Arabian Nights

Arabian Nights: The Marvels and Wonders of the Thousand and One Nights, adapted from Richard F. Burton’s unexpurgated translation by Jack Zipes (fiction, 595 pages)

I’m sure I read some of Scheherazade’s tales as a child, but any memory of them is hazy at best, and I wanted to read the originals before starting in on Naguib Mahfouz’s Arabian Nights and Days. Of course, whatever I read as a child would have been sanitized for my protection. Not so this version, which was full of sex and violence.

When King Shahryar and his brother King Shah Zaman discover their wives have been cheating on them, they kill their wives and go off to find someone more unfortunate than themselves, to make them feel better. They find a jinnee who has captured a virgin and is keeping her for himself, but unbeknownst to him, to get back at him for holding her captive she is having sex with other men whenever he falls asleep. Of course, instead of feeling sorry for the captive woman, they see this as more evidence that no woman can be trusted, so King Shahryar decides to marry a virgin every night, sleep with her, and then have her killed in the morning. He does this every day for three years, by which time his kingdom is pretty much emptied of virgins. His grand vizier, whose task it is to procure the virgin every day and then kill her the next morning, laments to his daughter Scheherazade that he can’t find anyone for the king. The lovely and educated Scheherazade volunteers to marry the king in order to stop the madness. That night, she asks the king if her sister can spend the night in the room with them so she can say goodbye. By prearrangement, her sister asks Scheherazade to tell her a story.

And thus begins the thousand and one nights, with Scheherazade telling tales, and tales within tales, and tales within tales within tales, stopping every night as dawn comes (at a very exciting point!) and tantalizing the king so that he keeps her alive for one more night so he can hear more.

The tales are exciting and fantastical, and the structure is beautiful, with each tale opening the way to a new one. This particular volume (as far as I can tell, there is no one definitive volume) has some familiar stories (like Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves, Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, and the Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Seaman) and unfamiliar ones (like The Ebony Horse and The Hunchback’s Tale), with kings and slaves, jinnees and demons, giant birds and dragons. There is a running theme of storytelling to save one’s life, which of course eventually works its way up to Scheherazade herself.

The tales of the Arabian Nights were written long, long ago, and I should have expected them to be offensive. I guess I did expect them to be offensive, but somehow I was still shocked and offended over and over again by the sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, and all the other -isms. I think I would have been less offended if some of this had been acknowledged by the editor of this book, which was after all published in the 1990s. But instead, the back-cover copy (and the editor’s afterword) refers to “Prince Behram and the Princess Al-Datma” as “a delightful early version of The Taming of the Shrew.” This particular story is delightful in the same way as General Hospital charmed us all by having Luke rape Laura late at night in the disco, sparking off their long-running love affair. The Princess Al-Datma has rejected countless suitors and defeated others in one-on-one combat. After losing a jousting match with the princess, Prince Behram disguises himself as an old gardener, charms the princess by pretending to by a harmless crackpot who gives beautiful jewels to her ladies-in-waiting in exchange for kisses, and when she decides to give him a kiss for the jewels, grabs her, throws her to the ground and rapes her. Delightful, right?

On the other hand, I was heartened to discover that the real hero of “Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves” isn’t Ali Baba himself, but his slave girl Morgiana, who cleverly discovers the thieves and defeats them, saving Ali Baba numerous times in the process. And I was completely absorbed in Sinbad’s seven voyages (although I kept imagining his friends and family begging him not to get on a boat again, since he was clearly cursed!) and the story of The Ebony Horse. Like King Shahryar, I was often entranced, and rather than put the book down, I would push on to hear just one more of Scheherazade’s stories.

2441 / 36600 pages. 7% done!

5 / 6 purchased prior to 2008. 83%!

2 / 25 nonfiction. 8%!

1 / 6 global/translation. 17%!