Abu al-Husn and His Slave-Girl Tawaddud
Abu al-Husn and His Slave-Girl Tawaddud is a story that is first attested in medieval Arabic (later appearing in the Thousand and One Nights) that, besides being well known in itself, inspired spin-offs in Persian, Spanish, Portuguese, Mayan, and Tagalog. The tale in Arabic Summary As summarised by Ulrich Marzolph, Richard van Leeuwen, and Hassan Wassouf, the version in the Cairo edition of the Thousand and One Nights runs as follows: A rich man in Baghdad has a son called Abu ’l-Husn. When his father dies, Abu ’l-Husn squanders his inheritance ... until he owns nothing except a slave-girl named Tawaddud. Tawaddud advises him to take her to Caliph Hârûn al-Rashîd and sell her for 10,000 dinars. When she is led before the caliph, Hârûn starts interrogating her and she claims to be well versed in all the sciences. Thereupon Hârûn holds a contest between the foremost scholars of Baghdad and Tawaddud. She is questioned about the Koran, the traditions and the law, about theology, physiology and medicine, astronomy, and philosophy. In every discipline she proves to be exceptionally well informed and emerges victorious. Then she beats the champions of chess and backgammon and shows her ability to play the lute. Finally the caliph awards Abu ’l-Husn 10,000 dinars and takes him as a boon companion. He is allowed to keep Tawaddud. Origins The tenth-century CE Ibn al-Nadīm's famed catalogue of Arabic books, the Kitāb al-Fihrist, includes a chapter on 'the names of fables known by nickname, nothing more than that being known about them', among which al-Nadīm lists 'The Philosopher Who Paid Attention to the Handmaid (of) Qaytar and the Story of the Philosophers Connected with Her'. This sounds similar to the story of Tawaddud, so some scholars have guessed that it represents an earlier version of the same story. Because the subsection where this story is mentioned contains 'names of the books composed about sermons, morals, and wisdom, by the Persians, Greeks and Arabs', it has moreover been thought that the story of Qaytar (if that is indeed the name: the reading of the word is uncertain) was translated into Arabic from Greek. This claim too is merely speculative, however. Witnesses The Tawaddud story is first securely attested in a manuscript from the thirteenth century CE: Madrid, Real Academia de la Historia, Pascual de Gayanos collection, MS T-lxxi, as Hikāyat al jāriya Tūdūr wa mākānahā min ḥadīthihā maʿ al-munajjim wa-l-faylasūfi wa al-Naẓẓām bi ḥaḍrat Hārūn al-Rashīd. Another thirteenth-century Arabic manuscript is also known from Granada. The tale later came to be included in manuscripts of the Thousand and One Nights. It does not appear in the Galland Manuscript, the sole medieval manuscript of the Nights, but it does appear in many post-medieval manuscripts and the major printed edition known as Calcutta II, from which it was most famously rendered into English by Richard Francis Burton. Thematically, the tale fits the Nights well. Like the frame-story of the Nights, it is about a woman displaying her exceptional wit before