An analysis of the "Tale of the three apples" from The thousand and one nights
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Arabian Nights in Czech and Slovak literature and research
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Arabic literary refinement and the Arabian Nights
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Arabic manuscripts of the Thousand and One Nights
This book contains the first complete list of all known Arabic manuscripts of The Thousand and one Nights as well as a list and tentative classification of the Turkish (Osmanli) manuscripts. The four tales edited are Sûl and Shumûl, one of the oldest tales divided into nights (older, indeed, than the Galland manuscript), Bayâd and Riyâd, which has now been edited using two new sources, The Sleeper Awakened, a perfectly representative tale of “the merchant’s son”, and Zayd and Kahlâ, which is remarkable for its combination of Islam and paganism. It offers new material and new interpretations (the story of Khurâfa and the syntactic unit astonishing/more astonishing still). It seeks to provide an accessible definition of what middle Arabic literature is, shining new light on the history of the Nights: analysis of the first two tales has shown that the beginning of the Zotenberg’s Egyptian Recension is older than the Syrian branch.
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“Bi-khaṭṭ muʾallifihi”… Vraiment ? ! L’ apport de l’ analyse judiciaire d’ écritures à l’ étude des manuscrits arabes
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al-Bunduqānī calife, voleur et justicier
Après une description de la tradition textuelle qui a conduit à la publication par Chavis et Cazotte dans leur Suite des Mille et une nuits, en 1788-1789, de l’histoire d’al-Bunduqānī, celle-ci est étudiée comme une pièce littéraire qui mêle des motifs anciens et nouveaux, et, plus particulièrement, qui introduit, pour la première fois, dans un contexte de pauvreté et de corruption généralisées, la figure du justicier moderne, armé et solitaire. Le calife Hārūn al-Rašīd assume ici ce rôle mais aussi celui de voleur, jetant le doute sur sa propre police et sa justice. Les manuscrits d’al-Bunduqānī, dont certains ont été retravaillés par Chavis, Sabbagh et Varsy, sont ensuite classés en deux familles et un projet de leur édition est proposé : une édition critique au format standard comparable à celle réalisée par Muhsin Mahdi ; une édition « fluide », suivant la théorie de John Bryant, sous forme de tableaux permettant de visualiser les transformations opérées en Europe, sur un texte arabe, afin de mieux l’intégrer aux Nuits et créer de nouvelles sources.
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Can reading animate justice ?
In this study, I make audible a conversation in Alf Layla wa-Layla (The Thousand and One Nights) on the meaning and application of justice. Without assuming that Alf Layla constituted an organized whole, the study identifies, in the frame narrative and the first two chains of stories—all three understood to belong to the earliest bundle—a debate on the coincidence of successful interpretation and just rulership. By the end of these tales, i.e., by the twenty-seventh night, a complete tale is told. In these stories, I propose, Alf Layla adopts an attitude that privileges multiplicity over singular interpretation, in a fashion that affirms the contingency of ethical questions. The popularity of Alf Layla and the afterlives it enjoyed up to our present times—in the Arab world and the West—need not eclipse or substitute the Arabo-Islamic character the work came to exhibit, and the ethical questions it set out to address. In what has been read as fate, arbitrary logic, enchantment, magic, irrational thinking, and nocturnal dreamlike narratives, I suggest we can equally speak of a concern for justice. The study looks at Alf Layla’s affinity with advice literature, but stresses the need to read it as a work of (semipopular) literature that pays witness to societal debates on justice. Alf Layla, I suggest, belongs to Islamic culture in that the act of reading has been construed within hermeneutics that are largely informed by the ethical implication knowledge sharing entails. In how the stories find resolution to the crisis of the king, Alf Layla understands justice as an artificial and communal enterprise. The stories, more urgently, seem to suggest reading gears us towards a concern for the greater good.
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Dans le miroir persan
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De l'enfant au fils
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Deconstructive narratives, decreasing doublets, deceptive cadences, and the design of circles
While the beginning of the frame narrative in The Thousand and One Nights has generated many interpretations, its ending has gone almost unnoticed. This article discusses various narrative strategies for constructing an ending. The examples are taken from a corpus of texts consisting of the Arabic collection Alf layla wa-layla (“The Thousand and One Nights”) as it existed in the 9th/15th century and the so-called “orphan stories,” the tales Ḥannā Diyāb (c. 1688 – after 1763) told to Antoine Galland (1646–1715), who published them in expanded form in volumes nine through twelve of his Mille et une nuit[s]. It is argued that The Thousand and One Nights are by no means an arbitrary compilation of stories. On the contrary, they are a carefully crafted literary composition. This is particularly evident in the way of constructing narrative closures which create a feeling of satisfactory completion. This is demonstrated by pointing to narrative devices discovered in literary studies of works of the highest stratum of world literatures. It also advocates studying the work in its original form, the text of which has yet to be reconstructed.
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La difficile union des amants : Ġānim et Qūt al-Qulūb
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Enquête d'historien sur un conte des Mille et Une Nuits
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Études de genre et population fictionnelle des Mille et une nuits
Feminist approaches and gender studies are among the most notable works devoted to the Thousand and One Nights. Šahrazād monopolizes the attention and is treated as a monolithic character, there are in fact several Šahrazāds, depending on the textual version considered. The one who learns history and has three children (ZER) is not the same as the one who learns medicine and has no children (G/Kayseri). On the other hand, Šahrazād would benefit from being reintegrated into her universe beside the other characters: in the Nights, a story can occur with male protagonists (The Second Shaykh) and be repeated with female protagonists (The Eldest Lady), or feature characters who biologically change their gender, through metamorphosis or, in their appearance, through disguise. Such behavioral variations can affect the entire population of the Nights, which new work proposes to approach in the manner of demographers, as has been practiced for illustrated albums (Brugeilles, Cromer, and Cromer) and as Françoise Lavocat’s research on the French novel shows. Now, with some adjustments (Katz; van Renterghem), it seems possible to transpose this type of approach to medieval Arabic literature and more particularly to the Thousand and One Nights.
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Femmes des Mille et une nuits
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From One Thousand and One Nights to Safavid Iran
Shāh Ṭahmāsp Ṣafavī (r. 1524‒1576) patronized the translation of Arabic works into Persian in an effort to convert society to the Twelver Shīʿī outlook. According to modern Iranian literary history, one of the works that came to his attention for translation was Risālah-i Ḥusnīyah (Ḥusnīyah’s Treatise (Ḥusnīyah)), the story of a scholarly Shīʿī slave-girl and former student of the sixth imām Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq (d. 765), who debates the Sunnī scholars of the fifth ʿAbbāsid caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd (d. 805) on religious law, and roundly defeats them all. The date of this narrative’s appearance in Iran is 958/1551, according to the manuscript introduction. A link between Ḥusnīyah and the “Tale of Tawaddud,” the story preserved in One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights), and in independent form, which tells of a scholarly Sunnī slave-girl who debates the scholars of al-Rashīd’s court, had gone unnoticed in Iranian scholarship until recently, and was known to western scholars only through the summary and partial translation of Sir John Malcolm in his 1815 The History of Persia. From the Early Period to the Present Time. The comparison of a portion of the two tales illustrates not only a shared frame story but also the ideological common ground between the two. Since no Arabic original of Ḥusnīyah has been found, however, nor has scholarship located a sixteenth-century manuscript to date, the appearance of this story in Iran poses more questions than it provides answers. Ḥusnīyah is both an obvious artifact of the Ṣafavid legitimization project and a story linked to an earlier polemical narrative, and these two characteristics raise its importance for further study of its transmission as well as for the ideological intents of both stories.
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La genèse de deux "classiques" de la pédagogie de l'arabe
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The golden rule in The 101 Nights’ version of The Book of Sindbād, the question of literary context and a possible solution formulated in later Arabic versions
This paper presents a brief account of, and a number of comments on, the literary history of the golden rule (“do not do unto others what you dislike for yourself”) as found seemingly a bit out of context in the version of The Book of Sindbād contained in the medieval popular story collection The 101 Nights (“The Story of the Prince and the Seven Viziers”). The problem of context and its possible solution are addressed by examining other versions of The Book of Sindbād in Arabic, such as the one contained in the so-called Breslau edition of The 1001 Nights, and in various other languages.
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Hidden Davidic and Solomonic legends in The Hundred and One Nights
This paper focuses on what can be identified as ancient Davidic and Solomonic biblical and midrashic narratives, echoed in some of the core stories of The Hundred and One Nights, a story collection in Arabic that took shape among lower strata of medieval society in western part of the Muslim world. We do not identify any specific written Jewish sources as having had a direct influence on the collection. Rather, we would like to reveal some of the contents of an ancient well of themes that were available, mostly through Muslim tradition, to those involved in the formation of the work in question. We would also like to point out some of the transformations that such contents have undergone in their shifting between religious, historical and literary levels. The existence of Jewish backgrounds in medieval Arabic literature in general is well-known. However, a more complete picture of this existence requires a comprehensive study of popular literature. As the theme of The Hundred and One Nights and its Jewish background has been overlooked by research until very recently, our study strives to address this lacuna.
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The Hundred and One Nights: a recently discovered old manuscript
In the year 2005, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture has acquired a manuscript of the Hundred and One Nights, a work that constitutes a sibling to the Book of the Stories of the Thousand and One Nights, better known in English as the Arabian Nights. The manuscript is bound together with a copy of the Book of Geography (Kitāb al-Jughrāfiya) compiled by Muḥammad b. Abū Bakr az-Zuhrī, an author who lived in the Spanish city of Granada, then under Muslim domination, at the beginning of the twelfth century. The calligrapher's colophon dates the completion of his copy of the Book of Geography to Rabīʿ II 632 (commenced December 24, 1234). Both books are written in a fairly similar Maghrebi hand, and the paper of both books appears to be the same. Considering the fact that the oldest unambiguously dated manuscript of the Hundred and One Nights known so far dates from 1190/1776, and that the oldest preserved manuscript of the Thousand and One Nights dates from the fifteenth century, the recently discovery manuscript deserves particular attention. While a comprehensive evaluation of the manuscript's importance will only be possible after detailed scrutiny, the present short essay serves to present the manuscript to international research.
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"Le meunier et l'âne" dans le Sulwān al-muṭā' d'Ibn Ẓafar al-Ṣiqilli et dans les Mille et une nuits
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Love or lust: sexual relationships between humans and jinns in the Thousand and One Nights and the Nightingale's eye
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Märchenprinzessinnen in "Tausenundeiner Nacht"
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Marges et espaces blancs dans le manuscrit arabe des Mille et Une Nuits d'Antoine Galland
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Les Mille et Une Nuits et les débuts des Ottomans en Égypte
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Modes of existence of poetry in the Arabian Nights
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Numismatic nights : gold, silver, and copper coins in the Mahdi : a manuscript of Alf layla wa-layla
Based upon an analysis of the so-called Mahdi A manuscript of Alf Layla wa Layla—preserved in the Bibliotheque Nationale—and the wider context of Mamluk numismatic history, Schultz explores what this version of the famous collection of stories can tell us about coinage in the Mamluk Sultanate. He first revisits the debate over the date of this manuscript’s transcription. While Muhsin Mahdi concluded that this manuscript was transcribed in eighth/fourteenth century, Heinz Grotzfeld argued that the manuscript was a ninth/fifteenth century product. Grotzfeld based his conclusion on the basis of the mention in the manuscript of gold coins known as “ashrafī ” dinars, and he identified these coins as those dinars struck in 829/1425 during the reign of sultan al-Ashraf Barsbāy. Schultz demonstrates how the numismatic evidence overwhelming supports the later date, while also allowing for a date of transcription slightly earlier than the mid-century date favored by Grotzfeld. The second part of the essay gives multiple examples of how the language of money and commercial transactions found in several stories help corroborate other interpretations of monetary circulation in medieval Egypt and Syria.
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Orientalisme et champ universitaire français au XXe s.
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Paradise, Alexander the Great and the Arabian Nights
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Le passage des anciennes à de nouvelles Mille et une Nuits au XVe siècle
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Pour une lecture historique des Mille et Une Nuits
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Power of perception
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Quatre personnages éduqués du début des Mille et une nuits
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La réception arabe des Mille et une nuits (XVIIIe-XXe s.)
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Representations of trade and merchants in the Arabian Nights
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Sept contes des Milles et une nuits
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The Thousand and one nights and twentieth-century fiction
It is gradually being acknowledged that the Arabic story-collection Thousand and one nights has had a major influence on European and world literature. This study analyses the influence of Thousand and one nights, as an intertextual model, on 20th-century prose from all over the world. Works of approximately forty authors are examined: those who were crucial to the development of the main currents in 20th-century fiction, such as modernism, magical realism and post-modernism. The book contains six thematic sections divided into chapters discussing two or three authors/works, each from a narratological perspective and supplemented by references to the cultural and literary context. It is shown how Thousand and one nights became deeply rooted in modern world literature especially in phases of renewal and experiment.
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Visions of the Jinn
In this richly-illustrated book, illustrations of various Western editions of The Arabian Nights from the eighteenth to the twentieth century are presented and analysed. Visions of the Jinn is simultaneously a closely-focused study of a special case in the history of book illustration, an account of the evolution of an important strand of visual fantasy and a presentation of a hitherto neglected area of Orientalism. Some of the artists - Dulac, Dore, Brangwyn - are famous. Many others, such as Coster or Letchford, are almost totally unknown. In the course of the book, the discussion also reveals much about the visual discovery of the Near East in modern times. This volume will make an important contribution both to the history of book illustration and, more generally, to the history of the book.
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Zu den altorientalischen Motiven in Tausend und einer Nacht
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ألحان رواية ألف ليلة
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ألف ليلة وليلة
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ألف ليلة وليلة : نحو سرديات نفسية
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ألف ليلة وليلتان
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التأثر والتأثير بين : "رسالة الغفران" و"الكوميديا الإلهية" و"ألف ليلة وليلة" والآداب الأخرى
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تاريخ ألف ليلة وليلة
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الحكاية التمثيلية في "كتاب ألف ليلة وليلة"
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حول ألف ليلة وليلة
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العجوز في ألف ليلة وليلة
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قانون الجاذبية السردية بين "ألف ليلة" و"الفيل الأزرق"
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