by Paul Nurse
Even so, within this seemingly chaotic panorama, it is possible to detect a kind of organized, coherent sense to at least some of the Nights’ earlier tales. In his famous “Terminal Essay” on the Nights, Sir Richard Burton notes that a common thirteen stories tend to appear in most of the editions published during his day:
1 The introductory frame story, including the incidental story “The Tale of the Bull and the Ass,” told by Scheherazade’s father
2 “The Trader and the Genie” (with either two or three incidental tales)
3 “The Fisherman and the Genie” (with four incidental tales)
4 “The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad” (with six incidental tales)
5 “The Tale of the Three Apples”
6 “The Tale of Nur al-Din Ali and His Son Badr al-Din Hasan”
7 “The Hunchback’s Tale” (with eleven incidental tales)
8 “The Tale of Nur al-Din Ali and the Damsel Anis al-Jalis”
9 “The Tale of Ghanim bin Ayyub” (with two incidental tales)
10 “Ali bin Bakkar and Shams al-Nahar” (with two incidental tales)
11 “The Tale of Kamar al-Zaman”
12 “The Ebony Horse”
13 “Julnar the Sea-Born”
Together, Burton says, these forty-two tales take up 120 Nights, or less than a fifth of the most extensive Arabic text in existence, the “Calcutta II” edition with 264 stories spread over 1001 Nights. After working for years, Muhsin Mahdi arrived at the conclusion that the reconstructed archetype of an important fourteenth- or fifteenth-century manuscript of the Nights contained no more than 270 to 275 nights involving either thirty-five or thirty-six stories, and these are all he included in his critical Arabic edition of the work.
But setting aside the numbers game for a moment, it seems that in its earliest tales, most unabridged versions tend to follow a common, albeit rough, scenario. Following the vizier’s story about the bull and the ass, Scheherazade begins her storytelling by reciting to Shahryar and Dinarzade the tale of the merchant and the genie with its incidental stories, then immediately launches into a second cycle involving a fisherman, a cruel genie and the tales the fisherman tells. Depending on the edition, there then follow cycles of “The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad,” “The Tale of the Three Apples,” “The Hunchback’s Tale” and “The Tale of Nur al-Din Ali and the Damsel Anis al-Jalis.” Most major translations of the Nights—with perhaps some minor variation of placement—follow this sequence before veering off into their individual collections, depending on their sources or the wishes of the translators.
There could well be a structural reason for this basic grouping, since issues of cruelty, envy and preserving life through storytelling occur in several of these narratives, not just in the frame tale of Scheherazade but in the stories themselves, especially those involving the trader and the fisherman and their respective encounters with angry demons, all-powerful beings who would do them harm. Subsequent stories also touch on themes of infidelity (“The Tale of the Ensorcelled Prince”), malicious envy (“The Eldest Lady’s Tale”) and rage leading to murder (“The Tale of the Three Apples”)—literary motifs reflecting the same forces spawning Scheherazade’s predicament. Common as these elements are in storytelling the world over, this particular sequence cannot be a mere accident, and it is possible that it or something like it was the original sequence used to create Arabic versions of Alf Laila from the Persian Hazar Afsanah.
It appears, then, that the basic scenario of The Thousand and One Nights runs something like this. Having made her decision to marry the sultan to stop his butchery of women, Scheherazade finds that her father, the vizier, tries to dissuade her by reciting his own warning story (“The Tale of the Bull and the Ass”), which he hopes will preserve her life. Shahryar’s vizier thus becomes the first Arabian Nights character to relate a tale while introducing the concept of instruction through storytelling. Scheherazade, however, holds firm, marries the sultan and then, as the first night—their wedding night—progresses, begins (with Dinarzade’s collusion) a process of telling stories not only to prevent her execution and the executions of more innocent women but also to plant the seeds of her raging husband’s redemption by an almost subliminal process of inducing the better angels of Shahryar’s nature to reassert themselves.
She does this by reciting stories involving the arbitrariness of chance and the cruelty of the powerful visited upon the innocent or unfortunate. The genies in the first and second story cycles may be seen as supernatural representations of Shahryar himself, powerful entities holding the fate of others in their hands. The actual guilt or non-guilt of those involved is not at issue in the face of an all-encompassing authority that may be just or unjust according to its inclinations; it is the simple fact of the authority’s power that allows it to dispense clemency or punishment.
But through her stories, particularly in the first two cycles, Scheherazade demonstrates that the cruelty of power can be defective to the point of self-destruction, and that storytelling has the capacity to thwart death and restore justice. By telling the enraged genie tales, which help Shahryar see that the trader should not die for the accidental killing of the genie’s child, the two sheikhs (some versions add a third old man) calm the demon with entertaining stories, but only after each first extracts a promise that a portion of the trader’s life will be spared if the genie finds their stories sufficiently entertaining. He does, and the trader lives. In this way, Scheherazade reflects her own desire to “die as ransom for others” should she fail in her plan, and subtly tells the sultan so in her first tale, in which stories are the device whereby a life is spared.
She continues this practice in the next cycle of stories, where in one tale involving a king and his sage, the king’s unjust execution of the sage rebounds on him, causing his own death as retribution for abusing his power. The analogy of this king, who dies because he has acted in an unjust manner, and the sultan, killing the virgins, is very clear, and it can be argued that Scheherazade recites this story deliberately to make her new husband consider his own security as a monarch who has acted in a similar way to his counterpart in the tale.
By demonstrating that hate, envy, greed and vanity often lead to disaster, Scheherazade chastises the sultan through oblique means, reminding him that for all his power within his kingdom, he remains a mortal man beset by mortal failings. Even a king, she admonishes, is responsible for his actions, and can expect to be judged for his dealings with others. So Scheherazade and Dinarzade spin tales not only to stave off the executioner’s visit but also to plant in the sultan’s wounded psyche the means to heal itself. It has been remarked that the rawi who channelled Scheherazade’s stories to their listeners were providing their audiences with a kind of rough education in various aspects of life. In a more specific way, Scheherazade is doing the same for her husband, teaching him through enlightening narrative the evil nature of the path he has undertaken in the hope that Shahryar will return to his former self.
Since as daughters of the vizier Scheherazade and Dinarzade are exempt from the sultan’s decree, it is an awe-inspiring act of sacrifice on Scheherazade’s part to marry Shahryar and risk her life to save both others and the sultan. Her maturity and goodness ally with the forces of life to battle lethal and arbitrary cruelty. When the rage clouding Shahryar’s judgment is banished by Scheherazade’s instruction in the duties of life and authority, the world is returned to its former tranquility. The sultan regains his princely virtue, Scheherazade preserves her life and those of the kingdom’s daughters, and the ultimate story in The Thousand and One Nights ends on an appropriately happily-ever-after note.
There is a fifth Muslim reference to the Nights, although it appears decades after the book’s publication in Europe. At the end of the eighteenth century, in the preface to a Turkish storybook entitled Phantasms of the Divine Presence, the translator, Ali Aziz Efendi the Cretan, notes that he employed a work called Elf Laila (“A Th
ousand Nights”) as one of his sources, claiming it was written by a ninth-century philologist and companion of Haroun al-Rashid named al-Asami. Beyond this mention, however, there is no supportive evidence that anyone called al-Asami ever fashioned a version of Alf Laila, so he joins Muhammad al-Jahshiyari among the legendary “non-compilers” of The Thousand and One Nights.
The celebrated Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, a passionate admirer of the Nights, likens its structure to a palace so vast that it can be built only by many generations of men. From the setting of its foundation in the latter part of the first millennium to its continuing mystique at the beginning of the third, the Arabian Nights has had innumerable wings added to its core structure over the course of at least eleven centuries, giving Borges’s labyrinthine word-palace a shape never remaining exactly the same, under continuous construction for more than half of the past two thousand years. Even if the tales within Alf Laila wa Laila form an ever-changing mansion of narrative, from available accounts it is possible to construct a timeline of the book’s progress in the Muslim world from its ancient origins to the moment it first appeared in the West.
The core of the Arabian Nights lies in the lost Persian storybook Hazar Afsanah, which itself incorporated Indian tales carried to Persia. This core was almost certainly quite small—perhaps just a few dozen stories at most. Once the text was translated into Arabic, sometime in the eighth or early ninth centuries, it was given the title Alf Khurafa—“A Thousand Stories”—but was more commonly called Alf Laila—“A Thousand Nights.” At around the same time, Arabic stories were added, beginning in Iraq, superimposing an Arab layer onto the existing Indo-Persian base and providing the first of several Nights ironies. Rather than being “Arabian” Nights originating on the Arabian peninsula, the heart and soul of the work hails from Persia, with contributions from India and perhaps other lands. Indigenous Arabian stories and Arab modifications came only later, adding their own cultural contributions to a preexisting collection without being part of the work’s original source.
A third layer of stories looks to have sprung from Egypt between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries; many of these are set in Cairo, and a number contain narrative threads dating back to ancient Egypt. Those tales in the Nights featuring demons, magical objects, talismans and trickster-figures probably arose from this most recent source, as did many of the romantic and sexual stories. This makes it possible to render some tentative differentiations among the tales. Those fables concerning animals are generally thought to have come from India, while most of the fairy stories (such as “The Trader and the Genie” and “The Fisherman and the Genie”) look to have originated in Persia. Anecdotes and moral fables are chiefly Arab, while other stories not belonging to these three basic groups probably arose from further afield; Egypt, the Byzantine Empire, Ottoman Turkey, China, even Japan are all possible sources for stories so closely associated with Arabia.
By the late twelfth century, the work had become known as The Thousand and One Nights, assuming much of its present form as it wound its way through Egypt and Syria, where still more stories were added along with additional modifications to create what became the source material for the first western translation of the Nights, appearing in the eighteenth century. Some researchers speculate that there may be still another layer to the work dating from the sixteenth and even seventeenth centuries, when material from popular Muslim epics and counter-crusade stories, along with later Egyptian and Turkish tales, was introduced.
The long period over which the work was compiled definitely swelled its contents far beyond its original size. If Hazar Afsanah and Alf Khurafa were small selections of stories, then over the centuries the attachment of different layers added to the work’s oeuvre until the early modern age, when the cumulative contents of Alf Laila wa Laila probably reached the 1001 Nights promised in the work’s now-common title. From the original eighth-century Persian core, Arab stories were added, as were independent story cycles like the Sindibadnama (also known as “The Craft and Malice of Women” or “The Seven Viziers,” but having nothing to do with Sindbad the Seafarer) and longer, self-contained tales such as “The Tale of King Omar bin al-Nu’uman and his Sons Sharrkan and Zau al-Makan.” By the early Renaissance, the totality of the Arabic Nights had become the original Alf Laila on steroids.
This long period over which the Nights was gathered also makes for a frankly bizarre, even impossible timeline, if Scheherazade’s stories are taken literally. In the frame tale, Scheherazade and Shahryar are presented as characters from the Sasanian period of Persian history—those kings ruling Persia and parts of Asia from 226 to 641 CE, with Shahryar ruling some part of the Indies and China. Yet Scheherazade’s stories contain allusions to much-later times and cultures, as well as references to materials, substances and inventions that had yet to come into existence, let alone use. Coffee, tobacco, gunpowder, firearms, artillery—even Islam itself, which was not founded until the seventh century—make appearances in stories told by a woman allegedly living during Europe’s early Dark Ages, when Rome was only in the first stages of its long decline.
In the greater scheme of things, however, this doesn’t matter one bit. As the patron saint of storytellers, Scheherazade is a cosmically immortal figure, as magical as the awesome genies she describes. She is able to move forward and backward in time to employ whatever stories she chooses from whichever period suits her immediate purpose. As a character with a personal history, Scheherazade’s repertoire may be gleaned from her readings of the chronicles stored in her father’s house, but her stock has no limits; it cannot be restricted by mere temporal parameters.
Still, mysteries of origin and dispersal remain. So many stories embody echoes of other tales from outside the collection that the Nights can seem a kind of narrative vortex, absorbing and recycling stories from other sources into a perfectly elastic text. Some material dealing with universal mythological themes, like the transformation of men into beasts, would have appeared independently, but it is clear from both Muslim and European literary history that elements of The Thousand and One Nights and other tales appeared interchangeably in both the East and the West centuries before the work’s actual publication. It is known that stories from the Nights were circulating in “westernized” versions in Europe many centuries before their printed appearance, cropping up in oral form in Germany, France, Italy and Spain, although it is unclear whether manuscript versions of sundry Nights tales were in circulation. All the same, it is likely some Nights stories were present in Europe from around the twelfth century, arriving through Arabized Sicily or Moorish Spain to be absorbed into the European folklore tradition.
This is no one-way street, since it also appears that the basis of some Nights stories owes a debt to western tales as well as vice versa. The striking similarity between Sindbad’s fight with a carnivorous, one-eyed giant during his third voyage and Odysseus’s battle with the Cyclops Polyphemus in The Odyssey is too close for pure coincidence. Canto 28 of Orlando Furioso, a sixteenth-century epic poem by the Italian Ludovico Ariosto, contains a version of the story of Shahryar and his brother Shazaman that initiates the Nights’ frame tale, in which King Astolfo and his companion King Jocundo—both suffering adulterous wives—undertake a bitter journey to prove that a faithful woman does not exist. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales contains a reference in “The Squire’s Tale” to a mechanical brass horse capable of flying, very similar to the Nights’ “The Ebony Horse,” while Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century Italian Decameron likewise contains stories with strong similarities to tales found either within the Nights or other eastern collections.
There are also elements of the Nights found in the Old Testament story contained in The Book of Esther, known to have been written in Persia no later than the third century BCE. Here Esther the Jewess becomes the soothing queen of the Persian king Ahasuerus (the historical Artaxerxes II) and so is able to save both herself and her people from a royal edict ordering the Jews’ destructio
n—a scenario similar in outline to Scheherazade marrying Shahryar to end his murderous spree. Similar echoes can be heard in the troubled backstory of Ahasuerus and his first queen, Vashti (deposed and executed for an act of disobedience, whereupon a succession of virgins are brought before the king so he might choose a successor), and the motif of night recital is found in Esther 6:1 when Ahasuerus, suffering from sleeplessness, commands that the Persian “Book of Chronicles” be brought before him and read aloud to pass the time.
Even the Nights’ most famous device, the concept of a frame tale through which other stories are presented, appears as a vehicle in other cultures. In the Nights, it is the method whereby Scheherazade saves her life. In The Odyssey, Odysseus relates his adventures to King Alcinous while residing at the latter’s court. In the Canterbury Tales it is a group of pilgrims, travelling through England to the shrine of Saint Thomas à Becket, who exchange stories with one another en route; in the Decameron, a number of people escaping the plague by fleeing into the Italian countryside do likewise. The Arabian Nights contains a unique difference, however. While these other characters tell stories for diversion or explanation, Scheherazade lives under perpetual threat as she plays an intellectual cat-and-mouse game with the sultan’s rage, trying to break the circle of marriage and death destroying her world. Should she fail, the deadly cycle will continue unabated. This makes her recitations not merely the framework whereby other tales are hung, but itself the most important story in the book; it is the story necessary for life to continue.