Leg over Leg, Volumes 3-4

Leg over Leg, Volumes 3-4

Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq

Language: English

Pages: 552

ISBN: 2:00333640

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Leg over Leg recounts the life, from birth to middle age, of “the Fariyaq,” alter ego of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, a pivotal figure in the intellectual and literary history of the modern Arab world. The always edifying and often hilarious adventures of the Fariyaq, as he moves from his native Lebanon to Egypt, Malta, Tunis, England, and France, provide the author with grist for wide-ranging discussions of the intellectual and social issues of his time, including the ignorance and corruption of the Lebanese religious and secular establishments, freedom of conscience, women’s rights, sexual relationships between men and women, the manners and customs of Europeans and Middle Easterners, and the differences between contemporary European and Arabic literatures, all the while celebrating the genius and beauty of the classical Arabic language.

Volumes Three and Four see the peripatetic Fariyaq fall in love and convert to Catholicism for twenty-four hours in order to marry. Although the narrative revolves around a series of debates over the nature of male-female relationships, opportunities also arise for disquisitions on the physical and moral significance of such diverse topics as the buttocks, the unreliability of virginity tests, and the human capacity for self-delusion. Lengthy stays in England and France allow for animadversions on the table manners and sexual aberrations of their citizens, but the discussion, whether it involve dance-halls, pleasure gardens, or poetry, almost always ends up returning to gender relations.

Akin to Sterne and Rabelais in his satirical outlook and technical inventiveness, al-Shidyaq produced in Leg Over Leg a work that is unique and unclassifiable. It was initially widely condemned for its attacks on authority, its religious skepticism, and its “obscenity,” and later editions were often abridged. This is the first complete English translation of this groundbreaking work.

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Eyebrows are to the eyes,’ she said. ‘And beards?’ I asked. ‘Old men’s embellishments,’ she said. ‘Side-whiskers?’ I asked. ‘Squeal! An adornment for the looker and the looked-upon alike,’ she answered. ‘What element of beauty do they possess,’ I asked, ‘especially when the mustaches have been shaved off?’ ‘They are,’ she said, ‘what calyxes are to a flower, leaves to a bough, a velvet edging to a robe, a hedge to a garden, a halo to the moon!’” 4.9.15 While they were talking, someone knocked.

Wasīmah” kathamah, “plump as a result of drinking or other cause” mukalthamah, “having the flesh of the cheeks firm but not coarse and ugly” kamkāmah, “short and of compact physique” wathīmah, “bulging with flesh” mūshim, “with budding breasts” haḍīm, “haḍam is concavity of the belly and delicacy of the haunch” bathnah, “a plump young beauty” bakhdan, “smooth” bādin, [stout] “too well-known to require definition; synonym bādinah” bahnānah, “having sweet breath and smell, or.

Take wives in our country target black slave girls, as a way of escaping the imperiousness and profligacy of their own women. I have seen women of the common people among them performing laṭʿ, which means sucking their fingers after eating, and licking off what is on them.531 Their noblewomen wash their hands in a cup placed on the table, in the presence of their guests, and rinse their mouths out with water and then spit it into the cup. Is this to be considered a form of good manners or.

Women Pope Port of London posterior. See also backside, backsides; bustle, bustles; buttock, buttocks; rump preacher priest, priests, anxieties backsides, attraction to of Choueir dress false statements concerning al-Fāriyāq as marriages, assistance in arrangement of remarriage, views on women, Jewish, views on printing presses prostitute, prostitutes proverb Proverbs pulchritude Qāmūs (al-Firūzābādī) on bodily acts deficiencies of disagreements with al-Fāriyāq, copy owned.

Something to be brought to the forefront.’ Said she, ‘Put your mind at rest. Whether it belong to the former or the latter, you will find me as you left me, God willing.’” 3.12.4 He went on, “Then I bade her farewell, my tears bathing her neck, and she wept too to see me go, for it was the first time I had left her. It was part of her nature that when she wept, her face took on an arousing look and appealingly comely expression—and women are as attractive as can be when they cry (though these.

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