3.5.7
And this is the purpose of this chapter — to alert people to the fact that this is one of those customs whose practice people misunderstand, since there is nothing in the backside to indicate anger. On the contrary, the locus of the latter is the front side. If a woman faces her husband when she lies down and scowls at his face, wrinkles her brow, sticks her nose in the air, blocks her nostrils, and closes her eyes so that she cannot smell his smell or see his ugly countenance, or covers both mouth and nostrils with her hands, her sleeve, or a handkerchief, that is a sign of anger, but when she turns her backside to him, there is nothing to indicate that. Were you to tell me that if she faced him she still might faint at his breath because the foul smell would inevitably penetrate her nostrils even if they were blocked, from which it follows that she has no alternative but to turn her backside to him, I would reply that in that case it would be better for her to lie flat on her stomach, thus avoiding unpleasantness altogether.
3.5.8
To proceed: the backside is one of those things that people have gone to great lengths to exalt, magnify, and aggrandize both materially and immaterially. On the material side, they use padding, wadding, stuffing, packing, pillows, cushions, supports, bolsters, and bustles to lure the hearts of onlookers and fascinate the minds of suitors. How, one must ask, can one and the same thing be used as a means to contentment and ire at one and the same time? It is a blatant contradiction. On the immaterial side, scholars, litterateurs, and our masters the poets never stop singing its praises and competing in descriptions of its breadth and capacity, one of them going so far as to say
Who has seen the like of my beloved?
She’s like a full moon should it appear.
Her waist comes in today,
A day later her rear.
while ʿAmr ibn Kulthūm spoke of
A rump that the door’s too narrow to admit,
And a waist that’s driven me insane!
Here one must point out that the poet describes the waist simply as a cause of his madness and any implication that it is slender is based on the fact that it drives people insane, since it, like the rump, is not actually visible. The same implicit understanding should preferably be applied to all parts of the body, since had he said “a rump that has driven me insane,” it would be self-evident that it fills the door with some left over. I would also very much like to know whether the al-60 preceding the word bāb (“door”) is generic or referential61 and whether Imam al-Zawzanī62 devoted any attention to the elucidation of this matter.
3.5.9
One of the things that most exercises a woman’s mind and keeps her from sleeping at night is how, through exaltation of that high and elevated place, she may charm any who see her. She may even be so taken up with it that she’s distracted from paying attention to her face and the rest of her body and leave them unadorned. Though her face grow gaunt and the plumpness of her body dissipate with sickness or old age, thus reducing her dependence on her charms, she will still depend on and maintain that, since it is, for her, the capital she uses to attract and arouse desire. There isn’t a woman who doesn’t wish she had an eye in the back of her head so that she could keep it under perpetual observation and maintenance. She may think nothing of standing for an hour, walking for two, or dancing for three but will not sit down for an instant for fear lest it be roughened or squashed, and should she, when walking or dancing, look over her shoulder, it is to draw attention to what lies behind it. Her voluptuous gait and the swinging of her hips are the most entangling snare in which a man’s heart may find itself caught and she walks that way because she knows that the Divine Wisdom has designed things, from before the beginning of time, so that the greatest quantity of flesh and fat (in terms of the rest of the body, not of butchers’ shops) should be in that spot, thus making it an attraction for kings and sultans, emirs and judges, imams and priests, as well as rabbis, mages, sages, scholars, rhetoricians, preachers, men of letters, poets, apothecaries, pharmacists, players of musical instruments, and everyone else — not so that they can make kabobs of its flesh or cooking grease of its fat or light lamps with it or use its skin to make a tabla,(1) but as a means to delight their eyes and bring joy to their hearts (for a man’s eye, despite its small size,63 is never satisfied, even when filled with something a thousand times larger and broader than itself) and as a sign to them that all their wisdom in this world, all their refinement and pride and glory, though they be higher than cloud-scraping peaks or lofty mountains, are still lower than the foothills of that place.
3.5.10
The woman well knows, too, that should you, for example, seat one of the aforementioned great and good before a public convenience(2) that has been placed on a gilded dais over which you have previously raised a silver-coated, decorated, embellished, engraved, and ornamented dome draped with silk and brocade and wreathed with flowers and sweet-smelling herbs, he would scorn to stay there half an hour, whereas he would never scorn to stay next to that lofty structure night and day, without interruption, head bare, hair disheveled, feet naked, mouth open, tongue lolling, spittle dribbling, eyes staring, tail between legs, arms extended, neck twisted, ears pricked, and generally in the vilest shape one can imagine for a person of standing. Things would reach such a point that, should he hear a peep from that place, he’d think the sultan must have sent him an orchestra to congratulate him on such a terrific triumph and comprehensive conquest and imagine that the lute would never have acquired the most plangent sound of all instruments had it not been fashioned in the likeness of a half of that place, and that had it been formed from both halves together it would be heard to speak Arabic complete with grammatical endings; likewise, that the dome takes its shape from it and from it ambergris derives its smell, that the Arabs were so enamored of it that they added the letters of its name to six-letter verbs, which indicate a request for an action or that a thing is considered to possess a certain quality,64 that all the breadth of a man’s chest and all the width of his back are worth nothing compared to the breadth of that thing, that when big-buttocked women press eminent princes with their requests, the princes are brought low, that that posterior sack, whether it be “bearing,” as some poets would have it,65 or “borne,” as in reality it is, is no more of a burden to the one who lifts it than a purseful of gold, that it is the hottest of all the parts of the body in the winter, when it needs no heating, and the coolest in the summer, that being the first part of the body to touch the ground on sitting, it is always smoother than the cheeks and the sides of the neck below the ears, which is why the ʿUdhrī kisser finds more pleasure in kissing it than he does in kissing the chin, nose, eye, or forehead, that in common parlance people give it the names of kings and sultans, men of power and eminence, and leading imams, and that for some (forgive me, Lord!) the Most Beauteous Names66 are as nothing before it, albeit their daily magnificat is to chant, “O Lord, glorious be thy name!”
3.5.11
Well too she knows that many a beast is more intelligent than any human or enjoys a happier state by virtue of instinct, for the male among the dumb beasts is aroused by two lumps of flesh on his female, even though they encompass both front and back,67 only at a known season, while that animal that has been endowed with the power of speech is in a permanent state of arousal over them, frothing and foaming, groaning and moaning, bellowing and whinnying, glugging and gurgling, roaring, driveling, screaming, and drooling, and sometimes going insane as well, for no better reason than a delusion on his part that, being butts, they will help him to pierce the bull’s-eye with his arrow from the front, or what would be the point of all this insanity? Indeed, she knows too that that spot, despite its being located in the lower confines of the body, is vertically aligned with the head, implying that its low placement in no way detracts from its worth or dignity. Even were it to be imagined that it was placed at the level of the feet, it would retain that status and be regarded with exactly the same respect. Some women think it better to bare it than to bare their mouths, for the former is less likely to do harm than the latter, since to this day no one is known to have been killed by anything escaping unexpectedly from the backside whereas slips of the tongue that have resulted in deaths are too numerous to be counted. Based on this, they make a point of going out on windy days, which, in their view, are holy holidays. Some of them think that the backside is worthy of being hung with jewelry, made up, and painted, whether openly or under wraps. As a certain connoisseur of backsides has said,