Eastern Dreams by Paul Nurse

al-Makan”) can reach the size of a lengthy novella. Changes in mood occur with jarring abruptness, as when a tender tale of two lovers reconciled by a dream is succeeded by two stories involving bestiality—it’s as if a Harlequin romance contained an epilogue of pornographic vignettes.
    It is also a disappointing certainty that some of the most famous and beloved stories found in most editions—Sindbad’s voyages, Aladdin’s lamp and Ali Baba among them—are probably not part of the original work at all but were added later, either because of a general demand for more stories or a desire to incorporate enough material to enlarge editions toward the magic number of 1001 Nights. Independent stories, or story cycles inserted to flesh out the whole, account for both the great size of some versions (even a paperback edition can run near nine hundred pages) and the many variations in style and feeling. This makes
The Thousand and One Nights
one of the most unusual books in all literature. It’s not onlythe sole major western literary work originating from outside the West, but also the only one possessing no clear origins, a variable core, some standard additions culled from other sources and a number of “orphan stories”—tales lacking apparent antecedents, or whose provenance is suspect.
    With such obscure origins and ever-shifting content, it has been argued that there is no true end to
The Thousand and One Nights;
that as a book with no definable limits, it has no real conclusion but is unique in that it is constantly developing and reconfiguring itself. In many ways, this very formlessness gives the work its greatest strength, for it imbues the text with a singular flexibility of form—an ability to alter itself to fit the expectations of those entering its fantastical world. Few books of any time or language have the power to become whatever one wants them to be as does the
Arabian Nights’ Entertainments
.

    Even so, within this seemingly chaotic panorama, it is possible to detect a kind of organized, coherent sense to at least some of the
Nights
’ earlier tales. In his famous “Terminal Essay” on the
Nights
, Sir Richard Burton notes that a common thirteen stories tend to appear in most of the editions published during his day:
    1  The introductory frame story, including the incidental story “The Tale of the Bull and the Ass,” told by Scheherazade’s father
    2  “The Trader and the Genie” (with either two or three incidental tales)
    3  “The Fisherman and the Genie” (with four incidental tales)
    4  “The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad” (with six incidental tales)
    5  “The Tale of the Three Apples”
    6  “The Tale of Nur al-Din Ali and His Son Badr al-Din Hasan”
    7  “The Hunchback’s Tale” (with eleven incidental tales)
    8  “The Tale of Nur al-Din Ali and the Damsel Anis al-Jalis”
    9  “The Tale of Ghanim bin Ayyub” (with two incidental tales)
    10  “Ali bin Bakkar and Shams al-Nahar” (with two incidental tales)
    11  “The Tale of Kamar al-Zaman”
    12  “The Ebony Horse”
    13  “Julnar the Sea-Born”
    Together, Burton says, these forty-two tales take up 120 Nights, or less than a fifth of the most extensive Arabic text in existence, the “Calcutta II” edition with 264 stories spread over 1001 Nights. After working for years, Muhsin Mahdi arrived at the conclusion that the reconstructed archetype of an important fourteenth- or fifteenth-century manuscript of the
Nights
contained no more than 270 to 275 nights involving either thirty-five or thirty-six stories, and these are all he included in his critical Arabic edition of the work.
    But setting aside the numbers game for a moment, it seems that in its earliest tales, most unabridged versions