By the time of Muhammad’s death in AH 11 (AD 633), the armies of Islam had conquered the Arabian Peninsula the next generations would see the defeat of Byzantium, the successor state to Rome in the eastern Mediterranean, and of the Persian Empire and the incorporation of most of their lands into the Muslim sphere. Two years later, Muhammad defeated a Meccan force and began the expansion of what would become a mighty empire. This event begins the Muslim calendar, which reckons from the year of the hijra ( anno hegirae in Latin, or AH). In the year 622 of the Christian calendar, the Prophet Muhammad made the hijra, or withdrawal, from his home city of Mecca, where his preaching of Islam had made him many enemies, to the nearby city of Medina. THE LITERARY TRADITION OF THE ARABIAN NIGHTSīefore telling the story of Richard Francis Burton and his relationship to the Nights, a bit of background is in order. In effect, by his acts of translation and reinvention, Burton created a new work of literature that must be considered separate from the history of the Arabian Nights.
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Moreover, in his presentation of the Nights, Burton self-consciously transformed them into something quite different from what they originally were. Yet Burton’s life-linguist, explorer, swordsman, soldier, spy, adventurer, and world-class self-publicist-is so colorful, it threatens to overshadow both the stories themselves and the history of their translations.
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Although the Nights have inspired English writers as famous-and as disparate-as Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the Brönte sisters, the man most identified with the Nights in the English-speaking world is Sir Richard Francis Burton. Rather, we must rely on the skill of the translator-a subtle art that both crosses cultural divides and inevitably transforms the source material for good or for ill. Those of us who do not read fluent Arabic can, of course, never know the Arabian Nights in the original. The tale of how the Nights came to stand as a supposed monument of Arabic literature is itself a fascinating story. However, there is no transmission without transformation, and in many ways, the reception of the Nights tells us more about our own culture than it does about the Muslim world. The real value of the Arabian Nights is that the collection is one of the world’s great works of literary transmission. In addition, because they are translations by Westerners, they should perhaps be considered more a work of Western literature and a product of Western ideas of the East than an authentic vision of the Muslim world.
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Of course, this is utter contrivance: the Nights are more valued and widely read in the West than they are in Arabic culture. Evil viziers, beautiful sultans’ daughters, flying carpets, poor boys who are granted wishes by magic jinnis (or genies)-all have their origins therein.Īlthough such stories are supposedly intended for children, there is also a very adult element to the Arabian Nights, for even if they are fairy tales, they are thought to give us a window into a foreign, exotic world of incense-filled harems. The tales found in the Nights have been told and retold in movies, novels, and animation. Perhaps even more than the Koran, the holy book of Islam, the Nights are the text from the Muslim world that is most widely read in the West and thus the most identified, in popular culture, with Arabic history and customs.
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The Arabian Nights (also known as the Thousand Nights and a Night, or the Kitàb ‘alf layla wa-layla in Arabic) occupies a unique position among both Arabic- and English-language classics.