The Islamic Context of The Thousand and One Nights

Muhsin al-Musawi

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780231519465
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

In this fascinating study, Muhsin J. al-Musawi shows how deeply Islamic heritage and culture is embedded in the tales of The Thousand and One Nights (known to many as the Arabian Nights ) and how this integration invites readers to make an Islamic milieu. Conservative Islam dismisses The Thousand and One Nights as facile popular literature, and liberal views disregard the rich Islamic context of the text. Approaching the text with a fresh and unbiased eye, al-Musawi reads the tales against Islamic schools of thought and theology and recovers persuasive historical evidence to reveal the cultural and religious struggle over Islam that drives the book's narrative tension and binds its seemingly fragmented stories.

Written by a number of authors over a stretch of centuries, The Thousand and One Nights depicts a burgeoning, urban Islamic culture in all its variety and complexity. As al-Musawi demonstrates, the tales document their own places and periods of production, reflecting the Islamic individual's growing exposure to a number of entertainments and temptations and their conflict with the obligations of faith. Aimed at a diverse audience, these stories follow a narrative arc that begins with corruption and ends with redemption, conforming to a paradigm that concurs with the sociological and religious concerns of Islam and the Islamic state. By emphasizing Islam in his analysis of these entertaining and instructional tales, al-Musawi not only illuminates the work's consistent equation between art and life, but he also sheds light on its underlying narrative power. His study offers a brilliant portrait of medieval Islam as well, especially its social, political, and economic institutions and its unique practices of storytelling.

1

THE ISLAMIC FACTOR IN GLOBAL TIMES

“Whether an Arab or a foreigner, he is a brother dervish.”

DERVISHES ARE not alone in speaking of global fraternity beyond ethnic or social distinctions.¹ The mendicants’ journeys to Baghdad, after a series of adventures and misfortunes, testify to Sufi unease at settlement of any sort and to deep recognition of the vagaries of time. On the other hand, the frame tale is transactional on more than one level, for it buys life with narrative, and it collapses physical virginity with narrative virginity, where whatever is new and unfamiliar suffers use, both the new story and the virgin maid. It may not be superfluous to mention John Barth’s recurrent reference to this element or trope as a testimony to the power of the unexhausted and the new. In The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, a parody of Sindbad’s voyages in the New World Order as ordained by the first Bush administration and its advisors before 1991, Scheherazade says that her last story will be “a virgin story in both respects, for it’s about virginity, too.”² The new order will also invade and defile, like the giant ifrit who abducts the young bride on her wedding night. But, as if to beat power on its own terms, the virgin maid proves to be too sophisticated for both her husband and the ifrit, as she has already gathered a good number of wedding rings from people who have formerly made love to her and entrusted her with their secrets and stories. The virginity trope both in Barth’s novel and in Scheherazade’s tales resists and defies Islamic prohibitions of extramarital sexual relationships, but it also subscribes to the postcapitalist unrelenting desire for others.

The tales are a testimony to this movement and navigation among religions, regions, ethnicities, and nations. They contain moral constraints and taboos as well as laxity and expressions of human ingenuity. This plethora of voices, desires, interests, and claims underscores its globality and perennial appeal to different nations and cultures. Even the emergence of the mufāḍalah subgenre (prioritization on the basis of virtue or merit), its transposition from literature onto cities and nations, is another sign of a newly tolerant and accommodating outlook that is no longer restricted or constrained by prejudice or a group solidarity. On the other hand, the appearance of commerce as the force behind the exchange of ideas, styles of life, and cultivation of minds and souls establishes the tales as global symptoms. The journey may change its purpose and incentives every now and then, as many tales, including Sindbād’s voyages, demonstrate, but the outcome is the same and the achievement testifies to an urban mind geared toward global faring. No matter the reasons behind the journey, there is also some moral support for the migrational endeavor, and imams and jurists provide encouragement and solace to people in this search. Homelands are where you find love and affection, says one poem quoted from the imam al-Shafʿī.³ This outlook does not gloss over the troubles and vagaries of politics and misfortune, but the tales have the underlying premise of cordiality and rapprochement, which is bemoaned at times by contemporary critics as wishful thinking. The subtext of the tales beckons to a world without borders, but it also raises questions regarding power politics and the role of self-interest, selfishness, and greed in augmenting the urgent desire for a pleasant settlement. However, now more so than at any other time or age, the Thousand and One Nights may stand as a unique representative of a global age. The case is so not only because of its wide dissemination as a cultural commodity in cultural industry and production but also because it has already beckoned to an age beyond borders and limits. With its magic rings, lamps, and talismans, and with its mixed races and cultural diversity, the collection has already anticipated an age of transregional communication and mobility. The imagination behind the collection was congruent with the metropolitan life and imperial center that was the Baghdad of the ʿAbbāsid times and the Cairo of the Mamluks. Its success in the West should not be seen only in terms of narrative appeal since, apart from this significant fact, the collection pointed to an age of discovery and provided incentives for human reason to travel beyond limits into unmapped horizons of search and achievement. The imagination behind the collection has already seen through the human mind’s whims, anticipations, expectations, inhibitions, and desire to control the universe. It has already drawn the map for research and discovery. Every finding has a root in an imaginative flight. Apart from its feminist overtones and narrative power as a celebration of art and its supremacy against heavy odds, the frame story should be read in terms of the new age. Its achievements have bypassed communication barriers despite hegemonic cultural industry. We have to look upon the components of this imaginative galaxy through cultural lenses that detect comparisons between the past and the present. The demon who transforms a mendicant—who was once a son of a king—into an ape is as supreme and dominating as global capital’s machinery and force, which can change many communities and individuals into mimics and hybrids. Every agency corresponds to something or to some power that we take for granted today as central to the extant world order. The disillusioned kings who decide to roam the lands like dervishes encounter first the kidnapped bride and her kidnapper, the monster, who has a free hand in both sea and land, much like global capital and its war industry. Alternatively, and within the frame-clustered tales, the fisherman’s colorful fish sums up the enforced erosion of identities. Religious communities change into fish under the merciless power of magic and enchantment, and their islands are transformed into hills surrounding the lakes under the same magical power. This tale can serve as an ironic trope for the devastation of cultures and identities that accompanies the achievements of the global village. The “inhabitants of my city, who belonged to four sects,” says the ensorcelled king, were “Muslims, Magians, Christians, and Jews,” but his wife, the enchantress, turned them into fish.⁴

In all the redactions of the Thousand and One Nights, however, there is an Islamic tinge that grows at times into a definite shade and trace whereby everything assumes a clear and simple Islamic character. It may not sound as definitive as decrees and classifications we come across in ḥisbah (market inspector’s duties) manuals, which speak early on of such matters as the division of the lands of the Muslims (Dār al-Islām) and the lands of war (Dār al-Ḥarb, that is, non-Muslim territory). Nevertheless, there is a narrative prioritization of Muslims in comparison to non-Muslims, as the tales of the barber and his brothers demonstrate. The system exemplified in these tales pertains to what is expected from the community itself, its Muslims and dhimmīs, which is not similar to what is expected from the latter when belonging to a Dār al-Ḥarb territory. In Yaḥyā Ben Adam’s Kitāb al-Kharāj (d. 818 C.E.),⁵ for instance, there is a definitive statement from the second caliph: “I wrote [said the speaker in the quote] to ‘Umar b. al-Khaṭṭāb [the second caliph] about people from ʿAhl al-Ḥarb entering our territory, the land of Islam, and settling there. ‘Umar wrote to me: if they stay six months, collect the ‘ushr [tithe] from them, but if they stay a year collect half-‘ushr.”⁶ Along such geographical and cultural lines of demarcation, faith is upheld as the criterion. In the aforementioned case, there is both the Islamic equalizer that considers all Muslims as one nation or ummah, regardless of race and color, and the separation from non-Muslim territories according to a number of laws and regulations. A good number of tales treat the mixed community in an Islamic quarter (dhimmīs or non-Muslims from communities with scriptures) as having the same rights and responsibilities, but they also describe distinctions that set them apart from Muslims.

In other words, despite the diversity and globality we come across in the tales, the collection remains a cultural product of specific characteristics and features that can be described as Arab-Islamic. Edward William Lane, the second major translator into English of the Thousand and One Nights, associates the transactional nature of the frame tale, art for life, with the Arab propensity for eloquence and appreciation of romantic tales: “Eloquence, with them, is lawful magic: it exercises over their minds an irresistible influence.”⁷ Although confusing storytelling with eloquence, the remark is apt as a testament to the art of storytelling but not to any rhetorical power as recognized by classical Arabic poetics. This general Islamic quality is not the one that traditionalists and conservative jurists seek; it is rather a cultural bent that comprises the mood and predilections of an urban society that finds justifications and excuses for little diversions, daily entertainments, and minor transgressions. Although these urban societies were under the purview of the muḥtasib’s office, the continually updated ḥisbah manuals indicate that these urban societies were in need of more authoritative inculcation and edification in Islamic law, as a body of decrees and regulations that apply the basics in the Qurʾ ān and the Prophet’s tradition to emerging situations and societies. The process of inculcation is worth understanding, for, as al-Ghazālī (d. 1111 C.E.) argues in Iḥyāʾ ‘Ulūm al-Dīn (The Revival of the Religious Sciences), where there is a treatise on ḥisbah, “even in the town most people are ignorant of the rulings of Islamic law concerning the conditions for prayer, so how must it be for the villages and the nomads among whom are Arabs, Kurds, Turks and other ethnic groups?”⁸ The storyteller should have been aware of that, and, as shown in the story of the slave girl Tawaddud, there was a good grasp of Islamic law on the part of storytellers as probable preachers. On the other hand, the tale, which was probably available when the caliphate was still in Sāmarrāʾ (836–892 C.E.), offers a critique of an authority based on artificial application of the Muslim law and lacking the capacity to deal with multifaceted and variegated issues. It snatches authority from this chancery and administrative structure, represented by jurists and the court entourage, and claims it as the right of a citizen, the slave girl as a reasonable human being. In other words, at the time of the Zanj rebellion (869–883 C.E.) in Basrah, where the slaves were openly offering their interpretation of Islam in opposition to the ʿAbbasids, the tales offer their own reading of Islamic law in concordance with reason and conscience. Public opinion, as expressed in rebellions or in other expressions and schools of rationalism that were still powerful then, signifies something other than subordination and obedience. There was no mere allegiance but rather what Habermas calls “the implicit law of the parity of all cultivated persons,” which he discerns in eighteenth-century Enlightenment discourse in Europe.⁹

THE ISLAMIC AND THE FOREIGN

Yet the collection offers a variety of readings and perspectives that demonstrate a medley, too, albeit with a general Islamic color. With a mixed agenda and concern, the collection offers an Islamic context that we may meet in entertaining collections compiled in the tenth and eleventh centuries and onward. The Thousand and One Nights remains uniquely different from these collections because of its collective authorship and its obscure development and growth, a fact that also explains its defiance of systematic patterning or classification. This accumulation of different manuscripts and redactions deserves a close look. Each period or site of redaction or compilation has unique ideological predilections and interests. A manuscript in Baghdad of the late ninth century containing the tale of the slave girl Tawaddud is not identical with another one circulated in the twelfth century in Syria or Cairo. Indeed, the increasingly rigid tendencies among some later traditionalists are a far cry from early pronouncements. They have the professional enforcement of law as applied by an increasingly powerful class in times of foreign invasions.¹⁰ The celebration of women’s arts was no longer sustained, and by the fourteenth century, we have ibn al-ʾUkhuwwah speaking of the need not to teach writing to women, for (and he uses unsupported tradition) a woman taught to write is “like a serpent given poison to drink.”¹¹ The same difference in narrative perspective and detail, especially in matters of jurisprudence, may well be traced to fourteenth-century copies. In other words, Islam is a common denominator in the collection as long as it is a cultural application and exercise of rituals and basic articles of faith. The case is not so whenever there is a mention of or silence on the nonofficial schools of law or other faiths. There is fluctuation in opinion and narrative method in such cases that should alert us to historical contexts. Yet the tales have a generalized Islamic context that can easily elude search for particular cases. This context is as diverse and colorful as is life in the cities during times of affluence and change.

As a cultural commodity in a global age, the collection in its many redactions can offer itself easily to multifarious productions in the cinema, the Internet...