ARABIAN NIGHTS
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT
The Arabian Nights stories come from many cultures: India, Persia and Arabia
They all reflect the enormous and highly civilized Islamic world of the 9 th to 13th
Centuries
There is nothing else like this text in Arabic literature
 Narrative fiction was unusual in medieval Arabic literature – mostly
religious, Islamic tracts
 Literature written in cultivated Arabic language – no colloquiallisms
 This text absorbed stories from other cultures and it expanded over time
Jorge Luis Borges says we should think of the text as a piece of architecture:
“To erect the palace of The Thousand and One Nights it took generations
of men, and those men are ourbenefactors, as we have inherited this
inexhaustible book, this book capable of so much metamorphoses”
Earliest mention of the text – ninth century A.D. papyrus mentions two
characters, Dinazad and Shirazad – has a few lines of narrative, in which the
former asks the latter to tell a story. There is also mention of the title: “The Book
of Stories From the Thousand Nights.”
A century later two writers in Baghdad mention the same work. Historian Mas’udi
talks about a book called “A Thousand Tales” translated from Persian, Indian and
Greek – the story of a king, his vizier, the vizier’s daughter and her slave. He
also gives a summary of the frame story but he criticizes it as a “coarse book,
without warmth in the telling.”
For the next seven centuries there are only two references to the book’s
existence. The infrequency of the medieval references to the work point to the
insignificance of the work in the eyes of recognized practitioners of medieval
Arabic literature. Yet is seems to have been a popular work
In 1704 Antoine Galland, an assistant to the French ambassador to the Ottoman
Empire, began to publish his translation of a manuscript he had bought in
Istanbul containing 234 stories. Arab critics argue that the European readers
wanted a book with literally one thousand and one nights of stories. Even though
the number originally was just meant to indicate a lot of stories - so the book
began to expand and absorb even more popular narratives.
The first English version was published in the 19th Century- Richard Burton and
John Payne both produced unexpurgated and complete translations – Burton’s
very racist
The stories seem to reflect life in the late medieval period in the Arab Islamic
world – in particular popular notions about how a Turkish sultan would live in the
fifteenth century. Ornate palaces, gardens, wine drinking, cup bearers and slave
consorts resemble the court society of the Ottomans – a period sometimes seen
in Arab culture as one of cultural decadence. In literature and art, it is a time of
cultural vitality
One of the interesting elements of the text is that it has a cross-cultural history
and identity. However, critics will always make a point of citing which translation
and which edition they are using to acknowledge the debate about what
constitutes the original and the expanded version of the Arabian Nights
NARRATIVE STYLE
Folk Story Tradition
 Secular literature, historically not approved by the cultured literary class as
literature at all.

Stories are extremely varied – jam-packed with spiritual as well as earthly
values, good and bad rulers, magicians and witches, sex, violence and
good and bad jinnis, humans turning into animals and vice-versa. Always
an underlying message about how to treat people and how to live your life
 Frame Story
Two brother kings Shahraya and Shahzaman
Shahzaman finds his wife having sex with the cook
Kills them both, throws them over the palace wall
Travels to his brother’s house to cheer up
Sees his brother’s wife having sex with a slave and all her slave girls having
sex with black slaves
Shahrayar kills his wife and all the slaves, decides all women are
untrustworthy
Will sleep with a young woman for one night only and then kill her before she
can cuckold him
Kills many of the young women
Vizier’s daughter, Shahrazad, offers to marry Shahrayar and try to trick him
into not killing her or any more young women by telling him stories.
Her younger sister must come along as a prop to ask her to keep telling the
stories until he catches the bait
Vizier tells her a story as a warning – but she does not listen – the ox and the
donkey – if you try to help someone by trickery you will suffer too
THEMES

Power of story-telling – healing, educating, entertaining
 Women
not just dangerous, untrustworthy, can use their intelligence and creativity and
even deceitfulness for the good
man powerless women – slaves and concubines
faithful and faithless women
sexually active women
magicians and witches

Power of kings

Djinns and monsters

Animals and humans

Justice and forgiveness
The demon is like the king in demanding blood for blood justice,
shahrazad is no more responsible for what the king’s first wife did than the
merchant is for innocently scattering date pits, one of which killed the
demon’s son
In both cases, a new, better kind of justice must be taught.
The stories in the first set teach justice with forbearance.
Evil people are turned into deer and dogs, not killed and the innocent
merchant is set free, thanks to the three old men