The Scented Garden

46 The Innocence and Reputation of Man. za) on your face ? In order to stick a Ghazi to your bottom ! ” 3. Black-violet : so in text [Persian text]. A black mole, in Sufi cipher, means the “ point of in- divisible unity.” But El Haji more scandalously and obviously chooses the podex itself throughout most of his masterpiece. 4. Friday. This appears at first sight an obvious misreading. But (if you please) Mahbub says : “ When a boy opens his podex, the hairs depart one from another like true believers quitting the mosque on Friday. [Persian text] (mist) also means a worm in Arabic and the passage implies that all Arabs have tape-worms ! ” As is well known, they pay re- spect to Abu Bekr and Omar, and make things very hot for the ’Arami every year at Mecca. The dragon is of course the universal one ; Rahu in India ; Caput Draconis and Cauda Draconis in the West, famed in Astrology as the powers of the Ec- lipse. But I personally support the misreading theory for [Persian text] though I can offer no conjectural restoration. The text makes nonsense, and Abdul- lah, with all his puns and eccentricities, rarely does this. In Morocco the appearance of hair on face or privates utterly disqualifies a boy for path- ic). 5. [Persian text] This is one of El Haji’s “ port- manteau ” words. He will not specify [Persian text] (solar) or [Persian text] (lunar) eclipse : so calmly invented a word with the third possible guttural to include all kinds ! 6. From the Q’uran. Used however to reject amorous advances, as they say “ Allah is bountiful ” to a beggar, meaning “ I am not.” But here it is meant seriously, or at worst to imply ; “ This is very disgraceful conduct — let us blame it on Al- lah ” !