Perhaps the saddest aspect of the current crises in the Middle East is that many now equate its culture with violence, barbarism and the oppression of women. Yet for hundreds of years, Arab science, architecture, medicine, astronomy and indeed treatment of women were far in advance of the west’s. Among its greatest jewels is its literature, of which only a few stories from The Thousand and One Nights (first published in the west in the 18th century) remain in any way familiar to us. These are what Marina Warner calls in her new history of fairytale, Once Upon a Time, “deep aquifers of story… emerging here and there in waterfalls and powerful rivers”. Authors from Dante to AS Byatt are forever in the debt of these stories, which, with their enchantment, eroticism, violence and drama, continue to fertilise the western imagination even when as watered down as Disney’s Aladdin.
Yet 600 years before The Thousand and One Nights, there existed a book just as extraordinary. It survived in just one ragged copy in the library of Aya Sofia in Istanbul, as a 16th-century manuscript, possibly put together in the 10th century. Miraculously discovered by Hellmut Ritter, a German scholar who translated it in 1933, the anonymous manuscript was missing its title page and half its 42 tales. Variants of six of these stories found their way into The Thousand and One Nights, yet there are many more here concerning lost princes, dazzling jewels, talking horses and terrifying jinn. Rape, murder, mutilation and castration are as common as love, piety, virtue and luck. Now translated for the first time into English by Malcolm C Lyons as Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange, these are definitely not for children.
Exotic, chaotic, romantic and entertaining, these tales lack the most marvellous one of all: the framing device of Scheherazade’s own story in which she both saves her own life and eventually cures the king of his mad jealousy by telling him The Thousand and One Nights, and stopping each at just the point where he spares her life in order to find out what happens next. We still get the famous “hall of mirrors” effect of stories within stories, but the narrative artfulness which developed by the late 15th century is largely absent.
Most of the Christian-inspired tropes we expect from western stories are also, inevitably, missing. We have quests, but there is no rule of three by which the protagonist can learn to do better, and no didactic moral purpose showing how the supernatural favours the merciful, the clever or the poor. In The Thousand and One Nights, we can admire the courage and resilience of Aladdin and Sinbad, but here even piety is inconsistent. The use of prolepsis, however, is much in evidence: as Robert Irwin points out in his superb introduction, the interdiction to do what is forbidden is a way of generating narrative suspense, and here it often seems impossible for our protagonists to survive.
The aim is usually for a hero to be returned to fabulous riches and a peerless wife gained in the course of travels, especially if these have been imposed by exile or betrayal. The good and bad suffer alike, although a heartfelt prayer to God can bring about miracles such as the restoration of severed hands and feet, or transformation from beast to human. Sometimes, reversals of fortune in the tales have an almost comical turn: in “The Story of the Forty Girls” a prince left to hunger and thirst in the desert finds himself in a magic castle, before a table laid with 40 places but no people. Like Goldilocks, he takes a bite and a sip from each meal, much to the disgust of the lovely huntresses who live there. One hides herself to try to find the intruder, but when the prince reveals himself she is so entranced by his beauty that they promptly have sex, or rather, the prince “jumped on her and deflowered her, discovering her to be a virgin”. The exact same thing happens to each of the 40 girls in turn, and each time the prince is surprised and delighted at finding a virgin. Defloration is promptly followed by pregnancy. (Boccaccio’s story of the randy nuns and the mute gardener in The Decameron runs along similar lines, though does not conclude with the raising of an entire army of sons.)
One of the fascinating aspects of these stories is spotting just how many other fairytales or works of literature they either prefigure or echo. What Salman Rushdie called “the sea of stories” both joins and sunders east and west. The geography of the tales encompasses a sphere of trade and influence stretching from Venice to Basra; a mermaid is wrapped in Venetian cloth, and heroes use the seal of “Solomon, son of David on whom peace be” to protect themselves from evil.
It is pointless to apply our own morals and mores to the medieval mind. Black people are repeatedly equated with ugliness, whereas men and especially women who are exceptionally beautiful are always described as being “like the full moon”. The modern reader recoils at the racism, as in “The King of Two Rivers”, when a lost prince, having been taken captive by 10 black men who treat him kindly, feels entitled to slit their throats while they sleep – but like the punishment meted out to the Grimms’ wicked stepmothers and Jews, it is part of the time at which the stories were told. Compassion and mercy, invoked at the start of each tale, are rarely felt, let alone exercised. A king faints from laughing at the stories of how six beggars, blinded, castrated or missing lips, came about their misfortunes.
Yet it is also noteworthy that where the European fairytale heroine was merely expected to be beautiful, a desirable Muslim maiden is also expected to possess intelligence. Nor is romance missing, for true love is preferred to a hundred concubines, even if the object of passion has originally been bought as a slave. The death of a king’s baby daughter is mourned to the point of madness by her father. Women are not just slaves or wives but sorceresses, jinn, evil and resourceful beings whose lusts can be just as energetic as men’s. None of these women resemble the stereotypical image the west has of Muslim womanhood today.
For the scholar of fairytales, this is a collection to treasure, gorgeously presented in its gold and turquoise binding, intelligently translated and saturated with the ancient, exotic, playful, romantic, multifaceted and tolerant culture which the Wahhabi interpretation of Arab faith has done its best to obliterate. The collection shows how, for centuries, Muslims, Jews and Christians could share both the real and the imaginative spaces of civilisation, each cross-fertilising the other in trade, knowledge and art. In these dark days, we have never needed to be reminded more of what was, once upon a time.
Amanda Craig’s most recent novel is Hearts and Minds (Abacus, £8.99).
