born at Nafzawa, a white, [570]
palm-encinctured town which gleamed by the shore of the Sebkha--that is,
salt marsh--Shot al Jarid; and spent most of his life in Tunis. The date
of his birth is unrecorded, but The Scented Garden seems to have been
written in 1431. [571] Nafzawi, like Vatsyayana, from whose book he
sometimes borrows, is credited with having been an intensely religious
man, but his book abounds in erotic tales seasoned to such an extent
as would have put to the blush even the not very sensitive "Tincker
of Turvey." [572] It abounds in medical learning, [573] is avowedly
an aphrodisiac, and was intended, if one may borrow an expression from
Juvenal, "to revive the fire in nuptial cinders." [574] Moslems read it,
just as they took ambergrised coffee, and for the same reason. Nafzawi,
indeed, is the very antithesis of the English Sir Thomas Browne, with
his well-known passage in the Religio Medici, [575] commencing "I could
be content that we might procreate like trees." Holding that no natural
action of a man is more degrading than another, Nafzawi could never
think of amatory pleasures without ejaculating "Glory be to God," or
some such phrase. But "Moslems," says Burton, "who do their best to
countermine the ascetic idea inherent in Christianity, [576] are not
ashamed of the sensual appetite, but rather the reverse." [577] Nafzawi,
indeed, praises Allah for amorous pleasures just as other writers have
exhausted the vocabulary in gratitude for a loaded fruit tree or an
iridescent sunset. His mind runs on the houris promised to the faithful
after death, and he says that these pleasures are "part of the delights
of paradise awarded by Allah as a foretaste of what is waiting for us,
namely delights a thousand times superior, and above which only the
sight of the Benevolent is to be placed." We who anticipate walls of
jasper and streets of gold ought not, perhaps, to be too severe on
the Tunisian. It must also be added that Nafzawi had a pretty gift of
humour. [578]

159. Origin of The Scented Garden.

The origin of the book was as follows: A small work, The Torch of the
World, [579] dealing with "The Mysteries of Generation," and written by
Nafzawi, had come into the hands of the Vizier of the Sultan of
Tunis. Thereupon the Vizier sent for the author and received him "most
honourably." Seeing Nafzawi blush, he said, "You need not be ashamed;
everything you have said is true; no one need be shocked a