by Paul Nurse
EASTERN
DREAMS
EASTERN
DREAMS
HOW THE ARABIAN NIGHTS CAME TO THE WORLD
PAUL McMICHAEL NURSE
VIKING CANADA
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First published 2010
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Copyright © Paul McMichael Nurse, 2010
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Nurse, Paul McMichael
Eastern dreams : how the Arabian nights came to the world / Paul McMichael Nurse.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-670-06360-4
1. Arabian nights. 2. Arabian nights--Influence. I. Title.
PJ7737.N87 2010 398.22 C2010-902846-5
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One book … that captivates in childhood and delights in age.
—ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, “A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE”
I thus give the reader some slight abstraction of my Oriental dreams, which always filled me with such amazement at the monstrous scenery, that horror seemed absorbed … in sheer astonishment.
—THOMAS DE QUINCEY,
CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER
Contents
Author’s Note
Introduction: Stories from the Past
1 A Spectral Work
2 A Frenchman Abroad
3 The Coming of the Nights
4 “These Idle Deserts”
5 The Nights and the Romantic Spirit
6 Searching for the Nights
7 The Victorian Rivals
8 The Arabian Nights Today
9 Infinite Delights
Epilogue
Notes
Suggestions for Further Study
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
There exist a number of systems designed to transliterate Arabic words into approximate English renderings; far too many, in fact, for a work of general interest. In this book, which is written for a broad readership by a non-Arabist, words that have familiar English forms, such as caliph, sultan, genie, Koran and roc are retained for the sake of familiarity, even if these terms have not been, linguistically speaking, transliterated into their closest phonetic equivalents (such as Qur’an, which is nearer to the Arabic pronunciation than the hard western “K” used in Koran).
As for names, the same rule applies. Although there are more accurate renderings of names like Scheherazade and Dinarzade available (Shahrazad and Dunyazad, respectively, being among the most common), these forms are the ones with the greatest familiarity for the greatest number of readers, and for that reason are retained here. It is also for that reason that I have decided to use a more popular and simpler Arabic word for “storyteller”—rawi—rather than the more acceptably accurate term al-hakawati. It is simply a matter of making things easier for readers.
Moreover, while there are countless versions of the Arabian Nights in print, the frame story involving Queen Scheherazade contained in the opening of many—but certainly not all—editions has been retold here in modified form as a reminder that the tales that follow are part of a larger and more immediate story occurring simultaneously with the recited ones, as well as the oft-forgotten fact that the most extraordinary figure in the entire Nights is the one actually doing the telling.
As far as quotations go, after some thought I’ve decided to use the Sir Richard Francis Burton English translation almost exclusively as a source text. Verbose, archaic and even as frequently unpleasant as is Burton’s style, it remains nonetheless the lengthiest version of the Nights in English, as well as one of the most famous translations of any book in existence, and even today retains an (admittedly prolix) antique flavour appropriate to the subject.
Regarding that subject: When discussing an Arabic text, I prefer to use its Arabic name, Alf Laila wa Laila—literally, “A Thousand Nights and One Night”—while otherwise employing interchangeably the common western titles of The Thousand and One Nights and the Arabian Nights for European-language editions. All versions of the work, however, are designated simply as “the Nights.”
Finally, while it’s hardly necessary to say it, it should be said, anyway. Any errors of fact, text, translation or anything else remain solely the responsibility of the author, and are not reflective of those associates, colleagues or friends who aided or otherwise supported the writing of this book. They remain blameless, although each deserves a 1001 salaams for their efforts.
EASTERN
DREAMS
Introduction
STORIES FROM THE PAST
What shall we tell you? Tales, marvellous tales
Of ships and stars and isles where good men rest,
Where nevermore the rose of sunset pales,
And winds and shadows fall toward the West …
—JAMES ELROY FLECKER,
“THE GOLDEN JOURNEY TO SAMARKAND”
This is how it begins, the story from which spring all the others in the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.
Long ago, two kingly brothers named Shahryar and Shazaman learned, to their sorrow, that their wives were unfaithful. After executing these inconstant queens for adultery, the brothers set forth to find someone whose misfortunes exceeded their own. By the seaside they encountered a great genie who kept his human wife hidden away in a crystal chest bound with four great locks. While the genie slept his wife emerged and, on threat of waking her demon husband, demanded love of the brothers who, complying in fear for their lives, were then shown the strumpet’s collection of 570 rings taken from her lovers, now augmented by two.
Learning this, the brothers resolved that the genie was more unfortunate than they, and returned to their respective kingdoms. But soon the eldest brother, the Sultan Shahryar, became so consumed with rage over the perfidy of women that he issued an edict whereby each day he would marry a virgin of his kingdom, only to execute her on the morning following their wedding night, his embittered mind believing that only in this way could a woman’s faithfulness be assured for all time.
Shahryar’s vizier, whose own daughters were exempt from the decree, went sadly about his business of each morning setting ou
t to find an innocent female, so that within the space of a day his king might marry a maid and murder a queen. But the vizier’s oldest daughter, Scheherazade, wise and worldly and learned beyond her green years, persuaded her father to give her to the sultan as his newest bride, and this the vizier reluctantly did.
On their wedding night, Scheherazade asked Shahryar if her younger sister Dinarzade might sleep beneath their bridal bed, so that the sisters could take proper leave of each other on the morning of the new queen’s execution. Her wish was granted, and when the newlyweds were done with their love-play, Dinarzade came out from under their bed with a request (according to a ruse the sisters had earlier agreed upon) that Scheherazade might beguile the night by telling a story to while away the long hours until sunrise.
Scheherazade did so, relating to her sister and her husband a tale of elegant beauty, designed to delight and inform. But when she perceived the courier of the dawn approaching in the east, Scheherazade ceased saying her permitted say, promising to finish her tale the following night. The story-loving sultan, not wanting to miss the conclusion, decided to stay her execution until the morning after.
And so on the next evening Scheherazade finished her previous night’s tale as promised, but then swiftly began another story, which gave rise to others, which begat still others. Shahryar’s curiosity made him postpone Scheherazade’s execution night after night, through 1001 consecutive nights, during which time his tale-spinning sultana bore her husband three strong sons whom he loved with all his being.
By the end of the 1001st Night, the sultan had also come to love Scheherazade with his whole heart, and was cured of his mad hatred of women. He rescinded the order of execution against his wife and revoked the edict against the women of his kingdom, repenting sorely for his ghastly crime. Thereafter, Shahryar summoned his scribes and his copyists and bade them write down all Scheherazade’s stories—her tales of description and discourse and wondrous histories, all from the first to the last, in letters of liquid gold. When the stories were set down, they were bound in thirty great volumes and stored in the Royal Treasury, where the work was entitled The Stories of the Thousand and One Nights. After which the Sultan Shahryar and his clever wife lived fully and well until the end of their days.
Since that ancient time, there have been countless retellings of Scheherazade’s tales, and her fanciful world has become a permanent vision of an alternative reality. By the time The Thousand and One Nights reached Europe in the early Enlightenment, its stories had already survived in the eastern world for close to 1001 years. Told and retold, read and reread throughout the immensity of the Muslim world, the book often referred to simply as “the Nights” has come to weave its charm on the West at least as vigorously as it has done in the East, yet to this day remains a work little understood in either realm.
Questions and contradictions abound. When, where and how did these stories originate? When were they first set down? How did they come to appear in the West, and to what effect? Why and how has this book endured and transcended cultures to become a bona fide classic of world literature, part of the corpus of international fiction held to contain important expressions of human truths? Why has this work—in the West, at least, practically synonymous with the innocence of childhood—been dogged by controversy almost from the moment of its earliest appearance nearly 1200 years ago? Perhaps most important, what is it about the Nights that has proved so durable that it has not only survived but flourished, to the extent that the entire world is now suffused with its imagery? It is quite possibly the most widespread literary text in human history.
The Arabian Nights is a uniquely elusive book, a work that teases and provokes even as it withholds. Some parts reflect the drama and vicissitudes of everyday life during recognizable historical periods; others intrude the fantastic into reality for good or ill. Still other parts serve as allegorical tales, parables from which the reader may draw instructive lessons. And practically all unedited editions contain hundreds of snatches of song and verse used to underscore the proceedings, making the original Arabic Nights almost as much a work of poetry as it is of prose fiction.
This quicksilver element has been a magnet for investigators, prompting many researchers to peer, Oz-like, behind the popular curtain to behold the Nights’ true face, however long and fraught with difficulty this feat may be. Delving into the ways and byways of Arabian Nights history, it is easy to grow confused about what is real and what is not. Actual historical periods, cultures and figures exist alongside imaginary characters and places. Ancient Baghdad, Damascus, Basra and Cairo coexist with mythical locales like the City of Brass. Common folk pursue trades little changed since the beginning of history at the same time as they interact with demons and fairies. Slaves mingle with kings and queens, sorcery affects one and all, and high and low alike stand powerless in the presence of Death’s Angel.
Often seen as the Muslim counterpart to European fairy tales, there is nevertheless an individual quality to the Nights that allows it to stand alone as folklore. Unlike most western fairy stories, good does not inevitably triumph over evil in the Arabian Nights. Fate is seldom irrevocably kind, and bound destiny—kismet—has a way of fulfilling itself no matter what one’s actions or intentions. In “The Third Kalandar’s Tale,” an astrologer divines that a young man will die when he is fifteen years old. The youth hides away on a secluded island for safety, but after he tells the visiting Prince Ajib ibn Khasib his foretold fate, and despite Ajib’s high regard for the boy, the prince kills him by accident, fulfilling the prophecy.
If there is anything approaching a common theme or motif to the Nights, it is the steadfast belief that life is not a linear progression, a straight arrow from womb to tomb, but rather a series of twists and turns harbouring the unforeseen. Some shifts are good, many more are bad, but existence itself is a continual process of reconfiguration. In the Arabian Nights, people are transformed into animals, the poor become wealthy and powerful, the wealthy and powerful lose their positions, and a person’s fate may hinge on his most mundane actions. Chance is a capricious beast, and the wise absorb this cosmic fact and live their lives accordingly; the foolish either ignore or—worse yet—fight kismet, only to suffer most terribly for it.
The history of The Thousand and One Nights and its spread across the globe is itself a tale of transforming wonder as curious as any found within its episodes of magic. Its progress through the centuries is a shifting adventure packed with extraordinary incident. Meticulous scholarship exists alongside fraud, forgery and sheer invention, as accepted facts are shown to be hollow or false.
Above all else, like all great tales, the history of the Arabian Nights is a story of people. Its literary landscape may be the teeming polyglot world of diverse cultures comprising the ancient East, but the West likewise plays a pivotal role in the work’s long trek toward global integration. Its stories depict a staggering array of fictional heroes, villains, lovers and rogues of many ethnicities, but the actual historical characters who step in and out of the tales are no less arresting. All-powerful kings vie with scholars, librarians, con artists, retiring bookworms and swashbuckling explorers. Fictional or not, each figure bound in some way to the Nights is a component of the swirling historical panoply in which a literary work, whose original purpose was entertainment allied with instruction, makes a series of journeys—physical, cultural, literary—across the years to become a universal depiction of an otherworldly cosmos.
Through the Nights’ exquisite power to transform while maintaining a consistent vision, the book has proved itself one of literature’s most enduring portals, a work capable of binding and perhaps even reconciling cultures. By transmitting essential truths about the vista of human experience through visions of the classical Muslim world, the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments has, during its immensely long history, come to fuse the picture of a fantastic realm onto the imagination of an entire planet.
When The Thousand and One Nights first appea
red in Europe early in 1704, the work proved delightfully novel for the denizens of an emerging modern age. Although Europe and the Muslim East had interacted through travel and trade for most of a millennium, Islamic manners and habits remained largely unknown in the West. Information about the Arab world was based mostly on merchants’ stories, travellers’ reports or the tales of returning Crusaders handed down through the generations. Fragmentary, contradictory and in many cases downright wrong (one persistent legend held that the coffin of the Prophet Muhammad in Medina was suspended in mid-air by giant magnets), these accounts provided little more than a glimpse through the opaque glass obscuring the world of the Muslims.
This new storybook, taken from these same lands, promised Europeans not only diversion and entertainment but also an opening, they believed, into a culture at once exotic and strange, and yet not so completely unfamiliar as to be impossible to comprehend. For the first time, ordinary citizens could read for themselves about the style of living of those populating the Muslim world, as well as accounts of the curious creatures that supposedly inhabited it. To westerners, the Arabian Nights seemed to incorporate every literary genre under the sun, from fairy tales, fables and love stories to historical anecdotes, tragedies, comedies and burlesques. It was, a later writer pronounced, “a revelation in romance,” capturing at once the fancy of occidental readers. Soon all of Europe was aflame that “something so new, so unconventional, so entirely without purpose” should have come their way. Readers ranging from sophisticated court ladies to provincial schoolboys consumed the work feverishly. Literary gatherings talked of little else but caliphs, genies, rocs, ghouls and the near-superhuman resourcefulness of the work’s narrator-heroine, a young woman who salvages an impossible situation by employing her genius for storytelling.
