Eastern Dreams (23 page)

Most manuscripts, Zotenberg believed, were composed more recently, in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries, and possibly in response to the western interest in the
Nights
. However they came about, they were certainly younger by hundreds of years than the three-volume Syrian manuscript Galland found, which, after considerable effort of examination and comparison to other manuscripts, Zotenberg pegged as being compiled sometime in the fourteenth century.
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The Egyptian manuscripts, Zotenberg found, often contain more stories than their Syrian counterparts but tended to be more streamlined in the telling, leaving out details or other information found in Syrian tellings of the same tales.

Since a number of their stories are distorted to the point of incomprehensibility, the Egyptian texts could have been made hurriedly, with less care than had been taken with the Syrian manuscripts, again probably in response to the influx of interested Europeans looking for
Alf Laila wa Laila
manuscripts. All the same, ZER remains a series of handwritten works, a kind of grab bag of Arabic stories that may or may not belong to the earliest
Nights
. It was not until the early nineteenth century that the earliest
printed Arabic texts were assembled as a by-product of the western fascination with the
Arabian Nights
.

Around 1813, in response to a request from the Honourable East India Company for a compilation of available Arabic
Nights
stories, a Calcutta language teacher at Fort William College named Sheikh Ahmed ibn Muhammad Shirwani edited a text for use as a teaching tool for Brits wanting to learn Arabic. This first printed text came about as a direct result of commercial politics—the outgrowth of an East India Company directive requiring its officials to familiarize themselves with Indian languages, especially Persian and Arabic, so native revenue-gatherers and judges could be replaced with Europeans. Over time, language training became a requirement for professional advancement within the company and later, within the British Crown's Indian Civil Service; failure could result in non-promotion or even dismissal.

The text edited by Shirwani can be seen as part of this policy of enforced language instruction—a collection of
Arabian Nights
stories in Arabic designed for teaching that language through a familiar text, but not undertaken as a scholarly project. Printed in two volumes between 1814 and 1818, this “Shirwani Text”—better known as Calcutta I—was created under the direct patronage and support by the East India Company as a kind of school textbook for the British.

Recognizing that language teaching is best done through a work already well known to students, the collection covers only the first two hundred Nights—about a hundred to each volume—and is the first printed edition of
Alf Laila wa Laila
in existence. For all that, Calcutta I is a problematic text, since Sheikh Shirwani does not describe his manuscript sources and the text's makeup remains vague. Also, it seems certain that Shirwani distorted things by modifying some stories and padding the text with outside material, including the Sindbad voyages taken from European editions.

There followed a gap of six years before the second text began appearing—a twelve-volume compilation known as the “Breslau Text” (1824–43). If anything, this work is even more problem-plagued than Calcutta I, since its first eight volumes were printed under the supervision of the German scholar Christian Maximilian Habicht and seem to have been cobbled together from sundry
Nights
and non-
Nights
collections.

Habicht claimed he had received a complete manuscript of
Alf Laila wa Laila
from Tunisia and it was from this full text that he began translating various
Nights
stories into German in 1824, publishing his results the following year. At the same time, Habicht began publishing in printed form the Arabic manuscript he claimed he'd been sent from North Africa. By the time of his death in 1839, eight volumes had been printed, but the work remained unfinished. Thereafter, a student of Habicht's, Heinrich Fleischer, undertook the task of completing and (that word again) “improving” the text, publishing a final four volumes between 1842 and 1844 to make the Breslau Text the only “complete” Arabic text of the
Nights
containing a full 1001 Nights to appear in Europe, as well as the first printed text in any language to actually contain 1001 Nights of storytelling.

But in a repeat of the bogus “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba” manuscripts, it seems very likely that Habicht's vaunted full “Tunisian” manuscript never existed. Like the Michael Sabbagh “Baghdadi” manuscript copy, Habicht's work is a mishmash stitched together from material provided by different manuscripts of
Alf Laila wa Laila
floating around Paris (where Habicht worked for a time as part of the Prussian legation), other story collections and, when it appeared in 1835, the next printed Arabic edition, the Egyptian Bulaq Text.

Maximilian Habicht was no con artist. He had a solid background as a teacher of Arabic, studying with the esteemed
Sylvester de Sacy in Paris before joining the faculty of the University of Breslau. But given the number of
Nights
frauds perpetrated in the decades following
Les mille et une nuits
, it must be asked why someone of his calibre would stoop to palming off a composite work as a complete edition of the
Nights
. To enhance his professional reputation as the man who uncovered the illusory “full” manuscript of
The Thousand and One Nights
? To reap the same kind of success as Antoine Galland and hopefully become wealthy from the effort?

Or perhaps Habicht's desire to have and hold a full version of the
Arabian Nights
was merely an extreme case of that same desire found throughout the West. Trying to patch together an edition with 1001 Nights from various sources when the work's origins are so obscure is not, as some have noted, such a terrible act in itself; it was, after all, the method by which Antoine Galland introduced the
Nights
to Europe in the first place. But most of Galland's modifications were not done until after an arduous and fruitless search for a full
Alf Laila wa Laila
. By coming forward with a patchwork version he claimed was a complete Arabic
Nights
, Habicht muddied an already-confusing situation further by perpetuating the myth that an
Alf Laila wa Laila
manuscript containing an actual 1001 Nights of storytelling existed somewhere.

And yet, given the age, this is an almost understandable, if not quite forgivable, reaction. After enjoying what they thought to be the “Part-
Nights
” for so long, Europeans of the time must have felt compelled to track down a full, original version of this most famous Arabic-language book. The move toward a scientific worldview during the Enlightenment, when the earth and all that lay within it was believed to be subject to a systematic human understanding, meant a belief that discovery, followed by a process of codification, would fall naturally upon even those literary works whose fame rested on part-versions. For the
Arabian Nights
, having no original
edition or author seems to have been no obstacle to the West's hunger to find—or, if need be, invent—one.

Perhaps there was also a willful intent to assign at least some sense of authority to a book that was proving so hard to identify. For a time right after the first appearance of
Les mille et une nuits
, there were some who believed that Antoine Galland had produced the work entirely from his own imagination. Even when it became clear he was adapting an actual eastern work, Galland was still perceived in some way as at least
one
of the authors of a book he had rendered into a European language.

This perception has clung to most of those translators following Galland. We speak easily of the Scott edition of the
Arabian Nights
, or the Lane version, or the Payne and Burton editions, with their similarities and differences. For a book with a host of questions surrounding it, assigning a provisional authority to something reworked into another language is not an unattractive idea. The theory that each translator puts such a personal mark on a translated work that they earn a modicum of its creation has merit, especially when the book has no assigned author. Taking such a mutable work as the
Nights
and recreating it in Arabic or another language is tantamount to fashioning it anew, of rewriting it for another audience.

This is what the editors and translators of this puzzling collection have done time and again. They have rewritten, and continue to rewrite, the
Arabian Nights
in the same way as a filmmaker remakes a previous version of a motion picture by using the same essential elements, but still manages to create a new, individual work. By doing this from the time Europe began gathering manuscripts of
Alf Laila wa Laila
, the West has entered into an unspoken collaboration with the East to further develop
The Thousand and One Nights
.

What has emerged bears only a faint resemblance to however early versions of the work looked, but is still in keeping with the
idea of the
Nights
as an endlessly adaptable compendium of stories from distant lands. It can be claimed that the
Arabian Nights' Entertainments
as the world knows the book today has become the co-operative product of both East and West—practically the only classic of world literature that has developed through the efforts of two cultures that are sometimes at violent odds with one another, but are capable of producing a work belonging equally to both.

With the Breslau Text considered conspicuously faulty, the next edition, the “Bulaq Text” of 1835, seen through the press by Sheikh Abd al-Rahman al-Safti al-Sharqawi, was a real step forward. Printed in the Bulaq suburb of Cairo, it was the product of the first indigenous printing press in Egypt (installed in 1821 by the viceroy, Muhammad Ali), as well as the only one of these four Arabic texts to be printed by Arabs. The collection is one of a series of fictional works in Persian, Arabic and Turkish published for Egypt's elite; most had something like a thousand copies run off in what we would think of today as “limited editions.”

From the more uniform and correct Arabic used, the Bulaq Text appears founded on a single Egyptian manuscript of the
Nights
from the eighteenth century, although like Sheikh Shirwani, al-Sharqawi gives no indication of his sources. It could be that the manuscript was compiled by one of those scribes who fashioned a text of
Alf Laila wa Laila
because of the
Nights
' popularity in the West and didn't care about the stories used. Such is its general consistency, however, that the Bulaq Text quickly became a main source for most subsequent printed editions of the
Nights
, including an important English translation printed several years later and the four-volume Arabic “Macnaghten” or Calcutta II of 1839–42, from which the first uncensored translations were made.

This last edition, Calcutta II, is the most extensive of printed Arabic texts, and has become the chief source from which unabridged translations have been made. In addition to the Bulaq Text, the main editor, the East India Company linguist and political officer William Hay Macnaghten (his 1841 murder at Kabul, Afghanistan, helped spark the First Afghan War), also used Calcutta I and the Breslau Text for comparison and correction, besides relying heavily on an Egyptian manuscript that belonged to the Anglo-Irish army officer and Persian specialist Major Turner Macan.

Because Macnaghten and his associates used more sources than their predecessors, Calcutta II is often thought the most complete and accurate Arabic edition of the
Nights
in existence. But it too has its errors and problems, not the least of which are unresolved questions concerning the so-called Macan Manuscript. This had been purchased following Macan's death by a Charles Brownlow, who submitted it to an examination by the Asiatic Society of Bengal for authenticity. All the examiners, including Macnaghten, pronounced it genuine, recommending that it be edited and published. But they still could not pin down definitively where the text originated, or to which branch of
Nights
manuscripts—the Syrian or the Egyptian—it belonged.

Not that they tried all that hard or even cared, wanting only to print an Arabic text with 1001 Nights. Confusing things even more is the inclusion of material taken from the Breslau Text, further broadcasting its (to put it kindly) questionable contents, and meaning that translations of the
Arabian Nights
based on Calcutta II are either heavily “contaminated” from the early
Nights
, as some believe, or simply include more supplementary material added to the body of the original tales, as ancient storytellers and scribes constantly did.

The whole thing now seems pretty incestuous, with editions using material already available in texts or manuscripts regardless of
its often-dubious lineage. Yet how bad this situation seems depends on one's viewpoint. Given that Antoine Galland altered his sources to create essentially new
Nights
stories or inserted independent material wherever he chose fit, it can be argued that using other material, even that which is known to have been forged, is not much different from the way the
Nights
first appeared in the West: as a series of anonymous, Arabic-language stories.