controlling words about a woman's attractiveness

A fictitious dialogue between the Arab physician Nafi al-Harith ibn Kalada of Thaqif, who died in 670, and the famous Persian King Khosrau I, who reigned from 531 to 579, seems intended to elevate the status of Bedouin Arabs in the eyes of Persian elites.  The Sassanid Empire under King Khosrau I represented an ancient and highly cultured Persian civilization.  Khosrau I was known in Persian as Anushirwan, which means “immortal soul.”  United under Islam, Bedouin Arabs conquered Persia in the middle of the seventh century.  Al-Harith became chief physician and professor at the Academy of Gundishapur in Persia.  Al-Harith was thus a Bedouin Arab working within the elite cultural sphere in seventh-century Persia.

Right at its beginning, the dialogue highlights status tension between al-Harith and Anushirwan.  The account begins:

On arriving at the court of the Persian King Anushirwan, {al-Harith} was admitted to his presence and, standing erect before the King, was asked by him:

Who are you?

I am al-Harith ibn Kalada of Thaqif.

What is your profession?

Medicine.

Are you a Bedouin Arab?

Yes, I am, and of purest Arab stock, from a tribe that lives in the heart of Arabia.

What need do the ignorant, stupid, ill-fed Arabs have of a physician?

O King, if this description of them is correct, they are all the more in need of someone to remedy their ignorance, compensate their deficiencies and teach them the proper diet.  A person with a well-developed mind knows what to do himself; he discerns what is wrong with himself and preserves his health by taking good care of himself.

The “standing erect before the King” invokes a contrast with bodily postures of status deference, e.g. bowing.  In the dialogue, the King tests al-Harith’s wisdom.  The dialogue makes clear the King’s contempt for Bedouin Arabs and al-Harith’s intellectual superiority over the King.

Al-Harith’s verbal domination of the King does not occur merely through reason.  Al-Harith’s description of a woman’s beauty captivates the King.  Among the King’s questions to al-Harith:

What kind of woman draws the heart most and is most pleasant to behold?

She is — if you can find such a one — a woman of tall and imposing stature, with a broad forehead, a retroussé nose, black eyes, red lips, pale soft cheeks, a generous torso, a graceful neck, eyebrows grown together, swelling breasts, a narrow waist and dainty feet, white skin, thick, curly hair and a fresh and mild complexion, one whom you would fancy, in the dark, to be the shining moon; when laughing, she shows teeth white as camomile and a mouth red as purple; she is like an egg lovingly protected in the nest, softer than fresh butter, sweeter than honey, more exquisite than Paradise and Eternal Life.  Her fragrance is more delightful than that of jasmine and roses; you will enjoy her company and delight to be alone with her.

These words cause the King to laugh so heartily that his shoulders twitched. But he went on to ask:

What is the best time for sexual intercourse?

The latter part of the night, when the belly is emptier, the breath more even, the heart more eager and the womb warmer.  If you choose to enjoy her in the daytime, your eye will feast upon the beauty of her face, your mouth will gather the fruits of her grace, your ear will capture her pleasant strains, and all your limbs will feel relaxed through her presence.

How wonderful a Bedouin you are!  You have been favored with knowledge and endowed with intelligence and understanding.

The King then presented al-Harith with fine gifts and ordered his words to be put down in writing.

A woman’s beauty, even just represented in words, can trump the achievements of an ancient civilization and a king’s rule.

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Notes:

The dialogue account is from HP, p. 212.  Al-Harith initially wins the King’s favor with elegant, formulaic praise of Bedouin Arabs.  The King then interrogates al-Harith with a lengthy set of medical questions.  The questions and responses about women and sex, presented in the context of medical questions, conclude the dialogue.  Ibn Abi Usaibia reports this dialogue from ibn Juljul.  However, ibn Abi Usaibia also reports that al-Harith wrote a “Dialogue on Medical Matters” between himself and King Anushirwan.  HP, p. 215.  Certain medical opinions of Tayādūq (also known as Baradiq) seem to have been influenced by al-Harith’s dialogue, as reported in HP.  See the sexual allure of old women, note [1].  Tayādūq died in 708.  Hence the dialogue reported in HP probably is ultimately from al-Harith.

A beautiful women’s face being like the shining moon and her teeth being lustrous white in an enduring image of female beauty.  For example, a leading physician in twelfth-century Damascus, Rashīd al-Dīn Abū Hulaiqa, wrote this love poem:

O my two companions, I find no sleep
Because I am in love; my heart is captured and chained
By love for a girl whose face outshines the full moon,
Especially through its contrast with her black hair.
I am confused by her, who equals the new moon in beauty,
How strange it is that the moon should lead astray instead of guiding!
She has teeth like a string of pearls,
And her speech is like pearls when scattered.

HP p. 761.

Reference:

HP: Ibn Abi Usaybi’ah, Ahmad ibn al-Qasim. English translation of History of Physicians (4 v.) Translated by Lothar Kopf. 1971. Located in: Modern Manuscripts Collection, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD; MS C 294. Online transcription.

COB-66: repeat until succede

Bureaucrats working late on the holidays preparing the perfect cover sheet or carefully editing, copying, and filing documents may, with the flicker of a fluorescent light, wonder whether their work can stand against the forces of darkness, change, and innovation.  In times of crisis, when defensive walls must be high, thick, and impenetrable, bureaucrats must work longer and harder.  There is no other way.  Failure is not an option.  If some bureaucratic procedure isn’t producing the desired results, don’t give up.  Practice makes perfect.  Keep repeating the failing procedure until it succeeds.

For those for whom work requirements allow for a free evening sometime during the holidays, we suggest sitting at your desk and watching a video of Dakshina/Daniel Phoenix Singh Dance Company performing Ludovic Jolivet’s profound dance, Yoy Y Vengo.  This dance captures the rhythms of a typical bureaucratic work week.  Despite its striving for modernity, modern dance has largely overlooked the significance of office chairs for movement.  Voy Y Vengo rightly places the office chair at the center of modern movement.

Pragmatic Euphony has a fascinating description of how the Chinese selected bureaucrats in the fifteenth century.  Bureaucrats took civil service exams over three days while living in a tiny little exam room: “The only movement allowed was the passage of servants replenishing food and water supplies, or removing human waste.”  Such an exam is excellent preparation for bureaucratic work.

As learned literary critics have expostulated, nursery rhymes encode transgressive semiotics.  Proper regulation of offensive nursery rhyme significations is imperative in a society that respects international human rights law.  Bureaucrats have stepped up to this unpleasant job.

That’s all for this month’s Carnival of Bureaucrats.  Enjoy previous bureaucratic carnivals here.  Nominations of posts to be considered for inclusion in next month’s carnival should be submitted using Form 376: Application for Bureaucratic Recognition.

American University Library moving quickly to electronic resources

American University Library, a leading academic library, is rapidly increasing its patrons access to electronic resources.  Electronic resources in fiscal year 2011 accounted for 74% of the American University Library’s collections expenditure.  That’s up from 59% two years ago.  Five years ago, the library’s journal collection was split 50-50 between print and electronic.  Now the journal collection is 99% electronic.  The journal collection offers access to about 85,000 e-journals.  Access to such a vast collection of journals simply would not have been possible in print.

While the average yearly cost per e-journal is less than $36, some electronic subscriptions are quite expensive.  American University Library’s access to Early English Books Online cost a $134,000 purchase fee plus $1,050 per year.  Early English Books Online contains electronic versions of every book published in English between 1485 and 1700.  That’s a wonderful resource and well worth the price paid.

Resources such as Early English Books Online could be much cheaper.  None of the books in that collection are under copyright.  If Google had scanned those books, Google would have been willing to make them freely available to everyone around the world.  Moreover, the ability to search and download Google Books is much better than the capabilities offered through many library e-book subscriptions.

Compared to traditional scholarly publishers, Google’s offerings better serve libraries’ mission, but require more changes in libraries’ normal patterns of activity.

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Statistics: American University Library’s electronic resources, fiscal years 2009-2011

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Source note: All the statistics above are either from the American University Library Annual Report 2010-2011, or calculated from data in that report.

the history of paratextual organization

Reading practices affect how text is organized within books.  Ancient Greek elite culture emphasized voiced reading of texts with acute concern for diction and style.  Ancient Greek texts, and beginning in the second century GC, Latin texts, were written in capital letters without any spaces between words, without any punctuation, and without any division among sentences, paragraphs, or chapters (scriptio continua).  That textual organization supported intensive teaching and rehearsal in declaiming a specific text.

Spacing between words and other textual articulations support rapid silent reading oriented towards conceptual reasoning.  In Europe, protoscholastic Irish monks at the periphery of elite classical reading practices pioneered word spacing in Latin in the seventh and eight centuries.  This textual practice gradually spread east and south across Europe in subsequent centuries.  Word separation became normal in French manuscripts only in the eleventh century.[1]  Flourishing scholasticism in twelfth and thirteenth century France generated highly articulated texts with section labeling, section numbering, and script and layout distinctions.  Standard numbering of chapters in the (Latin) Bible began in Paris about 1230.[2]  These textual features served readers who were silently reading, analyzing, and referencing specific pieces of text.

In the Islamic world, scholarly study of classical Greek texts prompted new textual organization in the tenth century.  According to Ibn Abi Usaibia, Ja’far Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Abu al-Ash’ath led this development:

He delved deeply into Galen’s books and wrote commentaries on many of them. He divided each of the “Sixteen Books” in parts, chapters and paragraphs in such a manner as had never been done before.  This has proved of great help to users of Galen’s books, for it facilitates locating what is wanted, furnishes references to any topic which is desired to be studied and gives information about the contents and purposes of any portion.  He divided many of the works of Aristotle and others in the same way. [3]

This description explicitly links conceptual study (writing commentaries, referencing topics to be study) to articulating the text.  The reference to direct access to any portion of the text almost surely implies a text-numbering scheme.

Textual study by Arabic scholars in the tenth century and European scholars in the thirteenth century produced similar textual articulations.  The division of a text into words, sentences, paragraphs, and chapters is easy to take for granted today. Such textual organization, however, developed only in circumstances of conceptual textual study.

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Notes:

[1] Saenger (1997) p. 23

[2] Blair (2010) pp. 38-9.  Dominicans of the House of St. Jacques in Paris  introduced chapter numberings in a bible concordance that they created from 1230-47.  The printer Robert Estienne introduced Bible verse numbering in a New Testament that he printed in 1551.

[3] HP p. 473.  Ibn Abu al-Ash’ath was active about 960 GC.  Arabic texts always had word separation.  Ancient Arabic, like ancient Hebrew and other ancient Semitic texts, was written without vowels.  Hence word separation was necessary for unambiguously interpreting a text.  Knowledge transmitted to Europe through Arabic texts contributed to the development of word separation in Latin:

Arabic scientific writings, when translated into Latin, brought word separation with them and formed the earliest body of writings to circulate invariably in word-separated text format.  In these writings, untranslated Arabic phrases, written in Latin transliteration, were always separated, unlike analogous Greek passages in Latin texts, which had been written in unseparated script, except when copied by Irish scribes.

Saenger (1997) pp. 124-5.  Apparently not recognizing the evidence from ibn Abu Usaibia, Blair (2010), p. 26, locates in thirteenth-century Egypt the Arabic development of “hierarchical and numbered divisions of the text, running heads, lettering of different sizes and colors, and tables of contents.”

References:

Blair, Ann. 2010. Too much to know: managing scholarly information before the modern age. New Haven: Yale University Press.

HP: Ibn Abi Usaybi’ah, Ahmad ibn al-Qasim. English translation of History of Physicians (4 v.) Translated by Lothar Kopf. 1971. Located in: Modern Manuscripts Collection, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD; MS C 294.

Saenger, Paul. 1997. Space between words: the origins of silent reading. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press.