The Arabian
Nights
Fiction Ar116
translated by Hussain Haddawy
The stories of The Arabian Nights
(and stories within stories, and stories within stories within stories) are
famously told by the Princess Shahrazad, under the threat of death should the
king lose interest in her tale. Collected over the centuries from India,
Persia, and Arabia, and ranging from adventure fantasies, vivacious erotica,
and animal fables, to pointed Sufi tales, these stories provided the daily
entertainment of the medieval Islamic world at the height of its glory. No one
knows exactly when a given story originated, and many circulated orally for
centuries before being written down; but in the process of telling and
retelling, they were modified to reflect the general life and customs of the
Arab society that adapted them―a distinctive synthesis that marks the cultural
and artistic history of Islam.
This translation is of the complete
text of the Mahdi edition, the definitive Arabic edition of a
fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript, which is the oldest surviving version of
the tales and considered to be the most authentic.
(from publisher)
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