SEARCHING FOR
THE NIGHTS
Thereupon quoth the King, “By Allah I will never return to my capital nor sit upon the throne of my forebearers till I learn the truth about this …”
—“THE FISHERMAN AND THE GENIE”
No craze, no matter how popular, lasts forever. While the mock-oriental tale never died out completely—with modifications, it continues sporadically to this day—its status declined markedly in the nineteenth century as more westerners travelled in Asia and more eastern literature became available in the West. The genre’s fading power, however, did nothing to dent the popularity of the Arabian Nights. By 1793, English translations of the original work reached their eighteenth edition, yet by the early Victorian Age the rate of publication had actually doubled over that of the previous century.
Numerous factors helped keep the Nights’ mythos at the forefront of the western imaginative tradition: the “discovery” of more tales in Chavis and Cazotte’s Suite des mille et une nuits, increasing eastern travel and the growing use of illustrations in new editions all contributed. By now the world of the Nights was as familiar to the West as King Arthur’s England or tales of Charlemagne, their picture of the Islamic Orient more potent than the reality found in any travel book or history. For many in Europe and the Americas, by the nineteenth century, the Arabian Nights had become the ideal, as well as the idea, of the Muslim East.
With a growing Asian empire containing millions of Muslim subjects, this familiarity was reflected especially in English literature; although, just as the Nights had been transformed as a book over the years, so too had its influence. Western literary culture had become infused with the idea of an alien East taken largely from the Nights and its progeny, with direct influence replaced by more covert allusions. Emily Brontë scatters oriental motifs throughout Wuthering Heights, Wilkie Collins does the same in The Moonstone, while Robert Louis Stevenson wrote volumes of short stories he christened “New Arabian Nights,” tying some tales together through the characters of Prince Florizel of Bohemia and his friend Colonel Geraldine, wandering London’s streets à la Haroun al-Rashid and Jafar.
It is left to an unhappy boy named Charles Dickens, however, to best describe the lasting effect of the Arabian Nights on English readers. For Dickens, the Nights did more than provide solace from a miserable childhood; he and many other writers found it acted as a powerful teacher in the art of storytelling. Dickens would later pay homage to the book in several of his works, but most particularly in his 1850 essay “The Christmas Tree,” in which he wonderfully evokes a child’s imagination on reading the Arabian Nights:
Oh, now all common things become uncommon and enchanted to me. All lamps are wonderful; all rings are talismans. Common flower-pots are full of treasure … trees are for Ali Baba to hide in; beef-steaks are to be thrown into the Valley of Diamonds…. When I wake in bed … on the cold, dark winter mornings … I hear Dinarzade, “Sister, sister, if you are not yet awake, I pray you finish the history of the Young King of the Black Islands.” Scheherazade replies, “If my lord the Sultan will suffer me to live another day, sister, I will not only finish that, but tell you a more wonderful story yet.” Then, the gracious Sultan goes out, giving no orders for the execution, and we all three breathe again.
In Europe, the Nights went some way toward inspiring indigenous folklore collections. Both the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen recall childhood readings of the Nights as among their earliest memories of literature, just as all three later noted or used sources from the Nights in their own work. The Grimms believed a number of their collected “Household Stories” from the German states had their origins in The Thousand and One Nights—residue, perhaps, of eastern tales that had penetrated the West centuries before. Andersen almost certainly had stories from the Nights or similar collections in mind when composing some of his original fairy tales, including “The Little Mermaid” (parts of “Julnar the Sea-Born”), “The Tinder Box” (shades of “Aladdin”) and that classic of toadyism run amok, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”—versions of which appear in several folklore traditions, including “The Lady’s Twelfth Tale” in the fifteenth-century Turkish book The History of the Forty Viziers.
Surprisingly, for all the esteem with which the West held the Nights, for almost a hundred years, the Antoine Galland edition remained the only translation in existence, the source of every adaption since the beginning of the eighteenth century. Claims in some versions that its tales were “taken from the Arabic” were true only in the most roundabout way, since Galland adapted his volumes from Arabic manuscripts with supplementary material taken from other sources, making all other western editions of the Nights “Arabic” only by one degree of separation.
There were and are problems associated with translating the Nights into European languages, problems that sometimes add to the difficulty of determining the actual text of specific stories, let alone the work’s contents. Modern written Arabic contains a number of punctuation and diacritical marks designed to convey proper meaning and intent. With pre-modern Arabic manuscripts of the Nights lacking most of these marks (through quick or careless transcription or the difficulties of reading the original manuscript), European translators were forced to rely on their intuition to interpret words and context as best they could. Trusting to their own judgment and having few if any supplementary texts for comparison, it was a near-certainty that in places translators would misconstrue meaning. Sometimes they excised obscure or unfathomable words or passages altogether, altering the text by leaving out necessary details or important information.
Inevitably, however, translations independent of Galland began appearing early in the nineteenth century, including the first actual English edition, created by the orientalist Jonathan Scott in 1811. Scott used Galland’s text as well as an Arabic manuscript housed in Oxford’s Bodleian Library, but edited his work on the side of wholesomeness to avoid offending readers. Considered “vapid, frigid, and insipid” by some, it nevertheless proved highly popular and stands as the first true literary edition of the Arabian Nights in English, as well as the end of the monopoly of Les mille et une nuits.
Like a persistent itch, though, the feeling among some that the West was being exposed to only part of a great Arabic original would not go away. There was a haze of mystery to the Nights that intrigued the curious, but which also proved frustrating since so little was known about the work. In time, the expanding European presence in Asia and the development of oriental studies prompted a number of individuals to delve into the Nights’ history to uncover what Antoine Galland had left unanswered or had been unable to unmask. The Frenchman’s Syrian manuscript, while old, was believed incomplete, partly because of the difference between its title and the number of Nights contained in the text, but also because of Galland’s own statement that he used at least one more manuscript in his adaption, as well as the puzzle surrounding the orphan stories.
Now, many decades after its publication, the Arabian Nights was becoming more than an influential storybook. Its fame saw it pulled inexorably into the growing body of eastern literature deemed worthy of investigation. This situation prompted two linked activities, beginning about fifty years after the first appearance of Les mille et une nuits: the search for additional Arabic manuscripts of the Nights and its scholarly study in hopes of learning about its background. In the first half of the nineteenth century, these trends would intersect with the creation of exhaustive, printed Arabic editions of the work containing an actual 1001 Nights, although most of these compendiums were created by westerners anxious to see a beloved book reach literary fruition.
The first mystery to be addressed was the question of Alf Laila wa Laila. Part of the adventure of the Nights’ progress in the West is bound up with the desire to uncover a full Arabic manuscript of the work or, failing that, at least one including everything within Galland’s text, including his orphan stories. The growth of Asian trade in the last quarter of the eighteenth century facilitated this search as increasing numbers of Europeans travelled and worked in the Muslim East, giving some the opportunity to hunt for Arabic sources of the Nights. As eastern studies established itself as an actual scholarly field, western interest in manuscript copies of Alf Laila wa Laila also increased, in hopes of adding to the small store of knowledge about the work.
Caught up in the romance of the quest for lost treasure, travellers went to Indiana Jones–like extremes to seek out manuscripts. They consulted scholars, interpreters, diplomats, traders or anyone else who could help locate native book dealers or scribes who might have Arabic copies of the Nights for sale, or possess relevant information.
Antoine Galland was the first of these arcane treasure-hunters. Although he never left Europe after beginning Les mille et une nuits, Galland searched actively through agents and acquaintances for the remainder of Alf Laila wa Laila to add to his sources, never knowing that by a brilliant quirk of fate, he already owned the earliest and most extensive Arabic manuscript of the Nights in existence. Succeeding hunters included many sometimes-nameless western travellers or employees in the East who either sought out, or happened to come across, texts they were able to bring back from the Middle East.
A number of Alf Laila wa Laila texts were found by travellers, with more than twenty such manuscripts surviving to the present day.* But neither extensive nor partial manuscripts were easy to obtain. While there does not appear to have been a great number of texts to begin with, many were owned by the rawi, who were understandably reluctant to give up part of their professional life’s blood. There is also the suspicion that eastern copyists catering to foreign tastes fashioned compendiums of Alf Laila wa Laila stories in simple response to a market need. And a number of manuscripts were fragmentary or in disrepair from years of handling, making their contents hard to understand, even for western Arabic readers.
Those hoping to prove the legitimacy of Galland’s orphan stories were also doomed to disappointment, since none of his intruded material appears in manuscripts predating Les mille et une nuits. Moreover, readable texts often proved different in their number of Nights as well as in many of the details in those stories they actually had in common, making it nearly impossible to determine what constitutes the body of the Arabic Nights. With few if any manuscripts bearing the same contents, over time it became clear that ordinary concepts of bibliography do not apply to The Thousand and One Nights, leaving its composition variable to the point of inconstancy.
Yet, searching for the Nights was never a lost cause, since additional manuscripts meant added information, even if much of it was contradictory or incomplete. And tantalizing hints of unsolved mysteries did appear. One large manuscript brought to England from Egypt by the notorious rake Edward Wortley Montague—in a lifetime of misdeeds, he was only incidentally an Arabist—contains a number of stories not appearing in other sources, including one (“The Tale of the Fisherman’s Son”) bearing strong similarities to “Aladdin.” Overall, though, Europe’s growing collection of Alf Laila wa Laila manuscripts only added to the West’s fascination with the Nights without solving definitively the many riddles surrounding it, keeping the work shimmering indistinctly like a desert mirage.
Shimmering, that is, until western scholars began deciphering the mysteries behind the book’s origins. At the same time as travellers searched for Arabic texts of the Nights in the East, another development ran parallel with the hunt. By now the study of the Asian world had become sufficiently formalized that learned societies along the lines of France’s Société asiatique and Britain’s Royal Asiatic Society were established to further the study of eastern life, providing focused organizations for the growing number of orientalists to publish their findings and debate relevant issues.
Not coincidentally, this period also saw the earliest attempts at identifying the history of the Nights as Europeans began investigating the tale lying behind these great eastern tales. Antoine Galland had begun the process by speculating that some stories may have come from outside sources; in his third volume he notes the similarities between Sindbad and The Odyssey, but for the most part, the fairy-tale charm of his work overwhelmed any real curiosity about its origins.
At the end of the eighteenth century, however, the English literary critic Richard Hole sounded the gun for educated inquiry into the Nights’ background by publishing the first book devoted entirely to a study of the work. Hole’s 1797 Remarks on the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments focuses mostly on the Sindbad voyages, but it also theorizes about the origins of the larger book. Hole is among the first to promote the idea that there is more to the Nights than simple “Arabic” stories brought to the West. Recognizing that “we are … as much acquainted with the merits of the original [Nights] as we should be in respect to the former beauty of a human body from contemplating its skeleton,” Hole postulates that the tales come from a variety of regions and may be infused with parts of stories already known in the West.
Like Galland, Hole was struck by the similarities between Sindbad and Odysseus, believing the former story cycle might as well be called The Arabian Odyssey since it bears “the same resemblance … as an oriental mosch [mosque] does to a Grecian temple.” Presciently, he bemoans the fact that the Nights was fast becoming a work thought fit for children only, rather than one seen in its proper light as a collection of folk tales intended for adults. Largely for this reason, Hole believed the Nights urgently needed retranslation to provide versions independent of Galland, restoring the book to its rightful place as cultural folklore.
Several years later, the French orientalist Louis Mathieu Langles went further by speculating that the oldest Nights stories ultimately originated in India, but found their way into the Middle East to be added to regional tales. Langles was not the only one advancing the idea of multiple sources at this time. While preparing his English translation, Jonathan Scott recalled similarities between the Nights and other stories he’d heard during his days with the East India Company in Bengal, leading many to regard the Arabian Nights as “probably a tissue of tales invented at different times, some of them entirely fictitious, others founded on anecdotes of real history, upon which marvellous additions have been engrafted … altered and varied by different reciters.”
Such mobility, it was argued, accounted for both the book’s varied tone as well as similarities to such European stories as the fourteenth-century Canterbury Tales, where such creations as the Nights’ “Enchanted Horse [is] evidently [the same as] the Horse of Chaucer.” As the Napoleonic Wars raged in Europe and oriental studies assumed a structured outlook, attention was being redirected away from the Nights as a collection of entertaining stories, or even as literary inspiration. At last, the book was being seen as something to be studied as well as read. The gathering of more manuscripts stimulated interest in its background, in turn creating a desire for new collections and sparking fresh analysis, speculation and debate.
No one did more to bridge these trends of manuscript-hunting and inquiry than an Austrian nobleman, Baron Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall. Von Hammer-Purgstall stands at the apex of the search for the Arabic Nights and the inquiry into the book’s history. Not only was he a searcher for a full Alf Laila wa Laila copy as well as a translator, he was also the most important of the Nights’ early theorizers. His conjectures about the work’s background did more for the study of the book than most other scholars combined.
His career resembles Antoine Galland’s without the poverty. Born at Graz in 1774, Joseph Freiherr (“Free Lord” or Baron) von Hammer-Purgstall exhibited an early proficiency in languages, studying Turkish and Persian in Vienna before becoming an influential linguist (he eventually mastered ten languages) and oriental scholar. Like Galland, von Hammer-Purgstall spent part of his youth in Constantinople as an embassy interpreter and secretary. On his return to Europe, he was ennobled and became a privy councillor before joining the Austrian chancery under Prince Klemens von Metternich, retiring in 1835 to become a full-time writer.
Respected scholar though he is, von Hammer-Purgstall was as eccentric as William Beckford or Jan Potocki, obsessed with secret societies in general and the Knights Templar in particular. Some of his books read today like early conspiracy theories, abounding as they do in Freemasons and Templars worshipping Gnostic deities; in one he yammers on at length about alleged connections between the Knights Templars, the Jesuits, the medieval Persian sect of Shi’a “Assassins” and eighteenth-century French revolutionaries. Somehow, it made sense to him but, for all that, von Hammer-Purgstall can never be dismissed as a crank, since he also wrote highly regarded histories of the Ottoman Empire and the Mongol presence in Russia, made graceful translations of Persian poetry and acted as president of Vienna’s Science Academy (an institution founded partly on his suggestion). Austria’s oriental society, the Österreichische Orient-Gesellschaft Hammer-Purgstall, is named for him.
This aristocratic man of parts is best known today for his histories as well as his pioneering contributions to Arabian Nights research. Von Hammer-Purgstall is among the first oriental scholars—certainly among the first important ones—to peer behind the stories in an attempt to identify the work’s origins. One of his first tasks in Constantinople was to search for a full, or at least fuller, Alf Laila wa Laila manuscript. In this he failed, but it seems he later came upon an extensive manuscript in Cairo containing details not found in the Galland Manuscript.
Unfortunately, this text, like Galland’s mystery fourth Arabic volume, was lost, but not before von Hammer-Purgstall made a French translation while still in Constantinople. This text has also been lost, although a German version was published in 1825. Frankly, from what can be gleaned from the German translation, von Hammer-Purgstall’s version of the Nights was not very good, as he does the same kind of adapting and “improving” as many others, fashioning an abridged edition suitable for everyone but useless in providing anything closer to Alf Laila wa Laila.
Fortunately, “the learned Baron’s” contributions go further than producing a mediocre new translation. Intrigued by Louis Langles’s conjecture about some stories originating in India, von Hammer-Purgstall built on Langles’s theories to push things further. After studying al-Masudi’s and Ibn al-Nadim’s writings, he published groundbreaking articles in 1826 and 1839 issues of the French Journal Asiatique. These stressed the importance of Persia in the development of Alf Laila wa Laila, postulating that the work had absorbed Indian stories, then augmented them with indigenous Persian tales to create Hazar Afsanah before transferring the work wholesale to the Arabs sometime before the tenth century, where another layer of stories was added to form the earliest versions of The Thousand and One Nights.
This was a giant leap in determining the work’s origins. But for his troubles, von Hammer-Purgstall’s theories brought him professional grief, as he entered into a rather genial theoretical conflict with the eminent English Arabist Edward William Lane (Lane had his own theories and produced his own translation); a not-so-genial conflict with France’s great scholar Sylvestre de Sacy, who felt the tales were too innately “Arabic” to have come from Persia and India; and was roundly attacked by a figure much closer to home, de Sacy’s disciple Gustav Weil, whose German part-translation of the Nights began appearing after 1837. To some extent, this debate about the work’s background continues today, but there is no mistaking the importance of Baron Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall to the history of The Thousand and One Nights. By the time of his death in 1856, theories regarding the book’s origins were divided between those who believed in a multicultural background and those who clung to the belief that regardless of external influences, the Nights is essentially a product of the Arab literary tradition. That there was a debate at all is proof that by the Victorian Age, the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments was seen as more than the sum of its pleasing parts. By then it had grown beyond its vast readership to become a concern of the scholarly class, who to this day view the work as an evergreen creation possessing endless pathways of inquiry.
The search for the Arabic Nights reached a kind of climax in the first half of the nineteenth century, when the gathering of additional manuscripts led directly to the creation of the first printed texts of Alf Laila wa Laila. Barring some fantastic future find, four such printed works—known as Calcutta I, the Breslau, the Bulaq and Calcutta II—have become the standard Arabic editions for translators to work from, although their contents are far removed from early versions and all contain material which, strictly speaking, does not belong in the book. Be that as it may, these collections remain the only editions of the Nights that are not revisions or reprints of earlier versions, with three of these “recensions”—revised texts created in a critical manner—done entirely in response to the western fascination with the Nights’ bewitching world. Together, they finally saw the Nights appear in printed Arabic form, but the delay in their appearance requires a word of explanation.
Printing in Asia has a significantly longer history than in the West, even if it remained a less-developed art before the nineteenth century. By the 1400s, the idea of applying inked types to paper had spread from China to Korea, Japan and then Europe. This earliest form of printing, called “block printing” (inking multiple characters on carved wooden blocks), emerged in the eighth century CE, but within several centuries the idea of rearranging characters for each new page—adjustable or “movable” type—gained precedence and remained the chief method of printing until the arrival of digital technology in the 1980s. In Europe, and probably independent of any Asian printing developments that might have made their way west, the German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg spent years experimenting with hand-cranked wine and olive presses before printing two hundred copies of his famous Bible in the 1450s, accelerating the Renaissance by making printed texts available to an emerging and literate middle class. Within decades, printing presses appeared in Venice, Paris, London, even Spanish-conquered Mexico City. Soon an information explosion was underway in the West as printing progressed to the point where within a generation of Columbus’s voyages, European presses were capable of producing a text using Arabic script typeface.
In the paper-rich Middle East, block-printing techniques were used routinely in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries for pamphlets and other small written works, but creating movable type based on classical Arabic script—which emphasizes calligraphy and joins the letters of some words—was difficult and decreased readability. Most texts within the Muslim world, then, continued to be laboriously hand-copied by scribes, a time-consuming process that meant it often took months or even years to produce a single volume.
There were also cultural questions about the actual value of printing as a craft, since, unlike the western Bible, there was no single eastern work—not even the Koran—that was sufficiently guaranteed to have a constant market and therefore make it commercially viable to print in large quantities. (Although the Koran was widely read by the literate, most had to memorize suras by rote.) Tied to this was a belief in some circles that as a series of texts, holy books were more sacred if they were handwritten—the product of devoted human labour—and that making such works by machine lessened their hallowed worth.
For these reasons, the craft of printing in the East, while developing initially in Asia, languished behind Europe and North America until well into the nineteenth century. Many of the first presses to appear in the eastern world—such as the first Arabic press in Cairo, installed by Napoleon Bonaparte to facilitate French investigations into Egyptology during the brief French occupation—came about as a result of the European presence, but they also acted as spurs toward the later development of indigenous Asian printing and therefore affected the creation of the first-ever printed Arabic versions of The Thousand and One Nights.
The first important recension of Arabic Nights stories came about some seventy years after Les mille et une nuits, but it was no more than a series of handwritten works from the Egyptian branch of Alf Laila wa Laila tales and no copies are known to survive today. More than a century later, this was dubbed the “Zotenberg Egyptian Recension” (ZER) after Hermann Zotenberg of France’s Bibliothèque nationale, a late-nineteenth-century librarian who made an intensive study of surviving Alf Laila wa Laila manuscripts in Europe. Zotenberg concluded that the bulk of these texts are Egyptian in origin with a few, like the Galland Manuscript, produced in Syria. One appeared to be a copy of an actual Baghdadi text, but it has since been shown to be a clever fake put together by the copyist Michael Sabbagh from various Nights manuscripts in Paris.
Most manuscripts, Zotenberg believed, were composed more recently, in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries, and possibly in response to the western interest in the Nights. However they came about, they were certainly younger by hundreds of years than the three-volume Syrian manuscript Galland found, which, after considerable effort of examination and comparison to other manuscripts, Zotenberg pegged as being compiled sometime in the fourteenth century.* The Egyptian manuscripts, Zotenberg found, often contain more stories than their Syrian counterparts but tended to be more streamlined in the telling, leaving out details or other information found in Syrian tellings of the same tales.
Since a number of their stories are distorted to the point of incomprehensibility, the Egyptian texts could have been made hurriedly, with less care than had been taken with the Syrian manuscripts, again probably in response to the influx of interested Europeans looking for Alf Laila wa Laila manuscripts. All the same, ZER remains a series of handwritten works, a kind of grab bag of Arabic stories that may or may not belong to the earliest Nights. It was not until the early nineteenth century that the earliest printed Arabic texts were assembled as a by-product of the western fascination with the Arabian Nights.
Around 1813, in response to a request from the Honourable East India Company for a compilation of available Arabic Nights stories, a Calcutta language teacher at Fort William College named Sheikh Ahmed ibn Muhammad Shirwani edited a text for use as a teaching tool for Brits wanting to learn Arabic. This first printed text came about as a direct result of commercial politics—the outgrowth of an East India Company directive requiring its officials to familiarize themselves with Indian languages, especially Persian and Arabic, so native revenue-gatherers and judges could be replaced with Europeans. Over time, language training became a requirement for professional advancement within the company and later, within the British Crown’s Indian Civil Service; failure could result in non-promotion or even dismissal.
The text edited by Shirwani can be seen as part of this policy of enforced language instruction—a collection of Arabian Nights stories in Arabic designed for teaching that language through a familiar text, but not undertaken as a scholarly project. Printed in two volumes between 1814 and 1818, this “Shirwani Text”—better known as Calcutta I—was created under the direct patronage and support by the East India Company as a kind of school textbook for the British.
Recognizing that language teaching is best done through a work already well known to students, the collection covers only the first two hundred Nights—about a hundred to each volume—and is the first printed edition of Alf Laila wa Laila in existence. For all that, Calcutta I is a problematic text, since Sheikh Shirwani does not describe his manuscript sources and the text’s makeup remains vague. Also, it seems certain that Shirwani distorted things by modifying some stories and padding the text with outside material, including the Sindbad voyages taken from European editions.
There followed a gap of six years before the second text began appearing—a twelve-volume compilation known as the “Breslau Text” (1824–43). If anything, this work is even more problem-plagued than Calcutta I, since its first eight volumes were printed under the supervision of the German scholar Christian Maximilian Habicht and seem to have been cobbled together from sundry Nights and non- Nights collections.
Habicht claimed he had received a complete manuscript of Alf Laila wa Laila from Tunisia and it was from this full text that he began translating various Nights stories into German in 1824, publishing his results the following year. At the same time, Habicht began publishing in printed form the Arabic manuscript he claimed he’d been sent from North Africa. By the time of his death in 1839, eight volumes had been printed, but the work remained unfinished. Thereafter, a student of Habicht’s, Heinrich Fleischer, undertook the task of completing and (that word again) “improving” the text, publishing a final four volumes between 1842 and 1844 to make the Breslau Text the only “complete” Arabic text of the Nights containing a full 1001 Nights to appear in Europe, as well as the first printed text in any language to actually contain 1001 Nights of storytelling.
But in a repeat of the bogus “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba” manuscripts, it seems very likely that Habicht’s vaunted full “Tunisian” manuscript never existed. Like the Michael Sabbagh “Baghdadi” manuscript copy, Habicht’s work is a mishmash stitched together from material provided by different manuscripts of Alf Laila wa Laila floating around Paris (where Habicht worked for a time as part of the Prussian legation), other story collections and, when it appeared in 1835, the next printed Arabic edition, the Egyptian Bulaq Text.
Maximilian Habicht was no con artist. He had a solid background as a teacher of Arabic, studying with the esteemed Sylvester de Sacy in Paris before joining the faculty of the University of Breslau. But given the number of Nights frauds perpetrated in the decades following Les mille et une nuits, it must be asked why someone of his calibre would stoop to palming off a composite work as a complete edition of the Nights. To enhance his professional reputation as the man who uncovered the illusory “full” manuscript of The Thousand and One Nights? To reap the same kind of success as Antoine Galland and hopefully become wealthy from the effort?
Or perhaps Habicht’s desire to have and hold a full version of the Arabian Nights was merely an extreme case of that same desire found throughout the West. Trying to patch together an edition with 1001 Nights from various sources when the work’s origins are so obscure is not, as some have noted, such a terrible act in itself; it was, after all, the method by which Antoine Galland introduced the Nights to Europe in the first place. But most of Galland’s modifications were not done until after an arduous and fruitless search for a full Alf Laila wa Laila. By coming forward with a patchwork version he claimed was a complete Arabic Nights, Habicht muddied an already-confusing situation further by perpetuating the myth that an Alf Laila wa Laila manuscript containing an actual 1001 Nights of storytelling existed somewhere.
And yet, given the age, this is an almost understandable, if not quite forgivable, reaction. After enjoying what they thought to be the “Part-Nights” for so long, Europeans of the time must have felt compelled to track down a full, original version of this most famous Arabic-language book. The move toward a scientific worldview during the Enlightenment, when the earth and all that lay within it was believed to be subject to a systematic human understanding, meant a belief that discovery, followed by a process of codification, would fall naturally upon even those literary works whose fame rested on part-versions. For the Arabian Nights, having no original edition or author seems to have been no obstacle to the West’s hunger to find—or, if need be, invent—one.
Perhaps there was also a willful intent to assign at least some sense of authority to a book that was proving so hard to identify. For a time right after the first appearance of Les mille et une nuits, there were some who believed that Antoine Galland had produced the work entirely from his own imagination. Even when it became clear he was adapting an actual eastern work, Galland was still perceived in some way as at least one of the authors of a book he had rendered into a European language.
This perception has clung to most of those translators following Galland. We speak easily of the Scott edition of the Arabian Nights, or the Lane version, or the Payne and Burton editions, with their similarities and differences. For a book with a host of questions surrounding it, assigning a provisional authority to something reworked into another language is not an unattractive idea. The theory that each translator puts such a personal mark on a translated work that they earn a modicum of its creation has merit, especially when the book has no assigned author. Taking such a mutable work as the Nights and recreating it in Arabic or another language is tantamount to fashioning it anew, of rewriting it for another audience.
This is what the editors and translators of this puzzling collection have done time and again. They have rewritten, and continue to rewrite, the Arabian Nights in the same way as a filmmaker remakes a previous version of a motion picture by using the same essential elements, but still manages to create a new, individual work. By doing this from the time Europe began gathering manuscripts of Alf Laila wa Laila, the West has entered into an unspoken collaboration with the East to further develop The Thousand and One Nights.
What has emerged bears only a faint resemblance to however early versions of the work looked, but is still in keeping with the idea of the Nights as an endlessly adaptable compendium of stories from distant lands. It can be claimed that the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments as the world knows the book today has become the co-operative product of both East and West—practically the only classic of world literature that has developed through the efforts of two cultures that are sometimes at violent odds with one another, but are capable of producing a work belonging equally to both.
With the Breslau Text considered conspicuously faulty, the next edition, the “Bulaq Text” of 1835, seen through the press by Sheikh Abd al-Rahman al-Safti al-Sharqawi, was a real step forward. Printed in the Bulaq suburb of Cairo, it was the product of the first indigenous printing press in Egypt (installed in 1821 by the viceroy, Muhammad Ali), as well as the only one of these four Arabic texts to be printed by Arabs. The collection is one of a series of fictional works in Persian, Arabic and Turkish published for Egypt’s elite; most had something like a thousand copies run off in what we would think of today as “limited editions.”
From the more uniform and correct Arabic used, the Bulaq Text appears founded on a single Egyptian manuscript of the Nights from the eighteenth century, although like Sheikh Shirwani, al-Sharqawi gives no indication of his sources. It could be that the manuscript was compiled by one of those scribes who fashioned a text of Alf Laila wa Laila because of the Nights’ popularity in the West and didn’t care about the stories used. Such is its general consistency, however, that the Bulaq Text quickly became a main source for most subsequent printed editions of the Nights, including an important English translation printed several years later and the four-volume Arabic “Macnaghten” or Calcutta II of 1839–42, from which the first uncensored translations were made.
This last edition, Calcutta II, is the most extensive of printed Arabic texts, and has become the chief source from which unabridged translations have been made. In addition to the Bulaq Text, the main editor, the East India Company linguist and political officer William Hay Macnaghten (his 1841 murder at Kabul, Afghanistan, helped spark the First Afghan War), also used Calcutta I and the Breslau Text for comparison and correction, besides relying heavily on an Egyptian manuscript that belonged to the Anglo-Irish army officer and Persian specialist Major Turner Macan.
Because Macnaghten and his associates used more sources than their predecessors, Calcutta II is often thought the most complete and accurate Arabic edition of the Nights in existence. But it too has its errors and problems, not the least of which are unresolved questions concerning the so-called Macan Manuscript. This had been purchased following Macan’s death by a Charles Brownlow, who submitted it to an examination by the Asiatic Society of Bengal for authenticity. All the examiners, including Macnaghten, pronounced it genuine, recommending that it be edited and published. But they still could not pin down definitively where the text originated, or to which branch of Nights manuscripts—the Syrian or the Egyptian—it belonged.
Not that they tried all that hard or even cared, wanting only to print an Arabic text with 1001 Nights. Confusing things even more is the inclusion of material taken from the Breslau Text, further broadcasting its (to put it kindly) questionable contents, and meaning that translations of the Arabian Nights based on Calcutta II are either heavily “contaminated” from the early Nights, as some believe, or simply include more supplementary material added to the body of the original tales, as ancient storytellers and scribes constantly did.
The whole thing now seems pretty incestuous, with editions using material already available in texts or manuscripts regardless of its often-dubious lineage. Yet how bad this situation seems depends on one’s viewpoint. Given that Antoine Galland altered his sources to create essentially new Nights stories or inserted independent material wherever he chose fit, it can be argued that using other material, even that which is known to have been forged, is not much different from the way the Nights first appeared in the West: as a series of anonymous, Arabic-language stories.
But it can also be argued that—questions of absolute invention aside—the West’s augmentation of the book takes the Nights’ development one step further from the fluid use of stories by the rawi and the scribes committing them to paper. If the core of the Arabian Nights lies in the Arabic Alf Laila wa Laila, then the West has carried on the tradition of enlarging the work as did those easterners that came before, creating a kind of “Greater Arabian Nights” extending from its original geographical and cultural parameters to encompass the whole world. This “Greater Nights” is like a cone, with the earliest stories in Hazar Afsanah forming the bottom tip and the remainder expanding upwards into Alf Laila wa Laila, after which the work’s western history adds further expansive mass to its figure.
Although the information surrounding these printed editions appears to be technical, not one is “scholarly” in the traditional sense, since their editors simply revised available material by correcting obvious mistakes and making stylistic changes before setting the type. Little supporting material regarding sources is offered; prefaces and introductions are perfunctory at best. But they still remain of vital importance by assembling in printed form many Alf Laila wa Laila stories bouncing around the eastern world for centuries in various manuscripts, producing something approaching standard Arabic compilations of a work that, before the nineteenth century, effectively had none.
If this seems curious for such a durable work as the Nights, it should be remembered that Alf Laila wa Laila held no special place in Muslim society. Popular and enduring as its stories were, it never set the imagination of the eastern world on fire as it has done so profoundly in the West. It is the western world that has put the Nights on its pedestal, encouraging the creation of three of the four Arabic texts (Calcutta I, Breslau and Calcutta II), while also defining its basic history.
Of equal importance, these printed texts provide the basic materials for scholars to continue the work of reading, translating and studying the gossamer work that is The Thousand and One Nights. In this sense, for all his padding and insertions, Calcutta I’s editor, Sheikh Shirwani, was right. Anyone today wanting to learn Arabic could do far worse than consult these editions and their translations as their personal Rosetta Stones.
The growth of empire characterizing the period during which these Arabic texts were printed saw a simultaneous and significant change in western perceptions regarding the eastern world. Whereas previous generations viewed the East as a source of wealth and knowledge, they also had a sincere desire to become better acquainted with non-Christian cultures. With the Arabian Nights aiding in a better popular presentation of Asian societies, old images of Muslims and other easterners as corrupt and immoral gave ground to new curiosities about cultures fast becoming linked to the West.
This was not to last. A change of attitude occurred as the West grew more technologically adept and internationally dominant and its involvement with Asia became more directly political and economic. The former picture of the East as a bewitching land of enchantment was slowly replaced by a belief in this same region’s essential stagnation. What was true of the oriental world a thousand or two thousand years ago, it was believed, is true today and probably always will be. The Romantic notion of this very timelessness was now held as evidence of the East’s inferiority relative to a progressive Europe and North America—a West shrugging off old cultural habits as it embraced the future.
As Europe, especially, came to identify itself with republicanism or constitutional monarchy, practicality and racial vigour, common images of the Orient now focused on presumptions of cultural inertia. The medieval world of the Arabian Nights was hardly the only, or even the most significant, factor in this changing perception, but the book’s popular portrayal of an immemorial East no doubt played some unconscious role in the new perspective. By appearing to confirm cultural differences, western editions of the Nights and the oriental tale genre helped solidify Europe’s sense of an oriental Other—an everlasting realm that may have its special attractions, but which cannot be considered an intellectual or cultural equal of the dynamic West.
Special attractions, indeed. Aside from its economic attractiveness, the eastern world still held an allure, one now based not on sacredness but on expectations of a natural sexual heat emanating from a region where the senses were thought to reign supreme. Images of western men consorting with eastern women—the familiar coupling with the exotic—predate the appearance of the Nights by centuries. Jason and Medea, Solomon and Sheba, Antony and Cleopatra; each of these affairs is the by-product of a western identification with the East as a repository of sexually available women. The concept of “dusky maidens” housed in intrigue-riddled seraglios or pining for absent lovers like Coleridge’s Abyssinian maid was a picture delighting western imaginations—an eastern sexual fantasy created by the West for its diversion. Although he was writing satirically, Oliver Goldsmith still spoke for many when remarking, “I am told they have no balls, drums nor operas in the East, but then they have got a seraglio…. I am told, your Asiatic beauties are the most convenient women alive, for they have no souls….”
In our time, the Nights has been criticized for its alleged misogyny and praised as a proto-feminist book. Evidence for both viewpoints can be found within so expansive a work, but what cannot be denied is the pervasive erotic element colouring unexpurgated editions. Besides such ribald stories as “The Tale of the Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad” and “The Goodwife of Cairo and her Four Lovers,” Scheherazade’s own frame story is based on the existence of adulterous relations. In the stories themselves, sexual adventures often figure as plot devices. Lovers and spouses cheat on each other, men visit brothels, sexual predators target young boys, lesbian relations occur in harems, slave girls are the playthings of kings and men chase women simply because men chase women.
There can be no doubt that European expectations of unscrupulous sexuality played some part in the West’s embracing of the Nights’ unspoken promise of novel pleasures. It has been noted that the Galland version and the numerous abridged editions are conspicuously clean compared with the actual Arabic Alf Laila wa Laila. All the same, independently gathered information about harems, communal baths, slave markets and veiled beauties helped heighten a historical sense of the East as a land glutted with erotic offerings, and the world of the Nights provided the backdrop for innumerable carnal fantasies about a place where western sexual standards were unimportant and very much unwanted.
By the early Victorian Age, the existence of printed Arabic editions of the Nights and the growing numbers of western Arabic readers made it clear that the full flavour of the work incorporated much more than was generally available in older translations. Once again the Arabian Nights was transforming—or perhaps re transforming is the better term—as it began turning away from its fairy-tale persona to assume more of its true nature as a treasure-house of story for all ages and sensibilities.
The accumulation of Alf Laila wa Laila manuscripts and the creation of printed Arabic compendiums played a decisive role in redirecting the Nights. By the late 1830s, attempts to produce uncensored versions gathered steam. The German Arabist Gustav Weil issued a part-translation (no verse) between 1837 and 1841 using the Bulaq and Breslau texts, as well as manuscripts held in the library of the dukes of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (the family’s Prince Albert married Queen Victoria; their descendents reign together as Britain’s royal family), but saw many potentially offensive passages changed by an editor his publisher hired to make the work more saleable. Weil was not pleased, but could do nothing.
In English, the first attempt at translating a completely unexpurgated version—prose, poetry and ribald parts all together—was undertaken by the lawyer and East India Company civil servant Henry Whitelock Torrens. Torrens began work in 1838 at Simla (now Shimla), the summer seat of the Indian government, using the Turner Macan Manuscript then being edited into Calcutta II. Despite his limited grasp of Arabic, Torrens was intent on rendering both the prose and verse portions of the work (the sexuality he leaves in, but tones down), yet found the task so onerous that after publishing the first fifty Nights at Calcutta and discovering that the great English scholar Edward William Lane had embarked on a similar project, he stopped work altogether, leaving a translation that included only a part-version of the first stories in Calcutta II.
Torrens wasn’t really wrong to abandon his project, for Lane was one of his century’s great Arabists. The son of a clergyman, he had been privately tutored in classics and mathematics, becoming so advanced that when he went up to Cambridge to study for the math tripos, he discovered he could already do them all and so left the university to train as an engraver in London. Diagnosed with a mild form of tuberculosis, Lane sailed for Egypt in search of better health at twenty-four, spending several years in Cairo assembling an array of materials for his projected career in lithography. He also became immersed in eastern studies and saw his career undergo another course correction.
With a deep background in Arabic culture (in later life, Lane returned to Cairo to work on his monumental Arabic–English Lexicon, a dictionary of Arabic words and their English equivalents), in 1836 Lane published Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, a hugely influential work presenting as full a picture of contemporary Egyptian life as was possible within the confines of print.
This early work is an ethnological classic, and one of the most detailed and sympathetic portraits of eastern life ever to appear. But it also has its flaws. In a reflection of the western belief in the East’s inability to progress—at least without help—Lane includes a chapter on storytelling where he notes that oral recitations of The Thousand and One Nights in Cairo are rare and copies of Alf Laila wa Laila hard to come by, but he still believes that the stories contained in the work continue to represent much of Cairo life as it had existed practically unchanged for more than a millennium.
Partly for this reason, Lane returned to Egypt in 1838 to begin work on a new English translation of the Nights—something he viewed as a semi-sequel to Modern Egyptians. Working mostly from the Bulaq Text, Lane envisioned the work partly as a manual for Britons on Muslim life and so annotated the text extensively, providing supplementary footnotes on everything he felt relevant. Lane’s notes were later published as a separate volume entitled Arabian Society in the Middle Ages: Studies from the Thousand and One Nights, making this last work a kind of companion piece to Modern Egyptians. As Lane progressed with what he admitted was a version of the Nights meant strictly for the drawing-room, changing and even omitting offensive material, his edition started appearing in monthly instalments between 1838 and 1841, when it was published in London as a three-volume book.
Reviewers and readers were kind. The critic and writer James Henry Leigh Hunt called it “a most valuable, praiseworthy, painstaking, learned and delightful work,” and Thomas Carlyle read Lane’s Nights avidly while preparing his lecture on Muhammad for Heroes and Hero-Worship. But it left a bad taste in the mouths of those who loved the Galland version, since Lane tries hard to push his own edition by disparaging his predecessor, claiming that Galland had “excessively perverted the work” with his insufficient knowledge of Muslim customs. By employing a heavy, pseudo-biblical style he feels appropriate to the subject, Lane contends that vernacular adaptions like Galland’s are not in keeping with the spirit of the original Nights, since they are altered extravagantly (today he might just say “dumbed down”) to suit European readers. This argument was taken up later by Lane’s nephew and future editor, Stanley Lane-Poole, who took Galland to task for his “lameness, puerility and indecency”—three nasty traits few other observers have ever noted about either Antoine Galland or his Nights.
Arguments and even quarrels are part and parcel of intellectual life. Once interested orientalists began creating independent versions of the Nights, it was inevitable that some would take issue with Galland’s altered paraphrase of Alf Laila wa Laila. Less forgivably, as a devoted partisan of Egypt, Lane missed the historical boat entirely by insisting that the Nights is most likely the product of one or two author-compilers who created the work in either Syria or Egypt between 1475 and 1525 CE, and that the Bulaq Text printed in his beloved Cairo contains the final or “actual” text of Alf Laila wa Laila. Lane provides little evidence for either contention, outside his strong personal preference for Arabic Egypt.
Edward Lane might have blasted Galland, but his own version received a drubbing from a formidable Arabist. Lane’s translation and especially his theories about the Nights’ history were hotly contested by the English polymath Richard Francis Burton. While acknowledging Lane as an “amiable and devoted Arabist,” Burton nevertheless skewered him for producing an expurgated edition that was “garbled and mutilated, unsexed and unsouled.” By making his “drawing-room” translation, Lane cut many of the tales in the Bulaq Text and rewrote parts of others, causing Burton to snort that Edward Lane had done nothing but convert “the Arabian Nights into the Arabian Chapters.”
Lane’s contention that the Nights is entirely an Arab work earned Burton’s particular scorn. “When he [Lane] pronounces The Nights … purely ‘Arab’ … his opinion is entitled to no more deference than his deriving the sub-African … from Arabia….” From consultation with Hermann Zotenberg and careful examination of many of the surviving Nights manuscripts in Europe, Burton knew that the theories of von Hammer-Purgstall and others in his camp were right. The Arabic version of The Thousand and One Nights is only a secondary stage in the work’s evolution; the book’s origins extend back far further than the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries, and the oldest stories predate the ninth century CE.
By Burton’s day, a thousand years after the appearance of the first Alf Laila wa Laila collections, enough historical work had been done on the Nights that few researchers believed an original Arabic edition containing 1001 Nights existed anywhere, or that the figure accurately described the book’s contents. The Arabian Nights is no more the product of a single place or person than is jazz; it developed over centuries from the seeds of the storytelling tradition to become literature’s great shape-shifter.
By the Victorian Age, it no longer mattered much. The creation of printed Arabic texts revealed that Alf Laila wa Laila bore a different tone to western versions of the Nights. It was now acknowledged among those familiar with Arabic that there existed a wide gap between the European and original Nights; the West had so far seen something less than the whole—only a kind of shadow Arabian Nights.
The creation of the Arabic recensions, while each contains problems, nevertheless served a dual purpose by providing the Arabic world with comprehensive editions of Alf Laila wa Laila and the West with the resources to fashion translations including previously expurgated material. Henry Torrens had begun in a tentative way to approach this issue by creating an unexpurgated Nights translated directly from the Arabic before passing the baton to Lane who, despite his criticism of Galland, nevertheless trod the same path as the Frenchman by reserving the “right to omit such tales, anecdotes, etc., as are comparatively uninteresting or on any account objectionable.”
With a mass of printed and handwritten material now available to work with, the stage was set for bolder attempts to render the full flavour of The Thousand and One Nights into western languages. By the late Victorian Age, two scholars of vastly different temperaments and experiences resolved separately to do exactly that, although both ran the risk of disgrace or even imprisonment for their efforts.
* Alf Laila wa Laila was not the only work sought; in his edition of the Nights, Sir Richard Burton notes that for years he has “vainly troubled friends and correspondents” to be “ever on the lookout” for the lost Persian storybook Hazar Afsanah.
*Most researchers now maintain that according to textural evidence, the Galland Manuscript cannot be dated earlier than sometime in the mid-fifteenth century, or prior to the earliest Renaissance voyages of discovery.