Impostures. al-Ḥarīrī

square; it was because they was playing double. Why, they was scared of each other, but it was God they ought to be scared of, leastways if they’d got any sense. Then he lined out a hymn:

      You captives once to sin and shame,

      By dire intemperance led,

      Whose thirst was as the fiery flame,

      With burning spirits fed:

      Oh, pause ere yet the cup you drain,

      The hand that lifts it, stay;

      Resolve forever to abstain,

      And cast the bowl away!

      1.6Then he brushed off the dust, and wiped off his mouth, and slung his water-skin under one arm, and tucked his stick under the other. When the crowd seen him get ready to leave, somebody sang out, “Take up a collection for him, take up a collection!” So everybody fished up some money out of their pockets. “Take it,” they said, “and spend it any way you want to, or give it away.” He looked kind of humble, and tucked down his head, and scooped in the money, and began to slip away ever so slow. Whenever anybody tried to walk along with him, or follow him, the preacher shook his hand and said “Good-bye,” so they had to leave him alone, so couldn’t nobody see where he was shoving off to.

      1.7Well, I go sneaking after him (the A-rab feller continued). Every now and then I stop a second and hide so he won’t see me. By and by we come to a cavern in the rock, and he slips inside. I wait a tolerable long time for him to take off his shoes and wash his feet. Then I spring up and make a rush for him. There he is, with a ’prentice sitting over opposite, and baker’s bread—none of your low-down corn-pone—in front of him, and a whole roast goat, and a jug of date-wine.

      “Why, you cheap old humbug!” I shout.

      1.8He got mad then, and looked huffy and bothered both, and I was afraid he was going to go for me. But he swallowed two or three times and quieted himself down. Then he sung:

      I got up and put on a preacher’s gown

      I spoke the good word to all the folks in town

      I took their fews n’ two and I bought a steak

      And I got me some wine and a honey cake

      Hi-dee hi-dee hi-dee hi!

      Hi-dee hi-dee hi-dee ho!

      I’ve had some luck but it’s all been lousy

      I’ve had to live by the bowsy-wowsy

      Ain’t nobody better at foolin’ men

      Or snatchin’ his supper from the lion’s den

      Hi-dee etc.

      Well that lion he was tough and strong

      But I talked to him the whole night long

      He had a heart as big as a whale

      And he fed me his supper right out of a pail

      Hi-dee etc.

      I’ve seen hard times to beat the devil

      But this hep cat is on the level.

      And if life was fair you wouldn’t see

      No cut-rate Jeff high-hattin’ me

      Hi-dee etc.

      1.9Then he says to me, “Come in to supper, or give me up, if it suits you better.”

      So I turn to the ’prentice and swear a colossal nine-jointed oath that he better tell me who his boss was.

      “Why, that’s Aboo Zeid of Sarooj, the school-men’s lamp, alone in the world!”

      There warn’t nothing to do then but go back out the same way I come in. “Good land,” I said to myself, “I never seen nobody like that old blister for clean out-and-out cheek!”

      Glossary

      fews n’ two money or cash in small quantity

       Jeff a pest or a bore

      high-hat to put on airs with, act superior to

      Notes

      The wordplay in §1.1, which sets the tone for the whole collection, might be lexically translated as “when I took for a seat the withers (ghārib) of exile (ightirāb).” The Arabic words ghārib (the upper part of a horse’s back) and ightirāb (being far from home) share the same root letters but are otherwise unrelated. This sort of wordplay (called jinās) occurs in every Imposture. I have not tried to duplicate it in every instance. In this case, the expression “back of beyond” brings together some of the same meanings.

      “Sana” (§1.1) is Sanaa (in Arabic, Ṣanʿāʾ), the principal city of Yemen. Here and elsewhere I have spelled placenames as I imagine my model text would have spelled them. Most of the Impostures begin by stating that the action took place in a particular city or town (See Map, p. xxviii), but nothing specific to that town is ever named or shown, with three exceptions (in Mecca, the pilgrimage; in Baghdad, the caliphal palace; and in Basra the riverbank and the mosque of the Ḥarām tribe). In his discussion of the “fictional landscape” of the Taḥkemoni, al-Ḥarīzī’s Hebrew Impostures, Michael Rand remarks that “the function of the geographical names . . . is not to chart a particular route, but rather to create a general sense of motion and restlessness” (Rand, Evolution, 18). The Imposture form, he goes on to say, is “suited for representing movement as such, not telic movement from a starting point to an end”:

      [Coming] from a particular place and having a specific place to go would constrain Heman and Ḥever [the narrator and protagonist of al-Ḥarīzī’s Impostures] to the point that they could no longer play out their game of unexpected meetings and surprise-recognitions as they roam over a far-flung landscape that is tantalizingly real and familiar and at the same time elusive and fantastic (Rand, Evolution, 22).

      Besides running into Abū Zayd almost everywhere he goes, al-Ḥārith, no matter how far-flung his destination, nearly always finds learned men discussing the fine points of the same linguistic and literary tradition. In that sense, nothing he sees anywhere in the “realm of Islam” really surprises him (Kilito, Séances, 21). It has also been argued that cities in the Impostures figure as spaces where the rule of law applies, as opposed to the wilderness, where Abū Zayd goes to escape justice (Bin Tyeer, “Literary Geography”; see further Zakharia, Abū Zayd, 181–82).

      Date wine (nabīdh, §1.7), being an intoxicant, was often banned by Islamic jurists. Some, however, permitted drinking it before it was fully fermented. As for the disciple, Zakharia thinks he is Abū Zayd’s son, who appears in several of the episodes (Zakharia, Abū Zayd, 128). Apart from who he might be or what he might stand for, he is needed here to introduce Abū Zayd to al-Ḥārith.

      The song in §1.8