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until the Arabs conquered Egypt and ‘Amr ibn al-‘As put a stop to the practice. But the story is probably an anti-Coptic libel.)
Prophecy
    One of the conventions of medieval Arab storytelling is that if an astrologer makes a prophecy, it invariably becomes true. One cannot beat fate. Unusually, the astrologer’s prophecy in the opening of ‘The King of the Two Rivers’ does not in the end come true, though it serves to get the story moving. Also the prince’s prediction that he will attack his father with a great army is never fulfilled, though it serves to explain why he was sent out in the desert. ‘Abu Disa’ sends up astrology mercilessly. The message of that story is perhaps that as long as one trusts in God everything will work out all right. In one of the more bizarre scenes in ‘Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle’, set in a church in Baalbek (in what is now Lebanon), the pagan god Baal addresses Mauhub with the following words:
Great king and leader, you will meet sorrows, difficulties and dangers, grave matters, the revelation of hidden secrets, heavy cares and troubles following one after the other. All this will be thanks to a beautiful gazelle acting as a lover wounded at heart. Take your time in dealing with this affair, Mauhub, and now, farewell, great king.
    Here prophecy serves as prolepsis, since it promises ordeals and adventures to come.
    According to Ulrich Marzolph, who has made a close study of these tales, ‘Sa‘id Son of Hatim al-Bahili’ ‘is the most remarkable story in the collection’. 15 It certainly is rather strange, and I believe that it has no other close parallel in Arab literature. A narrative to comfort a sleepless caliph, it starts off as a fairly conventional tale about the wonders of the sea and the conquest of part of India but then turns into something quite different, for the Muslim expeditionary force encounters an incredibly ancient hermit, Simeon, who declares himself to be the disciple and former companion of the biblical prophet Daniel. However, while Daniel is long dead, Simeon has succeeded in living on into Islamic times.
    Setting the meeting with Simeon aside for a moment, it should be noted that in the Old Testament and the Apocrypha Daniel was notedfor his prophecies. He retained this reputation in medieval Islamic times, and all sorts of prophetic treatises were spuriously attributed to him. According to Islamic tradition, Daniel acquired his knowledge of the future in a place known as the Cave of Treasures. Several of the prophetic treatises attributed to Daniel attach their predictions to astrological and meteorological phenomena such as eclipses, thunderstorms, rainbows and oddly shaped clouds. But the prophecies of Daniel that Simeon preserves in his story have little or nothing in common with this sort of divination. His prophecies can be classified as
malahim
.
    In Arabic
malahim
literally means ‘slaughterings’, and its singular form is
malhama
. The term is used to designate prophecies that treat of such grand matters as the rise and fall of dynasties, future wars with Christians, the Muslim conquest of Constantinople and Rome, the coming invasion of Gog and Magog, the Last Battle and the End of the World. These treatises drew widely on Jewish and Christian material and they were often attributed to monks. For example,
The Vision of the Monk Bahira
, which seems to have been produced in the eighth century, was very popular. There was a proliferation of apocalypses in the late Umaiyad period (early eighth century). In general, things were predicted to get worse before they got better. Armand Abel, who made a special study of
malahim
prophecies, remarked that these popular fantasies were really more interesting than ‘the bourgeois Arabian Nights’.
    Simeon’s prophecies are a bit of a dog’s dinner, as they seem to be drawn from a variety of ill-assorted sources and times. Some of the events ‘predicted’ had already happened