One Thousand and One Nights

by Richard Burton

  Next in date to the Apologue comes the Fairy Tale proper, where the natural universe is supplemented by one of purely imaginative existence. “As the active world is inferior to the rational soul,” says Bacon with his normal sound sense, “so Fiction gives to Mankind what History denies and in some measure satisfies the Mind with Shadows when it cannot enjoy the Substance. And as real History gives us not the success of things according to the deserts of vice and virtue, Fiction corrects it and presents us with the fates and fortunes of persons rewarded and punished according to merit.” But I would say still more. History paints or attempts to paint life as it is, a mighty maze with or without a plan: Fiction shows or would show us life as it should be, wisely ordered and laid down on fixed lines. Thus Fiction is not the mere handmaid of History: she has a household of her own and she claims to be the triumph of Art which, as Göethe remarked, is “Art because it is not Nature.” Fancy, la folle du logis, is “that kind and gentle portress who holds the gate of Hope wide open, in opposition to Reason, the surly and scrupulous guard.”244 As Palmerin of England says and says well, “For that the report of noble deeds doth urge the courageous mind to equal those who bear most commendation of their approved valiancy; this is the fair fruit of Imagination and of ancient histories.” And, last but not least, the faculty of Fancy takes count of the cravings of man’s nature for the marvellous, the impossible, and of his higher aspirations for the Ideal, the Perfect: she realises the wild dreams and visions of his generous youth and portrays for him a portion of that “other and better world,” with whose expectation he would console his age.

  The imaginative varnish of The Nights serves admirably as a foil to the absolute realism of the picture in general. We enjoy being carried away from trivial and commonplace characters, scenes and incidents; from the matter of fact surroundings of a work-a-day world, a life of eating and drinking, sleeping and waking, fighting and loving, into a society and a mise-en-scène which we suspect can exist and which we know does not. Every man at some turn or term of his life has longed for supernatural powers and a glimpse of Wonderland. Here he is in the midst of it. Here he sees mighty spirits summoned to work the human mite’s will, however whimsical, who can transport him in an eye- twinkling whithersoever he wishes; who can ruin cities and build palaces of gold and silver, gems and jacinths; who can serve up delicate viands and delicious drinks in priceless chargers and impossible cups and bring the choicest fruits from farthest Orient: here he finds magas and magicians who can make kings of his friends, slay armies of his foes and bring any number of beloveds to his arms. And from this outraging probability and out-stripping possibility arises not a little of that strange fascination exercised for nearly two centuries upon the life and literature of Europe by The Nights, even in their mutilated and garbled form. The reader surrenders himself to the spell, feeling almost inclined to enquire “And why may it not be true?’’245 His brain is dazed and dazzled by the splendours which flash before it, by the sudden procession of Jinns and Jinniyahs, demons and fairies, some hideous, others preternaturally beautiful; by good wizards and evil sorcerers, whose powers are unlimited for weal and for woe; by mermen and mermaids, flying horses, talking animals, and reasoning elephants; by magic rings and their slaves and by talismanic couches which rival the carpet of Solomon. Hence, as one remarks, these Fairy Tales have pleased and still continue to please almost all ages, all ranks and all different capacities.

  Dr. Hawkesworth246 observes that these Fairy Tales find favour “because even their machinery, wild and wonderful as it is, has its laws; and the magicians and enchanters perform nothing but what was naturally to be expected from such beings, after we had once granted them existence.” Mr. Heron “rather supposes the very contrary is the truth of the fact. It is surely the strangeness, the unknown nature, the anomalous character of the supernatural agents here employed, that makes them to operate so powerfully on our hopes, fears, curiosities, sympathies, and, in short, on all the feelings of our hearts. We see men and women, who possess qualities to recommend them to our favour, subjected to the influence of beings, whose good or ill will, power or weakness, attention or neglect, are regulated by motives and circumstances which we cannot comprehend: and hence, we naturally tremble for their fate, with the same anxious concern, as we should for a friend wandering, in a dark night, amidst torrents and precipices; or preparing to land on a strange island, while he knew not whether he should be received, on the shore, by cannibals waiting to tear him piecemeal, and devour him, or by gentle beings, disposed to cherish him with fond hospitality.” Both writers have expressed themselves well, but meseems each has secured, as often happens, a fragment of the truth and holds it to be the whole Truth. Granted that such spiritual creatures as Jinns walk the earth, we are pleased to find them so very human, as wise and as foolish in word and deed as ourselves: similarly we admire in a landscape natural forms like those of Staffa or the Palisades which favour the works of architecture. Again, supposing such preternaturalisms to be around and amongst us, the wilder and more capricious they prove, the more our attention is excited and our forecasts are baffled to be set right in the end. But this is not all. The grand source of pleasure in Fairy Tales is the natural desire to learn more of the Wonderland which is known to many as a word and nothing more, like Central Africa before the last half century: thus the interest is that of the “Personal Narrative” of a grand exploration to one who delights in travels. The pleasure must be greatest where faith is strongest; for instance amongst imaginative races like the Kelts and especially Orientals, who imbibe supernaturalism with their mother’s milk. “I am persuaded,” writes Mr. Bayle St. John,247 “that the great scheme of preternatural energy, so fully developed in The Thousand and One Nights, is believed in by the majority of the inhabitants of all the religious professions both in Syria and Egypt.” He might have added “by every reasoning being from prince to peasant, from Mullah to Badawi, between Marocco and Outer Ind.”

  The Fairy Tale in The Nights is wholly and purely Persian. The gifted Iranian race, physically the noblest and the most beautiful of all known to me, has exercised upon the world- history an amount of influence which has not yet been fully recognised. It repeated for Babylonian art and literature what Greece had done for Egyptian, whose dominant idea was that of working for eternity a . Hellas and Iran instinctively chose as their characteristic the idea of Beauty, rejecting all that was exaggerated and grotesque; and they made the sphere of Art and Fancy as real as the world of Nature and Fact. The innovation was hailed by the Hebrews. The so-called Books of Moses deliberately and ostentatiously ignored the future state of rewards and punishments, the other world which ruled the life of the Egyptian in this world: the lawgiver, whoever he may have been, Osarsiph or Moshe, apparently held the tenet unworthy of a race whose career he was directing to conquest and isolation in dominion. But the Jews, removed to Mesopotamia, the second cradle of the creeds, presently caught the infection of their Asiatic media; superadded Babylonian legend to Egyptian myth; stultified The Law by supplementing it with the “absurdities of foreign fable” and ended, as the Talmud proves, with becoming the most wildly superstitious and “other worldly’’ of mankind.

  The same change befel Al-Islam. The whole of its supernaturalism is borrowed bodily from Persia, which had “imparadised Earth by making it the abode of angels.” Mohammed, a great and commanding genius, blighted and narrowed by surroundings and circumstances to something little higher than a Covenanter or a Puritan, declared to his followers,

  “I am sent to ‘stablish the manners and customs;”

  and his deficiency of imagination made him dislike everything but “women, perfumes, and prayers,” with an especial aversion to music and poetry, plastic art and fiction. Yet his system, unlike that of Moses, demanded thaumaturgy and metaphysical entities, and these he perforce borrowed from the Jews who had borrowed them from the Babylonians: his soul and spirit, his angels and devils, his cosmogony, his heavens and hells, even the
Bridge over the Great Depth are all either Talmudic or Iranian. But there he stopped and would have stopped others. His enemies among the Koraysh were in the habit of reciting certain Persian fabliaux and of extolling them as superior to the silly and equally fictitious stories of the “Glorious Koran.” The leader of these scoffers was one Nazr ibn Háris who, taken prisoner after the Battle of Bedr, was incontinently decapitated, by apostolic command, for what appears to be a natural and sensible preference. It was the same furious fanaticism and one-idea’d intolerance which made Caliph Omar destroy all he could find of the Alexandrian Library and prescribe burning for the Holy Books of the Persian Guebres. And the taint still lingers in Al-Islam: it will be said of a pious man, “He always studies the Koran, the Traditions and other books of Law and Religion; and he never reads poems nor listens to music or to stories.”

  Mohammed left a dispensation or rather a reformation so arid, jejune and material that it promised little more than the “Law of Moses,” before this was vivified and racially baptised by Mesopotamian and Persic influences. But human nature was stronger than the Prophet and, thus outraged, took speedy and absolute revenge. Before the first century had elapsed, orthodox Al-Islam was startled by the rise of Tasawwuf or Sufyism248 a revival of classic Platonism and Christian Gnosticism, with a mingling of modern Hylozoism; which, quickened by the glowing imagination of the East, speedily formed itself into a creed the most poetical and impractical, the most spiritual and the most transcendental ever invented; satisfying all man’s hunger for “belief” which, if placed upon a solid basis of fact and proof, would forthright cease to be belief.

  I will take from The Nights, as a specimen of the true Persian romance, “The Queen of the Serpents” (vol. v. 298), the subject of Lane’s Carlylean denunciation. The first gorgeous picture is the Session of the Snakes which, like their Indian congeners the Nága kings and queens, have human heads and reptile bodies, an Egyptian myth that engendered the “old serpent” of Genesis. The Sultánah welcomes Hásib Karím al-Dín, the hapless lad who had been left in a cavern to die by the greedy woodcutters; and, in order to tell him her tale, introduces the “Adventures of Bulúkiyá”: the latter is an Israelite converted by editor and scribe to Mohammedanism; but we can detect under his assumed faith the older creed. Solomon is not buried by authentic history “beyond the Seven (mystic) Seas,” but at Jerusalem or Tiberias; and his seal-ring suggests the Jám-i-Jam, the crystal cup of the great King Jamshíd. The descent of the Archangel Gabriel, so familiar to Al-Islam, is the manifestation of Bahman, the First Intelligence, the mightiest of the Angels who enabled Zarathustra-Zoroaster to walk like Bulukiya over the Dálatí or Caspian Sea. 249 Amongst the sights shown to Bulukiya, as he traverses the Seven Oceans, is a battle royal between the believing and the unbelieving Jinns, true Magian dualism, the eternal duello of the Two Roots or antagonistic Principles, Good and Evil, Hormuzd and Ahriman, which Milton has debased into a common-place modern combat fought also with cannon. Sakhr the Jinni is Eshem chief of the Divs, and Kaf, the encircling mountain, is a later edition of Persian Alborz. So in the Mantak al-Tayr (Colloquy of the Flyers) the Birds, emblems of souls, seeking the presence of the gigantic feathered biped Simurgh, their god, traverse seven Seas (according to others seven Wadys) of Search, of Love, of Knowledge, of Competence, of Unity, of Stupefaction, and of Altruism (i.e. annihilation of self), the several stages of contemplative life. At last, standing upon the mysterious island of the Simurgh and “casting a clandestine glance at him they saw thirty birds250 in him; and when they turned their eyes to themselves the thirty birds seemed one Simurgh: they saw in themselves the entire Simurgh; they saw in the Simurgh the thirty birds entirely.” Therefore they arrived at the solution of the problem “We and Thou;” that is, the identity of God and Man; they were for ever annihilated in the Simurgh and the shade vanished in the sun (Ibid. iii. 250). The wild ideas concerning Khalít and Malít (vol. v. 319) are again Guebre. “From the seed of Kayomars (the androgyne, like pre- Adamite man) sprang a tree shaped like two human beings and thence proceeded Meshia and Meshianah, first man and woman, progenitors of mankind;” who, though created for “Shídistán, Light-land,” were seduced by Ahriman. This “two-man-tree” is evidently the duality of Physis and Anti-physis, Nature and her counterpart, the battle between Mihr, Izad or Mithra with his Surush and Feristeh (Seraphs and Angels) against the Divs who are the children of Time led by the arch demon-Eshem. Thus when Hormuzd created the planets, the dog, and all useful animals and plants, Ahriman produced the comets, the wolf, noxious beasts and poisonous growths. The Hindus represent the same metaphysical idea by Bramhá the Creator and Visva- karma, the Anti- creator,251 miscalled by Europeans Vulcan: the former fashions a horse and a bull and the latter caricatures them with an ass and a buffalo, — evolution turned topsy turvy. After seeing nine angels and obtaining an explanation of the Seven Stages of Earth which is supported by the Gav-i-Zamín, the energy, symbolised by a bull, implanted by the Creator in the mundane sphere, Bulukiya meets the four Archangels, to wit Gabriel who is the Persian Rawánbakhsh or Life-giver; Michael or Beshter, Raphael or Israfil alias Ardibihisht, and Azazel or Azrail who is Dumá or Mordad, the Death-giver; and the four are about to attack the Dragon, that is, the demons hostile to mankind who were driven behind Alborz-Kaf by Tahmuras the ancient Persian king. Bulukiya then recites an episode within an episode, the “Story of Jánsháh,” itself a Persian name and accompanied by two others (vol. v. 329), the mise-en-scène being Kabul and the King of Khorasan appearing in the proem. Janshah, the young Prince, no sooner comes to man’s estate than he loses himself out hunting and falls in with cannibals whose bodies divide longitudinally, each moiety going its own way: these are the Shikk (split ones) which the Arabs borrowed from the Persian Ním- chihrah or Half-faces. They escape to the Ape-island whose denizens are human in intelligence and speak articulately, as the universal East believes they can: these Simiads are at chronic war with the Ants, alluding to some obscure myth which gave rise to the gold-diggers of Herodotus and other classics, “emmets in size somewhat less than dogs but bigger than foxes.”252 The episode then falls into the banalities of Oriental folk-lore. Janshah, passing the Sabbation river and reaching the Jews’ city, is persuaded to be sewn up in a skin and is carried in the normal way to the top of the Mountain of Gems where he makes acquaintance with Shaykh Nasr, Lord of the Birds: he enters the usual forbidden room; falls in love with the pattern Swan-maiden; wins her by the popular process; loses her and recovers her through the Monk Yaghmús, whose name, like that of King Teghmús, is a burlesque of the Greek; and, finally, when she is killed by a shark, determines to mourn her loss till the end of his days. Having heard this story Bulukiya quits him; and, resolving to regain his natal land, falls in with Khizr; and the Green Prophet, who was Wazir to Kay Kobad (vith century B. C.) and was connected with Macedonian Alexander (!) enables him to win his wish. The rest of the tale calls for no comment.

  Thirdly and lastly we have the histories, historical stories and the “Ana” of great men in which Easterns as well as Westerns delight: the gravest writers do not disdain to relieve the dullness of chronicles and annals by means of such discussions, humorous or pathetic, moral or grossly indecent. The dates must greatly vary: some of the anecdotes relating to the early Caliphs appear almost contemporary; others, like Ali of Cairo and Abu al- Shamat, may be as late as the Ottoman Conquest of Egypt (sixteenth century). All are distinctly Sunnite and show fierce animus against the Shi’ah heretics, suggesting that they were written after the destruction of the Fatimite dynasty (twelfth century) by Salah al-Din (Saladin the Kurd) one of the latest historical personages and the last king named in The Nights. 253 These anecdotes are so often connected with what a learned Frenchman terms the “regne féerique de Haroun er- Réschid,”254 that the Great Caliph becomes the hero of this portion of The Nights. Aaron the Orthodox was the central figure of the most splendid empire the world had seen, the Viceregent of Allah combining the powers of
Cæsar and Pope, and wielding them right worthily according to the general voice of historians. To quote a few: Ali bin Talib al-Khorásáni described him, in A.D. 934, a century and-a-half after his death when flattery would be tongue-tied, as, “one devoted to war and pilgrimage, whose bounty embraced the folk at large.” Sa’adi (ob. A.D. 1291) tells a tale highly favourable to him in the “Gulistan” (lib. i. 36). Fakhr al-Din255 (xivth century) lauds his merits, eloquence, science and generosity; and Al-Siyuti (nat. A.D. 1445) asserts “He was one of the most distinguished of Caliphs and the most illustrious of the Princes of the Earth” (). The Shaykh al-Nafzáwi256 (sixteenth century) in his Rauz al-Átir fí Nazáh al-Khátir = Scented Garden-site for Heart-delight, calls Harun (chapt. vii.) the “Master of munificence and bounty, the best of the generous.” And even the latest writers have not ceased to praise him. Says Alí Azíz Efendi the Cretan, in the Story of Jewád257 (), “Harun was the most bounteous, illustrious and upright of the Abbaside Caliphs.”

  The fifth Abbaside was fair and handsome, of noble and majestic presence, a sportsman and an athlete who delighted in polo and archery. He showed sound sense and true wisdom in his speech to the grammarian-poet Al-Asma’î, who had undertaken to teach him:— “Ne m’enseignez jamais en public, et ne vous empressez pas trop de me donner des avis en particulier. Attendez ordinairement que je vous interroge, et contentez vous de me donner une response précise à ce que je vous demanderai, sans y rien ajouter de superflu. Gardez vous surtout de vouloir me préoccuper pour vous attirer ma creance, et pour vous donner de l’autorité. Ne vous etendez jamais trop en long sur les histoires et les traditions que vous me raconterez, si je ne vous en donne la permission. Lorsque vous verrai que je m’eloignerai de l’équité dans mes jugements, ramenez-moi avec douceur, sans user de paroles fâcheuses ni de réprimandes. Enseignez-moi principalement les choses qui sont les plus necessaires pour les dis cours que je dois faire en public, dans les mosquées et ailleurs; et ne parlez point en termes obscurs, ou mystérieux, ni avec des paroles trop recherchées.’’258