Ibn-e Sina could never quite recover from what he had discovered in the prince’s specimen.

During the day it was the jokes and at night it was the doleful lowing from the prince’s quarters which kept the Buyid royal family on edge. Some events too scandalous to communicate were not reported by the palace keepers. But they reached the king’s ears nevertheless through the palace spies who enjoyed the sometimes dangerous license to recite all they heard or saw before the throne. And thus the king learned that the night before, the prince had broken into the royal cow-shed and preened himself before the stud bulls, flapping the skirts of his brocade robes and exposing his derrière. The cow-shed was destroyed and two prize bulls lost after the prince’s flirtations created a fatal love-triangle, which quickly unraveled into a gory battle between two bellowing Egyptian bulls.

The prince was unhurt in this escapade but lost quite a bit of his fur the next day when he rushed snorting and butted the older princess’s pet dog in the palace corridors. The high-bred Chinese bulldog did not take kindly to the prince’s tossing him about with his head and with a powerful bite to the prince’s headgear pulled out a few locks from their roots.

There was silence from the prince for three days as he remained closeted in the royal library. Everyone hoped that the temporary madness that had afflicted him had been lifted from his head but on the morning of the fourth day loud mooing sounds were heard from the library and when the attendants and the chamberlain rushed to the royal “summons” they found the prince sitting with a number of recipes for beef dishes which he had copied from recipe books in the library.

He demanded that a butcher be sent for so that he could be slaughtered and made into kebabs without delay, and be served at dinner that day to the visiting Seljuqid delegation. Then he thought better of it and ordered that only one third of him should be made into kebabs, one third made into spicy mince fried with whole spices and one third made into some Persian rice dish he had discovered in the same books.

From that moment the prince insisted on being presented before the butcher. As he made his demand more fiercely, he was locked in his room and all sharp objects removed from his environment. The king now sought the aid of Ibn-e Sina, the famous and most influential polymath of his time and the greatest authority on medicine in the kingdom.

It was a particularly busy time for the great physician as his clinic routines were unalterable and if anything was most sacrosanct, it was his rest and study hours, which followed in quick succession. But the case interested the physician and he agreed to take charge.

Before visiting the prince Ibn-e Sina obtained a detailed account of the prince’s condition and sent for stool and urine samples. The samples confounded the one who prided himself on his medical knowledge, for they looked identical to the excrement of a cow.

Ibn-e Sina set a morning time to visit the prince. But before he appeared himself, he sent word to the prince to rejoice for the butcher was on his way to slaughter him.

The prince received the news with great joy and made himself presentable for the occasion.

Finally Ibn-e Sina and his attendants entered the prince’s room. The physician was holding a sharp knife, the skirts of his robe were pulled up and tied at his waist, and the butcher’s red cloth was draped on his shoulder. He looked around and roughly demanded, “Where is the cow that is to be slaughtered?”

The prince who was looking at the visitors with great excitement, jumped from his bed where he lay, and started mooing loudly.

Ibn-e Sina ordered his attendants to do the needful and they pounced on the prince and bound his arms and legs. They threw him on the ground, secured his limbs and one of them sat atop him so that he could not get up and run away. The prince was now mooing loudly and laughing.

Now Ibn-e Sina approached holding the knife and began to poke the prince’s body with his fingers and checking the fleshy parts of his body between his fingers. Then he shook his head and got up and sent for the prince’s family. When all of them assembled he pointed to the prostrated prince with his knife and said, “This cow here is too lean to be made into kebabs. You must fatten her up before you send for me again.” The he wrote a prescription for the food the prince should eat for the next month and left the dolefully mooing prince in his family’s care.

The prescription was later shown to the prince and he agreed to follow it to the letter.

It is written by the author of the Chahar Muqala that from following a healthy diet the Buyid prince slowly regained the power of his senses, the mad notion that he was a cow finally left him, and he made a full recovery. However Ibn-e Sina could never quite recover from the shock of how melancholia had altered the prince’s physical being, affecting his digestive system. It later launched him into his inquiry into the question of essence and existence and his great philosophical treatise on the subject.

Musharraf Ali Farooqi is an author, novelist and translator. He can be reached at www.mafarooqi.com