The Thousand and One Nights in Arabic Literature and Society.

• Author: PINAULT, DAVID
• Position: Review

The Thousand and One Nights in Arabic Literature and Society. Edited by RICHARD C. HOVANNISIAN and GEORGES SABAGH. Cambridge: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1997. Pp. 121.

This volume comprises a collection of essays presented on the occasion of the twelfth Giorgio Levi della Vida conference, held in Los Angeles in 1989. The conference honored Andre Miquel, who chose, as the gathering's theme, the interplay of societal, historical, and literary motifs in the Aif layla wa-layla ("The Thousand and One Nights"). The seven essays in this conference volume offer a wide range of methodological approaches to this topic. Stanislav Segert's discussion of ancient Near Eastern traditions cites thematic parallels to the Nights in Ugaritic legends from the second millennium B.C. Segert is necessarily cautious in ascribing any kind of direct influence to these sources, referring us instead to twentieth-century scholarship which hypothesizes that early Jewish converts to Islam may have acted as an intermediary source for the introduction of Mesopotamian material into the Arabic literary tradition. The essay by Fedwa Malti-Douglas, "Shahrazgd Feminist," makes clear that the Aif layla today, b y virtue of Europeanlanguage translations and recent popular-format retellings for television and cinema, belongs to the Western as well as the Arabic literary tradition. Describing the heroine of the Nights' frame-narrative as "the perfect locus for a gender analysis," Malti-Douglas compares representations of Scheherazade in stories by Ethel Johnston Phelps and Nawal El Saadawi.

The other essays in this volume focus primarily on the Nights' relation to the Mamluk society in which the core-stories were redacted. Andre Miquel emphasizes the social utility of Aiflayla tales. In his reading, the rogues' guilds (cayydri[tilde]n) depicted in the tale of "Dalila the Cunning" were offered to popular audiences as "a model of resourcefulness and communal fraternity which open all doors, including the doors of power. In this case the tale functions as a recruiting agent." And Miquel analyzes the Sindbad-cycle as a guide to business ethics for pragmatic merchants who wished to turn a profit overseas without losing either their personal identities or their lives.

Jamel Eddine Bencheikh, in his study of "historical and mythical Baghdad' shows how Arabian Nights redactors borrowed love-story motifs from pre-Islamic Iraq and applied them to historical personages such as the caliphal...