Malcolm C. Lyons > Quotes

“But racism is most outrageously to the fore in ‘Ashraf and Anjab’, in which the sadistically villainous Anjab is described by Harun al-Rashid as follows: ‘This man is black as a negro … with red eyes, a nose like a clay pot and lips like kidneys’, and his mother is no better looking for she ‘was black as pitch with a snub nose, red eyes and an unpleasant smell’. In ‘Sa‘id Son of Hatim’ the monk Simeon predicts that the shrine of the Ka’ba will be destroyed by drunken and singing blacks. As Bernard Lewis’s Race and Slavery in the Middle East put it when discussing the role of blacks in The Thousand and One Nights, it ‘reveals a familiar pattern of sexual fantasy, social and occupational discrimination, and an unthinking identification of lighter with better and darker with worse’.9”
― Malcolm C. Lyons, Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange

“The moon features frequently as a simile for beauty (and indeed Budur’s name means ‘moons’). Beautiful women are conventionally compared to gazelles. It was more common to evoke beauty through metaphor and simile than by close physical description.”
― Malcolm C. Lyons, Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange

“the late tenth-century ‘Aja’ib al-Hind (Marvels of India), attributed to the sea captain Burzug ibn Shahriyar, presented alleged facts about the Sea of Fire, whales, mermaids, cannibals, cattle-eating snakes, ritual suicides and so forth.”
― Malcolm C. Lyons, Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange