Introducing the “Arabian Nights”

The very first lines that I’ve written in a rough draft for a new project:

I was once riding on a brand new European-made commuter train in Cairo and, as we came into a station, two little Egyptian boys were waiting by the door of the train car, gazing intently at it.  Iftah ya Simsim! said one of them.  “Open Sesame!”  And, just then, the automatic door opened and they squealed with delight.  They had never seen such a thing before, but they knew the story of Ali Baba and his magic cave.

The Arabian Nights—or, better, The Thousand and One Nights or, even more faithfully to the Arabic, The Thousand Nights and a Night—are very possibly the best known work of Islamicate literature in the West.[1]  Children around the world grow up with such stories as “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” “Sinbad the Sailor,” and “Aladdin and the Magic Lamp.”

And yet The Thousand and One Nights are not children’s stories.  (Some of them, indeed, are very far from suitable for children.)  And they’re arguably not high literature.  They’re folk tales.

What do I mean by that?  I offer a story to illustrate:

Many years ago, when I was in graduate school, we were discussing “critical editions” in one of my classes.  A critical edition represents an attempt to restore the text of a work to the form created by the original author.

We agreed, however, that no such text could ever be pieced together in the case of the Nights, because there is no single “original author.”  In fact, we don’t know the name of even one author, and the work is a composite one, made up of many stories of varied origins that came together over the course of centuries at the hands of an unknown number of compilers.  No two manuscripts agree, not even on which stories they include.

The very next day, we learned that Muhsin Mahdi, of Harvard, was publishing a critical text.  (His, in fact, is the text that underlies the edition that I’ll be principally using in this essay.)  How did he do it?  By using just one single manuscript—that of the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.  One of the consequences of his choice is immediately obvious: Among the most famous tales from the Nights is, precisely, the story of Ali Baba, the forty thieves, and their magical cave of treasures.  It’s known around the world, including to young Egyptian boys on a new Cairo metro.  But Professor Mahdi’s edition contains not a trace of Ali Baba, because that story doesn’t occur in the Paris manuscript.

[1] For my distinction between Muslim or Islamic, on the one hand, and Islamicate, on the other, see the discussion on pages xxxx-xxx.

Posted from Canmore, Alberta, Canada