Arabian Nights: Book Review

Old wine

For most people, a genie means a cheerful being that is blue in color, has a humanoid body above the waist and wisps for legs, and grants wish after wish. This is one of the misconceptions that Arabian Nights can rid you of. In fact, genie, or jinn, which would be close to the original pronunciation, can be good, neutral, or even evil. For example, there is one story in Arabian Nights where a fisherman releases a jinn from a bottle, only to find that the jinn has vowed to kill whoever has freed him. The fisherman has a hard time putting the jinn back in the bottle and fleeing for his life.

Today, we perceive not just the genie, but many other elements of The Arabian Nights in an altered (say Disney-fied) form. Which is why reading the Arabian Nights is such a revelation; you get to find out that so many things are different from what you had believed. Arabian Nights is a collection of Arabic folktales, perhaps the most famous collection of its kind. It starts with a frame story where a Sultan is determined to marry a new girl everyday, whom he beheads the next day. The vizier’s daughter, a clever girl called Scheherazade, volunteers to marry the Sultan. She tells the Sultan a story that night, but before she can complete the next story, the night had passed. The Sultan allows her to live for one day to complete her story, but in this fashion, Scheherazade manages to go on for a thousand and one nights! The stories she tells make up the Arabian Nights.

In popular imagination, the Arabian Nights has been reduced to the saccharine sweet Disney story of Aladdin, a proper adventure that has become a formula of its own. But in The Arabian Nights, Aladdin is just a foolish lad who gets lucky, he has very little courage and adventurous spirit, there is very little of the charming rogue to him that Disney has invented. The Princess Jasmine is from China, and after the happy ending, the story goes on and on: the princess is kidnapped by the magician, she comes back, she turns into a nag, etc, which we never hear of in Disney. And no, she never wears that midriff-and-shoulder-baring outfit, she is always found clothed in flowing robes.

Besides, not all the stories in the collection are child-friendly, like Aladdin or Sindbad the Sailor. There are various versions of Arabian Nights, and depending on the translation, many stories are full of anecdotes that would make adults blush. This particular collection edited by Andrew Lang is relatively free of such innuendoes, illustrating how folktales have been edited over the ages to suit the tastes of children. But one can still find vestiges of ancient tales because, unlike Disney, not every tale here has a happy ending; there is as much tragedy as happiness here.

Another preconception the Arabian Nights breaks is about the portrayal of women in middle-eastern literature. Yes, the social structure is rigid, yes, they are bought and sold like slaves in the stories. But then again, there are many intelligent women who turn the situation around with their wit, many sorceresses who turn men into dogs and vice versa, and one particular princess who rescues her two older brothers from enchantment, and succeeds in adventures where they had failed. No wonder, the Sultan remarks, they hold her in high esteem and take her permission before any important step. And of course, the frame story itself is about a woman who cleverly saves her own life and that of many other nubile girls from a murderous Sultan.

The Arabian Nights has come down to us after a journey of several hundred years, and provides a window into Arabic society of hundreds of years ago. Conflict between Christians, Muslims and Jews are abundant in the stories. Alliances are formed on the basis of religions, and it is clear that Jews were despised. “I would rather throw this gold away than give it to a Jew,” says one character. Exotic princesses are mostly from China, Africans are either slaves or evil magicians, and Greeks and Persians are held in high esteem.

Interestingly, many stories in the Arabian Nights are familiar to us as our own folktales, proving that stories travel from one community to another with only cosmetic changes. The story of the lazy bum who marries the princess and makes it big, the story of older sisters who turn their younger sister, the queen, out of the house, only to have her children come back and avenge her, adventure stories where the hero outwits the devil to come back with riches are some such motifs that are found frequently in Arabian Nights.

Not just the content of the stories, but their structure is a revelation too. As you read on, you realize that these stories are not for those with limited attention spans. Characters from stories begin telling their own stories, and it goes on and on, sometimes ten stories deep. But in the end, sometimes the recessed stories are more interesting than frame stories, which often end without a ‘punchy’ conclusion.

For example, in one story a strange company assembles in the house of three beautiful sisters: one porter, one Sultan and his vizier, three men blind in one eye. The three sisters tell the men that they are not to question anything they do, in return for shelter. The men agree, but when one sister begins to beat their dogs for an exact number of times, the Sultan cannot resist asking for the reason. The beautiful ladies remind him of the condition, and tell the gathered company that now they cannot leave unless each tells their true story. The men do that, which makes for more than a dozen interesting stories, including the stories-within-stories. But in the end, when we come back to the original story, we don’t know who the three beautiful sisters are, nor the reasons for their strange behavior. They dismiss the men without explaining anything.

Such a structure is a characteristic feature of folktales: not all of them have a punchy ending, or morals. Most folktales are no more than simple communication; there may not be any message to take away from it other than to enjoy the story.

In conclusion, reading the Arabian Nights is more like reading poetry than fiction. The stories are full of magic, sorcery, fantasy, and romance, and plot is often secondary. This book takes you to the origins of storytelling: when stories were about sharing and connecting rather than projecting a certain message. A delectable ride if you have the time for it.