I'm ordinarily a very fast reader. On the other hand, it took me about nine and a half months to finish this. Hoo boy, am I stuffed.
Nevertheless, I'm ahead of the game at that. As you can tell from its title, if one were to read or hear the stories in this work according to the original plan, it would take roughly two and three-quarters years to complete.
Why so long? The framing device is well known. A certain caliph (king) named Shahriyar discovers that his wife has not only slept around, she has done so with various black slaves (their skin color apparently makes it worse somehow), denouncing and humiliating her husband to them in the process. Not only does he have her killed (which is to be expected in his age of the world, I suppose), he also concludes that no woman is to be trusted. He still has his physical needs, though, so he orders his wazir, or chief minister, to search out a woman for him each night. This woman he sleeps with and executes the following morning, then goes through the whole process all over again. The wazir's daughter, Shahrazad (more familiarly translated as Scheherazade) gets wind of this and convinces her father to send her to Shahriyar the next night. She starts telling the caliph a story, stopping in the middle when the sun comes up. Needless to say, he decides to leave her head where it is for one more night so he can hear how the story ends (have you ever been engrossed in a story and been interrupted?). A thousand and one nights later, she has borne him three sons and things have changed in other ways too. As you can plainly see, Scheherazade is the idol of all storytellers.
Oddly enough, there's both a great deal to say about this and nothing much to say about this. Let's start with the nothing much, because most of my impatience with these tales comes, I suspect, from the unavoidable fact that I judge them by modern standards. It's unfair, but there it is.
The first thing I notice is that, although the stories here come in a pleasing variety of types, they repeat themselves a lot. Sir Richard Burton, the famous 19th Century English explorer and translator of the tales, divided them into three rough categories; fables, fantasies, and histories, The fables are short, some taking Shahrazard less than a night to tell, and frequently deal with talking animals or people who learn valuable lessons, as with Aesop. Also as with Aesop, the events and morals are similar from tale to tale.
The fantasies have to do with the relationships between working class people or merchants and magical creatures of various kinds. They often get rich by those means, or even if they don't they often encounter cities covered with jewels and whatnot. The descriptions of these places resemble each other too, and the humans in such cases usually do the same things that their counterparts in other fantasies do. In some of the histories we learn some lessons regarding Islam and its tenets. Some of these are so detailed and analytical that I wonder if even the original audience could follow them.
The histories tell us about supposed kings and their supposed wars, or their struggles to have children or protect their kingdoms in other ways. Some of these take upwards of fifty nights and include multiple shorter tales. Sometimes there are fantastical elements to these wars, but with or without those elements, the warriors are all equally superhuman (the ones on the good side, that is), fight with the same weapons, kill each other in the same ways, and even issue the same challenges, word for word.
This repetitiveness leads me to suspect that the “1001 Nights” was never intended to be read straight through. They sound more like the kinds of tales told by the campfire by nomadic tribes, or after dinner by stationary ones. Like I said, by modern standards this isn't as entertaining as it probably was when told aloud by a storyteller. As a storyteller myself, I probably should have known that.
In addition to that, I found a strange schism in attitude here. The “Nights”, at least in this iteration, are from a clear Muslim perspective, and apart from the complex philosophical points I mentioned above, the tales present a few plain principles several times. One of these is that the present world is a sham, and will distract us from what's really important if we chase after wealth or women too much, whereas in the world to come where Allah reigns, true reward is to be found if only we attend exclusively, while alive, to death and the world thereafter. This is, of course, not unique to Islam, but it's emphasized so much that it's a little startling to see the overwhelming wealth the characters receive and the incredible beauty of the people they see. Nobles of all classes reward their people with “robes of honor”, “jewels of price,” gold and silver by the ton, and as for the description of the women (and men), they all have hourglass figures, faces like the moon, and all in all beauty so intense that those who see them immediately lose their reason. (Interestingly, a great many of them seem to have beauty marks – freckles or moles somewhere on the face that just makes them more beautiful – and most of them seem to be white, which I didn't expect to find as a sign of beauty in the middle east. Remember those black slaves that so horrified Shahriyar?) Anyway, to whatever extent these tales are supposed to demonstrate Muslim virtue, the characters usually receive some more immediate reward. Then again, this is a collection of stories, not the Qu'ran.
So, not a modern piece by any means, and I can't recommend that you try to swallow it whole, as I did. What's more, I should let you know that some of the most famous Arab tales, like “Aladdin” or “Ali Baba And The Forty Thieves,” were added to later collections. You won't find them here, although you will find Sinbad's seven voyages.
Subject to those restrictions, if you make good use of the table of contents, you can find some good stories here. You'll even find some that you'll enjoy reading to your children, but that's another thing to be careful of. Sir Richard Burton tells us in his comments that he specifically intended to provide a thorough translation of everything in the “Nights”, and some of these tales are definitely adults only stuff, although with no scatological language. This, I suspect, was the kind of attitude that got Sir Richard in trouble when he translated the Kama Sutra and performed a number of other scandalous activities.
Sir Richard, it's claimed, was the first non-Muslim to enter the Muslim holy city of Mecca, an act that would have drawn the death penalty if he had been discovered. In any case, he obviously knew enough Arabic to give us about as accurate a translation as we could probably hope for, not to mention enough Arabic to criticize in his introductory and subsequent essays a fair percentage of the other translations then available. We would consider his language pretty flowery today, with plenty of “thous” and “thees,” but you get used to that pretty quickly. More relevant is the fact that, although Sir Richard obviously intended this at least in part as a popular entertainment, it's mostly a scholarly work. And as an entertainment it works – it's produced orchestral music, ballet, and a wide variety of abridged storybooks, all of which I certainly invite you to enjoy – but let me repeat; Now that I've read the thing in its entirety, you don't have to.
Benshlomo says, Honestly, the things I do for you people...
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