![\"Placeholder\"](\"http:\/\/www.gildedserpent.com\/art57\/graphics57\/kathFraser\/colorizedoldstoryteller.jpg\")
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This paper is really about ideas\u2014how we play with them, refashion them, how we take old ideas and recreate them anew to suit new circumstances. <\/p>\n
In this paper I look at an old idea from the Middle East (and beyond), the story of Shahraz\u00e2d and explore some of things she is up to today.<\/p>\n
Everyone knows the story of Shahraz\u00e2d! Right? We seem to be able to just pick the details out of the air. She was the daughter of the chief minister. To take revenge on all women for his first wife’s unfaithfulness, the king married a virgin every night and had her killed in the morning. With a plan to stop the crimes Shahraz\u00e2d convinced her father to let her marry the king. She told the king a story on her wedding night, breaking off at a critical moment in the plot. Desperate to know the ending the king kept her alive for another day \u2014 this going on for “A Thousand and One Nights.” In the end the king “forgave” her, stopped the killings, and they lived happily ever after. In some versions her sister Dunyazad is present at these evenings of story telling. Sometimes Dunyazad marries the king’s brother. Sometimes Shahraz\u00e2d becomes a mother.<\/p>\n
Over the centuries Shahraz\u00e2d has demonstrated her stamina. All today acknowledge the immense influence of “Nights” on European literature, theatre, painting, music, film, dance and popular culture. Today Shahraz\u00e2d seems to belong to everyone, everywhere, anytime. Everyone seems free to use her as they please. <\/p>\n
Shahraz\u00e2d first captured me last summer when director Tim Supple<\/strong> brought his One Thousand and One Nights<\/em> play to Luminato, Toronto’s international annual arts festival (see bibliography). I felt obliged to attend the two evenings and six hours of performance but wondered why a sophisticated modern audience might like what I thought of as a tired orientalist piece. I became impressed with the cast drawn from across the Middle East and intrigued with the idea that the controversial Lebanese author Hanan el-Shaykh<\/strong> had created the play’s text from the original medieval Thousand and One Nights<\/em>. She says, with heart: “I felt as if I had opened the door of a carriage taking me back to the heart of my Arab heritage.” (Al-Shaykh. 2011, p.21)<\/p>\n In the end I got hooked and set off on my own Shahraz\u00e2d travels. <\/p>\n I began to research the literature and discovered there’s a whole one-thousand-and one-nights world out there today. It’s a legitimate field of scholarly study as well as a popular preoccupation \u2026 it’s vast, strong and growing. <\/p>\n Two hundred year’s scholarly attention to the Arabic texts of “Nights” reveals that there is no one book called The Thousand and One Nights<\/em>, written by a single author, at a single time. <\/p>\n Rather there now remain about 20 early (more or less similar) manuscript collections of stories written in Arabic and produced over the centuries. The earliest Arabic version of “Nights” (now lost) probably dates from 10th century Baghdad\u2014and even that<\/em> is based on an earlier Persian collection. Later 14th and 15th century Arabic collections added stories with a Cairo location to earlier ones sited in Baghdad, stories with attention to the important emerging middle classes. <\/p>\n Individual “Nights” stories have earlier versions of themselves originally from far and wide\u2014ancient Greece and ancient Egypt, India, China, Persia, Turkey, Byzantium.<\/p>\n Common to all older original Arabic versions of “Nights” was the so-called “frame tale” of Shahraz\u00e2d, the king Shahrayar, and Dunyazad the sister who also listened to the nightly stories. The frame tale not only opens and closes the entire collection of stories, but Shahraz\u00e2d’s voice also opens and closes each nightly story with the promise of more marvels the next evening. It is this frame tale of Shahraz\u00e2d that I explore here. Today she has escaped from the weight of “Nights” to have her own life. Scholar Fedwa Malti-Douglas<\/strong> claims: “the frame story of the 1001 nights is without doubt one of the most powerful narratives in world literature.” (p.11) Scholar Eva Salis<\/strong> says of her: “Many readings [of her story] are possible.” (87) Here I give your four of them.<\/p>\n 1st book – Arabian Nights & Days by Naguib Mahfouz<\/p>\n My first contemporary rereading of Shahraz\u00e2d comes from Naguib Mahfouz<\/strong>, winner of the Nobel prize for literature and Egyptian by birth. His highly political 1982 novel\u2014Arabian Days and Nights<\/em>\u2014takes place in a thinly disguised Cairo. (We should probably think of Shahrayar the king as president Hosni Mubarak<\/span>.) Mahfouz begins with the morning of the 1002nd day. King Shahrayar announces he has “forgiven” Shahraz\u00e2d. But later she confides to her father “A crime is a crime. How many virgins has he killed? How many pious and God-fearing people has he wiped out? Only hypocrites are left in the kingdom.” (p.4) From then on the novel concentrates on the true redeeming of the king and Shahraz\u00e2d hardly appears.<\/p>\n The novel relates fabulous, and often comic, tales of ordinary citizens of Shahrayar’s city, a series of murders and disappearances for which he must provide justice. His justice becomes more equitable as over time he wanders the city by night to learn truths about his realm. Power and corruption are increasingly addressed. In the end he turns over the kingdom to Shahraz\u00e2d as regent for their son, he leaves ordinary common people in positions of responsibility and he becomes a wandering mendicant seeking God’s wisdom.<\/p>\n![\"Antoine](\"http:\/\/www.gildedserpent.com\/art57\/graphics57\/kathFraser\/AntoineGalland.jpg\")
There are two interesting avenues. First, I give you a few key findings by scholars, from both east and west. Second, I give you four modern novelists who have reworked Shahraz\u00e2d to advance political and feminist agendas.<\/p>\n![\"earliest](\"http:\/\/www.gildedserpent.com\/art57\/graphics57\/kathFraser\/earliestcopy.jpg\")
The first “Nights” as a printed book appeared in Europe in 1705, with Antoine Galland’s<\/strong> famous translation into French. It became a literary sensation. Many other European translations soon followed, with each translator taking a highly personal approach to wording and censorship of the original Arabic.\u00a0 In recent years new Arabic compilations by Middle Eastern scholars have appeared, with subsequent translation into English (see bibliography<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n
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