The Arabic Alf Layla wa-Layla (The Thousand and
One Nights) is a vibrant and extensive collection
of stories brought together in the Islamic world of
the ninth–13th centuries. Also known as The Arabian
Nights, the original tales have Indian, Persian,
and Arabic antecedents and were likely told for
centuries before being written down.
A cycle of tales with no single author and no
single source, The Thousand and One Nights is
enormously diverse and entertaining. Long regarded
as a collection of fairy tales, like the folklore
of the Grimm brothers or the fables of AESOP, the
tales, as Robert Irwin observes in The Arabian
Nights: A Companion, include “long heroic epics,
wisdom literature, fables, cosmological fantasy,
pornography, scatological jokes, mystical devotional
tales, chronicles of low life, rhetorical debates
and masses of poetry.”
Though compilers can select among hundreds
of original stories, the traditional opening remains
the same. Long ago, Sultan Shahryar, bitterly disappointed
by the infidelity of his wife, vowed never
again to trust a woman. He proposed instead to
marry a new wife each night and have her killed
the next morning.After some time had passed, the
beautiful and clever Scheherazade developed a
plan to end the tyranny. She persuaded her father
to marry her to the sultan, then begged the sultan
to allow her sister, Dunyazad, to spend her last
night on earth with her. Just before dawn, Dunyazad
woke Scheherazade and asked her to tell a
story.When dawn broke, the story was unfinished,
and the sultan realized he must keep her alive in
order to hear the end. By the next morning the tale
was still unfinished, and once more the execution
was delayed. This cycle continued for more than
three years—for a total of 1,001 nights—during
which time Scheherazade bore the sultan three
healthy sons, and he fell deeply in love with her.
The Thousand and One Nights entered Western
consciousness with the French translation by Antoine
Galland (1646–1715) of a Syrian manuscript
dating to the 14th or 15th century.His publication,
preserved at the National Library in Paris, is now
the oldest extant manuscript of the Nights. Edward
Lane undertook an English translation in 1838–41,
with large sections excised to suit the sensitivities
of 19th-century Victorians. The 1885 translation by
Sir Richard Burton, who traveled widely through
the Middle East and India (and also introduced the
English-speaking world to the KAMA SUTRA), is not
entirely faithful to the Arabic versions, mixing in
tales by Geoffrey Chaucer and François Rabelais.
Since some of Galland’s added stories have been
translated into Arabic, it is now virtually impossible
for any but the most devoted scholar to trace the
complex web of influences. Readers can therefore
simply relax into the magical world of The Thousand
and One Nights, losing themselves among its
colorful characters: brave travelers and lovely
princesses; capricious rulers and trickster magicians;
and the demons, witches, and clever genies
who constantly test human ingenuity.
Critical Analysis
The narrative technique of using a frame story to
link a series of smaller tales is a standard feature of
ORAL LITERATURE and also appears in such written
works as the PANCHATANTRA of India, OVID’s Metamorphoses,
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and Giovanni
Boccaccio’s Decameron. The multitude of
stories in The Thousand and One Nights are linked
by the irresistible figure of Scheherazade, who, in
Burton’s translation, is both educated and beautiful:
. . . indeed it was said that she had collected a
thousand books of histories relating to antique
races and departed rulers. She had perused the
works of the poets and knew them by heart;
she had studied philosophy and the sciences,
arts, and accomplishments; and she was pleasant
and polite, wise and witty, well read and
well bred.
In addition to the stories told by Scheherazade,
the other characters begin to tell their own stories,
and the narrative thread can become quite complicated.
Readers of The Thousand and One Nights
find this interweaving of narratives one of its most
appealing characteristics. Novelist A. S. Byatt, in
the introduction to the Modern Library edition of
Burton’s translation, celebrates this structure and
sees it as supporting a larger theme:
A character in a story invokes a character who
tells a story about a character who has a story
to tell. . . . Everything proliferates. The Nights
is a maze, a web, a network, a river with infinite
tributaries, a series of boxes within boxes, a
bottomless pool. It turns endlessly on itself, a
story about storytelling. And yet we feel it has
to do with our essential nature, and not just a
need for idle entertainment.
For Scheherazade, storytelling is the way to extend
her life. The themes of the individual stories
continually echo the themes of the larger work:
kings and powerful beings like genies constantly
demand to hear stories; the weak or oppressed are
constantly brought to judgment and must use
their wits to protect their lives; wily sages and
thieves pop out of corners to trick honest citizens
out of their earned wealth; the stouthearted undertake
fantastic voyages and return with remarkable
tales. Magic elements abound in the stories,
but human cleverness predominates.
An example of the nested narrative technique
appears in the tale of “The Fisherman and the
Genie,” where the genie, waiting for the fisherman
to return to fulfill a sentence of execution, is approached
by an old man and a hind, and so begins
the story “The Old Man and the Hind.”The narrative
thread always finds itself, however; the first
story ends with the fisherman tricking the genie
into going back into his bottle, and the sly fisherman
quickly stoppers it up.
Although certain translators have tended to regard
The Thousand and One Nights as no more
than engaging tall tales, and to collect them as The
Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, these ostensibly
diverting stories carry a prickly subtext. Certain
tales seem uncannily modern, as in the tale of “The
Ebony Horse,” where a sage creates a flying machine
that an enterprising prince learns to operate.
Moreover, close readers will observe that the
Nights offers an intriguing series of lessons on
public relations. The tales expose a broad view of
all classes and levels of society, creating a stage
where kings rub elbows with street thieves.
Through frequent praises and invocations, Allah
serves as a constant presence and a unifying force
that binds the tales; Burton’s translation illuminates
this in its opening and closing addresses to
MUHAMMAD. Characters of different races and religions
populate the Nights, offering glimpses into
the diverse world of the Middle East. The seemingly
riotous tales of crosses and double-crosses
include useful advice on how to operate within a
society where it is accepted that women occupy
subordinate positions, class differences are distinct
and insurmountable, and rulers have the power to
distribute justice, grant life, and demand death.
The Thousand and One Nights has had a profound
impact on all the cultures it has reached. In
their childhoods, the English poets Samuel Taylor
Coleridge and William Wordsworth and the Victorian
novelist Charles Dickens immersed themselves
in tales of the Arabian nights; both Marcel
Proust and Edgar Allan Poe saw themselves as
Scheherazades of sorts. Twentieth-century novelists
have composed modern versions of oriental fables—
for example, Salman Rushdie in Haroun and
the Sea of Stories and Naguib Mahfouz in Arabian
Nights and Days. The Nights have sparked the
imagination of filmmakers and musicians, and almost
any child has heard at some point, and in
some version, the tale of Aladdin and his enchanted
lamp, the seven voyages of Sinbad the Sailor, and
the tale of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.Many a
child has perhaps wished for a lamp containing a
wish-granting genie without realizing the true
moral of Aladdin’s story: that genies are tricky creatures
and wishes are dangerous things.
Some maintain that The Thousand and One
Tales is an achievement unparalleled by any work
of literature in any other culture. Its sheer volume,
diversity, and complexity are unrivaled. It sheds
light on the culture of its creators, and it continues
to spark the imagination of new generations
with its promise of magic and its lesson that storytelling
is the only sure way to achieve immortality.
English Versions of The Thousand and
One Nights
The Arabian Nights. Translated by Husain Haddawy.
New York: Everyman, 1990.
Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One
Nights. Translated by Richard Burton. New York:
The Modern Library, 2001.
The Book of Thousand Nights and One Night. 4 vols.
Edited by E. P. Mathers and J. C. Mardrus. New
York: Routledge, 1994.
Works about The Thousand and One Nights
Caracciolo, Peter L., ed. The Arabian Night in English
Literature: Studies in the Reception of Thousand
and One Nights into British Culture. New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1988.
Hovannisian, Richard and Georges Sabagh. The
Thousand and One Nights in Arabic Literature and
Society. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University
Press, 1997.
Irwin, Robert. The Arabian Nights: A Companion.
New York: Penguin Books, 1994.