The World of The Arabian Nights Study Paper

The World of The Arabian Nights Study Paper

Task Four:  Arabian Nights Study Guide

 

By Diane Thompson, NVCC, ELI

 

The World Of The Arabian Nights

 

 

 

The stories come from India, Persia and Arabia; there are even stories from China, such as Aladdin, in some editions. These stories all reflect the enormous, highly civilized Islamic world of the ninth to thirteenth centuries. It stretched from Spain across North Africa to Cairo, across the Arabian Peninsula, up to Damascus and Baghdad, further north to Samarkand, across what is now Afghanistan, down into India, and beyond.

Many of the people in this huge area shared a religion, Islam, a religious language, the Arabic of the Koran, and many cultural elements which derived from the Koranic culture of Islam and its seventh century roots in the Arabian Peninsula, now mostly Saudi Arabia.

 

 

 

A traveler could wander across this huge region speaking Arabic, sharing in a familiar culture, studying and praying in mosques, and trading with fellow Muslims. A wonderful travel book was written by Ibn Battuta in the fourteenth century recording his travels of about 77,000 miles, from Morocco across North Africa, through Arabia, up through Persia, the Steppes of Central Asia, across what is now Afghanistan, through India, perhaps up to China, and back again in many slow loops. Ibn Battuta, the Arabic Marco Polo, was able to travel all this distance almost entirely within the sphere of Islamic culture.

 

THE VARIETY OF THE ARABIAN NIGHTS

 

The Arabian Nights is hugely various, like the lands it came from, and it is jam-packed with spiritual as well as earthly values. It includes information on what life is like and how to live it in a world full of tyrannical as well as good rulers, magicians and witches, good and bad jinnis (or demons), plentiful sex, lots of violence and mystical spiritual quests.

 

 

 

The Arabian Nights are not just Arabic, but Persian and Indian as well, so perhaps a better name for them is simply The Nights, one of the world’s great collections of stories. The Nights are a wonderful example of Folk literature and how it develops, through the telling and retelling of stories over a long period of time. There were many creators of these stories, many re-tellers, and many rewriters. There are, consequently, many different texts of the Nights, and stories were added to the Nights for many centuries. The stories are called the Thousand and One Nights to express the idea of a large number, not necessarily exactly 1001.

 

 

 

FRAME STORIES OF THE ARABIAN NIGHTS

 

 

 

The stories in the Nights are like a complex set of interlocking arguments and examples, each fitting more or less well into its frame and doing a more or less successful job of proving its point as well as entertaining. The main frame creates the setting and motivation for all the stories contained in the Nights:

 

 

 

Two brother kings, Shahrayar and Shahzaman

 

 

 

Shahzaman is cuckolded by his wife

 

 

 

Shahrayar is cuckolded by his wife.

 

 

 

They travel until they meet the Jinni (demon) who keeps his wife locked up in a glass chest, yet she still manages to cuckold him.

 

They return to their kingdoms and Shahrayar has his wife killed, and vows to marry a new wife each night and kill her the next morning, so she can’t cheat on him.

 

 

 

Shahrazad tells her father she will marry Shahrayar.

 

 

 

Father tells her The Tale of the Ox and the Donkey to dissuade her. Not successful.

 

 

 

Father tells her The Tale of the Merchant and His Wife to dissuade her. Not successful.

 

 

 

Shahrazad marries Shahrayar, and arranges for her sister, Dinarzad, to ask her to tell a story to pass the night. This story, and many more, will save her and deliver the people.

 

 

 

Story of the Merchant and the Demon

 

 

 

Story of the First Old Man and the Deer

 

 

 

Story of the Second Old Man and Two Dogs

 

 

 

Story of the Third Old Man.

 

 

 

These three stories are successful and persuade the demon to release the merchant.

 

 

 

Story of the Fisherman. And so on until eventually the King forgives women, accepts his marriage to Shahrazad as permanent, and all live happily ever after. The stories have been successful in curing the King and saving the people.

 

 

 

TEXTS AND VERSIONS OF THE NIGHTS

 

 

 

Because the Nights developed out of an oral tradition, there are many texts and versions of the Nights available. If you wish to read more than is included in the Norton Anthology, the best current translation is that by Haddawy, which is also published by Norton.

Although the Haddawy translation includes only a small portion of the total stories sometimes found in editions of the Nights, the translation is new, attractive, has a good introduction, and avoids the ugly racism of the more standard nineteenth century Richard Burton translation.

The Burton translation, although it includes many more stories, is so marred by the racial stereotyping in it, that I cannot recommend it. You may, if you wish, read one of the editions translated by Burton instead of the Haddawy version, but be warned, it is indeed racist in its negative stereotyped descriptions of black people.

 

 

 

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