Page 12 - Arabian Studies (II)

2 Arabian Studies II

specialized varieties. The details of the available descriptions arc
confusingly discrepant, and one can hardly feel otherwise than
sympathetic to Rciske, who confessed himself unable to make any
consistent picture out of them; and although Huber begins his study
by expressing the hope that, with the help of a number of citations
not available to Reiske, he can achieve more than Reiske did, the
reader is left at the end of it all with a feeling that one can do little
more than acknowledge that there must have been a number of
different varieties of the game. I am inclined to think that (as often
happens in mediaeval Muslim studies of pre-Islam) the philologists
were operating with a set of data which, while in themselves
authentic, were insufficient in principle for the construction of any
fully integrated account, and they filled this lacuna by constructing
their own hypothetical schemes into which to fit the data.
Nevertheless, there are some basic features which are common to
all accounts. It is generally agreed that maysir in its more limited
connotation was a procedure for allotting shares in the meat of a
slaughtered camel to the participants in the game; that the number of
players was normally seven; that the procedure involved shaking
untipped and unfeathered arrow-shafts (aqdah or maghaliq) in a
bunched up cloth called the ribabah, and having them drawn out at
random by an impartial person called the hurdah (with elaborate
precautions against cheating); and - most surprisingly — that the
portions of meat won were not consumed by the players but given to
the poor. This last feature shows that what was being gambled for
was not material gain but the prestige of almsgiving: it was a case of
competitive prestige-seeking. Most of the poetic allusions to the game
imply that participation in it was one aspect of that prime virtue in
the bedouin chieftain, generosity to the poor. On the other hand,
there are accounts which state that some of the arrows were ‘losers’,
and that the participants to whom these fell had to pay for the
animal. Thus although there was no material gain for the winners,
there was the possibility of material loss for the losers. One very
striking account (Huber, p. 41) depicts the players, during the
shaking-up process, excitedly shouting and each addressing his own
arrow with the adjuration ‘to win and not to lose’.
It is clear that the arrows must have been individually recog­
nizable. Some accounts say that they were marked with one or more
notches to signify the size of the portion of meat to be won; and
something of this sort is implicit in the statement in all accounts that
each arrow had an individual name. The lists given of these names are
not altogether clear, but some of them at least evidently relate to the
size of the portion — al-fadhdh ‘unique’ for the smallest portion,