Furthermore, they decorated the city after the goodliest fashion, and diffused scents from censers and burnt aloes wood and other perfumes in all the markets and thoroughfares, and rubbed themselves with saffron, what while the drums beat and the flutes and pipes sounded and mimes and mountebanks played and plied their arts and the King lavished on them gifts and largess.
And in very deed it was a notable day. When they came to the palace, King Shahryar commanded to spread the tables with beasts roasted whole and sweetmeats and all manner of viands, and bade the crier cry to the folk that they should come up to the Divan and eat and drink, and that this should be a means of reconciliation between him and them.
So high and low, great and small, came up unto him, and they abode on that wise, eating and drinking seven days with their nights. Whereat King Shah Zaman marveled with the uttermost marvel and said: "Fain would I take her younger sister to wife, so we may be two brothers german to two sisters german, and they on like wise be sisters to us; for that the calamity which befell me was the cause of our discovering that which befell thee, and all this time of three years past I have taken no delight in woman, save that I lie each night with a damsel of my kingdom, and every morning I do her to death.
If he accept this pact, she is his handmaid. Scheherazade, his vizier's daughter, concocts a plan to end this pattern. She marries Shahrayar, and then begins to tell him a story that night. However, she stops the story in the middle, so that he will be excited to hear the rest the following night.
The next evening, she finishes that story and then begins another, following the same pattern for 1, nights, until Shahrayar has a change of heart. The stories she tells comprise the collection. However, Aladdin outsmarts him, keeping the lamp for himself. Through the genie's power, Aladdin grows rich and marries the sultan's daughter.
When the magician steals the lamp back, Aladdin and his wife thwart and kill the villain. The magician's brother then attempts to avenge the dead man, but is equally defeated, so that Aladdin lives happily ever after.
In " Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," hardworking Ali Baba stumbles upon a thieves' hideout full of treasure, protected by a magic entry. When Ali Baba accidentally reveals the secret to his richer brother Cassim , Cassim gets trapped in the hideout, and killed by the thieves.
She lies to her husband about the mark, but he learns the truth and beats her severely before making her leave. She moves in with one of her sisters. They agree to remain single. At the end of the story, the Caliph summons the magical serpent to turn the dogs back into sisters.
He says that his son was married to one of the sisters, and he makes her go back to him. The three ladies are married to the dervishes, and the Caliph marries the last lady.
A frame story, often used with imbedded narratives, sets the stage for other stories to be told. Many of Shahrazad's stories also serve as frame stories for their characters to tell about their own adventures. Subsequent layers are the levels of stories within stories. The Thousand and One Nights often goes several layers deep. The Thousand and One Nights uses repetition to create a rhythm to the storytelling. For example, The Story of the three Calenders, Sons of Kings includes the embedded narratives of each of the Calenders.
There is also repetition in the story of Shahryar and Shahrazad, where Shahrazad tells part of a story every night and asks her husband for another day to continue the tale.
The stories use a variety of points of view. This has the effect of showing different perspectives in the world, including the female perspective. This encourages sympathy and understanding among the characters. The point of view also has an effect on the message. At the beginning, the king encounters a woman who is possessed by a genie, but chooses to sleep with other men.
He views her as an unfaithful woman. But a story from her perspective might show her as a prisoner trying retain some of her agency and get revenge on the genie. Many of the stories involve a character asking for mercy or forgiveness. In The Merchant and the Genie , the merchant accidentally kills the genie's son and will be killed for revenge.
But three sympathetic travelers make an agreement with the genie that the merchant should be pardoned in exchange for three fantastic stories. One of the travelers tells the story of how his wife turned his son into a cow. But the man didn't want his wife to die and had her turned into a dog instead as an act of mercy. Meanwhile in the frame story, Shahrazad asks the king to prolong her life.
So there are three levels of mercy occurring at that moment. Storytelling is used to soften the heart and elicit sympathy.
In The Merchant and the Genie, the three men exchange stories for a man's life. In The Story of the Three Calenders, the calenders share their life histories to prevent their being killed. In the frame story, Shahrazad uses stories to make the king forget his grudge against women and fall in love. Storytelling is also used as a warning. In the beginning, Shahrazad's father tells her stories to try to change her mind about marrying the king.
The Thousand and One Nights has been adapted into many films. These include Arabian Nights in , and Disney's Aladdin, which was released in with Robin Williams as the genie. It also influenced Jorge Luis Borges. Disney, n. Arabian Nights' Entertainments. New York: Oxford UP, Central Islamic Lands.
Digital image. She also brings the modern fiction writer's gift for psychological complexity to the rich-but-streamlined quality of the originals. I wanted to go deeper into the characters, move beyond the bare details, and give everything more depth. And I just wanted the writing to shine. She told me why she loves these stories--and how they dramatize the power literature has to make us feel more deeply, think more clearly, and become better people. They were dramatized on the radio for about one year, I remember, and I loved to hear about the merchants, the traders in the markets, jealous men, and demons, and the wickedness of women like "Delilah the Wily"--I adored her.
In fact, not many Arabs really know the stories. It's a long book, pages--and it's not available everywhere. It's seen by some as vulgar, and many are turned away by the archaic language.
Like most Arabs, I assumed the text was dated, psychologically simple, and hard to read. But later I discovered the beauty of it: I felt right away it is one of the most important and complex historical origins of literature. The theme of all the Arabian Nights is the oppressor and the oppressed. We see this tension play out through powerful Djinns locked in bottles, kings and their servants, parents and children--but mostly through women's battle for survival in a world ruled by men.
This is why the women of the stories are so wily: because cunning and trickery are the first recourse of the weak. These female characters become cunning to overcome the men who oppress them. They fight to make their own choices and live according to their beliefs about freedom, sexuality, and love. I recognized these qualities in my mother, who, in her own way, reminded me of the characters I used to hear about on the radio.
She was forced to marry my father when she was 14 years old. Later, she had a lover. And she conspired to see her lover all the time, although the family suspected and knew about her affair. She defended it and was so crafty that they would never be caught together. Like Shahrazad, my mother found her own way through craftiness, tricks, wiles, by being very intelligent and also a magician, in a way.
And the women in these stories in fact do find their own way--again and again, we watch as the powerless become powerful, and the strong become weak.
We see this contradiction at work inside Shahrayar, the all-powerful king. He rules absolutely but his enormous love for one woman, his wife, is his vulnerability. When he discovers that she's been unfaithful, it drives him to the point of madness, his love becomes hate, and his strength becomes weakness.
And he makes a bloodthirsty pronouncement:.
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