by Paul Nurse
Such questions can never be satisfactorily answered. But even Muhsin Mahdi’s great contributions to the Nights’ complex history are not the last words on the issue of the work’s composition—something reflected in the English translation of his critical edition. In 1990, another Baghdad-born Arab scholar, Husain Haddawy, translated Mahdi’s Arabic text of the Nights into English with a fine introduction on its history and major western editions. Compared with many previous translations, Haddawy’s edition is immensely easy to read, not least because he has modernized many terms for better understanding.
Nevertheless, in what is probably the latest instance of Arabian Nights irony, the lack of some beloved stories in this edition created a demand from disappointed readers for a semi-sequel. Haddawy consented, and six years later published an edition of several popular external orphan stories, including “Sindbad,” “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba,” ones that Muhsin Mahdi would have considered contaminating material inserted into Alf Laila wa Laila, but which centuries of familiarity in both hemispheres have welded onto the body of the Arabian Nights with unbreakable seals of affection.
By now, Haddawy’s approach seems to be the best way with which to treat the orphan stories of the Arabian Nights. While admitting that such tales are likely not part of early versions of the work, it must also be acknowledged that they cannot be ignored, since centuries of readership in both the East and West have melded them onto the book to create the work as it is known around the world. The acorn may be ancient collections of Alf Laila wa Laila stories, but the globe-spanning tree that has sprung from its roots is the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.
And the translation of the Nights continues to this day. In 2004, a new German version, translated by Claudia Ott, was released in commemoration of the three-hundredth anniversary of the Galland edition. Four years later, the first “complete” (i.e., taken from Calcutta II) English translation since Sir Richard Burton’s 1885–88 version appeared. Rendered into English by Cambridge scholar Malcolm Lyons and his wife Ursula, it has been acclaimed as a graceful replacement for Burton’s celebrated, but often-ponderous, translation.
Even magic carpet rides have their bumpy moments, buffeted by forces threatening to impede or even destroy their flight. The history of The Thousand and One Nights is long and eventful, marked by confusion, mystery and misdirection, but withal there has never been any real doubt about the work’s worth as a collection of stories. As one of humanity’s most defining features, the telling of wonderful tales can never be separated from the species creating it, and there is probably no work—certainly none in the western world—where the tradition of storytelling merges so happily with wonder than in the Arabian Nights.
In the sphere of storytelling, it is the Book of Books, its aura imbuing the wide realm of the world in language and vision from the time its earliest tales were committed to paper. Print, stage, film, television, video games—even a Global Positioning System dubbed the “Magic Carpet GPS”—feed and further the sense that the Nights’ phantasmagoria, while a constant universe, is also like the real universe in that it is capable of endless metamorphosis.
As a book, the Arabian Nights persists for the reason all classical literature endures: the particular way it simultaneously entertains, instructs and illuminates, opening a window onto the profusion of human behaviour resounding through any age or culture. Its tales may be technically fiction, but by addressing the desires, hopes and concerns common to all peoples across all times and places, they express eternal truths transcending romanticized periods and settings. Wherever mystery, excitement, enchantment and the wish for wonder nourish the human spirit, the Nights will endure. For much of its history The Thousand and One Nights has courted controversy over coarseness, violence and sexual licence, although the extremes of its rugged realm have never exceeded our own extremes and sometimes, sadly, pale by comparison. But the very fact that this glittering, half-fanciful cosmos remains alive, familiar and beloved by millions is proof of its power to enthrall even in the age of the microchip and the booster rocket. By itself, that qualifies as a kind of magic.
Then there lived after them a wise ruler, who was just, keen-witted and accomplished and loved tales and legends, especially those which chronicle the doings of Sovrans and Sultans, and he found in the treasury these marvellous stories and wondrous histories, contained in the thirty volumes aforesaid. So he read in them a first book and a second and a third and so on to the last of them, and each book astounded and delighted him more than that which preceded it, till he came to the end of them. Then he admired whatso he had read therein of description and discourse and rare traits and anecdotes and moral instances and reminiscences and bade the folk copy them and dispread them over all lands and climes; wherefrom their report was bruited abroad and the people named them “The Marvels and Wonders of the Thousand and One Nights.” This is all that hath come down to us of the origin of this book, and Allah is All-knowing.
—FINALE TO THE BOOK OF THE
THOUSAND NIGHTS AND A NIGHT
*Muslims aren’t the only ones who have had problems with the work’s content. The Arabian Nights has been banned at different times in American history; for example, it was banned because of the 1873 Comstock Act, which forbade the mailing of obscene materials. Meanwhile, in the same year as the 1985 Egyptian ban, the unexpurgated Nights was stamped as “unsuitable” for Jewish students by the Israeli director of the library in the British consulate in Jerusalem.
*Nothing came of this when, to their chagrin, Lawrence and his publisher discovered that the English poet and crossword puzzle composer Edward Powys Mathers was about to issue a translation of Mardrus’s Le livre des mille et une nuits through a rival publisher.
Chapter 9
INFINITE DELIGHTS
This is the third time; I hope good luck lies in odd numbers
… there is divinity in odd numbers, either in nativity, chance, or death.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, THE MERRY WIVES
OF WINDSOR, ACT V, SCENE 1
Few books of any time or place, let alone literature of a classic nature, have been known by so many names as the tales contained under the umbrella title of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. From its antecedent in the Persian Hazar Afsanah to its Arabic incarnation as Alf Laila to The Thousand and One Nights to the Arabian Nights, the title and contents may change but the essence contained in Scheherazade’s life-giving story—a young queen telling tales to end irrational cruelty—remains ever the same.
If irony is a prominent feature in the history of the Nights, then a final irony concerns the book’s title. The numerical name that appeared sometime between the tenth and twelfth centuries, The Thousand and One Nights, contains a particular significance beyond simply identifying a specific literary work, one prompting a good deal of hunting on the part of westerners who so fell under the spell of the number 1001 that they conducted elaborate searches for a “complete” Arabic version of the Nights.
Over time, their efforts resulted in editions in both eastern and western languages containing many more tales than any early compendium of the Nights could ever hope to house. The designated number of nights over which Scheherazade recites her stories proved an alluring figure for westerners, who came to imagine that the immensity of the eastern world must be home to a full edition of Alf Laila wa Laila—a complete Arabic manuscript lying in wait for those who sought it.
Antoine Galland was the first of these, falling under the title’s charm to initiate the first search for the “remaining” Nights not contained in his source texts. It appears he found at least one additional manuscript of the Nights containing more stories, but thereafter Galland’s quest for a full Alf Laila wa Laila proved fruitless, as it was doomed to be from the start. Those following Galland also hoped to uncover a complete text of the work, but when that became impossible, resorted to fashioning ones themselves, producing the Arabic printed editions with more stories than had ever appeared in any early m
anuscript.
Few if any of these searchers, however, understood an essential feature about the work’s title, one that itself contains a small story. When Islamic scholars first began employing the Indian zero and the Arabic numerical system was later adopted by the West, the ability to make ever-higher numbers became a real possibility, until the boundaries imposed by cultural conceptions of mathematics were rendered meaningless.
From one perspective, Scheherazade is telling linked stories over the course of 1001 sequential nights, one following another. The original Arabic title, Alf Laila or A Thousand Nights, represents this notion of a series of successive evenings extending to four digits. Eventually, a tradition arose in the Muslim world that no one could read all the stories contained in Alf Laila wa Laila because there were too many, or that if someone did manage to accomplish such a feat, they would surely die.
But for all his learning, Antoine Galland seems not to have been aware of a peculiar feature regarding Arabic usage of the number 1000. Rather than simply a figure between 999 and 1001, within ancient Arabic society, 1000 denoted the highest number attainable, the amount from which it is not possible to proceed further.
This interpretation seems to have been borrowed from the ancient Egyptians, who employed the hieroglyph representing 1000 to mean “all” or “all-encompassing.” For Muslims building on this concept, 1001 (1000, the highest number, plus one more) goes beyond this idea of the ultimate attainable number to become instead a transfinite figure denoting infinity.
There are such conceptual expressions in English. Phrases like “forever and a day,” “beyond the end of Time” and “happily ever after” convey the same idea as the classical Muslim use of 1001 to denote a sense of infinite continuation. Scheherazade’s 1001 nights of storytelling is, therefore, not meant to signify that she is spinning tales throughout the two years and 271 days it takes for 1001 nights to occur, but rather that she is telling stories continuously, onwards and onwards, forever without end.
The title The Thousand and One Nights does not mean to evoke a literal 1001 nights but countless nights containing endless storytelling sessions—a truly never-ending story—and it was understood intuitively as such in the marketplaces and coffee houses of classical Islam, where the title Alf Laila wa Laila represented a fathomless well of narrative from which the rawi, through Scheherazade, were able to draw. This is the reason Arabic manuscripts before the printed editions stop well short of an actual 1000 or 1001 Nights of storytelling. Even the oldest and most extensive text in existence, the Galland Manuscript, ends before a third of the titular nights have passed. This is also the reason why misinformed western searchers failed to come up with complete Alf Laila wa Laila manuscripts in Arabic and resorted to creating them, resulting in Calcutta II and the Breslau editions (with the Bulaq Text being an indigenous Arab creation).
Where, then, does the added single digit come in, making the total of Scheherazade’s nights 1001 rather than the earlier round 1000 contained in the Persian and Arabic A Thousand Tales?
Again, the answer lies in the classical Muslim concept of numbers. Like some medieval westerners, early Muslims considered certain figures to be luckier than others, representative of charms or possessing intrinsic fortune. In the western world, the number 3 is often tied to the Christian idea of the Trinity in everything from the expression “third-time’s-the-charm” to the common Russian greeting of a three-times-kiss on both cheeks. In classical times the number 7 (Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Seven Sleepers, stories of the Seven Wise Masters, and so on) was regarded as an especially fortunate numeral. And in India, the number 5 has a historical attraction, whether in the medieval Sanskrit story collection Panchatantra (“Five Books”) of the fifth or sixth centuries CE or traditional village councils composed of five members (Panchayats).
In a similar way, Muslims considered odd numbers to be intrinsically worthier than even figures. Sir Richard Burton, who believed the change from 1000 to 1001 Nights was a relatively minor matter, nevertheless writes that among Muslims, as among some Irish of his time, “there is divinity (the proverb says luck) in odd numbers and consequently the others are inauspicious,” before going on to list instances where 1001 is used in the Muslim world in a variety of ways—the Cistern of the 1001 Columns in Istanbul, Dervish convents, Muslim tombs and the Persian storybook translated by Galland’s contemporary, François Pétis de la Croix: 1001 Days.
In the final analysis, from the classical Muslim perspective Scheherazade is doing more than simply telling stories for the slightly more than a thousand evenings it takes to make the Nights a limitless reservoir of tales. To make her stories worthy—to imbue them with the luck, she and her sister need to make their daring scheme work—they require an additional night, making the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments a book comprising first endless storytelling sessions, but also tales that are then deemed fortunate, even as the symbolic number of nights over which they are recited reaches into infinity.
There are stories, and there are lucky stories. And then there are the stories of The Thousand and One Nights.
Lucky tales, indeed.
Epilogue
Given the historical irony contained in the book’s title, can there ever be a final, definitive version of The Thousand and One Nights? With its fantastically intricate history, is it possible to present readers of any place with a fixed, distinct edition that they can hold in their hands and tell them, “Here, this is the Nights”?
A provisional “Yes” must take into account two factors. The first is the recognition that for all its multinational contributions and contributors, The Thousand and One Nights is first and foremost an Arabic-language literary work, so any conclusive version should remain so. With the Persian Hazar Afsanah now lost, Arabic is, and for all time will remain, the original language of the Nights.
The second factor touches on matters both historical and practical—areas where a tentative solution may be offered. Barring the ninth-century Alf Laila Fragment, the Antoine Galland Manuscript remains the oldest surviving Arabic text of the Nights. Muhsin Mahdi’s heroic efforts at fashioning a critical edition of this manuscript have made concrete the gossamer idea of an archetypal early text. For historical purposes, Mahdi’s Arabic text may be designated as the “close historical” Thousand and One Nights of the Syrian branch of the tales.
However, for more than three centuries, the West, as well as parts of the East, have yearned for a text of the Nights that is as literal as its title, containing an actual 1001 evenings of storytelling, and giving Scheherazade’s own tale a distinct beginning and end. For this reason, and taking into account the insertions and enigmatic orphan stories to focus on its existence as a storybook, the Macnaghten text, or Calcutta II, may be seen as the closest ultimate version of the work, just as the Mahdi text is the closest to a standard early version.
Certainly, Calcutta II isn’t perfect. It includes the Sindbad voyages, which were not part of original versions of the collection, and incorporates material from sources whose background is unknown, unproven or under suspicion, or that just doesn’t belong. A measure of historical doubt is always required when reading Calcutta II or any of its translations.
Yet, in however cursory a manner, Calcutta II is formed from actual Arabic compilations of the Nights, the main source of which did undergo a form of examination by a committee composed of interested members of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Insofar as it was possible under the circumstances, Calcutta II’s text was checked and collated with other sources to produce a printed Arabic work of 1001 Nights bracketed by a complete rendition of Scheherazade’s story. Through beloved desire, the fanciful had become literal at last.
Together, the Muhsin Mahdi and William Hay Macnaghten texts of Alf Laila wa Laila may be seen as the historical alpha and omega of The Thousand and One Nights—the tangible first and last literary developments in the progression of this enchanting and, in our dreams, enchanted book.
Notes<
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Introduction: Stories from the Past
p. 7, “a revelation in romance”: Richard F. Burton, The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, hereafter Nights, 10 vols. (London: Printed for the Kama Shastra Society of London and Benares, 1885–86), X, 99.
p. 7, “something so new, so unconventional”: ibid.
Chapter 1: A Spectral Work
p. 17, “a Paris of the ninth century”: Nights, X, 173.
p. 20, “Such the gay Splendor, the luxurious State”: James Thomson, “Castle of Indolence,” 1748, in Liberty, The Castle of Indolence and Other Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 187.
p. 20, “to solace himself in the city”: Nights, I, 95.
p. 21, “the silken sail of infancy”: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Recollections of the Arabian Nights,” in Poetical Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1905), 17.
p. 21, “Thereon his deep eye stirr’d”: ibid., 21.
p. 22, “marks his reign with a stain of infamy”: Nights, X, 136–37.
p. 22, “For it was in the golden prime”: Tennyson, “Recollections of the Arabian Nights,” passim.
p. 24, “It is not merely a simple narrative”: Alexander Russell, A Natural History of Aleppo (London: Printed for G.G. and J. Robinson, 1794), 148–49.
p. 24, “in the midst of some interesting adventure”: ibid.
p. 28, “examples of the excellencies”: Nabia Abbot, “A Ninth-Century Fragment of the ‘Thousand Nights’: New Light on the Early History of the Arabian Nights,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies VIII, no. 3 (July 1949), 133.