Like CHAUCER’s CANTERBURY TALES or BOCCACCIO’s
DECAMERON, The Thousand and One Nights (Alf
Layla wa-Layla) is a collection of stories within a
frame narrative; the frame creates a context for the
telling of tales within the larger tale, and makes for
a highly entertaining text. The most popular work
of medieval Arabic literature, both in Islamic
countries and in the West, The Thousand and One
Nights has never been recognized by Arab literary
scholars as a serious literary text or part of the
Arabic literary canon. Still its tales of fantasy,
magic, romance, violence, and lust continue to ensure
its place in popular, if not learned, literary
circles.
By the 10th century, the Arabic scholar al-
Nadim called the work “foolish” and “vulgar.” His
opinion remains widespread among Arabic scholars
today—Egypt banned the Nights as immoral
as recently as 1989. Partly this antipathy is based on
a general Islamic mistrust of fiction—the KORAN
condemns all fiction as lies. In addition the colloquial
language of the Nights is a barrier to its acceptance:
Serious literature in medieval Arabic was
written in what was called the adab style, a courtly
form characterized by wide learning and complex
poetic forms.
Despite this official rejection, The Thousand
and One Nights has flourished as folk literature
since its beginnings. Those origins, however, are
murky. Clearly the tales began as oral stories, but
modern scholarship has managed to trace their
textual origin to a collection in Persian called the
“Thousand Stories,” produced during the Sassanid
period (226–652), the last pre-Islamic dynasty in
Persia. That Persian text seems to have been a
translation from an original collection in Sanskrit
that had come into Persia from India.
During the ninth and 10th centuries, Persian
texts of all kinds were translated into Arabic, and
like many other texts, The Thousand and One
Nights was probably translated at the court of the
caliph in Baghdad. The inclusion of a number of
tales set in the Baghdad of the caliph Haroun al-
Rashid (763–809) indicates how translators and
scribes felt perfectly free to add new tales to the
Nights even as they sought to transmit the text—a
practice that stemmed, most likely, from an impulse
to try to fill the fanciful “thousand and one”
tales of the title.
From Baghdad the core of tales spread through
the Islamic world, apparently becoming particularly
popular in Syria and in Egypt, where two different
branches of the Nights developed. The
earliest extant manuscript of the Nights was produced
in Syria in the 14th century.Manuscripts related
to this one are more conservative, consisting
of a core of tales most of which came, ultimately,
from the original Arabic translation.
In Egypt the Nights were particularly popular
during the Mamluk period (1250–1517). Here,
new tales were added from Egyptian, Turkish, Indian,
Persian, and Jewish sources. This Egyptian
branch of manuscripts contains the most famous
stories in the Nights—the tales of the seven voyages
of Sinbad (added early in the Mamluk period), Ali
Baba and the 40 Thieves, and a very late addition,
the tale of Aladdin—none of which appear in the
earliest texts of the Nights.
Because of its Iranian personal and place
names, one part of the text that can be definitely
traced to the Persian-Indian source is the frame
narrative. This is the familiar story of Shahrazad
(Scheherazade), daughter of King Shahrayar’s
vizier. The king, whose wife has proved spectacularly
unfaithful, decides that all women are therefore
untrustworthy, and hatches the mad plan of
ensuring his wives’ fidelity by marrying a new
bride every night and executing her every morning.
Shahrazad,witty and well read, resolves to save
the women of her land by volunteering to marry
the king. She forestalls her own execution by telling
Shahrayar stories, which she breaks off each night
at the climactic moment. In order to hear the end
of the story, the king must keep her alive until the
following evening. This open format allowed
translators and scribes to insert new stories at will.
The frame ultimately ends with the king’s sparing
Shahrazad’s life, presumably after a thousand and
one tales, and accepting her as his faithful wife.
The Thousand and One Nights is a highly unusual
literary classic, having been composed over
many centuries by a wide variety of contributors
in several countries. In modern times, the Nights
became popular in western Europe when Antoine
Galland translated the text into French (1704–08),
and Richard Burton made a popular English translation
(1885–88). Both Galland and Burton added
new tales (much as earlier Arab scribes and translators
had done), and, curiously, these western texts
were translated back into Arabic,with the new tales
added. Because of this complex textual history, a
definitive scholarly edition of the “original” manuscript
of the Nights was not available until 1984.
Bibliography
Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The
Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York:
Knopf, 1976.
Gerhardt,Mia Irene. The Art of Story-Telling: A Literary
Study of the Thousand and One Nights. Leiden,
Netherlands: Brill, 1963.
Ghazoul, Ferial Jabouri. The Arabian Nights: A Structural
Analysis. Cairo: Cairo Associated Institution
for the Study and Presentation of Arab Cultural
Values, 1980.
Haddawy, Husain, trans. The Arabian Nights. Based
on the text of the fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript
edited by Muhsin Mahdi. New York:
Knopf, 1992.
———, trans. The Arabian Nights II: Sinbad and
Other Popular Stories. New York: Norton, 1995.