Indeed, beyond the garden and the nights of Shahrzad, one can point to other works dealing with erotica, such as the writings of Abbasid scholar Al-Jahiz on the ways of young men and women, Al-Katib’s 10th-Century Encyclopaedia of Pleasure, and even the Assemblies of al-Hariri, a text from the Seljuk empire with passages on homosexuality. “It is clear that the strong, sensual, even pornographic, content of the Nights can be paralleled elsewhere in Arabic literature”, writes scholar Robert Irwin in his 2010 commentary on the One Thousand and One Nights. Such books – “filled with joyous and highly explicit descriptions of sex” – even had heaven’s blessings, according to the academic Sarah Irving: “Far from being some kind of underground medieval Arab porn,” she writes on the ArabLit blog, “these erotic books were religiously approved, their advice seen as part of God’s gifts to humankind”. Today, in an Arab world that is often portrayed as a sex-free zone and where the very subject of sex is taboo, works such as The Perfumed Garden may appear as freaks of nature or one-offs at best. According to various accounts, Burton intended to include it in a revised edition, titled The Scented Garden however, he died before being able to do so, and this unadulterated edition – along with many of Burton’s other writings – were later burned by his wife Isabel. The French manuscript Burton referenced contained a twenty-first chapter on homosexuality and pederasty absent in the extant edition, which Petronius would have doubtless relished. The stories are narrated in a lively manner akin to those of the One Thousand and One Nights and one might argue that its explicit descriptions of all manners of sexual intercourse could put even Vãtsyãyana to shame.

Unlike the Kama Sutra, which some might look at as largely educational, The Perfumed Garden, while edifying readers on various subjects, such as alternatives for the enlargement of male genitals and “everything that is favourable” regarding sex, also places a heavy emphasis on entertainment.

Karma sutra positions illustration