The Arabian Nights II
Read The Arabian Nights II Online
Authors: Husain Haddawy
Contents
MAP:
The World of
The Arabian Nights II
The Story of Sindbad the Sailor
The Story of 'Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves
The Story of 'Ala al-Din (Aladdin) and the Magic Lamp
The Story of Qamar al-Zaman and His Two Sons, Amjad and As'ad
The Adventures of Qamar al-Zaman's Two Sons, Amjad and As'ad
The Conclusion of the Story of Qamar al-Zaman
For Diana, Myriam, Peter, Christopher, Mark,
and for Samson of the Hebrides
and those who have the grace of turning hate to love.
“From fairest creatures we desire increase”; so have I, ever since I was a child in Baghdad. At that time, when life was desire and dreams, fulfillment was wish fulfillment, and dreams were only dreams. The main event of the season was King Kong or Flash Gordon or some Indian film, and when these came and went, we were left with our
Arabian Nights
and our favorite storytellers, men and women.
I remember my great-uncle best. He was a towering man whose eyes sparkled with kindness, an impish smile, and a child's sense of wonder. Though his wife and numerous children lived in Salman Pak, a village near Baghdad named for the Prophet's barber who lies buried there under the shadow of the great hall of Ctesiphon, the capital of the ancient Sassanian empire, my great-uncle himself spent most of his time at the Gaylani Mosque in Baghdad. He was an assistant to a diminutive holy man from Morocco to whom people came, seeking protection from harm by his talismans and charms, as in the case of his ancient predecessor, the holy Fatima, in the story of “'Ala al-Din and the Magic Lamp.”
My great-uncle used to visit my grandmother, bringing walnuts grown in the Kurdish mountains or bananas imported from India, and after supper, he would tell us a story. He knew that both she and I expected this other gift from him. When the story was over, I would ask him for another, and he, unlike our other visitors who usually offered an encore that, because of its brevity, left us with a feeling of pleasure and regret, would embark on a long story that we followed with delight and gratitude. It is because of this that I remember him best. I loved him for his generosity, and when one day, we received the news from the mosque that he had died suddenly that morning, I felt that something was lost from the world, a sense of abundance and increase.
And increase has indeed been the story of
The Arabian Nights
, this fair collection of stories, if it has one more story to tell. Being of various ethnic origins, including Indian, Persian, Chinese, and Arabic, the stories were modified in the process of telling and retelling, to conform to the general life and customs of the Arab society that adopted them
and to the particular conditions of that society at a particular time. Thus they circulated orally for centuries from the ninth century onward before they were collected and written down and began to be circulated in different manuscript copies, taking a path that intertwined with that of the oral tradition, until they were finally written down in a definite form in the second half of the thirteenth century, within the Mamluk domain, both in Egypt and Syria. Although that copy is now lost, its existence is attested to by the remarkable similarities in substance, form, and style among the subsequent early copies. All of them share the same nucleus of eleven stories, which persisted in all other manuscripts and which are:
“King Shahrayar and Shahrazad, His Vizier's Daughter”
“The Merchant and the Demon”
“The Fisherman and the Demon”
“The Porter and the Three Ladies”
“The Three Apples”
“The Two Viziers, Nur al-Din 'Ali al-Misri and Badr al-Din Hasan al-Basri”
“The Hunchback”
“Nur al-Din 'Ali ibn-Bakkar and the Slave-Girl Shams al-Nahar”
“The Slave-Girl Anis al-Jalis and Nur al-Din 'Ali ibn-Khaqan”
“Jullanar of the Sea”
“Qamar al-Zaman and His Two Sons, Amjad and As'ad”
All these early manuscript copies use the strategy of the frame story of Shahrayar and Shahrazad, dividing the stories into nights. Unlike later manuscripts, which contain one thousand and one nights, they contain about two hundred and eighty-two. Furthermore, the earliest versions, such as the fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript, show a certain cohesion and uniformity as a clear expression of the life, culture, and literary style of a specific historical moment, namely, the Mamluk period. I limited my first volume of translation of the
Nights
to the stories contained in this early manuscript, with a view to offering the English reader a specifically Mamluk literary work. The only exception is the omission of “The Story of Qamar al-Zaman,” as that manuscript contains only a few pages.
This second volume of the
Nights
is based, however, on a different consideration, prompted by the subsequent history of the stories. As their popularity increased, editors and copiers collected stories from various sources, from both the oral and the written traditions, and wrote them down in numerous manuscripts, preponderantly Egyptian, from the mid-eighteenth through the early nineteenth centuries. They deleted, added, modified, and borrowed passages from each other and kept adding stories, to create the compendious anthology
of folktales we now have under the title of
The Thousand and One Nights
or
The Arabian Nights
.
Eventually, the manuscripts became the basis for the printed editions, mostly of the nineteenth century. The first was the Calcutta edition (1814, 1818); the second, the Breslau edition (1824â43); the third, the Bulaq edition (1835), based on a late Egyptian manuscript whose editor, by adding and interpolating numerous tales, swelled the old text and subdivided the material until he had one thousand and one nights; and the fourth, the second Calcutta edition (1839â42), which was based variously on a late Egyptian manuscript, the first Calcutta, and the Breslau editions. All these editions were pieced together from various sources, not according to consistent, sound editorial principles, but solely for the purpose of producing the most compendious anthology of tales. The one notable exception is Muhsin Mahdi's recent work
Alf Layla was Layla
(Leiden, 1984). This is a painstaking, critical, and definitive edition of the fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript, but like its source, it is limited to the first ten of the nucleus stories, with the bulk of the eleventh, namely, “Qamar al-Zaman,” derived from a later manuscript.
Because of the authenticity, or rather the relative purity, of the stories in the Syrian manuscript version, as well as their general qualities, I, as I said, limited my first-volume translation to this text. But that left out an entire tradition, both written and oral, spanning the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries, and comprising hundreds of stories; I was reminded of this omission by both scholars and general readers, particularly those who missed their favorites, for from fairest creatures they desired increase. But although the solutionâto translate more storiesâseemed easy, it posed some problems. First, to translate the massive work in its entirety was out of the question, at least for me, since there are other fair creatures in this world. Second, to turn from the Syrian version, which is the closest to what one might call the “original” version of the written tradition, a version whose qualities I enjoyed and extolled, to later versions, which are inferior from a literary point of view, as I showed in the introduction to my first volume, seemed inconsistent and hard to do. Yet, somehow, the gap had to be filled, and a fair image of the
Nights
had to be presented. Therefore, I decided to compromise, by selecting among the stories those which, by representing the essential nature of the
Nights
, have captured the popular imagination. My choices, too, were determined by the existence of a reasonably good text.
The first choice was “Qamar al-Zaman,” thus giving me the opportunity to complete the nucleus by translating the eleventh story. After that, it was not difficult to decide on “Sindbad the Sailor,” “ 'Ala al-Din (Aladdin) and the Magic Lamp,” and “ 'Ali Baba and the Forty
Thieves.” The choice of text, however, proved more problematic. For “Qamar al-Zaman” and “Sindbad,” I chose the Bulaq edition over the second Calcutta, which is its rival among critics as the “standard edition,” simply because the Bulaq is less of a quilt, having fewer accretions and fewer random additions. To be sure, the editor of the Bulaq, following eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editorial practices, modified considerably the content and especially the style of the text, which was derived either from an oral version or from an older written version or both. For example, whereas the early versions vary in style from the colloquial to the literary from one story to another and even within the same story, the Bulaq is uniformly literary in style. But literary here does not necessarily mean superior, for what the style gains in “polish,” it loses in freshness and vigor. Such drastic editing reflected the biases of the Arab literati of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; these readers, including the editors themselves, regarded the tales with condescension, judging them to be entertaining in substance but “vulgar” in style, and appointed themselves to the task of “improving” them. Fortunately, the tales, in spite of any loss they may have suffered by being “improved,” have nevertheless maintained much of their beauty and vigor.
The choice of text for “'Ala al-Din” and “ 'Ali Baba” was much more problematic, for no available standard Arabic manuscript or printed edition contains these two stories, and no authentic source has yet been found. I therefore resorted to the French version of Antoine Galland,
Milk et Une Nuits
(1704â17). Galland, according to his diaries, first heard “'Ala al-Din” from Hanna Diab, a Maronite Christian from Aleppo, who may have subsequently written it down and given it to him for his translation. The first time the story appeared in Arabic was in 1787, in a manuscript by Dionysius Shawish, alias Dom Denis Chavis, a Syrian Christian priest living in Paris. This manuscript was designed to complete the missing portions of the fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript that Galland used for the first part of his translation of the
Nights
. The story appeared again in a manuscript written between 1805 and 1808, in Paris, by Mikhail Sabbagh, a Syrian collaborator of Sylvestre de Sacy. Sabbagh claimed to have copied it from a Baghdad manuscript written in 1703. However, careful examination of Sabbagh's and Chavis's versions, in light of the general styles of the
Nights
and of Galland's version, leads to the conclusion that they are not authentic. As evident from his French syntax and turns of phrase, Chavis fabricated his text by translating Galland back into Arabic; and Sabbagh perpetuated the hoax by improving Chavis's translation and claiming it to be a Baghdad version.
