Can Reading Animate Justice?

In this study, I make audible a conversation in Alf Layla wa-Layla (The Thousand and One Nights) on the meaning and application of justice. Without assuming that Alf Layla constituted an organized whole, the study identifies, in the frame narrative and the first two chains of stories—all three understood to belong to the earliest bundle—a debate on the coincidence of successful interpretation and just rulership. By the end of these tales, i.e., by the twenty-seventh night, a complete tale is told. In these stories, I propose, Alf Layla adopts an attitude that privileges multiplicity over singular interpretation, in a fashion that affirms thecontingency of ethical questions. The popularity of Alf Layla and the afterlives it enjoyed up to our present times—in the Arab world and the West—need not eclipse or substitute the Arabo-Islamic character the work came to exhibit, and the ethical questions it set out to address. In what has been read as fate, arbitrary logic, enchantment, magic, irrational thinking, and nocturnal dreamlike narratives, I suggest we can equally speak of a concern for justice. The study looks at Alf Layla’s affinity with advice literature, but stresses the need to read it as a work of (semipopular) literature that pays witness to societal debates on justice. Alf Layla, I suggest, belongs to Islamic culture in that the act of reading has been construed within hermeneutics that are largely informed by the ethical implication knowledge sharing entails. In how the stories find resolution to the crisis of the king, Alf Layla understands justice as an artificial and communal enterprise. The stories, more urgently, seem to suggest reading gears us towards a concern for the greater good. Keywords: The Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights, 1001 Nights, Alf Layla wa-Layla), Adab, Justice, Rulership, Readership, Advice Literature, Interpretation, Multiplicity, Legitimacy

The Arabic Novel: New Roots, New Routes

In the mid-19th century, the Arabic novel emerged as a genre in Ottoman Syria and khedival Egypt. While this emergence has often been narrated as a story of the rise of nation-states and the diffusion of the European novel, the genre’s history and ongoing topography cannot be recovered without indexing the importance of Arabic storytelling and Islamic empire, ethics, and aesthetics to its roots. As the Arabic periodicals of Beirut and the Nile Valley, and soon Tunis and Baghdad, serialized and debated the rise of the novel form from the 19th century onward, historical, romantic, and translated novels found an avid readership throughout the Arab world and its diaspora. Metaphors of the garden confronted the maritime span of European empire in the 19th-century rise of the novel form in Arabic, and the novel’s path would continue to oscillate between the local and the global. British, French, Spanish, and Italian empire and direct colonial rule left a lasting imprint on the landscape of the region, and so too the investment of Cold War powers in its pipelines, oil wells, and cultural battlefields. Whether embracing socialist realism or avant-garde experimentation, the Arabic novel serves as an ongoing register of the stories that can be told in cities, villages, and nations throughout the region—from the committed novels interrogating the years of anticolonial national struggles and Arab nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s, through the ongoing history of war, surveillance, exile, occupation, and resource extraction that dictates the subsequent terrain of narration. The Arabic novel bears, too, an indelible mark left by translators of Arabic tales—from 1001 Nights to Girls of Riyadh—on the stories the region’s novelists tell.

Listener as Narrative Category in “The Orphan’s Tales” by Catherynne M. Valente

Created in the form of “1001 Nights” “The Orphan’s Tales” by Catherynne M. Valente is filled with intertwined stories and plots. The article is devoted to the origin of a “story within a story” and its manifestation in the novel. The need of transferring the sacred knowledge of myth was the reason of emergence of coherent narratives, which aimed to support and approve the human beings in the unknown world around them. By his storytelling the narrator asserts the right to exist, in the verbal way he reflects the cycle of natural phenomena. He states the threefold semantic equivalence: his divine embodiment as the protagonist, the related to this his actions and gestures (acts) and his story about himself and his deeds. As a verbal sacrifice the story is offered to the god – the only listener who is able to understand and to accept it. This kind of tale keeps the signs of sacral. The intention to verbal concealing of the sacred was implemented in the structure of “story within a story”, or embedded stories. When we highlight the listener as the separate category in storytelling, we can describe it in the following way. Listener is an equal participant of sacral narrating. Like the storyteller the listener carries out the function of co-creating – he duplicates the storyteller on the semantic level. As for “The Orphan’s Tales”, the unique discourse of telling-listening as stated trough the numerous characters who tell and listen to each other. They carry out some particular functions: active listener; listener-transmitter; listener-composer.

The Golden Rule in The 101 Nights’ Version of The Book of Sindbād, the Question of Literary Context and a Possible Solution Formulated in Later Arabic Versions

This paper presents a brief account of, and a number of comments on, the literary history of the golden rule (“do not do unto others what you dislike for yourself”) as found seemingly a bit out of context in the version of The Book of Sindbād contained in the medieval popular story collection The 101 Nights (“The Story of the Prince and the Seven Viziers”). The problem of context and its possible solution are addressed by examining other versions of The Book of Sindbād in Arabic, such as the one contained in the so-called Breslau edition of The 1001 Nights, and in various other languages.

Qamarayn

This two-part article argues that the earliest Arabic manuscripts of the 1001 Nights celebrate sameness, especially physical sameness, in sexual relationships to the extent that a category of erotic embodiment emerges that cannot be understood through a binary construction of sex. The first part of the article proposes a reading of a fifteenth-century manuscript that takes its descriptions of beautiful bodies on their own terms. Eroticized characters recur as both lover and beloved in a series of parallel sexual encounters that situate them in emphatic mutual relation and accumulate weight as the text unfolds. The resulting erotics of sameness decenters the perspective of adult men and displaces or undermines, at least temporarily, the lines of gender otherwise drawn in the stories. By contrast, when difference is stressed via explicitly sexed or racialized bodies, it is used to deem a relationship ridiculous or threatening. The second part of the article presents a diachronic analysis of one story, “The Story of Qamar al-Zaman and Budur,” to show how modern editors, translators, and scholars have read binary sex into the text in order to make sense of its erotics. Manuscripts of the Nights dating from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries differ considerably from the earliest Arabic print editions in their presentation of the story. This case study reveals what translators and scholars miss when they work from these print editions and/or from modern constructions of gender, sexuality, and embodiment.

Doing Things with Lists—Enumeration in Arabic Prose

This article discusses the performative function of enumeration in Arabic prose. Bringing together a great variety of word lists from classical to modern prose (including the 1001 Nights, al-Tawḥīdī, al-Suyūṭī, al-Shidyāq, and Darwīsh), it unveils their often neglected importance to literature by drawing from an emerging scholarship on enumeration. Focusing on “enumerative games” (Mainberger), the article does not ask what the enumerated elements mean, but how the act of enumerating produces meaning. In the first part, the article discusses elements central to the poetics of the enumerative (including items, length, arrangement, and frame). In the second part it deals with the politics of enumeration in the example of al-Shidyāq’s al-Sāq ʿalā al-sāq fī mā huwa al-Fāriyāq (1855). The article seeks to provide a basic approach to enumeration and argues that enumerative games in literature perform acts of cultural politics.