Gently! Hush! Silence! Quiet! Cock an ear! Listen up! Hold your tongue! Quit talking! Hear! Hark! Hearken! — and know that I embarked upon the composition of this four-book opuscule of mine during wearing, grinding nights that had me praying to God standing and seated, until finally I found no further impediment to stop the faucet of my thoughts from emptying like rain clouds into the drainpipe of my pen and onto the surfaces of these pages; and that when I found the pen obedient to my fingertips and the inkpot to the pen, I said to myself, “There can be no harm to my following in the footsteps of that company of men who have rendered their reputations white by covering pages in black, for if they did well, then I too may be considered to have done well, and if they did badly, it may be that one more book is needed to add to their efforts, in which case my book, at least, may be described as perfect, for whatever has perfected something else must be capable itself of being perfect.” Taking this as my starting point, I never paused in the pursuit of my goal and felt no compunction in consigning to it all such words attractive and fascinating and figures admirable and scintillating as bring pleasure to the ear and to the constitution cheer; this, despite knowing that scarce an author can please everyone.
1.1.2
I picture myself, then, as one confronted by some picky fault-finder who says to himself, or to another, “If the author had put his talent to work to compose a book that was of some use, he’d deserve to be praised for it; but it seems to me he has wasted his time for nothing by mentioning on some occasions things that should not be mentioned and on others things that yield no benefit.” My reply to the first point is “How many a pot has called the kettle black!”31 and “You’ve made a bad business worse!”32 and “Make the most of what you’re given!”33 and “So what are you going to do about it?!”34 and “Mind your own business!” and “The accepting eye to every fault is blind!” while to the second it is to point out that one who limps (a) should go easy on himself, (b) shouldn’t try to climb mountains, (c) should tend to his own limp before anyone else’s, and (d) shouldn’t call attention to his limping;35 or as though confronted by someone else who says, “Another of Khurāfah’s tales, Umm ʿAmr!”36—to which I reply, “Many a true word has been spoken by the less than perfect!”
1.1.3
Next, I am confronted by a mighty crowd of priests, abbots, and monks, bequeathers of pious bequests, churchwardens, and sacristans, board-beaters,37 patriarchs, and hegumens, before whom goes the Great Catholicos38 with, before him, the Supreme Pontiff,39 all of them clamoring and havering, mooing and snorting, raging and roaring, shouting and shrieking, fuming and furious, threatening and fulminating, complaining and calumniating, venting, ventilating, and hyperventilating, yelling and gasping, praying and spittle-spraying, thus causing me to say, “Hold your horses! Hold your horses! You have spent your whole lives in the craft of exegesis, so what harm would it do if you were to explain away what it is you don’t like about my book from the get-go, making arguments, as is your wont, that whatever is malformed is in fact comely and whatever seems hideously phrased is in fact elegant? This is something Abū Nuwās made incumbent on you hundreds of years ago, when he said,
Be not stingy in forgiveness if you be a pious man
For your illiberality is but contempt of religion
“and
Be as you wish, for God is kind—
No harm shall befall you if you sin.
Two things alone you must eschew in full—
Ascribing partners40 to God and injuring men.”
1.1.4
If, on the other hand, you say, “Its words are too plain to explain away,” I say to you that only yesterday you were making mistakes, mispronouncing, and maledicting, uttering solecisms and stuttering, erring and aberring, speaking randomly and raggedly, misspeaking and randomly mouthing off, rambling and roaming, raving, ranting, and talking irrationally, faltering and floundering, babbling like foreigners, bumbling as though you had plums in your mouths and mumbling as though your mouths were covered, dragging out your words and wagging your tongues mischievously (and at great length too), stammering, yammering, and pronouncing letters like Qurʾān readers,41 tripping over your ts, prattling, faltering,42 and battologizing, hemming and hawing and hawing and hemming, talking as though you had a bone in your throats, swallowing your words, lifping your fs, mumbling as though you’d lost your teeth, speaking as though you were belching and vomiting, prattling incoherently, burbling like emptying water jars and squawking like parrots, talking nonsense, snarling like wolves tearing at their prey, howling, and ending up running out of breath like winded horses — so at what point did you acquire the knowledge that would allow you to understand it?
1.1.5
And if you say that one part (the bad part) is comprehensible and the other part incomprehensible, I reply, “Perhaps the part you don’t understand consists of precisely those good features that compensate for the work’s bad, and, anyway, under no circumstances do you have the right to burn the book.” I swear by my life, even if the only thing it had to intercede for it and give it currency with the literati, and with you too, as a literary work, were its enumeration of so many synonyms, that would be enough! Yet, in fact, there is more: the book contains sufficient discussion of beauty and beautiful women — God prolong their glory! — to require that it be extolled and its author be lauded while alive and eulogized when the time comes for him, unwillingly, to part their company.
1.1.6
In addition to which, I know many a noble churchwarden whose virtues are acknowledged among men and yet has no compunction about referring to “things quivering,” “things rounded,” “things tightened,”43 “things huge,” “things ‘the size of mountains,’” or “things hard and vigorously thrusting,” nor about making mention of the pudendum big, the pudendum large, the pudendum swollen, the pudendum huge, enormous, the pudendum vast, the thick, raised pudendum and the raised, thick pudendum,44 the pudendum thick of lip, the vulva huge, the vulva mighty, the vulva long of clitoris, the buttocks, the vulva’s inner chamber and space, the wide wet one and the bulgy one, the big brutish one and the just plain large one,45 the genitals of either sex, the woman’s droopy one, the skinny one, the buttocks but with a slightly different spelling,46 the anus, the flabby vulva, the pudendum shaven, the woman whose vulva is huge, the woman with a huge vulva with widely separated edges, the woman whose vulva squeaks when it’s entered, the woman with the dry little scrawny one, the woman with the emaciated one, the woman with the tiny vagina a man can’t get at, the woman who holds the man’s semen inside her womb, the woman who flashes her “thing” and her belly folds, the woman the clefts at the head of whose womb are narrow and who holds herself rigid on her side for the man,47 the woman whose vagina makes a sound when entered, the woman broad-buttocked as a donkey whose vulva also makes a sound, the one whose vagina makes another kind of sound, the woman who swoons during intercourse and the woman who faints during intercourse, the woman who menstruates from her anus, the woman with a wide vagina, the woman the meaty parts of whose vagina are tight, the woman whose vagina is wide open and the woman whose vagina is open wide,48 the woman whose vagina may be either small or capacious, the woman whose vagina and rectum have been torn so that they have become one, the broad-vagina-ed and debauched woman, the uncircumcised woman with torn vagina and rectum who is also incontinent, the women so much fucked that, like an overused she-ass, she’s developed a medical condition in her womb, the woman with the tiny vagina a man can’t get at (again, but a different word),49 the woman who covets the man during intercourse,50 the woman who wets her bed, the woman who excretes when laid, the tight woman, the woman who whinnies through her nostrils during intercourse like a lunatic, the woman who derives her pleasure from the edges of her vagina, the woman who gushes water during intercourse, the woman whose belly’s so big they say, “Bravo!”, the woman who’s no good at intercourse, the woman whose vagina is droopy with large edges, the woman with the long clitoris, or the woman who doesn’t keep herself covered when alone with her husband; nor about the thick clitoris, the clitoris tout court, the prepuce of the clitoris or that of the girl before she’s been cut, the semen in the womb, the woman’s womb itself,51 the folds that protect the clitoris, the part between the backside and the front, the side of the vagina, the back of the vagina, the edges or sides of the womb, the testicles, the clitoris said with a funny accent,52 the pelvic bone, the navel, the flabby belly between the navel and the pelvis, the tip of the clitoris, the glans, the “knotty rod,” the man with a strong penis, the “thick stick,” the large glans, the tip of the glans if it’s broad, the edges of the glans, the donkey’s glans, the donkey’s penis, the fly’s penis, the large limp penis, the large glans, the foreskin of a boy if it widens so far that the glans emerges, and a vein in the penis; nor about extra hard erections, ordinary erections, pricks that commit fornication, women’s stuffing of their vaginas with rags so that their wombs won’t come out, women’s spreading their legs wide during coitus, a man’s practicing coitus with one woman and then another before ejaculating and a man’s practicing coition with one women and then another before ejaculating,53 one slave-girl’s hearing the sounds made by her master when he’s with another slave-girl, and a little-used word for plain copulation,54 the spontaneous leaping of she-camels by he-camels, emaciation resulting from incessant intercourse, lusting for intercourse, sleep taken after intercourse, having intercourse with one’s slave girl by merely inserting and withdrawing because not wishing to ejaculate, withdrawing before ejaculation because not wanting children, thrusting it into her the whole way, ejaculating into the womb, people who fuck frequently, men with long genitalia, vaginas that excite, men intercourse with whom is sure to result in pregnancy, men who find it difficult to have intercourse with a woman, the hard man who keeps on fucking, the deflowering of pre-pubescent girls, sitting between a woman’s thighs in order to have intercourse with her, women’s emptying a man of all his seed, a noun meaning copulation from which no verb is formed,55 something white that comes out of the vulva, the curing of the thing resembling a scrotal hernia that emerges from a woman’s vulva and makes intercourse impossible, having protuberant buttocks (of a woman), the nympha at the base of the clitoris, to push forth its penis (of a donkey), women voracious as lionesses, dashing water on one’s vagina,56 the external parts of the vulva, the thing resembling a scrotal hernia that emerges from a woman’s vulva and makes intercourse impossible, the protuberant part of the womb, and the flesh of the inner part of the vulva;57 nor about the vulva (especially when large), the vulva said four other ways,58 the flabby vagina,59 the vagina that dries the liquid from the surface of the penis,60 the gaping vagina, the tight vagina, and another name for the vagina,61 the large ugly vagina with long womb flaps, the large wet squeaky vagina, the women’s sexual parts in general, the “bulge,” the “sprayer,” the fleshy vagina, the bizarrely spelled,62 the “shrunken,” the “gripper,” the “nock,”63 the woman sent mad by the cravings of her crevice, the woman’s “wide well,” and the vagina again in another exotic spelling,64 the large floppy one, and other “instruments of erection”;65 nor about mentioning the backside, the posterior, “the thrower,”66 “the catapult,” “the podex,” “the bellower,” “the dunger,” “the winnower,” “the currycomb,” “the sickle,” the khabanfatha,67 “the fontanel,”68 “the dry and sweaty-smelling,”69 “the slimy,” “the watermelon,” “the heater,” “the howler,” “the draining vent,”70 “the toothless one,” “the black one,”71 “the exploder,” “the whistler,” “the greatly swollen,” “the gusher,” “the prominent,” “the swallower,” “the blackener,” “the betrayer,” “the flintstone,” the bunghole, the butthole,72 and other “instruments of cutting off,”73 nor about mentioning the penis, “the falcon’s stand,” “the little bolter,” the huge penis, the huge long penis, the flaccid penis incapable of erection, “the lengthener,” “the little man,” “the big spider,” another rare word for the penis,74 “the strong, crafty wolf,”75 the erect but not very hard penis, “the mast,” “the thimble,”76 “the snub nose,” “the plumb line,” the prick,77 the penis distended and erect, the qaṣṭabīr,78 “the tassels,”79 “the short ugly thing,” “the straight, thick lance,” the huge, strong penis, the hard, dry thing, and other “instruments of attraction”,80 nor about using words meaning to lie with, to have sex with, to compress, to lie with one’s slave girl, to have intercourse, to perform coitus, to have sex with in or out of wedlock, “to prod,” to copulate with, to “push,” to “jab,” to shtup,81 another word of similar form but dubious status,82 to double up like a she-goat during mating, to “bridge,”83 to fuck hard,84 to “string her bow,” to “fill her up,”85 to “kick”86 her, to “nibble” her and a variant,87 to “chafe” her, to “cut” her, to “suckle” her, to “stick the kohl-stick in her kohl-pot,” to “furrow” her, to “push” her, or to “ram it in all the way to the hilt.” I would stare into their faces while they were using such words and see there no trace of either embarrassment’s red or the yellow of dread. On the contrary, their faces would be verdant and cheerful, radiant and joyful—and should anyone, out of sheer pigheadedness, deny that what I say is true and demand of me a list of their names, I’ll tell him, “Here it is, beginning with alif and ending with yāʾ.88 Just think of me as a churchwarden like them.”