Eastern Dreams (31 page)

A blockbuster work dealing with these very issues—practically post-colonialism's founding text—appeared in 1978 and has sparked dispute, some of it quite bitter, ever since. That year, Edward Said (1935–2003), a Palestinian Christian and professor of comparative literature, published his celebrated
Orientalism
, a seminal book whose intent is to demonstrate that western perceptions of the eastern world, reflected in western literature, are based on an ongoing series of false assumptions and preconceptions. Said contends that European peoples have used these same flawed perceptions to assign the East an inferior status relative to the West, one excusing and sometimes demanding western intervention in eastern (here Said is referring chiefly to Muslim) affairs.

By taking his cue from the dictum of the French philosopher Michel Foucault that knowledge represents a form of power, Said argues that the western absorption of systems of eastern knowledge, and the writing that results from such absorptions, amounts to a kind of power-grab—a cultural appropriation done purely for the West's benefit, and which has led European peoples to make conclusions about easterners that make it impossible to regard these easterners as human beings like themselves. They are therefore reduced to the status of “the Other”—individuals separated from the human community by a complex series of interlocking historical, social, political, economic and intellectual dynamics that the West deems alien and subordinate. In Said's view, western perceptions about
the “Orient,” however defined, are nothing less than a self-serving construct meant to assign inferiority.

The full value of Edward Said's argument lies outside the scope of this book, although it is notable that in his writings, Said's actual consideration of the
Arabian Nights
and its translators is surprisingly cursory. He tends to dismiss the book as a beneficent fantasy fit only for the young—one of those “childish things” best left behind with the greater sophistication maturity brings. He therefore ignores not only the adult nature of the original
Nights
but also the prominent way in which popular western visions of the Muslim Orient have been shaped by versions of the book and those literary works inspired by it. On its own, Galland's
Nights
played a vital role in introducing visions of a torpid, timeless East steeped in colour, spectacle and sensuality, implanting images westerners carried with them during actual eastern journeys. Whether these same travellers found their expectations denied or confirmed, many came with preliminary visions distilled either partly or largely from the
Arabian Nights
, and therefore with various notions taken from what was reasonably thought to be an actual eastern text.

The appropriation of one culture by another through its literature finds curiously little expression in Edward Said's work, although, as a literary scholar, it might be thought
The Thousand and One Nights
' immense western popularity would provide excellent fodder for his argument. Perhaps, concerned as he is with western writers who focus on the East, Said is puzzled by how to approach an eastern work actually considered by the West to be one of its own texts, and so largely ignores a prime and founding expression of orientalist perception over the past three hundred years.

Not that the
Arabian Nights
has escaped the culture wars scot-free. Other commentators have taken up the slack left by Said, focusing on how the West's appetite for the world of the mythical
Nights
has come to partially inform its attitudes and perceptions.
The Syrian cultural historian Rana Kabbani devotes substantial critical space in her book
Europe's Myths of Orient
to the Richard Burton edition of the
Nights
, finding it a prime compendium of “lewd Saracens,” subservient harem beauties and violent behaviour dolled up as an allegedly authoritative picture of a barbaric Orient.

Another observer, Swiss-Canadian philosopher Thierry Hentsch, goes further by postulating that western images of the Muslim Orient found in texts like the
Nights
are actually expressions of westerners' insecurities about their identity, a mirror the West holds up to help view and define itself. Here works like the
Arabian Nights
are not only simple distortions of the East, but indicators of the West's preoccupation with itself. With the post-colonial era now fading in the face of new global realities—some say by the establishment of a new colonial age founded on fresh methods of appropriation—it seems certain that the debate about the worth of orientalist imagery as depicted in such works as the
Nights
will remain vigorous for years to come.

The familiarity of
The Thousand and One Nights
in both the East and West and the ongoing use of its images is perhaps the most striking evidence of the book's enduring power. Within the mainstream Arab world, however, contemporary attitudes toward the work remain at least as ambivalent as they were during the Abbasid caliphate. Its origins may be homegrown, but the West's wholesale embracing of the work as the “
Arabian Nights
” is a source of deep suspicion to many Muslims, who see its status as proof that many western perceptions of Islam are filtered through fantastical and misleading images.

Nor has the secular nature of the
Nights
' stories helped its reputation within conservative parts of the Muslim community, where the
issue of Muslim identity is sometimes linked negatively to the West's perceived attitudes about Islamic culture. It can certainly be argued that portions of the western world remain in thrall to ancient images of the Middle East as home to authoritarian politics, ever-present violence and “oriental excess” in thought and deed. Actual violence in the region, coupled with tensions caused by western involvement in regional affairs, only serve to heighten a Muslim sense that through such works as the
Arabian Nights
, the West is often discovering answers before the questions are even asked.

The rise of fundamentalist Islamic groups has also had an impact on the status of the
Nights
, since the sexuality and vulgarity in unexpurgated versions remains a problem for reserved societies. For over a millennium, elite Muslim attitudes toward works like
Alf Laila wa Laila
remained dismissive, but not officially censorious. It was not until the establishment of independent Arab nations in the twentieth century, many with laws based on Islamic precepts, that official interest in the
Nights
began to assert itself through legislation.

From time to time, a number of Muslim nations have banned
The Thousand and One Nights
, most famously the Egyptian government of Hosni Mubarak. Partly in response to a growing fundamentalist presence on the national scene, Egypt banned unexpurgated editions of the
Nights
in 1985, on the grounds of obscenity and as a threat to Egyptian youth. This was despite the fact that almost all Egyptian versions of the
Nights
were already abridged to delete potentially offending material.
*

Although parts of the Islamic community harbour uncertainties regarding the
Nights
, they have not extinguished the flame of the book's glamour. As recently as March 2002, Muslim fundamentalists were outraged to learn that Arabic copies of the
Nights
were being distributed to alleged al-Qaeda inmates held at the U.S. Guantanamo Bay detainment camp in Cuba. This seems to have been an instance of captors, perhaps innocently enough, offering inmates something they imagined their wards might enjoy reading, without understanding the book's controversial nature in another cultural world. For all that, it seems
The Thousand and One Nights
remains a favourite among reading material available to those incarcerated in Cuba; with J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, it ranks high among books requested by prisoners from the Guantanamo prison library. Despite the feelings of many Muslim fundamentalists, it seems the human need for magic and wonder crosses a host of religious and political considerations.

Eastern authors who reference the
Nights
have also come under attack. The Anglo-Indian writer Salman Rushdie, who makes frequent allusions to the
Nights
in such works as
Midnight's Children
and
The Satanic Verses
but especially in his anti-censorship children's classic
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
, notoriously had an Iranian
fatwa
(religious decree) issued against him in 1989 for allegations of blasphemy in
The Satanic Verses
, and had to spend several years in hiding as a result. The Rushdie case is the most famous example of a negative reaction to modern writers employing Muslim religious themes and symbols, but it is not the only one. The Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, the first Arab writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (1988), came under literal attack for his writings in 1994 when the then eighty-two-year-old laureate was assaulted and stabbed by fundamentalist extremists in Cairo. He survived, but thereafter lived under bodyguard protection until his death in 2006.

Many contemporary eastern writers continue to view the
Nights
as unworthy of the name “literature” even as others, conscious of the work's international impact on stories and storytelling, have employed it as a personal resource. Certainly, its controversial nature has not prevented the book from maintaining a hold on the eastern world, even if some of its supporters rank with the worst
Nights
villains. During the 1980s, Iraq's ruling Ba'ath Party erected statues of
Arabian Nights
characters around Baghdad to legitimize the regime's historical connection to the country's past (including a macabre monument to “Ali Baba's” Marjana pouring boiling oil into a jar hiding one of the Forty Thieves), and it may be assumed the theme of despotism finds resonance with more than one regional ruler.

Happily, the work has also been put to many more sanguine uses. In her French-language
Sherazade
trilogy, Algerian-born Leila Sebbar's protagonist is an Algerian teenage runaway in modern Europe who wrestles with her identity in the same way her namesake wrestles with her fate. In
When Dreams Travel
, Indian novelist Githa Hariharan retells Scheherazade's story, but set firmly in the context of the eternal power struggle between men and women.
Balthasar's Odyssey
, a novel from 2000 by Lebanese author Amin Maalouf, concerns a seventeenth-century Levantine book merchant's
Nights
-like journey from Ottoman Turkey to England as he searches for a sacred book said to hold the key to salvation. In addition to the many references to the
Arabian Nights
found in his works, Salman Rushdie has stated publicly that it is the one book he would most like to have with him if marooned on a desert island; a powerful endorsement from a significant postwar literary figure.

Like Rushdie, Naguib Mahfouz has found inspiration in the
Nights
. His 1982 novel
Arabian Nights and Days
is at once a pastiche and an original drama, mixing the familiar figures of Shahryar, Scheherazade, Aladdin and Sindbad in a new scenario. In a work that
is more of an epilogue to the
Nights
than a direct sequel, Mahfouz uses seventeen linked tales to relate what happens following the end of Scheherazade's storytelling, interweaving issues of tyranny, corruption, guilt, conscience and the question of forgiveness by invoking a familiar fictional past. By using westernized
Nights
characters like Aladdin and Ali Baba as accepted parts of their text, eastern writers like Mahfouz contribute to what might be thought of as a covert cultural reconciliation, where literature derived from the East becomes a conciliatory symbol for all societies.

Astonishing as its tales are, the ability of the
Arabian Nights
to endure as a literary text is its most impressive characteristic—particularly as the book's impact is now felt not through the number of its readers, but by its echoes. In this sense, it may be said to have risen, phoenix-like, from the ashes of its reading-neglect to live anew as a revered, consulted or referenced book for a host of writers and commentators. From almost the moment the
Nights
arrived in the West, it has inspired, and continues to inspire; the use of its name and elements appear frequently in the printed word and more. The oriental romance may be a thing of the past and the contemporary media might use the
Nights
mostly as pop fodder, but suggestions of the work reverberate in literature without end.