by Paul Nurse
Over the next three centuries, the influence of The Thousand and One Nights would extend beyond the printed page and into the arts and thinking of Europe and the Americas. Its imprint has become so firmly fixed upon the western consciousness that even those who have never read an actual Arabian Nights story in their lives have a vision of a time and a place which—although arguably altered and distorted—remains a valuable tool in understanding how cultures perceive one another.
The book’s impact has been felt in other ways. Standing as it does almost at the dawn of European interest in Asia, the Arabian Nights is one of the first and most important works to act as a counterbalance to the traditional Christian enmity with Islam. By presenting a generally favourable portrait of a society, which to that time had been mostly the subject of ignorance and mistrust, the European Nights helped establish “oriental studies” as a genuine field of scholarly endeavour by creating a widespread market for information regarding eastern cultures, as well as dispelling some of the grosser myths surrounding the Muslim community.
This was a true sea change in cultural attitude. Like the Christian West of the time, Islam contained its own territories, attitudes and power, making it an intriguing if threatening rival, yet one whose workings remained barely known. With the publication of the Nights, knowledge regarding some of these workings now became available in the guise of stories, which became for many westerners not only their chief but often their only source of information regarding the world of Islam.
The Arabian Nights’ influence is not restricted to western concepts of the Muslim Orient. In the realm of arts and literature, the Nights’ emphasis on the exotic not only inspired countless imitations, but also acted as a prime shaper of a new artistic movement known as Romanticism. Numerous Romantics reference the Nights in their work, paying homage to a book many adored in childhood and considered among the most significant literary works in their lives. Nor does the Nights’ literary influence end with the Romantic period, for since then, even a partial list of writers who have directly or indirectly acknowledged the personal impact of The Thousand and One Nights is astonishing, both in number and variety. To name but a very few, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Matthew Arnold, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Edward FitzGerald, Robert Louis Stevenson, Marcel Proust and James Joyce. As the distinguished Arabian Nights researcher Robert Graham Irwin states with some slight exasperation in his companion book to the Tales, at times it seems it would be a simpler task to compile a list of literary figures who are not affected by their exposure to the Nights, than to assemble a list of those who are.
Contemporary authors who have produced meditations on or pastiches of the Nights include both western and many eastern writers. Jorge Luis Borges, Salman Rushdie, John Barth, Robert Graham Irwin, A.S. Byatt, Italo Calvino, Naguib Mahfouz and Githa Hariharan are among them, with many providing postmodern takes on established tales and extending the sense that the world of the Arabian Nights is a limitless expanse, open to endless permutations of its basic structure and contents.
Appearing as it did in a Europe just beginning to experience the effects of the Enlightenment—le siècle des Lumières or “century of lights”—one can argue that the course of western thought and perception was influenced as much by the Arabian Nights as by any work penned by Voltaire or Tom Paine. The presentation of folklore from the distant lands of India, Persia, Arabia and other regions revitalized European literature by infusing it with something fresh and rare, infinitely appealing to the Enlightenment preoccupation with the New. The impact of the Nights, and the various ways by which the work has welded the imagery of a romanticized past onto the global consciousness, is as real as it is undeniable. In the three centuries since it made its triumphal debut in the West, the Arabian Nights, now no longer the product of an imagined oriental antiquity, has come to belong to the whole of humanity.
Ironically, for all the new and bewitchingly exotic aspects of the book, parts of the Nights were already familiar to Europeans in ways that paved the road for its ready acceptance. Long before the work appeared in printed form, Europe was already acquainted with concepts of the realm thought of simply as “the East,” particularly those lands stretching from eastern Europe to India and beyond which contained the citadel of Islam.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Muslim world was for all practical purposes a closed book to the average westerner. Europeans were aware, though, that the East was the birthplace of all the ancient civilizations, as well as the cradle of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, three faiths bound not only by shared beliefs but by a common geographical heritage. Christianity itself, the faith by which Europe came to create part of its identity, was considered the greatest example in existence of an East–West cultural transmission, arising in the lands of the Levant* before moving west through Greece and Rome to penetrate the farthest reaches of Europe and the New World.
Moreover, the world-ranging explorations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which established links between Europeans and Asians from the Levant to the Far East, introduced the western world to luxury goods—silks, spices, tea, coffee, and so on—procurable only in the expanse of the eastern hemisphere, strengthening European beliefs that the East was home to lands rich in resources and material wealth. By the later Renaissance, the West was enthralled by images of the Orient as a fabulous realm of riches and foreign wisdom, a place of unfamiliar yet desirable articles, visions and thoughts.
These images came from a number of sources. Travellers’ stories, however distorted in the telling, remained nonetheless eyewitness accounts of regions understood to be quite different from Europe. Those who journeyed in the Levant returned to fill imaginations with pictures of places not only considered exotic but also held sacred as the wellspring of Christian faith. Greco-Roman texts, from The Iliad and The Odyssey to accounts of Alexander the Great’s campaigns in Persia and India, were the first “oriental stories” to reach Europe, creating an awareness that the eastern Mediterranean was home to modes of living so profoundly unlike those of Europe as to seem from another world.
Yet it was the Bible that had the greatest effect on western oriental imagery, since it conveyed a lasting perception of the East as a land suffused with supernatural possibilities—a realm where, everything being possible, anything might happen. As literary works, the Holy Bible and the Arabian Nights exist centuries apart, but both have provided the West with visions of people and places existing in territories of sustained magical happenings. As Europe emerged from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance and into the Enlightenment, comprehension of the Bible changed to the point where it became not only a work of divine inspiration, potentially holding the keys to cosmic mysteries, but also a book of wonder tales similar to the marvels found within the later Thousand and One Nights.
Both the Old and New Testaments are rife with stories of miraculous happenings which, even when acknowledged as belonging to a former age, were still understood as arising in places containing forces foreign to those of Europe. Hagar’s discovery of water in the wilderness, the parting of the Red Sea and Christ’s own supernatural powers were accepted as divinely inspired events, but they were also seen as logical products of a mystical domain, a region perhaps unsophisticated in terms of technology but passionately in tune with the natural world in ways increasingly lacking in Europe.
Over time, the East became not simply a geographical designation but “the Mystic East,” the land where magic occurs, in opposition to an ever-more-scientific West. It is no accident that by the nineteenth century, many European and North American homes contained copies of both the Holy Bible and the Arabian Nights, nor is it any surprise that they were often found side by side on the Victorian bookshelf. For westerners, the two books were of a piece; if not exactly fraternal literary twins, they were certainly first cousins, and both necessary fixtures in every gentleman’s library. The lasting result of these collective influences was to create an impression of the eastern
world as a territory existing outside European standards of time and place, a wondrous dreamscape unfettered by the limitations imposed by western conventions.
Residual elements of this understanding persist to this day. Popular terms such as “the Enchanted East” and “the Eternal East” might be little more than hoary orientalist clichés, but they still resound with an impact not far removed from perceptions of several centuries ago. Fortune tellers wearing turbans; themed hotels and casinos structured like the Taj Mahal or a caliph’s palace; fraternal organizations employing a mixture of Jewish, Arabic and Templar-inspired imagery in their presentations; the continuing presence of harem fantasies in romantic and erotic fiction—all spring from a centuries-old conception of the Orient as an enticing place of mystical enchantment.
Thus, when the first volumes of the Nights appeared in Europe, they found a readership already primed to embrace the new work as another in a long series of literary vehicles capable of bringing East and West together. If the Nights was hardly the first—it was certainly not the last—literary vessel ferrying visions of an imagined Orient to the West’s attention, it remains among the most important; first as a popularizer, then as an accepted representation and finally as a persistent image of a land of boundless possibility.
The consequences, good and bad, are felt to this day. On the minus side, the popular universe of the Arabian Nights was for many years considered by many westerners—even celebrated Arabic scholars like Edward William Lane and Richard Francis Burton—as a legitimate depiction of the Muslim world from which it is possible to derive reliable information, a terrifically dangerous assumption to make about a vast region comprising so many different peoples, languages and beliefs. With such imperfect comprehension, it was perhaps inevitable that misconceptions concerning a non-homogeneous religious culture would surface from casual readings of works like the Nights, some of which have arguably contributed to a European understanding that these same lands—allegedly backward, essentially unchanging—are ripe for intervention, perhaps even annexation.
On the plus side, it must be noted that the Nights’ fictional nature has helped immeasurably in rendering inhabitants of Muslim society more sympathetically human in western eyes. Visions of the treacherous Turk and the scimitar-wielding Arab (comparable to the stereotype of the suicide bomber in our own time) did not disappear with the arrival of the Arabian Nights, but they were supplemented by the appearance of attractive characters whose virtues and concerns mirrored those of western readers. Europeans now found themselves admiring the resourcefulness of figures like Sindbad the Seafarer, taking vicarious pleasure in the instant wish-fulfillment available to the youth Aladdin or enjoying as invisible companions the nocturnal adventures of the wise caliph Haroun al-Rashid as he walks incognito through the streets of Baghdad. It may have been only multiculturalism of the imagination, but it was a far cry from previous perceptions shrouded in ignorance and racial fear.
Following the appearance of The Thousand and One Nights, the romantic promises of the East became a touchstone of western desire—a wished-for destination, whether through the imaginative flights provided by books or the physical journeys countless travellers have undertaken to see for themselves “the land of the Arabian Nights.” Before the twentieth century, few westerners (most of whom received their geographical and cultural information only from books and lectures) saw much difference between the two, yet all who read the Nights with pleasure surrendered to the eternal human longing to find oneself transported to enchanted realms.
More than any single work dealing with the eastern world, including even the Bible, The Thousand and One Nights has provided a sometimes-stolid West with a contrasting sense of lightness and effervescence in its presentation of an ethereal domain. Whether embraced by children, academics, literary figures or those simply seeking escape, the Arabian Nights has attained a significance beyond that of any work of world literature from any Asian culture. Put simply, it is a book possessing origins, but lacking borders.
*A word taken from the Latin levare and converted into the French soleil levant or “rising sun”—the Morningland.
Chapter 1
A SPECTRAL WORK
Then quoth her sister … “How fair is thy tale … and how
sweet and how tasteful!” And Scheherazade answered her,
“What is this to that I could tell thee on the coming night,
were I to live and the King would spare me?”
—THE BOOK OF THE THOUSAND NIGHTS AND A NIGHT
The Thousand and One Nights is the product of a religious culture that has exerted a tremendous influence on world history, but about which shockingly little is understood. Although its tales are secular in nature, bearing the imprint of many societies, the world of the Nights as it came to the West is the direct outgrowth of classical Islam—the period between the seventh and fifteenth centuries CE, when Muslims forged an empire stretching from Spain to the borders of India even as they set about establishing one of the most cultivated civilizations in history.
Within two decades of the Prophet Muhammad’s death in 632 CE, the sword of al-Islam (“The Faith based on Submission to God’s Will”) had conquered all of Arabia before moving west and east across the continents, fixing itself so firmly on the human landscape that today, one of every five persons on earth call themselves Muslim. Currently, the Muslim world encompasses practically all of Saharan Africa and other parts of the African continent, most of the Middle East and Central Asia, and significant portions of the populations of India, western China and Southeast Asia; and this does not include the many millions of Muslims living in the West.
In the process of extending their domain beyond the deserts of Arabia, the early Muslims made important and grossly undervalued contributions to world culture. With the exception of China, no medieval society possessed a greater thirst for knowledge, or has given the world so many diverse things, than classical Islam. Thanks to Muslim culture, we now employ the “Arabic” numerical system to assign and calculate figures, including the concept of the “zero,” borrowed from India. Geometry and the use of the decimal system come to us from classical Islam, which also toyed with theories of gravity and evolution centuries before their development in Europe. Countless European words derive from Arabic antecedents; English alone boasts dozens, ranging from admiral and albatross to tariff, traffic and zenith. Coffee, today a commodity almost as valuable as oil on world markets (more than four hundred billion cups are consumed around the globe each year), came to Europe from the Muslim East in the early seventeenth century.
The efforts of numberless Muslim scholars and scribes, translating learned texts from Greek, Syriac, Persian and Sanskrit into Arabic, preserved classical knowledge either lost, forgotten or even destroyed in the West for later assimilation into a waiting Europe. In the process, the Muslim world helped kick-start the western Renaissance by providing a significant amount of the information necessary for European innovators to begin work on a new age. It is too much to suggest that Islam was solely responsible for the Renaissance, but its civilization still furnished many of the vital factors that helped Europe wrench itself from almost a millennium of medievalism to embrace a cultural and intellectual rebirth.
Much of this Muslim cultural flowering occurred during the five-hundred-year Abbasid caliphate (749–1258 CE), a golden age of high civilization recalled as fondly in Islam as is King Arthur’s quasi-mythical Camelot in the West. Supplanting the Umayyad caliphs who ruled the Middle East for most of a century following Muhammad’s death, the Abbasid family (descended from al-Abbas, an uncle of the Prophet) initiated the greatest period of sustained intellectual inquiry in Islam’s history.
Cognizant of the power of knowledge, the Abbasids presided over a time when Arab culture lay so far above the West as to be practically astral. No better symbol of their civilization exists than the Abbasids’ fantastical capital of Baghdad, at its peak the greatest and, at almost a million inhabitants, the mos
t populous, city outside China. Constructed over a four-year period in the eighth century to replace the Umayyad centre of Damascus as the capital of Islam, Baghdad typified the intellectual ferment of the Abbasid caliphate, becoming “a Paris of the ninth century”—a legend of the best of humanity.
Built by the western banks of the Tigris River in northern Mesopotamia (Iraq), Baghdad lay on trade routes linking modern Syria, Iraq, Iran, India and China. The city’s location southwest of Damascus spread the caliphate eastward, absorbing influences from Persia and the Far East as the capital quickly became an important western terminus of the fabled Silk Road. Known formally as Madinat al-Salaam or “the City of Peace,” Baghdad was more commonly called “the Round City” because of its perfectly circular, thirty-metre-high walls. The early town was structured as a series of concentric circles emanating from a central core containing the Grand Mosque and the caliph’s palace compound, but over time the metropolis expanded beyond its original walls to the eastern banks of the Tigris as numerous suburbs and workers’ communities developed around the original city.
Within a generation, Baghdad enjoyed a reputation as a place of extravagant fortune—the richest and most beautiful urban centre on earth. It is said that in the caliph’s palace there existed a shining mercury pond on which floated tiny golden boats, as well as an artificial tree on whose branches mechanical birds sang and chirped when prompted by hidden devices. An army of city workers walked constantly through Baghdad’s earthen streets, sprinkling scented water to settle the dust and leave a lingering sweetness in the air. Citizens could attend polo matches, listen to poetry or story recitals, visit zoos (where, legends say, the last phoenix in captivity was housed), browse through a hundred bookshops or seek earthier delights in quarters where secret cabarets were held.