THE ARABIAN NIGHTS
TODAY
And I threw myself down … on the raft … whilst the
stream ceased not to carry me along …
—“THE SIXTH VOYAGE OF SINDBAD THE SEAMAN”
The restoration of the Arabian Nights as earthy folklore marked the peak of the book’s fame in the West, but not its status. Even as the Nights reached its greatest popularity near the end of the Victorian Era, becoming after the Bible “the most popular book in the world … the only book … that … is a favourite with all ranks and times of life,” events were underway that would see it relinquish its place as a premier fabulist work. Henceforth the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments would be acknowledged as a classic of world literature, but would never again be so universally read, nor so treasured.
The development of the fantasy novel, as well as the evolution of literature intended specifically for children, both accelerated during the Victorian years, so that by the early twentieth century, both were established genres. Now the Nights found itself competing with other imaginative tales for the hearts and minds of western readers, a rivalry that had not existed in any meaningful way a century before. Despite the existence of “adult” versions of the Arabian Nights, by the turn of the last century the book had “ceased to be part of the common literary culture of adults,” with most editions falling almost entirely into the new realm of “kids lit,” where they remain today. It could be, too, that the slow accumulation of information about the work played a role in its decline. Knowledge always kills mystery; by answering some of the riddles surrounding the Nights, orientalists constructed a measure of its history, but they also wiped away much of the book’s glamour. Its exoticism became lost in a sea of scholarly concern as the Nights’ very fame served to smother part of its light.
Of greater impact, however, was the emergence of a new literary genre tied to the West’s industrial progress. To many, the developing technology of the modern age was a new kind of magic wrought by sorcerers of science, an industrial witchery mirrored in a type of literature replacing the supernaturally imaginative with the technologically progressive. By employing aspects of actual scientific discovery, a series of authors created works reflective of these discoveries, works that eventually became known as “science fiction.” Direct cause and effect are often elusive entities, but it is perhaps no accident that the Arabian Nights’ decline in readership coincided roughly with the rise of the first fabulist works dealing with the age of machines.
Like the Nights, science fiction has its origins in travellers’ tales of distant lands, from which writers could then construct speculative fiction involving otherworldly journeys. By the early Industrial Age, the first true fictional works incorporating elements of actual science began appearing. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and The Last Man (1826) are often considered among the first real science-fiction stories, with some of Edgar Allan Poe’s works viewed as proto–science fiction. But the genre found its true legs only after 1863, when Jules Verne published his first novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon. Thereafter, the floodgates opened for technologically based speculative fiction, including Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, some of Jack London’s early work and the celebrated “scientific romances” of the young H.G. Wells.
What saved the Nights from relative obscurity—who reads Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther today, although it was a huge international success in the late eighteenth century?—was the extent to which its mystique had become ingrained in western society. Even though fewer readers actually bothered reading the work any more, its name continued to resound across the years and cultures. The book’s ability to transform has never been restricted to print alone, for its general aura has been kept alive by other artistic forms, maintaining its visibility through fresh expressions of the Nights’ cultural empire.
Almost as soon as the work appeared in Europe, alternative presentations of its mythos appeared, and not only in the mock-oriental tale. Stage, musical and artistic presentations of eastern exoticism began cropping up even as the Arabian Nights was still making its way around Europe, and continue to this day. The English pantomime tradition went on tinkering with the “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba” scenarios well into the nineteenth century, while musical scores incorporating “oriental” themes appeared practically from day one of the Nights’ publication. Probably, the most famous musical homage, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s four-movement Scheherazade (Op. 35), remains a staple of symphony orchestras the world over to this day.
The visual arts have also played a powerful role in keeping the work alive and familiar. Eighteenth-, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century orientalist art was an outgrowth of the western vogue for eastern motifs. Whether in paintings, book illustrations, travel posters or later product advertisements (think Camel cigarettes, “Arabian” coffee, even Sheik condoms), allusions to the East were as much a part of the general “Oriental Renaissance” as they were direct results of the European vogue for the Nights. Yet the book’s standing as the premier depiction of the Muslim Orient provided artists with a surfeit of material to express western predilections for the distant and alluringly illicit. Through orientalized art, the perceived East became neither a geographical nor a cultural realm, but rather a psychological playground in which the West could express its exotic (and erotic) fantasies. Western theatrical works dealing with oriental stories and settings undoubtedly have a pre-Galland history, but they increased substantially after the appearance of Les mille et une nuits and persist in such twentieth-century extravaganzas as The Desert Song, Kismet and the Ali Baba takeoff Chu Chin Chow.
Often these presentations do little more than graft new elements onto basic structures; those that directly reference the Arabian Nights usually do so by modifying the original stories while maintaining a general familiarity of setting and mood. Yet the decline in the Nights’ readership parallels the appearance of a new artistic form that would go a long way toward maintaining the book’s fame; by itself, it has come close to replacing traditional storytelling methods as the preferred way of imparting narrative.
Among the late nineteenth century’s scientific marvels was a new medium known as “moving” or “motion” pictures. At first a simple novelty depicting ordinary domestic or street scenes, within a few years, cinematic pioneers were experimenting with “specialized effects”—using camera tricks to create unreal images—transforming the emerging art from straightforward documentary presentations to visual constructions with their own imaginative images.
The dreamworld of the Nights was ready-made for cinema’s ability to manipulate reality, and films depicting actual Arabian Nights stories or takeoffs are nearly as old as the medium itself. Just as Les mille et une nuits spurred creation of the European mock-oriental tale, so too has the familiarity of the Nights provided ample grist for the ravenous medium of moving pictures.
Most films dealing with the Nights are the cinematic equivalent of the lesser oriental knock-offs of the eighteenth century: at best colourful curiosities, at worst Saharas of junk adding to the impression that the work is, if not actually childish, then certainly something juvenile. Known cynically in the film trade as “t and s” productions (for “tits and sand”), these films often include such stock elements as foretold liberators and/or masked avengers, evil usurpers/wizards, disinherited princes or princesses, scantily clad maidens and recycled names like Ahmed or Ali (hero), Kasim, Hasan or Jafar (villain), Abdul or Abdullah (comedic sidekick) and a love interest named Jasmine or Yasmin (Scheherazade is even used on occasion). Add recurrent themes like roses possessing talismanic powers and a rousing revolt/battlefield finale, and the standard “t and s” picture becomes more a substratum of the swashbuckler genre than a story with distinctive Arabian Nights features.
Of the many productions referencing the Nights since the advent of cinema, only the 1924 Douglas Fairbanks epic The Thief of Bagdad, its 1940 Alexander Korda remake and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1974 erotic treatment Il fiore delle mille e una notte (“The Flower of the Thousand and One Nights”) manage to transcend the common herd: The Thief of Bagdad because its general storyline (used in at least six films to date) has become one of the most famous of Nights pastiches—almost an honorary Arabian Nights tale in itself—and the Pasolini film because it dares address the eroticism of the original work, and for that reason is not usually shown uncut.
Animation has also played an important role in keeping the work familiar, particularly to children. Besides such stand-alone offerings as three Technicolor Popeye the Sailor cartoons from the 1930s that use Nights scenarios for their basic plotlines, the earliest surviving animated feature film, Lotte Reiniger’s Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) (which predates Walt Disney’s Snow White by more than a decade) features wonderfully intricate silhouette cut-out figures in a story based partly (like Fairbanks’s The Thief of Bagdad) on “The Tale of Prince Ahmed and the Perie Banu.”
To be sure, there has been controversy over the depiction of the Muslim world in films referencing the Nights. Older Hollywood films depicting the Muslim Orient are prone to heavy stereotyping, and even today there are occasional discordant cultural notes. The 1992 Walt Disney animated Aladdin was released to critical acclaim and genie-sized box-office receipts, but also to some fire from Arab-American groups who thought it catered to the sort of outmoded images of Muslims found in the older “t and s” films.
It’s not hard to see why, since apart from the clear reference to oriental sexual fantasy found in the figure of the midriff-baring Princess Jasmine (portrayed notably as both a princess and a sexy slave), lyrics in the film’s opening musical number, “Arabian Nights,” prompted protests from the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, which argued that the narrator/storyteller singing of his eastern homeland, “Where they’ll cut off your nose if they don’t like your face / It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home,” perpetuated stereotypes of Muslims as prone to inherent violence. In response, Disney changed the offending line to (the actually better-sounding) “Where it’s flat and immense and the heat is intense / It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home,” which is how it is now heard on the DVD release.
Critics have also pointed out a questionable racial division among the characters in Aladdin, amounting to a kind of animated discrimination. Heroic figures such as Aladdin (reportedly based on the American actor Tom Cruise, and called by the western nickname “Al”) and Jasmine are portrayed with significantly lighter complexions and more westernized speaking voices than many villainous characters, who are drawn with darker skin tones and often sport mock “eastern” accents. For these reasons, Aladdin is generally considered among the more controversial of recent mainstream films.
Significantly for the idea that the “Greater Arabian Nights” is a worldwide phenomenon and not just an imagined realm embraced only by the West, not all “Arabian Nights” features have been produced by western filmmakers. The developing world also has a decades-long history of using the Arabian Nights as material for the indigenous national cinemas that began appearing during the early “talkie era” of the late 1920s and early 1930s. It is a mark of the way the westernized storybook has penetrated Asia that at least as many films involving stories or characters from the Arabian Nights have appeared in Middle and Far Eastern cinema as they have in the West.
India, especially, has a long history of making Bollywood versions of “Aladdin,” “Ali Baba” and “Sindbad” dating back to the early 1930s, while Turkey and Egypt have each produced multiple versions of “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba” for domestic audiences. Following the western pattern seen in The Thief of Bagdad, the eastern world has also released generic fantasy films inspired by the Nights, works not adhering to standard Arabian Nights stories but that still evoke the book by their attention to familiar motifs. This amounts to another transformation, as the screen has now become the single most important venue whereby audiences become familiar with the world of the Arabian Nights and assimilate its component parts.
“Arabian Nights” pictures may provide escapist entertainment around the globe, but the general western attitude toward the eastern world has met with heavy criticism in the postwar era. The dismantling of the European colonial system and the rise of “post-colonial” studies in academic and literary circles has seen established intellectual traditions infused with a desire to critique the West’s historical attitude toward formerly colonial peoples. The idea that western perceptions of a realm thought of as the “Orient” are mostly selfish inventions constructed for the West’s benefit has gained enormous sway in the decades since colonial independence, and continues to resound today in an ongoing debate about cultural perceptions.
A blockbuster work dealing with these very issues—practically post-colonialism’s founding text—appeared in 1978 and has sparked dispute, some of it quite bitter, ever since. That year, Edward Said (1935–2003), a Palestinian Christian and professor of comparative literature, published his celebrated Orientalism, a seminal book whose intent is to demonstrate that western perceptions of the eastern world, reflected in western literature, are based on an ongoing series of false assumptions and preconceptions. Said contends that European peoples have used these same flawed perceptions to assign the East an inferior status relative to the West, one excusing and sometimes demanding western intervention in eastern (here Said is referring chiefly to Muslim) affairs.
By taking his cue from the dictum of the French philosopher Michel Foucault that knowledge represents a form of power, Said argues that the western absorption of systems of eastern knowledge, and the writing that results from such absorptions, amounts to a kind of power-grab—a cultural appropriation done purely for the West’s benefit, and which has led European peoples to make conclusions about easterners that make it impossible to regard these easterners as human beings like themselves. They are therefore reduced to the status of “the Other”—individuals separated from the human community by a complex series of interlocking historical, social, political, economic and intellectual dynamics that the West deems alien and subordinate. In Said’s view, western perceptions about the “Orient,” however defined, are nothing less than a self-serving construct meant to assign inferiority.
The full value of Edward Said’s argument lies outside the scope of this book, although it is notable that in his writings, Said’s actual consideration of the Arabian Nights and its translators is surprisingly cursory. He tends to dismiss the book as a beneficent fantasy fit only for the young—one of those “childish things” best left behind with the greater sophistication maturity brings. He therefore ignores not only the adult nature of the original Nights but also the prominent way in which popular western visions of the Muslim Orient have been shaped by versions of the book and those literary works inspired by it. On its own, Galland’s Nights played a vital role in introducing visions of a torpid, timeless East steeped in colour, spectacle and sensuality, implanting images westerners carried with them during actual eastern journeys. Whether these same travellers found their expectations denied or confirmed, many came with preliminary visions distilled either partly or largely from the Arabian Nights, and therefore with various notions taken from what was reasonably thought to be an actual eastern text.
The appropriation of one culture by another through its literature finds curiously little expression in Edward Said’s work, although, as a literary scholar, it might be thought The Thousand and One Nights’ immense western popularity would provide excellent fodder for his argument. Perhaps, concerned as he is with western writers who focus on the East, Said is puzzled by how to approach an eastern work actually considered by the West to be one of its own texts, and so largely ignores a prime and founding expression of orientalist perception over the past three hundred years.
Not that the Arabian Nights has escaped the culture wars scot-free. Other commentators have taken up the slack left by Said, focusing on how the West’s appetite for the world of the mythical Nights has come to partially inform its attitudes and perceptions. The Syrian cultural historian Rana Kabbani devotes substantial critical space in her book Europe’s Myths of Orient to the Richard Burton edition of the Nights, finding it a prime compendium of “lewd Saracens,” subservient harem beauties and violent behaviour dolled up as an allegedly authoritative picture of a barbaric Orient.
Another observer, Swiss-Canadian philosopher Thierry Hentsch, goes further by postulating that western images of the Muslim Orient found in texts like the Nights are actually expressions of westerners’ insecurities about their identity, a mirror the West holds up to help view and define itself. Here works like the Arabian Nights are not only simple distortions of the East, but indicators of the West’s preoccupation with itself. With the post-colonial era now fading in the face of new global realities—some say by the establishment of a new colonial age founded on fresh methods of appropriation—it seems certain that the debate about the worth of orientalist imagery as depicted in such works as the Nights will remain vigorous for years to come.
The familiarity of The Thousand and One Nights in both the East and West and the ongoing use of its images is perhaps the most striking evidence of the book’s enduring power. Within the mainstream Arab world, however, contemporary attitudes toward the work remain at least as ambivalent as they were during the Abbasid caliphate. Its origins may be homegrown, but the West’s wholesale embracing of the work as the “Arabian Nights” is a source of deep suspicion to many Muslims, who see its status as proof that many western perceptions of Islam are filtered through fantastical and misleading images.
Nor has the secular nature of the Nights’ stories helped its reputation within conservative parts of the Muslim community, where the issue of Muslim identity is sometimes linked negatively to the West’s perceived attitudes about Islamic culture. It can certainly be argued that portions of the western world remain in thrall to ancient images of the Middle East as home to authoritarian politics, ever-present violence and “oriental excess” in thought and deed. Actual violence in the region, coupled with tensions caused by western involvement in regional affairs, only serve to heighten a Muslim sense that through such works as the Arabian Nights, the West is often discovering answers before the questions are even asked.
The rise of fundamentalist Islamic groups has also had an impact on the status of the Nights, since the sexuality and vulgarity in unexpurgated versions remains a problem for reserved societies. For over a millennium, elite Muslim attitudes toward works like Alf Laila wa Laila remained dismissive, but not officially censorious. It was not until the establishment of independent Arab nations in the twentieth century, many with laws based on Islamic precepts, that official interest in the Nights began to assert itself through legislation.
From time to time, a number of Muslim nations have banned The Thousand and One Nights, most famously the Egyptian government of Hosni Mubarak. Partly in response to a growing fundamentalist presence on the national scene, Egypt banned unexpurgated editions of the Nights in 1985, on the grounds of obscenity and as a threat to Egyptian youth. This was despite the fact that almost all Egyptian versions of the Nights were already abridged to delete potentially offending material.*
Although parts of the Islamic community harbour uncertainties regarding the Nights, they have not extinguished the flame of the book’s glamour. As recently as March 2002, Muslim fundamentalists were outraged to learn that Arabic copies of the Nights were being distributed to alleged al-Qaeda inmates held at the U.S. Guantanamo Bay detainment camp in Cuba. This seems to have been an instance of captors, perhaps innocently enough, offering inmates something they imagined their wards might enjoy reading, without understanding the book’s controversial nature in another cultural world. For all that, it seems The Thousand and One Nights remains a favourite among reading material available to those incarcerated in Cuba; with J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, it ranks high among books requested by prisoners from the Guantanamo prison library. Despite the feelings of many Muslim fundamentalists, it seems the human need for magic and wonder crosses a host of religious and political considerations.
Eastern authors who reference the Nights have also come under attack. The Anglo-Indian writer Salman Rushdie, who makes frequent allusions to the Nights in such works as Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses but especially in his anti-censorship children’s classic Haroun and the Sea of Stories, notoriously had an Iranian fatwa (religious decree) issued against him in 1989 for allegations of blasphemy in The Satanic Verses, and had to spend several years in hiding as a result. The Rushdie case is the most famous example of a negative reaction to modern writers employing Muslim religious themes and symbols, but it is not the only one. The Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, the first Arab writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (1988), came under literal attack for his writings in 1994 when the then eighty-two-year-old laureate was assaulted and stabbed by fundamentalist extremists in Cairo. He survived, but thereafter lived under bodyguard protection until his death in 2006.
Many contemporary eastern writers continue to view the Nights as unworthy of the name “literature” even as others, conscious of the work’s international impact on stories and storytelling, have employed it as a personal resource. Certainly, its controversial nature has not prevented the book from maintaining a hold on the eastern world, even if some of its supporters rank with the worst Nights villains. During the 1980s, Iraq’s ruling Ba’ath Party erected statues of Arabian Nights characters around Baghdad to legitimize the regime’s historical connection to the country’s past (including a macabre monument to “Ali Baba’s” Marjana pouring boiling oil into a jar hiding one of the Forty Thieves), and it may be assumed the theme of despotism finds resonance with more than one regional ruler.
Happily, the work has also been put to many more sanguine uses. In her French-language Sherazade trilogy, Algerian-born Leila Sebbar’s protagonist is an Algerian teenage runaway in modern Europe who wrestles with her identity in the same way her namesake wrestles with her fate. In When Dreams Travel, Indian novelist Githa Hariharan retells Scheherazade’s story, but set firmly in the context of the eternal power struggle between men and women. Balthasar’s Odyssey, a novel from 2000 by Lebanese author Amin Maalouf, concerns a seventeenth-century Levantine book merchant’s Nights-like journey from Ottoman Turkey to England as he searches for a sacred book said to hold the key to salvation. In addition to the many references to the Arabian Nights found in his works, Salman Rushdie has stated publicly that it is the one book he would most like to have with him if marooned on a desert island; a powerful endorsement from a significant postwar literary figure.
Like Rushdie, Naguib Mahfouz has found inspiration in the Nights. His 1982 novel Arabian Nights and Days is at once a pastiche and an original drama, mixing the familiar figures of Shahryar, Scheherazade, Aladdin and Sindbad in a new scenario. In a work that is more of an epilogue to the Nights than a direct sequel, Mahfouz uses seventeen linked tales to relate what happens following the end of Scheherazade’s storytelling, interweaving issues of tyranny, corruption, guilt, conscience and the question of forgiveness by invoking a familiar fictional past. By using westernized Nights characters like Aladdin and Ali Baba as accepted parts of their text, eastern writers like Mahfouz contribute to what might be thought of as a covert cultural reconciliation, where literature derived from the East becomes a conciliatory symbol for all societies.
Astonishing as its tales are, the ability of the Arabian Nights to endure as a literary text is its most impressive characteristic—particularly as the book’s impact is now felt not through the number of its readers, but by its echoes. In this sense, it may be said to have risen, phoenix-like, from the ashes of its reading-neglect to live anew as a revered, consulted or referenced book for a host of writers and commentators. From almost the moment the Nights arrived in the West, it has inspired, and continues to inspire; the use of its name and elements appear frequently in the printed word and more. The oriental romance may be a thing of the past and the contemporary media might use the Nights mostly as pop fodder, but suggestions of the work reverberate in literature without end.
When Dinarzade asks Scheherazade in the Alf Laila Fragment to relate tales of “the cunning and stupidity, the generosity and avarice … the courage and cowardice” of men, she is voicing the ability of the Nights to convey an encompassing humanity in narrative. So encompassing, in fact, that the Arabian Nights is one of the few books in whose pages readers can be guaranteed to find whatever they seek. Children see it as an attractive fairyland; adults reading or rereading the work are surprised by the frank sophistication of some versions; literary scholars view it as a seminal text containing informative treasures; professional historians acknowledge it as an important source of social conditions during early Islam.
And postwar academics criticizing orientalist perceptions are not the only intellectuals making use of the Nights. Since the 1920s, feminists have advanced the notion that Scheherazade is an icon of gender triumph over destructive male forces. That she prevails over the sultan is viewed as a prototypical feminist victory over male aggression; her wit and storytelling skills are capable of shaping the world as a civilizing force. Modernist writers, meanwhile, tend to view the work in a broader perspective, drawing on the Nights’ picture of a “neutral territory … between the real world and fairyland, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet” to blur the boundaries between real and unreal.
The Thousand and One Nights appears, like a shadow, throughout modern literature—a prototype of twentieth-century fiction that rejects literary absolutes to create worlds of deliberate uncertainty. Authors from Marcel Proust (who may have unconsciously written À la recherche du temps perdu as a personal version of the Nights) through James Joyce (with Ulysses and Finnegans Wake) to Jorge Luis Borges, John Barth, Italo Calvino and many others have featured it in their work, either through simple reference or via such literary devices as magic realism, metafiction and deconstructive playfulness.
If these and other contemporary writers using the Nights have anything in common, it is their reconstructing of the older book’s universe, where dreams and waking reality mingle in a peculiarly literary landscape. By employing the dense familiarity of the Nights’ characters and elements to explore themes relevant to their own concerns, modern writers continue the tradition of maintaining and expanding the Arabian Nights’ imaginative domain. They are now—albeit in often very different ways—as much custodians of the work as were the storytellers of old, transmitting to new generations the essential attributes of a gleaming world where magic, dreams, reality and human interaction coexist in a sometimes-harmonious, sometimes-uneasy alliance of opposites.
As for the work itself, it continues to attract translators and researchers, as well as breed controversy. Between 1899 and 1904, Dr. Joseph-Charles Mardrus issued a new, sixteen-volume French translation of the Nights that was hailed as a fine replacement for the Galland version, updating the literary style from the time of Louis XIV to fin de siècle Europe. It was so well received that T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) thought about producing an English translation. “Much the best version … in any language,” Lawrence wrote to his publisher. “The correctness of Mardrus can’t be bettered. The rivalry in English isn’t high. Payne crabbed: Burton unreadable: Lane pompous.”*
Which makes one wonder about the extent of Lawrence’s Arabic, since Mardrus did as much distortion as any of his predecessors, omitting some tales, reworking others and otherwise juicing things up by inserting personal bons mots and a number of nasty Gallic diatribes against Jews. He may have grown up in a household where both French and Arabic were spoken, but Mardrus’s Arabic scholarship has been called “beneath criticism” by Arabists who note that his translation swarms with errors and unnecessary vulgarisms.
At first, Mardrus claimed that he worked from the Egyptian Bulaq Text of the Nights, but backtracked when discrepancies between his version and the Bulaq edition were uncovered. He then maintained that what he actually used was a seventeenth-century North African manuscript (shades of Maximilian Habicht), but this appears to be another case of Nights fraud, since whatever text or texts Dr. Mardrus did use, he made as personal and loose an adaption as anyone before him.
That said, Mardrus’s edition is by no means worthless; its heavy eroticism evokes the outré Guy de Maupassant decadence of the period in which he wrote (and perhaps befits a man married to the lesbian novelist-poet Lucie Delarue-Mardrus), but his statement that “For the first time in Europe, a complete and accurate translation of The Thousand and One Nights is made available” is stunningly pretentious; his contention that the Arabic words have only been replaced with French ones laughable.
Luckily, for every charlatan and falsifier in the history of the Nights, there is a sincere and learned researcher. Before the First World War, the Scottish-American orientalist Duncan Black MacDonald did much work on the Nights as a sideline to his research on Islamic theology, believing Arabian Nights stories are indigenous examples of Muslim spiritual concerns. Aware that the history of the work was full of confusing artifice and invention, MacDonald examined the various Alf Laila wa Laila manuscripts in Europe and thought about using the Galland Manuscript to fashion a critical reconstruction of how the early Nights might have looked, shorn of the extraneous material added over the centuries. MacDonald does not appear to have gotten very far with the project before his death in 1943, but the idea of producing a critical edition of the Galland Manuscript was revived in the postwar era, when Muhsin Mahdi, a Baghdad-born professor of Arabic at Chicago and Harvard universities, decided to return the Arabic Nights to as close a rendition of early versions as was possible.
It took him a full quarter of a century. Beginning in 1959, Professor Mahdi compared the Galland Manuscript word for word with other surviving texts, taking careful note of errors and variations in words and phrasing. Battling his way through often difficult-to-read handwritten manuscripts strewn throughout the libraries of Britain and Europe, Mahdi was able to create preliminary archetypes of the Syrian and Egyptian traditions of Alf Laila wa Laila stories. Then, through near-Holmesian deduction, he constructed a common ancestor to both branches—a close, penultimate, written archetype of the Nights as it would have looked in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries. It was from this archetype or something very much like it, Mahdi maintained, that Antoine Galland worked to make a translation and bring the Nights to the West. Mahdi published his Arabic reconstruction in Leiden, the Netherlands, in 1984 to world acclaim, creating the first ancient text of Alf Laila wa Laila available in the modern era.
The result of Professor Mahdi’s Herculean labours is a meticulous recreation of an important early version of The Thousand and One Nights, containing significantly fewer stories than either the handwritten or printed Arabic texts that came later, but closer to how actual copies of the Nights looked during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Containing just thirty-five and a half stories told over approximately 270 Nights, this is probably as close to a “true” version of the Arabic Nights as it is possible to attain.
Mahdi’s efforts have also put to rest many myths surrounding the Nights in the West, including the idea that original Arabic versions of “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba” have been found, or that western translators and compilers in former centuries used complete Arabic manuscripts to create their versions. It is now plain that the tale of the Arabian Nights in the West contains practically as much—maybe more—deception, error and misinterpretation as it does careful study and reasoned conjecture.
For all this, not everyone believes Mahdi’s contention that Arabic editions of the Nights appearing after the period of his reconstructed archetype are the result of “polluting” factors. His belief in an anonymous Syrian compiler of this earliest manuscript has met with opposition from other researchers, who point out that even as a text, the Nights was never treated as a concrete whole in classical Islam—certainly not by the rawi, who never hesitated to fill in the vacant parts of any copies they happened to have. The idea of a pure or near-pure Arabic version of the Nights, while valuable, does not address the central issue of the work’s malleability or take into account the fact that Mahdi’s reconstructed Alf Laila wa Laila is itself probably quite different from the Persian Hazar Afsanah that spawned it.
Such questions can never be satisfactorily answered. But even Muhsin Mahdi’s great contributions to the Nights’ complex history are not the last words on the issue of the work’s composition—something reflected in the English translation of his critical edition. In 1990, another Baghdad-born Arab scholar, Husain Haddawy, translated Mahdi’s Arabic text of the Nights into English with a fine introduction on its history and major western editions. Compared with many previous translations, Haddawy’s edition is immensely easy to read, not least because he has modernized many terms for better understanding.
Nevertheless, in what is probably the latest instance of Arabian Nights irony, the lack of some beloved stories in this edition created a demand from disappointed readers for a semi-sequel. Haddawy consented, and six years later published an edition of several popular external orphan stories, including “Sindbad,” “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba,” ones that Muhsin Mahdi would have considered contaminating material inserted into Alf Laila wa Laila, but which centuries of familiarity in both hemispheres have welded onto the body of the Arabian Nights with unbreakable seals of affection.
By now, Haddawy’s approach seems to be the best way with which to treat the orphan stories of the Arabian Nights. While admitting that such tales are likely not part of early versions of the work, it must also be acknowledged that they cannot be ignored, since centuries of readership in both the East and West have melded them onto the book to create the work as it is known around the world. The acorn may be ancient collections of Alf Laila wa Laila stories, but the globe-spanning tree that has sprung from its roots is the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.
And the translation of the Nights continues to this day. In 2004, a new German version, translated by Claudia Ott, was released in commemoration of the three-hundredth anniversary of the Galland edition. Four years later, the first “complete” (i.e., taken from Calcutta II) English translation since Sir Richard Burton’s 1885–88 version appeared. Rendered into English by Cambridge scholar Malcolm Lyons and his wife Ursula, it has been acclaimed as a graceful replacement for Burton’s celebrated, but often-ponderous, translation.
Even magic carpet rides have their bumpy moments, buffeted by forces threatening to impede or even destroy their flight. The history of The Thousand and One Nights is long and eventful, marked by confusion, mystery and misdirection, but withal there has never been any real doubt about the work’s worth as a collection of stories. As one of humanity’s most defining features, the telling of wonderful tales can never be separated from the species creating it, and there is probably no work—certainly none in the western world—where the tradition of storytelling merges so happily with wonder than in the Arabian Nights.
In the sphere of storytelling, it is the Book of Books, its aura imbuing the wide realm of the world in language and vision from the time its earliest tales were committed to paper. Print, stage, film, television, video games—even a Global Positioning System dubbed the “Magic Carpet GPS”—feed and further the sense that the Nights’ phantasmagoria, while a constant universe, is also like the real universe in that it is capable of endless metamorphosis.
As a book, the Arabian Nights persists for the reason all classical literature endures: the particular way it simultaneously entertains, instructs and illuminates, opening a window onto the profusion of human behaviour resounding through any age or culture. Its tales may be technically fiction, but by addressing the desires, hopes and concerns common to all peoples across all times and places, they express eternal truths transcending romanticized periods and settings. Wherever mystery, excitement, enchantment and the wish for wonder nourish the human spirit, the Nights will endure. For much of its history The Thousand and One Nights has courted controversy over coarseness, violence and sexual licence, although the extremes of its rugged realm have never exceeded our own extremes and sometimes, sadly, pale by comparison. But the very fact that this glittering, half-fanciful cosmos remains alive, familiar and beloved by millions is proof of its power to enthrall even in the age of the microchip and the booster rocket. By itself, that qualifies as a kind of magic.
Then there lived after them a wise ruler, who was just, keen-witted and accomplished and loved tales and legends, especially those which chronicle the doings of Sovrans and Sultans, and he found in the treasury these marvellous stories and wondrous histories, contained in the thirty volumes aforesaid. So he read in them a first book and a second and a third and so on to the last of them, and each book astounded and delighted him more than that which preceded it, till he came to the end of them. Then he admired whatso he had read therein of description and discourse and rare traits and anecdotes and moral instances and reminiscences and bade the folk copy them and dispread them over all lands and climes; wherefrom their report was bruited abroad and the people named them “The Marvels and Wonders of the Thousand and One Nights.” This is all that hath come down to us of the origin of this book, and Allah is All-knowing.
—FINALE TO THE BOOK OF THE
THOUSAND NIGHTS AND A NIGHT
*Muslims aren’t the only ones who have had problems with the work’s content. The Arabian Nights has been banned at different times in American history; for example, it was banned because of the 1873 Comstock Act, which forbade the mailing of obscene materials. Meanwhile, in the same year as the 1985 Egyptian ban, the unexpurgated Nights was stamped as “unsuitable” for Jewish students by the Israeli director of the library in the British consulate in Jerusalem.
*Nothing came of this when, to their chagrin, Lawrence and his publisher discovered that the English poet and crossword puzzle composer Edward Powys Mathers was about to issue a translation of Mardrus’s Le livre des mille et une nuits through a rival publisher.