Smile! I have new stories for you today …
All the entourage of the powerful were targeted with lewd stories: the terrible governor of Khorasan, al-Hajjàj had a headache and a doctor prescribed a footbath. A know-all and hyper-critical eunuch wondered what connection there could be between the feet and the head. “You haven’t learnt anything from your experience? – the doctor asked him – When they castrated you, didn’t the hairs fall out of your beard?
It is often the weak who make fun of the powerful: a notable wanted to marry a young girl, but a young man from her tribe advised him against it, saying that he had seen her in the arms of another man. When the notable learned, later, that that very young man had married her, he sent for him to ask him how come he had married a dishonoured girl. He answered: “‘I didn’t lie to you. It was her father!”
Risqué situations are sometimes solved with shrewdness, even in defiance of religious prescriptions: a girl possessed by a demon was brought to a man who was an expert in magic. When he was alone with her, he found out that she was no longer a virgin and was pretending to be mad in order not to suffer the consequences when her husband and family realized the truth. The good man informed her relatives that he could get the evil spirit out of the girl through her eye but in that case she would have lost it. Or though an ear, but she would be left deaf in that ear. Or through a hand but she would be paralysed or through a foot and she would be left with a limp. Getting the spirit out through the vagina she would lose her virginity but without any other problems. They chose this solution and the girl was safe.
Smile! Next week I will get back to you with some more funny stories …
