The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, vol 10 by Sir Richard Francis Burton (essential reading TXT) 📖

“Ibn Said (may God have mercy upon him!) sets forth in his book, El Muhella bi-s-Shaar, quoting from El Curtubi the story of the building of the Houdej in the Garden of Cairo, the which was of the magnificent pleasaunces of the Fatimite Khalifs, the rare of ordinance and surpassing, to wit that the Khalif El Aamir bi-ahkam-illah[FN#152] let build it for a Bedouin woman, the love of whom had gotten the mastery of him, in the neighbourhood of the �Chosen Garden’[FN#153] and used to resort often thereto and was slain as he went thither; and it ceased not to be a pleasuring-place for the Khalifs after him. The folk abound in stories of the Bedouin girl and Ibn Meyyah[FN#154] of the sons of her uncle (cousin?) and what hangs thereby of the mention of El-Aamir, so that the tales told of them on this account became like unto the story of El Bett�l[FN#155] and the Thousand Nights and a Night and what resembleth them.”

The same passage from Ibn Sa’id, corresponding in three MSS., occurs in the famous Khitat[FN#156] attributed to Al-Makrizi (ob.

A.D. 1444) and was thus translated from a MS. in the British Museum by Mr. John Payne (ix. 303)

“The Khalif El-Aamir bi-ahkam-illah set apart, in the neighbourhood of the Chosen Garden, a place for his beloved the Bedouin maid (Aaliyah)[FN#157] which he named El Houdej. Quoth Ibn Said, in the book El-Muhella bi-l-ashar, from the History of El Curtubi, concerning the traditions of the folk of the story of the Bedouin maid and Ibn Menah (Meyyah) of the sons of her uncle and what hangs thereby of the mention of the Khalif El Aam�r bi-ahkam-illah, so that their traditions (or tales) upon the garden became like unto El Bett�l[FN#158] and the Thousand Nights and what resembleth them.”

This evidently means either that The Nights existed in the days of Al-‘�mir (xiith cent.) or that the author compared them with a work popular in his own age. Mr. Payne attaches much importance to the discrepancy of titles, which appears to me a minor detail. The change of names is easily explained. Amongst the Arabs, as amongst the wild Irish, there is divinity (the proverb says luck) in odd numbers and consequently the others are inauspicious. Hence as Sir Wm. Ouseley says (Travels ii. 21), the number Thousand and One is a favourite in the East (Olivier, Voyages vi. 385, Paris 1807), and quotes the Cistern of the “Thousand and One Columns” at Constantinople. Kaempfer (Am�n, Exot. p. 38) notes of the Takiyahs or Dervishes’ convents and the Maz�rs or Santons’ tombs near Koniah (Iconium), “Multa seges sepulchralium qu� virorum ex omni �vo doctissimorum exuvias condunt, mille et unum recenset auctor Libri qui inscribitur Hassaaer we jek mesaar (Haz�r ve yek Mez�r), i.e., mille et unum mausolea.” A book, The Hazar o yek Ruz ( = 1001

Days), was composed in the mid-xviith century by the famous Dervaysh Mukhlis, Chief Sofi of Isfahan: it was translated into French by Petis de la Croix, with a preface by Cazotte, and was englished by Ambrose Phillips. Lastly, in India and throughout Asia where Indian influence extends, the number of cyphers not followed by a significant number is indefinite: for instance, to determine hundreds the Hindus affix the required figure to the end and for 100 write 101; for 1000, 1001. But the grand fact of the Haz�r Afs�nah is its being the archetype of The Nights, unquestionably proving that the Arab work borrows from the Persian bodily its cadre or framework, the principal characteristic; its exordium and its d�no�ement, whilst the two heroines still bear the old Persic names.

Baron Silvestre de Sacy[FN#159]—clarum et venerabile nomen—is the chief authority for the Arab provenance of The Nights. Apparently founding his observations upon Galland,[FN#160] he is of opinion that the work, as now known, was originally composed in Syria[FN#161] and written in the vulgar dialect; that it was never completed by the author, whether he was prevented by death or by other cause; and that imitators endeavoured to finish the work by inserting romances which were already known but which formed no part of the original recueil, such as the Travels of Sindbad the Seaman, the Book of the Seven Wazirs and others. He accepts the Persian scheme and cadre of the work, but no more. He contends that no considerable body of pr�-Mohammedan or non-Arabic fiction appears in the actual texts[FN#162]; and that all the tales, even those dealing with events localised in Persia, India, China and other infidel lands and dated from ante-islamitic ages mostly with the na�vest anachronism, confine themselves to depicting the people, manners and customs of Baghdad and Mosul, Damascus and Cairo, during the Abbaside epoch, and he makes a point of the whole being impregnated with the strongest and most zealous spirit of Mohammedanism. He points out that the language is the popular or vulgar dialect, differing widely from the classical and literary; that it contains many words in common modern use and that generally it suggests the decadence of Arabian literature. Of one tale he remarks:—The History of the loves of Camaralzaman and Budour, Princess of China, is no more Indian or Persian than the others.

The prince’s father has Moslems for subjects, his mother is named Fatimah and when imprisoned he solaces himself with reading the Koran. The Genii who interpose in these adventures are, again, those who had dealings with Solomon. In fine, all that we here find of the City of the Magians, as well as of the fire-worshippers, suffices to show that one should not expect to discover in it anything save the production of a Moslem writer.

All this, with due deference to so high an authority, is very superficial. Granted, which nobody denies, that the archetypal Haz�r Afs�nah was translated from Persic into Arabic nearly a thousand years ago, it had ample time and verge enough to assume another and a foreign dress, the corpus however remaining untouched. Under the hands of a host of editors, scribes and copyists, who have no scruples anent changing words, names and dates, abridging descriptions and attaching their own decorations, the florid and rhetorical Persian would readily be converted into the straight-forward, business-like, matter of fact Arabic. And what easier than to islamise the old Zoroasterism, to transform Ahrim�n into Ibl�s the Shaytan, J�n bin J�n into Father Adam, and the Divs and Peris of Kayomars and the olden Guebre Kings into the Jinns and Jinniyahs of Sulayman? Volumes are spoken by the fact that the Arab adapter did not venture to change the Persic names of the two heroines and of the royal brothers or to transfer the mise-en-sc�ne any whither from Khorasan or outer Persia. Where the story has not been too much worked by the literato’s pen, for instance the “Ten Wazirs” (in the Bresl. Edit. vi. I9I-343) which is the Guebre Bakhtiy�r-n�mah, the names and incidents are old Iranian and with few exceptions distinctly Persian. And at times we can detect the process of transition, e.g. when the M�zin of Khor�s�n[FN#163]

of the Wortley Montagu MS. becomes the Hasan of Bassorah of the Turner Macan MS. (Mac. Edit.).

Evidently the learned Baron had not studied such works as the Tot�-

kah�ni or Parrot-chat which, notably translated by Nakhshabi from the Sanskrit Suka-Saptati,[FN#164] has now become as orthodoxically Moslem as The Nights. The old Hindu Rajah becomes Ahmad Sultan of Balkh, the Prince is Maym�n and his wife Khujisteh. Another instance of such radical change is the later Syriac version of Kaliliah wa Dimnah,[FN#165] old “Pilpay” converted to Christianity.

We find precisely the same process in European folk-lore; for instance the Gesta Romanorum in which, after five hundred years, the life, manners and customs of the Romans lapse into the knightly and chivalrous, the Christian and ecclesiastical developments of mediaeval Europe. Here, therefore, I hold that the Austrian Arabist has proved his point whilst the Frenchman has failed.

Mr. Lane, during his three years’ labour of translation, first accepted Von Hammer’s view and then came round to that of De Sacy; differing, however, in minor details, especially in the native country of The Nights. Syria had been chosen because then the most familiar to Europeans: the “Wife of Bath” had made three pilgrimages to Jerusalem; but few cared to visit the barbarous and dangerous Nile-Valley. Mr. Lane, however, was an enthusiast for Egypt or rather for Cairo, the only part of it he knew; and, when he pronounces The Nights to be of purely “Arab,” that is, of Nilotic origin, his opinion is entitled to no more deference than his deriving the sub-African and negroid Fellah from Arabia, the land per excellentiam of pure and noble blood. Other authors have wandered still further afield. Some finding Mosul idioms in the Recueil, propose “Middlegates” for its birth-place and Mr. W. G. P.

Palgrave boldly says “The original of this entertaining work appears to have been composed in Baghdad about the eleventh century; another less popular but very spirited version is probably of Tunisian authorship and somewhat later.”[FN#166]

B.—The Date.

The next point to consider is the date of The Nights in its present form; and here opinions range between the tenth and the sixteenth centuries. Professor Galland began by placing it arbitrarily in the middle of the thirteenth. De Sacy, who abstained from detailing reasons and who, forgetting the number of editors and scribes through whose hands it must have passed, argued only from the nature of the language and the peculiarities of style, proposed le milieu du neuvi�me si�cle de l’h�gire ( = A.D. 1445-6) as its latest date. Mr. Hole, who knew The Nights only through Galland’s version, had already advocated in his “Remarks” the close of the fifteenth century; and M. Caussin (de Perceval), upon the authority of a supposed note in Galland’s MS.[FN#167] (vol. iii. fol. 20, verso), declares the compiler to have been living in A.D. 1548 and 1565. Mr. Lane says “Not begun earlier than the last fourth of the fifteenth century nor ended before the first fourth of the sixteenth,” i.e. soon after Egypt was conquered by Selim, Sultan of the Osmanli Turks in A.D. 1517. Lastly the learned Dr. Weil says in his far too scanty Vorwort (p. ix. 2nd Edit.):-“Das wahrscheinlichste d�rfte also sein, das im 15. Jahrhundert ein Egyptier nach altern Vorbilde Erz�hlungen f�r 1001 N�chte theils erdichtete, theils nach m�ndlichen Sagen, oder fr�hern schriftlichen Aufzeichnungen, bearbeitete, dass er aber entweder sein Werk nicht vollendete, oder dass ein Theil desselben verloren ging, so dass das Fehlende von Andern bis ins 16. Jahrhundert hinein durch neue Erz�hlungen erg�nzt wurde.”

But, as justly observed by Mr. Payne, the first step when enquiring into the original date of The Nights is to determine the nucleus of the Repertory by a comparison of the four printed texts and the dozen MSS. which have been collated by scholars.[FN#168] This process makes it evident that the tales common to all are the following thirteen:—

1. The Introduction (with a single incidental story “The Bull and the Ass”).

2. The Trader and the Jinni (with three incidentals).

3. The Fisherman and the Jinni (with four).

4. The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad (with six).

5. The Tale of the Three Apples.

6. The Tale of N�r-al-D�n Ali and his son Badr al-D�n Hasan.

7. The Hunchback’s Tale (with eleven incidentals).

8. Nur al-D�n and An�s al-Jal�s.

9. Tale of Gh�nim bin ‘Ayy�b (with two incidentals).

10. Al� bin Bakk�r and Shams al-Nah�r (with two).

11. Tale of Kamar al-Zam�n.

12. The Ebony Horse; and

13. Juln�r the Seaborn.

These forty-two tales, occupying one hundred and twenty Nights, form less than a fifth part of the whole collection which in the Mac. Edit.[FN#169] contains a total of two hundred and sixty-four Hence Dr.