He who cannot pen a line is blessed with a living fine, while the master of wit sees of victuals not a whit, leading the poet to say:
Billy goats get given their livelihood with ease
While that of the eloquent is refused;
If my eloquence be the cause of my privation,
Let me with the billy goats be confused!
And the leading man of letters al-Būṣīrī, may the Almighty have mercy on his soul, said in a mawāliyā:
The man of great taste stands puzzled and at a loss,
While the billy goat advances and puts on airs.
Lord, let me be a billy goat, son of a dumb billy goat,
If you intend no relief for my cares!
And Ibn al-Rāwandī, God excuse his sins, said:
Allocator of our Daily Bread, how Fate has straitened me!
If You are not to blame, pray tell me, who might be?
You give silver in bushels brimming10 to the Jews
When I don’t have enough to even buy shoes.
You gave me wisdom, but not lucre.
Tell me, without the one, what use is the other?
1.5
It follows that one should stay in tune with one’s days, humor the age by acting in keeping with its ways, be on guard against whatever assaults Fate may bring, and “dance for the ape when he is king.” One should get along with people as best he may, perform any role he may be asked to play, implicate himself in men’s excesses, and number himself among them in their successes. As a poet has said:
Humor them in their homes,
Greet them courteously while their guest.
Make friends with some
That those may help you against the rest.
And in a Tradition it says, “I have been commanded to deal circumspectly with others.”
1.6
The tale is told that a certain king’s imam died. The king said to his ministers and the privy councilors of the realm, “Find me an imam who is God-fearing and ascetic, gentle in nature and unassuming.” Their choice fell on a man of the city who answered to that description but was poor. “Bring him to me,” said the king. When the man appeared, the king honored and made much of him, raising him in rank till he was more exalted than his ministers and showering him with favors. Finding himself in this state, the man started to lord it over his own kind and to treat them with contempt; he ceased to humor people or pay them due respect, and he treated the great men of the realm with contempt. These then agreed to set a trap to destroy him. Now, it was the king’s custom, when it was Friday and he wished to pray in a certain mosque, to send his prayer rug on ahead. There it would be spread out for him, and he would enter and sit on it with this imam beside him. What they agreed to do was to have a small cross of gold and jewels made and to give it, with a gift, to a certain intimate of the king’s who could be trusted to keep a secret, telling him, “Place this under the prayer rug where the imam’s forehead touches it, in such a fashion that no one sees you.” This he did. When the people dispersed following the prayer and the king was about to depart, the mosque attendant picked up the rug and saw the cross. He presented it to the king, who denied all knowledge of it and said to the great men of the realm, “What’s this? This cross has been found under the place where the imam’s forehead touches the rug!” “He must be an infidel,” they replied, “who has been hiding his true nature from us!” At this the king grew angry and ordered the man killed. As his funeral procession passed by, a poet declaimed:
Pious he was, God knows—righteous,
Fair and just, and ne’er before accused.
To which another replied:
He had no sense of how to humor men,
And that’s a sin too great to be excused.
Thus safety lies in humoring others, and using winning ways to get along with one’s brothers. One should adapt himself to their different manners and march under their changing banners, as I make clear in the following lines from a maqāmah of mine:
One day you’ll find me a scholar and a teacher,
The next a sinner and freethinker.
One day you’ll find me buried in the crowd,
The next a lord and master proud.
A pleasant manner, once you have the knack,
Will bring you pendant gems and money by the sack.
THE AUTHOR EMBARKS ON A DESCRIPTION OF THE COMMON COUNTRY FOLK
2.1
Let us now then embark on what we promised in advance and the occasion for all this song and dance—for a man’s knowledge and craft must make themselves heard, and “the piper doesn’t hide his beard.”11 Before wading, however, into the ocean of this verse, and others like it or even worse, we will tell of things that befell the commoners of certain of the people of the countryside, with a description of their vulgarity, scurrility, and personal puerility, of their names that are arsy-varsy and their hats that are topsy-turvy, of their shifts all frayed and their verses disarrayed, and of their disquieting womenfolk with the calamities and disasters they provoke.
2.2
Thus we declare: the baseness of their morals and their lack of refinement are the result of spending so much time in the company of beasts and cattle and of constantly hauling mud and dust, not to mention their lack of contact with the refined and their frequent intercourse with the coarse. They and the beasts are as though created from the same raw material, leading the poet to say:
Befriend not the peasant, be he a musk pot of fragrant bouquet!
Their oxen have let out the secret, that they’re both of one clay.
2.3
Indeed, they never escape their condition of uncouthness, because they spend all their time with the plow and the shovel-sledge and shaking their caps around the threshing floors, or rushing about in the swamps12 and the fields, or bustling around after the crops, or jumping about harvesting and reaping, or plunging into dung and mud, while devoting little time to prayer or religion. For the only things a countryman knows are belts and cudgels, cows and plow-shaft pins, waterwheels and drover’s whips, hauling mud and dung, shouting and screaming, drums and pipes, his leather sandals slung behind his neck, his lance and the shaking of his robe, his palm-fiber belt, straw and net sacks, his tattered garment and tatterdemalion form, his grubby cap and filthy turban, rushing off on raids, disasters and calamities, walking barefoot in the heat and through the esparto grass, and crying out loud in the dark, “Clan of Ḥarām!” At this the war bands gather around him and attack the villages of their enemies, be they Saʿd13 or Ḥarām, and turn out against them to the last man. Thus war and stubborn confrontation arise among them, and villages are ruined at their hands. They block the roads against friend and foe, leading to evil consequences and depriving their villages of benefits.
2.4
All this is due to their lack of intelligence and overwhelming ignorance, the baseness of their morals and their contentiousness—for while all of them in outward show are Muslims, murder to them is no different from debt. Furthermore, they cannot be trusted to keep their word and have no sociability and good cheer. They will not repay a loan and cannot tell what the Law demands from what one is free to decide on his own.14 If you do business with them, they devour you. If you offer them advice, they hate you. If you try to enforce the Divine Law with them,