Thousand and One Nights / Obscene Pornography or a Great Work of Culture?

  Thousand and One Nights

"The Arabian Nights"

Obscene Pornography or a Great Work of Culture?

There are always voices in the Arab world that want to censor, "purify" or even ban The Arabian Nights. The latest call comes from a group of conservative lawyers in Egypt who have gone to court over the matter. They want to take a new edition off the market and replace it with an edition from which all "obscene" words have been removed. Samir Grees explains the background to the case

There are always voices in the Arab world that want to censor, "purify" or even ban The Arabian Nights. The latest call comes from a group of conservative lawyers in Egypt who have gone to court over the matter. They want to take a new edition off the market and replace it with an edition from which all "obscene" words have been removed. Samir Grees explains the background to the case

Ilustration by Olga Dugina

​​ There can be few works that have fascinated their readers around the world as much as The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1,001 Nights. For some people, the tales – taken from Indian, Persian and Arabic sources and told by Scheherazade – are almost as popular as the Bible and Shakespeare. Many writers, among them Voltaire, Goethe and Borges, have said how much they admire the stories and admit how indebted they are to them.

Thousand and One Nights / The Healing Power of Storytelling

 

Thousand and One Nights

The Healing Power of Storytelling

The new German translation of Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights) makes the oldest Arabic version of this famed collection of Oriental tales available for German readers for the first time. Ludwig Ammann read the new translation by Claudia Ott.Translated from the German by Jennifer Taylor-Gaida

The new German translation of Thousand and One Nights makes the oldest 15th-century version of this famed collection of Oriental tales available for German readers for the first time. Ludwig Ammann read the new translation by Claudia Ott

Interview with Claudia Ott / "Love is the Language of the Orient"

Ilustration by Olga Dugina

Interview with Claudia Ott

"Love is the Language of the Orient"

Following publication of her much praised German translation of The Thousand and One Nights, Claudia Ott has now turned her attention to the love poetry of the Orient. Mohamed Massad talked to the Arabist about the beauty and diversity of oriental poetryFollowing publication of her much praised German translation of The Thousand and One Nights, Claudia Ott has now turned her attention to the poetry of the Orient in Gold on Lapis Lazuli, an anthology of one hundred poems from three millennia of oriental love poetry. Mohamed Massad talked to the Arabist about the beauty and diversity of oriental poetry

Interview with Claudia Ott / A New Chapter in the History of Arab Literature

 

Interview with Claudia Ott

A New Chapter in the History of Arab Literature

An almost 800-year-old manuscript is shedding new light on one of the hidden jewels of Arabic literature. Orientalist and translator Claudia Ott recently identified the oldest known manuscript of "The One Hundred and One Nights". She talked to Loay Mudhoon about it

Claudia Ott: "'The Hundred and One Nights'" and 'The Thousand and One Nights' were contemporaneous with one another, the one probably better known in the west, the other in the east of the Arabian world."

​​Just a few days ago you found what is probably the earliest manuscript of "101 Nights". Can you tell us how this discovery came about?

Claudia Ott: In March this year, I was lucky enough to be invited as a musician to play at the opening of the "Treasures of the Aga Khan Museum" exhibition at the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin. After the first rush was over and I had a little time to wander through the exhibition, a manuscript in a glass cabinet with art objects from Andalusia caught my eye. It was some distance away from the other manuscript treasures on show, such as the "Blue Koran" with its gold script on a lapis lazuli background.

MLYNXQUALEYON TRANSLATION

‘We Are the Exception’: Translational Fidelity and the ‘Nights’

MARCH 22, 2016

At the 2016 American Oriental Society (AOS) meeting, held March 18-21, translator-scholar Bruce Fudge spoke about “Frugal Orientalism: Borges and the New Translations of The Thousand and One Nights.” Fudge, who’s at the University of Geneva, is also at work on the first English translation of The Hundred and One Nights (Kitab mi’at laylah wa-laylah), to be published by the Library of Arabic Literature:

The “frugal Orientalism” of Fudge’s talk comes from Jorge Luis Borges’ musings on Antoine Galland’s translation of the Thousand and One Nights. Borges goes on:

The basic problem remains: how to entertain nineteenth-century gentlemen with the pulp fictions of the thirteenth century? The stylistic poverty of the Nights is well known. Burton speaks somewhere of the ‘dry and business-like tone’ of the Arab prosifiers, in contrast to the rhetorical luxuriance of the Persians.

 

Bruce Fudge on the Differences Between ‘A Hundred and One Nights’ and the ‘1,001’

October 12, 2016

Bruce Fudge, Professor of Arabic at the University of Geneva and author of Qur’anic Hermeneutics: al-Tabrisi and the Craft of Commentary (2011), wanted to take a break from Qur’an commentary and “read all the things that religious scholars told you not to read.”

So when an opportunity arose to translate a text for the Library of Arabic Literature, Fudge suggested a collection of stories not unlike the 1,001 Nights. For while much of scholarship about classical Arabic literature is focused on high literature, he said, 1,001 Nights is just the tip of the iceberg of semi-popular stories. Fudge says that, when he first went around Moroccan bookshops asking about A Hundred and One Nights, booksellers told him that surely he meant the 1001. But, he says, he found that they were better-known than he’d expected.

In the first part of an interview about this edition and translation of A Hundred and One Nights, Fudge talked about where the stories might’ve come from and how they traveled, who might have produced and read the Nights, and what the use of Middle Arabic tells us about their composers, scribes, and audience.

 

A Hundred and One Nights: Part of the ‘Tip of the Iceberg’ of Popular Arabic Tales

October 5, 2016

Bruce Fudge, Professor of Arabic at the University of Geneva and author of Qur’anic Hermeneutics: al-Tabrisi and the Craft of Commentary (2011), wanted to take a break from Qur’an commentary and “read all the things that religious scholars told you not to read.”

 

Who was the “real” Aladdin? From Chinese to Arab in 300 Years

The following is a guest post by Arafat A. Razzaque, a PhD candidate in History & Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. He specializes in medieval Islamic social and cultural history, and has a secondary interest in the Thousand and One Nights, stories from which he first read in Bengali translation.

This article is the first of a two-part series about Aladdin. Part two, entitled “Who wrote Aladdin? The Forgotten Syrian Storyteller,” can be found here.

***

The recent clamor around Disney’s forthcoming remake of Aladdin (1992) was a vivid reminder that an entire generation of people today grew up enchanted by the film. Rumors about the studio’s alleged difficulty finding an actor to play Aladdin sparked renewed criticism of Hollywood’s diversity problem. The comedian Hari Kondabolu responded on Twitter: “Lots of brown kids got called Aladdin growing up. Now you…don’t want to cast one of us?”

 

Who “wrote” Aladdin? The Forgotten Syrian Storyteller

• POSTED ONSEPTEMBER 14, 2017

Ajam Media Collective

This article was written by a guest contributor and solely reflects the views of the author.

following is a guest post by Arafat A. Razzaque, a PhD candidate in History & Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. He specializes in medieval Islamic social and cultural history, and has a secondary interest in the Thousand and One Nights, stories from which he first read in Bengali translation.

This article is the second of a two-part series about Aladdin. Part one, entitled “Who was the “real” Aladdin? From Chinese to Arab in 300 Years” is available here.

***

Long before podcasts, the twentieth century’s first media revolution gave birth to what is called radio drama. In the 1950s, Egyptian Radio began broadcasting arguably the Middle East’s greatest modern adaptation of the 1001 Nights. It was produced by a pioneer of Arabic children’s programming famously known as Baba Sharo, who was a student of the towering Taha Hussein and later became the station’s chairman. Written by the poet Tahir Abu Fasha (who also wrote songs for Umm Kulthum), the series lasted 26 years on the airwaves, with 820 episodes total. As a child, the Lebanese novelist Hanan al-Shaykh would sit “glued to the radio” waiting to hear the captivating Zouzou Nabil, who voiced Shahrazad.

 

Naguib Mahfouz

Lost Naguib Mahfouz stories discovered in Nobel laureate's papers

This article is more than 2 years old

Fifty handwritten stories – 18 of which have never been published – by the late Egyptian writer were found in his daughter’s home

Alison Flood

Friday 9 November 

A lost collection of short stories by the celebrated Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz has been discovered in a box of the late Nobel laureate’s papers.

Naguib Mahfouz

 

Portrait of the Author as a Historian: Naguib Mahfouz

The ideas of a French philosopher provided the great Egyptian novelist with a way of assessing the good and the bad in his nation’s past.

Alexander Lee
History Today Volume 67 Issue 

1 January 2017

Throughout his life, Naguib Mahfouz felt caught between the timelessness of Egypt’s ancient past and the turbulence of its recent history. Even as a boy, he had felt it. Growing up in a devout Muslim household in one of Cairo’s oldest quarters, his childhood had been shaped by the unchanging obligations of faith and overshadowed by the legacy of the past. When he was not studying the Koran, he was playing in the streets of al-Gamaliya, not far from Saladin’s Citadel, or visiting the pyramids with his mother. But, though it was easy to believe that he was insulated from time’s flux, he could see that Egypt was changing around him. Over the preceding 40 years it had embarked on a process of rapid social and economic modernisation. Industrial development was spurred on by foreign investment, new roads and railways were constructed, educational reforms were implemented and scientific rationalism was exalted. Political changes were in the air, too. Though Egypt was notionally a British protectorate, liberal nationalism was on the rise and, before Mahfouz had turned eight, calls for independence had spilled over into violent revolution. 

Naguib Mahfouz (1911 - 2006)

Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006)

The 1988 Nobel prize-winner put modern Arabic literature on the map, says Robert McCrum

Robert McCrum
Sunday 3 September 2006

IN THIS SEASON of literary prizes, it is good to reflect that without the Nobel Prize, the great Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006) might have remained unknown outside the Arab world. Even in his native city of Cairo, he was always cult reading. Named after the physician who delivered him on

Naguib Mahfouz / Speaking for the People

 

Naguib Mahfouz

Speaking for the People

Tony McKibbin

February 14, 2018

What might it mean to “produce the novel of one’s generation”, (Paris Review) as Charlotte El Shabrawy proposes Naguib Mahfouz did with The Cairo Trilogy, a three thousand page book about Cairo life between the wars?  By extension, we might wish to ask what it means to be a writer of one’s nation? It is to this latter question we want especially to attend as we will look at both the work and the social context to understand the significance of Mafhouz, a writer of immense importance not only in the context of Egyptian literature but modern Arab literature too – so much so that to say he produced the book of his generation can almost seem more like understatement rather than hyperbole. A question worth asking within this one is of a writer’s immense importance in relation to the people, with the public they are not only writing for but somehow speaking for also. The best a writer from the UK, the US, France or Italy can expect is that they have written the book of their generation, as Fitzgerald may well have done with The Great Gatsby, as Moravia may have done with The Time of Indifference, as Michel Houellebecq may have managed with Atomised or even Martin Amis with Money. We do not judge the quality of the books; we aim to say no more than that there will be little opportunity for the writer to hold such a significant place as the writer of their nation because of so many competing figures. Along with Fitzgerald, there was Hemingway and Faulkner, as well as Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos and Sinclair Lewis. Moravia’s contemporaries would include Italo Calvino, Primo Levi, Giorgio Bassani and Cesare Pavese; Amis’s Ian McEwan, Alisdair Gray, James Kelman, Salman Rushdie, Angela Carter and Kazuo Ishiguro. Enough listing of names, however. Our point is merely to say that an Egyptian writer has the advantage of making a name for him or herself in an uncrowded field as a writer from the US etc. cannot. This would, of course, be based on the assumption that the writer wants to make a name for themselves and, perhaps alas, many do. As Rushdie says, “my friend Martin Amis has a wonderful phrase: ‘What you hope to do is leave behind a shelf of books.’ You want to be able to walk into a bookstore and say, ‘From here to here, it’s me.’” Rushdie also reckons The “world is drowning in books; even if you read a great masterpiece every day, you’d never be able to read all the ones that exist already. So if you want to add a book to that mountain, it had better be necessary.” Rushdie is here offering more than a couple of egoistic remarks (Harvard Business Review), but he is also implicitly indicating as a British writer (albeit with an Indian background) he is writing in this crowded market. He would appear to be speaking for himself and trying to reach others. Mahfouz, however, is perhaps an example of the reverse: someone who is writing for others but trying to find himself. Rushdie writes to produce literature out of what is already abundantly there; Mahfouz in creating literature gives both a voice to the people and generates a literature out of that voice.