Scheherazade's Children Quotes

“From the earliest of times, the eye has had a privileged place in the conventions of Arabic poetry.22 As Richard Ettinghausen put it, In [Arabic courtly poetry] one reads that the ideal Arab woman must be so stout that she nearly falls asleep… . Her breasts should be full and rounded, her waist slender and graceful, her belly lean, her hips sloping, and her buttocks so fleshy as to impede her passage through a door. [Her neck is said to be] like that of a gazelle, while her arms are described as well rounded, with soft delicate elbows, full wrists, and long fingers. Her face [has] white cheeks, … and her eyes are those of a gazelle with the white of the eye clearly marked.23 Far from expanding creatively on this set of classical formulas, the figures of feminine beauty in the Nights often repeat them mechanically. This story cycle is filled with over a dozen derivative poems that repeat, in cliché terms, this same image of the beloved’s eye.”
― Philip F. Kennedy, Scheherazade's Children: Global Encounters with the Arabian Nights