Eastern Dreams (6 page)

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 classical 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
.