This chapter argues that the conflation between Islam and the Arabian Nights is not a straightforward trajectory. If this conflation was less noticeable in the first half of the eighteenth century, interested scholars, Orientalists like Sir William Jones, physicians, antiquarians and philologists began late in the century to trace Islamic echoes, and manners and customs that they associated with Islamic societies. In other words, the issue of attachment to and detachment from the tales is also intertwined with and entangled in the rising aspirations of the empire. Involvement in the colonial conquest often led pillars of this conquest, its savants, and entrepreneurs of the East India Company and the Royal Society of Bengal to treat the Nights as documents. The first Governor of the Presidency of Fort William in Bengal and the head of the Supreme Council of Bengal, Warren Hastings (1732–1818), was among early enthusiasts of Galland’s Nights as a document. The first de facto Governor-General of Bengal (1772–85) was often cited in support of Antoine Galland’s translation of Mille et une nuits. Contes arabes (1704–12/17) as representative of Islamic societies. The celebration that Galland’s edition enjoyed could not last forever. With the increasing philological interest in the Nights as a significant document for royal societies and others concerned with ‘useful knowledge’, the search for complete manuscripts turned into a relentless mania that drove many in Egypt and South Asia to stitch together tales from different sources to claim complete manuscripts.

Such is the clamour around the Macan manuscript (Calcutta II) that it was claimed as the most complete against the incomplete Galland’s manuscript and its siblings. William Hay Macnaghten, later the Secretary to the Secret and Political Department in Calcutta, and Henry Torrens of the College of Fort William and the Royal Society of Bengal were among the new breed of Orientalists who took the Nights as their property to be made available to speakers of Arabic and English. As argued and documented by scholars, such appointees to India’s General Committee of Public Instruction like Charles E. Trevelyan (1833) would argue strongly for providing the English-speaking world with a complete manuscript.

This contribution prepares for a lengthy study of imaginative geography, and its metanarrative as an empowering narrative strategy. The classical and medieval Arab-Islamic geographer was not necessarily a geographer per se. Philologists often use their knowledge of space to construct a wide ranging inquiry that happened to serve generations of geographers. A close reading in a number of explanatory commentaries and marginalia helps to perceive the turns and fluctuations in geographic genealogies in relation to lands outside the Islamic core. The self-conscious geographer needs not only to define method or mode, but also to vindicate a departure, and claim or deny antecedent authority and source material. A republic of letters finds substantiation and root in these insights, and explanations, and complements other explorations in compendiums, encyclopedic knowledge, and literary or broad cultural exchange.

Chapter 8 wraps up the discussion. It attempts to show how the Nights has been opening the gate for every kind of reading. Although the book, and this chapter in particular, is not a survey of scholarship, it selects instances that show a genealogical string that brings all the players on board, showing how the often marginalized John Payne is pivotal to the twentieth-century scene, not only because he was Richard F. Burton’s ghost translator, but also because he set the road for literary classification of the tales that nobody, not even Burton, can overlook. Twentieth-century scholars like Mia Gerhardt or Peter Heath cannot devise more typologies than Payne’s, but they add what “conditions of possibility” allow. The chapter focuses on critical typologies, textual and genealogical criticism, the comparatists’ pursuits, and also literary criticism. The latter covers genres and translational mediums, and poetics of narrative. It also looks upon cultural criticism as more nuanced than nineteenth-century readings of manners and customs. The chapter has to conclude with the question: Is the Nights adab? A refined belles lettres?

This study of the Thousand and One Nights addresses the place of what is commonly called Arabian Nights in contemporary world cultures.1 It aims to study theoretical and philological undertakings, including poetics of prose and poetry, in conversation with social science. It explores and excavates the reasons for and effects of an enormous constellation of knowledge about and around the tales that has generated further projects to compile manuals, guides, companions, edited compilations, and encyclopedias.2 These constellations and projects also build on, or converse with, cinematic production, theater, painting, music,3 and other visual sites and spectacles. Since its early inception in translation, 1704–12/17 (Les Mille Et Une Nuits: Contes Arabes), it has sustained an unequalled presence in cultural production. The enormous increase in scholarship on A Thousand and One Nights (the Arabian Nights) is further indicated by the multiplication of publications that take the tales as their focus and concern.4 Whether this scholarship addresses issues of translation, the appropriation of the tales in visual culture, or in media, its growth evidences a massive production of published materials, one that prompts us to speak of A Thousand and One Nights as a field of knowledge.

Chapter 5 complements the previous chapters in that it argues archaeology in relation to two domains whereby a history of the burgeoning of the Nights in its own lands is laid out in terms of a body of enunciations and statements. A discursive genealogy suggests multiple productions that share only a basal root, that is, the frame tale of the two kings, but not the rest like “The Merchant and the Demon.” The other domain includes early migrations of tales, and the major translational movement established by Galland. Both domains have their histories as effectively giving place “to definite types of discourse … which are related to a whole set of various histories.” In this discursive density, the issue of authorship cannot be visible. It wanes and disappears in large grids of narrative engagements. Furthermore, beginnings cannot be dissociated from a narrative corpus that has its own underlying theoretical bases before the advent of the novel as a bourgeois epic.

Chapter 6 starts with the understanding of the advent of the Nights as “a major event for all European literature,” a point that Borges and others argue passionately. In order to see the impact of this event we need to differentiate the Romantic craze of William Beckford in his Vathek, Episodes, and “Long Story,” his translators, and also his admirers from others. Beckford was phenomenal in working across at least three cultures along with Arabic: French, English, and Jamaican. His infatuation and reproduction of the Nights is unique, but we have to place it in context of a raging discussion run by many, but especially Schlegel, of the grotesque and Arabesque. His writing and personal penchant to challenge everything presents him as a filiate who belongs to a specific genealogy in the Nights. His approach is different for instance from the Brontës whose writings bear the marks of a contained infatuation. They are the bridge for twentieth-century shifts in reading and response. A “murky sensualism” which Maxime Rodinson associates with “the Western bourgeoisie” prepares for the dialectic of rapprochement, engagement, and detachment that present the twentieth century and after as more experimental but also no less involved in substantiating the Nights in architecture, painting, enactment of medieval travels, and the practice of parody and pastiche in a postmodernist anxiety and search for distinction.

Chapter 2 takes its title from a conversation with John Barth (1987) to address the focus on the frame tale in contemporary writing. It shows the central function of the preliminary volatile sites, the preludinal site of nuptial failure, the garden scene, and its narrative function before the advent of Scheherazade. What is missed in scholarship, old and contemporary, is redeemed here to draw attention to the role of the spectacle in exploding hierarchies, power structures, and racial and class distinctions. It draws attention to a number of narrative levels that have to be taken into account when we address the frame tale, not as a container, but a dynamic that offers storytellers the chance to embed tales that are no less explosive. It shows also the implications of narrative functions in relation to issues of relativity, plight, desire, and joy.

Chapter 4 goes along with Borges’s reading of a dynastic translational spectrum of anxieties. A forum for discussion initiated by Galland has been involving a worldwide cultural scene with anxieties that are expressed in reeditions, abridgments, authentication processes, claims to fidelity to an original, though disputed, text, and unexpurgated or collated editions. The discussions erupted since the advent of Galland’s Thousand and One Nights set the scene on fire: accusations and counter charges over three centuries signify the existence of the Nights in world culture as a knowledge consortium that brings on board theories of translation, cultural interventions, and conversations and discussions among the most prominent intellectuals, artists, and fiction writers. Illustrators, film industry producers and directors have been participating in this dynasty, simply because they are part of one translation or another, though on certain occasions they stand on their own. If political dynasties of rulers are often biologically related, the Nights in Europe has its textual dynasty: no translator or editor could ever get free from Galland’s enterprise, not even Muhsin Mahdi who produced Galland’s Arabic manuscript after only portions of it appeared in print early on in the twentieth century. More important is the fact that the Nights was once a platform in the ongoing racial philological divide in language families, Aryan and Semite. New philology found in the Nights a viable means to discuss origins. The divide did not die, and it is reborn in stock images, value judgments, and essentialisms.

Chapter 7 throws us headlong into a controversial issue that reflects on the first chapter, but also complements every other chapter in that it takes the “Oriental mode” as a problematic that invites deconstruction. Does the connotation of the mode signify the anxieties of the pillars of the Enlightenment? It certainly does, and hence the need to work out an emancipatory discourse from a ruling Western rationality that presents everything, even the theory of the novel or narratology as necessarily Western. The role of philologists since the early nineteenth century in relation to the production of knowledge is more relevant to the study and vogue of the Nights than has been hitherto noticed. Scheherazade’s body, the matter and manner of the Nights is no less the crux of discussion than the visible grouping of language in families, Aryan and Semite. This is why many twentieth-century experimentations are to be read as decolonizing in that they redirect attention to a literary text, not a document.