In a town in Persia there dwelt two brothers, one named Cassim, the other Ali Baba. Cassim was married to a rich wife and lived in plenty, while Ali Baba had to maintain his wife and children by cutting wood in a neighboring forest and selling it in the town.
One day, when Ali Baba was in the forest, he saw a troop of men on horseback, coming toward him in a cloud of dust. He was afraid they were robbers, and climbed into a tree for safety. When they came up to him and dismounted, he counted forty of them. They unbridled their horses and tied them to trees.
The finest man among them, whom Ali Baba took to be their captain, went a little way among some bushes, and said, "Open, Sesame!" so plainly that Ali Baba heard him....
If the average reader in "The West" has any exposure at all to Arabic literature, it usually is through the written version of a centuries-old compilation of oral folktales and stories known variously in English as The Arabian Nights, The Arabian Nights Entertainment or The Thousand and One Nights. This is a bit ironic, since the best known tales from this compilation -- such as Ali Baba and The Forty Thieves, above, as rendered by Andrew Lang and illustrated, below, by Maxfield Parrish -- are not found in the original Arab sources for this compilation, but were interpolated into it by European translators utilizing other Middle Eastern folktales:
In fact, the original Arabic sources (known as the "Syrian tradition") contain very few tales. The most accurate modern publication of this tradition is Muḥsin Mahdī's 1984 Arabic edition based on a 14th century Syrian manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale. This was translated into English by Husain Haddawy in 1990:
Western readers whose only exposure to Arabic literature is Sir Richard Burton's somewhat florid and sexually exotic 1885 translation of the more copious "Egyptian tradition" (see below) likely will find Mahdi's rendering, which presents the tales as they are thought to have first been heard by a medieval Arabic audience, to be quite short and coarse:
While the earliest evidence for these tales is from the 9th century CE, the earliest preserved manuscript sources (as noted above) are from the 14th-15th centuries CE. These earliest collections draw upon three major sources:
- Persian tales influenced by Indian folklore and adapted into Arabic by the 10th century
- Stories recorded in Baghdad during the 10th century
- Medieval Egyptian folklore
While almost all versions of these tales share a core of common stories (e.g., The Fisherman and the Jinni), the most famous English-language versions (including Burton's) are based largely on a French translation first published by Antoine Galland in twelve volumes from 1704-1717. Because Galland's translation includes a number of tales that do not exist in the earliest surviving manuscript sources (such as Ali Baba), some scholars speculate that four centuries of fires, floods, neglect and/or warfare may have destroyed some of the sources to which Galland may have had access. (Galland himself asserted that the additional tales came from a Maronite scholar in Aleppo.)
Whatever the case, Gallant's much more copious Egyptian tradition of the tales was added to continually during the 18th-19th centuries, and it is through this tradition that most Western readers have gained what limited exposure they have to native Arabic literature.
As famous as the Egyptian tradition of these tales may be in the Western world, it is no more representative of the diversity and grandeur of Arabic literature than the latest Stephen King bestseller is representative of the diversity and grandeur of English literature....
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