Arabian Nights

A. Synthesis

Preface

The Arabian Nights tales were not compiled in the collective format known to contemporary readers until the early eighteenth century, when British and French Orientalists finished their first translations. The stories originated in Persian and Indian oral traditions, gradually moving into the Arab literary scene from the ninth century onward, when they were translated and repurposed for Arab societies’ pleasure. The frame narrative, which was the nucleus of the stories, however remained undisturbed. Also, these stories were heavily sanitized in translation, though we are now fortunate to have texts closer to the originals. While this intended synthesis is not a study of European disfigurement of the Arabian Nights, an analysis of Orientalist representations of the tales' settings and peoples (all the way from North Africa to India) would be important.

Reading Cultures

The medieval Islamic society in which the Nights were compiled and circulated was characteristically literate – meaning, it featured massive amounts of high, middle, and low culture that spanned many literary and artistic forms. Literacy, however, must be evaluated carefully with a conscious attempt to avoid an anachronistic historical construction of a premodern society. The definition of the scope of literacy, moreover, should not be constrained merely to “reading.” Doing so would, as the following synthesis argues, unfairly limit the thriving literary culture of medieval Islamic society.

As Nelly Hanna has convincingly demonstrated, the medieval Islamic world’s institutions reinforced literacy and literacy culture – beginning early, with universal elementary education. Teaching the young was foremost a religious duty, undertaken to introduce all people, regardless of age or class, to the Qur’an, Islam’s Holy Book. Yet beyond the religious dimension, a “confluence of several factors” fostered a high popular literacy rate across the medieval Muslim world. First, this popular literary culture maintained an existent continuity with literate pre-Islamic societies. Second, extensive independent funding for Islamic schools and the academy further drove up the literacy rates and publication of books. Third, the Muslim world’s position as the hearth of global trade at the time made literacy among merchants, traders, artisans, craftsmen, and other lay groups a necessity.

Because of the inexpensiveness of paper, moreover, book production was “voluminous” and widespread. Book ownership extended far beyond the academy and ruler’s court and into the lay people’s homes, leading Hanna to estimate the one in five houses in a typical major Muslim city possessed a library. Yet, Hanna’s most important contribution is her emphasis that despite sizable textual literary rates, “oral culture” continued to play an important role in medieval Islamic society. “The transmission of learning,” she argues, remained overwhelmingly oral, in great bureaucratic centers and in lower class homes. The learning process, moreover, relied on oral transmission and oral literature as the crux of cultural exchange, even among the most highly educated – including the sultan and the religious academy (the entire academy was “religious”). Her principal argument, thus, is that across geographical diversities and different historical developments, medieval Islamic society possessed a literary culture with a “complex relationship between oral and written.” Across social strata, these two literary forms intermix effortlessly and organically, quite unlike most modern literary traditions.

The above description of literary culture is most prominent in the famous Arabian Nights tales, which mix textual and oral traditions indiscriminately. In the introduction to his translation, Bruce Fudge has argued that the Nights are indisputably a written transmission. He points to the seven known Nights manuscripts’ clear, uniform styles, arguing that their syntactical and terminological structures demonstrate that written format was their chief mode of transmission. While Fudge’s observation that the stories were expressed in textual format is accurate, the centrality of the oral literary culture, as explained above, must not be denigrated. Medieval Islamic society’s oral culture undergirded the literary tradition, especially in the Nights tales, which were compiled and transmuted from the oral format in a textual one. There is little need to dispute the dominance of a textual or oral tradition; as Hanna demonstrated, they are often one and the same.

If we thus judge literacy to include a robust oral tradition, then medieval Muslim societies can be comfortably viewed as overwhelmingly literate. Furthermore, just as oral and textual transmissions intermixed, “high” and “low” reading cultures did as well. In his study of medieval Islam, however, Boaz Shoshan disputes the presence of widespread literacy, arguing that both “high” and “popular” literature were the domain of the elite. He argues that textual works were primarily the domain of the religious scholars, while oral literature revolved around, and was patronized by, the sultan. Because the sultan was both the audience and subject of the oral tales, Shoshan characterizes what he calls “popular literature” as a bourgeois creation exclusive to the upper classes. Paradigmatically, he views Islamic literature as courtly or academic, limiting its scope and excluding the lay masses from “literacy.” Shoshan thus fails to take into account the medieval Islamic world’s highly accessible educational system, strong widespread reading culture, and pragmatic need for lay literacy.

The medieval Muslim world should be seen as “one of the most bookish of pre-modern cultures,” – one guided by a certain textual pragmatism that lent itself to prolific book production and democratized reading cultures. And as Dagmar Riedel has noted, despite that world's massive textual tradition, “the ideal form of communication remained the personal encounter,” where stories were traded – and thus, the literary culture enhanced and perpetuated.

B. Social Context

We should begin with an encyclopedic contextualization and history of the Nights:

"The collection derives from an earlier Persian book [and ancient Indian models] named Hazār Afsāna (A thousand stories)... note that the Arabic translation is commonly known as Alf Layla (A Thousand Nights). Ibn al-Nadīm also mentions the general design of the work's frame-tale and explicitly states that he had seen the book on various occasions 'in its entirety'...Ibn al-Nadīm's evaluation of the collection as 'a poor book with silly tales' characterises the attitude of the learned, both contemporary and modern, and disregards the fact that the collection's tales were obviously enjoyed by the indigenous popular audience."[1]

"Since the earliest preserved manuscript of the Nights is dated to about five centuries later than the early testimonies to the book's existence, the content of the original collection and its further development can only by hypothesised. Obviously the nucleus of the Nights was a second/eighth-century Arabic translation of the Persian collection Hazār Afsāna. This translation, whether Islamised or not, was known as Alf Layla. The third/ninth-century paper fragment testifies to the fact that the collection did not necessarily exist in complete manuscripts. Rather, various different selections appear to have existed since very early times. This argument makes the existence of a canonical text of the Nights highly improbable. Instead, what is more likely is a constant rebuilding of the collection around a constitutive nucleus, probably not comprising much more than the frame-tale and the early tales that relate to Shahrazād's own situation, in that they also deal with the stratagem of saving one's life through the telling of tales."[2]

I extracted useful information about the social context of storytelling and the proliferation of manuscripts, with particular emphasis on the Nights.

"The stories of the Nights are of various ethnic origins, Indian, Persian, and Arabic. In the process of telling and retelling, they were modified to conform to the general life and customs of the Arab society that adapted them and to the particular conditions of that society at a particular time. They were also modified...to suit the role of the storyteller or the demand of the occasion."[3]

"The stories of the Nights circulated in different manuscript copies until they were finally written down in a definite form...in the second half of the thirteenth century, within the Mamluk domain, either in Syria or Egypt...What emerged, of course, was a large heterogeneous, indiscriminate collection of stories by different hands...representing different layers of culture, literary conventions and styles tinged with [different political and social eras] cast of time, a work very different from the homogeneous original."[4]

I extracted helpful information regarding literacy rates across age groups, social classes, and regions:

"Most towns, in the central areas of the Islamic world, either had an elementary school, or the local mosque undertook to teach children. In the major urban areas of the central Islamic lands, schools were numerous and consequently accessible to important sectors of the population. Education of the young sometimes took place neither in the mosque nor in a school but in the more informal setting of the home of the shaykh or teacher...For many people, whether they lived in town or in the countryside, elementary education, in a school, a mosque or a home, was all they received. But they nevertheless made use of it in various ways...Teaching the young, and perhaps the not so young, was a religious function, even though the consequences of this function went beyond the strictly religious domain."[4]

"Recent studies of probate records have explored the possession of books in the Eastern Mediterranean region. Although book production for academic circles had always been voluminous, it appears that a significant number of people who owned books were not part of the world of the academy. They included merchants and traders, and occasionally artisans and craftsmen. A study of inheritance records...estimated that one out of every five houses in this city had books. Book owners included textile merchants, soap merchants, weavers, dyers of cloth and tailors. Similar trend can be observed in Cairo, where one also finds many traders, craftsmen and merchants who possessed books. One reason that can explain this trend was that many books, according to the prices provided in probate records, were relatively inexpensive. Elsewhere, I have explained the expansion of book ownership by the greater availability of cheap paper."[5]

"Local specificities and historical factors seem to play a major role in the way the history of literacy developed. Some factors, notably the religious factor, were widespread in much of the Islamic world. Other factors, like the level of trade, the availability of paper, for instance, were specific to certain times and regions. The confluence of several of these factors meant that in certain regions popular literacy was more widespread than in others...The Eastern Mediterranean had a long history of writing, going back centuries, in some cases to pre-Islamic times, as the voluminous papyrus collections indicate. Furthermore, from the thirteenth century onwards, there was extensive funding for schools. Finally, its position on major trade routes was important. Literacy was therefore fairly widespread, since it touched not only scholars and bureaucrats, but also merchants and traders. Thus, long before the appearance of missionary schools or state-run schools, there were certain locations, usually urban, which had relatively widespread literacy."[6]

"There were among these various societies many different reasons to become literate and numerous ways in which this literacy was put to practice. Literacy could be limited to specific domains, or it could have multiple purposes in a person’s life, especially in those regions were literacy was more developed." [7]

"In most of these societies where literacy (reading or writing) was prominent, oral culture continued to play an important role, in the transmission of learning and in a literature which remained oral. This is as true of the great bureaucratic centres, which depended heavily on writing, as it is of other regions with less literate societies. Much of the learning process in institutions of higher education depended on oral transmission and oral literature was an important part of cultural exchange, even amongst the highly educated. In other words, many of these cultures used both oral and written forms of expression and communication, and both were vitally important, in different ways. The complex relationship between oral and written, and the impact of the increased use of the written word on oral culture, are subjects that have as yet to be investigated."[8]

"Once one takes into consideration the geographical diversities and the different paths of historical developments of different regions, the picture of literacy that emerges is a complex and multi-faceted one, in which the diversities in time and place cannot be easily enumerated in a few pages. There is room to understand literacy in the context of the social and cultural conditions around it and one can see both their impact on literacy and the impact of literacy on them."[9]

I extracted information about the number of collected manuscripts and linguistic style, specific to the Nights:

"There is, however, one aspect of the transmission of the Nights (whether the Hundred and One or the Thousand and One) that is beyond dispute and worth stressing here. It consists of a written transmission. These collections and the tales they contain were not part of an oral tradition. A Hundred and One Nights exists in seven known manuscripts, and despite a number of differences, sometimes quite significant, between the different versions of a given tale or in the overall contents, much of the material is identical, virtually word for word...The language of these texts is usually very simple in syntax and vocabulary; basic rules of Arabic grammar are treated with often breathtaking insouciance...But despite all this, the tales were read and reread, recopied and rewritten, and this type of literature was widespread."[10]

Excerpts from the following study provide insight into the nature of Islamic literary culture (both high and middle), and especially its manuscripts:

"My starting point is the observation that Islamic traditions of the transmission of knowledge favor a textual pragmatism which privileges the written text over the physical book. Despite the intense reliance on writing and literacy in all premodern Muslim societies, the ideal form of communication remained the personal encounter among human beings.[11]

"The Muslim Middle East is praised as 'one of the most bookish of pre-modern cultures,' and Islamic manuscripts are regarded as the most important resource for research on all aspects of Islamic civilization."[12]

Furthermore, for a differing account of literary and artistic culture in medieval Islam, see Boaz Shoshan's "High Culture and Popular Culture in Medieval Islam."[13] Shoshan focuses on strata within medieval Islamic society and argues that high culture was largely constrained to the sultan's court and the ulama (religious clerical) circles:

"When Muslim rulers took a rest...from ruling, they turned to their exclusive ways of entertainment," one of which was literature. Certain genres of Islamic literature could be defined as courtly, in the sense that they were written for the education and entertainment of rulers, quite often for some particular ruler."[14]

"The second cultural block which existed in medieval Islam could be labeled 'learned culture' in the sense of the culture of religious scholars (ulama)...it should [be] well known to us...that a large part...of our picture of medieval Islam derives from these circles."[15]

"Another famous literary creation, the Thousand and One Nights, although more often considered to be popular literature, has been viewed also...as a bourgeois creation. Accordingly, it reflects the interests and preferences of an urban, mercantile, fairly well-ordered and culturally mature society."[16]

C. Images of Reading/Storytelling

Images of reading per se are limited in the Nights tales we surveyed. As the secondary sources attest, this dearth of images of reading owes to the Nights' positioning within an oral tradition in medieval Islamic society. The fundamental "image" of storytelling, however, is the frame story, which appears almost identically in both the 101 and 1001 cycles.

See frame story for the initial set-up of the story-within-a-story narrative:

"The vizier went down, repeated the king's message to his daughter, and said, 'May God not deprive me of you.' She was very happy and, after preparing herself and packing what she needed, went to her younger sister, Dinarzad, and said, 'Sister, listen well to what I am telling you. When I go to the king, I will send for you, and when you come and see that the king has finished with me, say, '"Sister, if you are not sleepy, tell us a story."' Then I will begin to tell a story, and it will cause the king to stop his practice, save myself, and deliver the people.' Dinarzad replied, 'Very well...'

...Shahrazad turned to King Shahrayar and said, 'May I have your permission to tell a story?' He replied, 'Yes,' and Shahrazad was very happy and said, 'Listen.'" (p. 16).

The frame story unfolds the rest of the tales; with each one Shahrazad keeps herself and her sister Dinarzad alive for another night. The stories are told for the sultan; their fantastical nature appeals to his infatuation with wealth, power, women, and violence. It is thus an inflection of "high" and "low" culture - and a mixing of the two. The sultan, who is supposed to represent and seek "high culture," instead enjoys the fantastical, raunchy tales within the cycle. But we can assume that the real-life audience enjoys the latter, "low culture" as well, amused that even their sultan finds himself taken with it:

"They claim, blessed king, that there once lived a king whose domains stretched far and wide...Arabs and non-Arabs feared him and brought him gifts, whole nations made way for him. All men grovelled before him. He was cultured and eloquent and loved the company of the learned; scholars and wise men gathered around him as they had done for no king before him." ("The Tale of the Ebony Horse," 307).

Now contrast the above excerpt with a raunchy tale told to the king, which inspires a different sort of excitement, more relatable to a "low" folk audience:

"They say, Your Majesty, a man once had a servant who was a jinni. He had only to ask for whatever it was he wanted." The man proceeds to ask, upon his "wily" wife's advice, to "ask the Almighty God for more penises." His wish was answered: "his body was covered with penises." Then, abruptly, coming out of the tale and back into the frame story, Shahrazad ceases speaking. She continues on the next night, at the king's request, bringing about the end to a comical tale of multiple, then none, then just one, penis. ("The Story of the Vizier and the Seven Prices," 271-73).

Footnotes

[1] Ulrich Marzolph, “Arabian Nights”, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 3, ed. Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, and Everett Rowson. Consulted online on 05 April 2018 http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_0021.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Husain Haddawy, "Dissemination and Manuscripts," in The Arabian Nights, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990), xi-xii.

[4] Ibid., xii-xiii.

[5] Nelly Hanna, "Literacy and the 'Great Divide' in the Islamic World, 1300-1800," Journal of Global History 2 (2007): 175-194, esp. 179-80.

[6] Ibid., 189.

[7] Ibid., 191.

[8] Ibid., 192.

[9] Ibid., 193.

[10] Bruce Fudge, Introduction to A Hundred and One Nights, trans. and ed. Bruce Fudge (New York: New York University Press, 2016), xiv-xxiii.

[11] Dagmar A. Riedel, "Of Making Many Copies There is No End: The Digitization of Manuscripts and Printed Books in Arabic Script," Columbia University Academic Commons (2016): https://doi.org/10.7916/D82F7NB4.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Boaz Shoshan, "High Culture and Popular Culture in Medieval Islam," Studia Islamica no. 73 (1991): 67-107.

[14] Ibid., 69-70

[15] Ibid., 75.

[16] Ibid., 79.