490“they apply the term Khawājā to others”: i.e., to other Christians (from Persian khōjā (“teacher”)).
491“God relieve you (or shrive you or deceive you),” etc. (maṣaḥa llāhu mā bi-ka… aw masaḥa aw mazaḥa…): sirāṭ and zirāṭ are recognized variants of ṣirāṭ (“path”), as busāq and buzāq are of buṣāq (“the best camels”); but masaḥa (“to wipe”) and mazaḥa (“to joke”) are not variants of maṣaḥa and have unrelated, comically inappropriate, meanings.
492ʿAzrāʾīclass="underline" the angel of death.
493“kubaybah… kubbah”: both are dishes made of cracked-wheat kernels, with meat, onions, etc., but the first form is Egyptian, the second Levantine (“kibbeh”).
494“kubbah… patootie… kubbah… pastries!” (fī ʿijānak… kubbah… ʿajīnī): a pair of puns as (1) kubbah means, as well as a certain dish, a “boil” or “bubo” and is used in curses, and (2) ʿijān (“anus”) is from the same root as ʿajīn (“pastry”); the foreign doctor confuses the two meanings in the first case and mishears in the second.
495“like a rugged boulder hurled from on high by the torrent” (ka-julmūdi ṣakhrin ḥaṭṭahu l-saylu min ʿali): a hemistich from the muʿallaqah of the pre-Islamic poet Imruʾ al-Qays (translation Arberry, Seven Odes, 64).
496“One of these giaours (plural of cure)” (aḥada hādhihi l-ʿulūj (jamiʿi ʿilāj)): the plural of ʿilāj (“cure, treatment”) is in fact ʿilājāt, whereas ʿulūj, though from the same root, is the plural of ʿilj (“infidel”); again the doctor confuses the words.
497“Tell the emir that I am, thank God, a bachelor” etc.: a reference to the exchange at the end of 2.10.3.
498“his consul’s office”: in Egypt, legal cases involving a foreigner and an Egyptian could be tried in the foreign plaintiff’s consular court.
499“his turban in Lebanon and its ill-fated fall”: see Volume One (1.2).
500Baḥth al-maṭālib: in full Kitāb Baḥth al-maṭālib fī ʿilm al-ʿArabiyyah (The Book of the Discussion of Issues in the Science of Arabic), by Jirmānūs Farḥāt, a grammar published for the first time under al-Shidyāq’s supervision in Malta in 1836; on Farḥāt, see Volume One (n. 130 to 1.3.2).
501“with no vowel on the rhyme consonant” (sākinat al-rawī): see Volume One (n. 24 to 1.11.8).
502“wa-ʿawlajtu fī-hā”: the metropolitan’s solecism lies in his use of awlajtu, a Form IV, or rubāʿī (mazīd), verb, intransitively, i.e., to mean “I entered,” when it should only be used to mean “I caused (something) to enter, I inserted (something).” For the original letter, see 2.2.15.
503“from habba meaning ‘to rise’” (min habba idhā qāma): the root h-b-b is used in two distinct semantic areas: “to rise,” as in habbat al-rīḥ “the wind rose,” and hibāb, “soot”.
504“Take heed” etc.: Matthew 24:4–5 in the King James Version, with a difference in the translation of the last clause between the Arabic, reflected above, and the English, though it would seem that the translators of the English were as much in error, from the author’s perspective, as those of the Arabic.
505“Let the deacons be the husbands of one wife”: 1 Timothy 3:12: again, the English translators are as guilty as the Arab.
506“Panegyricon” (mamdaḥ): an invented word, literally “a place for eulogizing,” by which the author means the offices of the Egyptian government’s official gazette and the first daily newspaper to be printed in Arabic, namely Al-Waqāʾiʿ al-Miṣriyyah, which was issued for the first time in December 1828 and on which al-Shidyāq worked from January 1829; in its early years, the gazette contained material in both Turkish and Arabic.
507“neglected” (uhmilat): a play on words, as undotted letters are known technically as muhmalah.
508“how can the witness of the instrument itself — the reason for the discounting of its owner’s witness — be valid”: the speaker implies that musicians are not considered ʿudūl (men of probity) and that their testimony cannot be accepted in a court law.
509“demolish the castles where you store your peddlers’ goods, as well as any king’s trumpet!”: perhaps a reference to the destruction of the walls of Jericho by the trumpets blown at Joshua’s command (Joshua 6:20).
510Allāh!: see Volume One (n. 151 to 1.5.3).
511“his ode known as Al-Ghabab”: the reference is to a line in an ode in which al-Mutanabbī mocks his former patron, Sayf al-Dawlah, saying, “He who rides the bull after riding fine horses * Ignores its cloven hoofs and its wattle (aẓlāfahu wa-l-ghabab)” (Mutanabbī, Dīwān, 432).
512“‘nation’ ought to have been put in the dual” (ummatu ḥaqquhā an takūna ummatā): because the “nation of men-and-jinn” could logically be considered two nations.
513al-thaqalayn… thaqīlah… thiqal: the author plays with the root th-q-l, whose basic sense is of heaviness; al-thaqalayn is an idiom meaning “mankind and the jinn,” an appellation explained as being “because, by the discrimination they possess, they excel other animate beings” (Lane, Lexicon).
514“the rule of taghlīb”: taghlīb (“awarding of precedence”) is a stylistically elegant usage according to which the dual form of one noun is used to indicate both that noun and another with which it is closely associated, e.g., al-qamarān (literally, “the two moons”), meaning “the moon and the sun” and al-aṣfarān (literally, “the two yellow things”), meaning “gold and silver”; the argument here, therefore, turns the convention upside down and claims that, since māshiyayn (“two persons walking on foot”), were it an example of taghlīb, would give precedence to the prince, the singular (māshiyan) may be assumed to mean “the prince and others.”
515“the body (singular) of each of the two” or “the bodies (plural) of each of the two,” (jismuhumā aw ajsāmuhumā): i.e., the prince and the squadron should be regarded as consisting of either two entities with one body each or of two entities with a plurality of bodies. Objection may be made that it would be simpler and more natural to take sariyyah as the feminine singular equivalent of sarī, in which case the translation would run, “The prince repaired with the princess” etc. To this the riposte would be that, had the critics entertained this possibility, they would have proposed the dual form of the noun (jismāhumā) as being (along with the singular) the “more chaste” option, rather than the plural (ajsāmuhumā).