The Arabian Nights - A Companion Read online

  Robert Irwin has taught Arabic and Middle Eastern History at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and London. Publisher and novelist, he is also the Middle East editor for the Times Literary Supplement and a prolific author. His latest work is the highly acclaimed Night and Horses and the Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature.

  ‘Irwin organizes his material like a good storyteller...he gives us the crystallized sum of The Nights: anecdote, history, moral fable, aphorism, story after story, wonder upon wonder. This monumental, infinitely faceted gem should be every writer’s bedtime sampler.’

  - Michael Moorcock, New Statesman & Society

  ‘Superlative...just the sort of relaxed, informative book that Edmund Wilson might have written had he grown interested in the Middle East and its early literature.’

  - Michael Dirda, Washington Post

  ‘A generous and erudite book...We’re in the company of someone who loves The Arabian Nights, and who has generously shared that love with us through this companion.’

  - Michele Roberts, Independent on Sunday

  Reprinted in 2010 by Tauris Paperbacks

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  Copyright © Robert Irwin, 1994, 2004

  First published by Allen Lane, The Penguin Press 1994

  Cover image: The Scribe by Ludwig Deutsch, Oil on panel, signed and dated 1911. 20 x 14

  1/2 inches. Reproduced with kind permission of Mathaf Gallery Limited.

  The right of Robert Irwin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN 978 1 86064 983 7

  eISBN 978 0 85773 006 0

  A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

  A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  Library of Congress catalog card: available

  Contents

  Preface to the Second Edition

  Introduction

  1 Beautiful Infidels

  2 The Book without Authors

  3 Oceans of Stories

  4 The Storyteller’s Craft

  5 Street Entertainments

  6 Low Life

  7 Sexual Fictions

  8 The Universe of Marvels

  9 Formal Readings

  10 Children of the Nights

  Chronology

  Notes

  Preface to the Second Edition

  Years ago I used to play on a classic Williams pinball-machine, ‘Tales of the Arabian Nights’. As I fired off one silver ball after another, I would gaze at the filmic iconography of The Arabian Nights spread out on the machine’s gaudily painted playbar. That iconography, divorced and free-floating from particular stories, will register with people who have never opened the book of the Nights: the Roc’s giant egg, harem girls in diaphanous trousers, hook-nosed men wielding scimitars, genies, minarets, the Cyclops, the prince disguised as a beggar, the basket full of serpents, the rope which turns into a ladder, the all-seeing eye. This visual clutter of oriental knick-knacks can be put to any purpose. In the West today the Nights chiefly serves as a kind of reservoir of images and story-fragments that can be recycled in films for juvenile audiences.

  In the modern Middle East, Sheherazade, the story-teller of the Nights, has become the beguiling icon of a great cultural heritage which rather less charming political figures have sought to claim as their own. Abu Nuwas Street in Baghdad, which runs along the edge of the Tigris, takes its name from a real-life ninth-century poet and libertine who features as the protagonist in several stories of the Nights. The Sheherazade Monument is situated between Abu Nuwas Street and the river. Mohammed Ghani’s bronze statue, commissioned by the Ba‘th regime, shows Sheherazade talking for her life in front of the negligently reclining despot and serial killer, Shahriyar. (It is possible that Sheherazade’s plight may have struck a chord with some of those who walked past her monument.) Elsewhere, on a Baghdadi traffic intersection there is a statue of Morgiana the slave girl, pouring boiling oil into the jars that concealed the forty thieves (in the story of ‘Ali Baba’). More recently, American troops, who broke into one of Uday Hussein’s palatially furnished love-nests in the city, discovered in the bedroom a fresco of Sheherazade playing a lyre. I do not know if Uday Hussein gave any thought to the decorative iconography of his pleasure palaces, but it may be that the Nights frame story of Sheherazade and Shahriyar, a fable about a despot and how his mingled blood-lust and boredom had to be assuaged by a desperately talking woman, appealed to Uday Hussein’s dark humour.

  In modern times, in both the West and the Arab world, the magnificent cultural riches of The Arabian Nights have been reduced to a scant handful of clichéd and kitsch-laden images. Most people in the West are familiar only with the grim Arab world of the headlines – Taliban, fatwas, suicide bombers, Intifada, disputes over water rights, OPEC meetings, demonstrations, arrests and executions. Even those who have actually visited the Middle East on business may return with memories only of long waits for visas, charmless modern hotels, scorchingly hot and dusty highways and sugary local imitations of Coca Cola. But there is another Middle East to be found on the shelves of any decent library in the Western world, a territory compounded of enchantment, romance and mystery.

  The Arabian Nights: A Companion, which is now, some ten years on, being republished, owes its inception to sheer boredom. When, as a postgraduate at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies, I started to study Middle Eastern history and Islamic culture, I was struck by how very dull most of the stuff was that I read. There were exceptions of course. However, what I mostly read were chronicles that recorded the treks of men with unpronounceable names to unspellable places and the pointless battles they fought there. As for the account of Arabic literary culture in English, this had a somewhat frowsty, almost Victorian feel, as the only accessible general account, A Literary History of the Arabs had been published by R.A. Nicholson in 1907.

  Thinking that it would be good to wake things up a bit, I decided to return to The Arabian Nights, the book that, with its tolerant princes, combative women, wily robbers and mysterious sorcerers, had lit up my imagination as a child. The Nights was the product of a medieval culture that was confident, tolerant and pluralist. The Christian broker and the Jewish physician are as much at home in the Hunchback cycle of stories as the Muslim tailor and barber. Of course, the Muslim faith was important. It pervades the stories of the Nights and in some cases even dominates them. Those who venture into the world of the Nights learn of the doom of mighty dynasties by the decree of Allah; they are taught to be patient in suffering and to trust in Allah; and they are told of the inspiring deeds of Sufis and other holy men. Piety and Prayer in ‘The Arabian Nights’ is a book that could and should be written. However, it is also evident that the Muslim faith that pervades the Nights is not the maximalist version favoured by modern Islamists. The story-tellers and their audiences took it for granted that most of the protagonists in stories of the Nights were believing Muslims, even if they were believers who were sub
ject to human lapses. There are frequent instances in the stories of such lapses as adultery, the wearing of extravagant costumes, indulging in profanity and the drinking of alcohol. (I am reminded of a historical encounter between an only moderately pious Timurid prince and a holy man. When reproached by the holy man for drinking alcohol, the prince replied that he would only refrain from drinking wine when it had become the greatest of his remaining sins.) A character in a Nights story is more likely to die as a martyr to love than to sacrifice him or herself in some ideologically motivated suicide attack. It may be that the sort of ideological Islam whose demands on the faithful are absolute is a peculiarly modern phenomenon and one, moreover, that owes a great deal to such Western ideologies as ultramontane Catholicism, Evangelicalism, Marxism and Fascism. The Nights itself has occasionally fallen victim to the Islamic fundamentalist version of literary criticism, as unexpurgated versions of the story collection have been banned in several countries. In 1985 the head of the morals department of the Egyptian Interior Ministry brought a prosecution against a Lebanese edition of the Nights, on the grounds that it threatened the morals of Egypt’s youth. However, the Nights naturally has its defenders among leading Arab novelists, playwrights and poets. The Nobel-Prize-winning Egyptian novelist, Naguib Mahfouz, is only the most famous of such enthusiasts for the medieval stories.

  When The Arabian Nights: A Companion first appeared, it was widely reviewed – and not just in English; reviews appeared in Arabic, Hebrew, Italian, German and French. I was struck by the generosity of (all but one) of those reviews and, in many cases, the erudition of the reviewers. William Gash’s review in The London Review of Books (10 November, 1994) was a stylish piece of literature in its own right: ‘Yet these tales were originally told, not by a campfire, in some man’s soothing voice, or listened to in the lap of dearest daddy, but – instead of the once customary cigarette – enjoyed during the calm following copulation, after lengthy and enervating love-making: the man a murderer of his mistresses, the woman a willing but oft-tupped victim, while a third the belaboured lady’s sister, naps beneath the bouncing bed where she’s been staying out of love’s way until tale-time comes and she can clear her throat to request a bit of post-coital edification and escape ....’

  Despite the kind words of the reviewers, the book has its gaps. It could not go on forever and, as I noted in the Introduction, I had found no space for such important topics as poetry, film, wisdom literature, mysticism, music inspired by the Nights and the impact of the Nights on modern Arabic literature. I am at work slowly filling these gaps. A study of the story and the Disney film of Aladdin appeared in the Times Literary Supplement (December 24, 1993). Essays on the Arabian Nights on film and the Arabian Nights in modern Arabic literature are in press. Other studies will follow and will, I hope, be eventually collected and published as a single volume. Looking back on what I wrote in the Companion, I think that I underestimated the importance of poetry and of the nudama’, or princely cup-companions, as sources of stories. However, it will take much more time and research to get such emphases right. In the meantime there is quite a bit about poetry and nudama’ in my more recent Night and Horses and the Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature (2000).

  There is now a great deal more to read on the subject of the Nights than when I started – and even then the volume of secondary literature was daunting. More generally, the volume of literature dealing with pre-modern Middle Eastern history and Islamic culture has grown exponentially. Quite a few brilliant and groundbreaking books have appeared in recent years. We have had such excellent works as Michael Cook’s short life of Muhammad, Carl Ernst’s incisive account of Sufism, Franklin Lewis’s comprehensive survey of the teachings and influence of Rumi, Jonathan Bloom’s analysis of the impact of the adoption of paper on Islamic society, Robert Hillenbrand’s superbly eloquent analysis of Muslim architecture, Lesley Peirce’s study of the power of the women in the Ottoman harem, Doris Behrens-Abouseif’s original survey of the importance of beauty in Arabic culture and Malcolm Lyons’s prodigious and profound researches on the Arabian epic. A student starting out in this territory should not ever have to read a dull book.

  I am very grateful to Iradj Bagherzade and Turi Munthe at I.B.Tauris for giving my book a new life and me some more money.

  Supplementary Reading

  Narrative analysis was dealt with only skimpily in the Companion, but, since its publication, the floodgates have opened and other studies have appeared that deal more closely with narrative analysis of individual stories – among them Contes Nouveaux des 1001 Nuits: Étude du manuscript Reinhardt by Aboubakr Chraibi (1996), Sheherazade Through the Looking Glass: The Metamorphoses of The Thousand and One Nights by Eva Sallis (1999), and Sex, Love and Death in the 1001 Nights by Daniel Beaumont (2002). Ferial Ghazoul’s previously published essays were reprinted in a new and more widely available edition as Nocturnal Poetics: The Arabian Nights in Comparative Context (1996). The proceedings of a small conference on the Nights was belatedly published in 1997 as The Thousand and One Nights in Arabic Literature and Society, edited by Richard G. Hovannisian and Georges Sabbagh. Muhsin Mahdi’s publication of a critical edition of the Nights, Hussein Haddawy’s translation of the text established by Mahdi and my own discursive Companion seem to have, in effect, cleared the ground for the deluge of academic studies that have followed since (far too many to be properly listed here). Richard Van Leeuwen’s encyclopedic Die Wereld van Sjahrazaad (1999) can be recommended to Dutch readers (but those who are more comfortable in German or Japanese can read my book as translated into those languages). I wish that, when I was writing the Companion, I had been able to draw upon the Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature edited by Julie Scott Meisami and Paul Starkey (1998). It contains useful articles on the Nights, as well as on its sources and literary rivals and offspring.

  The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, edited by John Clute and John Grant (1997) and The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales, edited by Jack Zipes (2000) both devote a fair amount of attention to the Nights and usefully take stock of the stories in a comparative and non-Islamic context. Most recently, Marina Warner, in Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds (2002), has produced a bold and strikingly original reading of the story of ‘Aladdin’. The influence of the Companion has not been restricted to non-fiction. It was an acknowledged source for A.S. Byatt’s The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye (1994) as well as of Anthony O’Neill’s Scheherezade (2001). Also, though it is hardly obvious, my broodings on character and destiny influenced my treatment of these themes in a novel that I was concurrently writing about the British Surrealists of the 1930s and 40s, Exquisite Corpse (1995).

  Only French academics seem to like to pretend that nothing is published in this field, except that which is written in French. A great deal has been written and continues to be written on the Mille et Une Nuits in French by André Miquel, Claude Bremond, Abdelfattah Kilito, Patrice Coussonet, Malek Chebel, Sylvette Larzul and others. It is a substantial and valuable corpus, even though, for the most part, its authors prefer to ignore work being done by British, Germans and others. Still, the bibliography in Les Mille et Une Nuits: dossier documentaire, published by the Bibliothèque of the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris in 2001, can be recommended as the only thing of its kind and it does list quite a few works by scholars who are not French.

  Introduction

  Beneath English trees I meditated on that lost maze: I imagined it inviolate and perfect at the secret crest of a mountain; I imagined it erased by rice fields or beneath water; I imagined it infinite, no longer composed of octagonal kiosks and returning paths, but of rivers and provinces and kingdoms . . . I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars.

  Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Garden of the Forking Paths’

  One feels like getting lost in The Thousand and One Nights, one knows that entering that book one can forget
one’s own poor human fate; one can enter a world, a world made up of archetypal figures but also of individuals.

  Borges, ‘The Thousand and One Nights’1

  According to a superstition current in the Middle East in the late nineteenth century when Sir Richard Burton was writing, no one can read the whole text of the Arabian Nights without dying. There have indeed been times (particularly when toiling through Burton’s own distinctly unattractive translation of the Nights) when I thought that I might slit my throat rather than continue with this enterprise. However, I am still alive. It may be that I have acquired some sort of literary stamina from a youthful reading of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. The Arabian Nights, applying that title in its widest and loosest sense, is a very long book. Burton’s own omnium-gatherum translation, based on an uncritical collation of a variety of Arabic printed texts and manuscripts, stretched to sixteen volumes and included 468 stories (give or take a few, depending on how one counts). Moreover, a critical study of the Nights cannot be based on a reading of Burton’s translation alone. It was of course necessary to compare his version with those of rival translators and all of them with the original Arabic. Then there were the variant versions of the canonical tales to be read, the wider context of medieval Arab literature to be investigated, the secondary critical literature to be assessed and the multifarious offspring and influences of the Nights to be tracked down . . .

  It will probably come as a shock to most people in the West today to learn that the Nights is longer than Proust. In the nineteenth century, Burton’s, or it might be Payne’s or Lane’s, translation of the Nights was a standard work in gentlemen’s libraries. In the twentieth century, however, its popularity has declined, and only garbled versions of a handful of stories (‘Aladdin’, ‘Sinbad’, ‘Ali Baba’ and the story of Sheherazade herself) survive in popular consciousness and in bowdlerized children’s editions. Even professional Arabists, most of them, are shockingly ignorant of the contents of the Nights. It is commonly regarded as a collection of Arab fairy tales, the oriental equivalent of the Märchen (fairy tales or household tales) of the Brothers Grimm. But, while it is true that there are items in the Nights which might pass as fairy tales, the collection’s compass is much wider than this. It also includes long heroic epics, wisdom literature, fables, cosmological fantasy, pornography, scatological jokes, mystical devotional tales, chronicles of low life, rhetorical debates and masses of poetry. A few tales are hundreds of pages long; others amount to no more than a short paragraph.