The Humanist Message Hidden Amid the Violence of <em>One Thousand and One Nights</em>
By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature.
Though the Persian story collection One Thousand and One Nights has been famous for centuries, today, few people dare to actually read it. Its unwieldy length (several thousand pages), expansive narrative structure, and uneven quality make cover-to-cover completion a foreboding prospect--plus, no definitive version exists. Also known as The Arabian Nights, the set of folktales was passed down orally until the 9th century and then compiled into an array of differing written versions and translations. Storytellers and scribes added, subtracted, and altered individual stories for ages, so even if you wanted to read the "whole thing," the question remains: Which one?
One thing all versions share, however, is a sophisticated narrative device: the famous frame story of Shahrazad, a brilliant woman forced to marry a bloodthirsty king who kills his wife each night and marries a new one in the morning. Shahrazad outsmarts the king by telling him a story each night before he goes to sleep; she ends each tale on a cliffhanger in order to maintain suspense within an
