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 impact of the Arabian Nights in Modern Egyptian narration: Mahfouz’s Arabian Nights and Days as a Case Study

The Arabian Nights were passed orally for long eras, long before they were written down; the collective sense, through several anonymous narrators, developed them: changing, modifying, omitting and adding to this oral discourse. All for the purpose of entertaining the public according the spirit of the age and the socio-cultural contexts, afterwards, it was recorded in different versions, as diverse as their sources, up until the landmark version, namely the one printed in Bulak, Egypt in 1835.The West is to be commended on paying attention to the significance of The Arabian Nights, academically and creatively, before its original-home, especially since it was later translated to many languages. After French orientalist Antoine Galland (1646 - 1715) translated into French between 1704 and 1713 a third of the manuscript he had brought from the Orient.This study delves into “The Impact of The Arabian Nights on Modern Egyptian Narration”. The researcher tries to point out how Egyptian writers were inspired by the classic text by examining Naguib Mahfouz's Arabian Nights and Days (Layālī alf laylah) as a case study. An analytic, text-based approach was used to detect the intertextual interaction between the classic and the modern, and to explore how classical elements and connotations were employed within the modern text.

DIALOGIC ADIGA: THE NEOLIBERAL GOSPEL AND ITS CONTEXTS IN THE WHITE TIGER

Aravind Adiga’s 2008 Man Booker Prize-winning novel, The White Tiger, both accommodates and provokes a variety of voices and discourses, evoking and dealing with India’s past, present, and future, thus highlighting its author’s dialogic vision. Although postcolonial and posthumanist approaches are worth exploring at length in this very challenging text, the current starts from the novel’s initial “conversation” with a controversial non-fiction book, Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat, and the theory of the ten flatteners that reshape globalization, with Bangalore as the then (2006) neoliberal hub of the world. Using the patterns of the frame narrative of the Arabian Nights and of the European epistolary novel, the text under investigation dramatizes and transfigures the dark side of neoliberalism by means of the imaginary conversation between a murderer turned successful entrepreneur and the leader of the world’s most prominent rising economic tiger.

Traces of Scheherazade in Margaret Drabble’s The Red Queen: A Transcultural Intertextual Reading

This paper examines the transcultural intertextual influence of Scheherazade, the legendary queen and the storyteller of The Thousand and One Nights, on Drabble’s The Red Queen (2004), which has a subtitle, “A Transcultural Tragicomedy.” It discusses how an appropriation of Scheherazade was utilized by Margaret Drabble in writing, The Red Queen. “But appropriation is what novelists do,” Drabble writes in the “Prologue” of her novel, adding, “whatever we write is, knowingly or unknowingly, a borrowing. Nothing comes from nowhere.” This paper is a syncretic reading of The Red Queen to show the universality of womanhood and cross-cultural parallels. In this novel, which is based on the memoirs of an eighteenth-century Korean crown princess known as Lady Hong or Lady Hyegy?ng, the protagonist comes from the history of the East, just like Scheherazade, “to retell [her] story.” Also like Scheherazade who narrates stories in order to live, the Korean Princess uses storytelling as a strategy for survival. Moreover, the intentions of the novel can be seen in a feminist tradition of historiographic metafictional re-workings of the Orient and the Arabian Nights.

Richard Francis Burton

Richard Francis Burton (b. 1821–d. 1890) was a prodigiously gifted polymath who knew some twenty-five languages, wrote more than twenty books about his journeys through distant lands, introduced the Kama Sutra and other exotic works of erotica to English readers, and produced a controversial and influential sixteen-volume translation of the Arabian Nights. Few Victorians ventured to as many regions of the world as Burton or showed as much curiosity as he did about the cultures and customs of the peoples who inhabited them. He was raised by his expatriate parents in Italy and France, began his career as a cadet in the East India Company army, gained fame from his pilgrimage to Mecca disguised as a Muslim from South Asia, led the first British-sponsored expedition in search of the source of the Nile River, traveled extensively through East and West Africa, North and South America, Arabia and even Iceland, and spent the final decades of his life as a British consul in Damascus and Trieste. He was a prominent figure in bohemian circles in mid-century London, where he helped found the controversial Anthropological Society and the notorious Cannibal Club; he provoked public outrage for his defense of Islam, polygamy, and slavery; he famously and tragically clashed with John Hanning Speke, his erstwhile companion on the East African expedition, over the latter’s claims to have discovered the Nile’s source; he spent the last decade of his life battling the forces of prudery in Britain with his translations of The Kama Sutra, The Book of a Thousand Nights and Night (especially its “Terminal Essay” on pederasty), and other sexually explicit works. He was both an agent and a critic of British imperialism, a racist and a relativist, a religious skeptic and a spiritualist, a pornographer and a cultural provocateur, a man of action and a prolific author. No wonder he has attracted the attention of biographers and literary scholars, historians and cultural critics, geographers and anthropologists, area studies specialists, novelists and many others. They have been drawn to his protean character, his literary accomplishments, his contrarian opinions, his daring expeditions, his geographical findings, his ethnographic observations, his interest in human sexuality, and much more. Every generation, it seems, has found new reasons to revisit his life and writings.

“I Am Not Good at Any of This.” Playing with Homoeroticism in The Arabian Nights

The story collection known in the West as The Arabian Nights or One Thousand and One Nights, is famous, among other things, for its erotic playfulness. This eroticism was (and is) one of the key reasons for its continuous popularity after Antoine Galland’s French translation in 1704. The Arabian Nights includes, besides traditional, heterosexual acts, play, and desires, examples of homoerotic playfulness—even though we must tread lightly when using such Western concepts with an oriental text body such as this one. The homoerotic playfulness of The Arabian Nights is the subject of this article. By making use of a text-immanent analysis of two of the Nights’ stories—of Qamar and Budûr and of Alî Shâr and Zumurrud—the author of this article focuses on the reversal of common gender roles, acts of cross-dressing, and, of course, homoerotic play. He will argue that these stories provide a narrative safe environment in which the reader is encouraged to “experiment” with non-normative sexual and gender orientations, leaving the dominant status quo effectively and ultimately unchallenged, thus preventing the (self-proclaimed) defenders of that status quo from feeling threatened enough to actively counter-act the experiment.