Tales from 1,001 Nights, also commonly known as the Arabian Nights, is a collection of Persian, Arabic, Indian and Turkish folk tales from the period of medieval Islam, with evidence of stories written as early as the 9th century. The name refers to the frame story, over a large collection of tales, of King Shariyar and his day-old wife Scheherazade, whom he has deflowered and plans on executing the following day. However, the learned and imaginative Scheherazade plans to tell the King stories every night, always leaving him on a cliff-hanger in the morning so he postpones the execution to the following day in order for Scheherazade to continue the stories the next night, a strategy she had kept up for one thousand and one consecutive days.
Most stories in the Arabian Nights drew scenes of groups of merchant travellers recounting the tales around a fire, or of mothers re-telling them to their children, an audience of lower-class citizens. But some of the stories of royalty, with numerous quotations from poems — some quite florid — and verses from the Quran, may have appealed to the higher classes. Originally, the stories were meant for portraying a faithful Muslim, which would inevitably include the elements of Islam, although it also gives current day readers, many of which may not be religious, an insight to the people of the time and their common practices and how they made decisions depending on the consequences of their actions.
In the universes upon universes of stories than cannot be contained within each other — as any such smaller story could be readily expanded on from its small excerpt within the book — I could find myself jumping between two to three, five to six characters in one ‘story’, an example being The Story of Tak Al-Muluk and Princess Dunya.
The 1,001 Nights shows examples of everyday life in the middle east during the medieval period, along with its moral issues such as lust or greed or vanity that people fall prey to, exposing the darker faces of humanity. The stories, stripped of their supernatural elements, then become a narration of a merchant, or a sailor, or a devout Muslim’s encounters with the everyday citizens through the streets of the city, a day in the life, of sorts.
Sindbad the Sailor: The First Journey of Sindbad gives a good indication of the themes present in many other stories as part of the Arabian Nights: religion (on the second page, already, is a reference to Solomon, the son of David, a character in the Quran), spontaneous recollections of poetry, cries to God and the recurrent expression: “There is no might and no power except with God, the Exalted, the Omnipotent”. We also learn of morals such as the eventual depletion of riches, despite one’s current affluence, due to reckless spending, and the major point being brought across Sindbad’s seven voyages: relapsing into past mistakes.
The man whom Sindbad encounters after being stranded on an island, learning of the stranger’s mysterious horse-mating ritual, the island in the distance, Kasil, from which sounds of musical instruments playing all night long, fish with the face of an owl; I am, as I have been in many of the other tales from the 1,001 Nights, enthralled by the events from such exotic worlds and of unplanned travels. Some of the sailing and habits of the seas remind of a book I read in 2016, The Republic of Pirates, which details the history during the golden age of piracy (1650–1730) and accounts of pirates’ adventures. Sindbad says at the end of his first voyages, “I bought a large number of eunuchs, retainers, mamluks, concubines and black slaves,” a statement that showcases the old customs and societal norms of medieval Islam.
Sindbad the Sailor and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves were more appealing to me and felt more complete. It still included the usual morals, religious practices and poetry, but I felt that each part tied in with the previous and following sections, in contrast to the successive nature of the original tales from the Arabian Nights, going from one section to the next with very few connections between. This might have been due to the fact most popular English editions being translated by the English, leading to embellishments made more favourably towards a Western audience. Entertaining that thought, in addition to Antoine Galland’s authorship of Sindbad the Sailor, we can see how Galland was influenced by the Arabian Nights in the themes he included in the stories, but also his fusion between the Arabic and his own European styles into a piece of text that embodies world literature.
Poe’s The Thousand and Second Night plunges into the universe of the Arabian Nights with the familiar characters of the frame story of Scheherazade and King Shariyar, where he mentions consulting the Isitsöornot — a fabricated book of Poe’s listing tall tales — and creates the basis for the short story: the ‘true’ ending to the original Arabian Nights. He enters the one thousand and second night with Scheherazade and King Shariyar, where Scheherazade has one final story to share with the King before her eventual death. Here we enter into the story of Sindbad the Sailor’s untold Journey.
In his writing, he includes features of the original stories, with stories within stories, and also implements his own writing style, for example — and I find this quite humorous — the excessive use of brackets such as when describing how “Scheherazade not only put the finishing stroke to the black cat and the rat, (the rat was blue,) but before she well knew what she was about, found herself deep in the intricacies of a narration, having reference (if I am not altogether mistaken) to a pink horse (with green wings)…”
His style includes incredibly extensive descriptions of scenery and details of small creatures. Sindbad is carried off by, what appears to be, a demonic creature, assembled from Frankenstein-like parts and of immense proportions, to travel (as the original Sindbad was keen on seeking adventure in his travels). He comes by quite a few islands, which Poe goes into great depth to depicting, one of which was filled with “forests of stone”, another had “far more spacious and more magnificent palaces than are to be found in all Damascus and Bagdad”, with “rivers as black as ebony” alongside fish with no eyes, smarter-than-human bees and metallic horses and chickens. He does the Arabian Nights justice in really going into the descriptions, including (what I personally found as a feature, too, in the original tales) hyperbole: he’s describing the plethora of gems that were “larger than men” and warns of passing by a luxuriant land but that “to enter it was inevitable death.” Many tales in the Arabian Nights were written to teach morals, as seen in the Animal Stories and Five Stories of Kings, however, Poe decides on simply being within and experiencing the stories.
Although, there is another interesting aspect to The Thousand and Second Night.
In the descriptions there are many references to discoveries in the real world, such as sites of petrified forests, mechanisms for solving problems, and many, many scientific revelations and inventions. The people who came with the creature, at the start, that carried Sindbad through this journey, are part of a civilization of “the most powerful magicians” and “necromancers”. This is a metaphor for the progress of our human-kind throughout history, as we made geographic findings, created powerful machines to transform metals, print script and calculate problems in an instant. These “magicians”, us, reach such a level of complexity that King Shariyar shuts Scheherazade up, fed up with her preposterous lies and finally, after spending one thousand and one nights listening to her tales, executes her.
Poe craftily reinvents the story of Sindbad the Sailor with his own prologue of sorts, where he tells the history of human society and the world beyond when the original stories were written, recounting history up to the point Poe, himself, considered as his present time period.
Kinsella finds a connection with the ‘books’, the imaginary author of the Arabian Nights, by classifying the stories as ridiculous and characters as overly expectant. Present in many stories are the common themes of divine intervention, but also through jinn and other spiritual entities. In the last line, Kinsella mentions the articulate imagination that we people possess, able to conjure up such scenes and entire fables so fantastical and filled with purpose to educate. But yet, it is also speaking of the conniving nature of the characters within the stories, cruel enough to appear as ‘beasts’.
People cooperate, or fall prey to others, when there involves food, sleep or lust for women. These three pitfalls are expressed rather dramatically in The Story of ‘Aziz and ‘Aziza, where ‘Aziz, unsatisfied with his cousin whom he was chosen to marry to, seeks the beauty of an unknown woman, whom he follows around, where in one room he expects to finally meet with her, but time and time again, fails to resist the urge to eat and, thus, falls asleep and misses his opportunity. Countless other tales tell of a man who surreptitiously falls in love with a woman, only to repent for their sinful actions by the wrath of a jinn.
Only through the segregation of men and women, where men’s cravings and women’s seduction can be eliminated, will it allow for cooperation. Our society is so caught up in the sexualization of women (more evident now than ever, with the introduction of the internet and explosion of advertising) and men’s submission to such idealizations. Men cannot control their urges of “swarming” over women, to such a degree that we sometimes forget that sex is not all that matters.
The Tales from 1,001 Nights has impacted the world in a great many ways: spreading its words of wisdom throughout many people’s lives through word of mouth; spreading into the European society and educating white-folk of Islamic culture and practices; popularizing certain characters — Aladdin and the genie — and icons — the magic lamp — to a point where the mention of such figures goes over many people’s heads as to their origin. For example, in the book It by Stephen King, there is a movie theater by the name of “The Aladdin”. In the three pieces covered — Sindbad the Sailor: The First Journey of Sindbad, The One Thousand and Second Night and Drowsing over the Arabian Nights — there is a common point: they were all written by Europeans. Obviously, in the case of the latter, Thomas Kinsella had been reflecting on the tales as a whole, and then with Edgar Allen Poe writing an original piece but in the style of the Arabian Nights. However, it has been found that with the former, that Antoine Galland had most likely contributed significantly with his own influence on the story, adding to it a European flavor. The effect of this has already been explored, however, the thought of such prominent figures, such as Poe, writing about and in the style of the Arabian Nights goes to show the effects of its storytelling on European society, and, more generally, the world.
Over the course of four months or so of reading the Lyons’ translation of the Tales from 1,001 Nights, submerging myself, almost every day, into the adventures of dervishes; the rulings and dealings of kings; the religious chatter among foxes and crows; poetry and religion and lust; wealth and poverty; greed and generosity; and love and hatred; I’ve come to realize how bountiful this life we live really can be.
