The Thousand and one Nights
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The Thousand and One Nights, generally known to the English, speaking world as the Arabian Nights, is a compendium of Arabic tales compiled between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries. The collection starts with the story of King Shahrayar. Betrayed by his adulterous wife, he swears never to trust a woman again, deciding instead to marry a different virgin every night and have her executed the next day. He carries out his plan for three years, until his Vizier can no longer find a virgin to offer the king. The Viziers courageous daughter, Shahrazad, then attempts to change the kings mind and save the remaining maidens of the kingdom. Shahrazad offers herself as a bride. With the help of her sister, Dinarzad, she obtains permission to tell the king a story. Just as the sun is about to rise, she reaches the point of critical suspense, and the king, his curiosity piqued, spares her for the next night to complete her narrative. But the following night only brings another unfinished story. Thus, the king spares the bride for a thousand and one nights during which time she narrates an astonishing variety of tales. Finally, fascinated with his bride of “one night,” Shahrayar rescinds the decree and crowns her as the queen.
The stories connect through skillful interweaving rather than thematic links. Depicting all types of people from the wicked to the virtuous, from the proud to the humble, from the gruesome to the gleeful, the tales thread the whole scope of human experience into one long narrative. Some stories are stretched out and form a sort of mini-series. “The Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor,” for example, are told in seven installments. Others are short anecdotes, barely one page long.
The stories in The Thousand and One Nights originated in a wide geographical area. Although most relate to medieval Arabic culture and civilization, many stories are rooted in ancient oral traditions of the Near East, Persia, India, Iraq of the first millennium B.C., Greece, Israel, and pre-Muslim Arabia. First written in different vernaculars, the tales also were embellished, revised, and spiced with Muslim flavor when translated into Arabic.
The technique of connecting incomplete stories under the umbrella of a frame story is not original. The archetype of this literary genre already was established during the third century B.C. by Indian stories about the birth of Buddha intended to inculcate moral axioms ascribed to Buddha. While the frame story provided a rationale for a successive line of tales, in itself it was only a frame and as such, subservient to the separate stories. Likewise, the Arabic tales, under a similar frame, were not necessarily related, even though the wise counsel at the end of each story provided a unifying factor.
The Thousand and One Nights illustrated that secular pieces, even when humorous, could be told for moral purposes, and that didactic teaching could be achieved outside a house of worship. These apparently frivolous stories could bolster and supplement the moral exhortations of the clergy when transmitted orally, but they had an even broader dissemination and greater impact when put into written form.
The tales of The Thousand and One Nights may possess an allegorical dimension, in which their conspicuous emphasis on material wealth functions as a metaphor for the lasting richness of spiritual life, while their general preoccupation with the lower echelons of society provides a