The cities of premodern Arabic literature are erotic playgrounds. The proximity engendered by urban life and the opportunity to encounter, seduce, and manipulate strangers afforded by the imperative of economic exchange are key themes in Arabic narratives and lyrics about cities. In poetry especially, all social interactions in the urban sphere are given an erotic gloss. Sexual opportunity, the vulnerability of women and young men, elite prerogative, and anonymous encounters can appear rather fun and titillating from the perspective of most poets in the Arabic literary tradition, which has generally been the preferred point of view adopted by most scholars, but the outlines of another city can be detected beneath the façade of the erotic playground so often encountered in literature and recreated in scholarship. It is the predatory city, an exhaustingly erotic, frighteningly promiscuous, and diverse and dangerous arena in which eloquent objectification and amusing assaults have not yet lost their sting.

Smooth Trade

A scene so familiar it has become a film cliché. A wealthy and powerful man – perhaps a mafia don or king, or a poor man in the company of a wealthy sponsor, or in some cases a secret agent – stands in the center of the tableau, often several centimeters off the ground, and usually in front of an array of mirrors, as another man – hunching and obsequious – moves around him silently, taking measurements, running his hands over the other man's body, pinning, pleating, and chalking. The poem quoted above is at least as old as the mid-fifteenth century so the scene being depicted and the clothes being tailored are, of course, radically different from the familiar film scenes set in Savile Row – radically different from the few old-fashioned tailors left in downtown Cairo, too – but the power imbalance, peacocking, and unusual intimacy inherent in such scenes has not diminished much over the past five centuries.