by Paul Nurse
The appropriation of one culture by another through its literature finds curiously little expression in Edward Said’s work, although, as a literary scholar, it might be thought The Thousand and One Nights’ immense western popularity would provide excellent fodder for his argument. Perhaps, concerned as he is with western writers who focus on the East, Said is puzzled by how to approach an eastern work actually considered by the West to be one of its own texts, and so largely ignores a prime and founding expression of orientalist perception over the past three hundred years.
Not that the Arabian Nights has escaped the culture wars scot-free. Other commentators have taken up the slack left by Said, focusing on how the West’s appetite for the world of the mythical Nights has come to partially inform its attitudes and perceptions. The Syrian cultural historian Rana Kabbani devotes substantial critical space in her book Europe’s Myths of Orient to the Richard Burton edition of the Nights, finding it a prime compendium of “lewd Saracens,” subservient harem beauties and violent behaviour dolled up as an allegedly authoritative picture of a barbaric Orient.
Another observer, Swiss-Canadian philosopher Thierry Hentsch, goes further by postulating that western images of the Muslim Orient found in texts like the Nights are actually expressions of westerners’ insecurities about their identity, a mirror the West holds up to help view and define itself. Here works like the Arabian Nights are not only simple distortions of the East, but indicators of the West’s preoccupation with itself. With the post-colonial era now fading in the face of new global realities—some say by the establishment of a new colonial age founded on fresh methods of appropriation—it seems certain that the debate about the worth of orientalist imagery as depicted in such works as the Nights will remain vigorous for years to come.
The familiarity of The Thousand and One Nights in both the East and West and the ongoing use of its images is perhaps the most striking evidence of the book’s enduring power. Within the mainstream Arab world, however, contemporary attitudes toward the work remain at least as ambivalent as they were during the Abbasid caliphate. Its origins may be homegrown, but the West’s wholesale embracing of the work as the “Arabian Nights” is a source of deep suspicion to many Muslims, who see its status as proof that many western perceptions of Islam are filtered through fantastical and misleading images.
Nor has the secular nature of the Nights’ stories helped its reputation within conservative parts of the Muslim community, where the issue of Muslim identity is sometimes linked negatively to the West’s perceived attitudes about Islamic culture. It can certainly be argued that portions of the western world remain in thrall to ancient images of the Middle East as home to authoritarian politics, ever-present violence and “oriental excess” in thought and deed. Actual violence in the region, coupled with tensions caused by western involvement in regional affairs, only serve to heighten a Muslim sense that through such works as the Arabian Nights, the West is often discovering answers before the questions are even asked.
The rise of fundamentalist Islamic groups has also had an impact on the status of the Nights, since the sexuality and vulgarity in unexpurgated versions remains a problem for reserved societies. For over a millennium, elite Muslim attitudes toward works like Alf Laila wa Laila remained dismissive, but not officially censorious. It was not until the establishment of independent Arab nations in the twentieth century, many with laws based on Islamic precepts, that official interest in the Nights began to assert itself through legislation.
From time to time, a number of Muslim nations have banned The Thousand and One Nights, most famously the Egyptian government of Hosni Mubarak. Partly in response to a growing fundamentalist presence on the national scene, Egypt banned unexpurgated editions of the Nights in 1985, on the grounds of obscenity and as a threat to Egyptian youth. This was despite the fact that almost all Egyptian versions of the Nights were already abridged to delete potentially offending material.*
Although parts of the Islamic community harbour uncertainties regarding the Nights, they have not extinguished the flame of the book’s glamour. As recently as March 2002, Muslim fundamentalists were outraged to learn that Arabic copies of the Nights were being distributed to alleged al-Qaeda inmates held at the U.S. Guantanamo Bay detainment camp in Cuba. This seems to have been an instance of captors, perhaps innocently enough, offering inmates something they imagined their wards might enjoy reading, without understanding the book’s controversial nature in another cultural world. For all that, it seems The Thousand and One Nights remains a favourite among reading material available to those incarcerated in Cuba; with J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, it ranks high among books requested by prisoners from the Guantanamo prison library. Despite the feelings of many Muslim fundamentalists, it seems the human need for magic and wonder crosses a host of religious and political considerations.
Eastern authors who reference the Nights have also come under attack. The Anglo-Indian writer Salman Rushdie, who makes frequent allusions to the Nights in such works as Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses but especially in his anti-censorship children’s classic Haroun and the Sea of Stories, notoriously had an Iranian fatwa (religious decree) issued against him in 1989 for allegations of blasphemy in The Satanic Verses, and had to spend several years in hiding as a result. The Rushdie case is the most famous example of a negative reaction to modern writers employing Muslim religious themes and symbols, but it is not the only one. The Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, the first Arab writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (1988), came under literal attack for his writings in 1994 when the then eighty-two-year-old laureate was assaulted and stabbed by fundamentalist extremists in Cairo. He survived, but thereafter lived under bodyguard protection until his death in 2006.
Many contemporary eastern writers continue to view the Nights as unworthy of the name “literature” even as others, conscious of the work’s international impact on stories and storytelling, have employed it as a personal resource. Certainly, its controversial nature has not prevented the book from maintaining a hold on the eastern world, even if some of its supporters rank with the worst Nights villains. During the 1980s, Iraq’s ruling Ba’ath Party erected statues of Arabian Nights characters around Baghdad to legitimize the regime’s historical connection to the country’s past (including a macabre monument to “Ali Baba’s” Marjana pouring boiling oil into a jar hiding one of the Forty Thieves), and it may be assumed the theme of despotism finds resonance with more than one regional ruler.
Happily, the work has also been put to many more sanguine uses. In her French-language Sherazade trilogy, Algerian-born Leila Sebbar’s protagonist is an Algerian teenage runaway in modern Europe who wrestles with her identity in the same way her namesake wrestles with her fate. In When Dreams Travel, Indian novelist Githa Hariharan retells Scheherazade’s story, but set firmly in the context of the eternal power struggle between men and women. Balthasar’s Odyssey, a novel from 2000 by Lebanese author Amin Maalouf, concerns a seventeenth-century Levantine book merchant’s Nights-like journey from Ottoman Turkey to England as he searches for a sacred book said to hold the key to salvation. In addition to the many references to the Arabian Nights found in his works, Salman Rushdie has stated publicly that it is the one book he would most like to have with him if marooned on a desert island; a powerful endorsement from a significant postwar literary figure.
Like Rushdie, Naguib Mahfouz has found inspiration in the Nights. His 1982 novel Arabian Nights and Days is at once a pastiche and an original drama, mixing the familiar figures of Shahryar, Scheherazade, Aladdin and Sindbad in a new scenario. In a work that is more of an epilogue to the Nights than a direct sequel, Mahfouz uses seventeen linked tales to relate what happens following the end of Scheherazade’s storytelling, interweaving issues of tyranny, corruption, guilt, conscience and the question of forgiveness by invoking a familiar fictional past. By using westernized Nights characters like Aladdin and Ali Baba as accepted parts of their
text, eastern writers like Mahfouz contribute to what might be thought of as a covert cultural reconciliation, where literature derived from the East becomes a conciliatory symbol for all societies.
Astonishing as its tales are, the ability of the Arabian Nights to endure as a literary text is its most impressive characteristic—particularly as the book’s impact is now felt not through the number of its readers, but by its echoes. In this sense, it may be said to have risen, phoenix-like, from the ashes of its reading-neglect to live anew as a revered, consulted or referenced book for a host of writers and commentators. From almost the moment the Nights arrived in the West, it has inspired, and continues to inspire; the use of its name and elements appear frequently in the printed word and more. The oriental romance may be a thing of the past and the contemporary media might use the Nights mostly as pop fodder, but suggestions of the work reverberate in literature without end.
When Dinarzade asks Scheherazade in the Alf Laila Fragment to relate tales of “the cunning and stupidity, the generosity and avarice … the courage and cowardice” of men, she is voicing the ability of the Nights to convey an encompassing humanity in narrative. So encompassing, in fact, that the Arabian Nights is one of the few books in whose pages readers can be guaranteed to find whatever they seek. Children see it as an attractive fairyland; adults reading or rereading the work are surprised by the frank sophistication of some versions; literary scholars view it as a seminal text containing informative treasures; professional historians acknowledge it as an important source of social conditions during early Islam.
And postwar academics criticizing orientalist perceptions are not the only intellectuals making use of the Nights. Since the 1920s, feminists have advanced the notion that Scheherazade is an icon of gender triumph over destructive male forces. That she prevails over the sultan is viewed as a prototypical feminist victory over male aggression; her wit and storytelling skills are capable of shaping the world as a civilizing force. Modernist writers, meanwhile, tend to view the work in a broader perspective, drawing on the Nights’ picture of a “neutral territory … between the real world and fairyland, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet” to blur the boundaries between real and unreal.
The Thousand and One Nights appears, like a shadow, throughout modern literature—a prototype of twentieth-century fiction that rejects literary absolutes to create worlds of deliberate uncertainty. Authors from Marcel Proust (who may have unconsciously written À la recherche du temps perdu as a personal version of the Nights) through James Joyce (with Ulysses and Finnegans Wake) to Jorge Luis Borges, John Barth, Italo Calvino and many others have featured it in their work, either through simple reference or via such literary devices as magic realism, metafiction and deconstructive playfulness.
If these and other contemporary writers using the Nights have anything in common, it is their reconstructing of the older book’s universe, where dreams and waking reality mingle in a peculiarly literary landscape. By employing the dense familiarity of the Nights’ characters and elements to explore themes relevant to their own concerns, modern writers continue the tradition of maintaining and expanding the Arabian Nights’ imaginative domain. They are now—albeit in often very different ways—as much custodians of the work as were the storytellers of old, transmitting to new generations the essential attributes of a gleaming world where magic, dreams, reality and human interaction coexist in a sometimes-harmonious, sometimes-uneasy alliance of opposites.
As for the work itself, it continues to attract translators and researchers, as well as breed controversy. Between 1899 and 1904, Dr. Joseph-Charles Mardrus issued a new, sixteen-volume French translation of the Nights that was hailed as a fine replacement for the Galland version, updating the literary style from the time of Louis XIV to fin de siècle Europe. It was so well received that T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) thought about producing an English translation. “Much the best version … in any language,” Lawrence wrote to his publisher. “The correctness of Mardrus can’t be bettered. The rivalry in English isn’t high. Payne crabbed: Burton unreadable: Lane pompous.”*
Which makes one wonder about the extent of Lawrence’s Arabic, since Mardrus did as much distortion as any of his predecessors, omitting some tales, reworking others and otherwise juicing things up by inserting personal bons mots and a number of nasty Gallic diatribes against Jews. He may have grown up in a household where both French and Arabic were spoken, but Mardrus’s Arabic scholarship has been called “beneath criticism” by Arabists who note that his translation swarms with errors and unnecessary vulgarisms.
At first, Mardrus claimed that he worked from the Egyptian Bulaq Text of the Nights, but backtracked when discrepancies between his version and the Bulaq edition were uncovered. He then maintained that what he actually used was a seventeenth-century North African manuscript (shades of Maximilian Habicht), but this appears to be another case of Nights fraud, since whatever text or texts Dr. Mardrus did use, he made as personal and loose an adaption as anyone before him.
That said, Mardrus’s edition is by no means worthless; its heavy eroticism evokes the outré Guy de Maupassant decadence of the period in which he wrote (and perhaps befits a man married to the lesbian novelist-poet Lucie Delarue-Mardrus), but his statement that “For the first time in Europe, a complete and accurate translation of The Thousand and One Nights is made available” is stunningly pretentious; his contention that the Arabic words have only been replaced with French ones laughable.
Luckily, for every charlatan and falsifier in the history of the Nights, there is a sincere and learned researcher. Before the First World War, the Scottish-American orientalist Duncan Black MacDonald did much work on the Nights as a sideline to his research on Islamic theology, believing Arabian Nights stories are indigenous examples of Muslim spiritual concerns. Aware that the history of the work was full of confusing artifice and invention, MacDonald examined the various Alf Laila wa Laila manuscripts in Europe and thought about using the Galland Manuscript to fashion a critical reconstruction of how the early Nights might have looked, shorn of the extraneous material added over the centuries. MacDonald does not appear to have gotten very far with the project before his death in 1943, but the idea of producing a critical edition of the Galland Manuscript was revived in the postwar era, when Muhsin Mahdi, a Baghdad-born professor of Arabic at Chicago and Harvard universities, decided to return the Arabic Nights to as close a rendition of early versions as was possible.
It took him a full quarter of a century. Beginning in 1959, Professor Mahdi compared the Galland Manuscript word for word with other surviving texts, taking careful note of errors and variations in words and phrasing. Battling his way through often difficult-to-read handwritten manuscripts strewn throughout the libraries of Britain and Europe, Mahdi was able to create preliminary archetypes of the Syrian and Egyptian traditions of Alf Laila wa Laila stories. Then, through near-Holmesian deduction, he constructed a common ancestor to both branches—a close, penultimate, written archetype of the Nights as it would have looked in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries. It was from this archetype or something very much like it, Mahdi maintained, that Antoine Galland worked to make a translation and bring the Nights to the West. Mahdi published his Arabic reconstruction in Leiden, the Netherlands, in 1984 to world acclaim, creating the first ancient text of Alf Laila wa Laila available in the modern era.
The result of Professor Mahdi’s Herculean labours is a meticulous recreation of an important early version of The Thousand and One Nights, containing significantly fewer stories than either the handwritten or printed Arabic texts that came later, but closer to how actual copies of the Nights looked during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Containing just thirty-five and a half stories told over approximately 270 Nights, this is probably as close to a “true” version of the Arabic Nights as it is possible to attain.
Mahdi’s efforts have also put to rest many myths surrounding the Nights in the West, including the idea that origin
al Arabic versions of “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba” have been found, or that western translators and compilers in former centuries used complete Arabic manuscripts to create their versions. It is now plain that the tale of the Arabian Nights in the West contains practically as much—maybe more—deception, error and misinterpretation as it does careful study and reasoned conjecture.
For all this, not everyone believes Mahdi’s contention that Arabic editions of the Nights appearing after the period of his reconstructed archetype are the result of “polluting” factors. His belief in an anonymous Syrian compiler of this earliest manuscript has met with opposition from other researchers, who point out that even as a text, the Nights was never treated as a concrete whole in classical Islam—certainly not by the rawi, who never hesitated to fill in the vacant parts of any copies they happened to have. The idea of a pure or near-pure Arabic version of the Nights, while valuable, does not address the central issue of the work’s malleability or take into account the fact that Mahdi’s reconstructed Alf Laila wa Laila is itself probably quite different from the Persian Hazar Afsanah that spawned it.
