Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded, with Risible Rhymes. Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī

derived from taʾannus (“friendliness”), or uns (“friendliness”), or muʾānasah (“intimacy”), since, when Adam, God’s blessings and peace be upon him, saw Eve, he felt friendly towards her (anisa ilayhā) and ran to her. Consequently, one finds that men run after women and are drawn to them, for they are the acme of desire, the fragrant nosegays of men’s hearts. It is said that a man once passed a beautiful woman and recited:

      Women are devils created for us—

      God save us from those devils’ ways!

      To which the woman replied:

      Women are nosegays created for you—

      And all of you love to sniff nosegays!

      Niswān is of the pattern of jirwān (“puppies”), niswah of the pattern of qahwah (“coffee”) or ʿajwah (“pressed dates”), and nisāʾ of the pattern of kisāʾ (“clothes”); fusāʾ (“silent farting”) may also be a contributing element.

      11.7.4

      The meaning is: “I am afraid for myself and am frightened at what has befallen me, so while in this state I go off quickly, and ‘flee,’ that is, make a quick departure, towards ‘the womenfolk,’ and hide myself among them” or “I sit next to them or facing them,” as in the proverb “Half of valor is knowing when to flee.” Even ʿAntarah, for all his strength and courage, fled, saying, “I would rather be reproached for this than be killed!” for if anyone is in fear of an oppressor or of one who might do him harm and he is able to free himself from his clutches by fleeing, he may do so. The Almighty has said, «Cast not yourselves into perdition!»²⁵³

      11.7.5

      If it be said, why did the poet choose to take refuge with the women rather than the men, even though women are incapable of fending off harm and injury or of protecting any person who might be taken from their midst because of their weakness and inability to fight, we would reply that the answer may be from either of two perspectives. First, that, when this disaster took him by surprise and the tax collectors arrived unexpectedly and his joints went loose and he suffered an attack of the trots, he shat all over himself, as explained above, and was unable to stand up or make his way towards any man with whom he might hide himself or towards any place far from the village in which he might conceal himself, because he was so scared and was shitting on himself so much—and indeed farting on himself, the latter being, as we shall see, a concomitant of the former—and when he saw these women near him, or near the place where he was, he concealed himself among them. Second, it may be understood from what he says that he was weakhearted and a coward, incapable of standing up to or trading blows with others, or of any other type of men’s business, and that he was afraid that if he went to any of the people or to any of his relatives, they would direct the Christian to him, and the latter would take him and use him ill, and take his revenge on him; for the peasants give one another no quarter and do not maintain kindly relations among themselves, especially where relatives are concerned, as previously noted²⁵⁴—and everything has a foe of its own kind. As the poet says:

      Everything has a foe of its own kind—

      Even iron is attacked by the file!

      11.7.6

      Additionally, women are not implicated in this business, so no one who saw them congregated in a place would suspect that they had a man in their midst, unless some circumstantial evidence should happen to give him away, and propriety would probably prevent anyone from searching them. Our Master Ḥassān,²⁵⁵ God be pleased with him, hid among the women during certain raids because of his cowardice and lack of courage, as mentioned in the various biographies of the Prophet. Thus the answer now is clear.

      Subsequently, since his taking refuge among the women required something to actually conceal him from his enemies and hide him from sight, he says:

      11.7.7

      wa-ltaffu bil-ʿabā (“and wrap myself in my cloak”): that is, “when I am seated in the midst of the women, or next to them, or opposite them, I wrap myself in my cloak (ʿabā), or I lie down after wrapping myself in it, in order by so wrapping myself to rid myself of my fears”—for one who is frightened will conceal himself in anything that he sees, be it a cloak or a robe or anything else that may hide him from sight. He may even go so far as to dress himself as a woman and so disappear from the sight of his enemies and be saved by the Almighty.

      11.7.8

      It once fell out that a certain king was searching everywhere for a rebellious subject in order to kill him and was told, “He is in such and such a village.” So he sent one of his officers after him with a contingent of soldiers, who entered the village and surrounded it. When the man realized that they wanted to take him to the king, he put on women’s clothing and went out among a throng of women, all of them wailing and weeping and shrieking. “What’s the matter with those women?” asked the officer. “Ask them what they’re doing!” So a company approached them and questioned them, and they replied, “A relative of ours has died in another village and we wish to go to him,” and they allowed them then to pass and they proceeded—the fugitive, unknown to the officer, among them—until the man had passed through the soldiers and gone his way and the Almighty saved him.

      11.7.9

      A similar incident once befell me when I was in a ship traveling from my town, Shirbīn, to Cairo.²⁵⁶ We were passing by a village called Masīd al-Khiḍr²⁵⁷ when a good-looking youth appeared, handsomely dressed in the uniform of an emir’s servant, who cried out to the ship’s captain, “Take me with you!” and beseeched and implored him in great distress to take him on board. The captain, however, refused, fearing that someone might be coming after him looking for him or following his tracks. At the same time, there were three women in the boat, one of them elderly. “Captain,” said the last, “a young man in distress asks you to take him with you, and you do not accede to his plea or have mercy on him? Pull in to the shore, take him, and I’ll come up with a trick to hide him from those who’re looking for him. I’ll conceal him among my daughters and no one will know who he is!” So the captain did as she said and took the youth on board. Once on the ship, he informed us that he was in the service of an emir and that he had duped him and fled and that he was certain to come after him. “Take off your clothes!” the woman told him, so he took them off. Then she took them and hid them among her things and dressed him in women’s clothes and sat him next to her. While we were thus engaged, an emir appeared riding a horse, spurring it on for all he was worth, men and slaves behind him, till they drew abreast of the ship and he said to the captain, “Pull in to the shore so I can search you! A serving boy of mine has just now fled, taking with him a thousand dinars that he stole.” The woman told the captain, “Pull in and don’t be afraid!” so the captain pulled in to shore and everyone on the ship was frightened at what was going on. The emir and his helpers boarded and searched the ship, while the woman exclaimed, “We saw nothing of the sort! What we did see was a young man in the distance running in such and such a direction.” Propriety and lack of grounds for suspicion prevented the emir from searching the women, so he left the boat empty-handed, but the young man stayed with us on the boat until it reached Cairo, and he went off to his family, safe and sound.

      11.7.10

      The poet, seeing this cloak (ʿabāʾah),²⁵⁸ enveloped himself in it and wrapped it around himself. Laff (“wrapping”) means enveloping oneself in something and wrapping it around oneself several times. In the language of the country people, the word is also applied to eating: one says, “So-and-so ‘wrapped’ (laff) a crock of lentils” or “a crock of bīsār,” meaning “he ate it.” And one says dāhiyah taluffak (“May a disaster consume you!”), for example. The poet enveloped himself in the aforementioned ʿabāʾah so as to trick anyone who saw it into thinking that it was just a folded cloak and not suspect that there was anyone inside it. The ʿabāʾah is a long, wide garment made of wool with varicolored stripes, which the country people use as something to lie on in summer and as a cover in winter.²⁵⁹