Nafzāwī - The Perfumed Garden of Sensual Delight

THE PERFUMED GARDEN OF SENSUAL DELIGHT

The Perfumed Garden of Sensual Delight has a bad reputation and a tattered history. For over a century, it has been known in English through Sir Richard Burtons bizarre translation (from the French) which consistently elaborated and misrepresented the original. If ever a book needed demystifying, it is this one. Although remarkably lewd at times, it does not linger over details nor does it contrive to excite. It does not, therefore, qualify as pornography. In fact, The Perfumed Garden of Sensual Delight is nothing more than a manual for the ordinary, married man of its authors time and place -Tunisia, in the early part of the 15th century- but one that is not without some entertainment value.

The present translation is not only the first, published English version to be based upon an established Arabic text, but also the first to be translated directly from the original Arabic at all.

JIM COLVILLE has wide experience throughout the Middle East and North Africa as an Arabic/English translator and interpreter. He is currently with the Royal Commission in Jubail, Saudi Arabia.

THE PERFUMED GARDEN OF SENSUAL DELIGHT

(ar-raw d al- t ir f nuzhatil kh t ir)

by

Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Nafzawi

Translated from the Arabic with a short introduction and notes

by

Jim Colville

THE ROUTLEDGE ARABIA LIBRARY VOLUME SEVEN

First published in 1999 by

Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Transferred to Digital Printing 2011

Routledge International 1999

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

ISBN 10: 0-7103-0644-X (hbk)

ISBN10: 0-4156-0589-X (pbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-7103-0644-9 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-4156-0589-2 (pbk)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Ibn Muhammad al-Nafzawi, Muhammad The perfumed garden of sensual delight. (the Routledge Arabia library)

1. Husbands - Tunisia 2. Tunisia - Social life and customs

I. Title II. Colville, Jim

305.310961109024

ISBN 071030644X

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Applied for

Publishers Note

The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent.

CONTENTS

T his little book has a bad reputation and a tattered history. Discovered around the middle of the nineteenth century by the cultural wing of the occupying French army in North Africa, it was brought to Europe, suitably dressed for the occasion, and displayed in limited editions as an example of lorientalisme exotique so much in vogue at the time. However, the nineteenth century European invention of the Orient suggests nothing more exotic than a caricature of its own fantasy in which The Perfumed Garden, among others, was coerced into the role of surrogate. Indeed, the books treatment provides a striking example of what has been called the seductive degradation of knowledge. That it has played an unwitting role in shaping European views of Arab cultural and social values is clear:

It is largely due to his [al-Nafzawis] book, and to Burtons masterly [sic] translation of the Arabian Nights, that the West has come to a reasonably precise, accurate, and systematised knowledge of Mohammedan sexual life and thought.

Perhaps better to have left well alone in the first place but the least that can now be done, by way of contrition, is to provide a faithful translation something that, in English, The Perfumed Garden has conspicuously lacked.

The book deals with sex in an open and uninhibited way; it is, by turns, serious and amusing, almost sublime and quite ridiculous. Sin and shame are specifically excluded from this garden, where sexual pleasure is a divine gift we all have the right to enjoy. Although remarkably lewd at times (so lewd it is almost cathartic), The Perfumed Garden does not linger gratuitously over details nor does it contrive to excite. It does not, therefore, qualify as pornography as I hope readers of this translation will agree. The stories and poems create a thin literary veneer but hardly give it the character of a work of literature. None are likely to be original and many would have been familiar, in one form or another, to al-Nafzawis readers. Neither is the book a treatise on sexuality; two stories featuring lesbians and a joke about a donkey suggest no more than, at most, casual interest in the spectrum of sexual inclination. This is the misunderstanding that left earlier translators so dissatisfied with the original. The Perfumed Garden is a practical guide for the ordinary married man.

The book has not fared well in Arabic-speaking countries either. Until recently, and despite the existence of a number of manuscript copies, the only published edition was a dismal, error-ridden version produced, it appears, in response to the curiosity aroused by European interest. The title is familiar to many but the book is known to few, not least in the land of its authors birth.

Of Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Nafzawi, very little is known with certainty. His name suggests an origin in the south of what is now Tunisia, from the homeland of the Nefzaoua tribe near the town of Kebili, or perhaps, with less likelihood, in the far north of that country, from the town of Nefza. His dates of birth and death, profession and other details of his life are obscure.

However, he tells us in his preface to The Perfumed Garden that it was written at the request of one Muhammad ibn Awana al-Zawawi, appointed chief minister to the Sultan of Tunis, Abdalaziz al-Hafsi, after the latters seizure of Algiers. Abu Faris Abdalaziz al-Hafsi was a distinguished scion of the Hafsid dynasty of Tunis (12281574) whose own period of rule (13941434) was a time of territorial expansion and material prosperity. He captured the city of Algiers in 1410 or 1411 and, the same year, appointed his friend Muhammad ibn Abdalaziz as chief minister an arrangement that held until the Sultans death in 1434.

Present-day Arab opinion of The Perfumed Garden is divided. There are those who appreciate the candid and open treatment of so private a subject as the physical relationship between man and wife and, in recent years, a scholarly interest in this aspect of mediaeval writing has developed. But there is also regret at its populist style and evidently down-market appeal. It is of uneven quality and at times repetitive. There is also criticism of its medical advice (although al-Nafzawis prescriptions are not superstitions). However, the principal target of Arab criticism is not so much the book itself but the choice of a book of this kind to represent Arabo-Muslim culture and further, the consistent misrepresentation of that choice. It is not an understatement to note that, stripped of acquired mystique, The Perfumed Garden hardly lays claim to greatness.

The book may be criticised, too, from other quarters. It is written exclusively for men and assumes the desirability of polygamy. Women are presented as liable to so many more physical and character defects than men (a casual reading suggests that all a man needs to be concerned about is the size of his penis and his inherent gullibility). Betrayal and deception of their husbands seems to be the order of the day and older women, in particular, get hard treatment. Many of the books assumptions were not, of course, uncommon in contemporary Europe.