Eastern Dreams (24 page)

But it can also be argued that—questions of absolute invention aside—the West's augmentation of the book takes the
Nights
' development one step further from the fluid use of stories by the
rawi
and the scribes committing them to paper. If the core of the
Arabian Nights
lies in the Arabic
Alf Laila wa Laila
, then the West has carried on the tradition of enlarging the work as did those easterners that came before, creating a kind of “Greater
Arabian Nights
” extending from its original geographical and cultural parameters to encompass the whole world. This “Greater
Nights
” is like a cone, with the earliest stories in
Hazar Afsanah
forming the bottom tip and the remainder expanding upwards into
Alf Laila wa Laila
, after which the work's western history adds further expansive mass to its figure.

Although the information surrounding these printed editions appears to be technical, not one is “scholarly” in the traditional sense, since their editors simply revised available material by correcting obvious mistakes and making stylistic changes before setting the type. Little supporting material regarding sources is offered; prefaces and introductions are perfunctory at best. But they still remain of vital importance by assembling in printed form many
Alf Laila wa Laila
stories bouncing around the eastern world for centuries in various manuscripts, producing something approaching standard Arabic compilations of a work that, before the nineteenth century, effectively had none.

If this seems curious for such a durable work as the
Nights
, it
should be remembered that
Alf Laila wa Laila
held no special place in Muslim society. Popular and enduring as its stories were, it never set the imagination of the eastern world on fire as it has done so profoundly in the West. It is the western world that has put the
Nights
on its pedestal, encouraging the creation of three of the four Arabic texts (Calcutta I, Breslau and Calcutta II), while also defining its basic history.

Of equal importance, these printed texts provide the basic materials for scholars to continue the work of reading, translating and studying the gossamer work that is
The Thousand and One Nights
. In this sense, for all his padding and insertions, Calcutta I's editor, Sheikh Shirwani, was right. Anyone today wanting to learn Arabic could do far worse than consult these editions and their translations as their personal Rosetta Stones.

The growth of empire characterizing the period during which these Arabic texts were printed saw a simultaneous and significant change in western perceptions regarding the eastern world. Whereas previous generations viewed the East as a source of wealth and knowledge, they also had a sincere desire to become better acquainted with non-Christian cultures. With the
Arabian Nights
aiding in a better popular presentation of Asian societies, old images of Muslims and other easterners as corrupt and immoral gave ground to new curiosities about cultures fast becoming linked to the West.

This was not to last. A change of attitude occurred as the West grew more technologically adept and internationally dominant and its involvement with Asia became more directly political and economic. The former picture of the East as a bewitching land of enchantment was slowly replaced by a belief in this same
region's essential stagnation. What was true of the oriental world a thousand or two thousand years ago, it was believed, is true today and probably always will be. The Romantic notion of this very timelessness was now held as evidence of the East's inferiority relative to a progressive Europe and North America—a West shrugging off old cultural habits as it embraced the future.

As Europe, especially, came to identify itself with republicanism or constitutional monarchy, practicality and racial vigour, common images of the Orient now focused on presumptions of cultural inertia. The medieval world of the
Arabian Nights
was hardly the only, or even the most significant, factor in this changing perception, but the book's popular portrayal of an immemorial East no doubt played some unconscious role in the new perspective. By appearing to confirm cultural differences, western editions of the
Nights
and the oriental tale genre helped solidify Europe's sense of an oriental Other—an everlasting realm that may have its special attractions, but which cannot be considered an intellectual or cultural equal of the dynamic West.

Special attractions, indeed. Aside from its economic attractiveness, the eastern world still held an allure, one now based not on sacredness but on expectations of a natural sexual heat emanating from a region where the senses were thought to reign supreme. Images of western men consorting with eastern women—the familiar coupling with the exotic—predate the appearance of the
Nights
by centuries. Jason and Medea, Solomon and Sheba, Antony and Cleopatra; each of these affairs is the by-product of a western identification with the East as a repository of sexually available women. The concept of “dusky maidens” housed in intrigue-riddled seraglios or pining for absent lovers like Coleridge's Abyssinian maid was a picture delighting western imaginations—an eastern sexual fantasy created by the West for its diversion. Although he was writing satirically, Oliver Goldsmith still spoke for many when
remarking, “
I am told they have no balls, drums nor operas in the East, but then they have got a seraglio…. I am told, your Asiatic beauties are the most convenient women alive, for they have no souls….”

In our time, the
Nights
has been criticized for its alleged misogyny and praised as a proto-feminist book. Evidence for both viewpoints can be found within so expansive a work, but what cannot be denied is the pervasive erotic element colouring unexpurgated editions. Besides such ribald stories as “The Tale of the Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad” and “The Goodwife of Cairo and her Four Lovers,” Scheherazade's own frame story is based on the existence of adulterous relations. In the stories themselves, sexual adventures often figure as plot devices. Lovers and spouses cheat on each other, men visit brothels, sexual predators target young boys, lesbian relations occur in harems, slave girls are the playthings of kings and men chase women simply because men chase women.

There can be no doubt that European expectations of unscrupulous sexuality played some part in the West's embracing of the
Nights
' unspoken promise of novel pleasures. It has been noted that the Galland version and the numerous abridged editions are conspicuously clean compared with the actual Arabic
Alf Laila wa Laila
. All the same, independently gathered information about harems, communal baths, slave markets and veiled beauties helped heighten a historical sense of the East as a land glutted with erotic offerings, and the world of the
Nights
provided the backdrop for innumerable carnal fantasies about a place where western sexual standards were unimportant and very much unwanted.

By the early Victorian Age, the existence of printed Arabic editions of the
Nights
and the growing numbers of western Arabic readers made it clear that the full flavour of the work incorporated much more than was generally available in older translations. Once again the
Arabian Nights
was transforming—or perhaps
re
transforming is the better term—as it began turning away from its fairy-tale persona to assume more of its true nature as a treasure-house of story for all ages and sensibilities.

The accumulation of
Alf Laila wa Laila
manuscripts and the creation of printed Arabic compendiums played a decisive role in redirecting the
Nights
. By the late 1830s, attempts to produce uncensored versions gathered steam. The German Arabist Gustav Weil issued a part-translation (no verse) between 1837 and 1841 using the Bulaq and Breslau texts, as well as manuscripts held in the library of the dukes of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (the family's Prince Albert married Queen Victoria; their descendents reign together as Britain's royal family), but saw many potentially offensive passages changed by an editor his publisher hired to make the work more saleable. Weil was not pleased, but could do nothing.

In English, the first attempt at translating a completely unexpurgated version—prose, poetry and ribald parts all together—was undertaken by the lawyer and East India Company civil servant Henry Whitelock Torrens. Torrens began work in 1838 at Simla (now Shimla), the summer seat of the Indian government, using the Turner Macan Manuscript then being edited into Calcutta II. Despite his limited grasp of Arabic, Torrens was intent on rendering both the prose and verse portions of the work (the sexuality he leaves in, but tones down), yet found the task so onerous that after publishing the first fifty Nights at Calcutta and discovering that the great English scholar Edward William Lane had embarked on a similar project, he stopped work altogether, leaving a translation that included only a part-version of the first stories in Calcutta II.

Torrens wasn't really wrong to abandon his project, for Lane was one of his century's great Arabists. The son of a clergyman, he had
been privately tutored in classics and mathematics, becoming so advanced that when he went up to Cambridge to study for the math tripos, he discovered he could already do them all and so left the university to train as an engraver in London. Diagnosed with a mild form of tuberculosis, Lane sailed for Egypt in search of better health at twenty-four, spending several years in Cairo assembling an array of materials for his projected career in lithography. He also became immersed in eastern studies and saw his career undergo another course correction.

With a deep background in Arabic culture (in later life, Lane returned to Cairo to work on his monumental
Arabic–English Lexicon
, a dictionary of Arabic words and their English equivalents), in 1836 Lane published
Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians
, a hugely influential work presenting as full a picture of contemporary Egyptian life as was possible within the confines of print.

This early work is an ethnological classic, and one of the most detailed and sympathetic portraits of eastern life ever to appear. But it also has its flaws. In a reflection of the western belief in the East's inability to progress—at least without help—Lane includes a chapter on storytelling where he notes that oral recitations of
The Thousand and One Nights
in Cairo are rare and copies of
Alf Laila wa Laila
hard to come by, but he still believes that the stories contained in the work continue to represent much of Cairo life as it had existed practically unchanged for more than a millennium.

Partly for this reason, Lane returned to Egypt in 1838 to begin work on a new English translation of the
Nights
—something he viewed as a semi-sequel to
Modern Egyptians
. Working mostly from the Bulaq Text, Lane envisioned the work partly as a manual for Britons on Muslim life and so annotated the text extensively, providing supplementary footnotes on everything he felt relevant. Lane's notes were later published as a separate volume entitled
Arabian Society in the Middle Ages: Studies from the Thousand and One Nights
, making this last work a kind of companion piece to
Modern Egyptians
. As Lane progressed with what he admitted was a version of the
Nights
meant strictly for the drawing-room, changing and even omitting offensive material, his edition started appearing in monthly instalments between 1838 and 1841, when it was published in London as a three-volume book.

Reviewers and readers were kind. The critic and writer James Henry Leigh Hunt called it “
a most valuable, praiseworthy, painstaking, learned and delightful work,” and Thomas Carlyle read Lane's
Nights
avidly while preparing his lecture on Muhammad for
Heroes and Hero-Worship
. But it left a bad taste in the mouths of those who loved the Galland version, since Lane tries hard to push his own edition by disparaging his predecessor, claiming that Galland had “
excessively
perverted
the work” with his insufficient knowledge of Muslim customs. By employing a heavy, pseudo-biblical style he feels appropriate to the subject, Lane contends that vernacular adaptions like Galland's are not in keeping with the spirit of the original
Nights
, since they are altered extravagantly (today he might just say “dumbed down”) to suit European readers. This argument was taken up later by Lane's nephew and future editor, Stanley Lane-Poole, who took Galland to task for his “
lameness, puerility and indecency”—three nasty traits few other observers have ever noted about either Antoine Galland or his
Nights
.