Arafat A. Razzaque writes for the Ajam Media Collective about the history of the Aladdin tale, familiar from the Thousand and One Nights but not originally a part of it. He begins with “arguably the Middle East’s greatest modern adaptation of the 1001 Nights“:
Written by the poet Tahir Abu Fasha (who also wrote songs for Umm Kulthum), the series lasted 26 years on the airwaves, with 820 episodes total. As a child, the Lebanese novelist Hanan al-Shaykh would sit “glued to the radio” waiting to hear the captivating Zouzou Nabil, who voiced Shahrazad.
I love that kind of local detail, which you’re unlikely to learn from Western accounts. He continues with a history of the Nights:
The 1001 Nights has a pretty remarkable genealogy. Our oldest documentation of it is an Arabic papyrus from Egypt, reused as scrap with inscriptions dated 879 CE. There was an earlier Persian book called Hazār afsāna (A Thousand Stories) that did not survive. But key elements of the frame story of Shahriyar and Shahrazad were already common in Pali and Sanskrit texts from ancient India, while another Arabic book called One Hundred and One Nights has an alternate version also found in a third-century Chinese Buddhist text of the Tripiṭaka.
The event that sparked the Nights into a modern European phenomenon was its translation by Antoine Galland from a fifteenth-century Arabic manuscript that still remains our principal source. First published in 1704, Galland’s Les Mille et une nuit: Contes Arabes (“1001 Nights: Arabian tales”) was an instant bestseller, mainly because it coincided with the rise of French fairy tales. […]
In Arabic, Alf layla was first printed in India. Known as the “Calcutta I” edition of 1814–18, it was prepared by Shaykh Aḥmad al-Shīrwānī, a teacher of Arabic at the Fort William College in Bengal, where East India Company officials were trained in South Asian languages, especially Persian. Subsequent Arabic editions were published in Breslau, in today’s Poland (by Habicht, 1824–43), in Bulaq, Cairo (1835) and again in India (“Calcutta II,” 1839-42). By the late-nineteenth century, the book was appearing everywhere—a fascinating example being the Judaeo-Arabic edition of 1888 printed in Bombay by Aharon Yaacov Shmuel Divekar, a native Jewish-Indian (“Bene Israel”) who also published prayer books for the city’s Baghdadi Jewish community.
Then he gets to the meat of his piece, the origin of the Aladdin tale:
After nearly a century of speculation, in 1887 the Prussian scholar Hermann Zotenberg who worked as a manuscript curator at the French national library, came across Galland’s archived diaries. There it was revealed that Galland had an oral source, “the Maronite Hanna of Aleppo.” Meeting Hanna Diyab in 1709 through a colleague in Paris was great luck for Galland, since he ran out of stories to translate from available manuscripts. […]
Galland wrote in his journal that he received “the Story of the Lamp” from Hanna Diyab on May 5, 1709. Every few days for the next month or so, Diyab told him fifteen more tales. Ten of these, including Ali Baba, were later published as the last four volumes of Galland’s Nights (1712–17). […] In 1993, a previously unknown autobiography/travelogue by Hanna Diyab was discovered at the Vatican Library. It has now been published in French as of 2015, and though of much broader historical interest, it also offers tantalizing glimpses into how Aladdin and Ali Baba came to be imagined.
I’ll let you discover the rest at the link; there’s all kinds of good stuff, like “A major classic of the Danish Golden Age happens to be an adaptation of Aladdin by Adam Oehlenschläger (1805), set in Isfahan rather than China because Persia was imagined to be the modern, cosmopolitan France of the East.” And I’d never heard of the One Hundred and One Nights; don’t miss the Bruce Fudge interview linked to it above. (We discussed a new, “complete” edition of the Arabian Nights back in 2009.)
I’ve been a big fan of Ajam recently, in particular their podcasts (and the podcasts other contributors). One of particular interest has been ZamZaman which covers a variety of music genres from the Caucasus.
They could all reflect Turkish/Ottoman rather than Arabic tradition? But it’s obvious that stories travel, and both the Silk Road and the Mediterranean have been mediating culture for thousands of years, so versions of the same motives should be found all around the Mediterranean basin, as well as further east. Which is why narrative folklorists are speaking of Eurasia as one region of shared narrative traditions.
(Why doesn’t pc’s comment above turn up on JC’s list of Commented-On Langauge Hat Posts? Something with having gone right into moderation because of two links?)
I had to rescue it from moderation, so I guess that’s why.
A nice corrected version with apparatus: Aladdin eller Den forunderlige Lampe.
I never actually read the version of Aladdin from the 1001 nights, so this is how the tale is supposed to go.
Note that the two places where “Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp” takes place are China and Morocco—in the ultimate East and ultimate West from the viewpoint of Middle-Eastern storytellers.
JC’s list of Commented-On Langauge Hat Posts
… is based on polling the “Recent Comments” section of the home page every minute. I don’t know exactly when things appear there.
Waitaminnit, there’s an account of the Scheherazade and Shahryar story in a 3rd century (very early for Chinese Buddhism) Chinese Tripiṭaka?
note
Did anyone read the book?
I still hesitate to read it in English or French because why would I do that if I can strugge with the arabic text instead. And I hesitate to read it in Arabic.
I still hesitate to read it in English or French because why would I do that if I can strugge with the arabic text instead. And I hesitate to read it in Arabic.
I know the feeling, believe me, but it’s better to conquer it and read something you want to read in the easiest available way — if you like it enough, you can always go back and struggle with the original. (That’s how I made it through Proust; I started out in French, but after a couple of years realized I was never going to finish it that way. My brother is still doggedly working through the French, and has been for decades now.)
I read the Nights in Husain Haddawy’s translation, which is good (and has useful annotation).
“Nights”
Actually I meant Hanna Diyab’s book! Published in English in 2021 (Diyāb, Ḥannā, The Book of Travels).
But your comment made me realise that I never even seriously considered trying the Nights in Arabic:/
By the way: Hanna told Galland 16 stories, he wrote one (Aladdin) and just told the others.
Galland wrote brief sketches of those stories, and then published 10 stories. As everyone knows, these include many of the most famous ones (apart of those known to English reader, every Russian knows Pushkin’s “king Saltan” tale in verse based on one of them*)
English translations of these sketches can be found here:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13110/marvelstales.32.1.0133
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13110/marvelstales.32.2.0435
* “He listened and heard the eldest saying: As we are talking about wishes, mine would be to be married to the sultan’s baker so as to eat from that bread that they call the sultan’s bread etc. The second sister said, and I, my wish would be to be the wife of the Sultan’s master chef, I would eat excellent stews. The youngest, who was a great beauty and quite witty, said: as for me, I would wish to be the sultan’s wife, I would give him a prince who would have golden hair on one side, and silver [hair] on the other, whose tears would be pearls, and who would not laugh a single time without rosebuds breaking into blossom.”
I’m afraid, in Russian instead of tears and silver we have a bogatyr (“Arnie Schwarzenegger or some other bodybuilder”, Turkic *bagatur).