“The Book of Charlatans” by Jamāl al-DīnʿAbd al-Raḥīm al-Jawbarī, translated by Humphrey Davies

An illustration of alchemy

Year in year out Spain produces 1,500 kilos of that delicate spice, saffron, sold wholesale for US$700 per 100 grams. Gourmets were puzzled a few years back when 1900 kilos of Spanish saffron hit the market. Food inspectors soon discovered that the yellow powder contained traces of the flavorless plant root, or worse, animal droppings. The huge increase in volume came from the diversion of Iranian saffron, whose sale is stifled by the American embargo, to Spain’s packagers. Along the way crooks put their fingers on the scale by adding the impurities. Similar scams were practiced by spice dealers in 13th-century Damascus, involving precious products like myrobalan, agarwood, ginger, indigo, musk, ambergris. “Wise up to these things,” exhorts the Book of Charlatans, this newly translated compendium of tricks, cheats and phony spells.

The author, Jawbari, appears to have been a Syrian Mark Twain, traveling widely to document the underbelly of Levantine society, consorting with vagabonds and mountebanks who would have easily graced the pages of Tom Sawyer or Life on the Mississippi. Sometimes, Jawbari appears as the hero of his own stories catching out crooks like a character in Ghostbusters, but mostly he is content to retell tales in the spirit of the 1001 Nights.

Unlike Twain, Jawbari himself believed in miracles and magic. For an orthodox Muslim, there is nothing God cannot make happen if He so determines. So Jawbari takes pains to distinguish between a true prophet working miracles, like Idris, or a learned astrologer reading the stars, from the many false prophets and folksy fortune tellers. The fakes are not so hard to identify, according to Jawbari. While legitimate holy men, sheikhs and saints are distinguished first and foremost for piety, forbearance and simplicity, he meets many extravagant preachers who claim to command angels or pretend to teleport themselves to Mecca overnight. They hoodwink the crowd with flowering, mystical hocus-pocus and by planting shills among the spectators who pretend to be possessed and then act out a miraculous recovery by means of the incantations of their undeclared ringleader. These unholy men are not above sexually abusing credulous women or naïve boys by invoking heterodox ethics and a “bad is good”, antimonial philosophy. Readers will recognize that these holy rollers are rife in our own societies, with their quack cures for COVID, their extra-marital shenanigans, their prosperity gospel and pay-to-play prayer sessions.

 

The Book of Charlatans, Jamāl al-DīnʿAbd al-Raḥīm al-Jawbarī, Humphrey Davies (trans) (NYU Press, November 2020)
The Book of Charlatans, Jamāl al-DīnʿAbd al-Raḥīm al-Jawbarī, Humphrey Davies (trans) (NYU Press, November 2020)

Jawbari claims a fantastic intellectual lineage, one that seems straight out of Masonic literature. In addition to consulting the classical works of Arabic and Persian sciences by Ibn Sina, Ibn Haytham and Aristotle, he lists works by Hermes Trismegistus, Seth and Solomon as his sources. The citation of non-canonical and legendary works suggests that Jawbari was gently laughing at enthusiasts of esoteric literature. Most of Jawbari’s insights are deliciously down-to-earth.

The common thread behind many of the tricks exposed here is that the trickster invests some cash up front in order to establish credibility. An alchemist produces real gold from charcoal. He does this by lining, unbeknownst to the onlookers, a crucible with solid gold. He puts a lump of coal in the crucible, and then adds his secret sauce. Heating up the crucible, first the sauce boils, then the coal is consumed, and in the end he pours out the molten precious metal, as though it were the coal, transformed. The onlookers then pay top dirham for the sauce, which never again turns charcoal into gold, but the alchemist has long gone on the lam.

Another tale: a confidence man enters a mosque on Friday and waves a purse full of jewelry around. Before the assembled faithful the imam asks him what has transpired. The man claims that, poor as he is, he has found this purse and brought it to the mosque to turn it in. Moved by this display of honesty, the imam asks the congregation to reward the conman. He leaves laden with gold gifted by the congregation. Later an old woman appears and claims the lost purse—the contents of which she recites by heart. The imam gives her the purse, and she leaves to rejoin … the conman, her husband. How many financial transactions in our own day work this way. When a private equity firm invests money, takes on loans and then recovers its investment by way of dividends, they are performing the same trick.

 

Jawbari delights in gut-wrenching concoctions to produce special effects: crushed dung beetles, disinterred corpses, bile of slaughtered dogs. He warns of date-rape facilitated by the 13th-century equivalent of hash brownies. He enumerates scams involving astrologers, treasure finders, alchemists, mind readers and druggists. All have their methods for separating the gullible from their dinars.

Humphrey Davies, who previously translated Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building, employs racy English to render the text, arguing that the manuscript’s grammatical mistakes and non-standard jargon suggest that Jawbari himself composed in something closer to modern colloquial than to classical Arabic. One can imagine that the book’s patron, a minor Turkish dynast of Diyar Bekir, probably enjoyed the combination of high-falutin language with tangy obscenities and everyday slang.

The Book of Charlatans is an amusing evocation of the seamy side of the medieval Levant, full of worthy descendants of the 1001 Nights. It’s also a worthwhile warning that these people are still busy among us today, as any visit to your spam folder will reveal.


David Chaffetz is the author of Three Asian Divas: Women, Art and Culture in Shiraz, Delhi and Yangzhou (Abbreviated Press, November 2019) and Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empire (WW Norton, July 2024).