Chapter XXXIV “The Scented Garden”

Bibliography: 

77.  The Scented Garden.  “My new Version,” translated 1888-1890.

158.  Nafzawi.

As we learn from a letter to Mr. Payne, 8th November 1888, Burton began his “new version” of The Scented Garden, or as it is sometimes called, The Perfumed Garden, in real earnest early in that month, and Lady Burton tells us that it “occupied him seriously only six actual months,"[FN#569] that is, the last six months of his life.

The Scented Garden, or to give its full title, “The Scented Garden for the Soul’s Recreation” was the work of a learned Arab Shaykh and physician named Nafzawi, who was born at Nafzawa, a white,[FN#570] palm-encinctured town which gleamed by the shore of the Sebkha—­that is, salt marsh—­Shot al Jarid; and spent most of his life in Tunis.  The date of his birth is unrecorded, but The Scented Garden seems to have been written in 1431.[FN#571] Nafzawi, like Vatsyayana, from whose book he sometimes borrows, is credited with having been an intensely religious man, but his book abounds in erotic tales seasoned to such an extent as would have put to the blush even the not very sensitive “Tincker of Turvey."[FN#572] It abounds in medical learning,[FN#573] is avowedly an aphrodisiac, and was intended, if one may borrow an expression from Juvenal, “to revive the fire in nuptial cinders."[FN#574] Moslems read it, just as they took ambergrised coffee, and for the same reason.  Nafzawi, indeed, is the very antithesis of the English Sir Thomas Browne, with his well-known passage in the Religio Medici,[FN#575] commencing “I could be content that we might procreate like trees.”  Holding that no natural action of a man is more degrading than another, Nafzawi could never think of amatory pleasures without ejaculating “Glory be to God,” or some such phrase.  But “Moslems,” says Burton, “who do their best to countermine the ascetic idea inherent in Christianity,[FN#576] are not ashamed of the sensual appetite, but rather the reverse."[FN#577] Nafzawi, indeed, praises Allah for amorous pleasures just as other writers have exhausted the vocabulary in gratitude for a loaded fruit tree or an iridescent sunset.  His mind runs on the houris promised to the faithful after death, and he says that these pleasures are “part of the delights of paradise awarded by Allah as a foretaste of what is waiting for us, namely delights a thousand times superior, and above which only the sight of the Benevolent is to be placed.”  We who anticipate walls of jasper and streets of gold ought not, perhaps, to be too severe on the Tunisian.  It must also be added that Nafzawi had a pretty gift of humour.[FN#578]

159.  Origin of The Scented Garden.