Its stories are regularly denounced as vulgar, improbable, childish and, above all, badly written. [79] Crime fiction elements are also present near the end of "The Tale of Attaf" (see Foreshadowing above). llomani), daughter of Bahman.. .. 366 seq. 342, arbitrarily writes "Montasir" for "Mostanir." For Abu'l-Mahasin, an Egyptian historian who died in 1470, writing of IIamdi, a famous highwayman of Bagdad in the 10th century, remarks that he is probably the figure who used to be popularly spoken of as Ahmad al-Danaf (ed. Soon after, the Prussian scholar Christian Maximilian Habicht collaborated with the Tunisian Mordecai ibn al-Najjar to create an edition containing 1001 nights both in the original Arabic and in German translation, initially in a series of eight volumes published in Breslau in 1825–1838. "[119], UPA, an American animation studio, produced an animated feature version of 1001 Arabian Nights (1959), featuring the cartoon character Mr. In the mid-20th century, the scholar Nabia Abbott found a document with a few lines of an Arabic work with the title The Book of the Tale of a Thousand Nights, dating from the 9th century. One such cycle of Arabic tales centres around a small group of historical figures from 9th-century Baghdad, including the caliph Harun al-Rashid (died 809), his vizier Jafar al-Barmaki (d. 803) and the licentious poet Abu Nuwas (d. c. 813).

p. 55, Pinault, David. One example is "The Adventures of Bulukiya", where the protagonist Bulukiya's quest for the herb of immortality leads him to explore the seas, journey to Paradise and to Hell, and travel across the cosmos to different worlds much larger than his own world, anticipating elements of galactic science fiction;[84] along the way, he encounters societies of jinn,[85] mermaids, talking serpents, talking trees, and other forms of life. Scheherazade, also commonly Sheherazade (Russian: Шехераза́да, tr. This goes on for one thousand and one nights, hence the name. Stories from the One Thousand and One Nights have been popular subjects for films, beginning with Georges Méliès' Le Palais des Mille et une nuits (1905). ; the latter is the better story, but departs so far from the original that the author must have had no more than a general recollection of the narrative he drew on. [33] Professor Dwight Reynolds describes the subsequent transformations of the Arabic version: Some of the earlier Persian tales may have survived within the Arabic tradition altered such that Arabic Muslim names and new locations were substituted for pre-Islamic Persian ones, but it is also clear that whole cycles of Arabic tales were eventually added to the collection and apparently replaced most of the Persian materials. Yā 'aynu ṣāra ad-dam'u minki sijyatantabkīna min faraḥin wa-'aḥzānī, And I have regretted the separation of our companionshipAn eon, and tears flooded my eyes Scheherazade's Children: Global Encounters with the Arabian Nights. [11] The motif of the wise young woman who delays and finally removes an impending danger by telling stories has been traced back to Indian sources. Other writers who have been influenced by the Nights include John Barth, Jorge Luis Borges, Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, Goethe, Walter Scott, Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, Nodier, Flaubert, Marcel Schwob, Stendhal, Dumas, Gérard de Nerval, Gobineau, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Hofmannsthal, Conan Doyle, W. B. Yeats, H. G. Wells, Cavafy, Calvino, Georges Perec, H. P. Lovecraft, Marcel Proust, A. S. Byatt and Angela Carter. At the same time, some French writers began to parody the style and concoct far-fetched stories in superficially Oriental settings. Wa-nadhartu in 'āda az-zamānu yalumanāla 'udtu adhkuru furqatan bilisānī [62], Several different variants of the "Cinderella" story, which has its origins in the Egyptian story of Rhodopis, appear in the One Thousand and One Nights, including "The Second Shaykh's Story", "The Eldest Lady's Tale" and "Abdallah ibn Fadil and His Brothers", all dealing with the theme of a younger sibling harassed by two jealous elders. Bahman had married a Jewess (i. The Arabian Nights, also called One Thousand and One Nights, is a collection of stories and folk tales from West and South Asia that was compiled during the Islamic Golden Age.It took centuries to collect all of these together, and various translators, authors, and scholars have contributed. As a child, he was fascinated by the adventures recounted in the book, and he attributes some of his creations to his love of the 1001 Nights.

The tales vary widely: they include historical tales, love stories, tragedies, comedies, poems, burlesques, and various forms of erotica. The storytellers of the tales relied on this technique "to shape the constituent members of their story cycles into a coherent whole."[59]. He also writes disparagingly of the collection's literary quality, observing that "it is truly a coarse book, without warmth in the telling". But once he married a clever princess called Shahrazad, who spent the marriage night in telling a story which in the morning reached a point so interesting that the king spared her, and asked next night for the sequel. Lane iii. 1–9, Sallis, Eva. After returning to Baghdad, Ja'afar reads the same book that caused Harun to laugh and weep, and discovers that it describes his own adventures with Attaf.