The Arabian Nights: A Companion

239 Pages·2016·1.79 MB·English

by  Robert Irwin

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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In the United States of America and in Canada distributed by
Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St Martin’s Press
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
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 subject 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.