This note appears on the last blank page of a manuscript volume. These blank pages in Islamic manuscripts, found at the beginning or end of the volumes, are often filled with pieces of poetry, no-context records of children’s birth or death dates, dates of earthquakes and other major events, etc. While it can be very entertaining to decipher and contextualize them, most are anonymous, contentless, and irrelevant for historical study. However, those fortunate researchers—among which I have yet to count myself— might stumble upon a note that provides valuable historical information, such as a death date otherwise uncertain or unknown.

The note I share here is a terse Arabic sentence in conditional form and strikingly foulmouthed:

Whoever looks at his brother’s book without his permission looks at his mother’s farj.

من نظر في كتاب أخيه بغير إذنه، فإنما ينظر في فرج أمه

 

Here is the picture of the note:

The pronouns (all male singular) are a bit crammed. Clearly, they belong to two individuals who are close, like brothers. The first individual, A, has a book, and his bro, B, looks at it without A’s permission. This disrespectful behavior of B is equated to B’s looking at his own mother’s farj.

It is not hard to guess that A wrote this note. He seems to have intended to cuss a specific individual, B, or a group of fellows (B, C, D, et al.) because they looked at his book without permission. Alternatively, A might have felt threatened and wanted to take preemptive action, and to surprise his bros: imagine C, who managed to grab A’s book on the sly and perused it. When C reaches the final page, boom, he reads the angry note cursing his mother.

Several features in the note make my fictionalized details plausible:

First, the manuscript volume (of which I won’t give full bibliographic info) is a copy of Abū al-Layth al-Samarqandī’s (d. 373/983) Tanbīh al-Ghāfilīn. While not a popular textbook in learning institutions, it might have been used in an educational context at a rather elementary level.

Secondly, the note is obviously written by an amateur hand, possibly a very young novice who lacked calligraphic talent at that point.

Thirdly, the writer of the note seems furious. In his first attempt, he skipped the words naẓara and bi-ghayr idhnihī, and separated the normally combined inna-mā. There is also what seems like a hamza over the alif of inna, which would turn it into fa-anna-mā; and that would be a syntactic mistake, too. After the first attempt failed —probably because of the guy’s hands shaking with fury— he started a new line. The second half of the word bi-ghayri is covered due to a subsequent rebinding; and the rest of the note is on a new line, now with correct orthography and partial vocalization.

Returning to our furious fellow A. Why did he write this note? Was it common to look at fellow students’ books in an educational setting? And why would it be a grave offense? Perhaps A was a nerd and took copious notes on the margins of his books during lectures (and this volume contains many such notes). When the exams were near, other and not-so-nerd classmates wanted to benefit from their bro’s hard work. One fine day, they found A’s richly annotated textbook and looked through it or even went so far as to copy some of A’s notes. A somehow knew this and saw red, “They could have at least asked my permission!” So, he decided to admonish (tanbīh) these heedless men (al-ghāfilīn) and teach them a lesson.