Title VI Department of Education Grant, The Middle East and Cross-Regional Connections.
Whose Arabian Nights?

Cynthia L. Giddle
Community College of Philadelphia

1. Unit Title: Whose Arabian Nights? Islamic, Arab, Persian, and Western visions (Religious, Secular, Literary, Fine Art Perspectives)
2. Course: English 101/108

3. Nature of Course and Target Audience: As English 108 is a course in learning across several disciplines as well as a study skills course, I look for core texts that are particularly enriched by readings from several disciplines, such as history, art history, sociology, and religion. The Arabian Nights is certainly such a text, with an interesting history of translation and appropriation in the West and a pan-Arab fictional landscape that draws on several Middle Eastern cultural traditions (of Persian illustration and epic, as well as pre-Islamic Arab poetry) as well as Islam and the Qu'ran.
Though students come to English 101 to practice essaywriting and argumentation, they find, in my experience, more satisfaction with the course when the reading that prompts writing is serious and significant, with cultural weight. The Arabian Nights offers entry into many literary and cultural and historical questions.
Materials for this course (i.e. this unit) are often easily adaptable for other humanities and literature courses, especially Humanities 101 and English 208 (Introduction to Prose).

4. Unit Goals:
a. Through supplemental reading and viewing, students will discuss/analyze the Arabian Nights
As a representation of Islam and the Qu'ran
As a development of Persian and/or Arab poetry
As a set of influential Arab stereotypes created by the West
As sociological/anthropological/historical study of class and gender in
the "medieval" Arab world
b. These comparisons will offer new ways of understanding and synthesizing material from different disciplines that will culminate in papers that rely on close and outside reading to create arguments supported by a small (1-3 entries) bibliography.
c. The material will provide students with some basic sense of the history of Islam, the geography of the Middle East, the indeterminacy of many texts, and the patterns of storytelling.

5. Introduction to Material/Background Knowledge Required:
Western audiences suspect that they know the Arabian Nights-through Disney's Aladdin or 1950s technicolor Sinbad adventures or 19th century translations (principally Lane and Burton) that influenced writers like Charlotte Bronte (who used Arabian Nights as a submotif in Jane Eyre). However, only recently was a definitive (and authentic) edition of the earliest, extant 14th-century Syrian manuscript published in Arabic (Mahdi 1984) and then translated into English (Haddawy 1990). Earlier English editions feature many translation errors and extreme cultural biases; they were influential in creating Arab stereotypes. The Appendix includes a chronology of these translations.
Haddawy's translation may surprise Western readers as it does not include the tales of Aladdin and Sinbad (though the popularity of the first volume led to a second that includes some of these more familiar and less "original" stories) and it does include much Islamic material, such as prayers (the opening "foreword" resembles the opening prayer of the Qur'an) and allusions to religious figures and practices.
These stories have had a profound effect on Western readers in the last two centuries, but also in the Arab/Islamic world, though sometimes they are dismissed as crude popular literature or even banned as pornography. Naguib Mahfouz and Salman Rushdie have refashioned the tales into modern novels. The ladies reading group in Lolita in Tehran discusses and categorizes the women of the AN.
The stories take place across the Arab world in China, Persia, India, and modern day Armenia although many are set in and around Baghdad and the court of the "golden age" caliph Haroun Al-Rashid (5th Abbasid caliph 786-09). He and his sidekick Jafar offer some continuity of character across stories.
The organization of the book is intricate and often deliberately misleading; Haddawy's table of contents can't reflect this complexity so sometimes substories are not listed. Also stories set up as exemplary often don't prove the example or fit the situation. There are a number of patterns: echoes of the storytelling necessity of the frame tale (save your life tell a story), stories by groups (usually of three, though sometimes the promised third story isn't told) of like individuals (for example: all metamorphosed into animals, all with a missing limb/eye), stories of deceptions (often by women), stories of quests, of demons /djinns and metamorphoses. The Foreword (part of the work) makes a series of claims for the purpose of the AN: 1) moral instruction; 2) teaching the art of discourse (useful for composition students?); 3) teaching history of kings; 4) teaching how to avoid deceptions; and 4) sheer fun and escape.
Toward the end of Haddawy's translation the stories are longer and less interrupted, though they feature many scenes and unexpected twists. They also follow a couple of generations of characters within families.
Possible literary sources:
Persian love stories: Nezami's Khamseh (especially the unhappy "Layla and Majnun") written in the 12th-century seems apt for comparison with the AN love stories, especially the three extended love quests near the end. The verse describing ideal beauty resembles the MANY such verses interspersed in the stories of the AN.
Pre-Islamic Arab love poetry: the qasida with the pattern identified by Michael Sells-paradise, exile, wine boast, sacrifice, re-acceptance into community-seems apt to describe the structure of some of the AN stories and the verse forms, especially descriptions of despair in love and joy in drinking, resemble MANY verses of the AN.

6. Student Readings and Other Learning Materials:
a. Arabian Nights. trans. Husain Haddawy. NY: Norton, 1990.
b. Zimmerman, Mary. The Arabian Nights, a Play. Evanston: Northwestern, 2004.(adapted from the English Lane translation)
c. Irwin, Robert. "Low Life" (Ch. 6, p. 140-159) and "Sexual Fictions" (Ch. 7, p. 159-178) from The Arabian Nights: A Companion. London: Allen Lane, 1994.
d. Qu'ran: surah 1 (the opening),
surah 4 and surah 2 (especially 187, 223, 228, 231, 282 (women's roles), either
surahs 2:30-39, 7:11-27, 15:26-43, 20: 115-124, 38: 71-85 (the five Eden
accounts)
or surah 27 (Bilquis)
e. Bible: Genesis 2: 21-25 and 3 (Eden) or The Book of Esther
f. Nizami, "Layla and Majnun" (p. 49-65) in Chelkowski, Peter J. Mirror of the Invisible World: tales from the Khamseh of Nizami. NY: Metropolitan Museum, 1975. (This book includes as well short summaries of "Khosrow and Shirin" and "The Seven Princesses" along with beautiful plates from the Met's 1524/5 edition of the Khamseh)
g. "Jullanar of the Sea," Edward Lane and Richard F. Burton translations
h. "The Mu'allaqa" by Labid (qasida) from Desert Tracings. Trans. Michael Sells. Middletown: Wesleyan Univ Press, 1989.
i. One chapter: of Clot, Andre. Harun Al-Rashid and the World of the Thousand and One Nights. NY: New Amsterdam Books, 1989.
j. Esposito, John. "Ten Things Everyone Needs to Know About Islam" from Things Everyone Needs to Know About Islam. NY: OUP, 2002. Available online:
http://arabworld.nitle.org/texts.php?module_id=2&reading_id=62&sequence=1

7. Pre-Reading Assignments:
One day discussion of Islam and the AN Foreword before the first reading assignment in AN: Assign Esposito "Ten Things…" on Islam; discuss "Foreword" to AN (part of the work) in comparison to surah 1 (the opening prayer); listen to opening prayer sung (Sells CD). Assign reading chart with map (See Appendix).

8. Classroom Activities/Calendar:

Week One:
Arabian Nights: Prologue, through p. 30 (Frame story and Scherazad's first cycle of tales, which features a Merchant whose own life is saved by the tale-telling of others)
Comparative Bible/Qur'an stories:
1) Eden stories (Cf. Falls from innocence to garden scene of Shahrayar awakening to knowledge of women)
OR 2) Book of Esther and Bilqis (Surah 27, especially 23-44)
(Both powerful queens with influence on kings, like Scherazad)
Irwin, Chaps. 6 and 7 (women's lives and the urban context of the tales)
Purpose: Analyze the character of Scherazad and women in relation to Christian/Muslim archetypes and historical background (Irwin).

Week Two:
Arabian Nights: p. 30-66 (an intricately connected set of stories that begins with a fisherman who ries to save himself from a demon through an analogy: this pattern continues as each subsequent story opens another analogy; this sequence does conclude on p. 66; Scherazad does finish some stories and yet live)
Arabian Nights: p. 66-114 (another storytelling occasion, with women holding power and demanding stories; this sequence opens with an explicit naked "naming of parts" in a pool; somehow the women are ultimately considered chaste and married off after the storytelling, which is attended eventually by Haroun Al-Rashid and Jafar)
Qasida: "The Mu'allaqa" by Labid
Chapter from Andre Clot's book about Harun al-Rashid
Purpose: Analyze the plot of AN stories/poetry with another pattern in mind (the paradise, exile, return structure of quasida and its wine-boasts, sacrifices, descriptions of beauty) and another element of history (the caliph who figures in many of the stories, Harun Al-Rashid, who first enters with his vizier Jafar on p. 77; his court was in Baghdad).

Week Three:
Arabian Nights: p. 295-344 : "Nur al-Din Ali ibn-Bakkar and the Slave-Girl
Shams al-Nahar" (desperate love story/quest ends in death of both)
Arabian Nights: p. 344-383: "The Slave-Girl Anis al-Jalis and Nur al-Din Ali
ibn-Khaqan" (desperate love story/quest ends in marriage)
Both of these stories include MANY poems on beauty and love; select a few for discussion of patterns; both stories also feature the court of Haroun Al-Rashid.
Nizami's "Layla and Majnun" (written in 1188): 20page summary version
(reproduce plates as well for students)
British Library on-line gallery of Layla and Majnun images:
http://www.imagesonline.bl.uk/britishlibrary/controller/subjectidsearch?id=11531
Visit to Art Museum: Persian Miniatures
Excerpt from Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East
Purpose: Analyze the sense of beauty and love in AN in relation to that in one of Nizami's love stories, "Layla and Majnun" and Persian visual art tradition, as well as the representation of slavery and race.

Week Four:
Arabian Nights, p. 383-428 (the end), "Jullanar of the Sea"
Other translations of this story: Lane, Burton, Zimmerman (based on
Mathers/Mardrus translations)
Visit to Rare Book Room, Free Library (collection of Arabian Nights
manuscripts)
Purpose: Analyze variations in translations of this story and kinds of western illustration. (Dulac in 1907, Maxfield Parrish in 1907, Chagall in 1948, Matisse in 1950).

8. Writing Assignments and Possible Exam Questions:
(Paper assignment and Exam questions used in English 101: see appendix)

Sample assignment: Using "Jullanar of the Sea" as a culmination of the AN sequence and a "conclusion" (though the tales are famously unending: most modern retellings focus on trying to end them), ask students to apply some ideas and comparisons from weeks one through three in a focused analysis.
"Jullanar of the Sea" begins with Jullanar's "inter-racial" marriage to the King of Persia (she's a sea creature; he's a land creature) after her manipulating/instructing him through silence (same as Shahrazad or not?); then the story becomes the love-quest of her son Badr who eventually after being metamorphosed multiple times into a bird and metamorphosing one of his female opponents into a mule conquers his recalcitrant love Jauhara and marries her.

English 101/108: Paper on AN
Requirements: 1000-1500 word essay in response to suggestions below, wordprocessed, titled, with a thesis and supporting argument; quoted support (in MLA form) must include at least one historical/religious/literary source beside the AN, and one other story from the AN besides the frame and "Jullanar"; bibliography with at least two entries in MLA form.

Suggestions:

1) Does this last constellation of stories, "Jullanar of the Sea," contradict or reinforce the assumptions Shahrayar held about women's behavior and character when Shahrazad began her stories? Is Jullanar the ideal woman-if so, what is that ideal (Bilqis, Layla, the beloved of the qasida?)? Are there still more evil, lusting enchantresses than good women?

2) What does Badr, another man beset by and hunting for women, learn in his
quest? Does this story fit a pattern of such quests or is it unique?

3) What makes a woman in the end desireable and beautiful and good? Are these qualities mutually exclusive or connected? (Do the descriptions of Jullanar and Jauhara and Lab match the portraits of women in Persian illustrations, love poetry?)

Note: in choosing which background material to incorporate as support for your argument, it might help to ask yourself which of the traditions we studied in Weeks 1-3--Islamic, Pre-Islamic Arab, or Persian-seems closest to the patterns, characters, and behaviors of the last set of stories.

4) (Requires bibliography of at least 3 entries): Do the more western translations
of the Jullanar sequence offer a radically different view of women and/or love than that in the Haddawy translation?

9. Instructor Bibliography
Retellings: (Note: these I've read and recommend; there are a number of others listed on Arabian Nights Resource website)
Barth, John. "Dunyazadiad" in Chimera. NY: Fawcett, 1972.
(focus on the sister, Doony, as audience in postmodern, meta-critical way)

Mahfouz, Naguib. Arabian Nights and Days. NY: Anchor, 1982..
(gritty supplement, Scherazad's life with child in the Cairo ghetto)

Poe, Edgar A. "The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade"
(Scherazad predicts future and is killed for it, without really finishing the story)

Rushdie, Salman. Haroun and the Sea of Stories. London: Granta, 1990.
(quest for absent mother, Indian pop culture spin, Rashid becomes the Shah of Blah, the Sherazad figue "Blabbermouth")

Additional Criticism and Backgrounds:

Approaching the Qur'an. Trans. Michael Sells. Ashland: White Cloud Press,
2002.
Burton, Richard F. "Julnar the Seaborn and her son King Badr Basim of Persia"
in The Arabian Nights tales from a Thousand and One nights (intro A.S. Byatt). NY: Modern Library, 2001.
Irwin, Robert. The Middle East in the Middle Ages: the early Mamluk sultanate,
1250-1382. London: Croom Helm, 1986.
Lane, Edward. "Jullanar of the Sea" in Best Selections from the Arabian Nights
entertainments. NY: Hart Publishing Co, 1976.
Lewis, Bernard. Race and Slavery in the Middle East: an historical enquiry. NY:
OUP, 1990.
Nizami. Layla and Majnun. Trans. Gelpke. NY: Omega Publications, 1996.
Pinault, David. Story-Telling Techniques in the Arabian Nights. Leiden: Brill,
1992.
Seyed-Gohrab, Ali Asghar. "The Ideal Beloved" (Chapter Eleven) in Layli and
Majnun. Love, Madness and Mystic Longing in Nizami's Epic Romance.
Leiden: Brill, 2003.
Shacker, Jennifer. "Otherness and Otherworldliness: Edward W. Lane's Arabian
Nights" in National dreams: the remaking of fairy tales in nineteenth-
century England. Philadelphia: Univ Penn Press, 2003.
Stowasser, Barbara. Women in the Qur'an. NY: OUP, 1994. (especially either
Ch. 2 on Eve or Ch. 6 on Bilqis)
Wadud, Amina. Qur'an and Woman. NY: OUP, 1999. (especially p. 23-6 on
Eden or p. 40-2 on Bilqis)
Women in Iran from the rise of Islam to 1800. Ed. Guity Naskat and Lois Beck.
Urbana: Univ of Illinois, 2003. (especially "Taming the unruly king:
Nizami's Shirin as lover and educator, " Fateneh Keshavarz)
READING NOTES: ARABIAN NIGHTS

While reading the AN, you need to keep track of patterns in the stories. Fill in this list as you go (as well as annotating the book), using shorthand and page numbers. Examples given for "Jullanar of the Sea."

MAP: Number the stories, beginning with the prologue in the Table of Contents; put the number of the story on the map in its proper location (if mentioned and actual).

Places: Khurasan (Persia), sea-kingdom, "City of Magicians"
Deceptions: Lab's adultery
Metamorphoses: bird (Badr twice), she-mule (Lab),
Guests: Badr for Jauhara
Evil women: Jauhara (refuses love, metamorphoses Badr into bird), Lab (Circe-like metamorphoses all men after loving them briefly, like Shahrayar?)
Use of language/stories: Jullanar's silence

Islamic allusions (five pillars):
Qur'an: (396)

Religious figures: Solomon (389), sea people his descendants

Declaration of faith (shahada): (419)

Prayer (salat): appeals to God's mercy (397) (402)

Alms (zakat): (389)

Ramadan, Hajj, other practices: veiling (411)

Qasida features:

Exiles: Badr from Persia

Journeys/Separations: Badr's multiple journeys

Drunkenness: Badr and Lab

Verses: (419)

Sacrifices: Jullanar's acceptance of slavery?

Returns: Jullanar rescues her son and completes his quest

Persian features

Love denied: Jauhara resists

Madness in love: Badr's relation to Jauhara and Lab

Descriptions of Beautiful women: Jullanar, Jauhara, Lab

Verses: (400) (401)