Desperate for the approval of the young courtier whom he no doubt privately condemns as an overschooled sodomite, bristle-bearded Shaykh Hajjar has cornered me in the village's only café-if the sitting room of a qat-chewing old woman can be called a café by anyone other than bumpkins. The latest denial comes from Hajjar al-Assad himself, the middle-aged head of the clan and the sort of half-literate lout that passes for a Shaykh in these parts. No doubt they are worried about the bad impression such an association might make on me, favorite physicker of the Caliph's own son.
By my third day in Beit Zujaaj, several of the Assads, omniscient as "important" families always are in these piles of cottages, have accosted me to deny the malicious whispers. Two days into my stay the villagers fall over one another to share with me the rumors that Abdel Jameela is in fact distantly related to the esteemed Assad clan.
Most of the characters' names, by the way, are vaguely allegorical or otherwise playful-"Abdel Jameela," for instance, might be roughly translated as "servant (or slave) of beauty."Īs soon as I arrive in the village of Beit Zujaaj I begin to hear the mutters about Abdel Jameela, a strange old man supposedly unconnected to any of the local families. These demands eventually led to the story that appears here.
Translating this image into a story, of course, introduced deeper demands in terms of plot and character. The poem consisted entirely of a single image-an old man somewhere in the medieval Islamic world defying the narrow-minded by declaring his love for a hooved woman. FROM THE AUTHOR: "Hooves and the Hovel of Abdel Jameela" is actually a prosification of a very short poem I wrote years ago.
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