The Islamic Context of The Thousand and One Nights

TO SOME Islamic thinkers, the popular mind only displays the Islamic message itself: its appeal to principles of freedom, equality, justice, affection, and compassion. That was one of the reasons behind both the enormous appeal of its message and the hierarchal resistance to its basic beliefs of equality and justice, a resistance that penetrated the development of nations, dynasties, and the Islamic empire. They rarely debate the concept of ʿāmmah, however, as being anything more than the material for faith and guidance. Kamal al-Dīn al-Damayrī (d. 808 H.) says in his Ḥayāt al-Ḥayawān al-Kubrā: “The common individual is weak, excited by the jadal [argumentation and debate] of the advocates of the new.”¹ Islamic nations as well as the empire could not keep up with the prophetic decrees of brotherhood and reverence and were gradually entrenched in their needs and requirements, which happened to elude many articles of the faith. Does this tension in the Islamic state or empire since the Umayyads appear in the tales as a collective memory? Apart from the relaxed navigation among lands and times, the tales demonstrate this tension and direct it to anxieties, adventures, ambitions, conflicts, reconciliations, and long journeys of discovery and business. The fantastic element resists comparisons, but it keeps the mind attracted to and ingrained in the real as the instigator of the fantastic excursion. Both the message of Islam and the expansion of the Islamic state, geographically and culturally, should be kept in mind when perusing the Thousand and One Nights. The collection and its evolution between the eighth and fourteenth centuries, its emergence, accumulation, and fragmentation, resembles in many ways the increasingly layered structure of the empire. As argued earlier, the analogy may further explain the appropriation of a narrative nucleus, the frame tale of Scheherazade and Shahrayar, and its ostensible title, the thousand and one fables, as the basis for a growing collection that under the artistry of storytellers and compilers digested other material of different locations, identities, and cultures. As an ensemble of so many cultural nuclei and an efficient melting pot, the collection has proved to be of enduring fame, with a global appeal that has never waned. Its slave girls, singers, mendicants, professionals, and abundant pearls and merchandise function as tropes and significations for an empire’s long history of achievements and failures.

The frame tale is not a mere ensemble, a basin or container, which holds a number of stories together. Its very appropriation from other collections of Indo-Persian origin should alert us first to the nature of culture at that time, from the ninth century onward. The appropriation was obviously not condoned by the elitists, who were the guardians of taste and the upholders of the literary canon, despite the political upheavals that had begun to undermine the unity of the empire. But this appropriation reveals something else. It is an oblique way of questioning the centrality of the sovereign, the caliphal order itself, not only due to the almost concomitant emergence of the Fatimid caliphate (969–1171 C.E.) and its claim to legitimacy against the ʿAbbāsid rule, or the similar Andalusian claim following the inauguration of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān the Third as caliph (912–61 C.E.), but also because the frame tale debates the legitimacy of the sovereign. Both King Shahrayar and King Shahzaman recognize their limitations as human beings who are unable to claim any divine order. They were overruled by their wives, who preferred cooks and slaves to them. Instead of actual satisfaction with the delicacies and privileges of the court, their wives were more interested in ordinary life and society. They are so much involved in this society that they are ready to suffer the consequences. In other words, the narrative constructs a social order or disorder that harbors adultery, transgression, deceit, desire, and other human frailties and limitations. Through narrative, it questions and undermines claims to legitimacy and tests the will of monarchs to change in due course, but as a historical process, a journey of great challenge.

The monarch must listen, meditate, request, recapitulate, and learn. He has to abandon a chauvinistic male legacy and become instead a mere human like any other in order to accept advice, counsel, and the existence of people not as slaves or sheep but as a community with moral responsibility, duties, and rights. In other words, the journey initiated in the frame tale and onward, through the progression and repetition of some tales or their motivations, is a journey from limited fraternity or solidarity to a greater collective consciousness, from a tribal or quasi- religious order to a national one, from an indefinite geographical naming to cities with names, topographies, communities, and order. Even intruders from the other world, outer space so to speak, must abide by rules. Habits of a later period, probably the Mamluk, are emphasized in the second mendicant’s tale, both to demonstrate the social and religious obligations of women to be veiled in the presence of strangers and to have this veiling as a structural motivation, without which the battle between the human power represented by the king’s daughter and the supernatural order represented by the jinn cannot take place.

It is only because of her interest in the restoration of the monkey, the transformed monarch, to his original form, that the battle takes place. Yet the battle is also one of human affirmation, which must be fought with great craft, courage, cunning, and eventual sacrifice. Its culminating rituals are burns, bruises, and death. Her father, the king, has to be burned and bruised, to bear the scars of human life, in order to evolve into a human representative of the community with an ordinary discourse that speaks of its own pains and troubles with modesty and humility. There is no grand discourse but rather a communal one that emanates from the very limitations of the real situation. His religious references are casual and ordinary considering the calamity that has touched him deeply, indeed as deeply as the adulterous behavior of Shahrayar’s wife, which put an end to his sense of supremacy and sovereignty. Thus he says to the young man, the ape restored to his previous form:

The city-state is not an order of the past, for along with it, there are nation-states and empires. In the same tale, we are told of the borders and laws of each nation, when the second mendicant says to the highwaymen: “We are messengers to the great king of India; you cannot harm us.” The highwaymen are more adept in geography and law, for they reply: “We are neither within his dominions nor under his rule.”³

What holds the collection together, and what upholds the concept of nationhood, Islamic or Arab, is the Islamic context. The Islamic stamp of the collection is one in keeping with the original doctrinal message, that is, its focus on an Islamic brotherhood of love, intimacy, compassion, and good work. Although at times the collection seems divided between good and evil, contrasts and dichotomies are not meant as contradictory structures. The two viziers in the tale of Nūr al-Dīn and Anīs al-Jalīs, for example, exemplify this dichotomy, for ibn Khāqān is known for doing good and forbidding evil,⁴ an attitude that wins him the love and support of the common public. The other vizier is the opposite. He is greedy, cruel, and a liar. These are human qualities, but the specific reference to ibn Khāqān’s Islamic morality, doing good and forbidding evil, puts him within an Islamic order as enforced in Islamic ḥisbah manuals. In other words, Islamic identity has a universality that can be accommodated and easily accepted by readers, whoever and wherever they are. This combination has received a variety of responses from scholars and critics. The European neoclassicists were often attuned to the universal outlook whenever they had a well-disposed predilection to enjoy Eastern narratives. Especially for the apologists among them, there is in the tales something that addresses human concerns and needs. The universal is the gateway to their appreciation of a culture with which they were not familiar. While both shared some common criteria that confuse refinement of taste with elevated style and morality with restrained composition, they belong to different worldviews, with deep contradictions whenever the issues of universalism, the court, and religion are the subject of discussion. On the other hand, both subscribe to an established belief that confuses elitism with polity, for they take themselves to be the true representatives of the society, its welfare, and its culture. They are the protectors and the guardians of the whole society and the bulwark against sordidness, which is usually associated in elite discourse with both the popular and the poor. The belletristic tradition in European and Islamic contexts built its canon on highly refined prose writing inaccessible to the layman and, indeed, very belittling of classes that were deemed beyond the reach of this prose and its aspirations.

This categorization cannot be consistently applied, however. Especially among jurists, there are some who side with the popular mind against the extravagance of the court. They may even speak up against governors who misuse power. Among the many anecdotes on record is the one by Saʿīd ibn Muslim, the governor of Armenia, who had Abū Hiffān waiting at his door for three days. When admitted, Abū Hiffān told him: “This power that has devolved on you and that you now possess was earlier in the hands of others. By God, they have become a mere story; if they did good, then it is a good story; if they did evil, then it is a bad one. Ingratiate yourself then with God’s servants by being pleasant, gentle, and easily accessible through your chamberlain.”⁵ Subordination to authority entails a tendency to become inaccessible to the underprivileged. The same classification applies to the tales, their audiences, and their opponents, East and West.

Regardless of under which name or denomination faith appears, religion cannot remain the same, for it grows into an institution, an overwhelming presence, pragmatic and utilitarian, which the popular mind appropriates in multifarious ways. The processes of rulers and jurists that Hourani has studied⁶ were not basically different, for both tried to abide by the laws as specified in the Qurʾān and the Prophetic traditions. Both were bound and guided by the state. Both appropriated the laws to meet new demands. There was, however, another popular tradition that could not be controlled. Popular literature gradually moves from the margins to claim a religiosity of another sort, ritualistic and popular, which amalgamates benedictions, recitations, visitation prayers, vows, anecdotes, formulas, and some scattered lines from holy texts. This is the aspect of the Thousand and One Nights that deserves attention in order to show its Islamic context. Having said this, we should not overlook the cultural aspect of the tales, whenever they argue or narrate issues and matters of urban life, marketplace ethics, and women. All of these aspects, as well as rituals and popular practices, manifest a culture that we usually call Islamic, in the same manner as we call European certain Christian ways of conduct and behavior. Partaking of the oral tradition, however, the tales in their early ensemble and configuration are not innocent hearsay or idle chit-chat, for morality retains a purpose and a role, depending on its sources, sites of enunciation, and target. To speak of the elite society, the court, the merchants, and private life behind closed doors is as purposeful as bugging, wiretapping, surveillance, and espionage. The only difference is that there is more fantasy and desire in the storyteller’s repository and invention.

While the tales have this imaginative assemblage, they also collate a large corpus of narratives that became part of the cultural material of urban life, which was circulated, added to, sifted, and transformed according to storytellers and their whims, concerns, and audiences. In other words, the outcome is a cultural repertoire, an inventory of many directions, that may be defined metaphorically as Islamic to account for life as it was desired or made available in talks, anecdotes, and, in some cases, lived. Yet regardless of our point of view, the tales were the most influential product in defining the Arab East for European and, now, American audiences, especially through media manipulation of stock images and stereotyping to fit into a reductive strategy of mass production and consumerism. Indeed, a solid neoclassicist like Walter Bagehot wrote in his lengthy 1859 essay “The People of the Arabian Nights” that he, like many, knew that they were repeating hearsay and nonsensical depictions of the so-called East, but custom and tradition made the practice a way of cultural classification that had no basis in reality.⁷

Especially in matters that relate to Islamic narrative norms and practices, the tales demonstrate both their efficacy as popular traditions in the East and West and as a commodity in a cultural field that continued, for over five centuries, to accumulate in order to meet the literal demands of the title. Even when storytellers and compilers understood that the “thousand and one” was only a term to signify endlessness and continuity, they had to cope with a market that could have taken the title literally. To meet the demand, many tales were taken from the corpus of anecdotal literature, historical records, and popular traditions. A number of implications are involved here, which invite further explanation. There was a demand for this supply, and compilers were ready to take care of the matter during a time of lucrative business for bibliophiles, copyists, and their like, especially when other means of livelihood (that is, the court) were not as easily accessible as before. There was also the appearance, since the ninth century, of the warrāqīn markets. These were the markets of the copyists, hack editors, and booksellers, who had a quarter of their own in Baghdad and later in Cairo, at which readers and book collectors shopped. On the eastern side of the Tigris, ibn ʿAqīl tells us, was the booksellers’ market, “a large one which is also the meeting place of learned men and poets.”⁸ This was located at the bridgehead in the days of the caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd and had been previously the Palace of Ḥuzayma, which “stood at the corner where the road of Shammasīyah branched off to the northern gate”; it was probably in the same location as the present Sūq al-Sarāy. Copyists and calligraphers were so much in demand, says George Makdisi in his classic book on Islamic humanism, that there were instances of fierce competition for books of the grammarian and calligrapher al-ʿAttābī (d. 556/1161), due to his renowned textual accuracy and the beauty of his handwriting.⁹ Copyists were employed by scientists, historians, and grammarians. In the ninth century, for instance, the lexicographer al-Aḥwal (275/888) was employed by Ḥunain ibn Isḥāq for his translations from Greek sciences. Others lingered in the market, waiting to be commissioned by writers and translators.¹⁰ Such an industry was unique in its enormous production and the size of the labor force employed before the appearance of print.¹¹ Even if there were no actual demand for the Thousand and One Nights compilation, it was in their interest to encourage it in order to sell more books and consequently to secure their livelihood.

Whether we are speaking of ninth- and tenth-century Baghdad or Mamluk Cairo, literary production of every kind, including the inscription of oral tradition and popular lore, grew significantly, as the enormous corpus of books demonstrate. The popular demand, as well as the interest of copyists and compilers, along with the commitment of many to preserve a legacy, operated very strongly in creating a lucrative business in a busy market space. This is not a passing matter; rather, it means the birth of new public spaces for meetings and discussions as well as the deliberate condescension to public taste, the popular one in particular. As the official language was more limited in use, especially since belletristic chancery writing was often reserved for the elite, the nonofficial language of the middle and lower classes became widely disseminated. This led to a larger application of popular Islamic terms that gradually evolved as formulas. The specific mention of markets, baths, and other meeting places by inspectors or writers on the duties of market inspectors should alert us to this proliferation of cultural production, whose preachers, diviners, and narrators or qaṣṣāṣīn were the butt of juridical criticism.¹²

This same dissemination of popular taste became a way of life, a practice that can be detected almost everywhere in writings since the tenth century. The tendency was so powerful that the tenth-century judge al-Tanūkhī complained of the distortion of actual stories and historical accounts. The other implication relates to a large number of tales that resort, as narrative method, to autobiographical introductions. This autobiographical element is of some significance, not only as concomitant with the tendency to transmit, authenticate, and confirm a social and national connection, but most often to establish identity as a Muslim. Although ibn al-ʾUkhuwwah tells us that the prioritization of Islamic citizenry dwindled by the fourteenth century and perhaps much earlier, the tales still speak of this prioritization.¹³ There are tales of Jews and Christians in this context, but these also operate in an Islamic context, as the tales of the barber’s brothers signify. Moreover, the establishment of nasab (lineage or genetic succession) corroborates an Islamic identity in the lands of Islam during a crucial period of migrancy and dislocation. Most of these tales narrate, in the words and language of a speaker, a story of displacement and a search for settlement as well as a yearning for a life and a place that compensate for the ones lost. The story is undoubtedly an oblique narrative of rise and fall on an individual or communal level. Whether we speak of the mendicants or the barbers’ brothers, there is a search for a habitation. The only difference between this level and the imperial one is the tendency to accommodate oneself in a new Islamic land. Despite the nostalgia for the lost city, there is no terrible sense of foreignness. In fact, the conversations on and discussions of Muslim cities center on worldly preferences: which is preferable, Cairo, Damascus, or Baghdad?

The tendency to compare cities is not unique to the Thousand and One Nights; since the tenth century, books on the merits and virtues of cities, their faḍāʿil, were many. These books have been classed as the faḍāʾil genre. Baghdad received greater attention in the ninth and tenth centuries, but other cities also gained visibility. There appeared books on Andalusia (Muslim Spain) and on Damascus, Jerusalem, and Cairo. As many people and intellectuals were driven by economic and political reasons to migrate to other places, a great body of literature became available that also met the needs of its own period. The Cairo of the tales is mostly the Fatimid or Ayyubid Cairo, when festivities were in abundance, although the crowdedness was even greater during the Mamluk period. In the Jewish physician’s tale, the young merchant from Mosul tells us how his father, uncles, and others were in the Mosul mosque after prayers, sitting in a circle and talking “about the wonders of foreign lands and the marvels of various cities until they mentioned Cairo, and one of my uncles said, ‘Travelers say there is nothing on the face of the earth fairer than Cairo.’ Another disagreed, saying, ‘It is Baghdad that is the Paradise and the capital of the world.’” Ibn Mihmandār’s third-century hijrah treatise entitled Faḍāʿil Baghdad enumerates many of the merits and virtues of a metropolis that even that early on had already elicited the celebration and admiration of visitors, scholars, and tourists. Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597/1200) continues this tradition in his Manāqib Baghdad. Al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī quotes one of the poets, ʿUmarah b. ʿAqīl b. Bilāl al-Khaṭāfī, as saying upon the shifting of the capital to Sāmarrāʾ (836 C.E.): “Have you seen in all the length and breadth of the earth / A city such as Baghdad? Indeed it is paradise on earth? Life in Baghdad is pure; its wood becomes verdant, / While life outside of it is without purity and freshness? There the lifespan is long; its food / Is healthful; for some parts of the earth are more healthful than others.”¹⁴

The mention of Baghdad as the capital refers to the period before 1258 C.E.. Thereafter, “the universe was without a caliph until 659 A.H., in the days of al-Malik al-Ẓāhir Baybars al-Banqdārī,” Ibn Duqmāq said in a lament about the fall of the caliphal center.¹⁵ The story of the barber and the lame man from Baghdad in the tailor’s narrative also bears evidence of those glorious days celebrated by historians, travelers, and visitors, like the Khurāsanī young man who described in a letter to his father the Baghdad of 803 C.E. as a city of cultural expansion, education, and joy. In this city, all artisans, professionals, functionaries, and skilled workers found enough education to raise them up to the expectations of the more privileged classes. In night 144, the Baghdadi barber speaks of himself as follows: “God sent you a barber who is also an astrologer and a physician, versed in the arts of alchemy, astrology, grammar, lexicography, logic, scholastic disputation, rhetoric, algebra, and history, as well as the traditions of the Prophet, according to Muslim and al-Bukhari [compilers of the sayings of the Prophet].”¹⁶ In the Jewish physician’s tale, the young merchant from Mosul acquaints us with a different image of cities that were lost and others that were replacing them. He shows a stronger affinity to his father’s view that Cairo is the best of cities, at a time when it was acquiring the status of the center of the Islamic world. He adds, “But my father, who was the eldest, said, ‘He who has not seen Cairo has not seen the world. Its dust is gold, its women dolls, and its Nile a wonder, whose water is sweet and refreshing and whose clay is soft and cool.’” One may come across these appellations in many historical accounts, too. The father goes on to describe the Ethiopian Pond, the observatory, the Nile Flooding Feast, and al-Rauda Park.¹⁷ On the way to Cairo and in the company of his father and uncles, the young merchant from Mosul reaches Aleppo and then Damascus, “which I found,” said the narrator, “to be a pleasant, peaceful, and prosperous city, abounding in trees and rivers and birds, like a garden in Paradise.”

This invocation of the celestial and the heavenly is deliberate, since the narrator quotes from the Qurʾān in describing Paradise as abounding in “‘fruits of all kinds,’ like one of the gardens in Rudwan [i.e., gardens of the blessed].”¹⁸ The paradisiacal image is significant both because it offers us some evidence for a period in the history of Damascus when it was relatively peaceful, before or after the Crusades and the Mongol invasions, and because it operates in the context of a frame of reference in which a similar invocation was made in certain battles to defend Cordoba and other Andalusian cities described by the military leader as paradise.¹⁹ The predication of the paradisiacal and the heavenly on the earthly and the politically real also suggests the actual materialistic subtext that allows for the larger appeal of the Thousand and One Nights. In other words, this subtext is not in keeping with Islamic codes and ethics; nor is it in keeping with shariʾah law. The movement between the needs of urban life and the demands of law is broad enough to let the governor of Damascus decide in the same story that the chief merchant should pay the young merchant indemnity, since the chief merchant is behind the application of the law that has led to the severing of the young man’s hand. Islamic law is strict in these matters, and it should specify the terms of equivalent compensation. The beauty of Damascus is marred by these incidents, the growing separation between the mercantile class and the Islamic law, and the possibility of greater corruption, failure, and disruption. In other words, in comparison to this mixed Damascene tale, the Baghdad of bygone days is portrayed as peaceful and under careful police control, as in the cycle of the porter and the three ladies of Baghdad, and if it witnesses some un-evenness in behavior, this either takes place outside the domains of the Commander of the Faithful or for specific reasons, like the raid on the jeweler’s house in Shams al-Nahar’s tale.

The story of the Cairene Christian broker is worth noting in this respect, both for its attention to the Christian segment of the population and because of the urban identifications that make it a Cairene tale, with Cairo as a real city that has its beauties and troubles. The Cairene Christian broker “swore by the New Testament” that the young trader, the native of Baghdad, must be his guest.²⁰ Both the oath and the invitation lead us to the story of the young Baghdadi trader who hides his right hand. We understand that he was in love in Cairo and that he spent all his money on this love affair. While there are similar stories in the Nights, where people end up bankrupt after wasting their money on company and pleasure, there are only a few tales that cite love as the reason behind this bankruptcy. Love usually functions as a temptation that leads to further consequences. Although he is the son of a prominent Baghdadi businessman, the young trader finds himself in Cairo in desperate need of money. One day, “I left my lodging at the caravansary and walked along Bain-al-Qasrayn Street until I came to the Zuwayla Gate, where it was so crowded that the gate was blocked up with people.”²¹ Both crowdedness and need encourage the latent desire to acquire money. We know from al-Maqrīzī’s (d. 1442 C.E.) Khuṭaṭ that Cairo was a bustling and very crowded city in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Around the area mentioned in the tale, between Bāb al-Futūḥ and Bāb Zuwayla, there were forty-eight markets out of the eighty-seven total and there were forty-four caravanserais out of fifty-eight total in the city. The area was extremely crowded and busy with mercantile activity. The tale, however, depicts another difference between the Cairene tales and the Baghdadi ones. In the Baghdadi cycle, there is pleasant humor and knowledge to compensate for need and to lead to one’s financial improvement. In the Cairene tales, need may prompt theft and murder. Thus the young trader says:

Urban circumstances only increased the trader’s temptation to steal, a behavior that questions his early education, status, and prestige. Religion perhaps has not taken root in his person; more likely he is overruled by love and need. This fact sets the metropolis and the state apart from early periods, when religion, with its obligations and blessedness, including the obligation to resist temptation, was still fresh. Although the blame is partly put on Satan, the actual circumstance and the dire need to meet the demands of the ongoing love affair make this theft a deliberate act. The city itself becomes a site of temptation, not the celestial city or city of God.

This interpretation does not apply to another story in the same king of China cluster of tales. The steward tells us the story of “the young man from Baghdad and Lady Zubaida’s Maid.” Like the trader in the Cairene tale, this young man’s thumb is cut off, not for theft, but for audacity or carelessness of behavior, which overlooks the manners of the court and its entourage. His hand smells of ragout spiced with cumin on the night of his wedding to the maid. The narrator, the steward, is obviously a learned person who is in the habit of attending religious gatherings. “I was invited to hear a recitation of the Qurʾān, where the doctors of the law, as well as a great many citizens of your city [China], were assembled.”²³ As is the case in these autobiographical tales, the narrator-actor should inform the assembly of his lineage, circumstance, and station, both to justify his condition and to establish himself anew in a different community. He has already passed the rite of passage, and should now claim himself as one of the group after passing through the ordeal. The young man, whose thumb is cut off, tells us about his father, who “was one of the most prominent merchants of Baghdad, in the days of the caliph Harun al-Raschid, but who was fond of wine and the lute, so that when he died, he left me nothing.”²⁴ Both stories associate bankruptcy with either love and its demands or wine and music. In other words, both speak of worldly temptation, especially pleasure, as the most destructive element to one’s prosperity and life. If applied to the community and the state, these temptations may fit ibn Khaldūn’s explanation of the rise and fall of empires, the disintegration of solidarity, and the fragmentation of power.

What applied to the father in the steward’s tale may well apply to the young trader from Baghdad, who tells his story to the Egyptian Coptic broker. Both young men come from Baghdad, though one’s love affair takes place in Cairo and the misfortune of the other takes place in Baghdad. In other words, the metropolis is the place where temptation occurs and where fortune and misfortune come in consequence to one’s deeds. Here is the new place which ibn Khaldūn associates, on the one hand, with royalty and its systematic departure from any form of solidarity and consequential reliance on the state apparatus and, on the other hand, on new interdependent arrangements of immediate interest and expediency. If there is a mention of religious rituals, it is only rituals of habit, not faith. Notwithstanding the mention of the recitation of the Qurʾānic gathering in the steward’s tale, and the “mourning ceremony” where “recitations of the Quran” are performed upon the death of the young man’s father in the same tale,²⁵ these are only rituals with no actual hold on each person’s mind or behavior, as we see from their careers and acts. The difference between the tales with similar outcomes—the cutting off of thumbs and so on—relates more to an urban center in a specific period. The Baghdad of al-Rashid has, in the minds of storytellers, not only an atmosphere of refinement and affluence, which cannot condone theft for need, but also an organized police system. The barber in the tailor’s tale addresses the young Baghdadi youth as follows: “in Baghdad one cannot do anything of the kind [being alone with a woman], especially on a day like this in a city whose chief of the police is very powerful, severe, and sharp-tempered.”²⁶ We know that some other tales may disagree with this, but there remains this underlying assumption that holds the Baghdadi tales together.

Travel in the tales, whether by necessity or inclination, becomes another term for a good story. It is also a means toward knowledge and commerce. Yet in its interest in travelogue as narrative, the Thousand and One Nights makes use of a rich repository of Arabic geographical literature.²⁷ Indeed, although of a separate tradition, the “Voyages of Sindbad (Sindabād) the Sailor” repeat, in a focused narrative, the travel accounts of ʿAbbāsid travelers and geographers who roamed the world out of curiosity and in search of profit. Like any expanding empire, the Arab-Islamic Empire during the ʿAbbāsid period had geographers and travelers who also happened to be well-known literary figures. The accounts they give do not necessarily correspond with the impression we get from the tales and, on occasion, there are striking differences between the two. On the other hand, the Baghdad of the ninth century was not the same as Baghdad of the tenth century. In comparison with other Iraqi cities, there is a lot of information to substantiate what historians say about Baghdad in the ninth century. In the story of “Noureddin and the Beautiful Persian,” the captain of the boat that takes them along the Tigris from Basra says, upon approaching Baghdad: “Rejoice, my friends, there is the great and wonderful city, to which people from every part of the world are constantly flocking.” The writers of that period tell us the “last quarter of the eighth century and the first quarter of the ninth centuries A.D. were a period of happiness and prosperity for the people. Prices were generally low and wages fair.”²⁸

The glorious city of the ʿAbbāsids, which gained so much fame for its prosperity and security in the ninth century, was not so glorious in the days preceding its fall. The sailor Bozorg ibn Schahriar (d. 953 C.E.) described it in his book ʿAjāʾib al-Hind [The marvels of India] as the “abode of troubles” during the period 900–953 C.E.²⁹ He mentions in one account how the vizier Abū al-ḥasan ibn al-Furāt conspired during the ʿAbbāsid caliph al-Muqtadir’s (908–932 C.E.) reign to molest merchants, Muslims, Jews and Christians, and how the Omani merchants were so afraid that they desisted from going to the shores of Iraq.³⁰ The increasing anger toward the minister led to his trial and execution in July 924 C.E. This able financier and shrewd politician was a well-educated man and an experienced administrator in the organization of financial services. He was also a victim of circumstances during a time when fraud was rampant. His reign, as well as the reign of some Mamluk Sultans later in Egypt, has many echoes in the Thousand and One Nights. Stories that narrate vicissitudes of fate and occasions of misfortune occur mostly in Baghdad, Damascus, and Cairo. At times, other kingdoms are mentioned, which may be allusions to ancient historical happenings.

Depending on the location and identity of the scribes and storytellers, there is a different touch in each redaction or version of the Thousand and One Nights. Perhaps written down in the thirteen or fourteen century during the Mamluk period (1250–1512 C.E.), the story of the young man from Mosul in the “History of the Jewish Physician” celebrates Damascus as follows: Damascus “was in the midst of paradise.” He adds: “I found the city large and well-fortified, populous and inhabited by civilized people.” In the same story, however, Cairo is preferred to all other cities, including Baghdad, which began to suffer destruction and neglect in the eleventh century. The young man from Mosul says: “All that my other uncles could say in favor of Baghdad and the Tigris, when they vaunted Baghdad as the true abode of the Mussulman religion and the metropolis of all cities in the world, did not make half so much an impression on me.” His father says: “the man who has not seen Egypt has not seen the greatest wonder in the world.” The son concurs, asking, “Is not Cairo the largest, the richest, and the most populous city in the universe?” He quotes poets who celebrate the city and the Nile, concluding, “if the account of a great number of travelers might be believed there was not in the world a more beautiful country than Egypt on the banks of the Nile, which all agreed in praising.” The celebration of the Cairo of the Mamluk period, 1250–1512 C.E., is not accidental. Many tales were written during this period, and many writers and jurists migrated to Cairo, “the garden of the Universe, the orchard of the World,” as the Tunisian social historian and judge ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406 C.E.) says.³¹ The Egyptian jurist and chancery clerk al-Qalqashandī (d. 1418 C.E.) emphasizes this aspect of Cairo as the hospitable metropolis in his compendium Ṣubḥ al-aʿshā (Dawn of the Benighted Regarding Chancery Craft).³²

There are other professions that benefit from the marketplace, its attendants, functionaries, clients, and urban people. Some ḥisbah manuals tell us how many professions and crafts are in these markets. Ibn al-ʾUkhuwwah mentions flour merchants, bread bakers, sellers of roast meat, sausage makers, sellers of liver and appetizers, butchers, vendors of cooked heads, cooked-meat sellers, pickled-meat sellers, sellers of soup, fish fryers, makers of zulabiya, dessert makers, makers of syrups, druggists, sellers of savories, milk sellers, drapers, bazaar criers, weavers, tailors, repairers and fullers, silk weavers, dyers, cotton spinners, linen makers, moneychangers, goldsmiths, shoemakers, farriers, brokers of slaves, brokers of houses, brokers of animals, ḥammāms (public baths), sellers of sidr (lotus leaves), cuppers, phlebotomists, physicians, oculists, surgeons, preceptors, mosque attendants, muezzins, preachers, astrologers, public letter writers, sellers of earthenware and water pots, sellers of clay and molders, makers of sewing needles and pack needles, makers of spindles, comb makers, henna makers, pressers of olive and sesame oil, sieve makers, tanners and leather-bottle makers, makers of padded quilts, makers of fur coats, makers of reed matting, sellers of straw, timber merchants, carpenters, sawyers, builders, painters, whitewashers, lock makers, plasterers, and lime burners.³³ These professions and crafts come under the purview of the muḥtasib and they serve as indicators of urban productivity. In narrative terms, they serve action and characterization, for each has a story to tell in an interactive space, which is no longer limited to the court and its interests. In the Nights, the barber tells us how much he knows about this professional society: “None of my friends is worthy of it [your generosity],” the barber says to the young Baghdadi youth, “yet, they are all decent men, such as Zentut the bath keeper and Saliʾ the corn dealer and Sallut the bean seller and Akrasha the grocer and Saʿid the camel driver and Suwaid the porter and Ḥāmid the garbage man and Abu-Makarish the bath-attendant and Qusaim the watchman and Karim the groom.”³⁴ The most recurrent setting for these tales is the marketplace, since action unfolds there in transactions, dealings, or intrigues. In the story of the “Christian Merchant,” the man from Baghdad is now in Cairo, because in his early youth he “heard travelers and other people tell of the land of Egypt, and it stayed in . . . [his mind].” There he attends the Jerjes Market and is “met by brokers, who had already heard of my arrival.”³⁵ Transactions are carried out neatly, and the young merchant from Baghdad tells us as much, for he sells his goods on credit for a fixed period “on a contract drawn by a scribe and duly witnessed.” Then, every Monday and Thursday, the scribe and the moneychanger go around “to collect the money till past the afternoon prayer, when they would bring it” and he would count it and give them “a receipt for it and return to the caravansary.”³⁶ These transactions entail exactitude and neat handling according to Islamic rules, which were usually regulated in manuals and watched over by the muḥtasib (the moral and judicial inspector of commerce and markets) and his officials. Certainly there must have been a strong judicial system, and the judiciary was obviously able to enforce law and order. It was only when there were corrupt ministers that the system weakened. The presence of this strong judicial system, testified to by many treatises on the subject during that period and mentioned many times in the Thousand and One Nights, exemplifies the nature of the urban center and its complexity and troubles. Although the young merchant from Mosul does not tell us what the judge, the young woman’s father, looks like, he does tell us what is reiterated by the barber, that the judge comes back home with an entourage. There are guards and subordinates who accompany him to his house. The chief justice, as well as the high judges, dressed in a specific fashion, hinted at in the tales, which continued in other Islamic centers. During the Ayyubid and Mamluk times, the judge would wear a black robe with a black linen hood and a black turban. This reflects the earlier recorded ʿAbbāsid fashion. He also carried a sword.³⁷

The enormous attention paid to professions and crafts in The Thousand and One Nights should alert us to the fundamental change in social and economic relations. The shift from a rural or Bedouin society to an urban life of such complexity and diversity signifies and entails a radical shift in consciousness, which we trace in the tales. The religious or tribal solidarity that held the old societies together disappeared. It was replaced by a new, multifaceted urbanity, which is evident in the tales and ḥisbah manuals. These complain of many transgressions usually associated with urban life. This shift, which we trace in tales of ʿAbbāsid and Mamluk times, explains some of the popularity of the tales in eighteenth-century Europe. The tales appealed to middle-class audiences in the first place. The popularity of the Arabian Nights Entertainments (that is, The Thousand and One Nights) in Europe is closely related to a changing taste, a sense of nationalness that is usually tied to the rising middle classes, with their strong attachments to new terms of possession and ownership, a sense that is bound to grow into a nationalist disposition, with more emphasis on a state and citizenry.³⁸ As studied by Benedict Anderson, but with relevant modifications and qualifications, the pivotal structural patterns of the middle ages began to give way to a secular consciousness whose ethics and religions are more pragmatic and whose frame of reference is largely communal and national. The scriptural underlining, the monarchic or church sovereignty, as well as power relations that held an order under terms of obligation and servitude, were no longer tenable. The Thousand and One Nights encapsulates a historical journey that allows these processes to appear plausible enough through human or nonhuman means.

The three dervishes or mendicants who have undergone so many troubles and witnessed so many bewildering events settle one night in a house in Baghdad where they have heard music and merriment. The narrative journey of each is no less surprising than the tales of the three ladies in whose house they are guests. In the metropolis, where everybody expects law and order, these journeys, as narrated in one assembly at night, sound as if they were condensed in time and space to capture the past and relate it to the present. Out of a randomly governed universe appears order and law. Everyone has come from ruined kingdoms, deserted places, islands, or distant lands to a city that is well demarcated, whose police uphold law and order, and whose sovereign makes his nocturnal visits incognito to ensure safety and security. The sense of belonging that binds the community together is urban. Baghdad is repeatedly referred to as the Abode of Peace, an epithet bestowed upon it during its planning and construction. People who belong to the past but who are now in a present of greater complexity and national identifications, give us a sense of this journey in time and space. In the second mendicant’s tale, the young man introduces himself as the son of a sovereign:

The listing of his qualities is deliberate, for these make up the basic training and education for all those prepared to hold office in the future, especially people who are trained for the chancery or leadership.⁴⁰ The second mendicant’s tale, like many others, does not build the past out of the protagonist’s ruins only; he also juxtaposes it against a present. This present is still tied to the meaning of the sovereign as the commander of all, the arbiter in a centripetal and hierarchal order. The second mendicant adds: “Then I journeyed through many regions and visited many countries, with the intention of reaching Baghdad and the hope of finding someone there who would help me to the presence of the Commander of the Faithful, so that I might tell him my tale and acquaint him with my misfortune.”⁴¹ The past should be given meaning through a rehearsal that involves the protagonist’s own interpretation but also invites the intervention of the sovereign, who can make sense of this past, giving it coherence and meaning. History is construed through this meeting and assembly. The act of narrative evolves as a rewriting of history, an initiation into a new order. As a stranger, the second mendicant’s coming to the metropolis suggests a faith in its power, dominion, and supremacy. The protagonist’s journey is another pilgrimage, an initiation into a sensible world after a bewildering chaos. The sovereign still holds the power and supremacy, but he is close to the community, available to strangers, and ready to offer help and guidance. This is the mark of good Islamic rule that ensures success, argues ibn Khaldūn.⁴² Baghdad itself holds such a meaning in its role as the metropolitan center, the abode of security and peace, longed for by all strangers and travelers. As for the title that the caliph holds, the Commander of the Faithful, its sovereignty is larger than the metropolis. The title has religious connotations and power in a community of believers, or Muslims, although there are other smaller communities within which they enjoy their rights and show their obligations, too.

Like the tales of the other mendicants or dervishes, the second mendicant’s tale is one of regression until he reaches the metropolis. The opposite poles of the journey, regression in the first roaming activity and progression in the kingdom of Islam, work in relational terms whereby personal and cultural circumstances apply. Whatever happens in the past indicates the limitations of the human in a world that is a testing ground more than anything else. Time and place are subordinate to an overall design that challenges human curiosity. It is only after the fall from grace, a descent into the abyss, that a culminating resignation takes place. The fall should be represented in reality, so the three “shaved off . . . [their] beard and eyebrows,” and put on “a black woolen robe.”⁴³ This resignation means also a new readiness to forsake a past and accept a present. It is liminal, for it functions as the reason behind the curiosity of the ladies who ask about their shaved beard, blind eye, and woolen robe. Thus the question triggers the narrative, the journeying into the past that will invoke a guided rehabilitation, presently supervised by the Commander of the Faithful. It is only in the metropolis that a new line of progression takes place, giving sense to historical time as a time of one’s own making, but with the support of authority as the deliverer of law. This initiation is not linear, for they have to pass through private indoctrination in the arts of the city. Such indoctrination takes place in the house of the three ladies of Baghdad, where the mendicants tell their stories and where they witness scenes and hear tales no less bewildering than theirs, but which do not prevent the ladies from carrying on their normal life as urban citizens. Narrative is released from its mystique, shorn of its fantastic dimensions, and relocated in a present of stark reality, where the porter and the three ladies use every kind of language and where the porter uses the vernacular to approach mundane reality. Nudity in the bath scene symbolizes the act of stripping language of its polite mannerisms in the discourse of the porter and the interventions of the ladies. These prepare all for life in the metropolis. On the other hand, the bath scene is no less purifying than the purgatory of the journey. Storytelling at this stage makes no claim to omniscience. The narrator Scheherazade is reluctant to compromise her situation, so she only repeats what she hears. Thus she says:

I heard that the doorkeeper went into the pool, threw water on herself, and, after immersing herself completely, began to sport, taking water in her mouth and squirting it all over her sisters and the porter. Then she washed herself under her breasts, between her thighs, and inside her navel. Then she rushed out of the pool, sat naked in the porter’s lap and, pointing to her slit, asked, “My lord and my love, what is this?” “Your womb,” said he, and she replied, “Pooh, pooh, you have no shame,” and slapped him on the neck.

“Your vulva,” said he, and the other sister pinched him, shouting, “Bah, this is an ugly word.” “Your cunt,” said he, and the third sister boxed him on the chest and knocked him over, saying, “Fie, have some shame.” “Your clitoris,” said he, and again the naked girl slapped him, saying, “No.” “Your pudenda, your pussy, your sex tool,” said he, and she kept replying, “No, no.”

The storyteller, in the name of Scheherazade, finds this enjoyable enough to elaborate on the tendency in Arabic linguistics at that time to compile dictionaries on words, roots, and varieties, which were to become, in a later period, a significant part of Arab scholarship.

The scene is one of frivolity, to be sure, and storytellers showed no squeamishness in reporting it. Its humor gives it the liberatory sense of speaking in plain terms of things that are tabooed in so-called polite society, whether Arab-Islamic or Western. The scene suffered meticulous editing, expurgation, and bowdlerization in England, for example. No less so did nineteenth-century Arabic versions. The liberty taken with the description of the sexual organs should be considered in terms of ninth-century license, as the earlier reference to Abū Muḥammad ibn Qutaybah’s (d. 889 C.E.) comments indicates.

Apart from the language in the bath scene, however, there is the liberality taken in the depiction of accompanying practices, including the porter’s rubbing of their bodies and his recitation of verses lauding their nudity and beauty. The scene may be read in terms of psychological and sociological interests, in the recesses of the soul, with its tropes of unreachable and secret realms, the encircled houses, and gardens. It can be an instance of imaginary intrusion into the privacy of the upper classes through the person of the porter, the common man who has his own private thoughts and whims whenever he is asked to carry his basket and hurry behind women shoppers. The social barrier stands as an impasse that needs to be imaginatively surpassed. The only way to do it is through an appeal to the only qualification that receives due recognition in medieval Arab society during its glorious cultural expansion—eloquence and poetic talent. After rubbing the lady’s body, he recites poetry in appreciation of her figure, a gesture that makes her more inclined toward him. In the first section, the rubbing takes place with no further suggestions of erotic interest on her part:

But as soon as he begins reciting poetry, there is a transformation, a change that replaces class barriers with physical intimacy and affection. Although the scene is handled playfully, we should remember that storytellers cater to their public audience and its interest in fun and good times:

When the girl heard his verses, she came quickly out of the pool, sat in his lap and, pointing to her slit, asked “O light of my eyes, O sweetheart, what is the name of this?” “The basil of the bridges,” said he, but she replied, “Bah!” “The husked sesame,” said he, and she replied, “Pooh!” “Your womb,” said he, and she replied, “Fie, you have no shame,” and slapped him on the neck. To make a long story short, O King, the porter kept declaring, “Its name is so,” and she kept saying “No, no, no, no.” When he had had his fill of blows, pinches, and bites until his neck swelled and he choked and felt miserable, he cried out, “All right, what is its name?” She replied, “Why don’t you say the Inn of Abu Masrur?” “Ha, ha, the Inn of Abu Masrur,” said the porter. Then she got up, and after she put on her clothes, they resumed their drinking and passed the cup around for a while.

It is only after the undermining of social restrictions and barriers that the porter can acquire a voice of his own to practice the same frivolity and ask the ladies to participate in his game, which is no more than a male duplication of theirs:

The narrator brings the two moods together, in tune with the underlying assumption in the tales that ẓarf and knowledge are the best equalizers. The ladies find the porter no less prone to humor and jest than they are, and he is no less equipped in deriving fun from the most causal situations.

The porter proves to be no less witty than the Baghdadi girls, for he is no longer in the underprivileged position of being ridiculed in jest:

Since night is the time for storytelling, not physical contact and sexual intercourse, the bath scene must come to an end. The ladies’ moods change from frivolity to seriousness. “When it was dark, they said to the porter, ‘Sir, it is time that you get up, put on your slippers, and show us your back.’ The porter replied, ‘Where do I go from here? The departure of my soul from my body is easier for me than my departure from your company. Let us join the night with the day and let each of us go his way early tomorrow morning.’” This interruption should not be taken lightly. It is a threat to abide by one’s status and social station, as the interior inscription has already forewarned. Furthermore, it builds on the understanding that there is private and public life and social order. Just as the ladies govern their own life and have their slaves and their practices, the outside world also has its own rules. The porter belongs to this outside world, with its mercantile class, its professionals, craftsmen, administrators, police, and common people. This should be a busy and, perhaps, troublesome life, which lacks the pleasure of the company that he presently enjoys. There, among the common public he can be identified, but inside the Baghdadi house and in the company of the ladies, there is unequalled mirth and joy. Whenever affluence, prosperity, and privilege overwhelm the whole society, solidarities, empires, or clan-ruled communities disintegrate, as the historian and sociologue ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406 C.E.) writes in his Muqaddimah.

When she lifted her veil, she revealed a pair of beautiful dark eyes graced with long lashes and a tender expression, like those celebrated by the poets. Then with a soft voice and a sweet tone, she said to him, “Porter, take your basket and follow me.” Hardly believing his ears, the porter took his basket and hurried behind her, saying, “O lucky day, O happy day.” She walked before him until she stopped at the door of a house, and when she knocked, an old Christian came down, received a dinar from her and handed her an olive green jug of wine. She placed the jug in the basket and said, “Porter, take your basket and follow me.” Saying, “Very well, O auspicious day, O lucky day, O happy day,” the porter lifted the basket and followed her until she stopped at the fruit vendor’s, where she bought yellow and red apples, Hebron peaches and Turkish quinces, and seacoast lemons and royal oranges, as well as baby cucumbers.

The seemingly cursory enumeration attests to a fact about the Baghdadi markets in the ʿAbbāsid period, which were rich with everything and which the storyteller can only recollect with nostalgia: “She also bought Aleppo jasmine and Damascus lilies, myrtle berries and mignonettes, daisies and gillyflowers, lilies of the valley and irises, narcissus and daffodils, violets and anemones, as well as pomegranate blossoms. She placed everything in the porter’s basket and asked him to follow her.”

The enumeration is significant both for any discussion of urban affluence and metropolitan prosperity and for any study of the narrative. It narrates this imperial diversity in terms of merchandise and goods, not people. Fruits and flowers are the signs of this expansive order. As indicative of lucrative business and commerce, this enumeration also sheds light on a pleasant life that takes such variety for granted as part of its daily needs. Every particle of material that enters the house is there to attest to this integrated order, of which Baghdad is the center. Each narrative then takes this center as its nucleus, around which orbit planets that are not necessarily as safe, if they do not belong to this orderly universe. The mendicants’ journeys before reaching Baghdad indicate as much. They assume meaning and order only when placed within the organized and integrated universe supervised by the Commander of the Faithful, who is now joining the ladies in their Baghdadi house incognito, like the omniscient God, to offer them a present and a future that distances the past as an unwelcome memory, a nightmare to be put aside and forgotten.

But the present is not always as clean and peaceful as one might wish. It is demanding in terms of education, manners, and orderly behavior. The past may intrude as an unpleasant memory if the individual has no control over what to choose or discard from its store of recollections. The shopping scene, which is usually repeated in every edition of the Thousand and One Nights, is important both because it includes acts of transgression, like the buying of wine by a lady in a public place, and for its stories of the mendicants and the ladies, which testify to an educated society where everybody knows not only how to read and write but also knows the sciences and the arts. There is a shared or common register that makes dialogue possible. The porter is as well educated as the barber, but he is acceptable as a person because of his joviality and courtesy. The loquacious barber is nosy and his curiosity knows no limits, as it takes him far from the Abode of Peace, to areas and cities that the Baghdadis resort to in their desperate search for a land that can compensate for their loss. The porter’s place is Baghdad, and his livelihood depends on its lucrative business. His presence at the ladies’ house proves how true he is to his word. He is as refined and educated as he claims. On the other hand, his knowledge partakes of the general educational system of the society, its prerequisites of good conduct and fine manners. Thus he shows no surprise at what he sees, nor does he question their drinking of wine. In his survey of ʿAbbāsid life, Ahsan thinks that there were “some special drinks taken after the meal, but no alcoholic drink was included. These drinks were known simply as nabidh.”⁴⁵ The difference between nabidh (wine) and khamr (liquor) is one of degrees between distillation and fermentation. The tales themselves elaborate on drinking wine in general terms that may confuse the reader. The common mind was not meticulously concerned with these classifications. The hunch-back in night 102 was drunk, “reeking of wine,” and singing in the streets of how to “honor a friend with a cup of wine from Greece.”⁴⁶ In the story of the young merchant from Mosul, he also relates his story in Damascus, where he meets the young girl, buys wine for the occasion, and both “drank until they were drunk.”⁴⁷ The young Baghdadi merchant describes how he settles in Cairo: “I lived there, breakfasting every morning on a cup of wine, mutton, pigeons, and sweets.”⁴⁸

In the story of Anīs al-Jalīs, then, “wine” is liquor. This narrative should not pass without some further comment. It deliberately appropriates prohibitions, as was the case with some schools of fiqh in Baghdad that were more accommodating of urban desires. Numerous tales were mentioned and written down about jurists, judges, grammarians, and poets who participated in gatherings of wine and festivity. Some assemblies turned out to be hilarious orgies. Shaykh Ibrahīm is supposed not to join them or taste the wine, but upon being entreated by Anīs al-Jalīs, and thinking that Nūr al-Dīn is actually asleep, “the old man began to weaken,”⁵⁰ and taking a cup of wine, “drank it off, and she filled a second cup and he drank it off, too.” She tells him that if drinking is reprehensible, “it is all the same whether it is one or one hundred.”⁵¹ This tendency to circumvent the scriptural or the accepted jurisdiction in the matter is not confined to the speaker. He exemplifies a state of mind, and also the tendency of the rulers, to adopt an appropriating process that allows luxury to become a way of life, a way that differs from the life story of the Prophet and his companions.

The details demonstrate awareness on the storyteller’s part of the prohibitions against wine as probably leading to intoxication. In the Qurʿāan, it is an evil dear to Satan and should be avoided. Especially in public places it is forbidden and comes under the jurisdiction of the muḥtasib. In the following anecdote, wine drinking is reprimanded, censured, and certainly punishable by law. Al-Ghazālī relates the following anecdote: Abū Ḥusyan al-Nūrī the muḥtasib in the reign of the caliph al-Muʿtaḍid “went down to a drinking place near the river, known as the drinking place of the coal merchants. . . . There he saw a boat loaded with thirty containers on which were written in tar ‘benevolence.’ He read and disapproved of it . . . breaking all except one,” which he left as the caliph’s own share, which would be the muḥtasib’s message to him.⁵² Abū Ḥusyan al-Nūrī, whom al-Ghazālī quotes, told the caliph why he dared to break the jugs even though he knew they belonged to the caliph: “the corruption of citizens is due to the corruption of rulers, the corruption of rulers is due to the corruption of the scholars, and the corruption of the scholars is due to love of wealth and fame.”⁵³

Wine operates as a carnivalesque stimulus, though it derives its new power from society itself, its aggregation and togetherness. In these gatherings, wine, or more exactly nabidh, is usually served, especially after meals. Those who were not disposed to wine would take other drinks, such as sherbet and fruit juice, usually mixed with rose water or musk and always cooled with ice. In the story of the porter and the ladies of Baghdad, drinking wine is so smoothly practiced that no one in the company shows surprise. Yet the issue of wine drinking is not so smooth among jurists and Muslim traditionalists. Indeed, conservative jurists think of it as forbidden by the religious law, or sharīʿah. Not so the more liberal ones. In an anecdote reported by al-Jaḥiẓ,⁵⁷ the jurist Bishr al-Marīsī thinks drinking date liquor is “absolutely licit.” This idea was stressed in the presence of the ʿAbbāsid caliph al-Maʾmūn (d. 833 C.E.), against the opinion of the jurist Muhammad b. ʿAbbās al-Ṭūsī. The discussion concentrated on a drink made from boiling dates or dried raisins in water. This is nabīdh, or wine. According to the Iraqi school of law, Abū Ḥanīfah’s school, these ingredients have no bacilli, as in fresh grapes, that may cause strong fermentation. As such, it is only mildly alcoholic. Abū Ḥanīfah’s advice is to drink in moderation to avoid intoxication. It is no wonder, then, that all of the tales of an Iraqi origin treat wine in a very free manner.

On the urban level, wine drinking is narrated as part of the rituals of a happy society in a stable and prosperous civilization. In such a civilization, all the sections of society know one another and maintain a relational attitude that endows the social fabric with solidarity, although it is one of interdependency rather than blood relations. In the tailor’s story, the barber relays to the lame young man from Baghdad the names of his acquaintances, such as “Zentut the bath keeper, Saliʾ the corn dealer and Sallut the bean seller and Akrasha the grocer and Saʿid the camel driver and Suwaid the porter and Hāmid the garbageman and Abu-Makarish the bath attendant and Qusaim the watchman and Karim the groom.”⁵⁹ There are also anonymous people who are actively involved in daily and domestic transactions. Thus another section in the story of the porter and the ladies of Baghdad says: “Then she stopped at the butcher’s and said, ‘Cut me off ten pounds of fresh mutton.’ She paid him, and he cut off the pieces she desired, wrapped them, and handed them to her. She placed them in the basket, together with some charcoal, and said, ‘Porter, take your basket and follow me.’”

The regions from which these sweets and delicacies come should be noted. All of them are Muslim regions that demonstrate liveliness and vitality, as indicated in the food. Nothing here shows lavish luxury and ornamentation. The underlying implication seems to suggest that as long as the city and its surrounding provinces are Muslim, there is no fear of calamity, such as the one that befalls the petrified city, which the eldest lady, the shopper, has seen and reported. Although not necessarily sustained throughout the tales, this association between Islam and stability and prosperity becomes the broad context of demarcation.

The responsibility for any mishap that takes place in cities falls on the shoulders of humans, both because of their curiosity and proneness to exercise unlimited freedom and because they are idolaters. Idolatry, or the worship of something other than God, means also a breakup of social and communal ties. It is only in Islam and, partially, in other monotheistic religions that social and communal life assumes meaningfulness, as the Sindbad voyages imply. As idolaters are not forgiven in the Qurʾān, so also is the situation in the tales. Thus, in the petrified city (nights 34 and 35 in “The Tale of the First Lady”) we are told that the first lady hears the voice of somebody reciting the Qurʾān. The young man, with “a face as beautiful as the full moon,” on whom “God has bestowed the robe of beauty, which was embroidered with the grace of perfect cheeks,”⁶² tells her how the city has become petrified. As usual with the tales, male beauty receives more attention than female beauty and should be read in the context of the Baghdadi period and also in a Qurʾānic frame of reference where the wuldanun mukhalladūn (the boys of eternal youth) are mentioned as part of paradise. The lady feels the pangs of love that the youth reciprocates after a period of isolation and loneliness, which only Qurʾānic blessings redress. These pangs involve no contradiction with the scene of piety in the Nights, however. Both work together and in harmony as long as these feelings are pure and are bound to lead to marriage. The youth’s story is part of the paraphernalia that places the tales in an Islamic context. He relates:

Repeating the Qurʾānic warnings to worshippers of idols, the youth explains:

To recapitulate, the tale of the three ladies, especially the aforementioned tale of the first lady, the porter, and the bath scene, holds some significance both for its narrative of social responsibility and for its encapsulation of the terrain of nationhood and empire. The mendicants tell us how their fall from grace corresponds to the fall of their kingdoms, the loss of their power, and the end of their hopes and expectations. Thus their move toward the gravitating center of the empire, which can fit them anew into a social order whose faith is Islam and whose identity is Arab-Islamic. To undergo the correct rehabilitation into a new social order, they must pass through a baptism of some sort, one that leads to marriage with the ladies, which is arranged by the caliph himself, as the one in charge of the social order. This system is not divested from the divine even when its daily practices veer away from Islamic decrees and ordinances, as stressed by its nongovernmental jurists. In this center, people retain their wholeness and the mendicants lead a normal family life. The ladies themselves retain some lost humanity. Their sisters, the ones previously transformed into dogs, are restored to their human forms and brought back to lead a life that fits them into a new familial culture free from treachery and jealousy. In the absence of educators who are adept in magic, matters need the Commander of the Faithful to recall all to his presence, where order is established as in the city itself. The ruler and the perfect order are in harmony: a status Shahrayar has to reach through the narrative journey of the thousand and one tales. Yet there are many social and moral issues that accompany political and imperial growth, and they betray a departure from the presumed solidarity of the specific dynasty of the Commander of the Faithful, Hārūn al-Rashid.

Every expansion means a loosening of ties, which can be temporarily reassembled in times of impending danger or war. Every departure from this tightly supervised order implies some weakness and breakup. The move from empire to city-states finds no better narrative construction than in the tales of the hunchback and the barber and his brothers. While a city-state or even a nation-state is not as clearly defined as in nineteenth-century Europe, there are a number of characteristics that may well demonstrate potential narrative constructions worth mentioning. There is, first, a social fabric of professionals, physicians, porters, jesters, stewards, police, swindlers, thieves, and jurists. There is no longer one religious order, but rather a number of people from different religious affiliations, although Islam is the dominating faith. On the other hand, the presence of the Qurʾān as the text of reference in religious and legal matters does not preclude other transactions, dealings, and transgressions. In any case, Arabic is the common language presumed and accepted in the tales, for in every story, from China to Africa and the lands of the Franks or Europe, Arabic is the language of communication and transaction.⁶⁴

The use of Arabic, as presumed in the tales, mostly refers to the earlier periods of the empire. China was still mentioned as if it were part of the Islamic domains. In the tailor’s cluster of tales, all participants are residents of the Muslim empire, including the Jewish physician and the Christian broker. We know that at a later period, in ibn Baṭṭūṭa’s (b. Tangiers, February 1304 C.E., d. Morocco 1368–1369 or 1377) travels between 1342 and 1347 C.E., only parts of China had Muslim communities. In the rest of China, protection was provided to Muslim travelers and merchants, of whom their governments took special care. The care must have been reciprocal, since ibn Baṭṭūṭa mentioned how they let him know how important it was for them to leave a good impression among Muslim travelers. Although the empire had disintegrated long ago, the premise of a unified kingdom of faith was still effective. Some respect was shown toward its citizens when they traveled outside the Islamic dominion, a respect that enabled ibn Baṭṭūṭa to speak of Islam as the most blessed and respectable faith in comparison to the one dominating among the population in China, whom he describes as kuffār, infidels.

The application of religious decrees in empires or nation-states depends strongly on power relations, since each caliph may well impose a view or a perspective on the rest. Nevertheless, the rest, or some of them at least, may develop a counterdiscourse over time that can lead to the desegregation of the upheld order. Whatever the case may be, the issue of religion or its absence informs narrative and colors its outcome. In this context, the clear-cut demarcation between idolatry and monotheism is worth noting not only on the level of narrative construction, whereby roles and outcome are defined accordingly, but also on judicial and social levels, as the tale of the hunchback and its clusters suggest. Idolatry is excluded from the domain of communication or appreciation and is silenced narratively by being associated with petrified cities, burnt-out forms, or smitten couples, whereas the case of monotheism is treated differently. Whenever there is a possibility of extra liberty in religious or moral matters, this is displaced into the foreign reaches of the universe, like China. The storyteller needs freedom and more humorous encounters, which the imperial center falls short of providing. In the story of the hunchback, for instance, the story begins this way: “It is related, O King, that there lived once in China a tailor who had a pretty, compatible, and loyal wife.”⁶⁵

Apparently the tailor and his wife are Muslims and are afraid that the hunchback, who has been eating fish with them, has died. Their exclamations of fear are Islamic, but they can be used by all monotheists, too. “There is no power and no strength, save in God, the Almighty, the Magnificent.”⁶⁶ They find it easier to leave the hunchback on the stairs of the Jewish physician, whose exclamations also reveal his identity: “O Esdras, O Moses, O Aaron, O Joshua son of Nun!”⁶⁷ The physician and his wife decide to throw the body into the house of their neighbor, “the Muslim bachelor,” who in turn leaves the body at the entrance to the market. There, a “prominent Christian tradesman” who is drunk falls on the body. The watchman comes and “when the watchman . . . saw a Christian kneeling on a Muslim and beating him,” he exclaims: “By God, this is a fine thing, a Christian killing a Muslim!”⁶⁸ While the Muslim tailor, the Jewish physician, and the Muslim steward each try to escape punishment at first by disavowing responsibility and throwing it on the shoulders of another, each also hurries to the execution square to proclaim his guilt and ease his conscience. The Jewish physician, as the steward before him and the tailor soon after, comes forward, saying: “Is it not enough for me to have involuntarily and unwillingly killed one Muslim, without burdening my conscience with the death of another Muslim?”⁶⁹ The tailor asks also to have the Jew released, and all gather in the presence of the king of China to explain the situation, which amounts to no more than a choking case that looks like death. The significance of the tale lies, however, in its religious diversity. On the other hand, the communal tie proves stronger than any other tie, since moral responsibility, more than the fear for one’s own life or sectarian affiliation, weighs on each person’s conscience. It takes form through moral obligations that sustain a social order. In other words, the state as a community of citizens takes form in the tale, whereas neat religious affiliations become second in importance in a larger context of Islamic communal culture that allows all faiths to coexist, albeit with some distinctions that linger in the official discourse.

However, Islamic ritual operates strongly in specific periods of affluence and peace. Even when the narrative is more concerned with agency, space, and disposition, the religious element has some function. It operates as both a form of ritual and as the application of an imperial imperative that empowers human agency and makes sense of the endeavor outside the immediate center of the Islamic nation. The alternative space that works outside the center of authority may be the only one that frees the human from any ties while enabling that individual to consider himself or herself as capable of dealing with emerging and challenging situations. The outer space, like ruins, for instance, is the one that enables both ʿAlāʾ al-DĪn (Aladdin) and Maʿrūf the Shoemaker to meet other powerful agents who inhabit these unclaimed habitations, which are free from authority, including the authority of Islam, whether as the binding culture or as the religion of the state. Ruins offer Maʿrūf the chance to meet the ifrit, the super-natural beings, whose settlement there is disturbed by the presence of a human who calls for divine support.

The invocation of the supernatural signals a pact with a world that would replace the human world, which has already deserted him, leaving him in deprivation and misery. Both the physical nature of the ruins and the destitution of the forlorn and desperate complement each other. The mind in despair may end up in any situation, including living in an empty space, ruins, or wilderness, which allegorizes a release from subordination and a practice of one’s own inventiveness. Technically, invocations of divine intervention may occur as part of the whole Islamic subtext, but their recurrence is so patterned in terms of human need that they fit into a universal interest that broadens the Islamic context while also appealing to other nations and cultures, especially among the underprivileged and the downtrodden. Although travel accounts since the ninth century speak of lands as far away as China, traversing such distant lands becomes narratively manageable through other means, which partake of the fantastic. This was analyzed by Todorov and applied to the mendicants’ tales, an analysis that is not alien to early Islamic geographers such as Zakariyyā b. Muḥammad al-Qazwīnī (d. 656/1258), who set no less specific terms for the strange, the uncanny, and the wonderful.⁷⁰

If the Baghdadi narratives tend to be conciliatory and less disposed to ruse than the Cairene or Damascene ones, this is the case because of the storytellers’ attachment to the golden age of the caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd and the ʿAbbāsid caliphate. The compelling fame of the age was perhaps so fresh in the storytellers’ minds that it dislodged any negative image or impression. This attitude is also applicable to the European romantics who continued, as late as the first half of the twentieth century during the time of William Butler Yeats and Walter De La Mare, to celebrate that golden age. The Cairene tale has no such limitations, and hence urbanity has full play. The implications of urbanity are many and may well lead us to urban dealings, underground life, and also upper-class communities. Especially when these tales refer to pretensions to piety, there must be, thereafter, a ruse of some sort that uncovers hypocrisy while critiquing the use and misuse of power. The case is more so if the characters concerned are old women. Historical accounts tell us that they were used during the ʿAbbāsid period to penetrate the households of high-class families, learn their secrets, and relate their information to the state. The Fatimids also made use of old women for the same purpose. Pretensions to piety were the best means to reach these societies, as nobody would suspect a pious woman of probing private life for another purpose.⁷¹ While we might expect that the role of old women would not be that large, given the sophisticated intelligence system available during both periods, the Thousand and One Nights finds in old women the right stock character for multiple roles.

Whenever a pious old woman is mentioned, some disequilibrium soon follows. In night 599, for example, an old woman inserts the mask below the pillow in the house of Abū al-Fatḥ, who soon begins to suspect his daughter of some misbehavior.⁷² She may even incite people to believe that she is in command of both faith and magic. In order to bring people together, she resorts to ruse, for, to convince the young woman in night 584 that there is some danger in resisting marriage, she begins to frequent the young woman in the company of a dog, to whom she feeds some spicy food that makes the dog’s eyes water, as if it were crying. When the young woman asks for an explanation, the old woman’s says that the dog is an enchanted female who had been in the habit of rejecting suitors. One of them had some friends who are magicians, whom he requested to enchant the young stubborn woman. The girl decides to change her position, accept the suitor, and settle for the arrangement in which the old woman is interested.⁷³ The role can be more dangerous, such as in the story of ʿAzīz and ʿAzīzah and similar tales of entertainment and crime. The old woman is the one who lures ʿAzīz inside the house by asking him to read her a letter she pretends she has received. As readers of these tales, we may come away with the impression that hypocrisy as such is a way of life in a society that thrives on communication, meeting, and exchange among the younger generations, which composes the majority of the urban center. The old woman makes her living through double dealing whenever there is little space for her to practice her normal livelihood. With her piety and image as a wise person, she has a role to play—or at least it is the role that the storyteller assigns to her as an active agent, a participant in the social order and its productivity and mirth.

Piety is suspect in the tales, an attitude that persists in narrative until the first half of the twentieth century. Whenever there is this association with double dealing, storytellers are actively engaged in undermining an order, which they intentionally depict as corrupt. Theological rhetoric is manipulated for other purposes, too. The male’s relation to the female in many stories is “the doorman to her gate” or the “imam to her mihrab.” The transference of religious discourse to the sexual domain deprives it of its sanctity, as, in the story of ʿAlī Shār and Zumurrud, “the female is with him in a state of bowing and prostrating, standing upright and sitting, but in a playful pace with the glorifications of God.”⁷⁴ The movements and recitations involved in prayer are predicated into sexual intercourse. As popular narrative, the tales draw on every available register, not only out of playfulness but also because these registers happened to be popular enough to incite storytellers to mock them. Operating like the carnival, the emerging narrative is one of mockery that can pass, nevertheless, as street humor, unintentional and innocent. In the story of ʿAlī Shār, the queen Budūr puts on the mask of a king, telling Qamar al-Zaman that he should take off his underwear and sleep on his belly. Thinking that the king wants to make love to him, he argues: “But this is something which I have never done, and if you force me into it, I will ask God’s support against you in the day of Judgment.”⁷⁵

This mixed discourse of the pious and the humorous is in keeping with a large body of literature in the belletristic tradition since the ninth century. It rarely contests, however, practices and habits of thought taken seriously by the society at large, like using the right hand in greeting, shaking hands, eating, or receiving a cup of coffee. In more than one instance, good manners operate as both Islamic and Arab. Especially in Baghdadi tales, there is consistent mention of physical infirmity or disability that deprives a person of normal practices but that may be unwittingly taken at the outset as lack of refinement. In the “Jewish Physician’s Tale,” the young man from Mosul surprises the physician by putting forth his left hand. The physician says to himself, “By God, it is strange that such a handsome young man of such a high family should lack good manners.” The physician soon notices that “his right hand had been recently cut off.”⁷⁶ The surprise leads to a tale, however: whenever there is some discrepancy between expectation and reality, there is a good chance that an interesting urban narrative will begin. Discrepancy does not necessarily build on disappointment or failure, for there is often a prevailing urban interest in the good and joyful life, which demands some excitement to keep up its pace of anxiety and challenge.

In nights 279 through 282, there is more emphasis on the dramatic element and the implications of beauty, wealth, and grandeur. The common ground shared by historical accounts and the Nights as narrative defines the existence of two societies, one of the court and power and the other related to mercantile classes. Outside of both is the common public.

The society of the court and its entourage does not expect the mercantile class to know a great deal in matters of refinement, especially in ẓarf or taẓarruf (the practice and knowledge of delicate arts and fine, elegant manners). Būrān asks Isḥāq al-Mawṣilī, the renowned musician who is in disguise, if he is aware of the basics of conversation and communication and if he is aware of the art of ẓarf, including its prerequisites of arts, literature, and rhetoric. After a series of tests in music, poetry, and argumentation, Isḥāq al-Mawṣilī is revealed to be a distinguished ẓarīf, much more so than the ordinary dilettante to whom the term in Arabic may neatly apply.⁷⁸ More relevant to the issue of religion and urban manners is Būrān’s expectation that he would keep the secret of this meeting. He is entrusted with their company after he is tested as a good and trustworthy ẓarīf, a pleasant companion who is not from among the rabble or even the unworthy of trust from among the elite. He is, rather, a member of the chosen class, or al-khāṣṣah. The question that may come to the reader’s mind is: is it permissible for women to communicate, using the hanging basket, with people whom they do not know? First, we should remember that in the tale, as in the historical account, the dangling basket is a communication or transportation means for refined men to reach the otherwise unreachable. Those who are unworthy are sent back to the street. Ordinary people do not take the risk; those who accept it know that they have the potential to cross into the refined society of aristocratic women.

Their salons, as private spaces, do not transgress religious or social codes and ethics, as we understand from the historical account that relates the old nurse’s description of these meetings. On the other hand, these meetings attest to a cultural milieu that is highly refined and beyond the restrictions of conservative societies. There are no barriers that prohibit meetings or discriminate against women. What is applicably present, however, is the emphasis on knowledge and good manners. This is certainly different from meetings that occur between slave girls who are associated with the court and the palace but who have love relationships outside of this space. The renowned slave girl ʿArīb, who received her training and education in Basra until she became an expert and a poet in her own right, was in love with the poet Muḥammad ibn Ḥāmid. One stormy winter night, she used the basket and the rope to leave the palace unnoticed. When she returned, she was met by Ḥamdūn the singer, who asked where she had been. She answered:

It is quite possible that the tale in night 279 applies to ʿArīb, who was the caliph al-Maʾmūn’s slave girl, but was wrongly applied to Būrān. Isḥāq al-Mawṣilī’s tale says that ʿArīb used to love ibn Ḥāmid, and when she noticed that the caliph was enthralled by other slave girls, she left a marble statue in her bed and descended from the palace in a basket to meet ibn Ḥāmid. When ibn Ḥāmid “had his satisfaction she sat in the basket again and was returned to her place. But the Caliph had already inquired about her and knew where she was.”⁸⁰

The tales make use of ʿAbbāsid historical accounts and anecdotes, especially to construe effective love stories. These love stories take some liberty for the sake of passion. As argued earlier, while the theorists of love in that period tried to establish a religious foundation for good and passionate love through antecedent authority or some alleged sayings by the Prophet, others who wrote in later periods did not shy away from gay and lesbian relations. Indeed, many, including al-Suyūṭī (d. 911/1505) and al-Nafzāwī (eighth/fourteenth century), go as far as establishing sexual practice as a normal human behavior sanctioned by divine and human authority.⁸¹ In historical accounts, there is always a humorous or ironic twist in these narratives. The writer has to enjoy the occasion, too, but he also must weigh things in relative terms. A girl desperately in love and filled with a strong sexual urge, as in one of the tales, cannot be persuaded to offer the narrator, who is standing at the door, some water for the sake of securing a heavenly reward. Thus in the tale recorded by al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 255/868/9), the historical figure describes how he once saw a beautiful woman with languid and sad looks standing at the door. “I said to her: My lady, I am a strange old man, and I am thirsty, can you ask somebody to get me a sip of water? God will reward you. She replied: Old man, I am too busy for this job and for securing a reward.”⁸² The same story occurs with few modifications in the Thousand and One Nights.⁸³

The catalyst that activates the narrative and leads to its dramatic action is the lesbian scene in which the male lover finds his girlfriend and a female partner passionately involved. The tale and the historical account both take this scene as the point of departure. The male lover is infuriated, which causes his lover to despair, and she asks the old man to be the mediator and messenger to remedy the situation. Such developments in the form of petitions, requests, poetry, and songs stand for the deliberate narrative of female enticement and attraction, not only used to retain love but also to reverse male assumptions that there is one single source of love for women. Like many love narratives, space in this tale accommodates both land and river, and lovers are more joyful and less restricted in their feelings whenever they are in boats that pass by each other, and rapturous exchanges take place among their passengers or owners. The wound that unleashes action, the sense of being hurt or damaged, similar to the one that stands behind the whole narrative as framed in Shahrayar’s sense of betrayal, is appropriated in quasi-religiosity that legitimizes love. Even jurists can do little in a milieu that allows love to be expressed in many clear ways. Religion becomes a handmaid to urbanity since, as Aḥmad ibn Isḥāq al-Yaʿqūbī argues in his Mushākalat al-nās li-zamānihim (Peoples’ Similarity to Their Times), people tend to resemble their age. The ʿAbbāsids tended to appropriate jurisprudence and make it workable for the new social order, its needs, aspirations, and claims. So did their constituency.

However, there is something missing in the collection, and we should be alert to the meaning of this conspicuous absence: namely, other sects and schools of law such as the Shīʿīs and the Khārijīs.⁸⁴ One can argue that the collection reflects the climate of its times and that it is indifferent to religious attitudes outside the mainstream and hierarchical discourse. But this is not an accurate enough analysis to explain the historicity of the tales and their burgeoning since the last half of the ninth century. Compilers and storytellers might have been so accommodating of what was generally and officially acceptable that they put aside anything that might incite some audiences. On the other hand, the material as transmitted and accumulated obviously took a final form sometime in the twelfth century, when Fatimid sentiments lingered only among the general populace but rarely in elitist scholarship, which subscribed to the official discourse. The manuals on ḥisbah or market inspectorships may tell us as much. The Book of the Islamic Market Inspector by ʿAbd al-Raḥman b. Naṣr al-Shayzarī (d. 1193 C.E.?) is worth looking at in this context. It partakes of the spirit of the age, with its stark conservatism in jurisprudence and intolerance toward other schools of law. This movement was part of the reaction against the Fatimids (906–1160 C.E.) launched by the Ayyubids (1171–1250 C.E.). The regulations within the purview of the muḥtasib (market inspector) prohibit educators from reciting Shīʿī poetry: “The educator must . . . not acquaint them [the boys] with any poetry composed by the Ṭālibī Rawāfiḍ [i.e., the followers of the fourth caliph and cousin of the Prophet, Imam ʿAlī, and Shīʿīs in general].”⁸⁵ Rather, “he should teach them the poetry which eulogizes the Companions so that he fixes this in their hearts.”⁸⁶ The matter is so urgently present in his mind and in absolute conformity to the official discourse that he reiterates, in another place, that the market inspector should forbid the blind and beggars from “reciting the poetry which the Rawāfiḍ have composed about the Ṭālibīs, and from speaking about the death and such like, because all this incites the general public and it is therefore wrong to do it.”⁸⁷

The implications are far reaching, as they mean first that storytellers should refrain from tales that bring about narratives even verging on recollecting the life and martyrdom of Imam Ḥusayn, (murdered 680 C.E.) and his family and relatives, and that no mention of or allusion to this event should be made. Transgressions of this ruling are punishable by law. Censorship could be the reason behind the relative absence of any narrative that partakes of sectarian difference. Of some significance is the readiness of al-Shayzarī to equate this poetry, elegies on Imam Ḥusayn, with the poetry of both Ibn al-Ḥajjāj and Ṣarī ʿ al-Dilāʾ, whose frivolous or erotic verses at times made their way into some of the tales of the Thousand and One Nights. In other words, throughout the period of official anti-Fatimid sentiment, coercive marginalization took place against a literature that was deemed politically or, in the second case, morally undermining. It is no surprise, therefore, that later works such as the Maʿālim al-Qurbah fī Aḥkām al-Ḥisbah by ibn al-ʾUkhuwwah Ḍiyā al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Qurashī al-Shafʿī (d. 1329 C.E.) are less concerned with these matters and make no reference to such prohibitions.⁸⁸

If suppression is the method of the popular storyteller for dealing with sensitive issues, we might expect something similar in tales involving religious minorities. This is not the case, however, when it comes to non-Muslim minorities, who have a relatively full presence in the tales. A word of caution is needed, nevertheless, to understand the oblique displacement that storytellers follow whenever there is such an issue. Instead of Baghdad, the center of the caliphate and the Islamic world, they felt more at home using other centers as the location for narrative to unfold, like Cairo for Christians, Damascus for Jews, and sometimes China. However, the king of China in the tales of the tailor and the jolly hunchback is Islamized and therefore not surprised at meeting a group of people who are Muslims, Jews, and Christians. His Islamic outlook allows such diversity within an Islamic faith that all of the characters recognize. His demand for a tale better than the rest is the dynamic behind the narrators’ focus on an exciting slice from their life, one that involves action, mystery, and shock, on the condition that there is no deliberate implication of violence. Although compilers duplicate the court of the ʿAbbāsid caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd whenever there is another displaced court, there are some differences that sustain the majesty of the former in the minds of storytellers. The king of China receives people at his court, while Hārūn al-Rashid usually goes out incognito, looking for adventure. On the other hand, dislocation as the terrain for these narratives imposes a contrived sense of identity that has more color and intensity than we usually find whenever Baghdad is the site of narrative. While dislocation and personal misfortunes were as real as the many troubles and wars between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries, their recurrence in the tales enforces an Islamic identity that may not be in close correspondence to historical accounts. Just as the ultimate dislocation negates place and tribal identity, people from Mosul, Basra, or Baghdad refer to these places now as forsaken locations they might no longer reach. Instead of a solidarity based on tribal or national ties, there is now a cultural or professional identity that is not confined to territory or nation. The best trope for this collective and extraterritorial identity is the assembly or the group, for whenever one of these characters attends a meeting he is bound to see a number of people, including merchants, professionals, and artisans, who are unsurprised at his foreignness. All people in this assembly take dislocation for granted in times of turmoil, and all are bound by a new brotherhood that is Islamic first and foremost. Even transactions and business arrangements that help newcomers to adjust are done according to binding Islamic contracts like the ones exercised by the Baghdadi cloth merchant and the Christian broker in Cairo. In other words, the lost empire has been replaced by a group fraternity, which is held together by a common faith. Even in Sindbad’s travels, and despite the ultimate homecoming in each one of the seven voyages, the divisions that he sets for identity rely on culture, its markers of custom, lifestyles, and faith. He defines his identity by difference even when there is the possibility of rapprochement or a marriage arrangement with a woman from the new community. Admittedly for Sindbad a religious endeavor, business or commerce becomes even more meaningful whenever allied to faith. Even the conclusion to these adventures, returning home with presents, could symbolize funding the Muslim Treasury or the treasury of the Commander of the Faithful. Storytellers and copyists speak of these and other matters, like the vow of a young lady to sustain and preserve her virginity for the Commander of the Faithful, with tongue in cheek. The condescension to popular discourse entails the use of its jocular and sarcastic polyphony.

This mode of storytelling is suited to tales regarding non-Muslim communities, since it escapes the implications of fastidiousness usually associated with conservative discourse. “The Story of the Hunchback” is based on illusions that obscure the meaning of reality under the cover of night. Darkness as well as drunkenness delude the players in the tales into thinking they have killed the hunchback. The Jewish physician, the steward, the Christian broker, and the tailor suspect themselves of being the murderers of the king’s buffoon. The treatment of the non-Muslims is worth considering, as it demonstrates both the stereotyping stigma and the informing Islamic factor in existence since Arab Jews and Christians formed an integral part of the whole society. The scene is displaced onto China, and the king’s buffoon can act as he wishes: “he was drunk, reeking of wine.”⁸⁹ The Jewish physician would have been as renowned in the profession as any other dhimmi physician. We know from ḥisbah manuals that they occupied a privileged place in this profession because Muslims were more focused on jurisprudence and other administrative arts, careers more attractive to the ambitious. “Many a town has no physician who is not a dhimmi belonging to a people whose evidence about physicians is not accepted [in the court],” writes ibn al-ʾUkhuwwah.⁹⁰ Stereotyping operates in storytelling, however, in associating the taste for money with the Jews: “When the Jew saw the quarter-dinar as a fee for merely going downstairs, he was pleased and in his joy rose hastily in the dark.”⁹¹ Like other actors in the tale, the physician and his wife let the body down through the air-shaft into the house of the steward, an act the steward will also repeat in order to acquit himself of murder charges. The Christian broker is also implicated in the same alleged murder, but when the time of punishment comes and the execution of the culprit is to take place shortly, each one admits the assumed guilt. The Jewish physician justifies his confession as follows: “Is it not enough for me to have involuntarily and unwillingly killed one Muslim, without burdening my conscience with the death of another Muslim?”⁹² The Jewish physician is so involved in the life and welfare of the society that, as he repeats to the king of China, he has once received the full appreciation of the governor of Damascus: “the governor bestowed on me the robe of honor and appointed me superintendent of the hospital.”⁹³ He has received his education in Damascus and he is so familiar with social customs and habits of thought that he expresses surprise at seeing the young merchant putting forth his left hand instead of the right: “By God, it is strange that such a handsome young man of such a high family should lack good manners. How very strange!”⁹⁴ Moreover, there is so much rapprochement and solidarity between the physician and the young man that they have enjoyed some social activity and “then sat to eat,”⁹⁵ a procedure that means, among socially knit communities, good will and good intentions. In other words, apart from the considerations already specified in market-inspectors’ manuals, the non-Muslim communities are so integrally engaged in community life, culture, customs, and business that there is very little reason to assume that there is a separate category for them, which would have alerted the storyteller to repress or gloss over their presence, as he or she does regarding Muslim sects.

The same thing may well apply to the Christian community in relation to wine. Stereotyping has a function in the narrative, for there is the underlying assumption that all Christians are more prone to wine drinking than the rest of the community. While selling wines is confined to dhimmīs, the practice of excessive drinking is practiced by very few, regardless of their religious affiliation. The young Baghdadi merchant has a sip of wine every morning, and the Christian broker drinks wine excessively at night. In the story of the hunchback, “there came a prominent Christian tradesman, who had a workshop and was the king’s broker. He was drunk, and in his drunkenness he had left home, heading for the bath, thinking that morning prayers were near [sic]. He was staggering along until he drew near the hunchback and squatted in front of him to urinate.”⁹⁶ The storyteller confuses Muslim and Christian rituals and times for prayer, but he also treats the broker in a manner that is reminiscent of his treatment of the king’s buffoon, whom he has described as “reeking of wine.”⁹⁷ Wine becomes the trope for absolute abundance, carelessness, and frivolity. It is associated with darkness, when every desire except Scheherazade’s is unleashed and when restraint is put aside. The case is different during the day. Sobriety reigns and good manners are upheld.

The Cairene Coptic broker entertains the same surprise at seeing the young merchant eating with his left hand: “Only God is perfect. Here is a young man who is handsome and respectable yet so conceited that he does not bother to use his right hand in eating with me.”⁹⁸ The sense of shock at such a seeming departure from acceptable manners is not confined to the refined segment of the society, for professionals and merchants have the same manners and norms of behavior. The young Baghdadi merchant is aware of this problem, and addresses the broker as follows: “Don’t wonder and say to yourself that I’m conceited and have eaten with my left hand out of conceit. There is a strange story behind the cutting off of my hand.”⁹⁹ Although the watchman expresses shock at the night scene in the marketplace, where the drunken Christian broker seems to be beating the hunchback, there is little to suggest discrimination aside from the expression of surprise: “By God, this is a fine thing, a Christian killing a Muslim!”¹⁰⁰ The rest of the community is not ready to discriminate. Indeed, the steward of the king’s kitchen comes to the scene of execution to proclaim his own alleged guilt: “Is it not enough for me to have killed a Muslim, without burdening my conscience with the death of a Christian too? On my confession, hang no one but me.”¹⁰¹

While we meet many patterns of Islamic thought and practice, there is also an urban outlook and disposition that speak of the urban milieu first, whereby Islamic faith is enforced through the muḥtasib, or market inspector, or through acceptable moral and cultural norms. On the other hand, there are tales that are appropriated to fit into the Islamic milieu. This is especially so in the frame story and its cluster, as well as in other tales of suspected Greek or Indo-Persian origin, a point which J. F. Hewitt expressed over a century ago.¹⁰² Later scholarship partly accepted this idea. Muhsin Mahdi came up with an ingenious idea that takes the frame tale and its immediate unframed ones as a deliberate cultural appropriation of heathen values and fortunes to an Islamic context, a kind of predication onto another context to justify transformation and change. He says, “one may say that the overall subject matter of the Nights is the history of the relation between heathen royalty and the revealed religions, a history that begins in ancient times with circumstances that appear to be leading this royalty to a catastrophic end, but that ends with a festival in which this royalty and its city celebrate their triumph and well-being.”¹⁰³ The tales demonstrate the disharmony that triggers storytelling early in the evening and that calms down over the course of the night, in preparation for further fluctuation.

The opening garden scene that brings ease to the mind of the king’s brother is no less than a rebellion staged openly in the garden. Here slaves take over, exercise their power, make love to the queen and her female entourage, and join in a pact that takes revenge on authority as represented by the king. One can agree with Mahdi that it is a “common rebellion against the conventions that had established their inferior position.”¹⁰⁴ Instead of the queen and the slave Masʿūd of the garden scene, or instead of Masʿūd the lucky, “the Luck of Religion,” as he calls himself during his apelike jump from the top of the tree, we have a new woman addressing the morose king, a Shahrazad “of noble race,” joined by her sister, who perpetuates storytelling. The sister’s name, Dinarzad, means “noble religion,” which may metaphorically stand for storytelling, since she is the one who insists on more stories that, in matter and manner, become an embodiment of the storyteller, the one “of noble race.”¹⁰⁵

One may stretch this further to suggest the replacement of material power by art, an art that questions the premises and functions of authority and undermines its mechanisms. Just as there is another world, other powers, and other functions, and just as there are other beings and agents who transform humans, the art that relates these narratives is no less powerful as a medium, and probably a means, to affect such transformations. Women who mutter something while looking into a bowl of water can change humans, and Shahrazad may well be one of them. In other words, the king undergoes change, not only under the influence of the lessons or the passing of time but also because of the fear that overwhelms him. In Mahdi’s words, he “feels threatened by the human powers of magic and the superhuman powers of demons.”¹⁰⁶ Yet the division between royalty and rebellious spirits or demons is not strictly upheld throughout the tales and lines of demarcation. In the first three framed tales exist heretical demons, disobedient jinns, and disloyal queens; however, there are also God-fearing ones who abide by the laws that govern the human world.

There are also communities that uphold their religions even under dire circumstances. There are magician-queens who complement the garden scene with their alliances with slaves and against royalty. There is also plentiful use of the manuals on statecraft and kingship. In a universe of mixed powers and challenges, politics entails the control of one’s passions and the use of ruse and craft to deal with emerging situations. Such is the realization of ordinary human beings like the fisherman. The case becomes more problematic later, in the stories that have a definite Islamic context. Magic and supernatural powers are actively present to redress wrongs or to remedy situations. Whenever there is an evil power, there exists a counterpower to forestall harm or establish order. Kings and rulers are more often than not God’s vicars on earth; they are there to act like Hārūn al-Rashīd, as agents of the divine presence to endow the universe with goodness and justice. With a nostalgic recollection, indeed a mourning of a blessed past, the tales dwell on many of these days, when cities were prosperous, justice upheld, and security certain.

As hierarchy works strongly during times of solid and tight control, there is the underlying assumption in the tales that there is no other arbiter than the Commander of the Faithful. Whenever there is a problem that demands an authority higher than the chief justice, people invoke the intervention of the Commander of the Faithful; otherwise, their only re-course is supplication for God’s intervention. Thus, in the tailor’s tale, the story of the lame young man from Baghdad, the loquacious barber suspects that the judge is beating the young man whom he has seen entering the judge’s house to meet his daughter. “By God, none shall judge between us and you but the caliph, unless you bring out our master to his relatives, before I go and bring him out myself and put you to shame.”¹⁰⁷ The barber’s words are the storyteller’s, for the loquacious barber is another mouthpiece for the storyteller whenever there is unrestrained narrative and excessive nosiness. His words express the storyteller’s dissatisfaction with the judicial system, since it was historically opposed to storytellers and their use of the marketplace and street corners for their practice. The system is strongly targeted on its own grounds in the tale of the slave girl Tawwadud. Her testing of the celebrated dignitaries in Islamic law is a deliberate challenge to their knowledge and claims to authority. Here, Tawwadud seemingly subscribes to the official discourse, but she internalizes it and turns it against its upholders and ostensible missionaries.

In many tales that have a social or political context, there is a tendency to indirectly draw attention to the processes of appropriation, which tend to manipulate religion and place it in the service of the state. Like Protestant or Catholic states in their appropriations of religion to newly emerging needs and requirements, Islamic governments in the heyday of the Umayyad reign and the ʿAbbāsid empire needed this appropriation. It grew into a practice that was carried out by a great number of jurists, who gave it form and context through reinterpretation. While not touching the basics of religious faith, these appropriations tended to meet the demands and needs of a growing society with new urban desires and requirements, especially in matters of property and ownership, including the ownership of slave women. The Bedouin society has its codes of honor and ownership, but urban society relies more on Islamic statehood. This statehood implies an application of social divisions that are not necessarily in keeping with the Qurʿānic emphasis on equality. Class structures and social hierarchies are closely observed despite the vicissitudes of fortune and vagaries of politics that bring royalty and dignitaries down. Gradually, Islam is dislodged as a way of thinking to be replaced by an overarching urban one of broad secular concerns.

Imaginary flights mix easily with brutal realities, and verbal communication becomes a means to attain the unattainable, which in many other tales finds its representations in nonverbal narrative units, as the last chapter in this book will argue. The fifth brother speaks of an imaginary change that raises him to a noble status, which is concomitant with dreams of ownership and ultimate domestic bliss. There, he will let the bride wait for him “so that she may say that I am a proud man,” and until her mother joins in supplication: “‘My lord, look at your servant and comfort her, for she craves your favor.’”¹⁰⁹ In the sixth brother’s tale, there is the imaginary feast of the Barmaki, who derives his joy from inviting people to nonexistent luxurious banquets. But the brother “raised his arm” and “suddenly hit the host on the back of the neck,” telling the Barmaki: “My lord, you have admitted your slave into your house, fed him, and given him wine to drink until he became drunk and unmannerly. You should be the first to tolerate his foolishness and pardon his offense.”¹¹⁰ Secularized as such, and with no mention of God or the usual Islamic ceremonial blessings, the imaginary feast is no less a flight of fancy than many other tales. The storyteller can be exchanged for the Barmaki, and the Barmaki for the storyteller. Both create stories out of nothing. However, the presence of the desperate and the forlorn operates as an opening that escapes the limitations or constrictions imposed by laws. The down-to-earth conduct of the sixth brother is the source of power in the Thousand and One Nights. It forces a realistic dimension that transforms fantasy into a realistic narrative that accommodates religion to needs and facts as they are on the ground. The storyteller, with the barber as his mouthpiece, relates the historical background of the Barmakī debacle. While not engaged in the politics of the whole affair, he or she joins the common public in sympathizing with the family as a generous one. He tells us how the Barmakī chose his brother to manage his estate, but twenty years later, “the king seized all his property, including that of my brother, leaving him a helpless pauper.”¹¹¹

The storyteller has his or her ways of circumventing social and political structures in order to uncover their underpinnings and critique their artificiality. Dreams, transformations, and magic participate in this strategy as the storyteller’s stock in trade. Indeed, the barber’s fifth brother, whose daydreaming and subsequent devastation of his little merchandise was the subject of many Victorian allusions during precarious times, sums up the new social and economic transformations that caused the ruin of families and the rise to wealth and power of others. His daydreams rest on a duplication of current class structures that enable the privileged to hold servants and have a pleasant and pleasurable life. The tales of the fifth and the sixth brothers set daydreams against reality, wishful thinking against the hard facts on the ground. In this, the fifth brother is not far off the mark, just as one of the ladies of Baghdad, in the tale of the porter and the three ladies, looks upon decorum as the specific sign of social distinction and authority. When the mendicants and others show no careful observance of the rules inscribed on the inner side of the door, the lady says: “O guests, you have wronged us. Have we not told you of our condition, that ‘he, who speaks of what concerns him, not will hear what pleases him not?’ We took you in our home and fed you with our food, but after all this you meddled and did us wrong.”¹¹² The misbehavior comes only from people who dare to transgress, not from the common people who know their social limits. “Tell me who you are. . . . Were you not men of rank or eminent among your people or powerful rulers, you would not have dared to offend us.”¹¹³

Yet decorum and observance of rules of conduct are not necessarily class bound, for we are told in other tales that in certain professions there are no less binding rules. These are applicable to jurists, stewards, maids, and barbers, among others. But barbers are the most notorious for their loquacity, especially when it becomes their way of enforcing their laws and interfering with other people’s commitments. The barber in the cycle of tales under his name boasts of his erudition in all fields of knowledge, including astrology and medicine. The young man from Baghdad who is infatuated by the sight of the judge’s daughter is anxious to abide by the date and timing fixed for the couple by the old lady as the go-between. The barber, however, delays him by his stories and boasts of himself as follows: “You have asked for a barber, and God has sent you a barber who is also an astrologer and a physician, versed in the arts of alchemy, astrology, grammar, lexicography, logic, scholastic disputation, rhetoric, arithmetic, algebra, and history, as well as the traditions of the Prophet, according to Muslim and al-Bukhari.”¹¹⁴ We should not think this nonsensical, however, for it was part of the barbers’ job to entertain celebrities and to mix with the highest ranks of the society. This combination of education and habitual loquacity is the stock in trade for a talented storyteller, too. Their significant presence in the tales has a narrative role, however, for loquacity is another term for storytelling, but without that extra touch that turns talk into art. The barber’s intervention in this story, for instance, complicates it, causing more trouble for the protagonist and making him desperate to run away from the very land that harbors the barber and his like.

Whenever the person has wit and good education, like the porter in the story of the ladies of Baghdad, the tale takes a different direction. Wit and refinement lead it to a higher level of sociability, for “as a table needs four legs to stand on, you being three, likewise need a fourth, for the pleasure of men is not complete without women, and the pleasure of women is not complete without men,” he says.¹¹⁵ It is no wonder the swimming-pool scene in which he is a participant is so hilarious and funny that the squeamish Edward William Lane cut it out from his translation to meet the requirements of Victorian taste. In a moment of rapture and intoxication, the porter feels that the wine has acquired an exquisite flavor, and the more he drinks the more he loses “his inhibitions.”¹¹⁶ The scene, which is no less effective than a carnival, turns things upside down so that joviality triumphs over class distinction. Transgression and distinction contradict the Islamic warning against intoxication and social barriers, but the wine that causes social transgression remains punishable by law only as long as its drinking brings about intrusion into the public sphere, in person or through noise. Thus in the story of the porter and the three ladies of Baghdad, the caliph’s minister comes to the ladies with a fabricated story of being in a merchant’s house enjoying themselves until they were “intoxicated” but running away when the prefect of the police “raided the place.”¹¹⁷

In other words, storytellers would have known the social and religious implications of transgressions, the limits imposed on wine and music whenever exceeding specific regulations, and the punishment attending any misconduct. The fabricated incident could not have happened in al-Rashīd’s times, however, both because this does not correlate well with the entertainment at the ladies’ house and because there was no assumption among jurists at that time to intrude into people’s private spheres unless a danger to public safety was suspected. Like wine, excessive music that intrudes upon the public sphere is forbidden. According to ibn al-ʾUkhuwwah: “If the sound of music issues from a house, whose occupants are playing instruments in full view, the muḥtasib may forbid their continuing, but he may not enter the house and attack them or inquire into anything besides the offence.”¹¹⁸ The city, as supervised and watched by the police and the inspectors, feeds individual and communal freedom while imposing limits and checks to keep rights within limits and in due respect to institutionalizing religious decrees. Feigning to be merchants, the minister and the caliph are the ones who transfer and convey the complexity of urban life to the seeming pleasant private bliss in the ladies’ house. Like the royal brothers of the frame tale who are betrayed and consequently come up with a strategy to ensure sovereign control, the caliph and his minister come up with a plan to mix with the community, understand its rules of conduct, and test their own administration in the ladies’ house as a sphere of both private and public dimensions.

The pleasant surface hides another level of menace that involves other powers. However, both state and supernatural power can come to rapprochement under the banner of faith. The jinn succumb to the order of the Commander of the Faithful by restoring the ladies’ sisters to human form, but this happens at a later stage, after he has passed through a crucial moment of challenge. Enjoying their power within their private dominion, the ladies threaten intruders who enter into their privacy. The intruders face the consequences of such impudence: “Tell me who you are, for you have only one hour to live,” says the eldest lady.¹¹⁹ The disguised caliph says to his minister Jafar: “Damn it, tell her who we are, lest we be slain by mistake.”¹²⁰ The private sphere here assumes the power of the state, and the incognito scene plays well into the hands of the ladies who, for a moment, have all the sovereign power in their hands. This seeming loss of power on the part of the caliph and his minister foreshadows the impending fragmentation of the empire. This inversion of hierarchy, be it female and male or laity and the caliphal order, should not be seen as an ordinary matter. Narrative as performed in the Baghdadi scene runs counter to the poetics of allegiance that was, along with wars and surveillance, the staple of the ʿAbbāsid discourse as represented in its known court ceremonials of legitimacy. The ʿAbbāsids were sensitive to issues of power politics, especially when it came to their cousins, the ʿAlīds, and their questioning of the ʿAbbāsid claims of legitimacy. Though almost every poet of renown and a good number of prose writers, such as al-Jāḥiẓ, tried to show allegiance through some support of this claim, it may be worthwhile to mention ʿAlī ibn al-Jahm’s (d. 863 C.E.) famous Ruṣāfiyyah ode addressed to the caliph al-Mutawwakil and compare it to this carnival-like scene’s narrative of inversion at the ladies’ house in Baghdad. It may be worth comparing, also, to the mendicants’ praise for the ʿAbbāsid caliph al-Rashīd and his Abode of Peace, as Baghdad was called. Their praise rests on recognition of his justice, generosity, and rule in a Baghdad that was the center of the universe. In other words, his gifts are earthly, not divinely inspired. Legitimacy derives its power from facts on the ground, not from a sacral or heroic premise. On the other hand, poets in the vein of ibn al-Jahm usually resort to the earthly or worldly to claim or justify the divine. The poet says: “Islam with him is safe from every heretic; and the stray folk will suffer divine punishment.” He adds: “It suffices that God entrusts his affairs to you / and ordained ‘to obey those in authority.’” In the Thousand and One Nights, things work differently. It depicts the seemingly real and allows legitimacy to be parodied or questioned. Unless there is some human revelation, an exposure of some sort, things may take a different direction. Even jest may turn into reality and words assume the power of the actual, for, according to Shams al-Nahār, “no task is accomplished without speech.”¹²¹ It is only upon revealing himself as the caliph that things change and authority regains its status.

Jest, humor, double roles, and scenes of transformation or discrepancy are the storyteller’s repertoire, helping him or her meet the demands of the public, which, as we understand from manuals on market inspectorships, used to meet on the corners and in marketplace locations. The popular storyteller was not concerned with the cultivation of taste or the documentation of knowledge. It was enough for him to offer a good story that would be appealing enough to secure a livelihood. The Thousand and One Nights as such have the basic properties of popular art that might have seemed coarse and insipid to the “judicious” eyes of al-Nadīm.¹²² The disparity between the two perspectives emanates from status, class, and role in an Islamic society. The storyteller does not expect to be taken seriously by courtiers, state functionaries, distinguished litterateurs, or by jurists and religious scholars—a point that will be the focus of the next chapter.