(9th-13th centuries) Islamic story collection
The Arabic Alf Layla wa-Layla (The Thousand and One Nights) is a vibrant and extensive collection of stories brought together in the Islamic world of the ninth-13th centuries. Also known as The Arabian Nights, the original tales have Indian, Persian, and Arabic antecedents and were likely told for centuries before being written down.
A cycle of tales with no single author and no single source, The Thousand and One Nights is enormously diverse and entertaining. Long regarded as a collection of fairy tales, like the folklore of the Grimm brothers or the fables of aesop, the tales, as Robert Irwin observes in The Arabian Nights: A Companion, include “long heroic epics, wisdom literature, fables, cosmological fantasy, pornography, scatological jokes, mystical devotional tales, chronicles of low life, rhetorical debates and masses of poetry.”
Though compilers can select among hundreds of original stories, the traditional opening remains the same. Long ago, Sultan Shahryar, bitterly disappointed by the infidelity of his wife, vowed never again to trust a woman. He proposed instead to marry a new wife each night and have her killed the next morning. After some time had passed, the beautiful and clever Scheherazade developed a plan to end the tyranny. She persuaded her father to marry her to the sultan, then begged the sultan to allow her sister, Dunyazad, to spend her last night on earth with her. Just before dawn, Dun-yazad woke Scheherazade and asked her to tell a story. When dawn broke, the story was unfinished, and the sultan realized he must keep her alive in order to hear the end. By the next morning the tale was still unfinished, and once more the execution was delayed. This cycle continued for more than three years—for a total of 1,001 nights—during which time Scheherazade bore the sultan three healthy sons, and he fell deeply in love with her.
The Thousand and One Nights entered Western consciousness with the French translation by An-toine Galland (1646-1715) of a Syrian manuscript dating to the 14th or 15th century. His publication, preserved at the National Library in Paris, is now the oldest extant manuscript of the Nights. Edward Lane undertook an English translation in 1838-41, with large sections excised to suit the sensitivities of 19th-century Victorians. The 1885 translation by Sir Richard Burton, who traveled widely through the Middle East and India (and also introduced the English-speaking world to the kama sutra), is not entirely faithful to the Arabic versions, mixing in tales by Geoffrey Chaucer and Francois Rabelais. Since some of Galland’s added stories have been translated into Arabic, it is now virtually impossible for any but the most devoted scholar to trace the complex web of influences. Readers can therefore simply relax into the magical world of The Thousand and One Nights, losing themselves among its colorful characters: brave travelers and lovely princesses; capricious rulers and trickster magicians; and the demons, witches, and clever genies who constantly test human ingenuity.
Critical Analysis
The narrative technique of using a frame story to link a series of smaller tales is a standard feature of oral literature and also appears in such written works as the panchatantra of India, ovid’s Metamorphoses, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron. The multitude of stories in The Thousand and One Nights are linked by the irresistible figure of Scheherazade, who, in Burton’s translation, is both educated and beautiful:
… indeed it was said that she had collected a thousand books of histories relating to antique races and departed rulers. She had perused the works of the poets and knew them by heart; she had studied philosophy and the sciences, arts, and accomplishments; and she was pleasant and polite, wise and witty, well read and well bred.
In addition to the stories told by Scheherazade, the other characters begin to tell their own stories, and the narrative thread can become quite complicated. Readers of The Thousand and One Nights find this interweaving of narratives one of its most appealing characteristics. Novelist A. S. Byatt, in the introduction to the Modern Library edition of Burton’s translation, celebrates this structure and sees it as supporting a larger theme:
A character in a story invokes a character who tells a story about a character who has a story to tell…. Everything proliferates. The Nights is a maze, a web, a network, a river with infinite tributaries, a series of boxes within boxes, a bottomless pool. It turns endlessly on itself, a story about storytelling. And yet we feel it has to do with our essential nature, and not just a need for idle entertainment.
For Scheherazade, storytelling is the way to extend her life. The themes of the individual stories continually echo the themes of the larger work: kings and powerful beings like genies constantly demand to hear stories; the weak or oppressed are constantly brought to judgment and must use their wits to protect their lives; wily sages and thieves pop out of corners to trick honest citizens out of their earned wealth; the stouthearted undertake fantastic voyages and return with remarkable tales. Magic elements abound in the stories, but human cleverness predominates.
An example of the nested narrative technique appears in the tale of “The Fisherman and the Genie,” where the genie, waiting for the fisherman to return to fulfill a sentence of execution, is approached by an old man and a hind, and so begins the story “The Old Man and the Hind.” The narrative thread always finds itself, however; the first story ends with the fisherman tricking the genie into going back into his bottle, and the sly fisherman quickly stoppers it up.
Although certain translators have tended to regard The Thousand and One Nights as no more than engaging tall tales, and to collect them as The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, these ostensibly diverting stories carry a prickly subtext. Certain tales seem uncannily modern, as in the tale of “The Ebony Horse,” where a sage creates a flying machine that an enterprising prince learns to operate. Moreover, close readers will observe that the Nights offers an intriguing series of lessons on public relations. The tales expose a broad view of all classes and levels of society, creating a stage where kings rub elbows with street thieves. Through frequent praises and invocations, Allah serves as a constant presence and a unifying force that binds the tales; Burton’s translation illuminates this in its opening and closing addresses to muhammad. Characters of different races and religions populate the Nights, offering glimpses into the diverse world of the Middle East. The seemingly riotous tales of crosses and double-crosses include useful advice on how to operate within a society where it is accepted that women occupy subordinate positions, class differences are distinct and insurmountable, and rulers have the power to distribute justice, grant life, and demand death.
The Thousand and One Nights has had a profound impact on all the cultures it has reached. In their childhoods, the English poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth and the Victorian novelist Charles Dickens immersed themselves in tales of the Arabian nights; both Marcel Proust and Edgar Allan Poe saw themselves as Scheherazades of sorts. Twentieth-century novelists have composed modern versions of oriental fa-bles—for example, Salman Rushdie in Haroun and the Sea of Stories and Naguib Mahfouz in Arabian Nights and Days. The Nights have sparked the imagination of filmmakers and musicians, and almost any child has heard at some point, and in some version, the tale of Aladdin and his enchanted lamp, the seven voyages of Sinbad the Sailor, and the tale of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Many a child has perhaps wished for a lamp containing a wish-granting genie without realizing the true moral of Aladdin’s story: that genies are tricky creatures and wishes are dangerous things.
Some maintain that The Thousand and One Tales is an achievement unparalleled by any work of literature in any other culture. Its sheer volume, diversity, and complexity are unrivaled. It sheds light on the culture of its creators, and it continues to spark the imagination of new generations with its promise of magic and its lesson that storytelling is the only sure way to achieve immortality.
English Versions of The Thousand and One Nights
The Arabian Nights. Translated by Husain Haddawy. New York: Everyman, 1990.
Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights. Translated by Richard Burton. New York: The Modern Library, 2001.
The Book of Thousand Nights and One Night. 4 vols. Edited by E. P. Mathers and J. C. Mardrus. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Works about The Thousand and One Nights
Caracciolo, Peter L., ed. The Arabian Night in English Literature: Studies in the Reception of Thousand and One Nights into British Culture. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988.
Hovannisian, Richard and Georges Sabagh. The Thousand and One Nights in Arabic Literature and Society. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Irwin, Robert. The Arabian Nights: A Companion. New York: Penguin Books, 1994.
