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Volume 2
Nights 295 to 719

Translated by MALCOLM C. LYONS,
with URSULA LYONS
Introduced and Annotated by ROBERT IRWIN

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PENGUIN BOOKS

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Editorial Note

Introduction

The Arabian Nights: Nights 295 to 719

Glossary

Maps

The ‘Abbasid Caliphate in the Ninth Century

Baghdad in the Ninth Century

Cairo in the Fourteenth Century

Index of Nights and Stories

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THE ARABIAN NIGHTS
TALES OF 1001 NIGHTS
VOLUME 2

MALCOLM C. LYONS, sometime Sir Thomas Adams Professor of Arabic at Cambridge University and a life Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, is a specialist in the field of classical Arabic Literature. His published works include the biography Saladin: The Politics of the Holy War, The Arabian Epic: Heroic and Oral Storytelling, Identification and Identity in Classical Arabic Poetry and many articles on Arabic literature.

URSULA LYONS, formerly an Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Cambridge University and, since 1976, an Emeritus Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, specializes in modern Arabic literature.

ROBERT IRWIN is the author of For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies, The Middle East in the Middle Ages, The Arabian Nights: A Companion and numerous other specialized studies of Middle Eastern politics, art and mysticism. His novels include The Limits of Vision, The Arabian Nightmare, The Mysteries of Algiers and Satan Wants Me.

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This new English version of The Arabian Nights (also known as The Thousand and One Nights) is the first complete translation of the Arabic text known as the Macnaghten edition or Calcutta II since Richard Burton’s famous translation of it in 1885–8. A great achievement in its time, Burton’s translation nonetheless contained many errors, and even in the 1880s his English read strangely.

In this new edition, in addition to Malcolm Lyons’s translation of all the stories found in the Arabic text of Calcutta II, Ursula Lyons has translated the tales of Aladdin and Ali Baba, as well as an alternative ending to ‘The seventh journey of Sindbad’, from Antoine Galland’s eighteenth-century French. (For the Aladdin and Ali Baba stories no original Arabic text has survived and consequently these are classed as ‘orphan stories’.)

The text appears in three volumes, each with an introduction, which, in Volume 1, discusses the strange nature of the Nights; in Volume 2, their history and provenance; and, in Volume 3, the influence the tales have exerted on writers through the centuries. Volume 1 also includes an explanatory note on the translation, a note on the text and an introduction to the ‘orphan stories’ (‘Editing Galland’), in addition to a chronology and suggestions for further reading. Footnotes, a glossary and maps appear in all three volumes.

As often happens in popular narrative, inconsistencies and contradictions abound in the text of the Nights. It would be easy to emend these, and where names have been misplaced this has been done to avoid confusion. Elsewhere, however, emendations for which there is no textual authority would run counter to the fluid and uncritical spirit of the Arabic narrative. In such circumstances no changes have been made.

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The medieval Arabic story collection of Alf Layla wa-Layla, or the Thousand and One Nights, is best known in English as The Arabian Nights. It is reasonable to ask how old this classic work of Oriental fiction is, who wrote or compiled it and how many stories it contains. But such questions are almost impossible to answer. The collection was put together in a haphazard, unpoliced fashion over many centuries.

In the opening story which frames all the other stories in the Nights, the monarch Shahriyar, who has been sexually betrayed by his wife, cuts off her head and, thereafter, he takes a different virgin to bed every night and has her killed in the morning. In order to break the bloody cycle, Shahrazad, daughter of the king’s vizier, volunteers to give herself to Shahriyar, but, in order to avert her execution, she starts to tell a story to her sister, Dunyazad, whom she has brought with her into Shahriyar’s bedroom. Shahrazad leaves her story unfinished at the break of dawn, and Shahriyar spares her life in order to hear the rest. And so things proceed, with Shahrazad finishing one tale only to start a new one. This goes on night after night until, after a thousand and one nights, Shahriyar repents of his decision to have her killed.

This frame story of a clever bride telling stories to a jealous king in order to prolong her life goes back to a lost Sanskrit original dating from no later than the eighth century. At some point, stories from this Indian story collection were translated into Pahlavi Persian. The tenth-century Arab polymath al-Mas‘udi refers to the Persian version, which was called Hezar Afsaneh, ‘A Thousand Stories’. We do not know what was in this story collection. Although the Sasanian Persians seem to have had an extensive literature of entertainment, no examples have survived in their original Persian form. However, it seems likely that the stories of the Hezar Afsaneh were mostly didactic fables, often adapted from Indian originals (as was the case with the famous collection of animal stories known as the Fables of Bidpai). Such stories of the mirrors-for-princes kind gave guidance on good government and right conduct. The early Persian prototype of The Arabian Nights was probably a bit boring, and the wilder tales of marvels, monsters and mutilations were likely to have been the later inventions of Arab storytellers.

The Persian stories of Hezar Afsaneh, probably quite small in number, were in turn translated and adapted for an Arab audience. A ninth-century paper fragment of the opening page of the Nights survives (its title is Kitab Hadith Alf Layla, or ‘The Book of the Tale of One Thousand Nights’) but, though it features an early version of Shahrazad telling stories to her sister, the plot device of telling stories to prolong a life does not appear. However, Ibn Nadim’s tenth-century discursive catalogue of books, the Fihrist (or ‘Index’), mentions the story collection which he says derived from a Persian original, and he does give the frame story of Shahrazad telling stories for her life. Although he claims to have seen complete manuscripts of The Thousand and One Nights, he says that these comprised less than two hundred stories.

The oldest substantial surviving Arabic version of the Nights is a three-volume manuscript that today is in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. It seems to have been put together in Syria in the late fifteenth century. It was this manuscript which formed the basis of the epoch-making translation into French by Antoine Galland (1646–1715), an antiquarian who had spent years in Istanbul studying the various positions on the Eucharist taken by the Eastern Christian churches. He also collected old coins and other antiquities for the Royal Library (later to become the Bibliothèque Nationale) and the Cabinet des Médailles (a collection of coins, medals and antiquities that belonged to the French king). In the course of Galland’s sojourns in the Middle East in the years 1670–75, 1675–6 and 1679–88, he had become fluent in Arabic, Persian and Turkish.

Back in France, Galland settled in Caen and published a number of scholarly works. He also assisted the Orientalist Barthélemy d’Herbelot in compiling the Bibliothèque orientale, a monumental work of reference mostly devoted to Islamic culture that was finally published in 1697. Around 1698, Galland translated the stories of ‘Sindbad of the sea’. Then someone told him that the Sindbad stories were part of a much larger collection. This, he eventually decided, must be a longer version of the Arabic story collection known as Alf Layla wa-Layla, or, as he translated it, Les Mille et une nuits. (In fact, no early Arabic manuscripts of the Nights contain the Sindbad stories. They are found only in later manuscripts that were influenced by Galland’s choices.) He used a Syrian manuscript of the Nights, though there are occasional instances of Egyptian vocabulary and turns of phrase in the text. This manuscript, which Galland bought from a friend in Paris and which ended up in the Royal Library, is, as already noted, the oldest substantial, surviving manuscript of the Nights. (The manuscript Galland worked from was probably in four volumes, but the fourth volume has since been lost.) There is no such thing as a canonical text of the Nights with a fixed number of stories in a fixed order.

The surviving three volumes of the manuscript translated by Galland contained only thirty-five and a half stories and the number of breaks within the stories into nights was well short of a thousand and one. Though he was convinced that there must be a longer manuscript of the Nights, Galland was unable to lay his hands on one. Therefore, in order to satisfy public demand, he added stories which had been told to him by a Syrian informant. These stories, the so-called ‘orphan stories’, include ‘Ali Baba’ and ‘Aladdin’. There are no Arabic originals for them (though Arabic versions purporting to be the originals were produced by forgers in the nineteenth century). Galland also added the previously published Sindbad stories. In addition, in order to plump out his collection, he seems to have drawn on one or more Egyptian manuscripts of the Nights.

Galland probably intended that his translation Les Mille et une nuits (1704–17) should serve as a sort of sequel to d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale. The stories offered fantasy and diversion, but edification also: ‘They should also please by what they reveal of the manners and customs of Orientals, of their religious ceremonies, both pagan and Mohammedan; and these subjects are better brought out than in the authors who have written about them or in travellers’ narratives.’ Thus Galland claimed that he had tried to preserve the authentic way the Orientals spoke and felt – at least in so far as was compatible with bienséance (decorum). In fact, Galland’s translation was elegant and courtly, as the conventions of eighteenth-century literature demanded. It was also heavily glossed; Galland, instead of using footnotes, sometimes explained Oriental practices within the text of his translation. Also, in cases where it seemed appropriate to him, he exaggerated the magnificence of palaces, royal robes and jewellery.

Muhsin Mahdi, the Harvard professor who in the 1980s edited the Galland manuscript of the Nights in the Bibliothèque Nationale, is particularly critical of the liberties that the Frenchman took with his translation:

Abandoning the generally lean structure and fast movement of the original in order to create a more prudish, sentimental, moralistic, romantic, or glamorous atmosphere, he was apparently willing to pay a heavy price to make his Nuits popular. All this, along with his frequently imperfect understanding or misunderstanding of the Arabic original and inexplicable significant omissions, reflects poorly on his knowledge of the language he was trying to translate, acquaintance with the habits and the customs of the Orientals he was trying to explain and art as a storyteller.

Be that as it may, precisely that quality of Galland’s stories – ‘prudish, sentimental, moralistic, romantic, or glamorous’ – made them a great hit with the French reading public. More specifically, they appealed in the first instance to the ladies of the court and the salons. Galland had dedicated both the translations of the Sindbad stories and Les Mille et une nuits to the Marquise d’O, a lady in the service of the Duchess of Burgundy, and both these women took an interest in promoting his translations. Galland’s earliest readers were mostly adult, highly cultured and female. This was an age when women presided over literary salons (an age which the cultural historian Jean Starobinski has characterized as that of ‘the fictitious ascendancy of women’). Before Galland, Charles Perrault had won acclaim with the same audience when he published his Contes (1691–5), a collection of folk tales, including such famous stories as ‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Bluebeard’ and ‘Cinderella’, which were rewritten by him in an elegantly mock-simple style.

Earlier, Perrault had launched the fiercely debated ‘Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns’, by claiming that seventeenth-century France had reached a higher level of civilization than that of ancient Greece and Rome. He attacked the ancients and, most specifically, Homer for barbarousness. Perrault’s fairy stories had been collected and stylishly rewritten as a demonstration that there could be a distinctively modern French literary culture that owed little or nothing to classical precepts. Moreover, the fairy stories with his added glosses were, he claimed, more moral than most of the stories found in ancient Greek and Latin literature. Galland’s collection of stories was similarly admired for the fresh repertoire of plots, settings and characters that it provided. ‘Read Sinbad and you will be sick of Aeneas,’ the Gothic novelist Horace Walpole urged. Galland, like Perrault, wished to moralize and, in a prefatory note to his translation, he expressed the hope that those who read his stories would be ready to profit from the examples of the virtues and vices found in them.

Galland’s French volumes were rapidly translated into English. The first English translation of the early volumes of Les Mille et une nuits seems to have been published London in 1708 in chapbook form. (A chapbook is a book or pamphlet of popular stories of the kind originally sold by pedlars.) For a long time, English readers were content with this translation of a translation. Only in the years 1838–41 did a three-volume translation appear, taken directly from the Arabic by Edward William Lane (1801–76). Lane, a distinguished Arabist, had spent many years in Cairo. On his return to England in 1836, he published his famous quasi-encyclopedic survey Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. Lane seems to have intended his subsequent translation of the Nights to serve as a kind of supplement to this book. His translation was brought out by the same publisher, the Society for the Propagation of Useful Knowledge, and it was therefore aimed at a wide market. In his translation, the text of the Nights served as a pretext for lengthy and numerous footnotes explaining yet more aspects of the manners and customs of the Egyptians and Muslims more generally. The specially commissioned illustrations, executed by William Harvey, a well-known engraver who had been the favourite pupil of Thomas Bewick, and closely supervised by Lane, were almost as important to the essentially educational enterprise as were the footnotes.

Lane translated the Arabic into an antiquated, mock-biblical prose. Since he was even more prudish than Galland, his translation was heavily bowdlerized and some stories were omitted altogether on the grounds of indecency. Yet other stories were omitted because Lane claimed to find them too fantastical, vulgar or silly. But the truth seems to have been that the heavily illustrated text, which appeared in weekly instalments before being issued in three bound volumes, was losing money, and Lane was coming under pressure from his publisher to bring the unprofitable enterprise to a speedy end.

Lane translated from the Bulaq text, whereas this new Penguin translation by Malcolm Lyons has been made from Calcutta II. What do Bulaq and Calcutta II refer to? By the time Lane had begun his translation, several Arabic printed texts of the Nights were available. Of these the most important were first, a two-volume translation published in Calcutta by the College of Fort William for Oriental Languages in 1814 and 1818 (known to scholars as Calcutta I), and secondly the Bulaq edition (so called after the port suburb of Cairo), published in two volumes in 1835. Lane chose to work from the more recently published Bulaq text, which seems to have been based primarily on an eighteenth-century Egyptian manuscript.

Calcutta I had been commissioned by the College of Fort William in Calcutta as a textbook for teaching Arabic to East India Company officers. (Fort William had been established in 1800 to teach Oriental languages to company officials and civil servants in the colonial administration of India.) The larger, four-volume edition, known as the Macnaghten edition or Calcutta II and published in 1839–42, had a similar educational purpose. The text was based in large part on a manuscript brought to India by Major Turner Macan, a scholarly officer who, in 1829, had published an edited text of the great Persian epic the Shahnama. Macan had acquired the Nights manuscript from the estate of Henry Salt (1780–1827), British Consul in Egypt and a famous collector of its antiquities. Lane had met Salt on his first visit to Egypt in 1825 and it may have been Salt who inspired Lane’s interest in the Nights. It seems most probable that the compilation of this manuscript was commissioned by Salt during his last years in Egypt, that is around 1824–5. The scribe or scribes made use of a late Egyptian manuscript (probably of the eighteenth century), but they supplemented it by drawing on the printed text of Calcutta I. They also seem to have drawn upon the first two volumes of an edition of the Nights which a German scholar, Maximilian Habicht, had started to publish in Breslau in 1824. The Salt/ Macan manuscript is now lost. Very likely it was destroyed by the printers once it had served their use.

In India, Macan’s manuscript had been acquired by Charles Brownlow, who offered it for scrutiny and evaluation to a panel of experts belonging to the Asiatic Society of Bengal. The results of their deliberations were published in 1837 in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal:

The style of the language was declared to be singularly pure, the narrative spirited and graphic, and the collection of stories enriched with many tales either perfectly new to European readers or else given a form very different from that which they have been hitherto known, garbled and abridged by the carelessness of translators or by the imperfections of the MSS whence they were translated.

Sir William Hay Macnaghten, the leading Arabist, having looked at volumes three and four of the manuscript, declared that it was genuine and suggested that it would be a worthwhile enterprise to translate it. In the Journal, he gave it as his opinion that the government should subsidize the publication, because of ‘the credit which must accrue to our nation, from presenting to the Musulman population of India, in a complete and correct form and in their own classical language, these enchanting tales…’. In the event, the government did subscribe for fifty copies of the printed text.

As already noted, the Calcutta II text is also known as the Macnaghten edition, although the extent of his involvement in its preparation is questionable. Sir William Hay Macnaghten (1793–1841) had studied Arabic and Sanskrit at Fort William in Calcutta. He became Secretary to the Secret and Political Department in Calcutta. Emily Eden, sister of the Governor General of India and a devoted letter writer, described him as ‘clever and pleasant, speaks Persian rather more fluently than English; Arabic better than Persian; but, for familiar conversation, prefers Sanskrit’. According to his wife’s biography of him, Richard Burton, the future translator of the Nights, who was out in India in Macnaghten’s time, was less flattering. ‘Macnaghten was a mere Indian civilian. Like too many of them, he had fallen into the dodging ways of the natives, and he distinctly deserved his death.’ It is not clear how Macnaghten had offended Burton. What is clear is that he was one of the most influential formulators of policy in British India. A committed Russophobe, he advocated a forward policy in Afghanistan, where he hoped to establish a puppet regime to block further Russian advance towards India. His promising career in the Bengal civil service was cut short when, in 1837, he moved to Simla prior to accompanying Lord Auckland on an expedition into Afghanistan. The British aim was to oust the warlord Dost Mohammed Khan from Kabul and put in their own nominee. But their troops were trapped and surprised in Kabul and Macnaghten was murdered there in December 1841. It is said that his wife first learned of her husband’s death when his severed hand with his ring bearing an Arabic inscription was tossed into her tent.

Before his involvement in the ill-fated Afghan adventure, Macnaghten had volunteered to correct the Arabic of the manuscript prior to its being sent on to the printer. In this task he was to be assisted by the Maulavis of the Persian Office in Calcutta. (Maulavis were experts on Islamic law and they necessarily had to have a good knowledge of Arabic.) The chronology of Macnaghten’s departure for Simla and Kabul raises doubts about his serious involvement in the production of the edition that bears his name, as planning the Afghan expedition would have left him little spare time to work on the text. Whatever the case, it is clear that the edition that was published, while based on the Macan manuscript, drew heavily on the Bulaq edition. Since Calcutta II drew on so many earlier recensions of the Nights, it contained more stories and usually fuller versions of those stories.

When the Calcutta II project was launched, there had been hopes that Macnaghten might translate the Arabic once it was published. In the event, it was first translated into English by John Payne (1842–1917), a poet and translator. Payne’s highly literary translation was published in a single limited edition in 1882–4. Since his edition sold out and he had no intention of ever reissuing it, his friend and advisor Sir Richard Burton (1821–90) saw his opportunity. Burton was already famous for having disguised himself as a Muslim and making the hajj or pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, and for his expedition undertaken with John Speke in search of the source of the Nile. He had also published a translation of the Kama Sutra in 1883.

Burton’s translation was published in 1885–7 in sixteen volumes (six of which were supplemental volumes containing stories not found in Calcutta II) and, in order to circumvent the Obscene Publications Act of 1857, it was available to private subscribers only. While Lane’s translation had been excessively prudish, Burton’s was at the other end of the spectrum. He heightened the eroticism and, occasionally, the racism of what he translated. His prose was by turns pompous, slangy or tortured. However, he did provide a full translation and even supplied variant versions of some stories.

Two further translations need to be mentioned. Joseph-Charles-Victor Mardrus, a member of a Caucasian clan who grew up in Cairo, published a French translation of the Nights in twelve volumes between 1899 and 1904. This ‘translation’ is extremely inaccurate and some of the stories seem to have been invented by Mardrus. The prose was embellished in a fin-de-siècle manner. Though it is perhaps easier to read than the English of Lane or Burton, some readers may find it rather sickly. As a work of creative literature, Mardrus’s version certainly has its merits, but as a rendering of an Arabic original it is almost worthless. An English translation of the French by E. Powys Mathers was published in 1923 in a private subscription edition and in a public edition in 1937.

In 1984, Muhsin Mahdi, a professor of Arabic at Harvard, published a critical edition of the oldest substantially surviving manuscript of the Nights, the one used by Galland that is currently in the Bibliothèque Nationale and which contains only thirty-five and a half stories extending over 282 ‘Nights’. Mahdi’s critically edited text was subsequently well translated into English by Hussain Haddawy in 1990. Although Mahdi argued that the manuscript in question dates from the early fourteenth century, it seems clear that it in fact dates from the late fifteenth century. His view that there was a single thirteenth- or fourteenth-century core text to which, in the centuries that followed, other tales were added without any justification at all has also attracted some criticism.

In 2004, The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia was published in two volumes under the editorship of Ulrich Marzolph and Richard van Leeuwen. This work uses the Burton translation as ‘the main point of reference’ for its essays and articles, on the basis that the Burton translation provides the most comprehensive range of stories. As the article devoted to Burton puts it: ‘In the present work, Burton’s translation has been chosen as the major point of reference for purely pragmatic reasons… Burton’s translation is the most complete version of texts relating to The Arabian Nights in English.’ However, as the same article also notes: ‘Some critics have criticized the translation for its archaic language and extravagant idiom, rendering it hardly digestible for the average reader.’

To quote The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia once more, according to Ulrich Marzolph’s introduction: ‘Sadly enough, no adequate complete English-language rendering of The Arabian Nights prepared directly from the Arabic is available.’ The Penguin Arabian Nights aims to remedy this deficiency and this translation by Malcolm and Ursula Lyons is the first substantial translation made directly from the Arabic since Burton’s in the 1880s. Like Burton’s, it has been made from Calcutta II, so it includes some stories which were in the missing fourth part of the Galland manuscript and some which were added in later centuries. In addition, two of the most famous and popular ‘orphan stories’ have been translated from the French: ‘Aladdin’ and ‘Ali Baba’, together with an alternative version of ‘The seventh journey of Sindbad’. (But this new translation does not include the other stories contained in Burton’s supplementary volumes, where he drew on extra tales from the Breslau edition, an Oxford manuscript once owned by Edward Wortley-Montague, and other miscellaneous sources.) Calcutta II is a more comprehensive compilation than any of the rival printed versions of the Nights. But, though it has the most stories and usually the fullest version of the stories and though scholars were involved in its first printing, Calcutta II is not a scholarly text in any serious sense. It is, however, a wonderful collection of stories, many of which date from medieval times, while other tales seem to have been composed or added in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Galland, Lane and Burton produced didactic translations and used the stories as pretexts for glosses or notes. The Nights was treated by them as, in a sense, an ethnographic source, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the stories were often cited as a guide to the Arab way of life or the Arab mind. The Lyons translation has no such ethnographic agenda, and any annotation has been kept to a minimum. This literary translation is dedicated to the pleasure of storytelling. The book is long (approximately a million words), but its length permits a special kind of reading pleasure as it allows readers to lose themselves in a veritable sea of stories.

Robert Irwin

London

 

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SHAHRAZAD CONTINUED:

A story is also told that one night, when the caliph Harun al-Rashid was feeling restless, he summoned his vizier, Ja‘far the Barmecide. When he came, the caliph said: ‘Ja‘far, I am very restive tonight and in a bad humour. I want you to fetch me something to cheer and relax me.’ ‘Commander of the Faithful,’ said Ja‘far, ‘I have a friend, ‘Ali al-‘Ajami, who has a fund of entertaining stories that raise the spirits and remove sorrow from the heart.’ ‘Bring him to me,’ said the caliph, to which Ja‘far replied: ‘To hear is to obey.’ He left the caliph’s presence to look for ‘Ali, and sent a messenger to fetch him. When ‘Ali had come, Ja‘far told him of the caliph’s summons. ‘To hear is to obey,’ ‘Ali replied.

Nights 295 to 314

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Morning now dawned and Shahrazad broke off from what she had been allowed to say. Then, when it was the two hundred and ninety-fifth night, SHE CONTINUED:

The two of them set off for the palace, and when ‘Ali appeared before the caliph, he was given permission to sit, which he did. The caliph told him of his depression and went on: ‘I have heard that you know many stories and tales and so I want you to tell me something that may dispel my cares and cheer me.’ ‘Shall I tell you of something that I have seen with my own eyes, Commander of the Faithful,’ ‘Ali asked, ‘or something that I have heard?’ ‘If you have seen something, then tell me about it,’ Harun replied, and ‘Ali agreed. HE BEGAN:

You must know, Commander of the Faithful, that one year I travelled from Baghdad, my home, accompanied by a servant who brought with him a small bag. I came to a certain city and while I was there, buying and selling, I was assaulted by a Kurdish ruffian, who seized the bag. ‘This is mine,’ he claimed, ‘and all its contents are my property.’ ‘Muslims,’ I called out, ‘save me from this worst of rascals!’ The bystanders told us to go to the qadi and to abide by his arbitration. I was happy to do this and we set off to the qadi. When we got there he asked why we had come, telling us to explain the case. I said: ‘We have come to you as litigants with opposing claims and are content to accept your arbitration.’ ‘Which of you is the claimant?’ the qadi asked. At that, the Kurd went forward and said: ‘Master, this bag and its contents are mine. I lost it and then found it in the possession of this man.’ ‘When did you lose it?’ the qadi asked. ‘Yesterday,’ replied the Kurd, ‘and I spent a sleepless night because of its loss.’ ‘As you have recognized it, describe what is in it,’ the qadi told him. The Kurd said: ‘In it there are two silver kohl sticks, together with kohl for my eyes, a hand towel in which I placed two gilt cups and two candlesticks. There are two tents, two plates, two spoons, a pillow, two leather mats, two jugs, a china dish, two basins, a cooking pot, two clay jars, a ladle, a pack needle, two provision bags, a cat, two bitches, one large bowl and two large sacks, a gown, two furs, a cow with two calves, one goat, two sheep, a ewe with two lambs, two green pavilions, one male and two female camels, a buffalo, two bulls, a lioness and two lions, a she-bear, two foxes, a mattress, two couches, a palace, two halls, a colonnade, two chairs, a kitchen with two doors and a group of Kurds who will bear witness to the fact that this is my bag.’

‘What have you to say?’ the qadi asked me. I had been flabbergasted by what the Kurd had said and so I went forward and said: ‘May God honour our master the qadi. There was nothing in my bag except for one little ruined house and another one with no door, a dog kennel and a boys’ school, with boys playing dice. It had tents and their ropes, the cities of Basra and Baghdad, the palace of Shaddad ibn ‘Ad, a blacksmith’s forge, a fishing net, sticks, tent pegs, girls, boys and a thousand pimps who will testify that the bag is mine.’

When the Kurd heard what I had to say, he wept and sobbed. ‘My master the qadi,’ he said, ‘this bag of mine is well known and its contents have been described. In it are fortresses and castles, cranes, beasts of prey, chess players and chessboards. There is a mare and two foals, a stallion and two horses, together with two long spears. It also has a lion, two hares, a city and two villages, a prostitute with two villainous pimps, a hermaphrodite, two good-for-nothings, one blind man and two who can see, a lame man and two who are paralysed, a priest, two deacons, a patriarch and two monks, a qadi and two notaries, and these will bear witness that this is my bag.’

‘What have you to say, ‘Ali?’ asked the qadi and, bursting with rage, I came forward and said: ‘May God aid our master the qadi.’

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Morning now dawned and Shahrazad broke off from what she had been allowed to say. Then, when it was the two hundred and ninety-sixth night, SHE CONTINUED:

I have heard, O fortunate king, that ‘ALI SAID:

I came forward bursting with rage and said: ‘May God aid our master the qadi. In this bag of mine is a coat of mail, a sword and stores of weapons. There are a thousand butting rams, a sheep-fold, a thousand barking dogs, orchards, vines, flowers, scented herbs, figs, apples, pictures and statues, bottles and drinking cups, beautiful slave girls, singing girls, wedding feasts with noise and tumult, wide open spaces, successful men, dawn raiders with swords, spears, bows and arrows, friends, dear ones, companions, comrades, men imprisoned and awaiting punishment, drinking companions, mandolins, flutes, banners and flags, boys, girls, unveiled brides and singing slave girls. There are five girls from Abyssinia, three from India, four from al-Medina, twenty from Rum, fifty Turkish girls and seventy Persians, eighty Kurdish girls and ninety Georgians. The Tigris and the Euphrates are there, together with a fishing net, flint and steel for striking sparks, Iram of the Columns and a thousand good-for-nothings and pimps. There are exercise grounds, stables, mosques, baths, a builder, a carpenter, a plank of wood, a nail, a black slave with a fife, a captain and a groom, cities and towns, a hundred thousand dinars, Kufa and al-Anbar, twenty chests filled with materials, fifty storehouses for food, Gaza, Ascalon, the land from Damietta to Aswan, the palace of Chosroe Anushirwan, the kingdom of Solomon and the land from Wadi Nu‘man to Khurasan, as well as Balkh and Isfahan and what lies between India and the land of the Blacks. It also contains – may God prolong the life of our master the qadi – gowns, turban cloth and a thousand sharp razors to shave off the qadi’s beard, unless he fears my vengeance and rules that the bag is mine.’

The qadi was bewildered by what he heard the Kurd say. ‘You seem to me to be two ill-omened fellows or else two atheists who are trying to ridicule qadis and magistrates with no fear of rebuke. No one has ever described or heard of anything stranger than what you have produced, or spoken the kind of things that you have said. By God, not all the land from China to the tree of Umm Ghailan, from Persia to the land of the Blacks or from Wadi Nu‘man to Khurasan would be big enough to contain all the things that you have mentioned. Your claims are incredible. Is this bag of yours a bottomless sea, or the Day of Resurrection on which the just and the unjust will be gathered together?’ He then ordered the bag to be opened and when I did this, in it were a piece of bread, lemons, cheese and olives. I threw it in front of the Kurd and went off.

When the caliph heard this story from ‘Ali al-‘Ajami, he laughed so much that he fell over, after which he presented him with a handsome reward.

A story is told that while Ja‘far the Barmecide was drinking one night with al-Rashid, al-Rashid said to him: ‘I have heard that you have bought the slave girl So-and-So. I have wanted her for a long time, as she is so very beautiful that my heart is filled with love for her. So sell her to me.’ ‘I shall not sell her, Commander of the Faithful,’ Ja‘far replied. ‘Then give her to me,’ said al-Rashid. ‘No, I shall not,’ said Ja‘far. ‘If you don’t either sell her or give her to me,’ said al-Rashid, ‘I swear to divorce my wife Zubaida three times.’ ‘If I either sell her or give her to you, then I swear to divorce my own wife,’ replied Ja‘far.

After this, when they had recovered from the effects of the wine, they realized the severity of the affair into which they had fallen, and they could think of no way out. ‘The only man who can deal with this,’ said al-Rashid, ‘is Abu Yusuf.’ It was midnight when they sent for him, and when the caliph’s messenger came, Abu Yusuf got up in fear, saying to himself: ‘I wouldn’t have been asked to come at this time had there not been a serious problem for Islam.’ He left his house in a hurry, and when he mounted his mule he told his servant to take the mule’s nose-bag with him as it might not have finished feeding. ‘When we get to the caliph’s palace,’ he went on, ‘give it its bag so that, if it hasn’t already finished, it can eat the rest of its feed before I come out again.’ ‘To hear is to obey,’ replied the servant.

The caliph rose to greet Abu Yusuf when he arrived, inviting him to sit beside him on his couch, he being the only man who ever shared the caliphal couch. ‘We have only asked you to come because of an important matter,’ the caliph said. He explained the problem, adding that he and Ja‘far had been unable to think of a way out of it. ‘This is a very simple affair indeed, Commander of the Faithful,’ said Abu Yusuf. ‘Ja‘far,’ he went on, ‘you must sell half of the girl to the Commander of the Faithful and make him a present of the other half and in that way neither of you will have broken your oaths.’ The caliph was delighted with this and both he and Ja‘far followed Abu Yusuf’s advice.

The caliph then ordered the girl to be fetched immediately…

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Morning now dawned and Shahrazad broke off from what she had been allowed to say. Then, when it was the two hundred and ninety-seventh night, SHE CONTINUED:

I have heard, O fortunate king, that the caliph then ordered the girl to be fetched immediately as he was filled with longing for her. When she was brought in, he said to Abu Yusuf: ‘I want to lie with her immediately and I cannot bear to wait until the period of her ritual purification is over. How can this be managed?’ Abu Yusuf replied: ‘Fetch me one of the caliph’s mamluks who have not been freed.’ When one of them was produced, Abu Yusuf asked the caliph for permission to marry the girl to the mamluk. This man was then to divorce her before consummating the marriage, as it would then be legal for the caliph to sleep with her immediately, since there would be no need for purification. This pleased the caliph even more than the earlier solution, and when the mamluk came he gave Abu Yusuf permission to draw up the marriage contract. Abu Yusuf duly married the pair, the mamluk having agreed to this, and he then said to the man: ‘Divorce her, and you shall have a hundred dinars.’ ‘I shall not divorce her,’ the man said, and although Abu Yusuf kept increasing the offer until it had reached a thousand dinars, he still refused. ‘Is it up to me to divorce her, or up to you or the Commander of the Faithful?’ he asked, and when Abu Yusuf told him that it was for him to act, he insisted: ‘I shall never do this.’

The caliph was furiously angry and he asked Abu Yusuf what was to be done. ‘Don’t worry, Commander of the Faithful,’ replied Abu Yusuf, ‘this is easy. Make over this mamluk to the girl as her own property.’ ‘I make him over to her,’ said the caliph. ‘Tell him that you accept,’ Abu Yusuf told the girl. ‘I accept,’ she said. ‘I then rule that they must part,’ he declared, ‘for, as he has become her property, the marriage is annulled.’ The caliph rose to his feet and exclaimed: ‘You are the kind of qadi whom I want in my lifetime!’ He called for bowls filled with gold, which were emptied out in front of him. ‘Have you anything to put this in?’ he asked Abu Yusuf, who remembered the mule’s nose-bag. He called for it and after it had been filled with gold he took it and went off back home. In the morning, he told his companions: ‘There is no easier and shorter path to both religion and worldly affairs than knowledge, as a result of which I have been given this huge sum for answering two or three questions.’

People of culture should take note of the elegance of this affair, comprising, as it does, excellent examples, such as that of Ja‘far’s treatment of al-Rashid, the knowledge shown by al-Rashid and the superior knowledge of the qadi, Abu Yusuf – may Almighty God have mercy on all their souls.

A story is told that while Khalid ibn ‘Abd Allah al-Qushairi was emir of Basra, a group of people approached him holding on to a young man of dazzling beauty, obvious culture and ample intelligence, handsomely shaped, fragrant and conveying an impression of tranquillity and gravity. When his captors brought him to Khalid, he asked them what the matter was. ‘This is a thief,’ they told him, ‘whom we came across last night in our house.’ Khalid looked at the young man and was struck by his fine and well-groomed appearance. He told the men to release him, after which he went up to him and asked him for his story. ‘These people have told you the truth,’ the young man said, ‘and what happened was as they described it.’ ‘What prompted you to do that,’ asked Khalid, ‘an elegant and handsome man like you?’ ‘Greed for worldly goods,’ replied the young man, ‘together with the decree of God, the Sublime, the Exalted.’ ‘May your mother lose you!’ exclaimed Khalid. ‘Wasn’t your handsome face, the perfection of your intellect, together with your culture enough to turn you away from theft?’ ‘Stop this talking, emir,’ said the young man, ‘and carry out the decree of Almighty God. I have brought this on myself, and God is not unjust towards His servants.’

Khalid was silent as he thought the matter over and he then brought the young man close to him and said: ‘I am suspicious of this confession of yours before witnesses. I don’t believe that you are a thief. There may be some story here over and above the matter of theft, and in that case tell me about it.’ ‘Emir,’ the young man said, ‘don’t get the idea that there is anything here except the crime to which I have confessed. I have no story to tell you except that I went into the house of these people and stole what I could. They came on me, laid hands on me and brought me to you.’

Khalid ordered the young man to be taken to prison, and he had a proclamation made in Basra summoning all who wanted to witness the punishment of So-and-So the thief and the amputation of his hand to come to such-and-such a place on the next day. When the young man had been lodged in prison and his feet had been placed in irons, he sighed deeply, shed tears and recited these lines:

Khalid has threatened to have my hand cut off

Unless I reveal to him her story.

I said: ‘Far be it from me to reveal to him

The love for her that is lodged within my heart.

To have my hand cut off for the crime I have confessed to

Is easier for my heart to bear than her disgrace.’

The gaolers responsible for him heard this and told Khalid about it. He ordered them to fetch him the prisoner under cover of night, and when they brought him Khalid interrogated him and discovered him to be an intelligent and cultured man with a delicate wit and understanding. Khalid ordered him to be given food and after he had eaten they talked for some time. ‘I know that there is something here apart from theft,’ Khalid said. ‘In the morning when the people have gathered and the qadi is there, he will ask you about your crime. Deny it and say something to save you from the punishment of amputation. The Apostle of God, may God bless him and give him peace, said: “Where there is doubt, do not exact the penalty.” ’ He then had the young man returned to prison…

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Morning now dawned and Shahrazad broke off from what she had been allowed to say. Then, when it was the two hundred and ninety-eighth night, SHE CONTINUED:

I have heard, O fortunate king, that after Khalid had talked to the young man, he had him returned to prison, where he passed the rest of the night.

In the morning, so many came to witness the amputation that there was no one in Basra, man or woman, who was not there to see it. Khalid rode up accompanied by the leading citizens, together with others. He summoned the qadis and ordered the young man to be brought out. When he came, stumbling in his fetters, there was no one who did not weep for him, and women’s voices were raised in lamentation. The qadi ordered them to be silent and then he said: ‘These people claim that you entered their house and stole their goods, but perhaps you stole less than the minimum amount that entails punishment?’ ‘No,’ said the young man, ‘I stole more.’ ‘Perhaps you jointly owned some of this property with them?’ ‘No,’ said the young man, ‘it was all theirs and I had no right to it.’ Khalid was angry and, going up to him, he struck him in the face with his whip, quoting these lines:

Man wants to have his wishes granted,

But it is God’s own wishes that He carries out.

He now called for the butcher to cut off the young man’s hand. The man brought out his knife, stretched out the victim’s hand and set the knife against it. At that moment a girl rushed out from the crowd of women, wearing dirty rags. She threw herself on the young man, and then unveiled herself to show a face like a moon. The crowd raised a great clamour and a riot was close to being sparked off, when the girl cried out at the top of her voice: ‘I implore you in God’s Name, emir; don’t have his hand cut off before you have read this note.’ She passed him a note, which he opened and read. In it were these lines:

Khalid, this is a passionate lover who is enslaved by love,

Pierced by my glances from the bows of my eyelids.

The arrow of my glance gave him a fatal wound.

As an ardent lover he cannot recover.

He has confessed to a crime that he did not commit,

Thinking this better than to disgrace his lover.

Go gently with this wretched man;

His is a noble nature and he is no thief.

When Khalid had read these lines, he left the crowd, had the girl brought to him and asked her for the story. She told him that she and the young man loved each other. Wanting to visit her, he had made his way to her family’s house, throwing a stone into it to alert her. Her father and her brothers, hearing the noise, had gone to look for him and, when he saw that, he had collected all the household effects, pretending that he was a thief in order to shield his beloved. She went on: ‘When they saw what he was doing, they seized him, crying: “Thief!” and then they brought him to you. He confessed to theft and persisted in this so as not to bring disgrace on me. This was the action of a man who made himself out to be a thief because of his great chivalry and his nobility of soul.’

‘He deserves to get his wish,’ said Khalid. He then summoned the young man, kissed him between the eyes and ordered the girl’s father to be brought. ‘Shaikh,’ he said, ‘I had intended to carry out the sentence of amputation on this young man, but God, Great and Glorious, has saved me from doing that. I order that he be given ten thousand dirhams for having been willing to sacrifice his hand to preserve your honour and that of your daughter so as to save you both from shame, and I order that your daughter be given ten thousand dirhams because she told me what really happened. I now ask you to give her to him in marriage.’ The shaikh agreed to this and Khalid praised and glorified God, after which he preached a fine sermon.

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Morning now dawned and Shahrazad broke off from what she had been allowed to say. Then, when it was the two hundred and ninety-ninth night, SHE CONTINUED: