Although philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin's carnivalesque dialogic was restricted to the study of Rabelais and medieval European popular culture, it seems to have crossed the borders of the Continent and definitely found fertile ground in Asia. Cultural theorist Ben Taylor pointed out that many patterns and functions of carnivalesque folk humour found their way into cultures beyond Europe.Footnote ¹ Long before Bakhtin propounded his theory of carnival, medieval Cairene libertine poet playwright Ibn Dāniyāl, an immigrant ophthalmologist from Mosul, depicted such patterns of folk humour in recalcitrant parades in three shadow plays to lampoon and satirize the Mamlūk regime and its prohibitions. Theatre scholar Richard Leeuwen stated that Ibn Dāniyāl's shadow plays ‘come closest to the Bakhtinian concept of the grotesque, fulfilling an essential function of popular culture’. The plays, he elaborated, are farcical and artistically sophisticated, though obscene, offensive and subversive, and were meant to shock and daringly revolt against conformist taste, public order and rigid authority.Footnote ² In line with this argument, theatre scholar James Smith pointed out that Ibn Dāniyāl's trilogy can be interpreted through Bakhtin's carnivalesque dialogic because the playwright managed to create a communal plebian identity in medieval Cairo, defying the Mamlūk Sultan's historical crackdown on vice.Footnote ³ The carnivalesque spirit in the Middle Ages was a widespread tradition in both the Orient and the Occident, with equal degrees of diligence and functionality. Eroticism and sexual folk humour were common features of classical Greek bawdy comedies and phallic dance shows. Obscenity was also a literary characteristic of the fool variety in medieval Europe and seems to be inclusive of medieval literatures in the East. Scholar Enid Welsford remarked that pornographic material was a conspicuous feature of the fool literature in medieval Europe and medieval Arabic literature was no exception to this widespread tradition.Footnote ⁴

The Dāniyālic trilogy is geared to the orientalist carnivalesque mode, similar to that of Rabelais, because it is based on ‘grotesque realism’, which celebrates the liberation of the human body from what Bakhtin calls ‘the oppression of such gloomy categories as “eternal,” “immovable,” “absolute,” “unchallengeable”’ and instead sheds light on ‘the gay and free laughing aspect of the world, with its unfinished and open character, with the joy of change and renewal’.Footnote ⁵ Ibn Dāniyāl's trilogy exhibits many features of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque, such as folk humour, laughter, festive mockery, satire, lampoon, defiance of social norms and political despotism, grotesque realism, ribald language, obscenity and celebration of lower-body functions. The poet playwright places himself as a jester in a carnivalesque crowd; he is not just a bystander looking at the mock world of his play. The role of the poet playwright as a jester, or what Arab studies scholar Andras Hamori calls ‘a ritual clown’, serves his function of societal lampooning.Footnote ⁶

Bakhtinian discourse on carnivalism highlights the twisted reversal of supremacy and authority where royalties and men of noble stature are made powerless while ‘dregs’ of society such as fools, clowns, jesters and plebeians are momentarily endowed with power to mock royalty, usually seen as pillars of society and emblems of religion. In carnivalesque folk comedies religiosity and obscenity are satirically combined to mock and deride a rejected dictatorship. In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin perceives the carnival as ‘a court and humanist utopia’ where freedom of speech is granted to formerly suppressed and marginalized voices.Footnote ⁷ The carnivalesque world portrayed in such folk comedies is a topsy-turvy wasteland where royalties are rendered pitiable and dregs of society – commoners, beggars and charlatans – are authorized to defy leaders of society. Literary critic Terry Eagleton stated that Western scholars enthusiastically welcomed Bakhtin's theory of unrestrained carnivalesque freedom because they viewed a carnival as ‘a blessed moment of release, a temporary respite from the world's tyrannical, compulsive legibility … from the terrorism of excessive significance’.Footnote ⁸

This study applies Bakhtin's theory of carnival to the third shadow play Al-Mutayyam wal Ḍāyiʻ Al-Yutayyim (The Love-Stricken One and the Lost One Who Inspires Passion) in the trilogy written by the medieval Egyptian playwright Ibn Dāniyāl. Unfortunately the trilogy Ṭayf al-Khayāl constitutes the only surviving dramatic manuscripts that have reached us from Mamlūk medieval Cairo. The play manuscripts have been kept for nearly seven centuries in museums across the medieval Muslim world in Egypt, Turkey and Spain. They were reconstructed by German orientalists and were later published in a complete form in 1992.Footnote ⁹ The three plays have been given scant attention by Arab scholars on account of their crude obscenity, the playwright's archaic language mixed with Egyptian vernacular, orthographic alterations, the texts’ syntactic and lexical intricacies and the playwright's extensive use of puns and allusions to the three Abrahamic scriptures. Orientalist Georg Jacob remarked that Ibn Dāniyāl is the ‘wittiest and most amusing poet in the Arabic language. No Arab poet can compare with Ibn Dāniyāl for his originality, sharpness and humor’.Footnote ¹⁰ Orientalist Paul Kahle stated that Ibn Dānyiāl was one of the most interesting but most difficult authors in Arabic literature.Footnote ¹¹ Kahleh observed that Ibn Dāniyāl's shadow plays contain offensively obscene passages that are unsuitable to our taste, which is why his work has been almost neglected in Asia.Footnote ¹² Moreover, the contextual long-standing banishment of Ibn Dāniyāl's trilogy from world literature is attributed to scholarly disregard of non-canonical genres, especially shadow plays, which have always been looked down upon as a worthless and distasteful literary genre inferior to elite classical Arabic poetry. In addition, most Arab scholars have had the impression that Arabic literature under the rule of the Mamlūk dynasty produced no impressive literary works. Only in the postcolonial era was the trilogy brought to light by the two German orientalists, first Jacob and then Paul Kahle. Quite recently there has been a substantial surge in scholarly studies on Ibn Dāniyāl and the playwright's legacy has begun to be reconsidered among scholars particularly in the West, who recognize him as one of the funniest writers of medieval Arabo-Islamic culture and world literature. Theatre scholar Marvin Carlson stated that Ibn Dāniyāl is ‘slowly coming to Western attention as one of the most important dramatists of the Middle Ages’.Footnote ¹³ The first English translation of the trilogy was released in a recent publication by the CUNY Graduate Center, Theatre from Medieval Cairo: Ibn Dāniyāl Trilogy (2013) translated and edited by Safi Mahfouz and Marvin Carlson.Footnote ¹⁴

Ibn Dāniyāl's trilogy not only is important to world literature, but also constitutes an essential historical manuscript on Mamlūk society in medieval Cairo. Carlson remarked that Western scholars have recently started to value the historical importance of this almost unknown medieval playwright's artistically sophisticated shadow plays; his trilogy can be rated among the most intricate and literate plays of the Middle Ages.Footnote ¹⁵ Literary scholar Everett Rowson argued that Ibn Dāniyāl's trilogy provides a relief for Arab theatre scholars who are ashamed of the absence of a theatrical tradition in Arabic literature.Footnote ¹⁶ In fact, the playwright's remark in the prologue of The Shadow Spirit that people were bored with the shadow plays staged prior to his trilogy is strong evidence that Arabic shadow theatre had become clichéd and timeworn. Additionally, this proclamation refutes most Western scholars’ false claim that Arabs did not know drama prior to the colonial era.

Ibn Dāniyāl's shadow plays share many features with European and Arabic folk literary genres. The trilogy exhibits many features of the Arabic maqāma, a prosimetric literary genre of rhythmic and rhymed prose with sporadic passages of classical Arabic poetry and zajal, a form of folk singing. The shadow play reached its maturity in transtextual fusion with the maqāma. Folklorist Hasan El-Shamy pointed out that maqāmāt, literary assemblies, may have been blueprints for theatrical performances staged for didactic purposes.Footnote ¹⁷ Much like European literature of the fool, the stock characters in Ibn Dāniyāl's trilogy are common people who resort to all sorts of deception to eke out a living by relying on their wit and eloquence. The plays also rely on the vulgar traditions prevalent in medieval European morality drama and in Aristophanes’ bawdy comedies.Footnote ¹⁸ All the speaking and non-speaking names in Ibn Dāniyāl's trilogy are scatological, genitalo-centric, abusive and humorously vulgar. Humorous names with sexual connotations are abundant in The Love-Stricken One and the Lost One Who Inspires Passion, including the public bath Bāb al-kharq (‘Door of Penetration’), Zallāqa (‘Penis Asshole Slipping’), Abū al-Sahl (‘Mr. Easy Penile Penetration’), ‘Omayr Al-Jallād (‘Penis Masturbator’) and the hermaphrodite Narjis (‘Narcissus’).

Although the three monotheist Abrahamic scriptures prohibited pagan rituals similar to those celebrated by the Greeks and the Romans, many seasonal fertility festivals were organized along the banks of the Nile and other parts of the Arab world by both Muslims and Christians. Arab historian Shmuel Moreh stated that these carnivalesque, burlesque rituals were organized to ‘celebrate death and resurrection in rituals of agricultural festivals pertaining to the vegetation and seasonal cycle … and became seasonal folk theatre’.Footnote ¹⁹ During the Mamlūk reign in medieval Cairo the Egyptians organized many revelry carnivals on the banks of the Nile, such as the Nawrūz fertility festival, which marked the Coptic New Year, and ‘Eid al-Shahīd or the Festival of the Martyr to supplicate God to increase the level of the Nile. Arabic scholars James Monroe and Mark Pettigrew pointed out that the Egyptian Nawrūz was a Saturnalian fertility festival similar to European carnivals in which the mock prince Nawrūz, or Lord of Misrule, satirizes the religious and political hierarchies of Mamlūk society.Footnote ²⁰ Thus it becomes clear that Ibn Dāniyāl followed his ancestors’ tradition in portraying these orgiastic and fertility rituals in his shadow plays.

Medieval folk festivities in Egypt under the rule of the Mamlūk dynasty momentarily legitimized rowdy humour and the mocking parody of political figures and clerics in carnivals that provided the fraught plebeians with both relief from the asceticism of rigid religiosity and the feudal system and an outlet to express their rebelliousness against the regime's autocracy. Most of the fictional characters in the trilogy parody real personages from the Mamlūk elite military society, thus mirroring what Bakhtin calls ‘a parodic effect’.Footnote ²¹ Historian Clifford Bosworth remarked that many men of letters and their patrons had a keen interest in these shadow plays’ profligate jargon and the depiction of underworld plebians’ insolent behaviours.Footnote ²²

The trilogy satirizes through parody and mockery a crucial event in medieval Mamlūk Egypt. In 1267 the Mamlūk Sultan Baybars I, one of the commanders-in-chief of the Muslim army that defeated the Seventh Crusade of King Louis IX of France, launched a tough campaign against sinners in Egypt. Ibn Dāniyāl wrote three bawdy shadow plays in the burlesque tradition in which he portrayed the plebeians’ fury and their carnivalesque rebellion against such a radical campaign. In The Shadow Spirit, the first play in the trilogy, the dissolute hunchback Ṭayf al-Khayāl (‘Shadow Spirit’) returns to Egypt after a long absence in Mosul to reunite with his friend, the mock prince Wiṣāl (‘Prince Sexual Union’), but is stunned to find out that the Mamlūk Sultan had waged a ruthless campaign against decadence and moral depravity in the country. Prince Wiṣāl and the hunchback recite an elegy mourning Satan's death and thus express their longing for the now-prohibited pleasures of sinful living – sex and drinking. Prince Wiṣāl recounts a dream in which he saw Satan ‘sad, heart-broken and in a morbid mood. He was one-eyed and the other eye was sore and full of pus’. In this distressing dream Satan complains to his old buddy, ‘I fell captive into the hands of the Sultan. My troops have been diminished; my status is sapped’. When Prince Wiṣāl protests to the conquered Satan that the marketplaces of depravities and debaucheries in Egypt have become stagnant, Satan despondently replies, ‘Now, I am no more in command. I have no authority, and no kingdom’.Footnote ²³ The mock prince advises Satan and his disciples to leave Egypt because the Sultan will strike reprobates with a fist of iron and will spare no one. Historian Li Guo remarked that lamenting the good old days of revelry and merriment before the Sultan's campaign against vice parodies al-woqouf ‘ala al-aṭlāl, a common theme in Arabic classical poetry which describes the love-stricken one's weeping on the deserted encampment and lost love.Footnote ²⁴ However, Guo pointed out that for the depraved bums the ‘beloved’ who deserted the encampment is none other than Satan, while the longing is for the forbidden fruits left in the lost garden.Footnote ²⁵

In response to the Sultan's tough campaign on vice, the plebeians of the bohemian underworld resorted to folk humour and laughter in what looks like a carnival to overcome their fear of a punishment that exceeded the crime. Humanities scholar Amila Buturovic noted that comicality, grotesque humour, the commoners’ dissatisfaction with the Mamlūk regime's crackdown on dens of vice, its severe disciplinary measures on violators and the carnivalesque life force that pervades Ibn Dāniyāl's trilogy imitate what Bakhtin calls ‘polarity in folk culture’.Footnote ²⁶ Comicality in Ibn Dāniyāl's trilogy in general aims at satirizing and defaming the Mamlūk military regime's autocracy through the culture of laughter and vulgarity. Historian Francesca Corrao pointed out that folk humour and carnivalesque ambivalence in Ibn Dāniyāl's trilogy shed light on achieving social satire through ‘the popular culture of laughter’.Footnote ²⁷ Corrao remarked that the collective joyousness of the plebeians through carnivalesque sexual humour and laughter temporarily relieved them of feelings of loneliness, terrorization and fear.Footnote ²⁸

One of the carnivalesque features prevalent in Ibn Dāniyāl's shadow plays is the narration of ribald anecdotes full of references to excrement. These scatological jokes both provoke laughter and help the playwright to circuitously lampoon the Mamlūk military autocracy and its policing surveillance of vice. Bakhtin remarked that bawdy jokes about the lower bodily stratum, with all its biological functions – pissing, pooping, farting and jerking off – not only produce carnivalesque hilarity but also relieve carnival partakers of life's daily toils. In addition, they alleviate the restrictions imposed on them by the official high culture, secretly expressing a network of values and desires.Footnote ²⁹ Theorist Charles Byrd analogizes Sigmund Freud's theory of anal eroticism to Bakhtin's grotesque dialogic and the celebration of the lower bodily stratum. Both theories shed light on the importance of laughter in ridiculing and satirizing a totalitarian regime.Footnote ³⁰ In Ibn Dāniyāl's carnivalesque cosmos of shadow figures, the commoners furtively condemn the caricatured Mamlūk regime of extremism by telling bawdy anecdotes marked by a wordplay entirely incomprehensible to the alien Mamlūks.

One of the conspicuous characteristics of medieval carnivals both in Europe and in the East was the use of abusive idiom where the explicit meaning was praise, but the implicit meaning was satire, jeering and lampoon. This uncouth language used in the marketplace and public squares swarmed with vulgarities, obscenities, curses and swearwords. In Carnival and Dialogue Bakhtin stated that such low form of discourse is simultaneously humiliating and renewing, revealing and hiding, selling and entertaining.Footnote ³¹ In Ibn Dāniyāl's carnivalesque, topsy-turvy, Mamlūk-caricatured world the poet playwright's panegyric is meant to satirize and lampoon rather than praise. Badawī pointed out that in the parodic carnivalesque mock world of Ibn Dāniyāl's trilogy the poetic passages portray all ‘low forms of life in a mock heroic style, with ironic allusions to the serious Arabic poetic tradition’.Footnote ³² The poet's praise, to quote Bakhtin, is both ‘ironic and ambivalent’ since his grotesque language ‘abuses while praising and praises while abusing’.Footnote ³³

In Ibn Dāniyāl's wasteland, the bohemian utopia in which Satan holds kingly powers, is destined to collapse from the outset. The depraved buffoons who are prone to vice finally realize that, though they can temporarily escape the Mamlūk regime's castigation, they feel a deep sense of guilt and are mesmerized by a tantalizing fear of God's punishment in the afterlife. After indulging in all sorts of sexual perversion, the brothel merrymakers finally become aware that their only salvation is genuine repentance to God, since death might strike them at any moment. This carnivalesque parade of degenerate men and the celebration of the lower bodily stratum in The Love-Stricken One and the Lost One Who Inspires Passion comport with Bakhtin's carnivalesque dialogic. Monroe and Pettigrew have argued that the chaotic world depicted in Ibn Dāniyāl's trilogy, in which vice is glorified, belongs to the carnivalesque tradition.Footnote ³⁴ The shadow play's carnivalesque mock world, as Smith stated, is a fleeting ‘temporary illusion’.Footnote ³⁵ In the epilogue the celebratory carnival ends when the degenerate men's laughter and merrymaking are silenced and order is restored with the sudden death of the Love-Stricken One. Having realized that death is inevitable the brothel guests disclose their intention to repent and henceforth follow the straight and narrow path of piety.

Although Ibn Dāniyāl's lewd shadow plays celebrate the lower bodily stratum, they should not by any means be looked down upon as cheap writing of popular culture. Carlson remarked that Ibn Dāniyāl can be called the Arab Aristophanes since his shadow plays swarm with obscenity and scatology similar to that of Aristophanic comedies.Footnote ³⁶ In depicting man's foibles and indecent behaviour through sexual humour, sarcasm and literary flippancy, Ibn Dāniyāl ridicules man's absurd attempts to fulfil the sinful pleasures of the lower bodily stratum and stresses the fact that death – the leveller – unpredictably puts an end to man's friskiness. Guo stated that Ibn Dāniyāl's trilogy represents ‘the zenith of the medieval Arabic shadow play’.Footnote ³⁷

During the Sultan's campaign on vice in Cairo, the gypsies and other ‘dregs’ of medieval Cairene society resorted to participating in carnivalesque festivities to alleviate their suffering. Buturovic remarked that because the common people in medieval Cairo were unable to cope with the hardships of their daily life they created – through the medium of laughter and obscenity – an atmosphere in which nothing was off-limits and static but rather every act was fluid and changeable.Footnote ³⁸ Although most of the festivities organized in medieval Egypt were typically religious, wherein commoners improvised poetry in ritualistic performances to praise God in the marketplace, the most remarkable feature of such festivities was a combination of religiosity, comicality and obscenity. Bakhtin pointed out that the marketplace is an unsanctioned arena where the carnivalesque crowd can communally express their suppressed sexual, social and political views without the fear of any consequent punishment.Footnote ³⁹ Bakhtin's ambivalent culture of laughter in a carnival sheds light on the skirmish between the strict high culture represented by the state and the church and the carnivalesque folk culture of the plebeians who struggle to achieve political and social reform through humour and grotesquery. Buturovic stated that Ibn Dāniyāl's trilogy wittily exposes the ambivalence of the Mamlūk regime's ideology by highlighting two binary opposites: folk ethos and religious discourse.Footnote ⁴⁰

A noticeable feature of Ibn Dāniyāl's trilogy is the portrayal of the carnivalesque revelries through ‘travesty’, or what Michael Bristol calls ‘code switching’ and ‘grotesque hyperboles’, whereby identity is made dubious by having binary traits.Footnote ⁴¹ In line with this argument, Buturovic pointed out that code switching in Ibn Dāniyāl's trilogy is based on reversing conventional images, comic juxtapositions and switching ethical and aesthetic binary opposites – ‘eternal’ and ‘changeable’, ‘religious’ and ‘profane’, ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’.Footnote ⁴² Unlike Bakhtin's carnival, which offers the commoners ‘an alternative social space of freedom and equality expressing a utopian promise of plenitude and redemption’,Footnote ⁴³ Ibn Dāniyāl's utopia of freedom of speech and unsuppressed sexual fantasies is a republic where the plebeians are merely social and sexual outcasts who remain oppressed and finally acknowledge their defeat in front of mighty death, lurking everywhere. In Ibn Dāniyāl's carnivalesque folk shadow plays, religiosity and obscenity are wryly pooled to mock and satirize the Mamlūk aristocracy and its dictatorial regime.

Al-Mutayyam wal Ḍāyiʻ Al-Yutayyim (The Love-Stricken One …) is a homoerotic narrative that recounts the weird quirks and jests of the conditions of lovers through insolent and witty anecdotes. Buturovic stated that the play is a burlesque portrayal of amorous conventions among plebeians in Mamlūk Egypt.Footnote ⁴⁴ In line with this argument, Rowson remarked that the play presents a Rabelaisian world in which all sorts of homoerotic lust find their gratification in open defiance of conventional restraints.Footnote ⁴⁵ Al-Mutayyam – ‘The Love-Stricken One’ – is a wanton pederast who falls in love with the effeminate boy al-Yutayyim – ‘The Lost One Who Inspires Passion’. At the beginning of the play al-Mutayyam appears onstage as a pale and skinny man who has been rendered feeble by intense passion, lovesickness and sleeplessness. When he appears he howls noisily, wails bitterly and chants an amorous lyric in which he reveals his agonized passion for a Turkish youth of charming beauty. He calls upon all love-stricken men to join him in lamenting their unrequited love. The poem he recites is a comical burlesque treatment of Arabic romantic poetry:

Al-Mutayyam's description of himself as the love-stricken one who has been slaughtered without a knife categorizes him as a victim of unrequited love. The poem he recites praises the boy's masculine beauty as exceeding every feminine charm and reveals that his love is distressing and agonizing. Then, al-Mutayyam recalls the day he saw al-Yutayyim among a crowd of half-crazed gawking admirers in the waiting room in a clinic and immediately became infatuated with him. When al-Yutayyim took off his garment in the clinic to get ready for the physician to examine him, all the men in the clinic, including al-Mutayyam, started to ogle his body and woo him with passion and fondness. The admirers tried to bribe him but he was aloof and did not yield to anyone. Al-Mutayyam proceeds to sing a muwashaḥ, a musical form consisting of strophic lines of popular poetry, in praise of the boy's effeminate beauty and dalliance:

Al-Mutayyam's former friend, a misshapen effeminate youth, appears while farting and snorting and chides al-Mutayyam for turning away from him and for desperately trying to have sex with an arrogant youth, al-Yutayyim. He warns al-Mutayyam that he has defamed and humiliated himself by courting a boy who does not return his love. Al-Mutayyam becomes enraged, reprimands his former buddy and rejects his offer to reunite. Al-Mutayyam praises al-Yutayyim's dalliance and asserts that coyness is a second beauty. Literary scholar Hanādī Al-Sammān remarks that homoerotic desire in medieval Arabic societies existed through what was known as the system of ghilmān (‘young male slaves’), which was a socially legitimate venue for homoeroticism.Footnote ⁴⁸ Literary theorist Frédéric Lagrange points out that pederasty was commonplace in classical poetry and ribaldry-related shadow plays were widespread in Egypt during the Mamlūk era.Footnote ⁴⁹ Such homoerotic attraction is vividly portrayed in many stories of The Thousand and One Nights. Al-Mutayyam sadly complains that al-Yutayyim is aloof and does not return his passion; this makes him frustrated and miserable. He even admits that he thought about taking the boy by force.

The dejected al-Mutayyam nostalgically recalls how he almost slipped in the public bath when he saw his object of passion half naked and was overcome with desire. Had al-Yutayyim not got hold of him, he would have died from the fall. He recites some poetry:

Al-Mutayyam is overcome with desire at the kiss, takes one step further and puts his hand on the boy's backside. Immediately al-Yutayyim disappears and leaves his admirer tormented by ardent love. The public bath's storyteller takes pity on the pederast, helps him stand up and gives him a glass of juice.

Recovering from his ecstasy, the pederast sends a letter to the boy and expresses his affection. In response to al-Mutayyam's entreaties, the boy's valet, Bayram, assures him that he has used all his cunning to convince al-Yutayyim to yield to his temptation. Bayram persuades al-Yutayyim that al-Mutayyam's passion for him is genuine and that he deserves reconsideration. Having heard that Bayram used all his shrewdness to persuade al-Yutayyim to yield to his demand, al-Mutayyam becomes thrilled, dances cheerily and takes many sips from his goblet of wine. When he sees al-Yutayyim once again he almost cries with joy and ecstatically sings a song praising his idol, a paragon of beauty. Al-Yutayyim sneaks a shy glance at the pederast and rebukes him for tarnishing his reputation among the townspeople. Then he joins his admirer in singing and they engage in a strophic duet in verse. Al-Mutayyam chants,

Al-Yutayyim replies:

The verse duet between the pederast and his object of affection ends with a challenge in three contests: a cockfight, ram butting and bull fighting. The loser in these fights will yield to the other's demands.

As the tension between the boy and his admirer increases so does the size of the animals participating in the contests. Before the cockfight starts, each chants a lyric in praise of his cock, a type of singing replete with sexual connotations. Al-Mutayyam challenges al-Yutayyim, saying that his rooster Ṣabāḥ (‘Dawn Cockcrow’) will defeat his cock al-Qāyyim Ṣayyāḥ (‘Erect Crier’) for it has never been beaten in a cockfight. The referee, Zayhoun, starts the cockfight with a pious preamble in praise of the virtues of roosters and cock-fighting. The referee asks the attendants to make their wagers on the match. He comically addresses al-Yutayyim's rooster as the prince of vagabonds and paupers. The description becomes politically satirical when he says that the cock among hens looks like the king of the Mamlūks dressed in a silken pallium knitted with stitches of silver and gold nuggets on the shoulders or even like Chosroes, the King of Persia. During the cockfight al-Yutayyim's rooster behaves like a coward and escapes from the ring. Al-Yutayyim is disappointed and attributes his rooster's retreat from the fight to a heavenly summoning, hearing the call for prayers which echo from the nearby mosque.

Al-Yutayyim challenges the pederast with the second competition, ram butting. Al-Yutayyim's ram turns tail and runs away. Al-Mutayyam laughs and joyfully announces his ram's victory. Al-Yutayyim attributes his ram's defeat to the spell of an envious eye cast upon it. Al-Mutayyam untiringly ogles al-Yutayim, who bashfully turns his face away, and pleads with him to return his affection. He sadly recites some lines of poetry:

To escape sodomy, al-Yutayyim challenges him to a third contest, bull-butting. The bettors make their wagers on the fight while the referee takes his position between the two furious, charging bulls. Al-Mutayyam becomes enraged and heartbroken when his bull is defeated and collapses on the ground. Heartbroken, al-Mutayyam weeps bitterly and laments the dying bull in verse. Having mourned the dying bull, al-Mutayyam announces that he will slaughter it to prepare a huge banquet for buffoons, drunkards, perverts and revellers throughout Cairo. Al-Mutayyam makes clear his intention of preparing this huge banquet when he says that his beloved al-Yutayyim might attend this communal meal and so he would admire his physical zeal and would eventually yield to him.

Al-Mutayyam throws the door of his house open and sings with a loud voice, calling for a carnivalesque parade of his companions to feast, drink, hum and drone to music and tambourine drums. The underworld buffoons, parasites and drunkards come one after the other to scrounge food and wine. They eat and drink until they fall to the floor in a heap of punch-drunk sleepers. They have not only indulged in excessive drinking, but have also revealed their suppressed sexual fantasies. Celebration of the lower stratum of the body acquired a great significance in popular performing arts in the Middle Ages; Bakhtin related such theatrical traditions to ‘the feast of the fool, in charivari and carnival, in the popular side show of the Corpus Christi, in the diableries of the mystery plays, the soties, and the farces’.Footnote ⁵⁴

Folk humour in medieval societies was widespread on the margins of the official high ideology and elite literature and was characterized by sexual liberty, crude vulgarity and incomparable lampooning of powerful figures. To add merriment to the medieval feasts, many people with physical deformities, such as hunchbacks, dwarfs and hermaphrodites, were summoned to perform. Such performing arts are also typical of Ibn Dāniyāl's trilogy. Carnivalesque folk humour is a social and political force that enjoys full impunity. No matter how many participants in a carnival flout laws and mock and satirize symbols of authority and high culture, their deeds will go unpunished and even uncensored because they constitute a collective force. Celebrating the lower body through grotesque and phallocentric imagery allowed plebs participating in a carnival to revolt against oppressive political and religious hierarchies. It also helped them overcome their fear of cosmic threats such as starvation, drought and natural catastrophe. In Bakhtin's words, the carnivalesque inculcates in the crowd ‘a sublime sense of fear’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Festive laughter in a carnival was meant to reveal the plebeians’ will to display the merriments of their folk culture in the face of the dominant ideology. According to Bakhtin, laughter purifies one from society's inflexible and intolerable dogmatism; liberates plebs in a carnival from eschatological fears, coercion and societal prohibitions, especially those imposed on them by religious elites; and restores this ambivalent wholeness.Footnote ⁵⁶

The first guest to attend the banquet is the hermaphrodite Narjis (‘Narcissus’). He ties a scarf around his waist and coquettishly shakes his hips and shoulders as he dances. He recites a bawdy lyric in which he praises all hermaphrodites and expresses his desire for anal jamming and swallowing a pederast's cum. Narjis informs his host that his top friend Dukthāb al-Uṣtoulī (‘Mr Insertion Filling Driller’) has a huge phallus with which Narjis was made to poop thick shit and so badly hurt his anus. The analogy between anal intercourse and childbirth pangs through scatological metaphors is meant to be both humorous and satirical. The hermaphrodite is proud to say that he makes his living by the toil of his ass and the sweating of his shoulders. Narjis coquettishly and lustfully ogles al-Mutayyam's erect penis, which is visible underneath his outfit. He advises al-Mutayyam to take a hermaphrodite's bottom to substitute for his unyielding al-Yutayyim. Narjis soon passes out.

The next visitor to the brothel is a young man with sexy curves who introduces himself as Abū al-Sahl (‘Mr Easy Penile Penetration’). He coyly says that he heard the flute music, singing and the boisterous sounds of wine bottles, and wanted to join the company of the merrymakers. Al-Mutayyam welcomes him to the revelry and offers him a goblet of wine. He asks al-Mutayyam if his object of lust, the arrogant and obstinate al-Yutayyim, is present among the merrymakers. Al-Mutayyam becomes sad, and in verse weeps over his bad luck in love:

Abū al-Sahl gulps many goblets of wine until he is drunk and sleeps like the dead. As he turns in bed his pants loosen and fall off his hips. Then another buffoon comes in and introduces himself as Abū al-Buḥaish Ibn al-Khannāqa (‘Digger, Son of Choker’). While ogling al-Mutayyam's phallus, he informs him that his unyielding mistress al-Yutayyim is the bottom for many. Drunk, he staggers and falls beside the other sleeping drunkards. Baddāl (‘Swinger’) rushes in and immediately offers himself to al-Mutayyam as a substitute for the unfaithful and perverted al-Yutayyim, while chanting, ‘Carpe diem. Enjoy your present for life is momentary and time is fleeting.’ Al-Mutayyam rejects Baddāl's offer, stressing that his braggart al-Yutayyim is a rarity. He, too, passes out drunk. The next visitor, Dawoud al-Qabbāḍ (‘David, Clutch with the Tight Grab’), laments the lovely days of fornication that are now gone. He ogles al-Mutayyam's erect phallus visible underneath his pants and expresses his wish for anal penetration. Dawoud drinks and falls asleep in a squatting posture on the heap of drunkards. The next guest, ‘Omayr Al-Jallād (‘Penis Masturbator’), introduces himself as the one with the pregnant hand who relieves his desire through genitalo-centric fantasy. He announces that having sex in fantasy is not punishable with lashing or stoning since it is not adultery. He chants a lyric:

Nabham al-Dabbab (‘Clever Crawler’) introduces himself as a voyeur who gratifies his sexual desire by watching, from outdoor terraces, couples having sex. He also sneaks into houses to have sex with boys even if they sleep in their parents’ laps. He joins the heap of other drunkards in the brothel. The Mamlūk slave advises al-Mutayyam to stop thinking of his unyielding mistress and have sex with one of the sleeping drunkards. The true parasite Salhab al-Ṭufaylī (‘Glutton the Parasite’) rushes in begging for food. Al-Mutayyam informs him that he has no food left but offers him some wine. The parasite drinks the wine greedily and immediately falls on the heap of motionless drunkards. Despite its scandalous obscenity, this play, like the other two in the trilogy, drastically shifts at the end when religious order is suddenly re-established and death, the leveller, brings an end to the revellers’ hilarious merriment of feasting, drinking and orgy. This restoration of religious order through either death or repentance is carnivalesque, as Carlson remarked, in harmony with the Aristophanic comedy in which new order simultaneously reaffirms traditional values.Footnote ⁵⁹

The final visitor to the brothel contrasts sharply with the former visitors. He is the incarnation of the Seraph Azrael, the Angel of Death. In the midst of the revelry an awe-inspiring man with a solemn decorum worthy of reverence approaches al-Mutayyam and the sleeping depraved drunkards and strikes terror into their hearts. He utters a loud shout that awakens all the sleepers of the brothel from their deep torpor and restores their abstemiousness. Horrified, al-Mutayyam inquisitively and fearfully addresses the reverent man and asks him to reveal his identity to the merrymakers. The pious man introduces himself as the Angel of Death who puts an end to people's immoral holiday and their indulgence in the sinful pleasures of the body, who snatches their souls and delivers them to the Almighty God. Terrified, al-Mutayyam inquires if he still has a chance for repentance and the Angel of Death assures him that God's mercy is bountiful and a sinner can seek forgiveness as long as he is still alive and before his soul loses sensation. Rowson argued that the restoration of moral order with the appearance of the angel of death in this play parallels the conclusions of Ibn Dāniyāl's other two plays in the trilogy. In The Shadow Spirit the title character, Ṭayf al-Khayāl, repents and his friend Prince Wiṣāl reveals his intention to go on a pilgrimage to the holy shrines in Mecca, while the second play, The Amazing Preacher and the Stranger, ends with a perfunctory poem of repentance.Footnote ⁶⁰

Thus, in the manner of Western morality plays, order is restored at the play's conclusion and religious authority defeats sinners, who in turn realize that it is high time to ask for divine forgiveness after life-long transgressions. The immoral, possible world of the play finally reconciles with religion. Al-Mutayyam sincerely supplicates God, the Merciful, the Munificent Lord, before he says his repentance prayer. In his prayer al-Mutayyam confesses his sins and bears witness that there is no deity but Allāh and that Mohammad is His Slave and Messenger. He expresses his fear of Judgment Day when all the dead are resurrected from their tombs and stand before God in submission. Having meekly made his supplications to God, al-Mutayyam turns towards al-Qibla, the Kaʻba in Mecca which all Muslims must turn to while saying their prayers, and soon dies. The roisterers and revellers are roused from their slumber and drunkenness and are horrified when they notice al-Mutayyam's sudden death; they hastily disperse in horror outside the brothel. The play ends with al-Mutayyam's burial rituals in a massive funeral service attended by remorseful and broken-hearted buffoons from different parts of Cairo. The hilarious comicality, and the historical and elite literary quality of the trilogy, unquestionably place Ibn Dāniyāl among the renowned playwrights of world literature in the Middle Ages.