1.10.10
It seems to me that many qualities considered praiseworthy in men are considered blameworthy in women. Take liberality, for example. Liberality in a man covers all faults, but the same quality is considered blameworthy in a woman, and the same applies to truculence, craftiness, praising people hypocritically, horsemanship, bravery, heroism on the field of battle, callousness, and coarseness, as well as zeal in the pursuit of high office, difficult affairs, distant journeys, hard-to-achieve purposes, impossible ambitions, and so on. The reason for this is that the woman inclines by nature to deviation and excess, as evidenced by those of them who develop a taste for worship and self-abnegation. Such women never know where to draw the line; on the contrary, they go to such lengths that they become obsessed and demented, claiming miracles and supernatural gifts, getting caught up in visions and dreams and imagining that angels are speaking to them and voices whispering in their ears, or that they can bring mortal remains back to life and raise the dead with their prayers. Sometimes they kill their children when they’re still young, in the hope that they will enter Heaven without being held to account, or give birth to twins and claim they were conceived with no father about. Some have a weakness for love and leave their mothers and fathers who bore them and raised them and run off after a man of whose qualities they know nothing except that he’s a male. Everything, then, that women set their hearts on they go to greater lengths over than men, and if they set their hearts on reading, who knows where it will end? What drives them to such exaggeration and excess is their innate awareness that they are stronger in resisting sensual pleasures than men; having extra capacity in this area, they go to excess in it, and from there it has spread to other states, affairs, and contingent conditions, as also to certain instinctual matters. These states and so forth include talking and laughing, bustling about and physical exercise. What one of them lacks in a particular area you’ll find immeasurably compensated for in another. What I say may displease women if they come to hear of it when they’re among men, but I’m certain they’ll laugh behind their hands at it in approbation and amazement.
1.10.11
It even seems to me that they’ll decide that I must have lived for a while as a woman and learned their secrets, until such time as God, blessed and almighty, turned me into a man, or that I learned these things from Hind and Suʿād, Mayyah and Zaynab,187 when, as a youth, I would write them love sonnets and lie to them that I’d gone without sleep all night and, complaining of our separation, make up maxims about my plight, saying my soul had been bewitched, my heart from its moorings become unhitched. In fact, we can be sure that it never left me, for if it had, it would never have returned, so often had I burdened it with cares and sorrows of a kind that had never previously bothered anyone in my country. These included mourning if a trope proved uncooperative when I tried to compose in the “novel” style188 something that no one had ever said before, believing it would be accorded the same status as those inventions on which everyone prides himself so much these days, and it wouldn’t come out right for me, causing me to spend the night in torment and despair. I swear before God, “Hind” never spoke to me and I never spoke to her. I just learned what I did from truth-telling dreams, for I spent the nights in sincere repentance and obedience to God, and if they don’t believe me, let them spend a night or two in repentance and obedience as I did and I guarantee them that He’ll send them down enough truth-telling dreams to provide them with a complete overview of men’s affairs.
CHAPTER 11: THAT WHICH IS LONG AND BROAD
189
1.11.1
Let us now return to the Fāriyāq, just as he returned to his profession — namely, the copying of manuscripts — albeit against his will. It happened that at that time two young emirs of the region had decided to study works of grammar at the feet of a grammarian, and the Fāriyāq was present at these classes, bent over his copying. One of the two pupils was slow to understand, quick to answer. He’d yawn and stretch, fidget and fart, slack off and snore, stick out his bum and sneeze. If he thought he’d understood a point, he’d scratch himself under his armpit and smell the scent, sniffing at it with bared teeth and smacking his lips like someone savoring a piece of cottage cheese. Then, out of delight at his own cleverness, he’d kick up a rumpus and tongue-lash the one next to him, saying, “Shame indeed on those of slow comprehension and dim apprehension! How is it that not all men can master grammar’s rules, which is easier than scratching your balls? If all the sciences were like that, I swear I’d have them down pat. I’ve heard, though, that grammar, while being ‘a key to the sciences’ is not regarded as one of them, so the others must be harder.”
1.11.2
Then his tutor would tell him, “Say not so! Say rather, ‘Grammar is the basis of the sciences’ and all the rest are as much in need of it as a building is of a foundation. Have you not observed that the people of our land learn only this and do not stray from it to any other? They think that he who has a command of grammar commands a knowledge of all aspects of the universe. That’s why it’s the only thing they write books about and why the only disputes that arise among them are about which chapters to put before others and the clarification of the ambiguities of that science with proofs and citations. They also disagree over the latter, some saying that they’re fabricated, others that they are determined by the meter or anomalous, though it all comes to the same in the end, namely that a scholar cannot be considered such unless he has acquired a command of grammar and gone deeply into all its finer points, and that almost no business can go smoothly without it. If you were to say, for example, ‘Zayd struck ʿAmr’190 without putting Zayd in the nominative and ʿAmr in the accusative, he would not in fact have struck him, and it would be wrong to depend on the information thus conveyed, for a true understanding of the nature of the act of striking is dependent in this instance on knowing that Zayd is in the nominative. Any language that has no markers for the nominative is utterly worthless, people understanding one another in the absence of these only by virtue of custom or convention; their books cannot therefore be relied on, however they may multiply, and neither can their sciences, however they ramify. Even though I might toil over this science by day and would often go to bed racking my brains over one of its knotty points or fiendish difficulties, I’d have to spend the whole night awake, unable to find my way to the proper solution to whatever was giving me such trouble. I did, however, derive one great benefit from it that made me eternally grateful to the daughter of Abū l-Aswad al-Duʾalī (since she was one of the reasons for its invention).”191 (To which I would add that all the other rhetorical sciences owe their existence to women, too.)
1.11.3
“And what was that benefit, master?” asked his pupil. Replied the tutor, “I had long harbored doubts over the question of the immortality of the soul and inclined toward the dictum of the philosophers to the effect that whatever has a beginning must have an end. But when I found that grammar has an ‘inchoative’ but no ‘terminative,’ I drew an analogy between that and the soul and ceased to be confused, praise God. Similar to grammar or greater in difficulty is the science of topoi and rhetoric.” “That I have never ever heard of before,” said the pupil. “I, however, have,” said his teacher, “and I know what it covers, which is metaphor, metonymy, figurative usage, punning, morphological parallelism, and more than a hundred other things. Laying all that out in detail takes an age, and one could spend his whole life just on the science of figurative usages and then die and still know little about it, or forget by the end of the book or books what he’d learned at the beginning.