Identity and the Arabian Nights

Alf Layla Wa-Layla, the One Thousand and One Nights, better known in the West as the Arabian Nights, is a work with even more faces than it has titles, which makes sense considering it can claim many authors, as the living and fluctuating result of many hands toiling over many centuries, compiling Arabic, Persian, Indian, Egyptian and Mesopotamian tales. However, the diversity of story elements comes close to making the work contradictory: Women are portrayed as wicked adulteresses who deserve to be killed or beaten for impudence, while the central heroine is unquestionably wise, brave and virtuous. Genie are strong and terrifying beings, though the child of one such is so weak as to be killed by getting hit in the eye with a date pit. The contradictions coexist in a fantastic dance, cavorting one around the other until the laws of the book’s world become uncertain.

Much like these examples, images of the Middle East have long been contradictory in the West. On the one hand, there is the “exotic” and magical Middle East, influenced by the Arabian Nights since medieval times, with flying carpets, genies and caverns of riches that “open sesame.” The other image, more prevalent today, is of a land torn by unrest and terrorism. One popular explanation for the prevalence of these two mixed images is the concept of orientalism, as posited by Edward Said in his 1978 book of the same title, which has greatly influenced academia since the late 20th century.

For a solid grasp of Said’s conjectures, one ought to read his book, but in a nutshell, orientalism is Said’s term for describing a perceived tendency of Western political (and cultural) forces to caricature the Middle East out of an imperialistic need to place the “Other” at a disadvantage and to exonerate military aggression. Furthermore, Said is very specific that he does not suggest orientalism to mean a misrepresentation of the “True Orient,” as he is skeptical of such an idea. In fact, he notably remarked in an article called On Orientalist Scholarship that no American or European scholar can ever “know” the Orient.

But perhaps any goal to know the Orient is nonsensical anyway, because on the human and individual level, boundaries between Oxidant and Orient are fluid, even meaningless—borders that only exist in maps and ideologies, and stories have never been confined by them, as the universal popularity of the Arabian Nights can testify. The appeal of this unconventional body of work is more than simple curiosity for that which seems “exotic;” there is something immediately exciting and familiar in the power of a cliffhanger: in this case, a cliffhanger that can cause the most powerful man in the book’s world to put off an official execution so that he can hear the next installment.

Of course, there are many examples of stories that excite the imagination and sympathy of people the world over, regardless of cultural origins, from A Christmas Carol to Like Water for Chocolate to Musashi. The cultural context of great stories informs the characters without preventing us from identifying with them. Maybe it’s the ego that always puts I at the center of the story, or maybe it is the empathy inherent in imagination; whatever the case, a story, by concern for its inhabitants and the power to place us in their skins, is humanistic by nature. As George Eliot in her essay, The Natural History of German Life, explains it: “The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies… Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.”

All who read stories have on multiple occasions identified with people very different from themselves. It is no coincidence that Scheherazade’s wisdom is attributed to her learning and manifest in her wide knowledge of stories. The characters of the Arabian Nights often use stories as ambassadors to make their points, such as Scheherazade’s father telling her the tale of the ox and the ass, or the multiple instances where stories are told in an effort to save lives. The Arabian Nights isn’t merely a collection of tales, the tales are currency in the book’s world; they are alive and impact the events of the narrative at large.

And it is a large narrative. The centuries have seen multiple versions of the Nights, by scholars of both East and West, and the stories themselves come in multiple layers, with characters inside stories telling stories about characters who again tell stories. These complex mirrors of narrative are truly the signature of the Arabian Nights, and perhaps are appealing because an infinity of stories feels like an honest reflection of the infinite possibilities of real life, no matter how fantastic the tales themselves. Like these stories, life is complex and often appears paradoxical. Though it may on the surface be easy to look at these stories and identify a decadent and “otherly” Ottoman Empire, or a “mystical East,” the real paradox is that this collection of folktales has lived so long because it excites our sympathies, invites our imaginations to wander through a mirror tunnel of adventure after adventure until, in the end, we see only ourselves.

We are the Other, and always have been. As an idea, we are Its creator; as a fear, It dwells inside us. As Joseph Campbell’s studies of folktales led him to surmise, this theme dwells in legend and lore the world over as an essential aspect of the Hero’s Quest, organic to the human experience. Think of Luke Skywalker training on Dagobah with Yoda: when he enters the darkness and confronts an apparition of Darth Vader, cuts off the hated villain’s head, whose face does he find beneath the helmet? This is one trick stories can play on us: we meet characters who excite both affection and revulsion, and for the duration, we see ourselves inside each, see the world through their eyes and apply our own world to their circumstances.

As a story about the sympathetic and enlightening power of stories, the Arabian Nights is the perfect point of departure for our own journey of one thousand and one tales. Story Euphoria will release a new article on the power and art of story every week with an accompanying podcast reading. You can download this week’s excerpt from the Arabian Nights Entertainments to listen at your leisure. To learn more about the “version history” of this work, see Daniel Beaumont’s article, "The Medieval Arabic Nights." If you would like to read the complete tales, you can get the text I read (or a different version) for free from Project Gutenberg, but if you’d prefer to read your own on the beach or in bed, see if your local library has a copy, or buy one:

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