by Paul Nurse
Scheherazade herself is a figure of mystery, since her origins are not readily apparent. Her phonetically accurate name, Shahrazad, is Persian, meaning “City Freer” (likewise, “Dunyazad”—Dinarzade—means “World Freer”), and from references in al-Masudi and Ibn al-Nadim, it is likely her story appeared in some form in Hazar Afsanah. Some believe Scheherazade has her precedent in the Indian legend of Kanakamanjari, the tale of a woman who maintains her king’s love for half a year by telling him stories every night, but only concluding them on the following evening. This makes literary sense, as Hazar Afsanah is known to have contained Indian stories, perhaps based on recycled Jataka tales of the Buddha or the Hindu Hitopadesha, a collection of Sanskrit fables.
But there is also a reference to a similar storytelling persona in Greek Byzantium, which had a tradition of reciting fantastical “evening stories” about romantic histories, fables, and proverbs as an enjoyable diversion from the humdrum cares of the daylight hours. The titles of a number of these tales are included in al-Nadim’s work, including one called “Shatariyus the King, and the Reason for his Marrying Shahrazad the Storyteller.” The complication does not end there, since there is one Nights story (“The Tale of the Two Kings and the Vizier’s Daughters”) in which Scheherazade actually tells her own tale and that of the sultan, but this time set in China, with the king’s brother Shazaman ruling part of Persia. All this leaves Scheherazade’s origins as alluringly mysterious as her character, and also indicates that the story of a king and a tale-spinning woman was not exclusive to the Muslim world during the first millennium.
So an innate truth about The Thousand and One Nights is that this personification of Middle Eastern literature—the most famous Arabic storybook in the world—is actually an international compendium of tales culled from India, Persia, Arabia, Ottoman Turkey and Egypt, probably infused as well with stories surviving from Hebrew, Greek and perhaps even Roman sources. Parented by multinational sires and a Muslim mother—literally, in Scheherazade’s case—the Nights may owe at least part of its longevity to its development at a time and a place acting as a crossroads between cultures. Attracting both eastern and western influences into its oeuvre, an entire fictional world was created based on Islam at its height—an imaginary, super-geographical realm given breath by its narrator’s ability to conjure life with her beguiling voice.
* al-hakawait: combining wati and haka in the sense of someone possessing the popular expertise for relating a tale or fable. The word for “storyteller” varies from region to region in the Arab world.
Chapter 2
A FRENCHMAN ABROAD
To be lucky in the beginning is everything.
—MIGUEL DE CERVANTES, DON QUIXOTE
By the time Alf Laila wa Laila reached the sixteenth century, it had become a veritable warehouse of eastern stories culled from many different sources, a work that had survived as popular entertainment in the Muslim world for more than six centuries, and would thrive for five more. Stories from The Thousand and One Nights continued to be heard and read in coffee houses, marketplaces and homes from Morocco to Constantinople and beyond as far as the China Sea; during the Ottoman Empire, they even became the basis for a national theatre in Turkey.
At around the same time, a phenomenon was taking place in Europe that would have a profound effect on the Nights: a growing consciousness of the Asian world. From about the early seventeenth century through the nineteenth, a period later described as an “Oriental Renaissance,” Europeans began a process of “rediscovering” the East—particularly India, but also the Near and Middle East—through increased interaction with Asian lands and peoples. Some European travellers had always smoothed their way by learning indigenous languages, but with merchant companies pushing outward along routes pioneered by Renaissance explorers, the new international trade reality sparked a revival of interest in eastern languages and cultures. The Portuguese in Africa, the French and British on the Indian subcontinent and the Dutch in the East Indies were all instrumental in bringing together aspects of eastern and western civilizations as never before. The sustained interaction with Asian peoples created a necessity for linguists versed in eastern languages and protocols to translate exchanges, inaugurating the development of oriental studies—what we describe today as “Islamic” or “Asian” Studies.
In the wake of the explorers and traders came the evangelists, many of whom advocated the study of Hebrew, Turkish, Arabic and Persian for churchmen looking to spread the Gospel and counteract the effects of rival Muslim missionary work. If trade initiated the first wave of eastern interest and study, then Christianity gave rise to the second, sealing the need for some level of understanding of Muslim peoples to discover how best to approach them.
These were practical considerations for two linked groups, but they were not the only ones. In an increasingly secular environment encouraged by the doctrine of deism, Europeans were now willing to view Islam and the East with a less jaundiced eye than previous generations. The increasing East–West interaction prompted a growing interest in oriental matters among Europe’s general population, particularly the leisured classes. Some were sincerely interested in studying the complexities of this unveiling universe, while others were simply on the lookout for fresh amusements, yet all are indicative of a burgeoning European preoccupation with Asia. Even as the Turks advanced on Central Europe in the late seventeenth century (actually laying siege to Vienna in 1683), the formal study of Persian had already been inaugurated in France; professorships of Arabic were being established in European universities; and various scholars were active in publishing the first eastern dictionaries, grammars and translations of principal Asian texts.
It was during this period of growing European interest in the oriental world that Alf Laila wa Laila—that sturdy survivor of a rich eastern literary tradition—stood ready to be uncovered by the West. It was perhaps only a matter of time before the Nights found a way into the consciousness of westerners capable of understanding and transmitting its contents to more of the world. This was the situation at the turn of the eighteenth century, on the cusp of what France records as her Grand Siècle or “Splendid Century,” when an Arabic copy of the Nights fell into the hands of a story-loving French scholar named Antoine Galland.
As the new century—the Enlightenment century—dawned in Europe, Antoine Galland was in his late fifties; an unassuming, lifelong bachelor who had passed only slightly more than half his adult life in his native France. He had spent the remainder working, studying and travelling in the Levant, where he’d ventured three times between 1670 and 1688 in the service of the French government. Fluent in four eastern languages—five if one counts Modern Greek as eastern—on each of these journeys Galland was commissioned with tasks requiring an awesome amount of industry, whether compiling extensive reports on Eastern Orthodox religious beliefs, accumulating oriental collectibles for French notables or acting as an embassy secretary in the Ottoman capital of Constantinople. In what time remained, Galland supplemented these activities by increasing his knowledge of Turkish, Persian and Arabic. Eventually, he became sufficiently well-versed in such studies that he was hired as an assistant compiler and editor on one of the West’s first encyclopedias of the eastern world, establishing himself as a pioneering oriental scholar.
Nevertheless, in another of those ironies that appear to be a continuing feature of Arabian Nights history, Galland could never have known that, though considered a notable Enlightenment figure, his posthumous fame is irrevocably tied to the publication of a storybook he translated as little more than a hobby, an amusing recreation following the hard scholastic work of his day. He also could never have conceived that by adapting The Thousand and One Nights for his countrymen, Galland was instrumental beyond anyone else in dispensing the Nights’ greatest power to the wider world—its extraordinary ability to transform and mould itself to fit the expectations of those entering its imaginary realm. In the centuries to come much longer, more
accurate and more heavily annotated translations of the Nights would appear from Arabists possessing at least as much knowledge as Antoine Galland, but this feverishly industrious Frenchman placed such a personal stamp on the work’s initial European reception that some observers feel he is not simply the doyen of western Arabian Nights translators, but in some important ways, the work’s true author.
Fittingly, Galland’s own life possesses something of a fairy-tale quality, since little in its beginnings suggest he would one day be counted among Europe’s premier orientalists as well as the originator of an essential piece of world literature. Born on April 4, 1646, in the small village of Rollot (where the cheese originates) in the northern frontier province of Picardy, Antoine Galland belonged to a family of poor peasant artisans who moved to the nearby town of Noyon a few months after his birth. His father’s death four years later left Antoine’s still-young mother, Marie, alone to earn a living, and unlikely to provide her five surviving children with more than the rudiments of an education.
Fortunately, Galland seems to have been born with that intangible quality of innate luck that can alter existence as much as any outlay of hard work. If he did not lead precisely a charmed life, he appears nonetheless to have had the happy capacity to be in the right place at the right time, as well as the gumption to use whatever opportunities appeared to advance himself far beyond his original station. In Noyon, a kindly great-uncle happened to be president of the local collège, or grammar-cum-high school. He took on the precocious youngster as a boarding student, where, from four to fourteen, Galland studied “Biblical languages”—Latin, Ancient Greek and Hebrew—until his protector’s death in 1660, as well as his family’s penury, forced Antoine to return home and apprentice to a local trade.
He might have stayed there, too, if not for an intense hatred of manual labour and a staggering love of learning. “Made for letters,” as Sir Richard Burton notes, Galland abandoned his apprenticeship within a year in hopes of continuing his studies in Paris. Details are sketchy, but it is very possible that one day the fifteen-year-old simply walked away from his trade (a serious move at a time when apprenticeship was akin to indentured labour) and kept going until he reached the capital, where he knew no one but an elderly aunt, at the end of September 1661.
Galland’s luck held. His kinswoman knew a priestly relative of the late Canon of Noyon, to whom she introduced Antoine. Impressed by the youth’s learning and modest manner, the priest recommended him to the vice-principal of the Collège du Plessis, which accepted Galland as a student. Thereafter he made such scholarly strides that, still in his teens, he began conducting classes in Ancient Greek while beginning Turkish, Persian and Arabic at the Collège Royal (now the Collège de France).
From all indications, Galland was a dream student, as he was to become a dream scholar. Single-minded beyond measure, his surviving journals and letters point to a man possessing equal parts ambition, quiet charm and an endless capacity for work. Less than a decade after arriving in Paris, Galland was assigned the responsibility of cataloguing the Sorbonne’s oriental manuscripts, an onerous task he performed with such conscientiousness that he earned himself a reputation as a budding scholar.
By now just twenty-four, Galland had been studying or teaching for nineteen of those years, and had already exceeded anything he might have expected from his rural origins. But this was the dawn of the new world being created by the Enlightenment, a time when opportunities were opening to those with sufficient talent and ambition, regardless of their background, and more was to come Antoine Galland’s way very soon.
While working as an assistant Latin instructor, his reputation for diligence and proficiency in eastern languages earned Galland the chance of a lifetime. The Marquis de Nointel had recently been named French ambassador to the Sublime Porte of the Turkish sultan Mehmet IV, and was due to leave within the year. Recommended as the new ambassador’s attaché-secrétaire, Galland was offered an appointment he quickly accepted.
It proved the making of him. Along with his secretarial duties, Galland was commissioned by Louis XIV’s government to undertake a detailed study of the Greek Orthodox faith, whose articles had been the subject of curiosity and heated debate among prominent French Catholics. He was further charged with collecting materials and artifacts to augment the private collections of Louis and his brilliant chief minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert. With these tasks in hand, Galland arrived at Constantinople in late 1670 and wasted no time in mastering Romaic (Modern Greek) by frequenting the Greek coffee houses of the Turkish capital. He then proceeded to grapple with the assigned study of Orthodoxy under the guidance of a patriarch of the faith who had been deposed and persecuted by the Turks, compiling two reports he sent personally to the king.
At other moments, Galland haunted the cafés and bookstalls of Constantinople, practising languages as he ferreted out materials suitable for the royal collections. Although it appears that he purchased everything he had shipped to France, there remains a degree of imperial appropriation here, since Galland was only one of a number of western agents in the Ottoman Empire searching for oriental artifacts for elite European collections—what amounts to a vast international shopping spree, with the East a kind of gargantuan curiosity shop—the object of which, as Colbert noted in a letter to Galland, was to “orner nostre France des dépouilles de l’Orient” (“ornament our France with spoils of the Orient”).
Although Galland’s instructions stipulated that he need not bother much with collecting manuscripts dealing with fiction or poetry, during these expatriate years, and probably beginning with his collecting commission, Galland developed a passion for eastern stories. Whether listening to the storytellers in the cafés or attending gatherings where epic tales were read aloud, he came away impressed both by their length (a romanticized life of Alexander the Great ran to a hundred and twenty volumes) and their sophisticated structure, and doubtless this inspired him to start his own collection. Decades later, Galland would ask rhetorically why the European interest in Muslim society was not reciprocated by a similar Islamic curiosity about the West. With long experience in eastern literature, he postulated that Muslim culture was of such an innately rich nature that it is essentially a self-sufficient entity, wanting and indeed needing no input from outside sources.
This sounds like a kind of reverse chauvinism to us, but Galland was not really wrong to think this way. At that time, the first western scholars investigating the East were encountering regions at the height of their powers, including an Ottoman Empire still far from its days as Europe’s “Sick Man.” Seventeenth-century travellers, scholars and merchants visiting the Levant, Mogul India or the Chinese Empire were dealing with territories at least on a par with Europe as far as political strength went, and generally secure in their individual power. Although Turkey had already entered the downside of the peak achieved during its days under Suleiman the Magnificent, in Galland’s time the Ottomans still controlled the Balkans, Asia Minor, Arabia, Egypt and parts of North Africa, and they would menace Central Europe until almost the eighteenth century. European imperialism in Asia lay far in the future.
One of the few portraits of Antoine Galland depicts him in middle age, wearing the characteristic long periwig of the time. Portly, with a small, rather prissy-looking mouth, he nevertheless sports a mild and altogether pleasant expression on his clean-shaven face, a reflection of the humility and unassuming nature Galland’s contemporaries record as their chief impression of him. Much of what is known about his character can be gleaned from the journals he kept during this first stay in Constantinople and afterwards, selections of which were later published to capitalize on nineteenth-century French imperial aims. These point to a quietly determined young man in love with learning, conscious of his obligations and at first sight, rather unworldly. Certainly the pleasures of the flesh do not seem to have excited Galland very much: he never married, and there is no evidence he was ever romantically attached to a woman in his li
fe. His entire existence seems to have been bound up in his work, making him practically a priest of scholarship—part of that fraternity whose greatest joy lies in pursuing ever-more esoteric pathways of learning.
He was not so pedantic, however, to be above taking part in the occasional embassy entertainment (once attiring himself in an elaborate Turkish costume to act in an amateur play; one thinks of the portrait of Byron in his Albanian dress), and was delighted to meet scholars, dragomans (“interpreters”) and celebrated European travellers like Jean Chardin, Guillaume-Joseph Grelot and Cornelio Magni. The admittedly incomplete picture that emerges from these fragments is of a personable youngster, happy with the lot Fate has cast him, possessing gifts for work and establishing contacts while intent on not disappointing his patrons.
Beneath the mildness, however, there is the sense that Galland carried within a steely determination to do well as a means of securing his advancement. The early decision to abandon his apprenticeship finds its counterpart in his constant, almost relentless activities in Ottoman Turkey. Whether there remained in the adult professional scholar something of the boyhood hatred of manual labour is unclear, but he seems hell-bent on ensuring he built and maintained a solid reputation for work in multiple fields. Combining a personable character with ambition, Antoine Galland looks to have been that rarest of creatures: an ambitious man lacking the driving egomania of most aspiring careerists.
During his first stay in the empire of the Turks, Galland developed an interest in numismatics (the study of coins, medals and medallions), collecting various specimens and over the years writing many papers on their provenance. Describing himself as a philosopher, classicist, numismatist and orientalist—quite a full plate for an arriviste peasant’s son from the provinces—Galland’s workaholic nature suggests more than a simple passion for his chosen fields. Finding that he had multiple interests, he may have had a half-conscious desire to cultivate these enthusiasms as a way of mov-ing between areas of expertise, maintaining not only his productivity but also his usefulness, and therefore a sustainable career.
