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Essay on Gender Relations in "The Thousands and One Nights"
"Thousand nights and one night" is the title of the most famous Arabian collection of fairy-tales and other stories. One often reads or hears nowadays "like a fairy-tale from the thousand-and-one nights", and, indeed, the fairy-tales are the most striking part of the collection.
Like all Orientals the Arabs from the earliest times enjoyed imaginative stories; but since the intellectual horizon of the true Arabs in ancient times before the rise of Islam was rather narrow the material for these entertainments was borrowed mainly from elsewhere, from Persia and from India, as we gather from the accounts of the Prophet's competitor, the merchant al-Nadr. In later times when Arab civilization had grown richer and more comprehensive the literary influence from other countries was, of course, much stronger.
An attentive reader of the "Nights" will soon be astonished by the manifold variety of their contents: they resemble in a way an Oriental meadow with many different beautiful flowers intermingled with a few weeds. On the other hand, the reader will notice that these stories comprise a very wide field: there are stories of King Solomon, of the kings of ancient Persia, of Alexander the Great, of the caliphs and the sultans on one side, and stories in which guns, coffee and tobacco are mentioned on the other side.
The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, also known as The book of a Thousand Nights and a Night, 1001 Arabian Nights, or simply the Arabian Nights, is a piece of medieval Middle-Eastern literature in the style of a frame tale. The nucleus of these stories is formed by an old Persian book called Hazâr Afsâna (the Thousand Myths) The later compiler and translator into Arabic is reputedly storyteller Abu abd-Allah Muhammed el-Gahshigar in the 9th century. The frame-story of Shahrazad seems to have been added in the 14th century.......
