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@krisrich

@krisrich

I've been trying to wrap my head around all of bad luck in "The Story of the Hunchback" from 1001 Nights and have been immensely helped by @krisrich 's book on blighted bodies (ahl al-ʿāhāt), which I strongly recommend google.com/books/edition/…

Most illuminating to me is the role of what was known as ʿilm al-firāsah, “physiognomancy”, or the art of discerning internal moral characteristics from external features. Abbasid scholars viewed firāsah as a particular skill of Arabs --

ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb was quite skilled at it – but they drew from Greek literature as well (most famously from Polemon's Physiognomy)
See here:
books.google.com/books?id=MHQ4D…
and here:
books.google.com/books?id=-I79H…

@krisrich

@krisrich

But what most surprised me when reading @krisrich 's book is how important the study and mastery of firāsah was to al-Shāfiʿī (d. 204/820). His students preserve all sorts of curious pronouncements by him on the topic.

E.g., al-Shāfiʿī taught, “Be wary of the one-eyed, the cross-eyed, the lame, the hunchback, the fair-haired, the thin-bearded and anyone with a blight on his body -- and be wary anyone who is deficient of nature, for he is perverse and his associations are unlucky.”

Sometimes the what al-Shāfiʿī considered a blight is surprising – here he demands perfume (ṭīb) bought from a fair-handed merchant to be returned.

Elsewhere, al-Shāfiʿī is described as travelling as far as Yemen in pursuit of books on firāsah, where he met a man having “blue-eyes, a broad forehead, and no beard”, which he describes as the most vile characteristics known to the physiognomancer