Eastern Dreams by Paul Nurse Page B

the genie finds their stories sufficiently entertaining. He does, and the trader lives. In this way, Scheherazade reflects her own desire to “die as ransom for others” should she fail in her plan, and subtly tells the sultan so in her first tale, in which stories are the device whereby a life is spared.
    She continues this practice in the next cycle of stories, where in one tale involving a king and his sage, the king’s unjust execution of the sage rebounds on him, causing his own death as retribution for abusing his power. The analogy of this king, who dies because he has acted in an unjust manner, and the sultan, killing the virgins, is very clear, and it can be argued that Scheherazade recites this story deliberately to make her new husband consider his own security as a monarch who has acted in a similar way to his counterpart in the tale.
    By demonstrating that hate, envy, greed and vanity often lead to disaster, Scheherazade chastises the sultan through oblique means, reminding him that for all his power within his kingdom, he remains a mortal man beset by mortal failings. Even a king, she admonishes, is responsible for his actions, and can expect to be judged for his dealings with others. So Scheherazade and Dinarzade spin tales not only to stave off the executioner’s visit but also to plant in the sultan’s wounded psyche the means to heal itself. It has been remarked that the
rawi
who channelled Scheherazade’s stories to their listeners were providing their audiences with a kind of rough education in various aspects of life. In a more specific way, Scheherazade is doing the same for her husband, teaching him through enlightening narrative the evil nature of the path he has undertaken in the hope that Shahryar will return to his former self.
    Since as daughters of the vizier Scheherazade and Dinarzade are exempt from the sultan’s decree, it is an awe-inspiring act of sacrifice on Scheherazade’s part to marry Shahryar and risk her life to save both others and the sultan. Her maturity and goodness ally with the forces of life to battle lethal and arbitrary cruelty. When the rage clouding Shahryar’s judgment is banished by Scheherazade’s instruction in the duties of life and authority, the world is returned to its former tranquility. The sultan regains his princely virtue, Scheherazade preserves her life and those of the kingdom’s daughters, and the ultimate story in
The Thousand and One Nights
ends on an appropriately happily-ever-after note.

    There is a fifth Muslim reference to the
Nights
, although it appears decades after the book’s publication in Europe. At the end of the eighteenth century, in the preface to a Turkish storybook entitled
Phantasms of the Divine Presence
, the translator, Ali Aziz Efendithe Cretan, notes that he employed a work called
Elf Laila
(“A Thousand Nights”) as one of his sources, claiming it was written by a ninth-century philologist and companion of Haroun al-Rashid named al-Asami. Beyond this mention, however, there is no supportive evidence that anyone called al-Asami ever fashioned a version of
Alf Laila
, so he joins Muhammad al-Jahshiyari among the legendary “non-compilers” of
The Thousand and One Nights
.
    The celebrated Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, a passionate admirer of the
Nights
, likens its structure to a palace so vast that it can be built only by many generations of men. From the setting of its foundation in the latter part of the first millennium to its continuing mystique at the beginning of the third, the
Arabian Nights
has had innumerable wings added to its core structure over the course of at least eleven centuries, giving Borges’s labyrinthine word-palace a shape never remaining exactly the same, under continuous construction for more than half of the past two thousand years. Even if the tales within
Alf Laila wa Laila
form an ever-changing mansion of narrative, from available