STORIES FROM THE PAST
What shall we tell you? Tales, marvellous tales
Of ships and stars and isles where good men rest,
Where nevermore the rose of sunset pales,
And winds and shadows fall toward the West …
—JAMES ELROY FLECKER,
“THE GOLDEN JOURNEY TO SAMARKAND”
This is how it begins, the story from which spring all the others in the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.
Long ago, two kingly brothers named Shahryar and Shazaman learned, to their sorrow, that their wives were unfaithful. After executing these inconstant queens for adultery, the brothers set forth to find someone whose misfortunes exceeded their own. By the seaside they encountered a great genie who kept his human wife hidden away in a crystal chest bound with four great locks. While the genie slept his wife emerged and, on threat of waking her demon husband, demanded love of the brothers who, complying in fear for their lives, were then shown the strumpet’s collection of 570 rings taken from her lovers, now augmented by two.
Learning this, the brothers resolved that the genie was more unfortunate than they, and returned to their respective kingdoms. But soon the eldest brother, the Sultan Shahryar, became so consumed with rage over the perfidy of women that he issued an edict whereby each day he would marry a virgin of his kingdom, only to execute her on the morning following their wedding night, his embittered mind believing that only in this way could a woman’s faithfulness be assured for all time.
Shahryar’s vizier, whose own daughters were exempt from the decree, went sadly about his business of each morning setting out to find an innocent female, so that within the space of a day his king might marry a maid and murder a queen. But the vizier’s oldest daughter, Scheherazade, wise and worldly and learned beyond her green years, persuaded her father to give her to the sultan as his newest bride, and this the vizier reluctantly did.
On their wedding night, Scheherazade asked Shahryar if her younger sister Dinarzade might sleep beneath their bridal bed, so that the sisters could take proper leave of each other on the morning of the new queen’s execution. Her wish was granted, and when the newlyweds were done with their love-play, Dinarzade came out from under their bed with a request (according to a ruse the sisters had earlier agreed upon) that Scheherazade might beguile the night by telling a story to while away the long hours until sunrise.
Scheherazade did so, relating to her sister and her husband a tale of elegant beauty, designed to delight and inform. But when she perceived the courier of the dawn approaching in the east, Scheherazade ceased saying her permitted say, promising to finish her tale the following night. The story-loving sultan, not wanting to miss the conclusion, decided to stay her execution until the morning after.
And so on the next evening Scheherazade finished her previous night’s tale as promised, but then swiftly began another story, which gave rise to others, which begat still others. Shahryar’s curiosity made him postpone Scheherazade’s execution night after night, through 1001 consecutive nights, during which time his tale-spinning sultana bore her husband three strong sons whom he loved with all his being.
By the end of the 1001st Night, the sultan had also come to love Scheherazade with his whole heart, and was cured of his mad hatred of women. He rescinded the order of execution against his wife and revoked the edict against the women of his kingdom, repenting sorely for his ghastly crime. Thereafter, Shahryar summoned his scribes and his copyists and bade them write down all Scheherazade’s stories—her tales of description and discourse and wondrous histories, all from the first to the last, in letters of liquid gold. When the stories were set down, they were bound in thirty great volumes and stored in the Royal Treasury, where the work was entitled The Stories of the Thousand and One Nights. After which the Sultan Shahryar and his clever wife lived fully and well until the end of their days.
Since that ancient time, there have been countless retellings of Scheherazade’s tales, and her fanciful world has become a permanent vision of an alternative reality. By the time The Thousand and One Nights reached Europe in the early Enlightenment, its stories had already survived in the eastern world for close to 1001 years. Told and retold, read and reread throughout the immensity of the Muslim world, the book often referred to simply as “the Nights” has come to weave its charm on the West at least as vigorously as it has done in the East, yet to this day remains a work little understood in either realm.
Questions and contradictions abound. When, where and how did these stories originate? When were they first set down? How did they come to appear in the West, and to what effect? Why and how has this book endured and transcended cultures to become a bona fide classic of world literature, part of the corpus of international fiction held to contain important expressions of human truths? Why has this work—in the West, at least, practically synonymous with the innocence of childhood—been dogged by controversy almost from the moment of its earliest appearance nearly 1200 years ago? Perhaps most important, what is it about the Nights that has proved so durable that it has not only survived but flourished, to the extent that the entire world is now suffused with its imagery? It is quite possibly the most widespread literary text in human history.
The Arabian Nights is a uniquely elusive book, a work that teases and provokes even as it withholds. Some parts reflect the drama and vicissitudes of everyday life during recognizable historical periods; others intrude the fantastic into reality for good or ill. Still other parts serve as allegorical tales, parables from which the reader may draw instructive lessons. And practically all unedited editions contain hundreds of snatches of song and verse used to underscore the proceedings, making the original Arabic Nights almost as much a work of poetry as it is of prose fiction.
This quicksilver element has been a magnet for investigators, prompting many researchers to peer, Oz-like, behind the popular curtain to behold the Nights’ true face, however long and fraught with difficulty this feat may be. Delving into the ways and byways of Arabian Nights history, it is easy to grow confused about what is real and what is not. Actual historical periods, cultures and figures exist alongside imaginary characters and places. Ancient Baghdad, Damascus, Basra and Cairo coexist with mythical locales like the City of Brass. Common folk pursue trades little changed since the beginning of history at the same time as they interact with demons and fairies. Slaves mingle with kings and queens, sorcery affects one and all, and high and low alike stand powerless in the presence of Death’s Angel.
Often seen as the Muslim counterpart to European fairy tales, there is nevertheless an individual quality to the Nights that allows it to stand alone as folklore. Unlike most western fairy stories, good does not inevitably triumph over evil in the Arabian Nights. Fate is seldom irrevocably kind, and bound destiny—kismet—has a way of fulfilling itself no matter what one’s actions or intentions. In “The Third Kalandar’s Tale,” an astrologer divines that a young man will die when he is fifteen years old. The youth hides away on a secluded island for safety, but after he tells the visiting Prince Ajib ibn Khasib his foretold fate, and despite Ajib’s high regard for the boy, the prince kills him by accident, fulfilling the prophecy.
If there is anything approaching a common theme or motif to the Nights, it is the steadfast belief that life is not a linear progression, a straight arrow from womb to tomb, but rather a series of twists and turns harbouring the unforeseen. Some shifts are good, many more are bad, but existence itself is a continual process of reconfiguration. In the Arabian Nights, people are transformed into animals, the poor become wealthy and powerful, the wealthy and powerful lose their positions, and a person’s fate may hinge on his most mundane actions. Chance is a capricious beast, and the wise absorb this cosmic fact and live their lives accordingly; the foolish either ignore or—worse yet—fight kismet, only to suffer most terribly for it.
The history of The Thousand and One Nights and its spread across the globe is itself a tale of transforming wonder as curious as any found within its episodes of magic. Its progress through the centuries is a shifting adventure packed with extraordinary incident. Meticulous scholarship exists alongside fraud, forgery and sheer invention, as accepted facts are shown to be hollow or false.
Above all else, like all great tales, the history of the Arabian Nights is a story of people. Its literary landscape may be the teeming polyglot world of diverse cultures comprising the ancient East, but the West likewise plays a pivotal role in the work’s long trek toward global integration. Its stories depict a staggering array of fictional heroes, villains, lovers and rogues of many ethnicities, but the actual historical characters who step in and out of the tales are no less arresting. All-powerful kings vie with scholars, librarians, con artists, retiring bookworms and swashbuckling explorers. Fictional or not, each figure bound in some way to the Nights is a component of the swirling historical panoply in which a literary work, whose original purpose was entertainment allied with instruction, makes a series of journeys—physical, cultural, literary—across the years to become a universal depiction of an otherworldly cosmos.
Through the Nights’ exquisite power to transform while maintaining a consistent vision, the book has proved itself one of literature’s most enduring portals, a work capable of binding and perhaps even reconciling cultures. By transmitting essential truths about the vista of human experience through visions of the classical Muslim world, the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments has, during its immensely long history, come to fuse the picture of a fantastic realm onto the imagination of an entire planet.
When The Thousand and One Nights first appeared in Europe early in 1704, the work proved delightfully novel for the denizens of an emerging modern age. Although Europe and the Muslim East had interacted through travel and trade for most of a millennium, Islamic manners and habits remained largely unknown in the West. Information about the Arab world was based mostly on merchants’ stories, travellers’ reports or the tales of returning Crusaders handed down through the generations. Fragmentary, contradictory and in many cases downright wrong (one persistent legend held that the coffin of the Prophet Muhammad in Medina was suspended in mid-air by giant magnets), these accounts provided little more than a glimpse through the opaque glass obscuring the world of the Muslims.
This new storybook, taken from these same lands, promised Europeans not only diversion and entertainment but also an opening, they believed, into a culture at once exotic and strange, and yet not so completely unfamiliar as to be impossible to comprehend. For the first time, ordinary citizens could read for themselves about the style of living of those populating the Muslim world, as well as accounts of the curious creatures that supposedly inhabited it. To westerners, the Arabian Nights seemed to incorporate every literary genre under the sun, from fairy tales, fables and love stories to historical anecdotes, tragedies, comedies and burlesques. It was, a later writer pronounced, “a revelation in romance,” capturing at once the fancy of occidental readers. Soon all of Europe was aflame that “something so new, so unconventional, so entirely without purpose” should have come their way. Readers ranging from sophisticated court ladies to provincial schoolboys consumed the work feverishly. Literary gatherings talked of little else but caliphs, genies, rocs, ghouls and the near-superhuman resourcefulness of the work’s narrator-heroine, a young woman who salvages an impossible situation by employing her genius for storytelling.
Over the next three centuries, the influence of The Thousand and One Nights would extend beyond the printed page and into the arts and thinking of Europe and the Americas. Its imprint has become so firmly fixed upon the western consciousness that even those who have never read an actual Arabian Nights story in their lives have a vision of a time and a place which—although arguably altered and distorted—remains a valuable tool in understanding how cultures perceive one another.
The book’s impact has been felt in other ways. Standing as it does almost at the dawn of European interest in Asia, the Arabian Nights is one of the first and most important works to act as a counterbalance to the traditional Christian enmity with Islam. By presenting a generally favourable portrait of a society, which to that time had been mostly the subject of ignorance and mistrust, the European Nights helped establish “oriental studies” as a genuine field of scholarly endeavour by creating a widespread market for information regarding eastern cultures, as well as dispelling some of the grosser myths surrounding the Muslim community.
This was a true sea change in cultural attitude. Like the Christian West of the time, Islam contained its own territories, attitudes and power, making it an intriguing if threatening rival, yet one whose workings remained barely known. With the publication of the Nights, knowledge regarding some of these workings now became available in the guise of stories, which became for many westerners not only their chief but often their only source of information regarding the world of Islam.
The Arabian Nights’ influence is not restricted to western concepts of the Muslim Orient. In the realm of arts and literature, the Nights’ emphasis on the exotic not only inspired countless imitations, but also acted as a prime shaper of a new artistic movement known as Romanticism. Numerous Romantics reference the Nights in their work, paying homage to a book many adored in childhood and considered among the most significant literary works in their lives. Nor does the Nights’ literary influence end with the Romantic period, for since then, even a partial list of writers who have directly or indirectly acknowledged the personal impact of The Thousand and One Nights is astonishing, both in number and variety. To name but a very few, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Matthew Arnold, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Edward FitzGerald, Robert Louis Stevenson, Marcel Proust and James Joyce. As the distinguished Arabian Nights researcher Robert Graham Irwin states with some slight exasperation in his companion book to the Tales, at times it seems it would be a simpler task to compile a list of literary figures who are not affected by their exposure to the Nights, than to assemble a list of those who are.
Contemporary authors who have produced meditations on or pastiches of the Nights include both western and many eastern writers. Jorge Luis Borges, Salman Rushdie, John Barth, Robert Graham Irwin, A.S. Byatt, Italo Calvino, Naguib Mahfouz and Githa Hariharan are among them, with many providing postmodern takes on established tales and extending the sense that the world of the Arabian Nights is a limitless expanse, open to endless permutations of its basic structure and contents.
Appearing as it did in a Europe just beginning to experience the effects of the Enlightenment—le siècle des Lumières or “century of lights”—one can argue that the course of western thought and perception was influenced as much by the Arabian Nights as by any work penned by Voltaire or Tom Paine. The presentation of folklore from the distant lands of India, Persia, Arabia and other regions revitalized European literature by infusing it with something fresh and rare, infinitely appealing to the Enlightenment preoccupation with the New. The impact of the Nights, and the various ways by which the work has welded the imagery of a romanticized past onto the global consciousness, is as real as it is undeniable. In the three centuries since it made its triumphal debut in the West, the Arabian Nights, now no longer the product of an imagined oriental antiquity, has come to belong to the whole of humanity.
Ironically, for all the new and bewitchingly exotic aspects of the book, parts of the Nights were already familiar to Europeans in ways that paved the road for its ready acceptance. Long before the work appeared in printed form, Europe was already acquainted with concepts of the realm thought of simply as “the East,” particularly those lands stretching from eastern Europe to India and beyond which contained the citadel of Islam.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Muslim world was for all practical purposes a closed book to the average westerner. Europeans were aware, though, that the East was the birthplace of all the ancient civilizations, as well as the cradle of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, three faiths bound not only by shared beliefs but by a common geographical heritage. Christianity itself, the faith by which Europe came to create part of its identity, was considered the greatest example in existence of an East–West cultural transmission, arising in the lands of the Levant* before moving west through Greece and Rome to penetrate the farthest reaches of Europe and the New World.
Moreover, the world-ranging explorations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which established links between Europeans and Asians from the Levant to the Far East, introduced the western world to luxury goods—silks, spices, tea, coffee, and so on—procurable only in the expanse of the eastern hemisphere, strengthening European beliefs that the East was home to lands rich in resources and material wealth. By the later Renaissance, the West was enthralled by images of the Orient as a fabulous realm of riches and foreign wisdom, a place of unfamiliar yet desirable articles, visions and thoughts.
These images came from a number of sources. Travellers’ stories, however distorted in the telling, remained nonetheless eyewitness accounts of regions understood to be quite different from Europe. Those who journeyed in the Levant returned to fill imaginations with pictures of places not only considered exotic but also held sacred as the wellspring of Christian faith. Greco-Roman texts, from The Iliad and The Odyssey to accounts of Alexander the Great’s campaigns in Persia and India, were the first “oriental stories” to reach Europe, creating an awareness that the eastern Mediterranean was home to modes of living so profoundly unlike those of Europe as to seem from another world.
Yet it was the Bible that had the greatest effect on western oriental imagery, since it conveyed a lasting perception of the East as a land suffused with supernatural possibilities—a realm where, everything being possible, anything might happen. As literary works, the Holy Bible and the Arabian Nights exist centuries apart, but both have provided the West with visions of people and places existing in territories of sustained magical happenings. As Europe emerged from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance and into the Enlightenment, comprehension of the Bible changed to the point where it became not only a work of divine inspiration, potentially holding the keys to cosmic mysteries, but also a book of wonder tales similar to the marvels found within the later Thousand and One Nights.
Both the Old and New Testaments are rife with stories of miraculous happenings which, even when acknowledged as belonging to a former age, were still understood as arising in places containing forces foreign to those of Europe. Hagar’s discovery of water in the wilderness, the parting of the Red Sea and Christ’s own supernatural powers were accepted as divinely inspired events, but they were also seen as logical products of a mystical domain, a region perhaps unsophisticated in terms of technology but passionately in tune with the natural world in ways increasingly lacking in Europe.
Over time, the East became not simply a geographical designation but “the Mystic East,” the land where magic occurs, in opposition to an ever-more-scientific West. It is no accident that by the nineteenth century, many European and North American homes contained copies of both the Holy Bible and the Arabian Nights, nor is it any surprise that they were often found side by side on the Victorian bookshelf. For westerners, the two books were of a piece; if not exactly fraternal literary twins, they were certainly first cousins, and both necessary fixtures in every gentleman’s library. The lasting result of these collective influences was to create an impression of the eastern world as a territory existing outside European standards of time and place, a wondrous dreamscape unfettered by the limitations imposed by western conventions.
Residual elements of this understanding persist to this day. Popular terms such as “the Enchanted East” and “the Eternal East” might be little more than hoary orientalist clichés, but they still resound with an impact not far removed from perceptions of several centuries ago. Fortune tellers wearing turbans; themed hotels and casinos structured like the Taj Mahal or a caliph’s palace; fraternal organizations employing a mixture of Jewish, Arabic and Templar-inspired imagery in their presentations; the continuing presence of harem fantasies in romantic and erotic fiction—all spring from a centuries-old conception of the Orient as an enticing place of mystical enchantment.
Thus, when the first volumes of the Nights appeared in Europe, they found a readership already primed to embrace the new work as another in a long series of literary vehicles capable of bringing East and West together. If the Nights was hardly the first—it was certainly not the last—literary vessel ferrying visions of an imagined Orient to the West’s attention, it remains among the most important; first as a popularizer, then as an accepted representation and finally as a persistent image of a land of boundless possibility.
The consequences, good and bad, are felt to this day. On the minus side, the popular universe of the Arabian Nights was for many years considered by many westerners—even celebrated Arabic scholars like Edward William Lane and Richard Francis Burton—as a legitimate depiction of the Muslim world from which it is possible to derive reliable information, a terrifically dangerous assumption to make about a vast region comprising so many different peoples, languages and beliefs. With such imperfect comprehension, it was perhaps inevitable that misconceptions concerning a non-homogeneous religious culture would surface from casual readings of works like the Nights, some of which have arguably contributed to a European understanding that these same lands—allegedly backward, essentially unchanging—are ripe for intervention, perhaps even annexation.
On the plus side, it must be noted that the Nights’ fictional nature has helped immeasurably in rendering inhabitants of Muslim society more sympathetically human in western eyes. Visions of the treacherous Turk and the scimitar-wielding Arab (comparable to the stereotype of the suicide bomber in our own time) did not disappear with the arrival of the Arabian Nights, but they were supplemented by the appearance of attractive characters whose virtues and concerns mirrored those of western readers. Europeans now found themselves admiring the resourcefulness of figures like Sindbad the Seafarer, taking vicarious pleasure in the instant wish-fulfillment available to the youth Aladdin or enjoying as invisible companions the nocturnal adventures of the wise caliph Haroun al-Rashid as he walks incognito through the streets of Baghdad. It may have been only multiculturalism of the imagination, but it was a far cry from previous perceptions shrouded in ignorance and racial fear.
Following the appearance of The Thousand and One Nights, the romantic promises of the East became a touchstone of western desire—a wished-for destination, whether through the imaginative flights provided by books or the physical journeys countless travellers have undertaken to see for themselves “the land of the Arabian Nights.” Before the twentieth century, few westerners (most of whom received their geographical and cultural information only from books and lectures) saw much difference between the two, yet all who read the Nights with pleasure surrendered to the eternal human longing to find oneself transported to enchanted realms.
More than any single work dealing with the eastern world, including even the Bible, The Thousand and One Nights has provided a sometimes-stolid West with a contrasting sense of lightness and effervescence in its presentation of an ethereal domain. Whether embraced by children, academics, literary figures or those simply seeking escape, the Arabian Nights has attained a significance beyond that of any work of world literature from any Asian culture. Put simply, it is a book possessing origins, but lacking borders.
*A word taken from the Latin levare and converted into the French soleil levant or “rising sun”—the Morningland.