what ” Arabian Nights” really talks about
What do you know about the tales of Arabian Nights? This is not a rhetorical question because the majority is content with a well-known stereotype: this is a well-known Arabic fairy tale about the beautiful Sheherazade, who became a hostage of the cruel-hearted king Shahriyar, who every night got himself a new wife, and chopped off her head in the morning.
The eloquent girl, who so vividly tells fairy tales, drugged the king and thereby bought her freedom. And of course, among her stories were stories about Aladdin, Sinbad the Sailor, and other brave brave men, but it turned out that all this was complete nonsense.
Fairy tales have come down to us after many centuries of censorship and translation, so there is little left of the original. In fact, the heroes of Sheherazade’s fairy tales were not as sweet, kind, and morally stable as the characters in the Disney cartoon.
Therefore, if you want to keep a good memory of your favorite childhood characters, stop reading immediately. And to everyone else – welcome to a world that you may not even have suspected. The first documented information that describes the story of Sheherazade as a well-known work comes from the pen of the 10th-century historian al-Masudi. In the future, the collection was rewritten more than once and changed depending on the time of life and the language of the translator, but the backbone remained the same, therefore, if not the original story, then very close to the original has come down to us.
It begins, oddly enough, not with the tears of a young beauty who was about to say goodbye to life, but with the story of two brothers, each of whom ruled his country. After twenty years of separate rule, the elder brother, whose name was Shahriyar, invited the younger one, Shahzeman, to his domain. He agreed without thinking twice, but as soon as he left the capital, he “remembered one thing” that he had forgotten in the city. Upon his return, he found his wife in the arms of a Negro slave. Angered, the king hacked them both, and then with a clear conscience went to his brother.
At a party, he became sad because his wife was no longer alive, and he stopped eating. The older brother tried to cheer him up but to no avail. Then Shahriyar offered to go hunting, but Shahzeman refused, continuing to sink into melancholy. So, sitting at the window and indulging in black melancholy, the unfortunate king saw how the wife of his absent brother arranged group sex with slaves at the fountain. The king immediately cheered up and thought: “Wow, my brother will have more serious problems.”
Shahriyar returned from hunting, finding his brother with a smile on his face. I didn’t have to ask for a long time, he immediately told everything frankly. The reaction was unusual. Instead of acting like a younger brother, the older one offered to go on a trip and see if wives cheat on other husbands? They were unlucky, and the wanderings dragged on: they could not find unfaithful wives until they came across an oasis, spread out on the seashore.
From the depths of the sea appeared a genie with a chest under his arm. He pulled a woman (a real one) out of the chest and said: “I want to sleep on you,” and fell asleep like that. This woman, seeing the kings hiding on the palm tree, ordered them to go down and take possession of her right there on the sand. Otherwise, she would have awakened the genie and he would have killed them. The kings agreed and granted her wish.
After the act of love, the woman asked for rings from each of them. They gave it away, and she added the jewels to the other five hundred and seventy that she kept in her casket. So that the brothers would not languish in conjecture, the seductress explained that all the rings once belonged to men who had seized her secretly from gin. The brothers looked at each other and said: “Wow, this gin will have more serious problems than ours” – and returned to their countries.
After that, Shahriyar cut off the head of his wife and everyone who participated in the orgy, and he decided to take one girl per night. This story may seem sexist today, but it’s more like a porn movie script. Think for yourself: no matter what the characters do, wherever they go, they have to either look at the act of intercourse or participate in it.
Similar scenes are repeated over and over again throughout the book. Why, the younger sister of Sheherazade personally watched the wedding night of her relative: “And then the king sent for Dunyazada, and she came to her sister, hugged her and sat on the floor near the bed. And then Shahriyar took possession of Shahrazad, and then they began to talk.
Another distinguishing feature of the tales of a thousand and one nights is that their characters act absolutely without reason, and often the events themselves look ridiculous to the extreme. Here is how, for example, the fairy tale of the first night begins. Once a merchant went to some country to collect debts.
He felt hot, and he sat down under a tree to eat dates and bread. “Having eaten a date, he threw a seed – and suddenly he sees: in front of him is a tall ifrit, and in his hands is a naked sword. Ifrit approached the merchant and said to him: “Get up, I will kill you, as you killed my son!” “How did I kill your son?” the merchant asked. And the ifrit replied: “When you ate a date and threw a seed, it hit my son in the chest, and he died at that very moment.” Just think about it: the merchant killed the genie with a date seed. If only the enemies of Disney’s Aladdin knew about this secret weapon.
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In our folk tale, there are also a lot of absurdities like: “The mouse ran, waved its tail, the pot fell, the testicles broke”, but there you definitely won’t meet such crazy characters as in the story of the fifth night. It tells about the king al-Sinbad, who for many years trained a falcon to help him in hunting. And then one day the king, together with his retinue, caught a gazelle, and then the devil pulled him to say: “Anyone whose head the gazelle jumps over will be killed.” The gazelle naturally jumped over the king’s head. Then the subjects began to whisper: they say, why did the owner promise to kill everyone over whose head a gazelle jumped, but he still hasn’t killed himself.
Instead of fulfilling the promise, the king chased the gazelle, killed it, and hung the carcass on the hindquarters of his horse. Going to rest after the chase, the king stumbled upon a source of life-giving moisture dripping from a tree. Three times he filled the bowl, and three times the falcon overturned it. Then the king got angry and cut off the falcon’s wings, and the falcon pointed with its beak upwards, where a viper cub was sitting on the branches of a tree, emitting poison. It is difficult to say what the moral of this story is, but the character who told it in the book said that this was a parable about envy.
Of course, it is foolish to demand from a book, which is at least 11 centuries old, a harmonious dramatic line. That is why the purpose of the persiflage described above was not to ridicule it crudely, but to show that it can be an excellent reading matter for the night, which will definitely make any modern person laugh. Tales of a thousand and one nights are a product of time, which, having passed through the centuries, unwittingly turned into a comedy, and there is nothing wrong with that.
Despite the wide popularity of this historical monument, there are incredibly few screen versions of it, and those that exist usually show the famous Aladdin or Sinbad the Sailor. However, the most striking film version of fairy tales was the French film of the same name. It does not retell all the plots of the book but serves a vivid and absurd story that is worthy of the Monty Python films and at the same time corresponds to the crazy spirit of fairy tales.
For example, Shahriyar in the film is a king who dreams of growing roses, writing poetry, and touring in a traveling circus at the same time. The vizier is an old pervert, so disturbed by the absent-mindedness of the king that he himself goes to bed with his wife so that he understands how windy women are.
And Scheherazade is an extravagant girl. By the way, she is played by the young and beautiful Catherine Zeta-Jones, who appears naked in front of the audience more than once in the entire tape. We have listed at least four reasons why you should watch this movie. Surely after this, you will want to read The Book of a Thousand and One Nights even more.
