“Dawn is a good time to see our palace masjid,” she said, and escorted me to that temple of worship, where she bade me admire the exterior of it, which was admirable indeed. The immense dome was covered with a mosaic of blue and silver tiles and topped with a golden knob, all shining in the sunrise. The manaret spire was like an elaborate giant candlestick, richly chased and engraved and inlaid with glowing gemstones.
At that moment I formed a private surmise, and I would speak of it here.
I already knew that Muslim men are bidden to keep their women sequestered and useless and mute and veiled from all eyes—in pardah, as the Persians call that lifelong suppression of their females. I knew that, by decree of the Prophet Muhammad and the Quran he wrote, a woman is merely one of a man’s chattels, like his sword or his goats or his wardrobe, and she differs only in being the one of his chattels with which he occasionally couples, and that with the sole purpose of siring children, and those valued only when they are male, like him. The majority of devout Muslims, men and women alike, must not speak of sexual relations between them, or even the relation of mutual companionship, though a man might be leeringly frank about his relations with other men.
But I decided, on that morning when I gazed at the palace masjid, that Islam’s strictures against the normal expression of normal sexuality has not been able to stifle all expression of it. Look at any masjid and you will see each dome copied from the female human breast, its aroused nipple erect to the sky, and in each manaret a representation of the male organ, likewise joyously erect. I might be mistaken in discerning those similarities, but I do not think so. The Quran has decreed inequality between men and women. It has made indecent and unmentionable the natural relation between them, and distorted it most shamefully. But Islam’s own temples bravely declare that the Prophet was wrong, and that Allah made man and woman to cleave to each other and to be of one flesh.
The Princess and I went inside the masjid’s wonderfully high and broad central chamber, and it was beautifully decorated, though of course entirely with patterns, not pictures or statues. The walls were covered with mosaic designs made of blue lapis lazura alternating with white marble, so the chamber was a soft and restful pale-blue place.
Just as there are no images in Muslim temples, there also are no altars, no priests, no musicians or choristers, no apparatus of the ceremonial, like censers and fonts and candelabra. There are no masses or communions or other such rites, and a Muslim congregation observes only one ritual rule: in praying, they all prostrate themselves in the direction of the holy city Mecca, birthplace of their Prophet Muhammad. Since Mecca lies southwest of Baghdad, that masjid’s farther wall was to the southwest, and in the center of it was a shallow niche, a little taller than a man, also tiled blue and white.
“That is the mihrab,” said Princess Moth. “Though Islam has no priests, we are sometimes addressed by a visiting wise man. Perhaps an imam, one whose deep study of the Quran has made him an authority on its spiritual tenets. Or a mufti, who is similarly an expert on the temporal laws laid down by the Prophet (peace and blessing be upon him). Or a hajji, one who has made the long hajj pilgrimage to Holy Mecca. And to lead our devotions, the wise man takes position yonder in the mihrab.”
I said, “I thought the word mihrab meant—” and then I stopped, and the Princess smiled naughtily at me.
I was about to say that I had thought the word mihrab meant a woman’s most private part, what a Venetian girl had once vulgarly called her pota, and a Venetian lady had more fastidiously called her mona. But then I took notice of the shape of that mihrab niche in the masjid wall. It was shaped exactly like a woman’s genital orifice, slightly oval in outline and narrowing at the top to close in a pointed arch. I have been inside many another masjid, and in every one that niche is so shaped. I believe it to be an additional corroboration of my theory that human sexuality has influenced Islamic architecture. Of course I do not know—and I doubt that any Muslim knows—which use of the word mihrab came first: the ecclesiastical or the bawdy.
“And there,” said Princess Moth, pointing upward, “are the windows which make the sun tell the passing days.”
Sure enough, there were openings carefully spaced about the upper periphery of the dome, and the new-risen sun was sending a beam across to the dome’s opposite inner side, where there were inset slabs with Arabic writings entwined in their mosaics. The Princess read aloud the words where the beam rested. According to that evidence, the present day was, in the Muslim reckoning, the third day of the month Jumada Second in the 670th year of Muhammad’s Hijra, or, in the Persian calendar, the 199th year of the Jalali Era. Then Princess Moth and I together, with much muttering and counting on our fingers, did the calculations necessary to convert the date to the Christian reckoning.
“Today is the twentieth of the month September!” I exclaimed. “It is my birthday!”
She congratulated me and said, “You Christians sometimes are given gifts on your birthdays, are you not, as we are?”
“Sometimes, yes.”
“Then I will give you a gift this very night, if you are brave enough to run some risk in receiving it. I will give you a night of zina.”
“What is zina?” I asked, though I suspected I knew.
“It is illicit intercourse between a man and a woman. It is haram, which means forbidden. If you are to receive the gift, I must sneak you into my chamber in the anderun of the palace women, which is also haram.”
“I will brave any risk!” I cried wholeheartedly. Then I thought of something. “But … excuse me for asking, Princess Moth. But I have been informed that Muslim women are somehow deprived of—of their enthusiasm for zina. I have been told that they are, well, somehow circumcised, though I cannot imagine how.”
“Oh, yes, tabzir,” she said casually. “That is done to the general run of women, yes, when they are infants. But not to any infants of royal blood, or any who could in future become the wives or concubines of a royal court. It was certainly not done to me.”
“I am happy for you,” I said, and meant it. “But what is done to those unfortunate females? What is tabzir?”
“Let me show you,” she said.
I was startled, expecting her to undress, right then and there, so I made a cautionary gesture at the lurking grandmother. But Moth only grinned at me and stepped to the preacher’s niche in the masjid wall, saying, “Are you much acquainted with the anatomy of a female person? Then you know that here”—she pointed at the top of the arch—“toward the front of her mihrab opening, a woman has a tender buttonlike protrusion. It is called the zambur.”
“Ah,” I said, enlightened at last. “In Venice it is called the lumaghèta.” I tried to sound as clinical as a physician, but I know I blushed as I spoke.
“The exact position of the zambur may vary slightly in different women,” Moth went on, herself unblushingly clinical. “And the size of it may vary considerably. My own zambur is commendably large, and in arousal it extends to the length of my little finger’s first joint.”
Just the thought of it made me arouse and extend. Since the grandmother was present, I was again grateful for my voluminous nether garments.
The Princess blithely continued, “So I am much in demand by the other women of the anderun, because my zambur can service them almost as well as a man’s zab. And women’s play is halal, which means allowable, not haram.”
And if my face had been pink before, it must have been maroon by now. But if Princess Moth noticed, it did not deter her.
“In every woman, that is her most sensitive place, the very nub of her sexual excitability. Without the arousal of her zambur, she is unresponsive in the sexual embrace. And lacking any enjoyment of that act, she does not yearn for it. That of course is the reason for the tabzir—the circumcision, as you called it. In a grown woman, until she is very much aroused, the zambur is modestly hidden between the closed lips of her mihrab. But in an infant female, that zambur protrudes beyond the little
baby lips. An attending hakim can very easily snip it off with just a scissors.”
“Dear God!” I exclaimed, my own arousal going instantly limp from horror. “That is not circumcision. That is the making of a female eunuch!”
“Very like it,” she agreed, as if it were not horrible at all. “The child grows up to be a woman virtuously cold and devoid of sexual response, or even any desire for it. The perfect Muslim wife.”
“Perfect?! What husband would want such a wife?”
“A Muslim husband,” she said simply. “That wife will never commit adultery and make him a cuckold. She is incapable of contemplating an act of zina, or anything else haram. She will not even tease her husband to anger by flirting with another man. If she correctly keeps pardah, she will never even see another man—until she gives birth to a man-child. You understand, tabzir does not hamper her function of maternity. She can become a mother, and in that she is superior to a eunuch, who cannot become a father.”
“Even so, it is a ghastly fate for a woman.”
“It is the fate decreed by the Prophet (may blessing and peace be upon him). Nevertheless, I am thankful that we upper classes are exempted from many such inconveniences visited upon the common folk. Now, about your birthday gift, young Mirza Marco …”
“I wish it was already night,” I said, glancing up at the slow-creeping sunbeam. “This will be the longest birthday of my life, waiting for night and zina with you.”
“Oh, not with me!”
“What?”
She giggled. “Well, not exactly with me.”
Bewildered, I said again, “What?”
“You distracted me, Marco, asking about the tabzir, so I did not explain the gift I am giving you. Before I explain, you must bear in mind that I am a virgin.”
I started pettishly to say, “You have not been talking like—” but she laid a finger across my lips.
“True, I am not tabzir and I am not cold and perhaps you would call me not entirely virtuous, since I am inviting you to do something haram. It is true, too, that I have a most charming zambur, and I dearly love to exercise it, but only in ways halal which will not diminish my virginity. In addition to my zambur, you see, I have all my parts, including my sangar. That maiden membrane has not been breached, and never will be until I wed some royal Prince. It must not be breached, or no Prince would have me. I should be lucky if I were not beheaded for letting myself be despoiled. No, Marco, do not even dream of consummating the zina with me.”
“I am confused, Princess Moth. You distinctly said you would sneak me into your chamber … .”
“And so I shall. And I shall remain with you there to assist you in zina with my sister.”
“With your sister?!”
“Hush! The old grandmother is deaf, but sometimes she can read simple words from the lips. Now keep silent and listen. My father has many wives, so I have many sisters. One of them is amenable to zina. In fact, she can never get enough of it. And it is she who will be your birthday gift.”
“But if she is also a royal Princess, why is her virginity not equally—?”
“I said keep silent. Yes, she is as royal as I, but there is a reason why she does not treasure maidenhood as I do. You will know everything tonight. But until tonight I will say no more, and if you pester me with questions I will rescind the gift. Now, Marco, let us enjoy the day. Let me command a coachman to take us for a ride about the city.”
The coach, when it came for us, was really only a dainty cart on two high wheels, drawn by a single midget Persian horse. Its driver helped me hoist the infirm old grandmother up to sit beside him at the front, and the Princess and I sat on the inside seat. As the cart rolled down the garden drive and out through the palace gates into Baghdad, Moth remarked that she had not yet had anything of breakfast to eat, opened a cloth bag, took from it some greenish-yellow fruits, and bit into one and offered another to me.
“Banyan,” she called it. “A variety of fig.”
I winced at the word fig, and politely declined, not bothering to mention my Acre misadventure that had made figs repulsive to me. Moth looked sulky when I refused, and I asked her why.
“Do you know,” she said, leaning close and whispering so the coachman would not hear, “that this is the forbidden fruit with which Eve seduced Adam?”
I whispered back, “I prefer the seduction without the fruit. And speaking of which—”
“I told you not to speak of it. Not until tonight.”
Several other times during the morning’s ride, I tried to broach that subject, but every time she ignored me, speaking only to call my attention to this or that point of interest and to tell me informative things about it.
She said, “Here we are in the bazàr, which you have already visited, but perhaps you do not recognize it now, all empty and deserted and silent. That is because today is Jumè—Friday, as you call it—which Allah appointed to be the day of rest, and there is no doing of trade or business or labor.”
And she said, “That grassy parkland which you see yonder is a graveyard, which we call a City of the Silent.”
And she said, “That large building is the House of Delusion, a charitable institution founded by my father the Shah. In it are confined and cared for all the persons who go insane, as many persons do in the hot summertime. They are regularly examined by a hakim, and if they ever regain their reason, they are set free again.”
In the outer skirts of the city, we crossed a bridge over a small stream, and I was struck by the color of that water, which was a most unusually deep blue for mere water. Then we crossed another stream, and it was a most unwaterly vivid green. But not until we had crossed yet another, and it was as red as blood, did I make any comment.
The Princess explained, “The waters of all the streams out here are colored by the dyes of the makers of qali. You have never seen a qali made? You must see.” And she gave directions to the coachman.
I would have expected to be taken back into Baghdad, and to some city workshop, but the cart went farther still into the countryside, and came to a stop beside a hill that had a low cave entrance halfway up it. Moth and I got down from the cart, climbed the hill and ducked our heads to go into the hole.
We had to go crouching through a short, dark tunnel, but then we came out inside the hill, and into a vastly wide and high rock cavern, full of people, its floor cluttered with work tables and benches and dye vats. The cavern was dark until my eyes got accustomed to its half-light, cast by innumerable candles and lamps and torches. The lamps were set on the various pieces of furniture, the torches were ensconced at intervals around the rock walls, some of the candles were stuck to the rocks by their own drip, and other candles were carried about in the hands of the multitude of workers.
I said to the Princess, “I thought this was a day of rest.”
“For Muslims,” she said. “These are all slaves, Christian Russniaks and Lezghians and such. They are allowed their due sabbath on Sundays.”
Only a few of the slaves were grown men and women, and they worked at various tasks, like the stirring of the dye vats, on the floor of the cavern. All the rest were children, and they worked while floating high in the air. That may sound like one of the Shahryar Zahd’s stories of magic, but it was a fact. From the high dome of the cavern hung a giant comb of strings, hundreds of strings, parallel and close together, a vertical web as high and as wide as the entire cavern’s height and width. It was obviously the weft for a qali which, when finished, would carpet some immense palace chamber or ballroom. High up against that wall of weft, hung in loops of rope that depended from somewhere even higher in the roof darkness, dangled a crowd of children.
The little boys and girls were all naked—because of the heat of the air up there, Princess Moth told me—and they were suspended across the width of the work, but at various levels, some higher and some lower. Up there, the qali was partially completed, from its hem at the top of the weft down to those levels where the children wor
ked, and I could see that it was, even at that early stage of progress, a qali of a most intricate and varicolored flower-garden design. Each of the dangling children had a candle stuck on its head with the wax, and all were busily engaged, but at what I could not discern; they seemed to be plucking with their little fingers at the unfinished lower edge of the qali.
The Princess said, “They are weaving the warp threads through the weft. Each slave holds a shuttle and a hank of thread of a single color. He or she weaves it through and makes it tight, in the order required by the design.”
“How in the world,” I asked, “can one child know when and where to contribute his bit, among so many other slaves and threads, and in such a complex work?”
“The qali master sings to them,” she said. “Our arrival interrupted him. There, he begins again.”
It was a wonderful thing. The man called the qali master sat before a table on which was spread a tremendous sheet of paper. It was ruled in countless neat little squares, over which was superimposed a drawing of the qali’s entire intended design, with the innumerable different colors indicated. The qali master read aloud from that design, singing something on this order:
“One, red! … Thirteen, blue! … Forty-five, brown! …”
Except that what he chanted was far more complicated than that. It had to be audible away up there near the cavern roof, and it had to be unmistakably understood by each boy and girl it called upon, and it had to have a cadence that kept them all working in rhythm. While the words addressed one slave child after another, out of the great many of them, and told each one when to bring in his individual shuttle, the singing of the words either in a high tone or a low tone told that slave how far across the weft to warp his thread and when to knot it. In that marvelous manner of working, the slaves would bring the qali, thread by thread, line by line, all the way down to the cavern floor, and when it was finished it would be as perfect in execution as if it had been painted by a single artist.