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Arabian Nights
(6,251 words)
Arabian Nights , the work known in Arabic as Alf layla

wa-layla, “A thousand nights and one night,” is an oriental Article Table of Contents
collection of stories that is constituted by a frame-tale
1. Sources of information
focused on the narrator, Shahrazād, telling stories for a
thousand nights. Derived from a pre-Islamic Iranian 2. Content
prototype that relied partly on Indian elements, the 3. Textual history
collection gained fame in the Western world by way of 4. Characteristics
the French translation adapted from various Arabic 5. The impact of the Nights
sources and published by Antoine Galland between 1704
Bibliography
and 1717. Commonly known in English as The Arabian
Nights' Entertainments or, in short, the (Arabian) Nights,
the collection in its many versions constitutes the Islamic
world's major contribution to world literature and an icon that has permeated literary imagery
around the world. Rather than denoting a specific book, the name the Arabian Nights implies
a phenomenon, since the work is both anonymous and authored by many different
contributors over an extended period of time. Different versions in Arabic manuscripts and
printed texts exist, as well as numerous translations and adaptations into European and other
languages.
1. Sources of information
https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-isla…num=1&s.f.s2_parent=s.f.book.encyclopaedia-of-islam-3&s.q=alf+layla Page 1 of 15
Arabian Nights - Brill Reference 21.02.2019 16(37
The only critical edition of an Alf layla wa-layla manuscript is the edition prepared by Muhsin
Mahdi (1984), based on the Galland manuscript, which was one of the sources Galland used
for his famous translation. The text of this edition has served as the basis for several
translations into European languages, including English, Dutch, and German. The older
English translations, such as those of Lane and Burton, which are based on various
manuscripts, combinations of manuscripts, and other sources, are available as Internet
resources. The volumes of Victor Chauvin's Bibliographie pertaining to the Nights, originally
published 1900–3 and recently reprinted, contain detailed summaries and commentaries on
the tales of the Nights (and many other tales). Mia Gerhardt's monograph, The art of story-
telling, and David Pinault's “sequel” study, Story-telling techniques in the Arabian Nights,
remain highly readable and inspiring studies. Comprehensive information about the Nights in
English is available in Robert Irwin's The Arabian Nights: A companion and in The Arabian
Nights encyclopedia, prepared by Ulrich Marzolph and Richard van Leeuwen. A number of
important essays tracing our gradually growing understanding of the complex nature of the
Arabian Nights have been republished by Marzolph in The Arabian Nights reader. The
tercentenary of the publication of Galland's translation in 2004 occasioned the publication of
a number of volumes documenting the state of the art in Arabian Nights research (Chraïbi;
Joly and Kilito; Ouyang and van Gelder; Yamanaka and Nishio; and Marzolph, Transnational).
2. Content
The frame-tale of the Nights begins with an anonymous narrator telling the story of the
Sassanian kings Shāhriyār and his brother Shāhzamān, the ruler of Samarqand. Deeply
traumatised by the unexpected discovery of their wives' sexual debauchery, they start to roam
the world in order to find out whether there are any faithful women to be found anywhere. In
their travels, they meet a woman who tells them of her abduction by a demon who keeps her
locked away in a box at the bottom of the sea, allowing her out only when he wishes. But while
the demon sleeps, she blackmails the two men into having sex with her, thereby ultimately
convincing them that men will never manage to control women's wiles. On the journey home,
Shāhzamān decides to live in celibacy, while Shāhriyār determines to marry a new woman
every night only to kill her the next morning. Once back in his kingdom, he continues this
practice until the number of marriageable women grows scarce. At this point, the wazīr's
daughter Shahrazād (Scheherazade) takes it upon herself to save her sex by volunteering to
marry the cruel ruler. After the nocturnal consummation of their marriage, she has her
younger sister (or, in some versions, her nurse) Dunyāzād (Dīnāzād, Dīnārzād) request that
she divert them by telling tales. With the king's permission, Shahrazād does so. As dawn
breaks, Shahrazād interrupts her story at a point that leaves the king's curiosity aroused, and
he decides to let her live so that he can hear the rest of the tale the following night. This
continues for a total of a thousand nights. On the thousand-and-first night, Shahrazād
discloses her stratagem to the ruler, and he pardons her.
3. Textual history
3.1. Early history. The collection developed into its present shape in several steps that can be
reconstructed with a fair degree of certainty. The most important attestations for the early
history of the Nights are two references, one preserved in the work of the Arab historian al-
Masʿūdī (d. 345 or 346/956–7) and the other in the catalogue (al-Fihrist) of the Baghdad
bookseller Ibn al-Nadīm, written in 377/987 (see Abbott). Both authors agree that the
collection derives from an earlier Persian book named Hazār afsān(a) (“A thousand stories”), a
title rendered in Arabic as Alf khurāfa (“A thousand fantastic stories”), the term khurāfa
relating to the eponymous protagonist of fantastic stories who allegedly lived during the
prophet Muḥammad's lifetime (Drory). Both authors note that the Arabic translation is
commonly known as Alf layla (“A thousand nights”). Ibn al-Nadīm also mentions the general
design of the work's frame-tale and explicitly states that he had seen the book on various
occasions “in its entirety” (wa-qad raʾaytuhu bi-tamāmihi dafaʿāt). While he describes the book
as containing some 200 tales, he does not, however, mention the actual content of any of the
tales included. Ibn al-Nadīm's evaluation of the collection as “a poor book with silly tales”
(kitāb ghathth bārid al-ḥadīth) characterises the attitude of the learned, both contemporary
and modern, and disregards the fact that the collection's tales were obviously enjoyed by the
indigenous popular audience.
Several elements in the collection's frame-tale have been shown to derive from ancient Indian
models (Cosquin). These elements include the stratagem of narrating stories in order to
prevent death as well as two specific tales, viz., the tale of the “Woman in the box” (Aarne and
Thompson, tale-type no. 1426), experienced by King Shāhriyār and his brother as a personal
adventure, and the story of the man who knew the animal languages (Aarne and Thompson,
tale-type no. 670), told to Shahrazād by her father in the hope of dissuading her from marrying
the king.
An Iranian origin is strongly suggested by the fact that the earliest known references to the
Arabian Nights explicitly mention a Persian-language predecessor. This notion is further
supported by the Persian background of the main characters in the frame-tale. Notably, the
narrator's name is of Persian origin, the Arabicised form Shahrazād being the equivalent of the
Persian Chehr-āzād, meaning “of noble descent and/or appearance.” Moreover, Ibn al-Nadīm
reports the opinion that the book was composed for Homāni, the daughter of King Bahman.
Al-Masʿūdī identifies a certain Humāya, daughter of Bahman, himself the son of the legendary
hero Isfandiyār, and a woman named Shahrazād, who was the sister of the Achaemenid
emperor Darius who reigned before him; this information is corroborated by various other
Arabic historians. Modern nationalistic Iranians who claim that the Nights are a monument of
Persian literature are certainly not completely wrong. Their claim, however, has also to be
considered against the tendency of traditional Arabic fiction to localise tales of magic in an
Iranian atmosphere (see Marzolph, Persian Nights, 278–80).
Various scholars have suggested a distinct Arabic origin for the collection. In particular, the
monumental collection prepared by Abū ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad b. ʿAbdūs al-Jahshiyārī (d.
331/942) has been proposed as a precursor to the Nights. As Ibn al-Nadīm states, al-Jahshiyārī
intended to compile a book of a thousand tales from the stories of the Arabs, the Persians, the
Greeks, and others, with each tale covering one night. He succeeded in collecting some 480
tales before death overtook him. The Istanbul manuscript of al-Ḥikāyāt al-ʿajība (“Wonderful
stories”), probably dating from the eighth/fourteenth century and containing several stories
that also occur in the Nights, has, albeit erroneously, been interpreted as a fragment of al-
Jahshiyārī's compilation (Marzolph, Das Buch, 632f.).
None of the available early testimonies contains an indication of the content of the Iranian
prototype or its early Arabic adaptation, and any attempt at reconstructing this content is
purely speculative. The content is, however, summarily intimated by a paper fragment
published by Nabia Abbott in 1949. Dating from the third/ninth century, this fragment
preserves the first pages of a book called The tale of the thousand nights (Ḥadīth alf layla).
Here, a certain Dīnāzād asks an unspecified narrator, if she be not asleep, to tell her a story
promised earlier and to “quote striking examples of the excellencies and shortcomings, the
cunning and stupidity, the generosity and avarice, and the courage and cowardice that are in
man, instinctive or acquired, or pertain to his distinctive characteristics or to courtly manners,
Syrian or Bedouin.” None of the actual tales are quoted in the fragment. It is noteworthy that
the request only to some extent matches the content of the Nights as documented in later
Arabic manuscripts, since there is no mention of the fairy tales, fables, romantic epics, jokes,
and anecdotes that make up the Nights as they are later known (Chraïbi, Les mille et une nuits,
95–104).
Additional evidence for the physical existence of the Nights is contained in the notebook of a
Jewish physician who sold, bought, and lent out books in mid-sixth/twelfth-century Cairo (see
Goitein). The notice pertains to a book called The thousand and one nights and thus bears
testimony to the fact that the elaborate title by which the collection is known today had by
then come into use.
Since the earliest preserved manuscript of the Nights is dated to about five centuries later than
the early testimonies to the book's existence, the content of the original collection and its
further development can only by hypothesised. Obviously the nucleus of the Nights was a
second/eighth-century Arabic translation of the Persian collection Hazār afsān(a). This
translation, whether Islamised or not, was known as Alf layla. The third/ninth-century paper
fragment testifies to the fact that the collection did not necessarily exist in complete
manuscripts. Rather, various different selections appear to have existed since very early times.
This argument makes the existence of a canonical text of the Nights highly improbable.
Instead, what is more likely is a constant rebuilding of the collection around a constitutive
nucleus, probably not comprising much more than the frame-tale and the early tales that
relate to Shahrazād's own situation, in that they also deal with the stratagem of saving one's
life through the telling of tales. The collection then, originating with tales from the Indian and
Iranian traditions, grew with the addition of narratives relating to the ʿAbbāsid period in pre-
sixth/twelfth-century Baghdad and tales of urban Cairo during the Mamlūk period.
3.2. Manuscripts of the Nights pre-dating Galland's translation. The oldest preserved text of the
Nights is contained in a three-volume Arabic manuscript, known as the Galland MS (BNF,
arabe 3609–11). According to numismatic evidence—mention of the coin ashrafī, first issued
by al-Malik al-Ashraf Barsbāy in 829/1426—the manuscript has been dated to the middle of
the ninth/fifteenth century (Grotzfeld, Age). It was acquired and used by Galland for the first
part of his translation. The manuscript is incomplete and contains only the beginning of the
Nights up to Night 282, breaking off in the middle of the tale of Qamar al-Zamān and Budūr.
Besides this manuscript, no more than half a dozen Arabic manuscripts that pre-date
Galland's translation are known, none of them containing a complete text of the Nights
(Marzolph, Re-locating). These MSS include (1) the John Rylands Library (Manchester), MS
Arabic 706 (first half of the tenth/sixteenth century); (2) the Vatican MS (arabo 782), dated
1001/1592–93, in its second half probably constituting a direct copy of the Galland MS; (3) the
MS Kayseri, Raşid Efendi Kütüphane, Edebiyat 38 (tenth/sixteenth century or later), (4) the
Maillet MS, now preserved in the BNF, arabe 3612 (second half of the eleventh/seventeenth
century). In addition to the Arabic manuscripts, several Turkish translations of the work pre-
dating Galland's translation exist, some of which even in his day were held in the Bibliothèque
du Roi (now the BNF) in Paris.
3.3. Galland's translation. Galland in his Mille et une nuits not only translated, but to a certain
extent created the Arabian Nights. Having spent a considerable part of his adult life in the
Middle East (Bauden), Galland, after his return to Paris, was employed as the King's antiquary,
mainly being responsible for the royal collection of antiquities, coins, and manuscripts. He
also co-edited Barthélemy d'Herbelot's highly influential Bibliothèque orientale, the very first
encyclopaedia of the Islamic world in a European language, which drew much of its
information, albeit often with a strong Christian bias, from compilations in the indigenous
languages. Galland's interest in Middle Eastern literatures being aroused, he had at some time
before the year 1700 acquired a manuscript of the tales of Sindbād, which he translated and
intended to publish. Learning about a similar, yet much larger compilation, he postponed the
publication of this work and managed to acquire a manuscript of the Nights from Syria.
Galland's adapted translation was published in twelve volumes. Vols. 1–6, published in 1704,
and vol. 7, published in 1706, present the tales from the Arabic manuscript in accordance with
contemporary criteria of translation (Larzul, Traductions), with the Sindbād tales integrated at
the beginning of vol. 3. For the tale of Qamar al-Zamān and Budūr, of which the old
manuscript contained only a fragmentary version, Galland used an additional Egyptian
manuscript. When his original texts had been exhausted, his enthusiastic readers demanded
that he continue and complete the work up to the prospective 1001 nights. Vol. 8, published in
1709, begins with the tale of Ghānim ibn Ayyūb as translated by Galland from an Egyptian
manuscript. To this, the publisher, without Galland's knowledge or consent, had added the
tale of Zayn al-Aṣnām and the tale of Khudādād and his Brothers, as translated by Galland's
orientalist colleague François Pétis de la Croix. For the remaining vols. 9–10, published in 1712,
and vols. 11–12, published posthumously in 1717, Galland had recourse to various other sources.
The story of the Sleeper and the Waker (a version of Aarne/Thompson tale type no. 1531) is
adapted from an as yet unidentified source. For the remainder of the tales, and in particular
for the tales that are most popular in later European traditions, Galland is indebted to the
performance of the gifted storyteller Ḥannā Diyāb. In his diaries, Galland states that he met
Ḥannā, a Syrian Maronite Christian from Aleppo, in the house of their common friend Paul
Lucas, who himself had travelled widely in the Middle East. From 6 May to 2 June 1709,
Galland wrote down extended summaries of the tales Ḥannā told him (Abdel-Halim, 271–87).
For the tale of Aladdin, Ḥannā is even credited with supplying a written version, the
manuscript of which is, however, not available. Galland later reworked some of his summaries
of Ḥannā's tales into fully fledged tales and published them in his Mille et une nuits. This
applies in particular to the tales of Ali Baba and Aladdin, which, for various reasons, were
most appreciated by Western audiences. The Arabic manuscripts of both tales later identified
by orientalist scholars were for a long time taken to be of “genuine” Arabic origin. While initial
doubts about the manuscripts' authenticity had been voiced at various occasions, it was only
Muhsin Mahdi's detailed argument that finally unmasked them as forged adapted translations
of Galland's texts (Mahdi, 3:51–86). The only one of Ḥannā's tales for which independent
Arabic manuscripts have been found that pre-date Galland's translation is the tale of the
Ebony Horse.
3.4. The consequences of Galland's translation. Galland's creative and enlarged adaptation of
the Arabic manuscripts and oral sources available to him was a tremendous success in Europe.
While the publication of the Mille et une nuits was still underway, the tales were translated into
various European languages and published in complete or partial editions. Virtually all
Western writers and creative artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were to some
extent inspired by the Nights (Irwin, 237–92). Moreover, the work gave rise to a vogue of
literature in the oriental style, in particular a whole genre of orientalist fairy tales (Dammann,
138–9), and thus constitutes an exotic ingredient added into the Age of Enlightenment. Some
of Galland's scholarly colleagues even aimed to imitate his success, such as Pétis de la Croix,
who published a collection titled Les mille et un jours (“The thousand and one days”), allegedly
translating a collection copied from a manuscript in the possession of a Persian dervish (ed.
Paul Sebag, Paris 20032). While Pétis de la Croix in his younger days had in fact stayed in the
Iranian city of Isfahan for an extended period, his compilation was later exposed as an
adapted translation of a Turkish collection of tales of the Faraj baʿd al-shidda genre preserved
in the Bibliothèque du Roi in Paris. In the field of orientalist studies, Galland's translation
inspired scholars to occupy themselves with the origin of the collection, its various tales, and
the culture presented therein. Moreover, it initiated a search for complete manuscripts of the
work, as all of the manuscripts available in the early eighteenth century were fragmentary.
3.5. Post-Galland manuscripts. In response to growing demand, Arab compilers, above all in
Egypt, produced complete manuscripts, including a full set of 1001 nights. The French scholar
Hermann Zotenberg later surveyed these manuscripts, dividing them into two branches.
While the “Syrian branch” included the old manuscript used by Galland, later research has
agreed to term the more widely documented “Egyptian branch” as “Zotenberg's Egyptian
Recension” (ZER). The alleged “Tunisian” manuscript, tales of which in addition to texts from
Galland and other sources were used as the basis of the Arabic edition (and subsequent
German translation) by German scholar Maximilian Habicht, turned out to be a wilful
mystification prepared by the Tunisian Jew Mordecai b. al-Najjār. Similar criteria apply to the
manuscripts prepared in Paris by Dom Chavis (second half of the eighteenth century) and
Michel Sabbāgh (first decade of the nineteenth century). Egyptian manuscripts with partly
differing contents include the Wortley-Montague manuscript preserved in the Bodleian
Library at Oxford (dated 1764–5; see Tauer) and the Reinhardt manuscript in Strassburg (dated
1831–2; see Chraïbi, Contes). All of the post-Galland compilers of Arabic manuscripts were
faced with the situation of having to prepare “complete” texts of the Nights. As no notion of a
specific or canonical set of tales to be included existed, completeness referred solely to the
fact that a total of one thousand nights of storytelling had to be filled.
3.6. Printed editions and translations. With the exception of the Breslau edition, which is partly
based on the alleged Tunisian manuscript, ZER-manuscripts formed the basis of most of the
printed editions of the Arabian Nights prepared in the nineteenth century. The most
important editions are (1) Calcutta I = ed. Aḥmad al-Shirwānī, 2 vols., Calcutta 1814–8; (2)
Bulaq I = 2 vols., Būlāq (Cairo) 1835; (3) Calcutta II = ed. William Hay Macnaghten, 4 vols.,
Calcutta 1839–42; (4) Breslau = ed. Maximilian Habicht and Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer, 12
vols., Breslau 1825–43; (5) Bulaq II = 4 vols., Būlāq (Cairo) 1862. Prior to the Arabic editions of
the Nights, Galland's French version had served almost exclusively as the source of reference
for translations into other European languages.
The most widely known English-language translations published in the nineteenth century
are those prepared by Edward William Lane and Sir Richard Francis Burton. Lane's translation
(3 vols., London 1839–41) largely follows the Bulaq I edition. Lane was an excellent scholar of
Arabic, but his translation bows to puritanical Victorian morals in eliminating various scenes
and even complete tales that according to contemporary criteria were deemed objectionable.
Since Lane intended the book to be read as a mirror of Arabic customs and, in fact, a
contemporary ethnographic guide, his translation is supplied with profuse and often
distracting annotation.
Burton in his translation (10 vols., “Benares,” i.e., London, 1885) profited to a considerable
extent from the previous limited English edition by John Payne (1882–4). He employed archaic
language and stressed sexual undertones and embellished any sexual scenes he could find; in
particular, his “Terminal Essay” is notorious for its preoccupation with sexual matters. The
main body of Burton's translation is based on the Calcutta II edition. In addition, he later
published a six-volume installment of Supplemental Nights (1886–8) containing additional
tales from other versions of the Arabian Nights, including the Breslau edition, the so-called
“orphan stories,” and tales from the Wortley-Montague, Chavis, and Cazotte manuscripts.
The English-language translation published by Powys Mathers (1937) is based on the French
version prepared by Joseph Charles Victor Mardrus (16 vols., Paris 1899–1904). This translation
is the least faithful to the Arabic original but due to its public appeal has been reprinted
numerous times. It contains numerous additions from a large variety of sources, including
traditional Arabic literature and nineteenth-century collections of folktales from the Arab
world. The Mardrus version was widely acclaimed in France by influential writers such as
André Gide and Marcel Proust and also contributed to the collection's fame in its English
version. More recent contributions to the literature include an English translation of the
Galland manuscript by Husain Haddawy, who has also translated some of the more popular
stories, following Bulaq I; and a faithful English translation of the “complete” text, based on
Calcutta II, with the addition of four stories from Galland's French text, prepared by Malcolm
C. Lyons and Ursula Lyons. A German translation that has been widely praised for its sensitive
adherence to the original Arabic was presented by Enno Littmann (1921–8, often reprinted
since 1953; based on Calcutta II, with the addition of the “orphan tales”).
4. Characteristics
While all versions of the Nights contain both the specific frame-tale and a largely identical
initial set of stories, they often differ in content, particularly in their later parts. Shahrazād's
stratagem of breaking off her tales at a critical point arousing the cruel king's curiosity not
only had the practical consequence of saving her life and, in consequence, saving her sex. It
also turned the frame-tale into a powerful device able to integrate a potentially endless
number of tales. The more the narration proceeds, the looser the original device of
“cliffhanger,” i.e., of interrupting the tales at specifically fascinating points, is practised. And
while most of the early tales are quite long, stretching over a number of nights, many of the
later nights contain several short anecdotes told in a

single night.
Some of the earlier tales appear to be consciously linked

to the frame-tale in that they also apply the stratagem of
telling stories to save one's life. In recent research, the
tales with that purpose have consequently been labelled
“ransom tales.” This criterion applies to the tale of the
Merchant and the Jinnī, the tales told by the Qalandars in
The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad, the tale of
The Three Apples, and The Hunchback's Tale, including
the tales of the Broker, the Reeve, the Jewish Doctor, the
Tailor, and the Barber. These tales, moreover, exhibit a
particular framing device of story-within-a-story that at Illustration 1. Abdallâh ibn Abî
times goes down several layers. From the perspective of Qilâba admiring the city of Iram.
the listener and/or reader, the Nights are narrated by a Illustration by Mirzâ ʿAli-Qoli
storyteller who has Shahrazād narrate a story in which Kho’i from the 1272/1855 Tehran
the protagonist tells his or her story, and so on. In his Edition of the Persian
essay “Narrative-Men,” Tzvetan Todorov has identified translation of the “Arabian
this device as one of the major characteristics of the Nights”.(Courtesy Archive of
Arabian Nights. In order to tell others who they are, the Persian Lithographic
narrative characters relate their previous experience by Illustration, U. Marzolph,
telling their story. In this manner, telling a story signifies Göttingen.)
life, and consequently, the absence of narrative signifies
death. As the characters are “merely narrative” and must narrate in order to live, their
storytelling generates the overwhelming abundance of embedding and embedded tales in the
Nights. The device of having characters within a tale tell their own tales embedded within the
narrative creates a labyrinthine structure that greatly contributed to the fascination of the
Arabian Nights, particularly with Western audiences.
As a consequence of the frame-tale's narrative potential, and to some extent resulting from the
fact that “complete” manuscripts of the Arabian Nights were not always available, the
compilers of later manuscript versions incorporated tales of the most divergent categories.
These tales included folktales and fairy tales, romances of love and chivalry, religious and
didactic tales, fables, and jokes and anecdotes, many of which are culled either from classical
Arabic literature or from the numerous existing anonymous collections of tales. Some
manuscripts even incorporated large and originally independent narratives or narrative cycles
such as the lengthy romance of ʿUmar b. al-Nuʿmān or the Persian Sindbād-nāme, a collection
of moralistic stories better known in the West as the Seven Sages. The tales of Sindbād's travels
that by way of Galland's version became an integral part of the Nights had previously been
included in a seventeenth-century Turkish manuscript. Even some of the European

translators, notably Mardrus, could not resist the temptation to enlarge the repertoire of the
Arabian Nights by adding tales from extraneous sources.
Research has classified the tales of the Arabian Nights and their hypothetical origin or
integration into several strata. While comparative folk-narrative research has in many cases
succeeded in identifying the ultimate origin of the tales, it is hard, if not impossible to tell at
which point they were integrated into the Nights. The Indian stratum probably encompasses
the “wiles of women” stories about extramarital sexual relations and some of the fables,
notably those having parallels in the collection Kalīla wa-Dimna, which is essentially an
adaptation of the Indian Pañcatantra. The Iranian stratum is said to contribute those tales
closest to the European understanding of fairy tale, in which wonder and magic occur on an
unquestioned and natural level. Greek influence is particularly discernible in the romances
(von Grunebaum). The Jewish stratum, often relating to stories from the Talmud or the
Midrashim, the so-called Isrāʾīliyyāt, encompasses tales of a moralistic nature, often focusing
on death and eternal merit in the hereafter. The Baghdad stratum prominently deals with tales
of the so-called Hārūn-cycle, in which Hārūn al-Rashīd is portrayed as a model ruler, as well as
jokes and anecdotes from the times of the ʿAbbāsid dynasty, mostly culled from Arabic adab
literature. The Cairo stratum is the latest addition to the narrative repertoire. Its tales are
localised in the atmosphere of urban Cairo and encompass Mamlūk tales of deceit and
roguery. These strata cannot, as earlier research suggested, be separated from each other
clearly. Rather than constituting a palace whose various chambers were added to the original
building at specific periods, the Nights resemble a building that fell into ruin repeatedly, while
new buildings were erected on the remnants in consecutive periods (Grotzfeld and Grotzfeld,
68–9).
In terms of ethical values, the narrative universe presented in the Nights is dominated by the
world-view of the merchant class propagating the ethics of success (see Molan and
Coussonnet). This is all the more understandable, as merchants and people trading or buying
in the bazaar probably constituted the major audience for oral performances of tales from the
Nights in their indigenous context. Accordingly, alluding to the traditional literary genre of the
“mirror for princes,” the Nights may be termed a “mirror for merchants,” that is, “a manual of
basic rule in manners and customs for young merchants” (Chraïbi, Situation, 6). Though the
Nights are by no means a unified collection, the tales convey to some extent an image of social
life in the Muslim world, particularly Egypt in the Mamlūk period. They should not, however,
be taken as an ethnographic manual, as, following Lane's translation, was popular in Victorian
England. In particular, the playful atmosphere of the Nights relating to licentious behavior or
the consuming of intoxicating beverages and drugs should not be interpreted as advocating a
tolerant or permissive atmosphere. It can rather be seen as a sort of compensation for the
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shortcomings of mundane existence and the product of wishful thinking, imagining a better,
“fairy-tale” life. The enthusiastic reception of the Nights in Europe, particularly in Victorian
England, is most probably due to the rigorous moral standards reigning at the time.
5. The impact of the Nights

The impact of the Nights on creative imagination can hardly be overestimated. Elements from
the frame-tale of the Nights can already be traced in Italian Renaissance literature long before
Galland. Both Giovanni Sercambi's (d. 1424) Novella d'Astolfo, and canto 28 of Ludovico
Ariosto's (d. 1533) Orlando furioso contain the story of the two men being sexually betrayed by
their wives. This coincidence suggests transfer by way of oral tradition, probably through
Italian trade with the Levantine countries. After the tremendous success of Galland's
translation, hardly a major European writer of the eighteenth or nineteenth century could
avoid being in some way or other influenced by tales of the Nights. By way of re-creations in
oral performance or public reading from printed tales, many of which were published as
separate chapbooks, tales from the Nights also reached the illiterate strata of society, and
many of its tales have since become stock tales of European folk literature (Marzolph,
Comparative folk narrative), in particular the tales of Aladdin, Ali Baba, Sindbād, and the
Ebony Horse. The media of drama and, later, film, also took inspiration from the Nights and
shared in propagating popular appreciation of the tales. Some of the earliest films ever
produced by Georges Meliès are inspired by the Nights. Both Douglas Fairbanks' The Thief of
Bagdad (1924) and Lotte Reiniger's Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (1926), the first feature-
length animated film ever produced, are partly based on the tale of Prince Ahmed and the
Fairy Pari Banu from the Nights. Numerous works in the modern literatures of the collection's
countries of origin, particularly Arabic and Persian literature, also take inspiration from the
Nights (Walther, Modern Arabic Literature). Already late in the nineteenth century, the Nights
had become a worldwide phenomenon, the impact of which transcended the boundaries of
both the Middle East and the West. Recently, the impact of the Nights has been studied in
regions as far flung as Hawaii (Bacchilega and Arista), Indonesia (Cohen), and Japan (Sugita).
From the twentieth century on, images and tales from the Nights have formed an integral
constituent of world culture. The collection as a whole is regarded as the quintessential fairy-
tale world of ultimate fascination, well-being, and happiness—a matrix resembling the
European notion of Cockaigne, with the added spice of (imagined) uninhibited sexuality.
International popular imagery includes the number 1001, denoting an endless amount, the
image of the jinnī who, when released from the bottle, cannot be controlled any more (from
the tale of the Fisherman and the Jinnī), or the words “Open, Sesame” (from the tale of Ali
Baba). The best-known tales from the Nights have moreover gained fame as modern trade
names, chosen with the purpose of spontaneously forming a link in the popular imagination
between the product and the content of the stories: “Aladdin” serves as a trade name for bail
bonds and Internet search engines, “Ali Baba” is probably the most famous name for Western
restaurants in the oriental style, and “Sindbad” is a popular name for travel companies,
particularly those catering to single males.
Ulrich Marzolph
Bibliography
In addition to sources cited in the article
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Cite this page
Marzolph, Ulrich, “Arabian Nights”, in: Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE, Edited by: Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, Everett
Rowson. Consulted online on 21 February 2019 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_0021>
First published online: 2007
First print edition: 9789004150171, 2007, 2007-1

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Arabian Nights - Brill Reference 21.02.

BrillOnline Reference Works

Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE

Arabian Nights , the work known in Arabic as Alf layla

later nights contain several short anecdotes told in a

Some of the earlier tales appear to be consciously linked

included in a seventeenth-century Turkish manuscript. Even some of the European

5. The impact of the Nights

Mohamed Abdel-Halim, Antoine Galland. Sa vie et son œuvre, Paris 1964

Muhsin Jassim Ali, Scheherazade in England. A study of nineteenth-century English criticism of

Husain Haddawy (trans.), The Arabian nights, New York 1990

Richard van Leeuwen, De wereld van Sjahrazaad, Amsterdam 1999

Ulrich Marzolph, Das Buch der wundersamen Geschichten, Munich 1999

Ulrich Marzolph, ed., The Arabian nights reader, Detroit 2006

David Pinault, Story-telling techniques in the Arabian nights, Leiden 1992

Cite this page

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