How many stories from the 1,001 Nights do most people actually know? The frame story of Scheherazade, perhaps. Aladdin, certainly. Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and some version of Sindbad, I would guess.
Of those, two – Aladdin and Ali Baba – do not exist in any Arabic manuscript that predates the earliest French translations in the early 18th century. It is entirely possible, even likely, that they were written by the translator, Antoine Galland, or by some other European.
Sindbad is a character from the Nights, but does not appear in collections in Arabic until the 15th century, over 500 years after the earliest collections. Yet Sindbad was introduced to Europe via Galland’s French translation in 1701, before the rest of the Nights.
In any event the versions we remember are largely fondly-remembered hokum: Disney, pantomimes, bowdlerised children’s editions, and Ray Harryhausen.
Does this matter?
Delving into Robert Irwin’s masterpiece The Arabian Nights: A Companion, I was reminded of stories I had read by half-forgotten (The Fisherman and the Jinn; The Tale of the Hunchback) and stories I had heard of but had never read (Judar and His Brothers; Ma’aruf the Cobbler).
I also discovered stories I had never heard of.
In The Tale of the Wazir and the Sage Durban, the sage, who has been condemned to death by beheading by the unjust king, takes a cunning posthumous revenge. He bequeaths to the king a book which, he claims, will have the power to make his severed head speak. In reality the book is poisoned, and the king dies when he licks his fingers to turn the pages. (The idea later appears elsewhere, including of course in Eco’s The Name of the Rose.)
There is a series of treasure-hunt stories, mainly later additions to the Nights and of Egyptian origin (Egypt, with its tomb-raiders, was where one was most likely to find mutalibun, or professional treasure hunters. I had read some of these, such as The City of Brass, but was completely unaware of The Queen of the Serpents and others.
(The treatise Kashf al-Asrar (‘Unveiling of Secrets’), written by al-Jawbari in 13th century Iraq, contains warnings of the perils of treasure hunting which seem straight from Raiders of the Lost Ark: ‘Imagine you are in a long narrow passage descending into the deeps of the earth and the passage is lined by sword-bearing statues. Beware! Beat out the ground in front of you with a stick, so that the swords fall on emptiness.’)
Encounters with ancient ruins, from centuries or even millennia before the tale, allow for instances of what John Clute and John Grant in the Encylopedia of Fantasy call the Time Abyss: a phenomenon, or a moment of perception, in which one’s perspective suddenly shifts so that one becomes aware of the true scale of a place, an event, or a time period. For example:
Knowledge in the ancient world, mainly lost by the time of the Nights tales, allowed those long-dead masters to create mechanical marvels: the flying ebony horse in the story that bears its name; a brass oarsman bearing a tablet of lead on his breast, in ‘The Tale of the Third Dervish’ (nested within the story of ‘The Porter and the Three Girls of Baghdad’).
The universe is larger and stranger than we imagine, and larger and stranger than we can imagine. In ‘Abdullah the Fisherman and Abdullah the Merman’ the kingdom of the ocean has no poverty, and so no need for trade; people go about naked, and free love is the rule. In ‘The Adventures of Bulukiya’, the hero is shown both Hell and the garden of Eden; and an angel on the Mountain of Kaf tells him that there are forty other worlds, each one over forty times the size of ours, and each with its own marvels.
And time itself is not as simple a thing as it appears. In ‘The Tale of the Warlock and the Young Cook of Baghdad’, a vizir enters a cauldron of water at the urging of the warlock, and in the brief time he is in the water, he experiences years of an alternative life. (The source for this may be an Indian Buddhist fable about the illusory nature of time.)
There are entire story cycles, separate to the Nights, which sound fascinating but were completely unknown to me.
In the Sukasaptati – ‘The Seventy Tales of the Parrot’ – from 12th century India or earlier, a parrot tells a series of stories to deter or distract a woman from committing adultery (though many of the stories are about adultery).
Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange, from the 10th century, survived in a single copy in a library in Istanbul. Of its eighteen stories, six are also in the Nights, but twelve are not.
Some stories have been lost altogether; of those, frustratingly, their names survive as the merest clue to what they were about. Ibn al-Nadim, a 10th century Iraqi bookseller, compiled a list of all books that were known to have been written at that time. Stories now lost include such intriguing titles as ‘The Foot Bone of the Giant Lizard,’ ‘Lover of the Cow’, and ‘Bird Droppings’.
It is not surprising that so much has been lost, or is gradually being forgotten. The process began long before the Nights reached Europe. In medieval Arabia storytelling itself was a disreputable activity. Poetry was the highest art form; storytelling was among the lowest, trivial at best and contemptible at worst. It was seen as comparable to those forms of entertainment with which it competed: public storytellers vied for attention with jugglers, snake-charmers, pedlars of quack medicines, fortune tellers, and people mimicking (presumably cruelly) the accents of Ethiopians or Turks, or the gait of the blind, or the voice of the stammerer.
(For a wonderful survey of the higher art of medieval Arabic poetry, see Irwin’s other masterpiece, Night and Horses and the Desert.)
Given the low esteem in which the Nights was (and, largely, still is) held in the Arab world, it is possible that, had it not been translated into French, and then found popularity in the West, it would have fallen into obscurity or been lost entirely.
Something compels us to try to preserve ancient art: stories, music, architecture, paintings (all the way back to the cave). We regret the loss of early movies, or all the programmes wiped by the BBC to make way for the Trooping of the Colour.
And yet: why does this matter? To take the example of stories: there are probably more stories in the world than can be consumed in a lifetime, and people unhelpfully keep writing more (myself included). Not all of those now being written are really any good; not all those from antiquity will be classics.
But, at the very least, we cannot be sure that we know with certainty which works are worth preserving. Our children, or their children, might see merit in things we under-appreciate. Or they may be inspired by things that mean little to us. Where we can, we should try to preserve, for them, what we can. For (in a line borrowed from Tim Powers’ The Drawing of the Dark) much has been lost, and there is much still to lose.
And the best way to preserve the slowly-fading stories of the 1,001 Nights is simply to go and read them.