Eastern Dreams by Paul Nurse Read Free Book Online Page B

the
Nights
has no specific point of origin. The most famous version, the
King James Bible
, contains sixty-six books in both testaments from Genesis to Revelations, but apart from the tradition that the apostles Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are the true authors of the Gospels, the names of the work’s actual compilers are generally anonymous. Fashioned from the bedrock foundations of the Hebrew
Torah
, the Bible assumed its present form sometime in the second century CE, appearing first in Greek and Vulgate Latin before entering other languages, including the commissioned English King James Version of 1611. For all the multiplicity of its sources, however, the Bible has some set, distinct limits, its parameters defined by church bodies that approved what does and what does not embody biblical scripture. That which is approved is considereda bona fide part of the Bible. Other writings deemed questionable are described as
Apocrypha
(“hidden things”)—biblical books included in early editions, but which are not part of the Hebrew Old Testament or recognized New Testament writings and therefore not accepted by some Christian denominations.
    No such sense of order or symmetry exists within
The Thousand and One Nights
. Some things are known or suspected, but for its first nine hundred-odd years—about three-quarters of the work’s known history—the only proof of the
Nights
’ existence are the few scattered references mentioned earlier. The rest of its pre-European history remains a riddle. Even the Arabic scholar Muhsin Mahdi (1926–2007), the one researcher who has gone further than any other in reconstructing a semblance of an important early version of the work, has his detractors, some of whom feel his efforts miss an essential point: that by its very nature,
The Thousand and One Nights
precludes itself from being treated as a standard canonical work, existing for the edification of a scholarly community. Never written entirely in immaculate, classical Arabic,
Alf Laila wa Laila
would not have been treated as codified literature by Muslim copyists and compilers, who had no reservations about adding, excising or altering material as necessity or desire dictated. This adds immeasurably to the difficulty of attempting even a working definition of what comprises the
Nights
.
    Foremost among mysteries is the question of what actually constitutes an
Arabian Nights
story. The common assumption—that a full version of the
Nights
contains 1001 stories, with a single, separate tale for each of its 1001 evenings—is false. Many stories resemble Chinese box-puzzles, with smaller or different tales contained within a larger, sometimes much larger, framework. “The Hunchback’s Tale,” for instance, which occurs on the twenty-fourth Night in the mammoth Richard Burton edition, contains no less than eleven sub-stories; Scheherazade needs some ten nightsto recite the entire series before she is able to embark on the next self-contained tale.
    Fittingly, characters within the
Nights
are obsessed with storytelling, exchanging tales with one another until the work resembles a fountain of gushing narrative.
Arabian Nights
’ characters tell stories for a variety of reasons—to entertain, to warn, to instruct, to make points and, in more than one instance, to save lives. Scheherazade is not the only character who talks to preserve life, as in more than one tale, storytelling becomes the price or purpose for existence.
    It is true that most editions of the
Nights
not designed for children tend to bear a common core of stories, but thereafter the length, content and editing varies enormously. One of the book’s chief characteristics is the extreme difference in story length, as well as the tonal shifts that can occur from tale to tale. Many stories run just a few paragraphs while others (such as “The Tale of King Omar bin al-Nu’uman and His Sons Sharrkan and Zau