Eastern Dreams (2 page)

Since that ancient time, there have been countless retellings of Scheherazade's tales, and her fanciful world has become a permanent vision of an alternative reality. By the time
The Thousand and One Nights
reached Europe in the early Enlightenment, its stories had already survived in the eastern world for close to 1001 years. Told and retold, read and reread throughout the immensity of the Muslim world, the book often referred to simply as “the
Nights
” has come to weave its charm on the West at least as vigorously as it has done in the East, yet to this day remains a work little understood in either realm.

Questions and contradictions abound. When, where and how did these stories originate? When were they first set down? How did they come to appear in the West, and to what effect? Why and how has this book endured and transcended cultures to become a bona fide classic of world literature, part of the corpus of international fiction held to contain important expressions of human truths? Why has this work—in the West, at least, practically synonymous with the innocence of childhood—been dogged by controversy almost from the moment of its earliest appearance nearly 1200 years ago? Perhaps most important, what is it about the
Nights
that has proved so durable that it has not only survived but flourished, to the extent that the entire world is now suffused with its imagery? It is quite possibly the most widespread literary text in human history.

The
Arabian Nights
is a uniquely elusive book, a work that teases and provokes even as it withholds. Some parts reflect the drama and vicissitudes of everyday life during recognizable historical periods; others intrude the fantastic into reality for good or ill. Still other parts serve as allegorical tales, parables from which the reader may draw instructive lessons. And practically all unedited editions contain hundreds of snatches of song and verse used to underscore the proceedings, making the original Arabic
Nights
almost as much a work of poetry as it is of prose fiction.

This quicksilver element has been a magnet for investigators, prompting many researchers to peer, Oz-like, behind the popular curtain to behold the
Nights
' true face, however long and fraught with difficulty this feat may be. Delving into the ways and byways of
Arabian Nights
history, it is easy to grow confused about what is real and what is not. Actual historical periods, cultures and figures exist alongside imaginary characters and places. Ancient Baghdad, Damascus, Basra and Cairo coexist with mythical locales like the City of Brass. Common folk pursue trades little changed since the beginning of history at the same time as they interact with demons
and fairies. Slaves mingle with kings and queens, sorcery affects one and all, and high and low alike stand powerless in the presence of Death's Angel.

Often seen as the Muslim counterpart to European fairy tales, there is nevertheless an individual quality to the
Nights
that allows it to stand alone as folklore. Unlike most western fairy stories, good does not inevitably triumph over evil in the
Arabian Nights
. Fate is seldom irrevocably kind, and bound destiny—
kismet
—has a way of fulfilling itself no matter what one's actions or intentions. In “The Third Kalandar's Tale,” an astrologer divines that a young man will die when he is fifteen years old. The youth hides away on a secluded island for safety, but after he tells the visiting Prince Ajib ibn Khasib his foretold fate, and despite Ajib's high regard for the boy, the prince kills him by accident, fulfilling the prophecy.

If there is anything approaching a common theme or motif to the
Nights
, it is the steadfast belief that life is not a linear progression, a straight arrow from womb to tomb, but rather a series of twists and turns harbouring the unforeseen. Some shifts are good, many more are bad, but existence itself is a continual process of reconfiguration. In the
Arabian Nights
, people are transformed into animals, the poor become wealthy and powerful, the wealthy and powerful lose their positions, and a person's fate may hinge on his most mundane actions. Chance is a capricious beast, and the wise absorb this cosmic fact and live their lives accordingly; the foolish either ignore or—worse yet—fight kismet, only to suffer most terribly for it.

The history of
The Thousand and One Nights
and its spread across the globe is itself a tale of transforming wonder as curious as any found within its episodes of magic. Its progress through the centuries is a shifting adventure packed with extraordinary incident. Meticulous scholarship exists alongside fraud, forgery and sheer invention, as accepted facts are shown to be hollow or false.

Above all else, like all great tales, the history of the
Arabian Nights
is a story of people. Its literary landscape may be the teeming polyglot world of diverse cultures comprising the ancient East, but the West likewise plays a pivotal role in the work's long trek toward global integration. Its stories depict a staggering array of fictional heroes, villains, lovers and rogues of many ethnicities, but the actual historical characters who step in and out of the tales are no less arresting. All-powerful kings vie with scholars, librarians, con artists, retiring bookworms and swashbuckling explorers. Fictional or not, each figure bound in some way to the
Nights
is a component of the swirling historical panoply in which a literary work, whose original purpose was entertainment allied with instruction, makes a series of journeys—physical, cultural, literary—across the years to become a universal depiction of an otherworldly cosmos.

Through the
Nights
' exquisite power to transform while maintaining a consistent vision, the book has proved itself one of literature's most enduring portals, a work capable of binding and perhaps even reconciling cultures. By transmitting essential truths about the vista of human experience through visions of the classical Muslim world, the
Arabian Nights' Entertainments
has, during its immensely long history, come to fuse the picture of a fantastic realm onto the imagination of an entire planet.

When
The Thousand and One Nights
first appeared in Europe early in 1704, the work proved delightfully novel for the denizens of an emerging modern age. Although Europe and the Muslim East had interacted through travel and trade for most of a millennium, Islamic manners and habits remained largely unknown in the West. Information about the Arab world was based mostly on merchants' stories, travellers' reports or the tales of returning Crusaders handed
down through the generations. Fragmentary, contradictory and in many cases downright wrong (one persistent legend held that the coffin of the Prophet Muhammad in Medina was suspended in mid-air by giant magnets), these accounts provided little more than a glimpse through the opaque glass obscuring the world of the Muslims.

This new storybook, taken from these same lands, promised Europeans not only diversion and entertainment but also an opening, they believed, into a culture at once exotic and strange, and yet not so completely unfamiliar as to be impossible to comprehend. For the first time, ordinary citizens could read for themselves about the style of living of those populating the Muslim world, as well as accounts of the curious creatures that supposedly inhabited it. To westerners, the
Arabian Nights
seemed to incorporate every literary genre under the sun, from fairy tales, fables and love stories to historical anecdotes, tragedies, comedies and burlesques. It was, a later writer pronounced, “
a revelation in romance,” capturing at once the fancy of occidental readers. Soon all of Europe was aflame that “
something so new, so unconventional, so entirely without purpose” should have come their way. Readers ranging from sophisticated court ladies to provincial schoolboys consumed the work feverishly. Literary gatherings talked of little else but caliphs, genies, rocs, ghouls and the near-superhuman resourcefulness of the work's narrator-heroine, a young woman who salvages an impossible situation by employing her genius for storytelling.

Over the next three centuries, the influence of
The Thousand and One Nights
would extend beyond the printed page and into the arts and thinking of Europe and the Americas. Its imprint has become so firmly fixed upon the western consciousness that even those who have never read an actual
Arabian Nights
story in their lives have a vision of a time and a place which—although arguably
altered and distorted—remains a valuable tool in understanding how cultures perceive one another.

The book's impact has been felt in other ways. Standing as it does almost at the dawn of European interest in Asia, the
Arabian Nights
is one of the first and most important works to act as a counterbalance to the traditional Christian enmity with Islam. By presenting a generally favourable portrait of a society, which to that time had been mostly the subject of ignorance and mistrust, the European
Nights
helped establish “oriental studies” as a genuine field of scholarly endeavour by creating a widespread market for information regarding eastern cultures, as well as dispelling some of the grosser myths surrounding the Muslim community.

This was a true sea change in cultural attitude. Like the Christian West of the time, Islam contained its own territories, attitudes and power, making it an intriguing if threatening rival, yet one whose workings remained barely known. With the publication of the
Nights
, knowledge regarding some of these workings now became available in the guise of stories, which became for many westerners not only their chief but often their only source of information regarding the world of Islam.

The
Arabian Nights
' influence is not restricted to western concepts of the Muslim Orient. In the realm of arts and literature, the
Nights
' emphasis on the exotic not only inspired countless imitations, but also acted as a prime shaper of a new artistic movement known as Romanticism. Numerous Romantics reference the
Nights
in their work, paying homage to a book many adored in childhood and considered among the most significant literary works in their lives. Nor does the
Nights
' literary influence end with the Romantic period, for since then, even a partial list of writers who have directly or indirectly acknowledged the personal impact of
The Thousand and One Nights
is astonishing, both in number and variety. To name but a very few, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Matthew
Arnold, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Edward FitzGerald, Robert Louis Stevenson, Marcel Proust and James Joyce. As the distinguished
Arabian Nights
researcher Robert Graham Irwin states with some slight exasperation in his companion book to the Tales, at times it seems it would be a simpler task to compile a list of literary figures who are
not
affected by their exposure to the
Nights
, than to assemble a list of those who are.

Contemporary authors who have produced meditations on or pastiches of the
Nights
include both western and many eastern writers. Jorge Luis Borges, Salman Rushdie, John Barth, Robert Graham Irwin, A.S. Byatt, Italo Calvino, Naguib Mahfouz and Githa Hariharan are among them, with many providing postmodern takes on established tales and extending the sense that the world of the
Arabian Nights
is a limitless expanse, open to endless permutations of its basic structure and contents.

Appearing as it did in a Europe just beginning to experience the effects of the Enlightenment—
le siècle des Lumières
or “century of lights”—one can argue that the course of western thought and perception was influenced as much by the
Arabian Nights
as by any work penned by Voltaire or Tom Paine. The presentation of folklore from the distant lands of India, Persia, Arabia and other regions revitalized European literature by infusing it with something fresh and rare, infinitely appealing to the Enlightenment preoccupation with the New. The impact of the
Nights
, and the various ways by which the work has welded the imagery of a romanticized past onto the global consciousness, is as real as it is undeniable. In the three centuries since it made its triumphal debut in the West, the
Arabian Nights
, now no longer the product of an imagined oriental antiquity, has come to belong to the whole of humanity.