A 13th-century guide to fraud and skulduggery

Eight centuries ago in Turkey, at a gathering of intellectuals, a Muslim sultan insisted that one of his courtiers write a book about an unlikely subject: thieves and con artists. The sultan, Rukn al-Din, had secured another such book from Spain, but he wondered: ‘What’s left out of it?’ The set-upon courtier was Jamal al-Din Abd al-Rahim al-Jawbari, and the commissioned Arabic work, Kashf al-asrar (Exposing Secrets), his only surviving text. But why would a powerful ruler such as Rukn al-Din, presumably safe from street-level scammers, order a guidebook about the medieval Islamic underworld?

The answer is most likely nostalgie de la boue — a way, as Tom Wolfe was to argue in Radical Chic, to assert superiority over the ‘middle-class striver’s obsession with propriety and keeping up appearances’. The Book of Charlatans wasn’t the first or last of its kind. Take the streetwise picaresque tales by al-Hariri in the 11th century, or the rip-roaringly grotesque plays of Ibn Daniyal in the 13th. Such elitist longing for the mud, however, wasn’t just in books. Rulers often held court with murky figures from the city’s underbelly. The tenth-century vizier al-Sahib ibn Abbad supported men such as Abu Dulaf, a shadowy traveller who wrote poetry about beggar thieves.

But unlike al-Hariri or Ibn Daniyal, al-Jawbari entices readers with purportedly real tips for avoiding fraudsters, divided into 30 chapters by type — ‘False Prophets’, ‘Apothecaries’, ‘Conjurers’, ‘Notaries’ etc. Often their schemes rely on tricks of chemistry or engineering. Al-Jawbari warns, for instance, of grifters who feign blindness by sealing their eyelids shut with ticks’ blood and gum Arabic, or a false prophet who claimed to control live fish with his spiritual powers, whereas in fact he used a paste of basil and human faeces to attract them.