Page 15 - Arabian Studies (II)

The Game of May sir 5
identity of the owner of each twig meant that his joking epithets, as
well as the allocation of the portion of meat, were being distributed
randomly, like the trinkets in the Christmas pudding, and with
similar results. The joking epithets added an extra piece of fun and
interest, as Thesiger’s comments indicate, to the process of distri­
buting the meat.
The gambling described by the Arab philologists, in which the
stake was not the meat itself but the prestige attached to giving it
away, can only have been played in large tribal gatherings attended
by both aristocratic chieftains and inferior tribal members as
recipients of the bounty, not among parties of desert travellers of the
kind described by Thomas and Thesiger. But the stress laid by both
those writers on the fact that some method of randomization in the
distribution of meat is the norm in desert society, suggests that this
norm was the behavioural substructure on which the more elaborate
code of the prestige gambling was erected. That ancient allusions to
may sir occur mostly in passages where the poet is boasting of his
generosity (thus leading the later scholars to view prestige gambling
as the only form of may sir), may be attributable to the very fact that
distribution of meat by lot was so much a part of normal everyday
behaviour that it never struck them as worth alluding torthey could
not envisage anything else happening. Only the more elaborate (and
less frequently occurring) game was deserving of note.
In the end, however, the Quranic censure of may sir remains
puzzling. It seems hardly possible that the innocent practices
described by Thomas and Thesiger for sharing out meat fairly should
have merited disapproval; and it is evident that those who practised
them had no feeling that they were offensive to Islam. As for prestige
gambling, leading as it did to feeding the poor (a thoroughly Islamic
virtue), one would prima facie have supposed it to be positively
laudable. There are several possibilities that one might bear in mind
in searching for an answer to the puzzle. One is that the Qur’an may
be referring to ‘gambling’ in the more general sense — and there are
some forms of gambling which undoubtedly ‘disseminate enmity and
hatred’ - rather than to the bedouin methods of distributing meat,
which are precisely aimed at avoiding quarrels, or to the type of
may sir described by the philologists, which resulted in ‘feeding the
poor’. Anyone who reads mediaeval Arabic commentaries soon
becomes aware that the commentators sometimes drag in pieces of
information either to display their erudition or for the intrinsic
interest of the information, even when it is irrelevant to the passage
on which they are commenting. Another possibility is that the
competitive spirit fostered by prestige gambling may have tended to