the woman as harkula — huge of haunch — and likened the haunch to a full dune of sand, heavy to the point that the woman's body tires under it, according to Amr ibn Kulthum, so that she nearly falls; nay, the carrying of it may throw her down. Imru' al-Qays chose to add something new to the descriptions of the haunch: not content to liken it to the sand-dune, he added that it is so vast and broad that (two young lads upon it...)!
As for the thighs, to be perfect in beauty they must be white, and soft as castor-stalks, and thick to the point that the one knocks against the other.
The Arab poets did not insist on the beauty of the legs, since to feel their beauty would have required a shortening of the long garment the woman wore. They assumed in them whiteness and straightness, like the papyrus-stalk; that they be rounded and plump; and that they be full and massive — khadallaj, that is, fat — to the point that seventy mithqals might go into her anklet, and if it were forced on by hammering it would break, from the bigness and fullness of the legs.
*
... We may end here this part of the survey of the body and the description of its beauty as the old poetry expressed it. I find it fitting to touch on a few further points connected with woman's beauty:
The gait: the fair one's walk was described as short-stepped, owing to her plumpness; as though she trod on thorns, so heavy was walking upon her and so narrow her steps; she walks slowly, like one enfeebled, with a lumbering gait like the gait of cattle; she is out of breath before she reaches her goal; whenever she rises she needs something to lean upon; and were it not that she braces herself when she stands up for her neighbors, she would drop, felled by indolence. She sways in her gait and undulates, quivers and struts, and every portion of her legs and thighs moves each on its own.
Speech: strange it is that the Arab poets described the woman,
when she talks, as speaking in a whisper! More than that, they portrayed her as sparing of words — as if they never truly knew her, or had never heard Ovid's symbolic tale of the woman whose tongue was cut out: they came back to it hours later and found it still quivering and moving, for never in its life had it known a moment's stillness!.. And they described her talk as honey, for its sweetness.
Adornment: the fair one was described as doing nothing and undertaking no work save in times of distress; hence the gravity of circumstances could be gauged by the amount of work the women were doing. She sleeps from nightfall and remains in her slumber till mid-morning, and hates to be waked though you offer her all you may, as in the well-known story of Aisha bint Talha. This excess of ease leads to the plumpness which the ancients took as the emblem of her beauty. Her indolence may come of her wealth and luxury. She stains her fingertips, as we have seen; she perfumes herself till the scent of ambergris and musk breaks from her and sweet odors are wafted from her — Omar finds his way to Nu'm's house by her fragrance, congratulates her people on her delicious scent, and takes her, as she passes, for a seller of perfumes. She is a garden full of cloves; there is nothing in her body but the fragrance of musk — were that fragrance wrung from her sleeves, she herself would well-nigh be wrung out with it. The woman wore ornaments in abundance, placing them on her ear, her neck, her wrist, and her leg. She was fastidious in her dress, changed her gowns often, and wore silk. In early Islam the woman took to wearing the sheer Alexandrian shifts and the safflower-dyed Quhi robes that all but revealed her body, uncovering more of her than they covered — which moved Mu'adh ibn Jabal to say: (You have been tried with the temptation of adversity, and I fear for you the temptation of prosperity — that is, the women, when they deck themselves with gold and wear the fine linen of Syria and the striped stuff of Yemen.) And when Aisha bint Talha was reproached for going unveiled and displaying herself, she said: (God, blessed and exalted, has stamped me with the stamp of beauty, and I wished that people should see it and know His grace toward them; never would I veil it!)
*
... And someone may ask: whom, then, would you nominate as the model of ancient Arab beauty? I stand perplexed, searching for a counterpart to Aphrodite and Helen among the Greeks, Cleopatra and Nefertiti among the Egyptians, Semiramis among the Babylonians, and the Shulamite among the Hebrews. The truth is that the old poets left us not so much real names as portraits of real persons, whom in most cases they painted with the selfsame portraits. It is difficult, then, to name a name; yet we may venture a suggestion. If we recall that Omar ibn Abi Rabi'a was the lover of lovers and possessed a refined taste in beauty (notwithstanding that he did not disdain to drink from any spring, and notwithstanding his praise of certain plain women — so that his lady-friends took him to task for it and asked how they could hold their heads high after his praise of Ramla, for instance); and if we recall that his first beloved was al-Thurayya, whose beauty Omar praised at length, of whom one critic of her age said that she was more marvelous than Omar had described, and another that she was the very pattern of beauty and perfection — then we may propose her among the beauties of the Arab women. Likewise, if we recall that Aisha bint Talha was his second beloved, that many of the great men of the people, and the connoisseurs of beauty among them, aspired to her love, and that she saw no blemish in herself so much as that anyone should charge her with one — we may propose her too among the beauties of the Arab women. We have, alas, no particular description of the two beyond the general descriptions lavished on all the fair ones, and beyond these two accounts —
so let us judge by them how great was the beauty of the two women, and let us see whether we would count al-Thurayya