A Boswell of Baghdad | Page 3

fount being the greatest of his pleasures.
Thereafter, until the year 1281, the Kadi lived with much honour, famed as the most learned and widely-read personage in Damascus, filling his house with scholars and discursive amateurs of verse, and engaging in conversations that are described by a friend as "most instructive, being entirely devoted to learned investigations and the elucidation of obscure points."
But Ibn Khallikan, who was now nearing three-score years and ten, was destined still to misfortune, for suddenly, in 1281, he was deposed from his kadi-ship and, more than that, thrown into prison on the charge of having made a remark detrimental to the sultan, Kalavun. A pardon soon after arriving, he was liberated and again reinstated; but after ten more months as a kadi he was, in 1282, dismissed finally, and this time he refused ever more to leave his house, and died there in the same year.
Not a word (you will say) so far as to Baghdad. But although Ibn Khallikan spent most of his life in Egypt or Syria, the greater number of his heroes were, as I have said, citizens all of the city of the romance which recently has fallen to Sir Stanley Maude's gallant forces. Yet of the romance which we shall always associate with Baghdad he knew nothing. To him it was delectable (and perhaps even romantic too--each of us having his own conception of what romance is) because grave bearded men there taught religion, explained the Koran, disputed as to points of grammar, exchanged sarcasms and swapped verses. Not, however, as I hope to show, unamusingly.
What indeed I particularly like about the book is the picture that it gives of sardonic pleasantry and intellectual and sophisticated virtuosity going quietly on side by side with all the splendours and barbarities of absolute autocracy and summary jurisdiction. It throws a new or unaccustomed light on those days. Not even yet--not even in Bloomsbury, where the poets meet--have we in England anything quite like it; whereas when Baghdad and Damascus were the theatres of these poetical and hair-splitting competitions our ancestors had but just got the woad off.
III.--MEN OF LETTERS
Those of us who know Baghdad only through the Arabian Nights and the ingenious productions of Mr. Oscar Asche, were not prepared for such a complete foreshadowing of the literary life and the literary temperament as Ibn Khallikan gives us.
Here, for example, is a poem by a book-lover--or manuscript-lover, to be more exact--written by Ibn Faris Ar-Razi, the philologer, who died before the Norman Conquest, which a later Occidental can cheerfully accept and could not much improve upon: They asked me how I was. I answered: "Well, some things succeed and some fail; when my heart is filled with cares I say: 'One day perhaps they may be dispelled.' A cat is my companion; books, the friends of my heart; and a lamp, my beloved consort." That is modern enough! Something of this kind, which is an earlier version of Omar Khayy��m's famous recipe for earthly bliss, has often been attempted since by our own poets; but nothing better. Favourite books, a lighted lamp, a faithful cat, and the library were paradise enow. It is odd, by the way, that Omar Khayy��m himself, although his dates qualify him, is not found in this work. But to make tents, even with leanings towards astronomy, was no high road to Ibn Khallikan's sympathies. Had Omar explained the Koran or had views on the suffixes of words, all would have been well.
While on the subject of sufficient paradises let me quote some verses by Ibn Sukkara Al-Hashimi, a famous Baghdad poet of the tenth century: The winter set in, and I provided myself with seven things necessary when the rain prevents us from pursuing our usual occupations. These things are: A shelter, a purse, a stove, a cup of wine preceded by a bit of meat, a tender maid, and a cloak.
Ibn Khallikan does not let it stop there, but fishes up from his memory a derivative, by Ibn Al-Taawizi, running thus: When seven things are collected together in the drinking-room, it is not reasonable to stay away. These are: Roast meat, a melon, honey, a young girl, wax-lights, a singer to delight us, and wine.
So much for the modernity and sense of comfort of the Persian author, as he flourished in Baghdad all those years ago. But there was then still more in publishing than yet meets the eye. The books of the juriconsult, Al-Mawardi, for example, reached posterity almost by chance. While he lived he did not publish any of his works but put them all up together in safety. On the approach of death, however, he said to a person who possessed his confidence: "The books in such a place were composed by me, but