The Islamic Context of The Thousand and One Nights

DERVISHES ARE not alone in speaking of global fraternity beyond ethnic or social distinctions.¹ The mendicants’ journeys to Baghdad, after a series of adventures and misfortunes, testify to Sufi unease at settlement of any sort and to deep recognition of the vagaries of time. On the other hand, the frame tale is transactional on more than one level, for it buys life with narrative, and it collapses physical virginity with narrative virginity, where whatever is new and unfamiliar suffers use, both the new story and the virgin maid. It may not be superfluous to mention John Barth’s recurrent reference to this element or trope as a testimony to the power of the unexhausted and the new. In The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, a parody of Sindbad’s voyages in the New World Order as ordained by the first Bush administration and its advisors before 1991, Scheherazade says that her last story will be “a virgin story in both respects, for it’s about virginity, too.”² The new order will also invade and defile, like the giant ifrit who abducts the young bride on her wedding night. But, as if to beat power on its own terms, the virgin maid proves to be too sophisticated for both her husband and the ifrit, as she has already gathered a good number of wedding rings from people who have formerly made love to her and entrusted her with their secrets and stories. The virginity trope both in Barth’s novel and in Scheherazade’s tales resists and defies Islamic prohibitions of extramarital sexual relationships, but it also subscribes to the postcapitalist unrelenting desire for others.

The tales are a testimony to this movement and navigation among religions, regions, ethnicities, and nations. They contain moral constraints and taboos as well as laxity and expressions of human ingenuity. This plethora of voices, desires, interests, and claims underscores its globality and perennial appeal to different nations and cultures. Even the emergence of the mufāḍalah subgenre (prioritization on the basis of virtue or merit), its transposition from literature onto cities and nations, is another sign of a newly tolerant and accommodating outlook that is no longer restricted or constrained by prejudice or a group solidarity. On the other hand, the appearance of commerce as the force behind the exchange of ideas, styles of life, and cultivation of minds and souls establishes the tales as global symptoms. The journey may change its purpose and incentives every now and then, as many tales, including Sindbād’s voyages, demonstrate, but the outcome is the same and the achievement testifies to an urban mind geared toward global faring. No matter the reasons behind the journey, there is also some moral support for the migrational endeavor, and imams and jurists provide encouragement and solace to people in this search. Homelands are where you find love and affection, says one poem quoted from the imam al-Shafʿī.³ This outlook does not gloss over the troubles and vagaries of politics and misfortune, but the tales have the underlying premise of cordiality and rapprochement, which is bemoaned at times by contemporary critics as wishful thinking. The subtext of the tales beckons to a world without borders, but it also raises questions regarding power politics and the role of self-interest, selfishness, and greed in augmenting the urgent desire for a pleasant settlement. However, now more so than at any other time or age, the Thousand and One Nights may stand as a unique representative of a global age. The case is so not only because of its wide dissemination as a cultural commodity in cultural industry and production but also because it has already beckoned to an age beyond borders and limits. With its magic rings, lamps, and talismans, and with its mixed races and cultural diversity, the collection has already anticipated an age of transregional communication and mobility. The imagination behind the collection was congruent with the metropolitan life and imperial center that was the Baghdad of the ʿAbbāsid times and the Cairo of the Mamluks. Its success in the West should not be seen only in terms of narrative appeal since, apart from this significant fact, the collection pointed to an age of discovery and provided incentives for human reason to travel beyond limits into unmapped horizons of search and achievement. The imagination behind the collection has already seen through the human mind’s whims, anticipations, expectations, inhibitions, and desire to control the universe. It has already drawn the map for research and discovery. Every finding has a root in an imaginative flight. Apart from its feminist overtones and narrative power as a celebration of art and its supremacy against heavy odds, the frame story should be read in terms of the new age. Its achievements have bypassed communication barriers despite hegemonic cultural industry. We have to look upon the components of this imaginative galaxy through cultural lenses that detect comparisons between the past and the present. The demon who transforms a mendicant—who was once a son of a king—into an ape is as supreme and dominating as global capital’s machinery and force, which can change many communities and individuals into mimics and hybrids. Every agency corresponds to something or to some power that we take for granted today as central to the extant world order. The disillusioned kings who decide to roam the lands like dervishes encounter first the kidnapped bride and her kidnapper, the monster, who has a free hand in both sea and land, much like global capital and its war industry. Alternatively, and within the frame-clustered tales, the fisherman’s colorful fish sums up the enforced erosion of identities. Religious communities change into fish under the merciless power of magic and enchantment, and their islands are transformed into hills surrounding the lakes under the same magical power. This tale can serve as an ironic trope for the devastation of cultures and identities that accompanies the achievements of the global village. The “inhabitants of my city, who belonged to four sects,” says the ensorcelled king, were “Muslims, Magians, Christians, and Jews,” but his wife, the enchantress, turned them into fish.⁴

In all the redactions of the Thousand and One Nights, however, there is an Islamic tinge that grows at times into a definite shade and trace whereby everything assumes a clear and simple Islamic character. It may not sound as definitive as decrees and classifications we come across in ḥisbah (market inspector’s duties) manuals, which speak early on of such matters as the division of the lands of the Muslims (Dār al-Islām) and the lands of war (Dār al-Ḥarb, that is, non-Muslim territory). Nevertheless, there is a narrative prioritization of Muslims in comparison to non-Muslims, as the tales of the barber and his brothers demonstrate. The system exemplified in these tales pertains to what is expected from the community itself, its Muslims and dhimmīs, which is not similar to what is expected from the latter when belonging to a Dār al-Ḥarb territory. In Yaḥyā Ben Adam’s Kitāb al-Kharāj (d. 818 C.E.),⁵ for instance, there is a definitive statement from the second caliph: “I wrote [said the speaker in the quote] to ‘Umar b. al-Khaṭṭāb [the second caliph] about people from ʿAhl al-Ḥarb entering our territory, the land of Islam, and settling there. ‘Umar wrote to me: if they stay six months, collect the ‘ushr [tithe] from them, but if they stay a year collect half-‘ushr.”⁶ Along such geographical and cultural lines of demarcation, faith is upheld as the criterion. In the aforementioned case, there is both the Islamic equalizer that considers all Muslims as one nation or ummah, regardless of race and color, and the separation from non-Muslim territories according to a number of laws and regulations. A good number of tales treat the mixed community in an Islamic quarter (dhimmīs or non-Muslims from communities with scriptures) as having the same rights and responsibilities, but they also describe distinctions that set them apart from Muslims.

In other words, despite the diversity and globality we come across in the tales, the collection remains a cultural product of specific characteristics and features that can be described as Arab-Islamic. Edward William Lane, the second major translator into English of the Thousand and One Nights, associates the transactional nature of the frame tale, art for life, with the Arab propensity for eloquence and appreciation of romantic tales: “Eloquence, with them, is lawful magic: it exercises over their minds an irresistible influence.”⁷ Although confusing storytelling with eloquence, the remark is apt as a testament to the art of storytelling but not to any rhetorical power as recognized by classical Arabic poetics. This general Islamic quality is not the one that traditionalists and conservative jurists seek; it is rather a cultural bent that comprises the mood and predilections of an urban society that finds justifications and excuses for little diversions, daily entertainments, and minor transgressions. Although these urban societies were under the purview of the muḥtasib’s office, the continually updated ḥisbah manuals indicate that these urban societies were in need of more authoritative inculcation and edification in Islamic law, as a body of decrees and regulations that apply the basics in the Qurʾ ān and the Prophet’s tradition to emerging situations and societies. The process of inculcation is worth understanding, for, as al-Ghazālī (d. 1111 C.E.) argues in Iḥyāʾ ‘Ulūm al-Dīn (The Revival of the Religious Sciences), where there is a treatise on ḥisbah, “even in the town most people are ignorant of the rulings of Islamic law concerning the conditions for prayer, so how must it be for the villages and the nomads among whom are Arabs, Kurds, Turks and other ethnic groups?”⁸ The storyteller should have been aware of that, and, as shown in the story of the slave girl Tawaddud, there was a good grasp of Islamic law on the part of storytellers as probable preachers. On the other hand, the tale, which was probably available when the caliphate was still in Sāmarrāʾ (836–892 C.E.), offers a critique of an authority based on artificial application of the Muslim law and lacking the capacity to deal with multifaceted and variegated issues. It snatches authority from this chancery and administrative structure, represented by jurists and the court entourage, and claims it as the right of a citizen, the slave girl as a reasonable human being. In other words, at the time of the Zanj rebellion (869–883 C.E.) in Basrah, where the slaves were openly offering their interpretation of Islam in opposition to the ʿAbbasids, the tales offer their own reading of Islamic law in concordance with reason and conscience. Public opinion, as expressed in rebellions or in other expressions and schools of rationalism that were still powerful then, signifies something other than subordination and obedience. There was no mere allegiance but rather what Habermas calls “the implicit law of the parity of all cultivated persons,” which he discerns in eighteenth-century Enlightenment discourse in Europe.⁹

Yet the collection offers a variety of readings and perspectives that demonstrate a medley, too, albeit with a general Islamic color. With a mixed agenda and concern, the collection offers an Islamic context that we may meet in entertaining collections compiled in the tenth and eleventh centuries and onward. The Thousand and One Nights remains uniquely different from these collections because of its collective authorship and its obscure development and growth, a fact that also explains its defiance of systematic patterning or classification. This accumulation of different manuscripts and redactions deserves a close look. Each period or site of redaction or compilation has unique ideological predilections and interests. A manuscript in Baghdad of the late ninth century containing the tale of the slave girl Tawaddud is not identical with another one circulated in the twelfth century in Syria or Cairo. Indeed, the increasingly rigid tendencies among some later traditionalists are a far cry from early pronouncements. They have the professional enforcement of law as applied by an increasingly powerful class in times of foreign invasions.¹⁰ The celebration of women’s arts was no longer sustained, and by the fourteenth century, we have ibn al-ʾUkhuwwah speaking of the need not to teach writing to women, for (and he uses unsupported tradition) a woman taught to write is “like a serpent given poison to drink.”¹¹ The same difference in narrative perspective and detail, especially in matters of jurisprudence, may well be traced to fourteenth-century copies. In other words, Islam is a common denominator in the collection as long as it is a cultural application and exercise of rituals and basic articles of faith. The case is not so whenever there is a mention of or silence on the nonofficial schools of law or other faiths. There is fluctuation in opinion and narrative method in such cases that should alert us to historical contexts. Yet the tales have a generalized Islamic context that can easily elude search for particular cases. This context is as diverse and colorful as is life in the cities during times of affluence and change.

As a cultural commodity in a global age, the collection in its many redactions can offer itself easily to multifarious productions in the cinema, the Internet, and in cyberspace at large. Of particular interest, however, is the manipulation and use or misuse of some tales, motifs, key words, images, and tropes that remind us of nineteenth-century European pantomime. Each age has its predilections and preoccupations, and the collection offers abundant material to accommodate parody, irony, travesty, and realistic representations. The universalized character of the collection should bode well in this age, but the particular Islamic context is bound to provoke and invoke diversified responses. In both cases, the Islamic context assumes great significance and importance. Focusing on this side of the tales, their resemblance and difference from European culture, James Mew writes to Cornhill Magazine in December 1875: “a sentence is like a cheveril glove to a good wit, and one may preach Protestant sermons from the texts of the Imam.”¹²

A cursory reading of responses old and new can tell us more about the collection, just as it is bound to inform us about the nature and orientation of a particular response, its cultural positionality, personal dispositions, and the relation to burgeoning genres and manifestations of taste. As I explained elsewhere, an early nineteenth-century critic in England or Germany might speak of Muslim piety and charity, while another perspective might focus on Turkey and the Ottoman Empire, seeing the tales through the lenses of competition and colonial aspiration. Among readers and admirers of the tales such as Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley, there are many differences despite the fact they belong to the same period, culture, and romantic movement. The question that always begs an answer is whether the problem of these multiple responses emanates from the recipient or the book. When we look at the same matter from the contemporary perspective or from an Islamic and Arab viewpoint, is there an answer that can satisfy everyone? Is the collection representative of Islamic life and culture? Does it operate as an accurate image of life in Turkey, as eighteenth-century British travelers and diplomats argued?¹³ While each response has an individual touch, flavor, and color, it may also partake of the nature of the moment and its power to influence attitudes and tastes. For instance, the censorship practiced in Egypt against the collection took place both because of the resurgence of Muslim ultraconservatism starting in the early 1980s and because of the tendency of the religious institution to exercise some say in cultural matters to show that it is actively present. In 1985, the Moral Court in Cairo accused the text of corrupting youth. If you ask the institution (al-Azhar) for the reasons behind the call to ban the edition edited by a shaykh in the nineteenth century, they have no better answer than the moral one.¹⁴ The institution acts as the protector of Islamic morality. If you ask further how the collection harms morality, there is no particular answer other than references to the “Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad” and similar frivolous tales. These have no more ribaldry and low humor than the amount al-Jāḥiẓ once described as “normal,” but the tales have been deliberately manipulated by hypocrites. Al-Jāḥiẓ writes: “some people who affect asceticism and self-denial are uneasy and embarrassed when cunt, cock and fucking are mentioned but most men you find like that are without knowledge, honor, morality or dignity.”¹⁵ The tales speak of such things only in a few places—far less than, say, what appears on popular satellite TV channels. Compared to the awakening period (the turn of the twentieth century), this response speaks of an ultraconservative taste advocated and supported by specific institutions and hard-line religionists. During that period, the objection to the increasing interest in the tales focused on the need for the production of scientific knowledge.¹⁶ But the collection still elicits such responses and can serve therefore as an index of tastes, positions, political ambitions, competitions, and, significantly, special interests. Thus its Islamic context deserves detailed analysis, not only in relation to globalization, the discontents of the nation state, and the resurgence of Islamic movements, but also in relation to the emanation, burgeoning, and demise or survival of literary genres and traditions.

Widely recognized as the most famous book in the world, the Thousand and One Nights has elicited a large corpus of critical insights, comments, appraisals, appreciations, views, and reviews.¹⁷ It has lent itself so easily to adaptors, redactors, cinema and theater producers, publishers, and media presenters and commentators that it has created a phenomenal register of codes and phrases that make up a common property. In its many editions, abridgements, and redactions, the collection has provided a shared register that has been in use since the eighteenth century. Words and phrases such as “caliphs,” “Commander of the Faithful,” “jinn (genie),” “talisman,” “open sesame,” “Aladdin’s lamp,” “Alnashshār’s visions,” and the “Barmicide’s feasts” have become idiomatic all over the globe. The vogue of phrases connoting abrupt change and dreams was enormous in nineteenth-century Europe, in keeping with radical urbanization, industrialization, social transformation, and economic upheavals in an age of imperial conquests. Not many realize that this circulation of images and phrases totally alien to European languages was triggered and originated by the appearance of the Thousand and One Nights.

The question that will continue to require an answer may rest on the need to understand the difference in reception between the Muslims (and the Arabs in particular) and their European counterparts. The sweeping success of that early appearance in France in 1704 and simultaneously in England and its continuous growth not only in book form but also in the cinema industry and the media in general provides the tales with a sustained ascendancy in the culture industry. Although a large portion of the cinematic adaptations of the Thousand and One Nights demonstrates what Robert Irwin calls “a playful and disrespectful approach toward the actual text of the Arabian Nights and indeed toward Middle Eastern culture in general,”¹⁸ there have also been serious films by Pier Paolo Pasolini and others. The sustained ascendancy of the tales should belie any attempt to rationalize reasons or to account for a sustained logic of cause and effect to explain how vogue and popularity operate. Granting that translations respond to the taste of a receiving milieu and that the tales in their different translations and redactions are indices of tastes, there must be some basic facts about the collection itself that make the appeal so general and sweeping in so many cultures, especially the English-speaking ones. If the collection had a specific character, it might have failed to attract such wide audiences. If it had only a universal appeal, it might have become like any entertaining narrative, popular but limited in its influences and effects. The tales were highly regarded as a collection in France, and they made a welcome contribution to French culture at a time of bourgeois growth and the increasing role of sociability as a practice and process with a definite departure from the declining court culture. But the French reception and appropriation of the tales is incomparable next to that of the British, for in England the tales had enormous influence despite the fact that the reading public in England was not that large in the eighteenth century.¹⁹ One answer may be found in the realistic strain in British culture, which saw itself reflected in the tales of fishermen, cobblers, stewards, mendicants, and other professionals and artisans. More important, however, is the assimilative tendency in a powerful imperial culture, which subsumes all other cultures as part of its scheme of colonial appropriation. Along with the universalizing tendencies of the bourgeoisie, that is, its structures of feeling and interests that find themselves well met in tales of curiosity, ambition, aspiration, conflict, and refinement, the imperial order finds in the tales and their enormous appeal a thriving project as well as handy source of casual reading and easy understanding of life and manners in the East, as many reviewers were happy to explain. The image making fits well into some racial dichotomies that justify the colonial enterprise. Translation is not a random endeavor, and its cultural underpinnings are not necessarily in the mind of its conductors and undertakers, but its outcome fits well in cultural production, consumption, and manipulation.

That many have found their own interests in some tales that invite diligent rewriting and appropriation should alert us, on the other hand, to the perennial charm of collective authorship, which entails the exercise of many talents to improve on a pure and simple narrative. If this is the case, why did the Arab classicists not show appreciation and respect for the tales? While this may be answered in due course through comparison and contrast between cultures, periods, and interests, let us first consider how the tales’ first appearance in Europe occurred.

No matter how we assess responses to the collection since its appearance in French and English, there are a number of facts that need to be kept in mind. First, the tales were extremely popular for at least two centuries. Second, every weekly or monthly had something to say on the collection whenever there was a new translation, abridgement, communication, adaptation, or rejoinder. Third, no writer of significance ignored the collection. If taken as indicators of taste, these points reveal a universal appeal and demonstrate a global attraction that was relatively as wide and engaging as the most popular media images of contemporary life. The title Arabian Nights’ Entertainments was first given to the Thousand and One Nights by the anonymous Grub Street English translator, who translated it from the French edition of the renowned scholar Antoine Galland (1646–1715). The French Orientalist translated it from the original Arabic from 1704 through 1712. Volumes 11–12 appeared posthumously in 1717. Galland titled the collection Les Mille et Une Nuits, Contes Arabes, which was phenomenally successful in England, enthralling the English reading public and catching up all of the dignitaries, notables, critics, philosophers, and journalists in one of the most controversial debates on the concept and purpose of literature. An English edition appeared in 1706; by 1713, there were four editions. Their serialization in early eighteenth-century England attests to this vogue despite the undeveloped publishing industry and the limited scope and reach of education. The thrice-weekly London News serialized the tales starting on January 6, 1723, and it took three years to cover the 445 installments.

While the popularity of the tales is not confined to the frame tale, the tale itself has its specific allure, as further analysis will show. The frame tale also works as a navigational trope among cultures and lands, not only because of its Indo-Persian origin but also because of its cluster of tales that speak of religions, communities, languages, and cultures that undergo expansion, contraction, or extinction. The frame story for the collection attracts readers for more than one reason. It can be taken as evidence of wit, challenge, intelligence, and resourcefulness on the part of the female storyteller Scheherazade. She is able to dissuade a melancholy and ruthless sultan from pursuing his cruel design to marry each wife for one night and kill her the next morning to avert adultery and betrayal, which, after being deceived by his wife, he associates with womankind in general. The vizier’s courageous daughter Scheherazade surprises her father by requesting to marry Sultan Shahrayar, as this decision entails risking her life. The resourceful Scheherazade draws upon her knowledge and repository of anecdotal literature to entangle him in a web of tales that entertain and awaken the soul to the wide prospects and vicissitudes of life. As each story leads to another, since the whole narrative technique is based on a story within a story, the sultan must wait until the following night to listen to the end of one story and the commencement of the next. The process of storytelling divests him of his cruelty and arrogance and enables him to see the complexity, variety, and color of life. The significance of this deal lies in its transactional nature: art for one’s life. Almost every writer recognizes Scheherazade’s narrative art as a metaphor for this power of storytelling. Edward William Lane put it aptly in the first volume of his translation: here is “the triumph of the fascination of the tongue over a cruel and unjust determination which nothing [else] could annul.”²⁰ Many followed suit in elaborating on this transaction, but one may well quote G. K. Chesterton, who wrote in The Spice of Life: “Never in any other book has such a splendid tribute been given to the pride and omnipotence of art.”²¹

Significantly, all manuscripts and detractions have, with seemingly slight variations, the same introductory or frame tale, that of King Shahrayar, Scheherazade, and her sister Dunyazad. It is, and for good reason, the most popular of the tales among readers of every age and culture. Littmann presented the classic classification of the frame tale, although the classification would undergo revisions later in the century. The frame story consists of three different parts, originally independent stories, as shown earlier by Emmanuel Cosquin.²² According to the latter, these parts are: (1) A story of a king grieved by a disloyal wife who is allayed and appeased when he learns that his elder brother has suffered the same misfortune. (2) The story of the giant demon whose captive bride deliberately betrays him with one hundred males. This is the same tale told by the seventh vizier in the Story of Sindbad the Wise. (3) The frame ransom story of a clever girl whose skillful storytelling averts the king’s design to take revenge by keeping a bride for a night and have her murdered the next day to prevent any betrayal. Of these three parts, only the third one seems to have belonged to the original frame story.²³ Nobody tried to see the reasons behind the natural Islamization of this frame. According to historical sources, this story migrated at an early date from India to Persia, underwent nationalization and appropriation, and combined with the other two parts of the frame story, a point that will receive further analysis later. Scholars devoted some attention to the frame story as a complex of stories developed deliberately to emphasize a multiple spectrum where many views and concerns speak for themselves beyond limitations and constraints. I add to these views of the buildup of the frame tale a number of notes.

First, in the frame tale and in the following tales such as “The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad,” embedding should be seen in view of the current understanding of reporting. Embedding is an imposition of a frame, a motif, an image, or even a story that can color and appropriate the enframed. This imposition acts on the material and operates on its stratagems. Moreover, within the Islamic empire, embedding becomes only a trope for this process of appropriation and containment. It is the equivalent of the New World Order as a trope for the imperial containment and hybridization of other cultures. There is a basic difference between old dynasties and empires and the neoimperial order. The Arab-Islamic culture was at that point in history digesting the desirable from other cultures, assimilating it into its own repository as the most prolific and active civilization, a process the British colonial order closely followed in expanding its cultural and economic frontiers centuries later. The New World Order as led by American and multinational capital imposes its will by force and exports the worst and most violent aspects of its identity to others under the banner of organized chaos. The history of the tales in Europe and America resembles the history of the old colonial system. By the same token or analogy, the tale, as well as the whole collection, has been passing through a process of appropriation and digestion in Europe and America since the early decades of the eighteenth century, signifying, for that matter, the colonization or appropriation of Scheherazade’s lands and cultures.

Scheherazade’s narratives resort to a number of strategies in which transmission precedes other techniques in terms of narration and documentation. On the other hand, this repository is distinguished by an exercise of freedom in the choice of material and paper transactions that are in keeping with an increasingly organized society, as delineated in its ḥisbah manuals. It is worth noting that the tales convey the application or rejection of ḥisbah decrees. As a system of rights and responsibilities, restraints and checks, the ḥisbah is applicable not only to taxation and market control but also to moral issues including adultery, fornication, drinking, dubious meetings, theft, deceit, and so on. The equivalents of these in the narrative are many, including warnings, ransoms, oaths, vows, and repayments in good tales to buy one’s life. Good narrative equals good money, and it can buy one’s life easily even in the courts and royal palaces. Although these tales are narrated by men and women, there are at times more limits imposed by women to prevent further intrusion or curiosity and to balance men’s possible misuse of power. These occur in embedded stories such as the “The Story of the Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad,” where a stratagem of limits applies. This stratagem has great narrative potential. The tale describes an inscription on the inside door requesting that one not ask and enquire. Had the inscription been on the outside door, it could have attracted nosiness and interference with household secrets. On the other hand, the inscription seemingly works against the curiosity of intruders and visitors, but in fact it stirs up curiosity and provokes it to the utmost. This warning cannot be debunked unless there is a counter-authority: thus the girl’s surprise at the audacity of the transgressor, who insists on asking for an explanation: “Haven’t you read the inscription on the door, which is quite clearly written, ‘Speak not of what concerns you not, lest you hear what pleases you not.’”²⁴ The implications of power work within a dynamic of competitive politics, for the empowered ladies are so only within their domain, but a caliph subsumes this into his larger authority as the Commander of the Faithful. “Tell me who you are,” says the girl, “for you have only one hour to live. Were you not men of rank or eminent among your people or powerful rulers, you would not have dared to offend us.”²⁵ While the phrasing partakes of power politics, it also negotiates a place in refinement and ẓarf (pleasant and gentle manners) etiquette. On the other hand, the incognito Commander of the Faithful, who is beyond the authority of the rest, has space enough to maneuver and command. Apart from narrative embedding, there are other embedded discourses here, not only from ẓarf manuals and the literature of the fantastic, where the wonderful and the natural fuse smoothly into each other, but also from the dominating discourse and its regulatory codes. As events take place in a specific domain of privacy, where women, dogs, and slaves seemingly have the upper hand, the evolving and flowing narrative is mostly women’s narrative, which accommodates all in its smooth blending of the general fabric and matrix of the tales.

This tale subsumes all the ingredients and motivations of the frame tale (deceit, disillusionment, revenge, ransom, storytelling) and adds more, including city life, royalty, the vicissitudes of fortune, supernatural intrusions, humor, the discourse of urban life, and private household secrets. It has embedding as a narrative stratagem that subsumes cultures and lands while working within a network of feminine poetics and subscribing to a substantial corpus of female anecdotal literature. Its contribution to the global and the particular is not limited to its use of Baghdad and its locale, life, politics, and centrality in Islamic and world culture; it also manipulates every means of border and time crossing and the politics of class, gender, race, and nation. Such is the impression one gets from the porter in the markets of Baghdad, from the young women in their opulent and secret life, from the dervishes, and from the ultimate appearance of the Commander of the Faithful and his control of fates and supernatural powers.

Third, women in the tales are actively involved in the shaping of events and are ready to pay for their transgression. The two queens of the frame tale set the prototype for the rest, as shown in the deliberate conduct of the bride abducted by the demon, the women in the mendicants’ stories, the narratives of the barber and his brothers, and the Egyptian cycle.²⁸ While these tales may be taken by some male chauvinists as another testament to the ruses of women, the amount of suffering undergone and the price paid for transgression speaks not only of a rebellious spirit against some rules but also of moral obligation toward others. Both the frame story and the story of the porter and three ladies of Baghdad tell us of these moral obligations. One may come across other instances of no less serious obligations, such as the story of the woman from the Juhaina tribe who asked the Prophet to impose the right punishment on her for committing adultery. Seeing she was pregnant, the Prophet ordered that she should be treated kindly until delivery. After the imposed punishment, the Prophet said the funeral prayer for her. When he was asked how it was possible to say funeral prayers for a fornicator, he observed: “She has made such repentance as, if distributed among the people of Medina, would suffice them. Have you seen more excellent a deed than that she sacrificed her life?”²⁹ Sacrifice on the part of women is not confined to free women, for even slaves in the tales show as much. Many people in the collection die out of sorrow for being forced by design or circumstance to be separated from their young masters and future lovers. Tawaddud survives this fate by posing a challenge to hierarchical authority and its jurists and rhetoricians. The slavery issue will be discussed in subsequent chapters, but the question of its appropriation in the tales is worth noting. How is it possible that a slave girl shows so much readiness to sacrifice for the sake of rejoining her master? According to a Khurasanī nobleman writing to his father about the slave market in Baghdad in the last decade of the eighth century, “the observer imagines on his first trip to this market that, while he is circulating among girls, they are being sold in injustice and slavery.”³⁰ He adds: “But he does not retain this sudden fancy after he sees how they embrace the people of ease. I had heard that some of the beautiful girls luxuriously adorned were rescued secretly from places they disliked.”³¹

The frame story raises some serious questions regarding its focus on adultery. Could this be an Islamic concoction, since Islam makes it clear in its message of initiation and mission that adultery is prohibited and is punishable upon the appearance of clear-cut evidence? The punishment in the frame story is as harsh as the ones prescribed by religious doctrine. A suspected married woman who either confessed to adultery or was reported on by lawful witnesses was to receive the punishment as described in the Qurʾ ān. In his Kitāb al-Kharāj, which was commissioned by and addressed to the caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd, the Grand Qaḍī Abū Yūsuf (113–182/731–798) says: “When evidence of adultery is given against a married man or woman and the witnesses explain the act of lewdness in clear terms, the Imam will pass verdict for stoning them to death.”³⁵ But for a sane and mature bachelor who admits adultery four times, it is 100 stripes.³⁶ Adultery for unmarried men is punishable: “hundred strokes in view of the people.”³⁷ Ibn al-ʾUkhuwwah, Ḍiyāʾ al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Qurashī al-Shāfʿī (1329) explains this whole issue in his Maʿālim al-Qurba fī Aḥkām al-Ḥisba: “A woman shall be beaten seated in her cloak, because she is concealed out of prudency, and if she were to stand she might be uncovered. Her garments therefore should be tied on her so that she may be hidden by them. The tying of the clothes must be done by a woman.”³⁸ A baseless accusation is also punishable. “The punishment for an unsupported accusation of adultery is eighty stripes.”³⁹ Furthermore, the “person bringing an unsupported accusation shall be declared a delinquent and his evidence is not to be accepted.”⁴⁰ Apart from this qualified prohibition of adultery in Islam, there is, however, a body of literature that enjoins the segregation of sexes in the marketplace, since mingling, according to jurists, may tempt people toward adultery, which the Qurʾān admonishes as reprehensible fāḥishah (abomination or monstrosity; 17: pt. 15:32).⁴¹ But this should be established “either by confession or proof,” on the condition that the man is “of full age and understanding and a free agent, whether he is a Muslim, a dhimmi or a renegade.”⁴² On the other hand, proof “consists in this, that four men, competent witnesses shall declare that they witnessed the act of sexual congress, specifically.”⁴³ “Congress” as a term is significant, because in such a meeting or similar dubious situations there also emerge cases of seduction that the muḥtasib should forestall. Ibn al-ʾUkhuwwah describes as reprehensible all the cases involving some dubious behavior: “In an unfrequented street and in cases of doubt he [the market inspector or the master of the sūq] must forbid them to continue yet must not be in haste to punish, for the woman may be closely related to the man.”⁴⁴ The punishment in the frame tale is death. Adultery is also treated severely in other religions and is equated at times with serious strife or political upheaval. The Arthurian legends make this the pivotal point in the fall of Camelot: Guinevere’s guilt was behind the fall of the ideal city. In narrative, it assumes an equivalent dynamic force that accelerates action and involves it in rapid succession and a series of losses. The Indo-Persian origin blends smoothly with the Islamized version in its new milieu, and the punishment is carried out as soon as the younger king sees the scene. The sovereign requires no evidence other than his own.

The narration of adversity in the frame tale accelerates subsequent action and storytelling, for the Sassanid royal house suffers an unexpected misfortune due to the adultery of the two queens, a misfortune that entails not only revenge but also a need for a thorough understanding of human behavior. Monarchy cannot operate as sovereign as long as it has this rupture within. While shedding blood will quell anger, it cannot offer solutions to a human situation that should be addressed on other bases. As betrayal is not merely personal but also involves royalty and universal applications of authority, both kings embark on a quest of purgation and knowledge. Ironically, they come back in an increasingly vengeful mood, one that has lost faith in women, shifted the blame on them, and devised a strategy to forestall further betrayals.

An overview of the frame tale may help us more toward an understanding of its function as both the threshold and the catalyst for the collection. It acts as a mirror for the reader’s agenda and priorities, but it also operates on their intimate and perennial desires. Moreover, it has interspersed throughout the collection such catalytic narrative ingredients as introductory geographical and historical settings of the Sassanids; the emphasis on human and supernatural agents in collaboration or confrontation; leitmotifs that prepare for action and accelerate controversy, such as gardens, windows, sealed boxes and caskets; human desires such as sex, hunger, and curiosity, which act as overridingly uncontrollable agents, leading to disequilibria; and faith in human reason as in line with God’s vision of the universe. Thus begins the anonymous narrator: “It is related— but God knows and sees best what lies hidden in the old accounts of bygone peoples and times—that long ago, during the time of the Sassanid dynasty [the Persian dynasty from 226 to 641 C.E.] in the peninsulas of India and Indochina, there lived two kings who were brothers.”⁴⁵ The story preempts criticism on grounds of authenticity and reliability and leaves things in the hands of omniscient God. On the other hand, the storyteller or the redactor treats the tale as history, with all the implications of historical narrative and its presumed value for the present listener or reader. We are informed that the older brother, King Shahrayar, is “a towering knight and a daring champion, invincible, energetic, and implacable.”⁴⁶ The emphasis on power and magnanimity is deliberate, as it sets the stage for the tragic flaw in his character, as both disappointment and resignation to fate become his frailty and weakness: he also uses his power to revenge himself on women. While he was ruling India and Indochina, “to his brother [Shahzaman] he gave the land of Samarkand to rule as king.”⁴⁷ Overwhelmed with a longing for his brother, the older king sends an invitation to his younger brother Shahzaman to visit, which the latter happily accepts. Camping outside the city with his brother’s vizier, he returns one night to his palace to bid his wife goodbye, only to find her “lying in the arms of one of the kitchen boys.” Though he kills both, the young king becomes troubled and morose, a demeanor that bothers the older king, Shahrayar. The young brother no longer joins his brother on his hunting and camping errands. One day, while he remains in the palace, the young king sees through his window his brother’s wife with twenty slave girls, ten white and ten black, in the garden. The ten black slaves are men dressed as women.

Insofar as the frame story’s narrative goes, this seeming resignation works within a stoic temper that can be traced to Greek philosophy and thought, but it is obviously tinged here with the detractors’ Islamic submission to things already decreed, a point that does not necessarily absolve human responsibility or free will. There is the qaḍāʾ muḥkam, as decreed by God in the “preserved tablet,” but there is also freedom to exercise will, to choose to exert one’s reason and power to improve in life and to prepare for the Day of Judgment. Life is a trial.⁵¹ On the other hand, the kings’ resignation is narratively couched in relativism so as to perpetuate dramatization. When they come to a meadow by the seashore, they decide “to sleep on their sorrows.”⁵² They wake up to resume journeying in the morning, but they “heard a shout and great cry coming from the middle of the sea.”⁵³ The preparation for the event is of great technical value. Set against their sorrows and saddened mood, the cry unsettles placidity and quietude and accelerates action. In terms of popular faith verging on superstition, the waterspout indicates the presence of evil jinn, as Lane explains in his notes.⁵⁴ When the “sea parted . . . there emerged a black pillar that, as it swayed forward, got taller and taller, until it touched the cloud.”⁵⁵ As if duplicating Masʿūd, they climb “a very tall tree, sat hiding in its foliage,” watching the black demon carrying a large glass chest with “four steel locks.”⁵⁶ Climbing trees like apes becomes another leitmotif in this frame story, as well as in the “Tale of Nūr al-Dīn and Anīs al-Jalīs,” where the caliph and the vizier climb the tree to watch the festivities in the hall of the Palace of Statues. This apelike climbing occurs whenever women and men are in dubious situations: the queen and her women in the garden scene with the slaves, the monster and the caged bride in this scene, and the caliph and his minister in “The Tale of Nūr al-Dīn and Anīs al-Jalīs,” where the shaykh forsakes his role as the keeper of the garden and the palace to host and join the lovers. The male as ape is delineated as bound by desire, whereas the woman is the one with reason and will.

Further dramatization takes place as the demon “pulled out a full-grown woman” whom he addresses as the most charming bride “carried away on . . . [her] wedding night,” telling her he “would like to sleep a little.”⁵⁷ It was then that she looks up at the tree and sees the brothers, indicating for them to come down and make love to her, or else she will awaken the demon. Collecting their wedding rings, she adds these to the ninety-eight she has collected from others “under the very horns of this filthy, monstrous cuckold,” who tried to keep her “pure and chaste, not realizing that nothing can prevent or alter what is predestined and that when a woman desires something, no one can stop her.”⁵⁸ This saying deploys two motifs: (1) the accelerated coincidence that justifies any occurrence under the auspices of fate and (2) the wiles of women, which Scheherazade’s tales have to counteract within the underlying relativism. The immediate response of both kings is to believe in both fate and the treachery of women, hence their decision to go back to their kingdoms and “never to marry a woman” again.⁵⁹ The implications of the two betrayals, the queens’ betrayal of the kings and the bride’s betrayal of the monster, have a double motivation, however. There is the revenge on male power and authority and there is also a celebration of the body in nature. The old dichotomous binary between culture and nature is retained in the frame tale. The queen celebrates sex in the garden, the bride has sex in the woods, and the lovers Nūr al-Dīn and Anīs al-Jalīs win over the shaykh through their festivities, regardless of his commitment to the caliph and the state. Nature is triumphant in both tales, and the perennial power of nature wins the day. In ancient civilizations, in general, there is also some belief in women’s excessive sexuality. While there is no such implication in Islam as faith, some ḥisbah manuals made such claims. Speaking of ḥammāms and the need for strict supervision, ibn al-ʾUkhuwwah argues: “The women in this place are more extreme in their sensuality than the men. They practice newly invented forms of lawlessness introduced by the excess of luxury, and there has been indulgence towards them when they should have been denounced so that the contagion has spread to the center and all about.”⁶⁰ The frame tale has plans to forestall the contagion, too. The king thinks of betrayal as an infection that requires a remedy, at least insofar as he is concerned. He instructs his vizier to get him a woman from among the daughters of the princes, officers, merchants, and even the common people. As death awaits all of Shahrayar’s brides in the morning, “all the girls perished,” and Scheherazade forces her wish on the vizier, her father, at a later stage, to marry the king, fulfilling her design to put an end to a reign of vengeance and terror. But her willful decision is counterbalanced by the father’s warning, accompanied with maxims and wise sayings that are usually borrowed from a strong male tradition. Here he sets the tone for storytelling within a male tradition that assigns knowledge to men, including the knowledge of the esoteric, the language of animals, and the masculine code that runs among humans, birds, and animals. He relates the story of the “Bull and the Ox,” embedded within another tale about the merchant and his wife and the dog and the rooster. These tales are designed to deter Scheherazade from a seemingly rushed decision, advising her not to “misbehave,” to give up curiosity, and not “imperil” herself.⁶¹ The rooster advised beating to control the inquisitive and curious soul. Beating and containment exist on the other side of the narrative fulcrum from curiosity, which is a dynamic narrative impulse; they stand also for an authoritarian patriarchal code that is unitary rather than multiple and diverse. Nevertheless, Scheherazade reads through these maxims and says, “These tales don’t deter me from my request.”⁶² She even makes an early claim to a counternarrative, telling her father, “If you wish, I can tell you many such tales.”⁶³ The latter insinuation is of some importance, both in view of the counternarrative to male discourse and its repository of anecdotal literature and in keeping with an enormous corpus of women’s narrative that is orally preserved and, if written, embedded in a male tradition. From this corpus the tales unfold.

The frame tale is multiembedded. The first part, dealing with betrayal and disenchantment, involves the story of the demon and the glass-box bride; the second, involving the argument between the vizier and his daughter, contains the story of the bull and the ox, the merchant and his wife, and the rooster and the dog. The third part includes the rest, while involving the narrative in a complexity that shatters dichotomies, platitudes, and generalizations. On the other hand, the underlying pattern that questions these is civilizational, not impulsive, cultural, not natural, for it emanates from a cultural consciousness that works by design and intent in opposition to an authority that works by power, maxims, and selective experiential application. We are told that Scheherazade “had read the books of literature, philosophy, and medicine. She knew poetry by heart, had studied historical reports, and was acquainted with sayings of men and the maxims of sages and kings. She was intelligent, knowledgeable, wise, and refined.”⁶⁴ The emphasis on the “sayings of men” is worth noting, as it is referentially inclusive of both patriarchal discourse and her nonpatriarchal plan to expose presumptions on women’s wiles. It also sums up her plan to reform, albeit through multiple critiques, rather than to overthrow or sap a system. Her stories to the king, as perpetuated by her sister’s desire to hear them, keeps the king awake, curious to hear more and more for unlimited time, as the phrase “one thousand and one nights” indicates. Eventually, Shahrayar’s character undergoes a change, and his mistrust of women is replaced by a different recognition of diversity. Such is the effect of literature on a person’s temper and nature. Based on challenge and acceptance of risk, narration as an act is not devoid of a woman’s presence. Both work together, and the king derives satisfaction from these meetings, where he can fully enjoy a sense of supremacy to compensate for his loss and put away his fear of any further loss of male potency. The early disturbing and disheartening scene in the garden implies to him his failure to satisfy his wife, and his bloodthirsty pledge is a self-styled mechanism to publicize his virility. While Scheherazade accepts the risk, her beauty, education, and resourcefulness work together both to engage his attention and to diversify this attention in the main occupations of human nature: human records, supernatural and uncanny events, and contemporary or relevant situations from all paths of life. In this sense, narration is an act of containment and resistance not only to the emerging king’s misogyny but also to any acquiescence to hegemony. Beauty and narration are cunningly interwoven, whereas poetic insertions are liberated from male voicing to fit into multiple storytellings that break down absolutist borders. The frame becomes a trope for liberty, since both narrative multiplicity and Scheherazade’s pragmatic achievement and successes (as a liberator of womankind) belie frames and borderlines.

The frame tale uses pairing to debunk inequality and separation. Black men and white women mix and make love, royalty and slaves do the same in the garden scene and in the royal bedroom. Without its adultery motifs and evidence of treachery, the story could have been in line with an Islamic context where the emphasis on equality regardless of color and race is stressed in the Prophetic tradition. The storyteller plays on the perennial, too, as the slave Masʿūd acts like an ape, an action that the two kings are to perform during a crisis. Nature overrules culture, and all retain a primal nature when in stress or sexual need. The frame tale works through dichotomies, too: the palace and the glass box indicate confinement; meadows and gardens signify freedom and laxity. Moreover, the night signifies privacy, including private sexual intrigues, but day is the time for orgy and public sex. The mere mention of a journey prepares the reader for unexpected happenings and shocking scenes that lead to more narrative and human transformation.

Although there are some extant comments on the frame tale since the ninth century, there is no serious effort to analyze the reasons behind its migration or transformation, the belletristic resistance to its arrival, and its converse popularity among storytellers. In this respect, the history of the frame tale may be of some significance to both the Islamic factor and the global dimension of storytelling. Even though storytelling usually tends to collapse detail and come up with anachronisms that fit into its anecdotal repository, this story, around which other tales coalesce and cluster, relates part of the history of the Sassanid royal house, a pre-Islamic Persian dynasty that ruled a large part of western Asia from 224 until 651 C.E. The names of the sovereigns might fit any rulers among the large number of people who governed these parts during different periods. The founder of the dynasty was Rasher, whose cult of divine kingship was a continuation of the Parthian (Arsacid) faith in divine succession. Ardashir killed the Arsacid Artabanus V in about 224, occupying thereafter the rest of the Parthian empire and invading both coastal Arabia and Roman Mesopotamia. The name Scheherazade or Shahrazad means in Persian “a descendant of noble race.” On the other hand, the name of the young sister who accompanies Scheherazade is Dunyazad or Dinarzad, which means “of noble religion.” Since the names of sovereigns and queens, or at least Scheherazade and her sister, indicate the Indo-Persian origin of the frame story, the relatively peaceful times under that dynasty were probably a prosperous period for the growth of cultural life. The tales are greatly concerned with household and family life and thus were appropriate for the period and milieu to which they migrated. On the other hand, possible discomfort among the elite regarding the style and the preoccupation of the frame tale and its cycle might have more than one origin, including the implication of rift and betrayal in the royal house and family, a precedent that nobody would have expected or condoned.

Arab bibliographers and historians of the ʿAbbāsid period (749–945/945–1258), the heyday of the Islamic empire, mentioned this frame story and the collection as the Thousand and One tales or fables. Their mention of the frame tale is an attestation to its vogue; otherwise, neglect would have been the right choice. The frame story leads us to tales of life in Baghdad, and these are the tales that held a special appeal for nineteenth-century audiences in Europe. The ʿAbbāsids established Baghdad in about 762 C.E., for one single purpose: to claim total sovereignty and legitimacy. They did not choose Kūfa, the regional capital for the previous dynasty in central Iraq below Najaf and the capital of the Prophet’s cousin and the fourth caliph ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib (killed 661 C.E.). Neither did they choose Damascus in Greater Syria or Sham, which was the capital of the previous dynasty, the Umayyads (661–750 C.E.). The second ʿAbbāsid caliph, al-Manṣūr (r. 754–775 C.E.), built Baghdad on the western side of the Tigris, where it soon grew into a populous city. Geographers record that its great western market was phenomenal, with many blocks and specialized components exhibiting an abundance of goods from all over the world.⁶⁵ Documents on Baghdad’s cosmopolitanism attest to an influx of enormous literature covering every kind of knowledge. A survey of some aspects of narrative compilation and composition during that time might serve our purpose here. So far, there has been little to add to what the English Athenaeum reviewer of 1838–1839 said in response to interventions by his predecessors and contemporaries. He partially sided with von Hammer, concluding that the Indo-Persian Hezar Afsaneh, which the Arab historian Abū al-Ḥasan al-Masʿūdī (896–956 C.E.) had mentioned in Murūj al-dhahab (The Meadows of Gold), was “either in whole or in part translated into Arabic, and served as a ground work to the various collections of tales circulated in the East.”⁶⁶ These views are based on scanty evidence proposed in a number of books. As it is central to this argument, this external evidence is worth citing again here. Abū al-Ḥasan al-Masʿūdī mentioned in his Meadows of Gold, which he wrote in 336/947 and reedited in 346/957, that the prototype tales for the Thousand and One Nights

Beyond these insights into the early history of the Thousand and One Nights,⁶⁹ the Athenaeum critic, most probably P. de Gayangos, came across another piece of external evidence to corroborate the existence in the twelfth century of a work called the Thousand and One Nights. He referred to Shihab al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Tilimsanī al-Maqqarī’s (1041/1631) Nafḥ al-ṭib min ghusṣn al-Andalus al-raṭib (The History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain).⁷⁰ This book was among the pieces of evidence used by von Hammer, Torrens, Ritter, and Nabia Abbott.⁷¹ Taken together, this significant documentation, as well as the reviewer’s effort to reconstruct the historical growth of the Nights, must be considered basic to the foundations of subsequent scholarship on its origins. Goitein’s discovery of the twelfth-century loan record corroborates al-Maqqarī’s reference.⁷² Aside from minor disagreements regarding the history and volume of some cycles, twentieth-century scholars such as Littmann, MacDonald, and Nabia Abbott have reached conclusions that are not different from those already reached by the Athenaeum reviewer, who translated al-Maqqarī’s work at a later stage. They conclude that from the Islamized Hezār Afsāneh was borrowed the framing tale, around which clustered a few Arabicized and numerous genuine Arabian tales, which continued to accumulate until the early sixteenth century. The reviewer’s method is no less rewarding than the substance of his argument. Rather than confusing the general with the particular and treating the collection as homogeneous, he demonstrated some awareness of the component parts and genres that compose the whole. By pointing to the need for separating possible interpolations from core tales, he touched on a topic that has engaged the attention of a number of scholars ranging from August Müller and Öestrup to Horovitz and Elisseeff.

While specific textual reference culminates in Nabia Abbott’s finding of an early ninth-century fragment bearing the title Kitāb Ḥadīth Alf Laylah and containing a number of lines that make up the justification for storytelling,⁷³ there are other scattered references to the Thousand and One Nights: a Cairene Jewish bookseller has this reference in his loan record in the twelfth century.⁷⁴ Additionally, the Egyptian historian al-Maqrīzī (d. 1442 C.E.) indicates that the collection was in circulation late in the eleventh century.⁷⁵ The mention of “nights” as durational or nocturnal recitation has some grounding in Islamic tradition, too. The writer and vizier’s scribe Muḥammad Ibn ʿAbdūs al-Jahshiyarī (d. 942 C.E.), writes al-Nadīm, began a compilation of a “Thousand tales from the stories of the Arabs, Persians, Greeks and others. Each section was separate, not connected with any other.” However, because he was not merely keen on available stock, or as al-Nadīm put it, because “he was of a superior type, there were collected for him four hundred and eighty nights, each night being a complete story, comprising more or less than fifty pages. Death overtook him before he fulfilled his plan for completing a thousand stories.”⁷⁶ While “thousand” indicates an unlimited number, the reference to “nights” is of great significance for contextualizing the early history of the collection. Abū Ḥayyan al-Tawḥīdī (d. 1024 C.E.) specifies the word in reference to his nocturnal narratives, “successive nights,” with Abū Abdallah al-Ārḍ ibn Saʿdān, the vizier.⁷⁷ While decidedly leaving Hazar Afsaneh behind and demonstrating to the vizier his broad knowledge of storytelling and its domains, he specifies “flowery nights” as the correct time for the performance of the art. He leaves behind the coarse and the insipid, which he associates with “women and their like,” but he raids Hazar Afsaneh in the sense that he hijacks, reenacts, and appropriates the framing tale. The term “nights” and the accompanying emphasis on elitism whenever the act of collecting popular tales is mentioned should draw attention to an endeavor filled with contradiction. While meeting the urban need of the new consumers, including ministers and top officials, this effort disdains to be immediately or directly involved in this street lore. The effort to write it down, however, must alert us to the other side of the story, the tendency to build on foreign lore and impose a certain regularity and formality on storytelling. The use of a frame story speaks for this writerly effort, which is not only a farewell to orality but also an endeavor to set it within the boundaries of a written tradition that should have its own regulatory patterns and codes as befitting growing scriptoria. Al-Nadīm’s “superior type” was, after all, one of the prominent officials and scribes, and his effort fell within this endeavor to organize and control an oral tradition. On the other hand, the effort to write a tale that was performed or told in a gathering, an assembly, or a private session builds on the recognition of a performed version that subsequent written explanatory notes try hard to recapture. We should remember, too, that apart from the little anecdotal repertoire that was left to us in terms of “nights,” efforts that can be claimed as such came later. Ibn ʿArabī’s (d. 1240 C.E.) Kitāb muḥādarāt al-abrār wa-musāmarāt al–akhyār (The Book of Repartee with the Virtuous and Late-night Talk with the Elect), for instance, was one in a series of other tales and anecdotes by al-Ḥanbalī (d. 1503 C.E.) and others. This is certainly not the same as the asmār or musāmarāt, late-night talks, where a group of friends gather to reminiscence and recollect. These terms are still widely in use and occur in recollections, speeches, and songs. They are usually associated with moonlit nights even if we suspect that the case might not be so.

The effort to write down tales for edification and entertainment has some precedence, however, in the so-called Kitāb Kalīlah w-Dimnah, deservedly attributed in its known form to ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (d. 756 C.E.).⁷⁸ In both the frame and the sequentiality of narratives, the book can be considered an exemplar of the writing down of composite narratives. The author-adaptor and translator ibn al-Muqaffaʿ created the form of sequentiality as a narrative technique to hold together the old and the new tales and narrative units. The case is a little different with the Thousand and One Nights, which originally came as a frame story that was receptive to many other transmissions, creations, and additions. Kitāb Kalīlah wa-Dimnah was not meant for the common people. As an elegant prose work, it was addressed to literary connoisseurs and people of fashion. It was also a manual for the instruction of courtiers and princes. It became so popular in the new imperial center Baghdad that its critics a few centuries later chastised their predecessors for treating it as the “Qurʾān of the community” to the extent that “they were so attracted to it and learning it by heart that it became like the Holy book.”⁷⁹ Certainly, the phrase Qurʾān al-qawm (the Qurʾān of the community, or the community Qurʾān) means also “the guiding and exemplary collected book.” Its freedom from any holy connotations makes it only a book, like any other composed and collected one. It soon became, however, very popular, a fact that explains the many transmissions and versifications that it went through. Between the eighth and tenth centuries, many versions and extracts were produced, and tracing their corruption or distortion through transmission or adaptation helps to give us an example of the history of the publication of popular works of the period.

Kitāb Kalīlah w-Dimnah has something to tell us about the future of the Thousand and One tales in their new milieu. Apart from the framestory technique and its revision or adaptation to include and enframe new tales, the translator as author Islamized the whole book and appropriated it to the morals and demands of the new society. Unlike the original or Ur-text, the new product sustains the Islamic belief in one God. It also follows the codes of poetic justice; thus the traitor of the piece is punished. While focusing on manners and morals relevant to the changing society, it also provided much advice for aspiring politicians and the polity. No wonder the jurist Abū Muḥammad ibn Qutaybah (d. 889 C.E.) adapted and used some extracts from the book; others versified it. On the other hand, Kitāb Kalīlah wa-Dimnah is an early instance of an oral tradition changed into scriptoria, a book intended to hold together narratives, impose an order on them, and limit their free transmission. The effort to turn it into a book should not be taken lightly, however. It means also the imposition of an ethic, a moral code, and, thereby, legitimacy. As recognition comes to works that are appropriated and adapted to institutionalized religion or to the emerging urban order, we should keep in mind that these works will no longer be the same. As prisons, asylums, schools, and other institutions speak for law and order as ordained by the state, so does the book. Every further adaptation, recension, or redaction conveys a message and reveals a taste. It also offers an early instance of beast fables with an edifying purpose, a pattern that was followed by the early collectors of the Thousand and One Nights, especially in the first part, which surveys the dialogue and contestation in narrative between Scheherazade and her father, the vizier.

At a later period, perhaps, the frame tale invited other tales and stories to gather around its intriguing storytelling. As an invitation to practice the art, the frame tale served in time as the nucleus for the collection that became such a European phenomenon that the Englishman Robert Chambers described it in his 1883 article “What English Literature Gives Us” as “amongst the similar things of our own which constitute the national literary inheritance.”⁸⁰ Yet the elite of tenth-century Baghdad had other readings to cherish as well. Al-Nadīm’s phrasing was not random, for the educated classes and the learned of Baghdad and other urban centers looked down upon popular literature, exactly as eighteenth-century European elites would do after reading Galland’s translation. It is understandable why European neoclassicists could not swallow tales that did not correspond to their standards of good composition. Nevertheless, this attitude could not deter the popularity of the tales and their appeal to perennial sentiments and human needs. Writers and poets in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and America received the tales with joy and admiration. Such were the enthusiastic responses of Emerson, Poe, and Melville in America, and Samuel Johnson, Horace Walpole, William Beckford, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Keats, Dickens, George Eliot, Tennyson, and Meredith in England. The new art, according to the critic William E. A. Axon, came at a time when the reading public was sick “of sham classical romances of interminable and portentous unreality.”⁸¹ The tales, he concludes, “may perhaps have had some share in encouraging the novelists when they did come to deal with homely scenes and common life.” This literary recognition may not correspond to the popular one, for the tales that gather around the frame story have a great variety of characters, topics, and concerns that may not interact well with certain interests and expectations.

In their originating habitat, these tales were meant as entertainments for coffeehouse audiences and urban communities at a time when storytelling was almost the only available mode of entertainment. It is only through this comparative reading, recognizing the two separate publics of eighteenth-century Europe and tenth-century Baghdad, that we can understand the problems involved in studying the orientation, migration, appropriation, and popularity of storytelling. Both as texts already written in one form or another or as oral narratives, the tales have made their way through urban audiences in both East and West. While the frame story and a few other tales have their non-Arab or non-Islamic origin, the rest are Islamic or Islamicized, especially the ones that take Baghdad, Cairo, and Damascus as their habitat and locale. The nature of this multifarious growth and its historical or urban contexts indicates that the frame story was used by storytellers as a pretext to accumulate a large number of tales that could correspond to the number mentioned in the title, 1,001, though the term connotes an unlimited number of stories.⁸² Navigating between the natural and the supernatural or wondrous, the storyteller unites these in many tales and provides one of the most salient and appealing features of storytelling. Les Mille et Une Nuits, Contes Arabes, in its first translation in French and then English was second only to the Bible among readers in England, France, and other countries. Thus, writing for the Atlantic Monthly in 1889, C. T. Toy emphasized their Oriental garb, charm of sentiment, mystery of the “strange life,” and their delicacy of humor. Galland’s version of the tales “opened the doors of unlimited and delicious romance. All Paris was full of the wonderful stories; it was a triumph resembling that achieved by the Waverley Novels” of Walter Scott.⁸³ Robert Louis Stevenson wrote on the collection as “more generally loved than Shakespeare,” for it “captivates in childhood, and still delights in age.”⁸⁴ Indeed, Galland’s version was for the English poet and critic William Ernest Henley a provider of “hachisch-made words for life.”⁸⁵ Writing to Cornhill Magazine in 1875, James Mew speaks of this vogue in terms of the unprecedented abundance in editions: “Every rolling year seems to request a larger number of editions.” He adds: “No deciduous laurel is this book, from the leaves of which greedy time steals gradually away the beauty and the verdure. As it once drew us, it still draws out children from the playground, and in the chimney corner its glittering conceits still carry consolation to old age.”⁸⁶

One should mention that the first translation was the one that had mass appeal. Galland’s version of the Thousand and One Nights is faithful to the original narrative thread. The French translator was aware of the Eastern storytellers’ knack for a good narrative that would entertain audiences in medieval urban centers. He himself stressed the picturesque and the exotic, minimized needless detail, and Frenchified dialogues and scenes to reach his French audiences. With his acute awareness of the literary market and popular taste, Sir Walter Scott wrote in the introduction to his Ivanhoe that Galland’s translation was “eminently better fitted for the European market, and obtained an unrivalled degree of public favor which they certainly would never have gained had not the manners and style been in some degree familiarized to the feelings and habits of the Western reader.” Indeed, the French translator whose Contes Arabes took France by surprise was so responsive to the predilections of his audiences that he dispensed with the original formula in which Scheherazade’s sister Dunyazad asks for a tale every night. According to the French writer Michaud: “The Parisians, returning from their nocturnal revels, would often stop before his [Galland’s] door, and awake him from his soundest sleep, by calling loudly for him. Galland would open the window, to see what was the matter, and they would cry out: ‘O vous, qui savez de si jolis contes, et qui les racontez si bien [,] racontez nous en un!’”⁸⁷

As an Orientalist, diplomat, and acute observer of taste, Galland tailored the translation to fit the receiving milieu. Keen on meeting both popular and literary tastes without losing sight of the need for a faithful rendition of his originals, Antoine Galland was able to sustain his reputation as the most appreciated translator of the collection. “It was he that first opened to Europe this precious source of delight; he it was whose taste and enthusiasm led the way to the taste and enthusiasm of others,” wrote the romantic critic and essayist Leigh Hunt.⁸⁸ Accepting the argument that the Victorian Orientalist Edward William Lane was able to provide a scholarly version of the tales (1839–1841), he further argued that without Galland “perhaps Lane himself would not have been ultimately led to favor us with his more accurate version.”⁸⁹ Yet it was not only this pioneering role as a translator that enabled Galland to have such a captivating effect on European audiences. His simplicity of style and skillful thread of narrative made his version accessible to readers of every predilection and taste. Summing up these characteristics and explaining the perennial charm of the tales in Galland’s rendition, Leigh Hunt wrote:

To us the Arabian Nights are one of the most beautiful books in the world: not because there is nothing but pleasure in it, but because the pain has infinite chances of vicissitude, and because the pleasure is within the reach of all who have body and soul, and imagination. The poor man there sleeps in a doorway with his love, and is richer than a king. The Sultan is dethroned tomorrow, and has a finer throne the next day. The pauper touches a ring, and spirits wait upon him. You ride in the air; you are rich in solitude; you long for somebody to return your love, and an Eden encloses you in its arms. You have this world, and you have another. Fairies are in your moonlight. Hope and imagination have their fair play, as well as the rest of us. There is action heroical, and passion too: people can suffer, as well as enjoy, for love; you have bravery, luxury, fortitude, self-devotion, comedy as good as Moliere’s, tragedy, Eastern manners, the wonderful that is in a commonplace, and the verisimilitude that is in the wonderful mendicants, cadis, robbers, enchanted palaces, paintings full of color and drapery, warmth for the senses, desert in arms and exercises to keep it manly, cautions to the rich, humanity for the more happy, and hope for the miserable.⁹⁰

So-called European romanticism is not concerned with an Islamic life or social and religious ways and customs. To this romantic mind, it is enough to lose oneself in a tale pure and simple. In Galland’s version, and indeed due to its skeletal faithfulness, there is this possibility of what Bakhtin calls the interior infinite,⁹¹ with its professed desire for the “boundless, the free, and also the dangerous, challenging, and tyrannical, where the repressed soul finds its opportunity to fly high as a spirit unquell’d.”⁹² This version proved to be the most appealing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. Later editions targeted different audiences, mostly scholars and researchers, and sometimes the rebels against strict middle-class morality as well. On the other hand, Leigh Hunt’s review succinctly synthesizes the major attributes of the tales: their romantic properties, social life, themes of love and pain, and the combination of the natural and the supernatural in their most appealing cycles. It touches also on the narrative techniques responsible for their popularity in the first place. Although mostly corresponding to a critique that emphasizes the wondrous element in the commonplace and the commonness in the supernatural, a romantic stance articulated most forcefully in William Wordsworth’s preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1798), the review also alerts us to other properties that received further attention throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, properties that have already won the tales their global appeal while ostensibly signifying their unifying Islamic factor, a point that is the focus of the next chapter.