Arabian Nights Research Articles

“DREAMING OVER AN UNATTAINABLE END”: DISRAELI'S TANCRED AND THE FAILURE OF REFORM

The “condition of England” in the middle of the nineteenth century was, for most Victorians (and is, indeed, for most modern scholars of the Victorian period), about as far removed from desert pirates and neo-Grecian queens as London from Jerusalem. But such was not the case in 1847 for the ambitious novelist-turned-politician Benjamin Disraeli, himself a mixture of political and social incongruities, who chose to conclude his political trilogy with a novel that bore greater resemblance to an Arabian Nights fantasy than to any mid-Victorian reform fiction. Contemporary readers of Tancred, or The New Crusade (1847) were understandably perplexed: “There is no principle of cohesion about the book, if we except the covers,” complained one reviewer (qtd. in Stewart 229). And, while critics have expanded upon this dismissive condemnation throughout the twentieth century, not much has changed regarding the general critical appraisal or thoughtful analysis of what Disraeli regarded as the favorite of his compositions (Blake 215). The least popular of the Young England novels both in its own day and in ours, Tancred has most frequently been viewed as an anomaly – an abandonment of the political manifesto Disraeli began in Coningsby and continued in Sybil.

Shahrazad's New Clothes

ESSAY ShahrazacTs New Clothes WillisG. Regier A completetronslotion ofTheArabianNightsisamightyfeat. Because of their length, dialects, and complexity, the Nights are more often retold than translated. In the following review-commentary, Willis G. Regier sizes up how the latest English translation compares with itsprecursors. In 2008 Penguin Books published a new trans lation of The Arabian Nights in a sumptu ous three-volume edition. The translation, by Malcolm C. Lyons and Ursula Lyons, shines likemoonlight and magic mirrors, stimulates and somniates, echoes and recycles like a dream. Sweet as honey, theseNights. The Penguin setwill be released in theUnited States in three thickpaper backs in 2010. In them theLyons give English the first new translation of a complete Arabian Nights since 1885. At minimum, a complete translation of The Arabian Nights is a mighty feat. Because of their length, dialects, and complexity, the Nights are more often retold than translated. To make them accessible, theLyons trimmed a bit "to speed up thepace of thenarrative towhat is hoped to be more nearly adapted to the eye rather than the ear." They recommend a few commentators, first of all Robert Irwin,whose participation is a stand ingrecommendation fortheset.Each of theirthree volumes bears a brief introduction and glossary by Irwin. Often compared to the Decameron and Canter buryTales, the Nights have been popular inEnglish since theyfirst appeared inLondon threecenturies ago. Prototypes of Turandot and theKing's New Clothes, petulant g?nies and angels ofdeath, lucky fools and forty thieves, piles of gems and bags of gold await readers of theNights. Children's versions pick out magic lamps and magic rings; the complete Nights add explicit sex and bloody violence. The guiding star of theNights is Shahrazad, fearless and fascinating. Ifyoumeet her all grown up, the Nights will be deeper, stranger, more dan gerous and alluring. Shahrazad's husband isKing Shahriyar, the cuckold serial killer.When he dis covered thathis first wife was unfaithfulhe killed her, then married a maiden, and killed her, too. For threeyears hemarried a virgin every day and killed her in themorning. Shahrazad, his latest bride, told bedtime stories to tame his rage.What dare she say toaman like that? How far would she go tokeep him hanging? Angry King Shahriyar wanted more than fairy tales. Hashish, adultery, beheadings, opium, bestiality, crucifixions, sisterswho whip sisters like dogs, daughters who kill fathers, brothers who kill brothers, torture, armies at war, assassins, usurpers, and caliphs who kill at whim darken the thousand and one nights. To soothe her homicidal husband, Shah razad tells one love story after another. Love is everywhere: love of women and men, love of money, jewels, and fine clothes, love of wine and roasted meat, adolescent lovers fainting and gasping, separated lovers weeping and withering, mother love, father love, incest, love that kills with music, love that dies forpoetry. Shahrazad knew King Shahriyar better right after night: some nights he got suspense, some nights he got sex. Some nights, it seems, she bored him to sleep. The Lyons reiterate that the Nights mesmerize. Abridgments of theNights omitmuch thata king needs toknow. Shahrazad tells a tale about Jesus and a tale about Alexander theGreat. Her ideal king is Solomon. She quotes poetry by the yard, flocks of proverbs, and the sayings of 301World Literature Today Muhammad (some dubious). She catechizes King Shahriyar a couple of times. Characters recur, foremost among them Harun al-Rashid, the Caliph of Baghdad. His drinking buddies are Abu Nuwas the gay poet, Jafarthevizier, andMasrur theexecutioner.When night comes and the caliph cannot sleep, theyput on disguises and walk Baghdad's streets. His jeal ous wife, Zubaida, is one of themost beautiful women in the world. To help him sleep, al-Rashid asks forstories. Shahrazad gives him storieswithin stories, and storieswithin storieswithin stories, told by old wives, wanderers, harem girls, barbers, sailors, and fishermen.She is the storyteller's storyteller, a learned woman who knows her audience and her books. She recites the story of Saif al-Muluk froma book. She cites Legends of the Ancients and theQur'?n. She isworth everymoment you can have with her. The new Penguin edition will attract new readers to theNights. As readers enter its busy streets and deserted cities, theywell...

Teaching World Literature by David Damrosch

818 Reviews contribution to Irish studies but also as a model for futuremusico-literary criti cism. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Matthew Paul Carlson Teaching World Literature. Ed. byDavid Damrosch. (Options forTeaching) New York: Modern Language Association of America. 2009. viii+432 pp. $40 (pbk$22). ISBN 978-1-60329-033-3 (pbk 978-1-60329-034-0). This collection comprises thirty-two essays by different authors, in fiveparts: Is sues and Definitions', 'Program Strategies', 'Teaching Strategies', 'Courses' (show ing what an exemplary syllabus in world literaturemight be), and 'Resources', including bibliographies. David Damrosch begins by asking 'What literature? Whose world? How has literature been understood in itsmyriad manifestations over time and across space?' (p. 3). He refers to Goethe's idea of 'world litera ture' as classics, masterpieces, and windows on theworld (p. 3), and agrees with JohnPizer (The Idea ofWorld Literature (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006)) that, even ifonly primary texts are studied, 'world literature courses should include direct discussion of thehistory of the termWeltliteratur (p. 3), first used by Goethe. He also discusses national literatures and literature in translation, maintaining that the study ofworld literaturemust be seen 'not in competition but in symbiosis with the study of national and regional traditions' (p. 9). The essays inPart 1are themost theoretical, discussing what literature should be taught and what world we refer to inworld-literature courses. Sarah Lawall argues 'if"West" refers to something more than geography [. . .] then the excluded "rest" becomes even more problematic' (p. 17). She compares, as many contributors do, anthologies ofworld literature, noting that our understanding of texts is shaped by Western frameworks, such as 'Renaissance', 'Enlightenment', and 'Romanticism', even if the volume (such as theNorton Anthology ofWorld Literature (New York: Norton, 2002)) deals with literature in China or Japan (p. 27). Lawall maintains that translation is a challenge for aworld-literature anthology because of differing linguistic and cultural traditions, the difficultyof locating accurate translation, and even the issue of getting translation right.Other problems include how genre is changed in translation and how, for example, songs of African oral performance or the dialect of a Greek comedy should be translated. These important issues, pinpointed in one paragraph, could have been developed further.On translation, Lawrence Venuti applies Derrida's idea of iterability, that themeaning of any sign can change, and argues that if translation partakes of iterability, it is actually a recontextualizing process. He engages with the question of what happens when a narrative from the global periphery is translated into a core language such as English using English-language stylistic analogues (p. 94). He suggests a possible destabilizing power in doing so.While translation is an issue inworld literature, surprisingly, none of the contributors refers to Benjamin's ideas on translation in 'The Task of the Translator (in Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1968), pp. 70 82). Vilashini Cooppan uses The Arabian Nights to discuss the ethical obligations MLR, 105.3, 2010 819 of world literature by referring to such postcolonial critics as Spivak and Homi Bhabha: the 'world' is an issue, or in Spivak's term, 'the arrogance of ambition' which mimes the imperial certitudes of the West's recognition of itself through its others (p. 37). Cooppan suggests a reading technique for someone who does not read The Arabian Nights inArabic: to consult versions throughout the history of translating the work and remind ourselves that the aim of reading world litera ture is to 'decolonize' the hegemony ofWestern schemas (p. 40). Zhang Longxi demonstrates how themetaphor of life-as-a-journey can be compared in itsuses by Plato and theChinese philosopher Zhuangzi. He argues that 'philosophy, religion, history, and literature are notmutually exclusive' (p. 65), and thatwhat is appealing 'is not just linguistic ingenuity [. . .]but the attractiveness of its thematic content, the idea thatmanifests itself in felicitous language and exquisite poetic expres sions' (p. 65). Following this,Zhang argues, 'sometimes we may find Shakespeare closer in spirit to the Chinese poet Tao Yuanming than to his fellow countryman' (p. 70). Thus the aim of studyingworld literature is 'to acquire a broad perspective for discerning thematic affinities and patterns of literary imagination beyond the gaps of languages and cultures' (p. 71...

The Poetic Vision of Nacer Khemir

This article looks at the unique vision of Tunisian Nacer Khemir as expressed in the three feature films he has directed over the past twenty‐five years: Les Baliseurs du désert (1984), Le collier perdu de la colombe (1990) and Bab’ Aziz (2005). His inspiration, rooted in the oral storytelling which formed a key part of his own childhood and in The Arabian Nights, first found expression in collections of fantastical tales and children’s stories. His films, drawing on the same sources, display a highly original approach to film narrative. Stories shift like the desert, which is his key setting, characters appear and disappear without reason, reality and imagination entwine. The quest which drives the characters is for perfect love and mystical understanding and, though there is no didacticism in his work, the director’s constant message is the need for an open and tolerant Islam.

When Dreams Travel: Mirrors, Frames, and Storyseekers in Githa Hariharan's Retelling of The Arabian Nights

When Dreams Travel: Mirrors, Frames, and Storyseekers in Githa Hariharan's Retelling of The Arabian Nights

The Eastern Tale and the Candid Reader: Tristram Shandy, Candide, Rasselas

Voltaire’s Candide, Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas and the first two volumes of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy appeared in 1759. All three works pursue an agenda of practical scepticism. Textual allusions to the Mille et une Nuit inform the ambivalent pursuit of sceptical reading in these works. Uncovering this hitherto unacknowledged shared source in the Arabian Nights adds new support for readings of these works as critiques of the “ lunacy” of the Seven Years War.

ANALISIS STRUKTURALISME LEVI-STRAUSS TERHADAP KISAH PEDAGANG DAN JIN DALAM DONGENG SERIBU SATU MALAM

Seribu Satu Malam (One thousand and One Nights or The Arabian Nights) is a renowned tale through out the world, which has been translated into languages. As a literarywork, it certainly has a unique structural characteristic. The aim of this paper is to analyze the unique structure of Seribu Satu Malam based on Levi-Strauss’ Structuralism. It analyses one of the Seribu Satu Malam stories as a sample; that is Kisah Pedagang dan Jin (the story of the trader and the genie). In the stories of Kisah Pedagang dan Jin, its structure can be found in the all of Seribu Satu Malam stories. This study reveals the threads of ceritheme, which connects one story to the others until those stories appeared as a unity. The stories are seen as variations of a single theme, which is how the characters saw their own life and solved their problems. This becomes the stories’ hidden structures.

Academic discourse and translation from Arabic

Translation, like any other mechanism of text production, has the intrinsic potential of both producing and reinforcing a specific discourse. In spite of the never-ending debate about the discursive character of academic knowledge and Edward Said’s particular interpretation of Foucault in Orientalism, it is difficult to deny that for a long time many European universities have fostered some of the most important misconceptions about Arab culture(s). In this kind of academic discourse, translation plays a central role. Translated texts are one step further than those texts written about the other, for they are themselves the other (or at least a part of it). We are indebted to countless generations of scholars responsible for most translations from Arabic. Nevertheless, the time has come to ask ourselves some important questions. Which texts have been translated from Arabic by European scholars and why? Which criteria have been used to translate these texts instead of others? What has been the influence of these translations on the target culture? Which representations of Arab culture can we find in these translations and their paratexts (introductions, forewords, reviews, footnotes, etc.)? Arabic studies in Spain have been reviewed by J. T. Monroe, Manzanares de Cirre, López García, etc., yet none of them have approached directly the problem of translation or its implications for the construction of a specific canon. In Spain, this canon has been restricted to the Andalusian heritage for a long time (especially in the fields of history, philosophy, theology, sciences and poetry) and to some universal works, such as The Arabian Nights, and has only opened itself to other spheres of the Arab culture in the last decades. My aim in this paper is to present, from a critical perspective, some of the results of my analysis of a corpus of translations from Arabic — carried out by an eminent Spanish Arabist — and to use these results to understand how translation has helped to construct a specific academic discourse in Spain about Arab culture and particularly about al-Andalus.

How the Arabian nights inspired the American dream, 1790-1935

How the Arabian nights inspired the American dream, 1790-1935

The Arabic Ghoul and its Western Transformation

As a kind of devilish genie, the ghoul was part of beliefs held by Arabs long before the advent of Islam and was a perceived reality for most people living in Arabia. This paper discusses the nature of the ghoul as depicted in various Arabic sources from the eighth century onwards. Throughout different historical and religious periods, the character of the ghoul remained the same, being represented as an ugly human-like monster that dwelt in the desert and secluded locations, in order to delude travellers by lighting a fire and thus leading them astray. In some cases, this creature was said to have killed travellers. However, when Antoine Galland translated the Arabian Nights into French in the eighteenth century, some features were added to the ghoul in order to intensify its fearful characteristics. For example, Galland emphasised that the ghoul used to dig graves and eat corpses if it needed food, an idea that was never mentioned in any of the Arabic sources. Accordingly, numerous English writers followed Galland's description and further fantasised in their works about the viciousness of this creature.

Thinking Is as American as Apple Pie

Thinking Is as American as Apple Pie David A. Hollinger (bio) Daniel Wickberg's basic point that intellectual history has been largely integrated into mainstream U.S. history is eminently sound, and can serve as a caution against making too much of the issue of whether the field is neglected. Intellectual history, social history, and cultural history have all been put forward in successive historiographical moments, the proponents of each often claiming to have new insights to which old-fashioned political history was blind. Each of these forgivable conceits has left a valuable residue in the range and depth of the profession's engagement with specific sets of issues, including theways in which political history itself is carried out. Wickberg's essay, while alluding to developments in the profession beyond the field of U.S. history, is largely focused on the study of U.S. history, as my own comments will be. With regard to the issue of "neglect," the percentage of departments offering courses labeled "intellectual history" has declined from about 80% in 1975 to about 60% in 2005, but in the meantime the percentage of departments offering courses labeled "cultural history" has increased from about 40% to about 60%. This juxtaposition, based on a study commissioned by the American Historical Association (reported in the New York Times, June 10, 2009) is worth noting given the fuzzy borders between intellectual and cultural history. Studies of the collective mentalities of publics were once loosely characterized as intellectual history, so that works such as Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land (1950) and William R. Taylor's Cavalier and Yankee (1961) were counted as intellectual history alongside histories of argumentation, such as Perry Miller's New England Mind (1939 and 1953) and Henry F. May's The Enlightenment in America (1976). But the emergence of cultural history as a separate, yet allied field, has led to a sharpened division of labor according to which intellectual history has come to refer to a somewhat narrower range of topics than it once did, focusing more on the history of actual argumentation by people who were equipped by education and training and temperament to take the lead in making arguments—the so-called "elites." A book like Susan Nance's How the Arabian Nights Inspired the American Dream, 1790-1935 (2009) might have been routinely classified as intellectual history if published in the 1960s, but today it is more likely to be classified as cultural history. Click for larger view View full resolution James Madison, from Letters and Other Writings of James Madison, Vol. I, 1769-1793 (Philadelphia, 1865). During this historiographical transformation some historians, often in the name of social history, did devalue the study of philosophy, theology, and social theory on the grounds that the ideas of elites were of little significance. But as the history of intellectuals has come to be recognized as simply one of the discipline's many subfields, rather than a proxy for the study of all Americans, this resistance is diminishing. Attention is again being paid to the history of the use of evidence and reasoning in public discourse. Thinking, rather than some esoteric activity limited to European worthies, is indeed as American as apple pie.1 The study of popular attitudes and general political ideas held by large population groups is of course a vital part of U.S. history, but so, too, are the refinements of [End Page 17] theorists like James Madison, the Transcendentalists, the Pragmatists, the modernization theorists, etc. To the list of works recognized as intellectual history in this somewhat narrow sense published since 2001 that Wickberg cites for having won prizes and comparable recognition in the profession at large, Iwould add Charles Capper's Margaret Fuller: The Public Years (2007), Joan Shelly Rubin's Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America (2007), and Nils Gilman's Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (2003). Gilman, along with Sarah Igo, whom Wickberg rightly mentions, is part of a younger generation of scholars willing to try to launch careers by studying the ideas of elite intellectuals. Other recent books by this generation include Daniel Geary's Radical Ambition: C...

An Ethical Underworld? Legendary con Artists in Arabic Vernacular Fiction

The commercial and critical success of Ang Lee's martial arts film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000),1 is an important landmark not only in the history of Chinese Cinema but also in the history of Hollywood. It departs from earlier Hollywood films about the East, such as the Fu Manchu series, and strikes out on its own in its quest for a place in the Hollywood pantheon. Its difference from the Arabian Nights films made in Hollywood cannot be more conspicuous. This difference is significant, especially in view of the one and same origin of Hollywood films based on 'Eastern' material and on the 'East', traceable to the silent The Thief of Bagdad (1924), the unrepeatable precursor of all cinematic adaptations of The 1001 Nights, and equally the progenitor of cul tural stereotypes, of both the Middle Easterner and the Far Easterner. The 'Mongol Prince from eastern Asia', the arch-villain of The Thief of Bagdad, had for decades provided the blueprint of Hollywood portrayal of an 'opium smok ing, treacherous, lecherous and despotic' mandarin from the far 'Orient'. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, preceded by three decades of kung fu films made globally familiar and popular by Bruce Lee and his generation of movie stars from Hong Kong and Taiwan, has neutralized this Hollywood 'Oriental' despot and opened up the global cinematic landscape for a more diverse Chinese world inhabited by complex Chinese characters. These Chinese kungfu films, just like The Thief of Bagdad, are based in in digenous vernacular fiction. While the genre of films constituting The Thief of Bagdad and its 'sequels' may all be attributed to transmutations of The 1001

Los velos de Scherezada: censura y seducción en las traducciones de Las mil y una noches

This article analizes representative instances of censorship and countercensorship in different translations of a story taken from the Arabian Nights, “The Story of Prince Camaralzaman” into French, English and Spanish, translations by Antoine Galland, Richard Burton, Pedro Peraza Páez, Rafael Cansinos Asséns and Hussain Haddawy. Initially, it establishes the textual complexity and instability of Galland’s sources and the history of his translation, in the light of Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism as a discursive mode based on a prejudiced, culturally charged vision of the East, resulting rather in a mere projection of Western aesthetic and moral values. In this sense, censorship and countercensorship as exemplified in these translations, especially regarding the erotic aspect of these tales, responds directly to the historical and cultural circumstances of the translators.

Death, paradise and the Arabian Nights

The article explores the relevance of modern sociological theories on death and dying as they might apply to Islamic communities. These include several relevant important European sociological commentaries: Walter's typology of death attitudes, Seale's pseudo-psychoanalytical approach and Kellehear's important study of the social history of dying. The article is based on a variety of sources including religious texts, tales from the Arabian Nights and recent ethnographies, as well as descriptions by European travellers in the Middle East. Ethnographic detail from the Middle East includes recent and current practices among pastoral nomads (the Beja, Ma‘aza Bedouin), among peasants from villages in Nubia and the Nile Valley, in the cosmopolitan cities of Ottoman Aleppo and in modern Cairo, as well as encounters with Muslim death in the West. No single Islamic tradition can be identified. In the light of practices that surround death, beliefs in the afterlife and Paradise, this article highlights the relevance of various sociological approaches to the study of dying in a variety of Muslim communities. Mirroring Kellehear's ‘Ages’, this article contrasts a range of orthodox religious and local Muslim traditions many of which are rarely discussed in the West.

The Fictive Origins of Secular Humanism

The Fictive Origins of Secular Humanism Justin Neuman The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie. New York: Random House, 2008. Pp. 368. $26.00 cloth. Shortly before the novel's release in the United States, the Sunday edition of the New York Times hailed Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence as a work of serious literary ambition destined to draw critical and popular attention back to Rushdie's prose and away from the political and personal imbroglios that have overshadowed his fiction since 1989. As of yet, this has not been the case; early reviews were mixed at best, and though it is undeniably a captivating and compulsively readable book, The Enchantress of Florence eschews the significant stylistic innovation and overt, high-stakes cultural commentary that energizes Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (1988). Instead, Rushdie's newest novel seeks sanctuary in the mirror of history—in this case, a mirror veiled in gauzy multiculturalist platitudes. Despite its preening, The Enchantress of Florence proves an essential book; in its strongest moments, The Enchantress of Florence repudiates linear, Eurocentric histories of the Renaissance and conjures in their stead a synchronous world of parallel realities in which the seeds of secular humanism flower not once but twice—once in northern Italy and simultaneously in northern India. Read reparatively, Rushdie's novel invites us to reconsider axiomatic tenets about modernity, secularism, and humanism—chief among them the relation between the ethos of modernity and the rejection of an enchanted world. [End Page 675] In terms of genre, The Enchantress of Florence is a globe-traversing prose romance about the vicissitudes of love, power, and storytelling—a romance dressed in the guise of an impeccably researched historical novel (complete with an extensive bibliography). The book's opening vignettes transport the reader, along with a golden-haired stranger, by bullock cart into Fatehpur Sikri, the city built by the Mughal emperor Akbar the Great in the sixteenth century. The stranger, who calls himself Mogor dell'Amore (the "Mogul of Love") and whose real name is Niccolò Vespucci—cousin of Amerigo and namesake of Niccolò Machiavelli—has journeyed from his birthplace in the New World via Florence to Mughal Hindustan with a story he will reveal only to Emperor Akbar himself. Gaining entry to the Mughal court through a series of bold stratagems, feats of linguistic virtuosity, and magic tricks, Mogor dell'Amore garners the favor of Akbar and so begins the teasing, digressive weaving and unweaving of a story that captivates the emperor for longer than Scheherazade plied Shahryar with her tales in The Arabian Nights. The story that emerges unites the lives of three Florentines (Niccolò Machiavelli, Antonino Argalia, and Ago Vespucci) with Akbar's dynasty by way of an intrepid princess named Qara Köz ("Lady Black Eyes")—the tragic heroine of Niccolò's tale and the erstwhile enchantress of Florence. Fictive and real, Florence and Hindustan, East and West evolve as parallel worlds—as "mirrors" of one another, to use one of the novel's favorite metaphors. But so enthralled is the novel with symmetry, parallel, and simultaneity ("We are their dream . . . and they are ours," as one character puts it) that The Enchantress of Florence underplays points of contrast (48). Rushdie's depiction of the birth of modernity in the budding secular humanisms of Florence and Mughal India severs the link—common to Renaissance self-understanding and to centuries of subsequent scholarship—between the rise of humanist sensibilities and the recovery of classical antiquity. According to regnant narratives of the Enlightenment, in fourteenth-century and fifteenth-century Florence the pietistic, feudal social matrix of medieval Christianity deformed in the crucible of the city-state under the twin pressures of mercantile capitalism on the one hand and a revival of classical aesthetics on the other. Individualism, the emergence of linear temporality, and a powerful critique of Christianity depend in no small part on the scholarly methods of textual analysis, hermeneutics, and archival research pioneered by Italian humanists in the fifteenth century—all of which parallel a steady repudiation of the enchanted world of medieval Christendom. Not only can no equivalent milieu of forces be found in Mughal India, Rushdie's depiction [End...

Marzolph, Ulrich (ed.): The Arabian Nights in Transnational Perspective, 2007

Marzolph, Ulrich (ed.): The Arabian Nights in Transnational Perspective, 2007

The Symbolical and Mystical Meanings in ‘cAbdullah of the Sea and cAbdullah of the Land’ (The Arabian Nights)

This article argues that the tale (#163, Nights 940–46)) from The Arabian Nights, entitled ‘cAbdullah of the Sea and cAbdullah of the Land’ encapsulates highly spiritual and symbolical meanings that appear different on land and on sea. It is divided in three parts. The first tackles the view of a simple and clear Islam represented by a fisherman named cAbdullah. Part two deals with a more hermetic Islam embodied by a merman who bears the same name. Part three analyses the complex symbols encoded in the three even numbers, namely, two, four, and 40. The tale as a whole illustrates the difference between exoteric Islam (the Land), characterized by simplicity and clarity, and Sufi Islam, distinctive for its depth and its mystery (the Sea).

Alternatives to the Novel Form: Oral Storytelling and Internet Patterns in Vikram Chandra's Red Earth and Pouring Rain

Contemporary Indian fiction in English revives the novel genre through alternative writing techniques inspired from the Indian oral storytelling tradition. In Vikram Chandra's Red Earth and Pouring Rain digressive storytelling that reflects oral patterns merges with structural strategies derived from the logic of the Internet, hypertext and computer games. The author's creation of an online storytelling community that gives him email feedback on his writing mimics the tradition of oral storytelling in a way that responds to both Bakhtinian expectations of the novel form and the demands of hypertextual interactivity. The implied audience is drawn into the process of storytelling, so that the novel's polyphony emerges from the work of a whole community rather than of an individual author/narrator. Red Earth and Pouring Rain is a modern version of the Arabian Nights, with a frame-narrative filled in by well-told tales meant to earn the protagonist's survival. Throughout the novel the classical concerns of the novel genre, which focuses on individual development and makes statements about society at specific historical moments, based on objective factual observation, are challenged by the presence of elements of myth-based traditional storytelling, digressions and ponderings on the meanings of events, in a discourse in which what matters is the endless storytelling process that must keep growing “like a lotus vine”.

Michael Oren,Power,Faith,and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present

Reviewed by: Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present Mitchell G. Bard (bio) Michael B. Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present New York, W.W. Norton, 2007, 672 pp A fter devoting himself to a penetrating analysis of the events during the narrow period of the Six-Day War, Shalem Center historian Michael Oren takes on the daunting task of describing the entire history of U.S. Middle East policy, which he dates back to before American independence. As in his earlier work, Oren has done a masterful job of surveying available documents and writing with a narrative flare that briefly put the 672-page tome on the bestseller list. Given that so much of the media’s attention, and substantive U.S. Middle East policy, is focused on Israel, it may be surprising to find that fewer than 100 pages of Power, Faith, and Fantasy discuss Israel, Palestine, or the conflict in any detail. Oren states that this was intentional because so much has already been written and relatively few historical documents are available for the modern period. Oren’s major contribution is in describing little known or unknown episodes in America’s early connection with a region that was founded in large measure on fantasy and faith. Americans developed over the years a mythological and stereotypical image of the Arab world, shaped by images books and, later, movies such as The Arabian Nights and Lawrence of Arabia. The latter refers especially to Christian missionaries who unsuccessfully exported their faith and in many cases wound up as the interpreters and defenders of Islam and its adherents. In the revolutionary era, Oren notes that the Middle East played a disproportionate role in Founding Fathers’ decisions. He argues that concerns about pirates played an important role in the drafting of the U.S. Constitution. He seems to equate the Federalist Papers with an obscure work of fiction, The Algerian Spy in which Rhode Island is to be a base for Algerian operations, which influenced the constitutional debate and the decision to establish an American navy. [End Page 183] A little understood aspect of contemporary U.S. policy is the antipathy most Americans feel toward the people of the Middle East. Polls consistently show that Americans sympathize three to four times as much with Israel as with the Palestinians, for example, and I have argued that one reason U.S.–Israel relations are strong and will remain so is that Americans generally do not like Arabs or Muslims. Oren reveals that this hostility dates back to the 17th century, but never connects the animus of Christians toward Islam to the modern period. Christian Americans took an interest in Hebrew long before most Jews did. Hebrew logos appear on the emblems of schools such as Yale, Dartmouth, and Columbia and the language was mandatory at colleges such as Princeton, where Oren James Madison majored in the subject. Ironically, a colleague told me that when working on his doctorate at Johns Hopkins twenty years ago, he was told that he could not study Hebrew to satisfy his language requirement. As others before him, Oren documents the long history of American interest in restoring the Jews to Israel since the early 19th century, which in part was attributed to the Christian desire to facilitate the Second Coming. In making the case that prominent Americans, such as presidents, made sympathetic statements about the idea of Jews returning to their homeland, he overlooks their broader agenda. Coincidentally, I was sitting next to Oren in the press center outside Gaza during the disengagement when he was editing the book and noticed he was using a well-known quotation by John Adams, the first American head of state to make a pro-Zionist declaration, “I really wish the Jews again in Judea an independent nation,” Adams wrote to Mordecai Manuel Noah in 1819 (after he had left office). I pointed out to Oren that this was misleading because, like others before him, he only cited part of the quotation and should read the rest. If he took my advice, he still chose to omit that...

Arabian Nights and Romantic Orientalism in Modern Europe

Arabian Nights and Romantic Orientalism in Modern Europe