Fescinnine.  The story of Moseilema, Lord of Yamama, is familiar in one form or another to most students of Arab History.  Washington Irving epitomises it in his inexpressibly beautiful “Successors” of Mahomet[FN#587] and Gibbon[FN#588] tells it more fully, partly in his text and partly in his Latin footnotes.  Moseilema was, no doubt, for some years quite as influential a prophet as his rival Mohammed.  He may even have been as good a man,[FN#589] but Nafzawi—­staunch Mohammedan—­will not let “the Whig dogs have the best of the argument.”  He charges Moseilema with having perverted sundry chapters in the Koran by his lies and impostures, and declares that he did worse than fail when he attempted to imitate Mohammed’s miracles.  “Now Moseilema (whom may Allah curse!), when he put his luckless hand on the head of some one who had not much hair, the man was at once quite bald ... and when he laid his hand upon the head of an infant, saying, ’Live a hundred years,’ the infant died within an hour.”  As a matter of fact, however, Moseilema was one of the most romantic figures in Arabic history.[FN#590] Sedja, Queen and Prophetess, went to see him in much the same spirit that the Queen of Sheba visited Solomon.  Moseilema, who outlived Mohammed about a year, was defeated and slain near his capital Yamama, by the Mohammedan hero Khalid, and Sedjah subsequently embraced Islamism.

In the tale entitled “Djoaidi and Fadehat el Djemal"[FN#591] appears that hoary poet, philosopher and reprobate, Abu Nowas[FN#592] of The Arabian Nights.  Like the Nights, The Scented Garden has a cycle of tales illustrative of the cunning and malice of women.  But all the women in those days and countries were not bad, just as all were not plain.  Plumpness seems to have been the principal attraction of sex, and the Kama Shastra version goes so far as to assure us that a woman who had a double chin,[FN#593] was irresistible.  If so, there were probably no words in the language good enough to describe a woman with three chins.  According, however, to the author of the recent Paris translation[FN#594] this particular rendering is a mistake.  He considers that the idea Nafzawi wished to convey was the tower-like form of the neck,[FN#595] but in any circumstances the denizens of The Scented Garden placed plumpness in the forefront of the virtues; which proves, of course, the negroid origin of at any rate some of the stories,[FN#596] for a true Arab values slenderness.  Over and over again in the Nights we are told of some seductive lady that she was straight and tall with a shape like the letter Alif or a willow wand.  The perfect woman, according to Mafzawi, perfumes herself with scents, uses ithmid[FN#597] (antimony) for her toilet, and cleans her teeth with bark of the walnut tree.  There are chapters on sterility, long lists of the kind to be found in Rabelais, and solemn warnings against excess, chiefly on account of its resulting in weakness of sight, with other “observations useful for men and women.”