by Paul Nurse
Paper itself had only made its appearance in Islam a little more than a century earlier. As it is known today, paper is a Chinese invention dating from the time of the Han Dynasty. Fashioned by compressing wood and bamboo fibres together into thin flat sheets, Chinese paper was infinitely easier and cheaper to make in bulk than the expensive papyrus and parchment used in Persia, Egypt and Europe. Zealously guarded by the Chinese, papermaking techniques nevertheless began spreading throughout Asia between the third and sixth centuries, but it was not until the eighth-century Tang-era war with the Abbasids over control of Central Asia that paper made its way west.
Tradition holds that during this conflict, a Chinese caravan carrying several skilled papermakers was captured by Muslim warriors. Recognizing their importance, the soldiers immediately whisked these craftsmen away to Samarkand, where the caliphate compelled them to work at their art as well as impart the secrets of making paper. By 793, Haroun al-Rashid had established a state-run paper factory in Baghdad, where the Muslims substituted linen fibres for the coarse wood of the Chinese to create finer and more durable sheets. From Baghdad, paper production spread to Damascus, Cairo and Morocco before reaching Europe through Moorish Spain in the twelfth century.
Within a hundred years of learning its technology, the Abbasids followed their Chinese predecessors by turning the output of paper into an early mass-production enterprise. Because of paper’s easy availability, a new class of “white collar” worker, more bureaucrat than scholar, began appearing in the caliphate. With the material now available to make copies of the Koran and to record everything from cargo manifests to government decrees, ever-more-voluminous writings appeared in the Abbasid dominion, writings that could be copied and made accessible to the farthest reaches of the empire and beyond.
At a time when the grand medieval libraries of Europe might boast a few dozen texts, their Muslim counterparts, particularly in the great municipal centres of Baghdad, Cairo and Spanish Cordoba, stored many thousands of volumes. So essential was the paper industry that around the time when the first Nights tales were recorded, an entire street in Baghdad was devoted to the sale of paper and books. It is no accident of history that when stories from The Thousand and One Nights first appeared in manuscript form, it was during the Abbasid caliphate, and probably in its paper-rich capital of Baghdad.
Part of the magical aura surrounding the Arabian Nights lies in its seemingly spontaneous appearance as a book. With no indication of the precise time its tales were first set down, the existence of the Alf Laila fragment is the sole tantalizing glimpse into the earliest history of the Nights in manuscript form. No reference to the work exists prior to this artifact, and we have little information concerning its progress to later versions. From the time of the ninth-century fragment until the early fifteenth century—some six hundred years—there are only four brief mentions of The Thousand and One Nights in extant writings.
The first is made by the tenth-century writer and geographer Abu al-Hasan Ali al-Masudi (d. 956), who notes that among Arabic translations of Greek, Persian and Indian story collections is a (now lost) Persian book, called in that language Hazar Afsanah—“A Thousand Legends”—and translated into Arabic as Alf Khurafah or “A Thousand Entertaining Tales,” but which is also known by another title: Alf Laila or “A Thousand Nights.” Al-Masudi adds that this is the story of a king, his vizier, the vizier’s daughter and her slave, the names of these last two figures being Scheherazade and Dinarzade. They are not yet sisters, as they will be in time, but in this version mistress and servant, and it seems the frame tale of Scheherazade and the sultan appeared in some recognizable form. Most authorities agree that Hazar Afsanah was translated into Arabic sometime around 850 CE and was probably the source for the Kitab Hadith Alf Laila text.
Several decades later, a second figure, a Baghdadi bookseller and bibliographer named Ibn al-Nadim, also records the existence of the Persian Hazar Afsanah. Like al-Masudi, Ibn al-Nadim provides a summary of the frame tale (only here Dinarzade is head of the king’s household, in league with Scheherazade), remarking that despite its title, the collection only contains about two hundred stories. While admitting that the work is popular, al-Nadim feels obliged to end his citation by sniffing that this is “truly a coarse book, without warmth in the telling,” echoing the sentiments of most educated Muslims of his time.
One intriguing tradition found in al-Nadim holds that Hazar Afsanah was written specifically for Humani, daughter of the Persian shah Artaxerxes I Longimanus, who is more commonly known in the West by the name Parysatis—“Peri-zadeh” or “the Fairy-born.” Her son, Artaxerxes II, is usually identified with the Persian king Ahasuerus in the Old Testament. Parysatis is therefore an ancestor by marriage to Queen Esther of biblical fame. If true, this would make the Persian prototype of the Nights an immensely old book.
During the next five hundred years, there are only two further mentions of the Nights—both brief, and both from Egypt. The first is a notation in a twelfth-century loan record of a Jewish book-dealer in Cairo remarking that a Muslim client has The Thousand and One Nights—the first recorded mention of the work’s modern title. The second comes three hundred years later, in the early fifteenth century, when an Egyptian historian cites Muslim authorities from two centuries before who say that stories from the Nights were in circulation in Cairo from at least the late eleventh century, or the time of the First Crusade.
Such is the total information concerning Alf Laila wa Laila found in medieval references: two in the tenth century, a third in the twelfth and the last in the fifteenth century. Still, the work was sufficiently popular to survive for many centuries in the Muslim world. As well as being part of the rawi’s stock in trade, stories from Alf Laila wa Laila are known to have been read by literate court ladies in Baghdad and Cairo throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, although even this appears to have been frowned on as a frivolous activity.
Why? Why did a work possessing such tremendous longevity, as well as the ability to transcend cultures, merit so little attention from the literate in the society from which it sprung? Part of the answer lies in simple snobbishness. As “coffee house” entertainments meant to please, Alf Laila wa Laila stories were considered beneath notice by earnest-minded Muslims. Regarded as something lowbrow for the masses, they belonged to the vulgar tradition of oral narrative entertainment, and on that account were deemed unworthy of educated individuals. In part, this was due to the Koran’s assertion that fictional narrative represents a form of falsehood, a kind of lying; for that reason, the Nights and stories in general were held as inferior to works designed specifically to instruct. This attitude prevailed even though, as folklorist Jack Zipes points out, for all their pleasurable aspects, the core Nights tales are primarily lessons—lessons in history, religion, etiquette, sex, duty, government or human frailty, enlightening listeners or readers with a kind of rough education about their society and social obligations. A continuing theme of many Nights stories is that problems have ultimate solutions that can be found by employing one’s courage and wit to unravel a predicament, making Alf Laila wa Laila as much a repository of instructive wisdom as any “serious” Muslim literary work.
To be sure, there are problems in assigning strict class distinctions to Arabic literature, if for no other reason than literacy itself was not held in the same esteem as it was in Europe. Tradition holds that the Prophet Muhammad was himself illiterate, and the Hadith (traditional sayings and doings of the Prophet and his companions, the Sahaba) were commonly transmitted orally from teacher to students. Even in the realm of the printed word, prose literature was never accorded the same regard in Muslim culture as poetry, considered the highest form of literary expression.
It is also true that Alf Laila wa Laila was never regarded as literature of the highest order because of the work’s perceived coarseness. A singular feature of the Arabian Nights is that many of its tales are set among society’s lower reaches. While most cla
ssical Arabic literature focuses on the wealthy and well positioned, the Nights is set among the entire strata of Muslim society, high and low. A great part of the work’s original popularity was based on this lopsided regard, as well as its frequent criticism of authority. Wastrels, woodcutters, tailors, merchants and other commoners are often heroes in The Thousand and One Nights, their adventures fulfilling the fantasies and hopes of the working classes, who listened to the rawi tell of people just like themselves, except that their lives are enlarged by circumstance and fate. Along with its inelegant mixture of classical and vernacular Arabic, the mass appeal of the Nights was a prime reason why educated Muslims scoffed at its tales as crass popular entertainment, something unrepresentative of higher culture.
This sense of coarseness extends to some of the book’s subject matter. There can hardly be many classical works that by necessity have been as “edited down” for younger readers as The Thousand and One Nights. A great number of versions, especially those found in the West, have been expurgated of material thought likely to be seen as objectionable. These “family-friendly” editions have become so prevalent that they now represent the overwhelming image of the book in western eyes, although the true essence of the Nights lies in its full presentation of human activity, including the vulgar, violent and erotic. Uncensored versions of The Thousand and One Nights describe a healthy dose of all manner of sexual practices, brutality and simple earthiness. Adultery, rape fantasy, bestiality and homosexuality of both genders contend with humour involving bodily functions, vivid descriptions of torture and murder and bawdy tales of wish-fulfillment gone awry (such as the story of the man who wishes at his wife’s behest for a larger penis, finds it grown to the size of a column, and then must use his remaining wishes to return things to the status quo).
This ribaldry extends to the work’s frame tale, where the reason for the lethal vengeance wrought against Shahryar and Shazaman’s adulterous wives is usually changed to attempted treason rather than infidelity, altering the source of Shahryar’s rage and casting in a different light Scheherazade’s altruism in saving the virgins of her kingdom. Yet, even here, a rough analogy can be made between the Nights’ frame story and the conventions of western fairy tales. Whatever the reason advanced for the sultan’s descent into gynocide, his and Scheherazade’s imaginative odyssey ends in true fairy-tale fashion, when an unbalanced world is set right again by the heroic efforts of a figure who risks all for others. And our clever heroine lives happily for the rest of her days with her reformed husband, the king.
Stripped of its juvenile connotations, the true Thousand and One Nights belongs to the select group of world storybooks furnishing portals onto other times and cultures. The English Canterbury Tales, the Italian Decameron, the Indian Katha Sarit Sagara (“The Ocean of Story”), the Chinese Shuihuzhuan (“Water Margin Classic”) and the Japanese Monogatari (“Tales of Times Past”)—these and similar compendiums have entertained and instructed countless numbers throughout history. Of all of these, however, only the Arabian Nights can be said to have attained a truly worldwide significance, even as the work itself continues to prove bafflingly elusive.
The seed of this elusiveness lies in the Nights’ unique composition. Like the Bible and some of the other collections mentioned above, The Thousand and One Nights has no single author or compiler, having developed over centuries from multiple sources, continually supplemented and modified by numerous, usually nameless contributors until something approaching an accepted version was reached. Unlike these other works, however, and despite the numerical precision of its title, there is no set number of stories within the Nights’ canon. There is no canon at all, in fact—no fixed contents that can be edited or altered, but never changed out of respect for the core structure. Certain tales do tend to appear in most versions, but there is no hard and fast rule regarding their inclusion. Editions, be they long or concise, are available in styles ranging from the archaically verbose to the Hemingwayesque elementary, while interested readers can find texts in a variety of G, PG and X-rated versions.
As a literary work, this makes the Arabian Nights peculiarly distinctive. With no defining limits, it is something of a ghost-book, a spectral work that, like all spectres, possesses a discernible form while lacking absolute corporeal dimensions. It can be read, but readers can never truly grasp its shifting, intangible essence. In other words, there is not, nor has there ever been, nor can there ever be, a complete, definitive version of The Thousand and One Nights—for the simple reason that there isn’t one.
Parallels can again be made with the Bible, which like the Nights has no specific point of origin. The most famous version, the King James Bible, contains sixty-six books in both testaments from Genesis to Revelations, but apart from the tradition that the apostles Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are the true authors of the Gospels, the names of the work’s actual compilers are generally anonymous. Fashioned from the bedrock foundations of the Hebrew Torah, the Bible assumed its present form sometime in the second century CE, appearing first in Greek and Vulgate Latin before entering other languages, including the commissioned English King James Version of 1611. For all the multiplicity of its sources, however, the Bible has some set, distinct limits, its parameters defined by church bodies that approved what does and what does not embody biblical scripture. That which is approved is considered a bona fide part of the Bible. Other writings deemed questionable are described as Apocrypha (“hidden things”)—biblical books included in early editions, but which are not part of the Hebrew Old Testament or recognized New Testament writings and therefore not accepted by some Christian denominations.
No such sense of order or symmetry exists within The Thousand and One Nights. Some things are known or suspected, but for its first nine hundred-odd years—about three-quarters of the work’s known history—the only proof of the Nights’ existence are the few scattered references mentioned earlier. The rest of its pre-European history remains a riddle. Even the Arabic scholar Muhsin Mahdi (1926–2007), the one researcher who has gone further than any other in reconstructing a semblance of an important early version of the work, has his detractors, some of whom feel his efforts miss an essential point: that by its very nature, The Thousand and One Nights precludes itself from being treated as a standard canonical work, existing for the edification of a scholarly community. Never written entirely in immaculate, classical Arabic, Alf Laila wa Laila would not have been treated as codified literature by Muslim copyists and compilers, who had no reservations about adding, excising or altering material as necessity or desire dictated. This adds immeasurably to the difficulty of attempting even a working definition of what comprises the Nights.
Foremost among mysteries is the question of what actually constitutes an Arabian Nights story. The common assumption—that a full version of the Nights contains 1001 stories, with a single, separate tale for each of its 1001 evenings—is false. Many stories resemble Chinese box-puzzles, with smaller or different tales contained within a larger, sometimes much larger, framework. “The Hunchback’s Tale,” for instance, which occurs on the twenty-fourth Night in the mammoth Richard Burton edition, contains no less than eleven sub-stories; Scheherazade needs some ten nights to recite the entire series before she is able to embark on the next self-contained tale.
Fittingly, characters within the Nights are obsessed with storytelling, exchanging tales with one another until the work resembles a fountain of gushing narrative. Arabian Nights’ characters tell stories for a variety of reasons—to entertain, to warn, to instruct, to make points and, in more than one instance, to save lives. Scheherazade is not the only character who talks to preserve life, as in more than one tale, storytelling becomes the price or purpose for existence.
It is true that most editions of the Nights not designed for children tend to bear a common core of stories, but thereafter the length, content and editing varies enormously. One of the book’s chief characteristics is the extreme difference in story length, a
s well as the tonal shifts that can occur from tale to tale. Many stories run just a few paragraphs while others (such as “The Tale of King Omar bin al-Nu’uman and His Sons Sharrkan and Zau al-Makan”) can reach the size of a lengthy novella. Changes in mood occur with jarring abruptness, as when a tender tale of two lovers reconciled by a dream is succeeded by two stories involving bestiality—it’s as if a Harlequin romance contained an epilogue of pornographic vignettes.
It is also a disappointing certainty that some of the most famous and beloved stories found in most editions—Sindbad’s voyages, Aladdin’s lamp and Ali Baba among them—are probably not part of the original work at all but were added later, either because of a general demand for more stories or a desire to incorporate enough material to enlarge editions toward the magic number of 1001 Nights. Independent stories, or story cycles inserted to flesh out the whole, account for both the great size of some versions (even a paperback edition can run near nine hundred pages) and the many variations in style and feeling. This makes The Thousand and One Nights one of the most unusual books in all literature. It’s not only the sole major western literary work originating from outside the West, but also the only one possessing no clear origins, a variable core, some standard additions culled from other sources and a number of “orphan stories”—tales lacking apparent antecedents, or whose provenance is suspect.
With such obscure origins and ever-shifting content, it has been argued that there is no true end to The Thousand and One Nights; that as a book with no definable limits, it has no real conclusion but is unique in that it is constantly developing and reconfiguring itself. In many ways, this very formlessness gives the work its greatest strength, for it imbues the text with a singular flexibility of form—an ability to alter itself to fit the expectations of those entering its fantastical world. Few books of any time or language have the power to become whatever one wants them to be as does the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.