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at the time this story was put together, while others have yet to happen (and probably never will). The prophecies are obscurely and allusively pitched in a manner that anticipates those of the sixteenth-century French astrologer Nostradamus. But Simeon’s predictions are moralistic, since the dreadful things that are to come are divine punishment for the decline of Muslim piety and practice.
    At times Simeon seems to be prophesying events during the Arab–Byzantine wars of the tenth century. The Qarmatians sacked Mecca in 930 and stole the Black Stone from the shrine in Mecca. Dailam is a mountainous region in northern Iran, south of the Caspian Sea. Although the Abbasid caliphs sent several expeditions there, it was never really under their control. Then in 945 Dailamite Buyid warlords established a protectorate over the Abbasid caliphs. Simeon foresees four rival caliphates existing simultaneously. From the tenth to latetwelfth centuries there were three competing caliphates: the Abbasid caliphate in Bagdad, the Fatimid caliphate in Cairo and the Umaiyad caliphate in Cordova. But it is hard to think of a fourth caliphate. Hajaj ibn Yusuf never killed an Abbasid ruler in Mecca. Though the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was demolished by the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim in 1009, it was not actually burned down.
    Other ‘predictions’ seem to refer to events in the thirteenth century, while yet others cannot be confidently attached to any real events. In 1236 Cordova fell to the army of Ferdinand III of Castile, although the Christian Reconquista of Spain was not completed until 1492. The ‘Persian’ invasion is predicted to happen more than 600 years after the death of the Prophet. So that would place it in the mid to late thirteenth century and therefore what might be being ‘prophesied’ was the Mongol invasion of Iraq, their killing of the last Abbasid caliph in Bagdad and then their invasion of Syria, which was launched from Persia. Ghadanfar is the name of a fictional character in the popular chivalrous romance of
‘Antar
, which is set in the period just before and during the rise of Islam. In
‘Antar
, he is the son of the heroic Arab warrior ‘Antar by a Christian princess, and for much of the epic he fought as a crusader against the Muslims. But Simeon calls him ‘al-Farisi’ (the Persian), and that makes no sense at all.
    Earlier in the story of ‘Sa‘id Son of Hatim al-Bahili’ the infidel king told his people not to fight the Muslim expeditionary force. ‘For five hundred years,’ he told them, ‘their empire has been advancing victoriously, so make peace with them and do not resist them or they will conquer you.’ What kind of chronological sense is that? The Muslim conquests began in the early seventh century. So are we to understand that the Muslim encounter with the infidel king and with Simeon took place in the twelfth century? If so, how could the story of the expedition have been told to Hisham ibn ‘Abd al-Malik , who was Umaiyad caliph from 724 to 743?
Coincidence and Fate
    In ‘Talha, the Son of the Qadi of Fustat’ what was the chance of Salih (Tuhfa’s former protector in Damascus) ending up begging at her husband’s house in Cairo? Or in ‘Muhammad the Foundling and Harun al-Rashid’ the chance of the caliph happening to go to the very bathhousewhere Khultukh happened to be working? Fate guides Badr and Jauhara to the same island. The broad comedy of the bogus astrologer ‘Usfur depends heavily on a ludicrous sequence of coincidences. But perhaps the message is that ‘Usfur’s aggressively nagging wife is right, for if you trust in God everything will be well. And as the king observes towards the end of the story, ‘When God grants good fortune to one of his servants, He makes all things serve him, and when fortune comes, it acts as teacher to a man.’ Of course coincidences (
ittifaqat
) made the storyteller’s work easier, but there was a pious subtext, as medieval Muslims