Note 79.1 — Chapter IV · THE INCIDENT OF THE SUPERNATURAL BIRTH IN MÄRCHEN.

Mohammedan stories attach, as we might expect, inordinate value to the male sex. They represent the fruit as eaten by the father, rather than by the mother. The Qissa Agar o Gul is an Urdu adaptation of a Persian romance. It was published as lately as 1880 at Lucknow. Here the fruit, a couple of apples, is given by a dervish to a king and his vizier, neither of whom has issue. Each of them eats his apple, and begets—the king, a son, and the vizier, twins, boy and girl.79.1 I have already referred incidentally to the case of Khodadad, who was one of fifty brethren begotten by a childless monarch upon his fifty wives, after eating as many pomegranate seeds. He had incessantly prayed for offspring, and was commanded in a dream by a man “of semblance like unto a prophet” to rise at dawn, and, saying certain prayers, to go to his Chief Gardener, from whom he was to require a pomegranate and to take of it as many seeds as seemed best to him.79.2 Another sultan is represented in the same great collection as receiving from a Takrúri, one of a Moslem negroid people credited by the Arabs with magical powers, a portion of certain medicinal roots, to be eaten by himself.79.3 So in the Turkish History of Forty Vezirs, where a childless king beseeches the intercession of a convent of dervishes, and sends them a fat ram and an offering of rice, honey and oil, the sheykh of the convent returns him a bowlful “of that meat,” ordering him to “desire a son and eat of the dervishes’ portion.”79.4 Yet the rule is not without exception. A sovereign of Serendib, in the Bahar Danush, receives from a religious recluse an apple with instructions to give it to his consort.80.1 A tale told by the Kabyles of the Lower Atlas speaks of a man who bought seven apples for his seven wives. Growing hungry, he ate half of one, or, according to a variant, he gave it to a man who met him. The result was that the wife who had only the other half brought forth a dwarf.80.2 And in a Balochi tale a fakir gives a king two kunar-fruits (Zizyphus Jujuba), one to be eaten by himself and the other by his wife.80.3 These exceptions, however, are more apparent than real. The Bahar Danush is an Indian work, composed in the reign of Shah Jehan by Ināyatu ’llāh of Delhi, who professed to have received the stories of which it is composed from a Brahman. This is merely another way of saying that they are drawn from earlier Indian sources. The Kabyles are mountain tribes related to the Berbers. The religion of the Apostle of Allah sits lightly upon them. Their aboriginal precepts are at least as much regarded as those of the Koran; and so far are their social relations from being dominated by Arab customs, that their women enjoy free and unrestricted intercourse with both sexes, and are looked upon as almost if not quite the equals of men. The Balochis pay little more respect than the Kabyles to Islam; and their religious practices are largely tinged with their ancestral paganism and that of their neighbours.