Scheherazade Goes West
Page 5
For Cheddadi, the Storyteller/King opposition in The Thousand and One Nights also reflects and magnifies the explosive conflict in Muslim culture between Shari’a, the sacred Truth, and Fiction. The triumph of Scheherazade is the triumph of wahm (“imagination”) over the legitimacy of the keepers of çidq (“truth”); she corrodes their credibility.18 Cheddadi then delineates the sad destiny of the quççaç(“street storytellers”), of which Salman Rushdie is a modern heir, and explains that their expulsions from mosques came about because the distinction between their fiction and “Truth” is a tricky one.
Street storytellers in medieval Baghdad were often branded as instigators of rebellion and, much like leftist journalists today, censored and banned from talking in public. In the Muslim year 279 (tenth century A.D.), states Tabari in his History of Nations and Kings, “The Sultan gave the order to inform the population in the City of Peace [a name for Baghdad] that no storyteller will be allowed to sit in the street or in the Big Mosque. . . .”19 And Cheddadi explains the authorities’ systematic witch-hunt of the storytellers by stating that the palace had no alternative but to silence these most dangerous of all creators: “Starting with the second part of the first century of Islam [7th century], we see Ali [the 4th Orthodox Caliph] expel storytellers from Basra Mosque. In the Orient, persecution of quççaç [street storytellers] will come to an end with their total extinction . . . , when they are replaced by the preachers (mudhakkirun or wu’az). It is the only way to establish a clear boundary between what ought to be considered as true and authentic and what pertains to the world of fiction, forgery, and lies.”20
It goes without saying that the conflict between Truth and Fiction in the Muslim world is justified by another conflict, which brings us back to the conflict between Shahrayar and Scheherazade: If Truth is the realm of the law and its constraints, Fiction is the world of entertainment and pleasure. And to make the whole matter totally indigestible for fanatics, be they traditional or modern, Scheherazade, as Cheddadi reminds us, has an unsettling characteristic: “Scheherazade is introduced to us, from her first appearance in the book, with the credentials of a perfectly accomplished Faquih, a Muslim religious authority. ”21 Her knowledge includes much history and an impressive mastery of the sacred literature, including the Koran, Shari’a, and the texts of various schools of religious interpretation. It is this strange combination of enormous knowledge — learned from reading over one thousand books — and a seemingly unpretentious goal to stick to the world of the night and fiction, that makes Scheherazade especially suspect, and explains another strange phenomenon: For centuries, the Arab elite scorned her tales and did not bother to put them in writing.
To understand the emergence of the storyteller as a symbol of human rights in the modern Orient, one has to remember that for centuries, the conservative elite, with a few exceptions, scorned The Thousand and One Nights as popular trash of no cultural value whatsoever, because the tales were transmitted orally.22 The male elite considered oral storytelling to be a symbol of the uneducated masses. Was that because the tales were mostly narrated by women within the private realm of the family? Although there is no conclusive scientific evidence to support this analysis, it is certainly a strong possibility and worth keeping in mind when trying to assess the peculiar place of the “feminine” Thousand and One Nightsin our very “masculine” Muslim heritage.
Algerian-born Bencheikh, a contemporary expert of the Scheherazade tales, wonders if the vilification of the tales before modern times by labeling them “Khurafa”(loosely meaning “delirium of a troubled brain”) was not due to the fact that women were often described as more astute than men.23 In the logic of the tales, the judge is wrong and the victim is right. “The King is not only judged by Scheherazade, the victim, but is sentenced by her to change his ways according to her wishes. It is the world turned upside down. It is a world where the judge . . . does not escape his victim.”24It is a world where the values are those of the Night. Remember the constant refrain that closes each of the tales:
Morning overtook Scheherazade (wa adraka shahrazad aç-çabah)
and she lapsed into silence (fasakatat ’ani l’kalami l’mubah).
When compared to the engulfing darkness of the night, the King’s court and his justice system seem as fragile a mirage as the day. No wonder that the Arab elite, often encouraged and financed by their despotic rulers, condemned The Thousand and One Nights to oral history for centuries and prevented it from gaining the credentials of a written heritage. Not until the nineteenth century, one hundred years after the Europeans, who had the written text as early as 1704, were the tales finally published in Arabic! And none of the first editors was Arab!
The first edition of the Arabic text was published in Calcutta in 1814 by a Muslim Indian, Sheik Ahmad Shirawani, who was an instructor of Arabic at Calcutta’s Fort William College. The second editio n of the Arabic text is the 1824 Breslau (Germany) edition and the editor was Maximilian Habicht. A decade later, Arab publishers began making money with the written text of the Nights, starting with the Egyptian Bulaq edition printed in Cairo in 1834.25
It is interesting to note that the first Arab editor of The Thousand and One Nights felt the need to interfere with the Bulaq version by “improving the language, producing a work that was in his judgment superior in literary quality to the original.”26
What is puzzling, says the Algerian expert Bencheikh, reflecting on the special place of The Thousand and One Nights in our Muslim heritage, is that the storyteller does not deny women’s kayd, their desire to sabotage men. According to him, this could explain why the Arab elites refused to write down the tales. “The storyteller, whose duty it was to obtain the grace of the cuckolded sovereign, put all her talent into creating tales that confirmed his distrustful feeling towards women.”27 The whole long string of tales are nothing but vivid illustrations of how sexually uncontrollable harem women are; to expect them to obey when inequality is enforced by law is preposterous.
Men can read their tragic destiny in each one of the tales, says Bencheikh. “We know that this terror of being betrayed has deep roots and exists in older cultures that expressed it more or less in the same way. . . . But here, we are working on a text written in the Arabic language. . . .”28 The use of the Arabic language heightens tensions because it is the language of the sacred text, the Koran. To write the tales down grants them a scandalously dangerous “academic“ credibility. Modernity has brought Scheherazade to the center stage of the twentieth-century Arab intellectual scene, because long ago, in ninth-century Baghdad, she clearly articulated key philosophical and political questions that our political leaders still cannot answer today:
Why should an unjust law be obeyed? Because men have written it?
If Truth is so evident, why are imagination and fiction not allowed to flourish?
The miracle in the Orient is that it is Scheherazade’s excessive thoughtfulness, together with her interest in wider philosophical and political issues, that made her explosively attractive. And the only way that Shahrayar could make sure that she was all his was to make love to her. Skillful lovemaking was the only tool he had to make her forget about the world for a few hours.
To seduce an intelligent woman who is concerned about the world, a man has to become the master of erotic art. When in the company of Scheherazade, Shahrayar’ s lovemaking reaches its full potential, which brings us back to the beginning: What happens to our queen when she goes West?
What changes do Western artists inflict on Scheherazade in order to make her conform to their fantasies when she crosses their frontiers?
What are the weapons of seduction with which Western artists equip her?
Does she become less or more powerful in their fantasy? Does she retain her status as queen, or lose it?
One thing is certain: We know the exact date Scheherazade crossed the frontier to the West: It was in 1704, and her first destination was Paris.
1. Introduction to Th
e Arabian Nights, translated from Arabic into English by Husain Haddawy, based on text edited by Muhsin Mahdi (New York: Norton and Co., 1990), p. xi.
2. Hiam Aboul-Hussein and Charles Pellat, Cheherazade, Personnage littéraire (Algiers: Société Nationale d’édition et de Diffusion, 1976), p. 18.
3. The Sassanians were a prestigious dynasty of Persian kings who established a powerful empire from 226 to 641, until the conquest of Persia by Islam. When Islam appeared, the Sassanians and Byzantines were the predominant powers in the Near and Middle East.
4. Literally, “bi jazair al Hind wa Çin a Çin,” on page 56 of Muhsin Mahdi’s Arabic original of The Arabian Nights quoted above. The English translation is that of Husain Haddawy, op. cit., p. 3.
5. Literally, “wajada zawjatahu naima wa ila janibiha rajulan min çybiyan al matbakh,” on page 57 of the Arabic original and page 3 of Haddawy’s translation, op. cit.
6. Haddawy, op. cit., p. 5.
7. Haddawy, op. cit., p. 59.
8. Haddawy, op. cit., p. 9.
9. Haddawy, op. cit., p. 11.
10. Haddawy, op. cit., p. 11.
11. A. S. Byatt, “Narrate or Die: Why Scheherazade Keeps on Talking,” in The New York Times Magazine, April 18, 1999, pp. 105-107.
12. “The Story of the Birds,” which I have translated here, does not exist in al-Mahdi’s version of The Thousand and One Nights, but does exist in one of the cheapest and more popular versions of Scheherazade’s tales, found in Morocco’s souks (Beirut: al maktaba ach-cha’biya), vol. II, page 43.
13. Aboul-Hussein and Pellat, Cheherazade, Personnage littéraire, op. cit., p. 36.
14. Aboul-Hussein and Pellat, op. cit., p. 114.
15. Abdesslam Cheddadi, “Le conte-cadre des Mille et Une Nuits comme récit de Commencement.” Contribution au “IV Colloquio de Escritorres Hispano-Arabe,” Alméria, Spain, April 26-29, 1988. Page 11 of the manuscript generously shared by the author before its publication.
16. Cheddadi, ibid, p. 12.
17. Ibid., p. 19.
18.Ibid., p. 2.
19. Tabari, “Tarikh al Umam wa-l-Muluk”(Dar al Fikr, 1979), vol. 6, p. 340.
20. Cheddadi, op. cit., p. 4.
21. Cheddadi, op. cit., p. 4.
22. The two exceptions of medieval historians who at least mentioned the tales in a few paragraphs (if only to remind Arabs about their Persian origin) were Mas’udi and Ibn Nadim. The ninth-century Mas’udi explained in his Golden Meadows (Muruj Dahab) that the tales were originally known by their Persian title, “Hazar Afsane,”literally the thousand tales. The tenth-century Ibn Nadim states in his Fihrist that, “The first to have created the tales . . . were the Persians of the First Dynasty. . . . The Arabs translated these tales, and talented men who had a literary gift recreated new ones and polished the old ones.” In Fihrist, Flugel edition, 1871, p. 304, and p. 422 of the Cairo edition of 1929.
23. Jamel Ed din Bencheikh, Les 1001 Nuits ou la Parole Prisonnière (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1998), p. 26.
24.Bencheikh, ibid., p. 34.
25. Hussain Mahdawi’s introduction to The Arabian Nights, op. cit., xiv.
26. Hussain Mahdawi’s introduction to The Arabian Nights, op. cit., xiv.
27. Bencheikh, op. cit., p. 29.
28. Bencheikh, op. cit., p. 32.04.
5
Scheherazade
Goes West
Scheherazade’s first trip to the West was made in the company of a French scholar, Antoine Galland. An art collector who traveled to the Orient as secretary to the French ambassador, Galland was the first translator of The Thousand and One Nights. In 1704, at age fifty-eight, he became an instant success when he allowed Scheherazade to tell her stories in French, and he remained obsessed with translating her tales until his death in 1715. His twelve volumes took thirteen years to publish (1704-1717), two of them posthumously.
In the meantime, Scheherazade was achieving what the Muslims who had fought the Crusaders failed to do: She ravished the Christians, from devout Catholics to Protestants and the Greek Orthodox, using only words: “Versions of Galland appeared in England, Germany, Italy, Holland, Denmark, Russia, and Belgium. . . .”1 The fact that the French translator took the liberty of cutting out suggestive scenes and wondrous descriptions of lovemaking and female anatomy likely to shock his audience probably helped. After all, “Sultans, Viziers, and women of Arabia or India had to express themselves as one would if living in Versailles and Marly.”2 The subjugation of Christian souls by Scheherazade’s tales was so satanically pervasive that ensuing translations and “pseudo translations,” as scholar Husain Haddawy calls them, reached a staggering number. “By 1800, there were more than eighty such collections,” he writes. “It was such hack versions that inflamed the imagination of Europe, of general readers and poets alike, from Pope to Wordsworth.”3
Strangely enough, the intellectual Scheherazade was lost in all these translations, apparently because the Westerners were interested in only two things: adventure and sex. And the latter was expressed only in a bizarrely restricted form confined to the language of the female body. Samar, the Arabic word for talking late into the night, was nowhere to be found in the Christian Europeans’ tales. For an entire century, Westerners’ interest in The Thousand and One Nights was limited to its male heroes such as Sindbad, Aladdin, and Ali Baba. Scheherazade had to wait until 1845, when Edgar Allan Poe published “The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade,” to be celebrated as the brainy master of storytelling. I was very happy when I first heard about Edgar Allan Poe’s sensible treatment of Scheherazade, and started looking for a copy of his book in Berlin bookstores. Poor Scheherazade had to cross the Atlantic, I thought, to find a man who would endow her with a developed intellect and describe her as “a politic damsel.” From 1704 to 1845, she had gotten helplessly stuck in Versailles and the French court’s obsession with women’s fashion. In this respect, her initial connection with translator Antoine Galland had proven to be fatal to her reputation.
Versailles ladies were Galland’s targeted audience. He even sought advice from duchesses and marquises before publishing his texts, which was probably one of the reasons he felt obliged to expurgate the tales. “I loaned my ninth volume of The Thousand and One Nights to Mademoiselle de Versamont so that she could read it to Madame the Duchess de Brissac . . . ,” Galland noted in his diary on the second of February, 1709.4
One of the greatest fans of the Orient at that time was none other than the Marquise de Pompadour, Louis XV’s official mistress, and she was more interested in harem clothes and the harem’s fashionable luxuries than in women’s subversive trends. In 1745, soon after Louis XV established La Pompadour in Versailles as his official mistress, she hung in her bedroom three paintings of “Sultanes,” or harem queens, by her protégé, artist Carle Van Loo. All three were beautifully bejeweled, well coiffed, and draped in luxurious clothes, thus forever linking harem women with frivolity and extravagant superfluous trifles.5 And, in 1778, on the eve of the French Revolution, Marie Antoinette herself appeared dressed as a “Sultane,” which did not help one bit to restore poor Scheherazade’s image as a political crusader fighting against despotic rule.
Besides adventure and sensual luxury, sexually explicit talk was the third element of The Thousand and One Nights that entranced early Western readers accustomed to being squeezed between censorious priests and cold rationalist thinkers such as Descartes.6 The translations opened up the gates to an Orient where sexuality was boldly explored by a female storyteller forced to entertain a dangerous and sulky husband. This storyteller knew, centuries before the advent of satellite-wired “phone sex,” that the most efficient weapon with which to arouse a man is words. That is the main lesson taught in “The Story of the Porter and the Three Ladies,” which Scheherazade narrated to the King on their twenty-eighth night. Yet though her storytelling represents one of the most pornographic choices she could have made, the key message is a political one. Even when Scheherazad
e chooses to speak in the register of pornography, she has a political message to convey.
The story begins by describing the victim, a poor hardworking man, who is literally picked up by a rich woman. “I heard, O happy King,” starts Scheherazade, “that once there lived in the city of Baghdad a bachelor who worked as a porter. One day, he was standing in the market, leaning on his basket, when a woman approached him. She wore a Mosul [mousseline, or fine muslin fabric] cloak, a silk veil, a fine kerchief embroidered with gold, and a pair of leggings tied with fluttering laces. When she lifted her veil, she revealed a pair of beautiful dark eyes graced with long lashes and a tender expression. With a soft voice and a sweet tone, she said to him, ‘Porter, take your basket and follow me.’ Hardly believing his ears, the porter took his basket and hurried behind her, saying ‘O lucky day.’”7
In the Arabic text, the porter uses the word qubul for luck, and literally says, “How sexy I am today” (ya nahari l’qubul). Well, his self-flattering appreciation of the situation hardly prepares him to cope with what happens next. The lady instructs him to carry heavy jars of wine, loads of meats, bags of vegetables, and all sorts of dried fruits considered to be aphrodisiacs — raisins, figs, almonds, and hazelnuts — into a luxurious house that she shares with her two sisters. But once the job is done and the porter is paid a Dinar for his services, he refuses to leave. “Give him another Dinar,” says one of the sisters, who was getting impatient. And that is when the porter reveals his intentions: Three beautiful women need a man.