arabian nights report

Reporter: Almira M. Murillo

Arabian Nights(Background)

The Arabian Nights: One Thousand and One Nights

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. These stories trace back to ancient and medieval Arabic, Persian, Indian, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian literature. Many of these were originally folk tales from the Caliphate Era, while others are drawn from the Pahlavi Persian work Hazār Afsān. Reporter: Almira M. Murillo


The original core of stories came from Persia and India in the eighth century. After being translated into Arabic, they were called Alf Layla, or The Thousand Nights. There were significantly fewer stories in the collection at that time. Somewhere in the ninth or tenth century, more Arab stories were added in Iraq, probably including ones that referred to Caliph Harun al-Rashid.


In the thirteenth century:

Additional Syrian or Egyptian stories were added, and as the years went on, more tales were added by authors and translators until the total was indeed brought up to one thousand and one. (This ClassicNote focuses on those stories most commonly known and taught.)


Though the different editions of The Arabian Nights vary greatly, the frame story of the ruler Shahrayar and his wife Scheherazade is common to all. All of the stories branch from this tale in some way. A story is often interrupted by a character who insists on telling another tale, which leads into the following story. Most of The Arabian Nights is written in prose, but verse is occasionally used in songs and riddles, or to relay great amounts of emotion. Most of these poems are single couplets or quatrains.


The Arabian Nights uses common motifs:

magic and fantasy, flyinga rise from poverty to riches and a fall back down again


Example• "Aladdin's Lamp" tells of a peasant boy who is tricked by an evil

magician into retrieving a magic genie lamp from a cave. However, Aladdin outsmarts him, keeping the lamp for himself. Through the genie's power, Aladdin grows rich and marries the sultan's daughter. When the magician steals the lamp back, Aladdin and his wife thwart and kill the villain. The magician's brother then attempts to avenge the dead man, but is equally defeated, so that Aladdin lives happily ever after.


The Fisherman and the Jinni• "The Fisherman and the Jinni" tells the story of a fisherman

whose nets retrieve a yellow jar from the sea. He opens it to release a dangerous genie, who has been trapped for hundreds of years and had decided to kill the man who rescues him. The fisherman tricks the genie into returning to the jar, and then tells him the story of "The Vizier and the Sage Duban," detailed below. After the story, the genie promises to reward the fisherman, and indeed shows him a magic lake full of strange fish. The fisherman sells the fish to the sultan, who explores the area of the lake to meet a sad prince who had been turned half to stone. He helps the prince, and then rewards everyone involved.


Characterization

• Fisherman- he is poor and have a family; only depends on fishing as a livelihood ; the one who rescued the Jinni

• Jinni- the smoke that emerged and formed into a genie who was trapped in the lamp for four hundred years

• Sultan- to whom he sells his fishes• The prince- the man who sultan saw crying when he

went to the pond, and ends up helping him


Implication of the Title

The Fisherman and the JinniSimply about a poor fisherman who saved a Jinni from being prisoned inside a lamp

arabian nights report

Education