The Islamic Context of The Thousand and One Nights

THE ISLAMIC CONTEXT OF

THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS

THE ISLAMIC CONTEXT OF

THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS

Mushin J. al-Musawi

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York,   Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2009 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-51946-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Musawi, Muhsin Jasim.

The Islamic context of the Thousand and one nights / Muhsin al-Musawi.

p.    cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-14634-0 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-51946-5 (e-book)

1. Arabian nights.    2. Islam in literature.   3. Arabic literature—

Islamic influences.    I. Title.

PJ7737.M75   2009

398.220953—dc22       2008039653

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Is There an Islamic Context for The Thousand and One Nights?

1. THE ISLAMIC FACTOR IN GLOBAL TIMES

The Islamic and the Foreign

Perspectives

The Early Vogue as a Global Index

The Frame Tale as Navigational Trope

Framing a Collection or Framing Cultures?

Warnings Grounded in Islamic Law

Multiple Approaches to the Frame Tale

The Moral Implication in the Frame Story

Resignation or Submission to Fate?

Narrating Cultural Consciousness

The Frame Story in Historical Contexts

The Frame Story as Urban Growth

2. THE UNIFYING ISLAMIC FACTOR

Narrative Challenge and Attraction

Upholding Human Propensity to Security

The Ordering of Good and the Forbidding of Evil

From Transmission to Narration

The Natural and the Supernatural Companionship

The Supernatural as Moral Authority

The Islamic Narrative Function

Loose Thematic Patterns

The Particular and the Universal in Religion

In Celebration of God

Binding Commitments and Pledges

Islamic or Not? The Nature of the Discriminatory Instance

The Islamic Law and the State

Law and Terms of Beauty

The Paradisiacal Referent

The Sanctified Sphere

Apostasy and the End of Narrative

Love or Sex?

Vicissitudes of Fortune and Human Frailties

3. THE AGE OF MUSLIM EMPIRE AND THE BURGEONING OF A TEXT

Representational or Parodic

Education and the Paradigm of Rise and Fall

Knowledge and the Growth of Empire

Education and Vicissitudes of Fate

Grounding in Magic

Education: Artists and Cultivated Taste

Refinement, Profession, and Class

Marketability and Freedom as Topography

Urbanity and Love

Tropes for Imperial Growth: Race and Acquisition of Slaves

Islamic Law and the Needs of the Empire

Expediency, and the Center That Does Not Hold

Narrative as Historiography

Vagaries of Politics

Wealth and Luxury as Signs of Deterioration

4. THE CHANGING ORDER: THE ROLE OF THE PUBLIC IN THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS

The Imperial and the Islamic

Sites of Popular Faith: Book Markets

Competing Centers or Competing Dynasties?

Metropolitan Temptations

Travels to the Metropolis

Professions and Crafts

Narrating the Journey of Consciousness

From Regression to Progression

The Liberating In-betweenness

Wine and Islamic Prohibitions

Social Interdependency

Idolatry and Monotheism

The Urban and the Imperial

Cairene Narratives and the Displacement of the Sacred

Ethics and Morals

Narrating Desire as Sexual Intrigues

Institutionalized Religion and Issues of Sects

Christians and Jews in an Islamic Environment

Heathen and Islamic Narrative

5. NONRELIGIOUS DISPLACEMENTS IN POPULAR TRADITION

The Unwritten Tale

As Medieval Narrative

Dichotomous Patterning in the Classical Tradition

Signs and Sites of Transgression

Appropriation for the Urban Classes

Urban Narrative Sites

6. THE PUBLIC ROLE IN ISLAMIC NARRATIVE THEORIZATIONS

7. SCHEHERAZADE’S NONVERBAL NARRATIVES IN RELIGIOUS CONTEXTS

What Is Nonverbal Narrative?

Scriptoria and the Blank Page

Iconic Inscription or Calligraphy

Talismans, Magical Practices, and Amulets

The Nonverbal in Human Action

Women’s Counterhegemonic Discourse

Mental Images and Pictorial Resolutions

Food Semiotics

The Zero Meal

CONCLUSIONS

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS BOOK has been living with me for some time. I began working on it in 1991, when I was in Yemen at Ṣan‘ā’ University. I continued working on it in Tunisia, at the University of Manouba, from 1993 to 2000. Throughout those years, I collected most of the material needed for my research. I began writing when I came to Columbia, where I found that its scope went well beyond my early concerns and plans. The book as it appears now engages issues and queries that long must have been in the minds of scholars and readers, especially regarding issues of morality, ethics, and religion.

I am grateful to the librarians at Manouba University for their help in procuring much needed material. Apart from many seminars I attended or read papers at, I benefited from the intelligent discussions at the Columbia University Arabic Studies seminar, and I am most grateful to the Columbia University Seminars administration and Professor Robert Belknap, for a generous grant that helped cover proofreading and indexing expenses. In this respect, I should acknowledge the diligence of Robert Riggs of the University of Pennsylvania, Jason Frydman of Columbia University, and my assistant Ryan Damron, for careful proofreading and editorial suggestions. I benefited from my students at Columbia University who, in the graduate seminar on the Thousand and One Nights, were thoroughly engaged in debates about issues pertaining to this book. I thank Kelly Boyce, Namrata Kanchan, Elias Abrar, Akash Kumar, Chermaine Lee, Suad Muhammad, Elizabeth Nolte, and Stephanie Saporito. I give special thanks to the Columbia University outside readers who read the manuscript and made very pertinent remarks and suggestions. Thanks are due to Roger Allen and William Granara for helpful insights. Richard Bulliet and Rashid Khalidi of Columbia University encouraged the publication of this book; to them goes my sincere gratitude. Portions of the last three chapters appeared in an early form in the Journal of Arabic Literature: Abbasid Popular Narrative: The Formation of Readership and Cultural Production, JAL 38 (2007): 261–292; Scheherazade; Nonverbal Narratives, JAL 36, no. 3 (2005): 338–362; and "The ‘Mansion’ and the ‘Rubbish Mounds’: The Thousand and One Nights as Popular Literature," JAL 35, no. 2 (2004): 329–367. I am grateful to Brill Academic Publishers for copyright permissions. I also thank Wendy Lochner, Anne McCoy, Christine Mortlock, Rob Fellman, and Michael Haskell from Columbia University Press for their support and care.

INTRODUCTION

IS THERE AN ISLAMIC CONTEXT FOR THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS

SEVERAL THINGS prompted this study of Islam in the Thousand and One Nights. There is, first, among academics and laypeople, an increasing interest in everything Islamic. The Thousand and One Nights, or the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, as it was called in English by its first Grub Street translator, has always been considered one of the world’s most entertaining books, but its title and concerns are Arab-Islamic, and thus it has drawn and should draw more attention as a repository of popular memory, collective consciousness, and cultural dynamics. We know that eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century Europeans, in the wake of the colonial incursions in the Arab east and India, were also drawn, in part, to the collection and its many abridgments and translations for this reason. The tales are part of a collective memory: they are the imaginative recreations or depictions of bygone things and images. They contain nostalgia and reality, dream and fact. But these elements are blended in a melting pot that can still overflow in spontaneous storytelling. Once written down, however, they were tampered with, scrutinized, and had their contents censored in various ways. The Būlāq edition (1835), for example, contains a tale in which the term Rāfiḍī appears, although this pejorative use in reference to Shīʿīs was not employed by earlier storytellers, as we see in Antoine Galland’s fourteenth-century version, for example.¹ This, however, does not negate the latent polarities that are kept under control. As with any cultural production, the tales unfold or appear in a climate that has been, and will be, divided between an Islamic ideology, with an interest in a sustained power politics that justifies a powerful order even if unjust, and an Islamic utopia that looks for an honest and just ideal savior who defends the oppressed in the face of tyranny and oppression. In the absence or enforced lack of well-established constitutional systems, such polarization will continue to exist within groups and societies.² However, the power of the tales resides somewhere else. It does not subscribe to this polarization but navigates smoothly between the two. Whenever a center is needed, the city of Baghdad is used, with its caliph, Hārūn al-Rashīd, who was usually celebrated in Europe after the publication of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Recollections of the Arabian Nights in England in 1830. In the caliph, storytellers invest their dreams of justice, wealth, beauty, humor, love, and luxury. In order to give an evocative impression of that historical person and his era, storytellers were willing to relate the most anachronistic or faulty historical details to their audiences. No sainthood is needed to dissipate gloom and depression. Wisdom emanates from the center, and the center is humanized and made into a pleasant abode of peace and comfort. Everything else, including jealousy, greed, anger, morbidity, cruelty, and despotism, passes through accommodating lenses to be pacified, calmed, corrected, and remedied. Even the basic informing dichotomy of male/female suspicion is resolved in tales and countertales. The underlying frame of reference is the pairing of opposites or of the same subject, pro and con, Aḍdād, which was a popular device in the eighth and ninth centuries, as Nabia Abbott noticed in reference to the cultural context of an early ninth-century fragment of the tales.³ The art of storytelling emerges as triumphant, pacifying Shahrayar, the king of China, and every other person, including the caliph himself, who listens to adventures with rapture and offers in the end his own gifts of reconciliation and rapprochement. The terms of storytelling production operate here as well, as the storyteller pampers the expectations of his audience and caters to feelings that otherwise might be hurt by direct or antagonizing religious or political overtones. The enveloping Islamic context is one of mercy, generosity, playfulness, and humor. Hence the perennial charm of the tales, a charm that surpasses historical record and hagiography.

Yet the tales have something deeper that eludes the superficial and pragmatic search for the depiction of probable customs, ways of life, and habits of thought. Even such cycles as the frame tale of Scheherazade and Shahrayar or the mendicants’ itinerary of fortune, misfortune, and repose may hold other meanings, ones the French and English romantics felt but were not keen on exploring. Scheherazade’s counternarrative, employed to defuse the morose king’s vengeful and vindictive plan, works within the parameters of Islamic faith, which objects to wholesale denunciations. The young abducted bride in the frame tale whom the ifrit assumes to be a virgin proves to have experienced many extramarital relations, affirming the two kings’ belief in the impossibility of faithfulness among women. This point should be disapproved of by queen Scheherazade, whose mastery of storytelling enables her to recollect stories of sincere love and sacrifice. Here she relies on a large corpus of Arab love lore of sacrifice and devotion. In other words, the Thousand and One Nights shows both sides of human sexuality and behavior, but it is bent on dissipating absolutism. Scheherazade’s premise is in keeping with Islamic tenets this book will study in the following chapters. On the other hand, the mendicants’ tales are Sufi tales, but the urban storyteller must accommodate them to his urban listeners, whom we can imagine as gathering in a certain corner of the marketplace, away from the watchful eyes of the market inspector⁴ or the scrutiny of the caliph’s advisors.⁵ Their itinerary from distress to adventure, from a seeming paradisiacal bliss to eventual self-reproach and ultimate resignation to the will of God, is only an urbanized appropriation of the Sufi path from the ego-self, the sanctuary of desires, to heedlessness and confusion, then from self-reproach to love and inspiration in moments of ecstasy, and ultimately to total contentment upon the immersion in divine beatitude. The journey was given allegorical forms by many Sufis, and especially by the martyr Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyā al-Suhrawardī (d. 587/ 1191) in Haykal al-nūr (The Shape of Light).⁶ In other words, the Islamic sub-text is strong enough to require attention, and it calls for meticulous reading. Islam in this respect is not confined to its message or to its rituals and obligations, though these have a strong presence in the tales. As it appears in the Thousand and One Nights, Islam is a way of life, a culture, and a context for aspirations, adventures, love, enterprises, and vicissitudes. According to Louis Massignon’s reading of the mainstream Sunni application, Islam is primarily "adab, ‘sociability,’ ‘civility’ in the broadest sense, hence a ‘rule of life.’⁷ Furthermore, even when we read some portions of the Qurʾān in their contextual terms as applying to the early reception of the Islamic Message, the tone is strongly suspicious of Bedouins. The Bedouins are the worst in disbelief and hypocrisy and more likely to be in ignorance of the limits which Allah has revealed to His Messenger" (Al-Tawbah, Repentance, 9:97). Moreover: And of the Bedouins there are some who look upon what they expend for a fine and await the turns of fortune to go against you (98). But there are some who believe in God and the Last Day, and look upon what they spend in Allah’s cause as means of nearness to God (99). The tales take it for granted that the moment a character is out in the wilderness, there are robbers and Bedouins who endanger one’s life. The book is urbanized and appropriated to meet the needs of city dwellers—thus the appeal of the Thousand and One Nights to readers beyond the narrative’s geographical borders.

There are other reasons, however, that relate to the occasion of the first translations of the collection into European languages. In celebration of the first appearance of Antoine Galland’s translation of the Thousand and One Nights (Contes Arabes) three hundred years ago (1704–1711), a number of studies have recently appeared that are mostly concerned with analyzing the tales of the Thousand and One Nights in view of new research interests. These include compilations of early and modern contributions, such as Ulrich Marzolph’s The Arabian Nights Reader.⁸ These interests are in keeping with the growth of cultural studies and the increasing preoccupation with such issues as class, gender, race, and nation. Such new focuses should receive a positive response from Arab scholars who understand the breadth of literature in Arabic culture. However, two things are glaringly missing in most studies, old and new: (1) the Islamic factor, including institutionalized religion, state institutions, and faith or mass religion as a religious sentiment that can constitute and operate strongly on structures of feeling; and (2) the underlying narrative unity in the tales as brought to us, not only in Antoine Galland’s manuscript but also in an earlier nuclei, notably presumed to be part of the circulated editions of the collection in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, as Nabia Abbott contends.⁹ These include the extant frame tale, the hunchback cycle, the story of Qamar al-Zamān and Princess Budūr, the stories dealing with the ruses of men and women, along with "The Wonders of the Sea, The Tale of Sindbad, and The Cat and the Mouse."¹⁰ The latter were obviously popular enough to threaten the formal education of young princes. They should have also included appropriate tales from Hazār Afsāna. Although the repetition of motifs and patterns have been discussed by scholars, there are other narrative patterns that are in keeping with the Islamic factor and not strictly with the morphological, symbolic, or psychological cycles.¹¹ Edward William Lane’s copious annotations, compiled later in book form by his nephew Stanley Lane Poole,¹² does not count, for it is an effort to meet the demands of the Victorian middle classes and the colonial apparatus for a manual to complement his other studies of Egyptian society. Other compilations of the tales are no less important, but they are less central to this study than Galland’s version, which is probably in keeping with the cursory mention of the tales in classical Arabic bibliographic and encyclopedic collections. On the other hand, the Būlāq version is an appropriation of many manuscripts, but it makes use of Galland’s version, the oral tradition, and also the European demand for a thousand and one tales. It serves a different purpose, however, for it demonstrates the intervention of compilers, editors, and redactors in matters relating to the Islamic context of the tales. Especially in religious matters and poetic extracts, this edition can authenticate or debate the nature of poetic misreading or distortion and its historical relevance to the primacy of specific Islamic laws in certain periods.

The present book argues that a work of such a composite nature, regardless of its authorship and primary audiences, cannot have and have had such enormous vogue and influence without a strong Islamic literary and cultural climate. Even its rejection by Arab classicists should be seen in context, for had it not been popular, nobody would have bothered to acknowledge its existence. Abbott is not far from this position when she contends in her 1949 article that "copious literary evidence indicates that the lighter literature, the khurāfāt [fables] and asmār [night tales] to which class the Nights belong, shared all along the way in this rapid and extensive movement [an enormous literary harvest], though generally on a somewhat lower level of respectability."¹³ The discerning British essayist and critic Bernard Cracroft wrote on the Thousand and One Nights in 1868: No book ever took possession of the world without . . . an antecedent national pedigree of overwhelming literary power and force.¹⁴ The premise should not be taken lightly, for the Islamic factor in its Arab milieu furnishes storytellers with a cultural force and a capacity to digest, appropriate, and reflect on the realities of the new metropolis that was Baghdad and its emergence, rise, and fall. While many Arab and non-Arab readers have spoken of or written on non-Islamic matters in the tales, only a few discerning critics among European intellectuals have argued for the amount of specifically Islamic piety in them.¹⁵ This Islamic factor should be given greater attention in order to fathom both the literary and cultural power of the tales and their undiminished attraction and appeal to different audiences in other cultures and nations. This premise applies also to the underlying unity that has been lost to scholars whose attention was diverted by the seeming fragmentation and incoherence of many tales. This book argues that insofar as the primary texts are concerned—that is, Galland’s and the extant ones mentioned in Abbott’s conjectures—there is an underlying unity both in matters of repetition and recurrent motifs, as already noted by scholars,¹⁶ and in the burgeoning and traveling of a frame tale into a metropolitan culture of great urban power. The royalty of the frame tale, as well as the allegorical dimension of its sequels, their natural and rural milieu, gives way to the complexity of urban life, where the court is no longer sovereign and detached and where humor brings royalty down to earth. In an urban context, even Shaykh Ibrāhīm, the caliph’s gardenkeeper in the story of Nūr al-Dīn and Anīs al-Jalīs, surrenders to the intoxicating atmosphere of music and wine when he is in the company of the young couple who unknowingly decide to spend the night in a spacious garden that happens to be attached to the caliph’s palace. The story plays on the religious borders of obligation and the irresistible temptation of physical beauty, wine, and music. Its focus on human desire and the search for delights is balanced, however, by a counternarrative filled with reminders of misfortune, deceit, jealousy, and the transience of pleasure. Imam al-Shāfʿī’s poetry is quoted quite often in this tale.¹⁷ The tension and polarization between faith, obligation, and temptation is so strong that it triggers action, travesty, and humor, all of which enable the urban mind to go beyond the strictures of authority and religious laws and reach for an appropriation of these in a new order, which is urban Islam. The elements that hold the first 271 nights (that is, Muhsin Mahdi’s edition of Galland) together have many things in common with many interpolated, added, or actual parts of the collection, but there runs in these tales specific aspects of urban production. In the story of Nūr al-Dīn and Anīs al-Jalīs, every motivation, from love or sexual scenes to the threats of hanging and the appearance of another fisherman and fried fish, alerts us to the surging sardonic humor that tinges the new metropolitan life and prepares us for the vagaries of politics.

Two more arguments hold the present book together. One relates to the philological and textual questions that have been in the minds of many scholars since the early appearance of the book in Europe. The dating of the book as a compilation was once the most central question for scholars and researchers. Many concluded with the current premise that, as a compilation over time, the book defies specific dating. Indeed, such is the case. But is this important to know? Or should we conclude that no matter when the book took shape there runs throughout the tales a cultural prism, which we will call the Islamic factor, that serves to identify attitudes and perspectives? The nostalgic recollection of Baghdad alerts us to the role of memory in culture. This memory evolves collectively and operates on every walk of life, cutting across borders in time and place. The mendicants’ tales might have been written in Cairo by a scribe who had heard of Baghdad and read about its old days, but collective memory endowed him or her with the power of collating and merging the past with the present, the historical evidence with a new yearning for old Baghdad, producing something unique and of so much appeal as to resist oblivion. Apart from this nostalgic mood, there are poetic interpolations and theological discussions that demonstrate the supremacy of two schools of law: the Shāfʿī (named after the jurist and imam Abū ʿAbdallah Muḥammad ibn Idrīs, d. 204/820) and the Ḥanafī (named after the imam Abū Ḥanīfah al-Nuʿmān, d. 150/767). Both of them were widely honored and accepted in Egypt and Iraq. Both had a great reverence for the Prophet’s family, and Abū Ḥanīfah al-Nuʿmān relied on the teachings of the sixth Shīʿī imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq (d. 145/765). The cultural underpinnings of the tales, especially in relation to the growth of some schools of law, should lead us to the cultural formation of storytelling and its contextual fabric and religious sentiments. The sardonic humor and playfulness that distinguish the style of these tales should, on many occasions, indicate that these schools were less restrictive than later tendencies, discussed in subsequent chapters, that were aggressively applied in Syria in the thirteenth century before migrating and spreading among desert tribes. As the study of contexts in many redactions of the tales assumes such significance, we should no longer waste more time on assigning specific dates to the collection as a whole.

The second argument relates to the Galland edition’s reception in France. We should always remember that Galland undertook the project with caution and tact and that he addressed the salon life in particular, with its highly refined salonniers and attendants. The refined ladies who ran those salons were in full control of an educated society. They were able to impose an elegant atmosphere on discussions and conversations that might have lapsed into debates and adamant contentions. The art of conversation that developed in these salons was the fruit of this leadership.¹⁸ It is no surprise that Galland addressed his translation to a female patron, and his daring and intelligent Scheherazade was most likely very appealing in these circles. To be sure, there are other reasons and explanations, which have received attention somewhere else.¹⁹

In chapter 1, with its focus on the Thousand and One Nights in a global age, I argue that it is not a random case to have a frame tale transplanted from Indo-Persian cultures to a dynamically powerful Arab-Islamic one, where it flourished. It built around itself a good number of stories. These mostly speak of or convey urban life in medieval Islam—that is, the late Umayyad (661–750) and the ʿAbbāsid dynasties until the fall of Baghdad (750–1258) and also the Mamluk rule (1250–1517)—from roughly the eighth century until the end of the fourteenth century. A literary development such as this could not have taken place without the existence of elements and factors contributing to such a growth, which, in the present case of the Thousand and One Nights, quickly caused it to become the most celebrated work in other cultures. The present book proposes to determine how and why this occurred. It will look into aspects and systems of thought and behavior that define the art of storytelling and will simultaneously demonstrate the universal appeal of the Thousand and One Nights, while searching for the underlying Islamic pattern that holds the composition together, especially in its most acceptable and scholarly celebrated versions.

A basic premise that runs throughout this proposed explanation of the logic behind the rootedness of the frame tale in a new culture is that it originally catered to the burgeoning urban life and its compromising attitudes and appropriations of the forbidden and the desired in Arab-Islamic societies, especially the Baghdadi society of Abbott’s fragment. The growing of a transplanted tale into a collection, its blooming into a panoramic scene of many sites and colors, is a metaphor for the cherished city that became its spatial frame of reference. Baghdad itself passed through similar stages to become the center of the universe. In that city, sociability assumed its known civilized shades despite the vagaries of its politics. Remember that Scheherazade is able to domesticate the imperious king through a socialization process that makes good use of storytelling. His haughtiness and anger are replaced by sensibility, understanding, and humor. The morose king evolves into a family man who is aware of life’s complexity and richness. The systematic narrative vacillation between the wiles of women and their affection, loyalty, and love, along with the contrasting debates with or against them, must have the right effect on the mind of the haughty sultan. This subtle balance that distinguishes many tales of diverse intentions and diversions is not foreign to the Baghdadi cultural milieu of al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 869), al-Bayhaqī (d. ninth–early tenth century C.E.), Badīʿ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī (d. 398/1008), and others who, along with the rhetoricians and their muwāzanāt (contrasting/assessing debates), reveal a great deal about the urban mind that distinguished Baghdad at that time (the eighth to twelfth centuries C.E.) and Mamluk Cairo later.

The second chapter argues that the transition into an urban society of great complexity finds itself well expressed—but not reflected—in this collection. One may suggest that other tales and collections that supposedly migrated from Indo-Persian sources, such as ibn al-Muqaffa’s (d. 759) Kalilah wa-Dimnah, are no less significant in this respect and deserve the same analytic application. The latter is an allegorical work with impressive insights into statecraft, human nature, and, by implication, right belief. However, it does not confine its address to the suburban audiences of the new Islamic city, the disenfranchised communities, the lower middle classes, or the mixed societies of the new Islamic nation. Nor does the premise apply to the assemblies, either Badīʿ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī’s or Abū al-Qāsim al-Ḥarīrī’s (d. (446–516/1054–1122) Maqāmāt. In both there is an urban core that operates strongly within markets, houses, and community assemblies. They convey an interesting picture of this urban life as they reflect on trickery; disparity between urban and rural life; drunkenness as a practice among the elite; corruption in the judiciary system; defilement of sanctuaries, sacred places, and mosques; and the interest in debates. Indeed, Badīʿ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī’s Ṣaimariyyah Maqāmah contains all the properties and components of urban life. Its focus on the vicissitudes of fortune, tricks, drunkards, city gossip, and physical outlook makes it distinguishable as an urban piece of narrative. Yet these works emanated from a different frame of mind: the mind of the intellectual as an alien and the growing separation from the court in keeping with the increased involvement in urban life. They first target the educated and the learned, who are expected to appreciate their eloquence, rich style, and humor. They also cater to the rising classes in general. No wonder that al-Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmat took as a model Badīʿ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī’s assemblies, to become one of the most recommended texts for the improvement of students’ Arabic.²⁰

According to the basic premise of this study, mixed, multiple, and anonymous authorship and the evolution into a collection cannot take place outside a powerful metropolis, a center widely recognized as the haven of safety and resourcefulness. The miserable losers of the paradisiacal bliss, the palace of forty doors in the third mendicant’s tale in the cycle of the porter and the three ladies of Baghdad, warn the third mendicant not to stay with them: we will never harbor you or let you stay with us. Get out of here, go to Baghdad, and find someone to help you there.²¹ The three mendicants are limited by their human nature, its curiosity and restlessness, and cannot therefore settle for a life of ease, joy, and abundance. Kicked out of this bliss, they find no other place to restore their humanity than metropolitan Baghdad in its heyday during the reign of Hārūn al-Rashīd. As the center of gravity, Baghdad, just as Mamluk Cairo later, drew all to its markets, streets, mosques, palaces, and culture. While the Commander of the Faithful (amīr al-muʿminīn) is at the heart of the center, the mosque is no less so, even in the most adventurous stories of love and marriage. The mosque is made subordinate to the vicar of God, the Commander of the Faithful. In an important moment in the history of the ʿAbbāsids, the caliph al-Rashīd was to secure the oath of allegiance to his sons. The formal document that was sent to all quarters of the empire spoke of this as God’s will and decree: The command of God cannot be altered, His decree cannot be rejected and His judgment cannot be delayed.²² The tales spoke of his orders in the same manner. Gravitation toward the center has this dynamic, which has at times a tinge of pragmatism both because of Baghdad and its lucrative business and orderly life during the reign of the Commander of the Faithful and because his offers can bring such opulence and affluence. On the other hand, the nonpragmatic connotations refer to a dimension seemingly beyond the reach of others, for absolute authority, if undefiled and well sustained, partakes of supreme power, which is usually reserved to God. Only under the auspices of Islamic faith, as supervised by the Commander of the Faithful, can smitten individuals or desperate losers retain their humanity and wholeness as responsible human beings. Before the gradual deterioration of the caliphate order set in from the tenth century onward, the first ʿAbbāsid establishment built its divine claim and legitimacy on its descent from the Prophet. Thus, Dāwūd, the brother of the first ʿAbbāsid caliph, Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Saffāḥ (749–754), described for the Kūfah Muslim community in the great mosque there his vision of the retrieval of historical usurpation of power by the Umayyads and its return to the Hashemite ʿAbbāsid family: God has let you behold what you were awaiting and looking forward to. He has made manifest among you a caliph of the clan of Hashim, brightening thereby your faces and making you to prevail over the army of Syria, and transferring the sovereignty and glory of Islam to you. In order to connect the historical lineage in more concrete terms, he added: "Has any successor to God’s messenger ascended this your minbar save the Commander of the Faithful ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib and the Commander of the Faithful ʿAbd Allah ibn Muḥammad?—meaning his brother Abū al-ʿAbbās.²³ Loaded with Qurʾānic references to the Prophet and careful to avoid rifts with the Quraysh tribes, he concentrated on the immediate need of building up legitimacy through lineage. Every thing or power should be subdued hereafter in the presence of the Commander of the Faithful or the mention of God. The ʿAbbāsid caliph Abū Jaʿfar al-Manṣūr (r. 754–775) established Baghdad as the new capital (762 C.E.) with the blessings of God. He laid the first brick with his own hand, wrote the historian al-Ṭabarī (839–923 C.E.), saying, ‘In the name of God, and praise to Him. The earth is God’s; He causes to inherit of it whom He wills among His servants, and the result thereof is to them that fear Him. . . . Then he said, ‘Build, and God bless you!’"²⁴ With this loaded blessing, the city derives its sanctity from this discourse, which is also the discourse of the caliphate in its struggle against its rivals from other dynasties and clans. The mixed discourse of authority, legitimacy, and need set the terms for a new empire that was soon to spread and rule over large areas in Asia and Africa.

This mixed discourse takes another turn in the tales, and it becomes more heterogeneous to accommodate different cultures, classes, races, and nations. For instance, in the tales the market remains an important center for the growing empire—and thus for narratives—but the mercantile class gravitates toward the court and its images of captivating women-in-waiting or well-placed maids and slaves. Black slaves share power through their knowledge of intimate secrets, and they also play the role of attendants and guards on many occasions. The same thing applies to maids, women singers, and stewards. Even ifrits and jinn participate in earthly life, bringing people together or punishing them for transgressions. Yet the universe as described in the tales is under the auspices of the caliph as the Commander of the Faithful. On the other hand, and despite the premise of divine right, the Commander of the Faithful is also challenged by humor and passionate love to assume a rather human size.

More important to this argument is the focused emphasis on the paradigm of rise and fall and the moral associations that are in keeping with both Islamic law and the sacrosanctity and inviolability of the court, a subject that is the primary concern of the third chapter. The frame tale establishes the nucleus of disruption, totality, and democratization. It gains support from its other embedded stories, which narratively reverse the cycle of fragmentation and disorder both through the deposition of supernaturally and magically empowered women and through the use of human reason and the increasing momentum of the liberating women who align themselves with new aspirations and thus help in setting up the terms of equality and mutual recognition. These women cut across race, color, and class, and they function in the narrative as a force that balances and undermines the association only of betrayal and deceit with women or blacks. The black girl, who is sitting at . . . the feet of the eldest lady of Baghdad is there to repay her for her kindness.²⁵ This occurs in the tale of the eldest lady in the cycle of the porter and the three ladies, which depicts a mixture of business life, adventure, travel and challenge, and family tricks and jealousy. The lady is repaid, however, for taking care of a snake whose sister turns out to be a supernatural being who saves the Baghdadi lady from drowning. In the same cluster of tales, the stories that follow give name to the new effort, its cultural and national identity, and its Islamic character. Such are the tales that are part of The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad, the embedded mendicants’ tales, and the steward’s tale, which also shows the other side of paradigmatic designs.

The countermovement outside the center toward Damascus, Cairo, and China provides us with the other side of the rise-and-fall paradigm. The ensuing disintegration touches social and family relations and prompts other journeys and adventures, as in the tale of the two viziers and the story of the hunchback and its cycle. The paradigm of rise and fall, which ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406 C.E.) applied later to a societal framework, took an apocalyptic turn in the practices of ascetics, whose warnings emphasize the discrepancy between Islamic piety and the affluence of the state and its lavish expenditures, as in the pieces of anecdotal literature related by Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 1111 C.E.) in his ḥisbah treatise.²⁶ There are many similar pieces in popular narrative, but in the collection of the Thousand and One Nights one comes across only The City of Brass and,²⁷ perhaps, its prototype in the first lady’s tale in The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad. Many readers were shocked then and now by the waywardness of the tales, their transgressions of Islamic law, and their conspicuous application of urban needs and desires.

In line with the urban premise, and integral to it, is the issue of adultery and love, family and social institutions, and gender and class relations. These are important and central dynamics in the making of this Arab-Islamic narrative. They are so both because storytellers gratify the interests of suburban classes and primarily because they largely depict the cultural consciousness of the urban classes in the age of empire. We should keep in mind that the frame tale is back in motion only after the two royal brothers conceive adultery as common and that they should deal with it in their own way to keep the kingdom inviolable and intact. Adultery rarely passes without punishment in the tales; the case of the abducted bride and the ifrit in the frame tale is an exception, as it combines abduction, fornication, and revenge in a wilderness where laws do not hold. As the family becomes as institutionalized as the state in its keeping with middle-class ethics, its strength and unity is behind the dynamic storytelling, its cycles of loss and gain, disappointment and joy.

Transgressions, including familial matters such as greed, jealousy, and deceit, have a place in this narrative. The empowering element is Islamic law, which the storyteller manages according to his understanding of how things should be, an understanding that usually deviates from some schools of law in certain matters. It certainly differs from the regressive tendencies of desert Wahhābism. Nevertheless, there is a unifying Islamic factor in this narrative that accommodates schools of law and popular attitudes in a cohesive frame of mind that has, nevertheless, its anachronisms and drawbacks, as the third and fourth chapters will argue.

Power is no longer concentrated in the palace and the court. As the frame tale loses its centrality and gives way to the tale of the three ladies of Baghdad and the tales of the mendicants, which unfold in the same place, so do the court and its commanding sovereign. The public sphere takes over, enforcing its own logic and turning the private sphere, like the house of the three ladies, into a public one enjoyed by mendicants and porters. Evolving into a public place, with mendicants, porters, disguised merchants, jinn, and dogs, it becomes henceforth the right space to test the authority and sovereignty of the disguised caliph. The storyteller’s navigation among the official Islamic madhhabs (schools of law) gives precedence to the Iraqi Ḥanafite school, followed by the Shāfʿī madhhab, both for its relatively accommodating approach to matters of urban nature, such as music, drunkenness, adultery, and other familial and societal issues, and for its emergence in the burgeoning and subsequent heyday of the ʿAbbāsid Empire (actual reign, 750–945 C.E.).²⁸ Subtle narrative techniques and designs impose coherence and unity on these themes, which otherwise may well escape the undiscerning eye.

The fourth chapter focuses more on thematic narratives and public concerns, where a tension or rapprochement exists between laws as prescribed in ḥisbah (moral and legal market inspector’s duties) manuals and the narrative drive that caters more to the demands of the urban and suburban tale. Topics that seem irrelevant to Islamic law and other wider laws function also in an Islamic orbit. Subjects such as humor, street gatherings, marketplace meetings, the roles of women, administrators, city maps, mosques, oaths, transactions, the fusion of the natural and the supernatural, apocalyptic visions, and the presence of diviners and letter writers are rich with Islamic implications. These implications exist both in the juridical sense and in a broad cultural context where the empire has its gifts, obligations, and demands. Professions appearing in a colorful and diversified application and function receive due attention, as these function also within broad thematic concerns including love, family, class, and the vicissitudes of fortune and vagaries of politics. Professions and their public sphere become the dynamic space for action and, thus, for narrative.

The fifth chapter follows these narrative topics with an analysis of the tales as popular literature, a literature no less threatening to the elite and its centers of power than the sprawling suburbs that historically became a nuisance, if not a menacing presence, to the caliphate’s center and its privileged domains. In this context, the tales move away from the basic frame tale toward another habitat, where the disguised slaves of the garden scene in the frame tale are more powerful in their own mounds and outskirts, though they remain within the reach of the intimidating rod and sword of authority. Suburban representations are the other face of social exclusion, and what can be excluded from respectable narrative can enforce its presence and power through the imaginative flights of the storyteller who leads the enchantress queen, in The Tale of the Enchanted King, to the mounds outside the palace, to surrender to a wretched vagabond with whom she is in love. On the other hand, education itself is no longer the privileged possession of royalty and the wealthy classes; it can also be a weapon in the hands of slaves, barbers, and professionals. This is why there must be a comparative approach to the implications of inclusion and exclusion in narrative.

In the sixth chapter, there is a discussion of the birth of a narratological corpus, driven by facts on the ground in a bourgeois milieu. The primary narratives that are passed on to us as readers are usually acceptable to the privileged classes. However, they are not the ones we meet in the so-called adab al-ʿāmmah, or the literature of the common public, the plebeian. This cultural product, which we come across in the historical accounts of civil wars, reaches us in fragments such as the Chartist literature in England, for example. It rarely appears in standard histories, for its exclusion