak more to the common taste

Than any pair of weighty tomes.

More profitable and useful than the teachings of two scholars

Are what a yoke of oxen from the threshings combs.

3.1.1

Are they not enough, the troubles to which men are subject by way of misery and care , effort and wear , toil and disease , hardship and dis-ease , of deprivation and lucklessness , despair and unhappiness ? Men are carried to nausea and craving, born in pain and suffering, nursed to their mothers’ detriment , weaned to their imperilment . They crawl only to stumble , climb only to tumble , walk only to lag , labor only to flag , find themselves unemployed only by hunger’s pangs to be destroyed . They languish and grow weak when they go without , suffer indigestion when they eat and grow stout . When they thirst, they lose weight , and when they drink, become sick as poisoned birds, gulp air, and nauseate . Lying awake at night, they waste away, worried and fraught , and sleeping, their allotted share of hours goes by and gains them naught . Old and feeble, they’re a burden to kith and kin , yet, should they die before their time, they cause them such grief as may do them in .

3.1.2

In the midst of all this, they must strive to obtain the means to earn their daily bread , while tormented by the need to make a show of dress and thread . The bachelor’s desperate to find a woman to call his own , the family man preoccupied with spouse and care of children, be they young or grown . When they fall ill, he does so too and when they mourn , he mourns and grieves in turn . Woe to him should his wife be overly fertile , but so too should she be barren and sterile , for then he sees other married men surrounded by bonny faces and children with pleasing graces and says to himself, “Verily, in sons lies all this world’s pleasure , and I am as one who dies (and what a fate!) leaving no successor !”

3.1.3

How often by the fall of a single fingernail is the whole body defeated , how often by the extraction of a single molar is most, if not all, of its power to endure depleted —not to mention the sicknesses that defy all doctors’ skills , the chronic ills , the passage of time and the passing of the years , the succession of sorrows and shifts of fortune that this worn-out, debilitated body bears , for in winter it is exposed to wind, nasal congestion, sputum, and the damp chills, to incontinence and miasmatic airs ; in summer, to cholera, fever, and headache, bloating, and stagnant weirs ; in spring, to the imperious demands of the rising blood and its evil commands ; in autumn, to the stirring of the black bile, the wind’s bane and its piercing of the bone .

3.1.4

In addition, some are born afflicted with (among the various defects and diseases)

janaʾ ,

“bending of the upper back over the chest”

or fasaʾ ,

“prominence of the chest and bulging of the abdomen”

or faṭaʾ ,

“concavity of the back and convexity of the chest”

or ḥadab ,

“too well-known to require definition” [hunching of the back]

or ḥusbah ,

“the whitening of a man’s skin as a result of a certain disease, followed by the corruption of his hair, after which his skin turns white and red”

or ḥaṣbah ,

“pustules that break out on the body”

or shabb ,

“a disease, too well-known to require definition” [?]

or ḍabūb ,

“a disease of the lip”

or ṭanab ,

“length in the legs combined with laxness, or in the back”

or ʿakab ,

“thickness of the lip or chin”

3.1.5

or a ghaḍbah ,

“a fleshy lump on the upper eyelid (as an inborn defect)”

or ghiḍāb ,

“a certain disease, or smallpox”

or ghalab ,

“thickness of the neck”

or qalab ,

“extroversion of the lip”

or qulāb ,

“disease of the heart”

or quwabāʾ ,

“those things that appear on the body and break out on it”

or kanab ,

“a thickening that covers the leg and hand”

or kawab ,

“thinness of the neck and largeness of the head”

or nāqibah ,

“a malady that affects a person as a result of extended intercourse”

or jawath ,

“largeness of the belly in its upper part, or flaccidity of the same in its lower”

or khawath ,

“flaccidity of the belly”

3.1.6