The Arabian Nights - A Companion

267 Pages·2007·2.13 MB·English

by  Irwin Robert

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.