{"id":76356,"date":"2019-07-23T23:10:10","date_gmt":"2019-07-24T05:10:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=76356"},"modified":"2019-07-23T23:10:10","modified_gmt":"2019-07-24T05:10:10","slug":"introducing-the-arabian-nights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2019\/07\/introducing-the-arabian-nights.html","title":{"rendered":"Introducing the “Arabian Nights”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

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\"Lake<\/a>
Lake Louise, in Banff National Park \u00a0\u00a0(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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The very first lines that I\u2019ve written in a rough draft for a new project:<\/p>\n

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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.\u00a0 Iftah ya Simsim!<\/em> said one of them.\u00a0 \u201cOpen Sesame!\u201d\u00a0 And, just then, the automatic door opened and they squealed with delight.\u00a0 They had never seen such a thing before, but they knew the story of Ali Baba and his magic cave.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

The Arabian Nights<\/em>\u2014or, better, The Thousand and One Nights<\/em> or, even more faithfully to the Arabic, The Thousand Nights and a Night<\/em>\u2014are very possibly the best known work of Islamicate literature in the West.[1]<\/a>\u00a0 Children around the world grow up with such stories as \u201cAli Baba and the Forty Thieves,\u201d \u201cSinbad the Sailor,\u201d and \u201cAladdin and the Magic Lamp.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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And yet The Thousand and One Nights<\/em> are not children\u2019s stories.\u00a0 (Some of them, indeed, are very far from suitable for children.)\u00a0 And they\u2019re arguably not high literature.\u00a0 They\u2019re folk tales.<\/span><\/p>\n

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What do I mean by that?\u00a0 I offer a story to illustrate:<\/span><\/p>\n

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Many years ago, when I was in graduate school, we were discussing \u201ccritical editions\u201d in one of my classes.\u00a0 A critical edition represents an attempt to restore the text of a work to the form created by the original author.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

We agreed, however, that no such text could ever be pieced together in the case of the Nights<\/em>, because there is <\/em>no single \u201coriginal author.\u201d\u00a0 In fact, we don\u2019t know the name of even one<\/em> 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.\u00a0 No two manuscripts agree, not even on which stories they include.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The very next day, we learned that Muhsin Mahdi, of Harvard, was publishing a critical text.\u00a0 (His, in fact, is the text that underlies the edition that I\u2019ll be principally using in this essay.)\u00a0 How did he do it?\u00a0 By using just one single manuscript\u2014that of the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.\u00a0 One of the consequences of his choice is immediately obvious: Among the most famous tales from the Nights<\/em> is, precisely, the story of Ali Baba, the forty thieves, and their magical cave of treasures.\u00a0 It\u2019s known around the world, including to young Egyptian boys on a new Cairo metro.\u00a0 But Professor Mahdi\u2019s edition contains not a trace of Ali Baba, because that story doesn\u2019t occur in the Paris manuscript.<\/span><\/p>\n

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[1]<\/a> For my distinction between Muslim<\/em> or Islamic<\/em>, on the one hand, and Islamicate<\/em>, on the other, see the discussion on pages xxxx-xxx.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Posted from Canmore, Alberta, Canada<\/p>\n

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\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0 The very first lines that I\u2019ve written in a rough draft for a new project: \u00a0 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.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nIntroducing the "Arabian Nights"<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"    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\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link 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