How can I, who am the Kings Wazir, look on and see sparrows fighting in my neighbourhood? By Allah, I must make peace between them! So he flew down to reconcile them; but the fowler cast the net over the whole number and the sparrow happened to be in their very midst. Then the fowler arose and took him and gave him to his comrade, saying, Take care of him, I never saw fatter or finer. But the sparrow said to himself, I have fallen into that which I feared and none but the peacock inspired me with false confidence. It availed me naught to beware of the stroke of fate and fortune, since even he who taketh precaution may never flee from destiny. And how well said the poet in this poetry,
Whatso is not to be shall neer become; * No wise! and that to be must come to pass;
Yea it shall come to pass at time ordained, * And th Ignoramus [1] aye shall cry Alas!
Whereupon quoth the King, O Shahrazad, recount me other of these tales!; and quoth she, I will do so during the coming night, if life be granted to by the King whom Allah bring to honour!-- And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased to say her permitted say.
- ↑ Arab. Akh al-Jahálah = brother of ignorance, an Ignorantin; one really and truly ignorant; which is the value of Ahk in such phrases as a brother of poverty, or, of purity.
When it was the One Hundred and Fifty-third Night,
She said:-- I will relate the
TALE OF ALI BIN BAKKAR AND OF SHAMS AL-NAHAR.
It hath reached me, O august King, that in days of yore and in times and ages long gone before, during the Caliphate of Harun al-Rashid, there was a merchant who named his son Abú al-Hasan [1]
- ↑ Lane (ii. 1) writes "Abu-l-Hasan;" Payne (iii. 49) "Aboulhusn" which would mean "Father of Beauty (Husn)" and is not a Moslem name. Hasan (beautiful) and its dimin. Husayn, names now so common, were (it is said), unknown to the Arabs, although Hassán was that of a Tobba King, before the days of Mohammed who so called his two only grandsons. In Anglo-India they have become "Hobson and Jobson." The Bresl. Edit. (ii. 305) entitles this story "Tale of Abu 'l Hasan the Attár (druggist and perfumer) with Ali ibn Bakkár and what befel them with the handmaid (=járiyah) Shams al-Nahár."
