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Maher Jarrar

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Makdisi & Nussbaum / The Arabian Nights in Historical Context 12-MakdisiandNussbaum-chap12 Page Proof page 297 16.6.2008 12:05pm

12
The Arabian Nights and the
Contemporary Arabic Novel
Maher Jarrar

Galland and the Nights

The influence of The Arabian Nights on world literature is attested to by the
remarks of two renowned Latin American authors who were fascinated by it.
Jorge Luis Borges writes, for example, ‘Los Noches son el tiempo, el que no duerme. Sigue
leyendo mientras muere el dia. Y Shahrazad te contará tu historia.’1 [The Nights are for the time
when one does not sleep. Read them as the daylight dies. And Scheherazade will
tell you your story.] For his part, Gabriel Garcı́a Márquez recalls that ‘[he] even
dared to think that the marvels recounted by Scheherazade really happened in
the daily life of her time, and stopped happening because of the incredulity and
realistic cowardice of subsequent generations.’2 Of course, despite its manifest
influence on eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century writing across the

I wish to express my gratitude to Professor Peter Heath (American University of Beirut), who
thoroughly read the first draft of this paper suggesting constructive criticism and favourable
perspectives. I would also like to thank Professor Robin Ostle (Oxford) and Stuart Reigeluth
(Madrid) for their insightful feedback. Nisrine Jaafar (Oxford) and Zalfa Feghali (American
University of Beirut) have provided valuable assistance, each in her own way.
1 Jorge Luis Borges, Obras (Buenos Aires: Émecé, 1974).
2 Gabriel Garcı́a Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale, trans. Edith Grossman (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 2003), 219.
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world, the actual history of The Arabian Nights is still somewhat unclear, despite
the ardent efforts of many scholars to track the text’s development and
mutation.3 Whatever the actual circumstances, however, the eighteenth cen-
tury can be regarded as a turning point in the cultural trajectory traced by the
Nights—a moment when it managed to penetrate new cultural spaces, ultim-
ately to serve as an inspirational source for European Romanticism. The Nights’
pervasive infiltration into the world’s literatures also inspired new conceptions
of the body, desire, and literary eroticism, many of which emerged in conjunc-
tion with the text’s rupture into the heart of various Western literary tradi-
tions—and from there to the literary cultures of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
It is important to bear in mind that the text’s reception must really be
understood to have taken place not as a single event, but rather as a continuous
process, running through the eighteenth century, and reaching a kind of climax
in the Romantic period. Galland’s enterprise coincided with—and the reception
of the Nights afterwards took place during—a period of colonial expansion,
which was a significant feature of its reception history.4 What this chapter aims
to explore, however, is not the reception of the Nights in Europe, but rather the
remarkable story of its influence on contemporary Arabic literature, following
its ‘return’, in effect, to the Arab world, as part of the same set of colonial projects
which ironically also provided the context for the reception of Galland’s text in
Europe itself. The Nights, in other words, ironically returned to their source of
origin in the Arab world as one of Europe’s cultural exports to what would
ultimately be considered the Third World. The particulars of Galland’s reception
in the Arab world still need to be researched. Nevertheless, such a project is
sidelined in this paper, the primary objective of which lies in studying the
reception of The Arabian Nights in the post-Mahfouzian Arabic nouveau roman,5
a postcolonial literary form that has managed to embrace major techniques in

3 Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion (London and New York: Allen Lane, 1994), 42–102;
Muhsin Mahdi, The Thousand and One Nights (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995).
4 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 63–5; Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism:
Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 100–21; Rana
Kabbani, ‘The Arabian Nights as an Orientalist Text’, in Ulrich Marzolph and Richard van Leeuwen,
eds., The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 2004), i. 25–8.
5 Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 153; said, ‘Arabic
Prose Fiction’, in Times Literary Supplement 2 (18 October 1985); Muhammad Barrāda, in al-Riwāya al-
‘arabiyya. Wāqi‘ wa-āfāq (Beirut: Dār Ibn Rushd, 1981), 5–13; Muhammad Dakrūb, ‘Hal sāra bi ’l-imkān
al-hadı̄th ‘an ‘arabiyyat al-riwāya al-‘Arabiyya?’ Al-Tarı¯q 40.3/4 (August 1981): 215; Andreas Pflitsch,
Gegenwelten. Zur Literaturtheorie Idwār al Harrāts (Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2000), 108–13.
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The Arabian Nights and the Contemporary Arabic Novel / 299

world literature and to reread the Nights along with ‘high’ and folk literatures
from both Europe and the Arab world. Contemporary Arab novelists thus draw
on the Nights both from within—from the powerful folk and oral traditions of
Arabic culture—and from without, as the Nights returned to the Arab world,
having been absorbed by and repackaged in a new European form: the novel.

Working Scheme
I would like to begin by exploring the various ways in which the Nights
inspired new adaptations and forms, or was brought into transtextual relations
with contemporary Arabic novels. I will show that there are five different
forms of relation or hybridization that bring the textual surfaces of contem-
porary Arabic narratives into dialogical discourse with the Nights:6
1. Interplay with specific cycles, themes or motifs from the Nights
2. Adaptations, transformations, and expansions of the frame tale
3. Extensions or inventions of additions to the number of the Nights: for
example, ‘the night after’, ‘the ninth night after the thousand and first’,
and so on
4. Adaptations of narrative techniques which are particular to the Nights
5. Hypotextual relations: where a cycle of the Nights functions as a hypotext7 to
a modern novel
Of course, this delimitation is not exhaustive and is even somewhat arbitrary,
inasmuch as it can lead to an open-ended discussion about the characteristics
that constitute a transtextual relationship with the Nights. For example, it is not an
altogether straightforward task to determine the point at which a modern
Arabic novel’s references to jinnis, subterranean caverns, flying horses,
enchanted cities, and so forth, might be considered enough to constitute a
relationship with the Nights.8
6 The theoretical framework goes back to Mikhail Bakhtin in The Dialogical Imagination. Four Essays,
ed. M. Holquist, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981),
276–331; and to Julia Kristeva’s reading of Bakhtin, Desire in Language. A Semiotic Approach to Literature,
ed. L. S. Roudiez, trans. Th. Gora, A. Jardine and L. S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press,
1980), 64–5. Words in italics refer to the terminology coined by Gérard Genette in Palimpseste. Die
Literatur auf zweiter Stufe, ed. Wolfram Bayer und Dieter Hornig (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1993).
7 Genette, Palimpseste, 14–18.
8 Thanks to Professor Peter Heath for pointing this out. It is noteworthy here that the
influence of Latin American literature and writers of ‘magical realism’ have deeply marked
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Literature Overview
A number of books and articles have considered the reception of the Nights in
the modern Arabic novel. In his pioneering work Min wahı̄ alf layla wa layla,
Fārūq Sa‘d examined the reception of the Nights around the world—including
the Arab world—in art, music, theatre, poetry, the short story, the novel, and
children’s literature.9 Sa‘d’s study is now regarded as one of the essential studies
of the Nights. The second key book is Mustafa’s ‘Abd al-Ghanı̄’s Shahrazād fı̄ ’l-fikr
al-‘Arabı̄ al-hadı̄th.10 ‘Abd al-Ghanı̄ tries to continue Sa‘d’s project by extending
his research on the same topic through the 1980s. The most distinctive feature
of ‘Abd al-Ghanı̄ is the way in which it traces the distribution of the reception
of Shahrazād in modern Arab literature into three basic categories: romanti-
cism, abstraction, and (of the greatest interest to ‘Abd al-Ghanı̄ as a pan-Arab
nationalist) nationalism. He re-evaluates some of the novels discussed by Sa‘d,
in terms of these three rubrics. The most significant addition provided by ‘Abd
al-Ghanı̄ is a discussion of Naguib Mahfouz’s novel Layālı̄ Alf Layla (The Nights of
a Thousand Nights (1979).11 Again, Sabrı̄ Hammādı̄ in his study on the impact of
the Nights on the modern Iraqi novel exhibits manifold examples.12
The work of Muhsin Jāsim al-Mūsawı̄ has also become essential to
contemporary Arab criticism of the Nights—indeed, it has generated some-
thing of a shift in Arabic literary criticism.13 His early work centred on the
reception of the Nights in English literature, but his scholarship in Arabic, and
on Arabic literature, centres on his exploration of the role of narration and in
particular the distribution of narrative voices in the modern Arabic novel.
Shahrazād’s position as narrator in the Nights’ frame tale, and its influence on

the contemporary Arabic novel. ‘Magical realism’ has significantly built upon the reception of
the Nights in Latin America. A comparative enquiry into the transtextual relations between
contemporary Arab novels and their Latin American counterpart (magical realism) would be
welcome.
9 Fārūq Sa‘d, Min wahı̄ alf layla wa layla (Beirut: al-Maktaba al-Ahliyya, 1962).
10 Mustafa, ‘Abd al-Ghanı̄’s Shahrazād f ı̄ ’l-fikr al-‘Arabı̄ al-hadı̄th (Cairo: Dār Shariqiyyāt, 1995; 1st
edn. 1985).
11 Sabrı̄ Hammādı̄, Athar al-turāth f ı̄ ’l-riwāya al-‘Irāqiyya al-hadı̄tha (Beirut: al-Mu’assasa al-
‘Arabiyya lil-Dirāsāt wa ’l-Nashr, 1980), 42–61.
12 Ibid.
13 See Muhsin Jāsim al-Mūsawı̄’s Thārāt Shahrazād: Fann al-sard al-‘Arabı¯ al-hadı̄th (Beirut: Dār al-Ā
dāb, 1993) and his Infirāt al-‘iqd al-muqaddas: Mun‘atafāt al-riwāya al-‘Arabiyya ba‘da Mahfūz (Cairo:
al-Hay’a al-Misriyya al-‘Āmma, 1999).
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The Arabian Nights and the Contemporary Arabic Novel / 301

contemporary Arabic novelists, features prominently in al-Mūsawı̄’s account
of the modern Arabic novel.
Wiebke Walther is considered the last of the pioneering investigators of the
influence of the Nights in Arabic literature.14 She published an influential
article in The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, which built on her own critical
introduction to the Nights, and which considers the reception and elabor-
ation of the Nights in modern Arabic poetry as well as prose.15
The groundbreaking studies of the influence of the Nights in contempor-
ary Arabic literature culminate in four articles. The first of these is Ferial
Ghazoul’s ‘Naguib Mahfouz’s Arabian Nights and Days: a Political Allegory’.16
The second is Fedwa Malti-Douglas’s ‘Shahrazād: Feminist’,17 in which Malti-
Douglas deals with two novels from a comparative feminist approach: Ethel
Johnston Phelps’s Schehrazade Retold and Nawāl al-Sa‘dāwı̄’s The Fall of the Imam.
Malti-Douglas, who specializes in both the Nights and the study of medieval
Arab folk literature, produces a remarkable investigation of how the frame
story is innovatively used in contemporary Arab feminist projects. Each of
these novels in ‘its own way, undercuts the medieval male scribe’s agenda’,
Malti-Douglas argues; ‘neither extols the heterosexual couple, so dear to the
epilogue of the original Nights. Both demonstrate that the recasting of the
world’s-famous frame story is not an innocent act.’18 Following on the work
of Malti-Douglas, Melissa Matthes has studied how the memoirs of three
contemporary Arab women writers similarly claim Shahrazād in order to
counter oppression and challenge what she refers to as ‘the ‘‘science of
politics’’ ’.19

14 Wiebke Walther, ‘Modern Arabic Literature and the Arabian Nights’, in The Arabian Nights
Encyclopedia, i. 54–61.
15 Wiebke Walther, Tausend und eine Nacht: Eine Einführung (Munich: Artemis Verlag, 1987), 160–5;
cf. as well, David Pinault, ‘Alf layla wa layla’, in Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, ed. Julie Scott
Meisami and Paul Starkey (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), i. 69–77.
16 Ferial J. Ghazoul, Nocturnal Poetics: The Arabian Nights in Comparative Context (Cairo: The
American University of Cairo, 1996), 134–49.
17 Fedwa Malti-Douglas, ‘Shahrazād Feminist’, in R. G. Hovannisian and G. Sabagh, eds., The
Thousand and One Nights in Arabic Literature and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997),
40–55.
18 Ibid. 53.
19 Melissa Matthes, ‘Shahrazad’s Sisters: Storytelling and Politics in the Memoirs of Mernissi,
El Saadawi and Ashrawi’, in Alif, Journal of Comparative Poetics. Gender and Knowledge: Contribution of
Gender Perspectives to Intellectual Formations (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1999), 68–96.
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The fourth of the groundbreaking articles on the role of the Nights in
contemporary Arabic writing was undertaken by Andreas Pflitsch, whose
essay, ‘Constructed Realities: The Contemporary Arabic Literature, Radical
Constructivism and Stories from The One Thousand and One Nights’, was origin-
ally published in German.20 Pflitsch draws on recent innovations in critical
theory in his suggestive reading of the work of two contemporary Arabic
novelists, the first the Egyptian Edmond al-Kharrāt, and the second the
Lebanese Elias Khoury. The most noticeable feature in Pflitsch’s work is
that it forgoes a search for the possible existential meanings underpinning
the act of narration, as might be expressed in the frame story and centres
instead on an examination of the narrative structure itself and the different
interwoven mises en scène of the narrative. Pflitsch embraces the aesthetic
theory of radical constructivism, which is derived from quantum physics,
and conceives of reality as an entity that cannot be quantitatively measured.
On this account, then, literature, which by definition represents a con-
structed fictive world, makes up a constructivist representation marked
with a double ‘fictionality’.21 Pflitsch illustrates his approach through his
reading of Khoury’s two works, The Journey of Little Ghandi and White Faces,
suggesting that Khoury invests in the narrative strategies of the the Nights in
such a way that ‘repetitive structures and self-referring passages render
Khoury’s text their proper focal point’. As for al-Kharrāt, Pflitsch argues
that in Makhlūkāt al-ashwāq al-tā’ira and Turābuhā za‘farān, he employs narrative
strategies that evoke the Nights by building up a circular motion within the
text, making the latter refer to itself. Both writers, for Pflitsch, reveal great
innovation in the ways in which they draw on the cultural and literary
heritage of the Nights in their twentieth-century novels.
As explained earlier, my own attempt in what follows is only to contribute
to the work that has already been done on the reception of the Nights in
contemporary Arabic literature, by providing readings of what I take to be
key examples of this reception, without actually attempting to address the
entire body of literature (a task beyond the scope of this chapter). Since it has
been extensively studied, I will exclude from my discussion perhaps the most
obvious recent literary elaboration of the Nights, namely, Naguib Mahfouz’s

20 ‘Konstruierte Wirklichkeiten: Die zeitgennössische arabische Literatur, der Radikale Kon-

struktivismus und die Erzählungen aus 1001 Nacht’, in Verena Klemm and Beatrice Gruendler,
eds., Understanding Near Eastern Literatures (Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2000), 59–71.
21 Ibid. 62.
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The Arabian Nights and the Contemporary Arabic Novel / 303

Layāli alf layla walayla.22 Mahfouz’s novel is ‘a political allegory very few can
doubt, but the content of its political message is more debatable given the
complexity and ambiguity of the allegory’, as Ferial Ghazoul points out.
Mahfouz, she adds, ‘uses enframed characters and stories to depict reality
with all its stock characters and contradictions in the Egypt of the seventies,
where the new economic policy of privatization and primacy of profit
ruptured the social fabric and toppled the ethical codes of the people’.23
In fact, the trend initiated by Mahfouz, which permeates both his novel
and the critical approaches to it—conceiving of both as political allegories—
has its representatives among many other students of the Nights. André
Miquel reveals to us that the Nights have their Sitz im Leben anchored within
the social and political realities of their time. Studying the Sindbad cycle, he
perceives it as both a roman à thèse and a breviary. He sees in it ‘a witness to
history, a witness to a balance of power that may intervene between the
different values of a code of civilization, and, last, a witness to particular
situations within a social body’.24 The Egyptian critic Muhammad Badawi has
studied the cycle of the Porter and the Three Ladies along Foucauldian lines as a
narrative that establishes the over-reaching power of the caliph and caliphate
institution.25 Attar and Fischer conclude their study of the frame story with
the claim that ‘Sharazad’s submission to the authority of the king finds its
last justification in the concept of submission [Islam] itself, as the very
principle on which civilization is founded’.26
Such a view of the Nights and the political interpretations of it persist up to
our own time and have become all-pervasive among Arab writers and critics.
In carrying out the preparatory research for the present project, I came

22 Hamdi Sakkut, The Arabic Novel: Bibliography and Critical Introduction, 1865–1995 (Cairo and New
York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2000), iii. 1382; Muhsin Jāsim al-Mūsawı̄, Thārāt
Shahrazād, 139–59; Ibrāhı̄m Fathı̄, ‘ ‘‘Afārı̄t Naguib Mahfouz wa Layālı̄ Alf Layla’, in al-Hilāl (April
1998): 60–70; Ahmad M. al-Qudāt, Al-Tashkı¯l al-riwā’ı̄ inda Naguib Mahfouz (Beirut: al-Mu’assasa al-
‘Arabiyya lil-Dirāsāt wa ’l-Nashr, 2000), 209–70.
23 Ghazoul, Nocturnal Poetics, 138.
24 André Miquel, ‘The Thousand and One Nights in Arabic Literature and Society’, in R. G.
Hovannisian and G. Sabagh, eds., The Thousand and One Nights in Arabic Literature and Society
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 13.
25 Muhammad Badawı̄, ‘al-Rā‘ı̄ wa ’l-banāt: Qirā’a f ı̄ al-Hammāl wa ’l-banāt’, in Fusūl, 13.1
(Spring 1994): 139–71.
26 Samar Attar and Gerhard Fischer, ‘Promiscuity, Emancipation, Submission: The Civilizing
Process and the Establishment of a Female Role Model in the Frame Story of 1001 Nights’, Arab
Studies Quarterly 13.3/4 (Summer/Fall 1991): 16.
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across almost two dozen accounts by Arab novelists testifying to the vitality
of the Nights as a continuing source of both aesthetic and political inspir-
ation.27 Salwa Bakr notes, for example, that she was first introduced to
Shahrazād and the Nights through a radio show broadcast during the
month of Ramadan in her early youth, with a musical background from
Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestral suite.28
Bakr’s remembrance evokes the sense, corroborated by all the other Arab
writers’ testimonies that, during the politically charged days of the 1950s and
1960s—the great age of Nasserism and cultural as well as political pan-
Arabism—a general awareness of the Nights was instigated. Indeed, an en-
tirely new generation of writers first encountered and subsequently built on
the Nights in this heady context. It is intriguing to consider the implications of
‘Abd al-Fattāh Kilito’s assertion that Arab writers have only just begun to
invest in the Nights as an essential part of their cultural heritage.29

Emil Habibi, a Forerunner

The Secret Life of Said, the Ill-Fated Pessoptimist (1972–4) by the Palestinian novelist
Emile Habibi30 is widely considered to represent a breakthrough in the post-
Mahfouzian Arabic novel.31 It was indeed very positively received.32 Elias
Khoury, a young critic at the time, pointed out the relationships that devel-
oped in The Pessoptimist between narrative structure, narrator, the use of
language and repetition, the circularity of the tale, and its parody to the

27 Fusūl: Majallat al-naqd al-adabı̄ 13.2 (Summer 1994): 377–460; al-Hilāl (April 1998): 85–98;
Al-Riwāya al-Sūriyya al-mu‘āsira: al-Judhūr al-thaqāfiyya wa ’l-tiqniyyāt al-riwā’iyya al-jadı̄da, ed. Jamal
Chehayed and Heidi Toëlle (Damascus: Institut Français d’études Arabes de Damas, 2001), 45,
100, 108, 119, 167, 245.
28 al-Hilāl (April 1998): 85–7.
29 ‘Abd al-Fattāh Kilito, ‘Za‘mū anna’, in Dirāsāt f ı̄ ’l-qissa al-‘Arabiyya: Waqā’i‘ nudwat Miknās
(Beirut: Mu’assasat al-Abhāth al-‘Arabiyya, 1986), 189.
30 Emil Habibi, al-Mutashā’il: al-waqā’i‘ al-gharı¯ba f¯ı ’khtifā’ Sa‘ı̄d abı̄ ’l-nahs al-mutashā’il, 2nd printing
(Beirut: Dār Ibn Khaldūn, 1989). (English trans. Salma Khadra Jayyusi and Trevor Le Gassick, The Secret
Life of Saeed, the Ill-fated Pessoptimist: A Palestinian who Became a Citizen of Israel (New York: Vantage Press, 1982).
31 Edward W. Said in his foreword to Elias Khoury’s novel, The Little Mountain, trans. Maia Tabet
(Manchester: Carcanet, 1989), p. xvi.
32 Maher Jarrar, ‘A Narration of ‘‘Deterritorialization’’: Emı̄l Habı̄bı̄’s Pessoptimist’, Middle Eastern
Literatures 5.1 (January 2002): 19–28.
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The Arabian Nights and the Contemporary Arabic Novel / 305

narrative techniques in Arabic folk literature, including the Nights.33 In a
brilliant study, Sa‘ı̄d ‘Allūsh went further and meticulously examined Habibi’s
use of the Nights at the level of narration, techniques, and intertextual strat-
egies.34 A similar attempt was undertaken by Anna Zambelli Sessona some
twenty years later35 without adding much to ‘Allūsh’s contribution. Habibi’s
narrative of the Palestinian experience of dispossession during and after the
creation of Israel in 1948—when 700,000 Palestinians were driven from their
homes, never to be allowed to return, while those who remained behind were
left to grapple with the surrealistic experience of becoming a disenfranchised
and despised minority in their own former homeland—entails weaving vari-
ous dialogical strategies, motifs, and techniques from the Nights within his text,
opening at the same time a mimetic hypertextual link to Voltaire’s Candide in
order to culminate in a design of satirical pastiche—both a Menippean cry and
a vital counter-narrative of resistance.36

Magical Realism and the Nights

Having been impressed with Habibi’s style and narrative structure in his own
encounter with The Pessoptimist, the Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury has gone
on to develop his own experiments in cyclical narrative in many of his
novels, in which narrators sequentially pass along the narrative thread, in a
manner not coincidentally suggestive of the role of Scheherezade in the
Nights. It is obvious from Khoury’s writings and novels that the Nights as well
as the medieval Islamic heritage constitute two of his main inspirational
sources (though Khoury himself is, incidentally, a member of Lebanon’s
Greek Orthodox community). To these, one can also add the element of
‘magical realism’.
Indeed, it is noteworthy here that the Latin American literature and in
particular the currents of ‘magical realism’ have had a profound influence on
33 Elias Khoury, in Shu’ūn filastı̄nı̄yah 39 (November 1974): 180–4 (reprinted in Elias Khoury,
al-Dhākirah al-mafqūdah. Dirāsāt naqdı¯yah, 2nd printing (Beirut: Dār al-Ādāb, 1990), 153–9.
34 Sa‘ı̄d ‘Allūsh, ‘Unf al-mutakhayyal al-riwā’ı̄ f¯ı a‘māl Emil Habibi (Beirut: Markaz al-Inmā’
al-‘Arabı̄, n.d.), 84–114.
35 Anna Zambelli Sessona, ‘The Rewriting of The Arabian Nights by Imı̄l Habı̄bı̄’, in Middle
Eastern Literatures 5.1 (January 2002): 29–48.
36 Maher Jarrar, ‘A Narration of ‘‘Deterritorialization’’: Emı̄l Habı̄bı̄’s Pessoptimist’, 15–28.
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the contemporary Arabic novel. What is especially intriguing, however, is the
fact that the great Latin American writers, such as Garcı́a Márquez and
others, were themselves influenced by The Arabian Nights.37 This represents of
course the continuation of an intellectual and cultural cross-fertilization
that has endured for hundreds of years. The mutual influence of Arabic- and
Spanish-language writers dates back to medieval times, when an avid move-
ment of acculturation took place in Islamic Spain. Added to this, of course,
were the various migration processes throughout the nineteenth century
from the Arab world, especially Syria and Lebanon, to Latin American
countries, which further deepened a whole range of cultural interactions.
Hence, the contemporary resonances between ‘magical realism’ (as well as
Latin American literature more generally) and Arabic literature is hardly a
surprising occurrence—and it is even less so given that both Latin America and
the Arab world have been contending with a range of social, economic, and
political problems common to the Third World—which often provide the
point of departure for much of the literature emerging from the Third World
in the postcolonial era. Thus, quite apart from the inspiration of Emile Habibi’s
The Pessoptimist—which succeeded in creating a new narrative style that draws
from The Nights, blending reality and fantasy to generate an imaginative
freedom that confronts a problematic colonial reality—Arab writers became
acquainted with Latin American literature through their own reading in
foreign languages. The first translations of Garcı́a Márquez’s works go back
to the early 1980s; between the years 1980 and 1984, at least four of his novels
were translated into Arabic. Yet, Habibi’s novel seems to remain an influential
outlier rather than an essential part within the transtextual chain encompassing
the Nights, ‘magical realism’, and the Arabic nouveau roman.
Zamora and Faris argue that ‘[I]n magical realist texts, ontological disrup-
tion serves the purpose of political and cultural disruption: magic is often
given as a cultural corrective, requiring readers to scrutinize accepted
realistic conventions of causality, materiality, motivation’. They add that ‘
[t]heir primary narrative investment may be in myths, legends, rituals, that
is, in collective (sometimes oral and performative, as well as written) prac-
tices that bind communities. In such cases, magical realist works remind us
that the novel began as a popular form with communal imperatives.’38 As

37 Fārūq Sa‘d, Min wahı̄ alf layla wa layla (Beirut: al-Maktaba al-Ahliyya, 1962).
38 Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community
(Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1995), 3–4.
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such, magical realism, as Rawdon Wilson puts it, ‘can be enlisted in the
analysis of postcolonial discourse as the mode of a conflicted consciousness,
the cognitive map that discloses the antagonism between two views of
culture, two views of history, and two ideologies’.39 Drawing on and extend-
ing this line of thinking, I would now like to address only two examples of
the elaboration of this tradition in contemporary Arabic literature: a novel by
the Algerian Rashid Boudjedra and another by the Lebanese Elias Khoury.40
What can readily be identified as the magical realist element in these two
novels emanates partly from the dialectical relationships between the con-
stitutive identities inherent in a space taken over and transformed by the
phallic brutality of an aggressive, colonizing power. Both novels reflect the
‘explosion’ in space created by a brutal power, in the process of orienting and
re-creating the colonized, original space that it has taken over.41 In the case of
Khoury’s Bāb al-Shams (1998; translated into English in 2005 as Gate of the Sun),
this is a space of partition, shifting boundaries, population transfers, racism,
death, and war.

Rashid Boudjedra’s Alf wa ‘ām min al-hanı̄n

Rashid Boudjedra’s Alf wa ‘ām min al-hanı̄n (One Thousand and One Years of Nostalgia,
published in French in 1979 and translated into Arabic shortly thereafter)42
seems to be employing transpositional textual strategies alluding to both the
Nights and Garcı́a Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. The structure of this
novel is solidly worked, weaving together textual allusions from the Nights
within a narrative web that disguises a parodic pastiche of One Hundred Years of
Solitude
At one point in the novel, Boudjedra evokes the Nights’ frame story43 in
order to generate an anti-hegemonic counter-reading—even a rebellion—

39 Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community
(Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1995), 222.
40 Khoury’s transtextual allusions to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in his Mamlakat
al-Ghurabā (Kingdom of Strangers, 1993) and to Garcı́a Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold in his
Majma‘ al-asrār (The Confluence of Secrets, 1994) will be the focus of a separate study.
41 For ‘the phallic formant’ of space, cf. Henry Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald
Nicholson-Smith (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1997, 1991), 286–91.
42 Rashid Boudjedra, Alf wa ‘ām min al-hanı̄n, trans. Mirzāq Biqtāsh (Beirut: Dār Ibn Rushd,
n.d.); Les 1001 Années de la nostalgie (Paris: Denöel, 1979).
43 Alf wa ‘ām min al-hanı̄n, 163–6.
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based on class and gender oppositions.44 Al-Manāma, the desert town in which
the story takes place, stands in for a traditional town in the Arabian peninsula
dominated by decadent patriarchal authorities and the aggressive intrusion of
colonial powers (themes explored most memorably perhaps in the Saudi
novelist Abdelrahman Munif’s classic Cities of Salt). Boudjedra’s Alf wa ‘ām min
al-hanı̄n, like Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, can be approached as a
carnivalesque narrative of ridicule and parody where instinctual pleasures are
ritualized soliciting the participation of the entire community, thus creating a
space for disparity challenging the official, hypocritical hierarchy and its
religious values. Carnival as an alternative and unofficial practice, according
to Bakhtin, in its practice of inverting social hierarchies, becomes anti-official
and potentially oppositional.45 In his book Queer Nations, Jarrod Hayes argues
that Boudjedra’s novel ‘explicitly establishes sexual liberation as a prerequisite
for successful struggle against colonial and neocolonial oppression’.46

Elias Khoury’s Bāb al-shams

Elias Khoury’s experimentation with cyclical modes of narration reaches its peak
in his novel Bāb al-shams which deals with the Palestinian nakba, or catastrophe,
of 1948. In preparing the novel, Khoury interviewed dozens of Palestinian
refugees in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan in order to gather living stories of their
displacement. At first glance, the frame story, like that of Shahrazād, employs
the healing words of the act of narrating and their power to trigger memory and
delay death. Yūnus, an old Palestinian freedom fighter lying in a comatose state
in a Beirut hospital, is being nursed by a son-like fellow, constantly narrating
stories for him. The fabula rotates between two deaths: the death of Umm
Hasan—the midwife who is entrusted with people’s lives and stories—and
the symbolic death of Yūnus.47 It is in effect as though it would require
the ‘death of the author’ to open the gaps of collective memory and bring
to life the narratives of a marginalized and uprooted people, who are, of
44 Cf. Muhsin Mahdi, The Thousand and One Nights, 129.
45 M. Bakhtin, Literatur und Karneval. Zur Romantheorie und Lachkultur (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer
Wissenschaft, a.M. 1990), 47–83; id., Rabelais and his World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1984), 9–10.
46 Jarrod Hayes, Queer Nations: Marginal Sexualities in the Maghreb (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2000), 74.
47 Maher Jarrar, ‘al-Qass wa ’l-mawt wa ’l-dhākira. Elias Khoury’s ‘‘Bāb al-Shams’’ malhamat
al-wa‘ı̄ wa ’l-adab al-muqāwim’, Al-Tarı̄q 58.2 (March–April 1999): 120–25.
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course, the novel’s ‘real’ storytellers. Khalı̄l, the implied narrator in Khūrı̄’s Bāb
al-shams, recalls that when he was a boy his mother used to tell him about the
‘blind singer of tales’ and narrate for him the stories, which the singer used to
recount while playing on his one-stringed fiddle (rabāba) under the light of the
full moon in Khalı̄l’s native town of al-Ghābisiyya in northern Palestine.48 In Bāb
al-shams, Khalı̄l takes over this role of the figure of the ‘blind singer of tales’, who
is, in the tradition of Arabic oral narrative poetry, a creative artist producing and
sustaining the tradition of which he is also an embodiment.49 Under the mystic
‘green’ light of the full moon, the muses of the implied narrator awake to
the sad melodies of a blind singer of tales; these muses are, however, but
the memories and voices of actual uprooted refugees. The muses trigger the
spirits of the dead, who start narrating in the silence of the night. While fear
haunts the narrator, he starts talking to them and he gives them names and
voices (p. 22). As in the Nights, naming has an ontological power: it grants
identity and bears witness. Khalil’s grandmother used to tell him: ‘Prayer is
[consists of] unfolding our words as a carpet upon the earth, and here am I
unfolding my words so you may walk on them!’50 He weaves a tale as broad as
his lost homeland in order that the coming generations might not forget it, in
order that ‘they should return to their homeland in order to shake the trees so
the spirits of the dead may fall and rest in their graves’ (p. 29). From the gaps,
absences, and silences resulting from this process flows the magical realistic aura
of some of these ‘real’ tales.
Borrowing heavily from the Nights, Khoury’s tale opens with the line ‘kān yā
mā kān’ (not quite ‘once upon a time’, p. 35) which any Arab reader would
instantly identify as the opening line of each of the Thousand and One Nights, as
well as the long tradition of Arabic folk tales that followed in their wake.
What follows is a series of stimulating narratives that are contained in one
another in a structure en abyme technique, also deliberately reminiscent of the
Nights. The narrators are from the here and now, marginalized people, anti-
heroes who lost their abode and are struggling to create a counter-narrative
that might earn them some measure of recognition at least in a world that
seems to have long since lost interest in their collective story. The implied
narrator recollects the Palestinian people’s oral memory, their geographical
48 Bāb al-shams, 16–17, 44, 313, 319.
49 See Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press
and Oxford University Press, 1960), 13–29, for the function of the ‘singer of tales’ in epic literature.
50 Bāb al-shams, 30 and esp. 114.
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space as well as their personal inner spaces, only to besiege the reader and to
seduce him/her gradually to enter the world of the text, to become her/
himself an involved character in the act of narrating.
In the work of Habibi and Khoury, the Nights are used as a pretext for
counter-narrative. Indeed, the counter-narrative which constitutes a vital
stand against the grips of colonialism, has been extensively theorized by
Edward Said, who stressed the importance of the narrative of resistance in
the Palestinian people’s struggle.51 In both novels, what we might identify as
‘magical realism’ flows from the gaps, absences, and silences resulting from
this process: not a bad dream, but the magical intuition of the terrible—but
unmistakably real—historical nightmare that has befallen the Palestinian
people. Thus appropriated by contemporary Arab writers, magical realism
creates a space for the memories of the displaced and uprooted to recuperate
the lost voices and discarded fragments that imperialist cognitive structures
have pushed to the margin. This is, in short, a space where the spirits of the
ancestors and of nature breathe upon popular ritual practices, feasts, and
mythologies, and where the boundaries vanish between the real and the
‘magical’, between reality and dream, between past and present.

‘Abd al-Rahmān Munı̄f: Alterations on the

Theme of Counter-Narrative
Another author whose novels could be categorized as a counter-narrative,
primarily experimenting with the Nights is ‘Abd al-Rahmān Munı̄f. One of the
issues at stake for the Arab novelists of the 1970s was to find a new mode of
expression for novelistic production. In his first few novels, Munı̄f worked in an
experimental fashion that tried joggling with the narrative voices, the narrative
techniques and language as such. Beginning with Endings (1977), Munı̄f starts
drawing on the rich Arabic narrative heritage.52 The author’s great creativity is
finally revealed in Cities of Salt, where—despite his usage of an omniscient
narrator—he employs the implicit weaving of stories inside one another, as

51 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 209–20.
52 See ‘Abd al-Rahmān Munı̄f ’s Upon Leaving the Bridge and Endings: A Redemptive Journey’, MIT
Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies (Special Focus: ‘Abd Al-Rahman Munif Remembered), 7
(Spring 2007): 59–69.
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derived from the Nights. Subsequently, stories continue to generate each other.
In this context, Munı̄f develops a language that he labels ‘the intermediate
narrative language’—one which lies between the high literary Arabic of medi-
eval writings and the low vernacular dialects of folk literature.53
In his last novel, Ard al-sawād (1999), which is a historical account of
nineteenth-century Iraq under Dāwūd Pasha (ruled 1817–31), Munı̄f builds
the structure of his novel around different chronotopes that deal with
crossing thresholds. One of the main axes that bind these chronotopes is
revealed towards the middle of the book in the form of a journey.54 Sailing
together on a boat along the Tigris to allow a lover a voyeuristic gaze at his
object of desire, the all-male company carries a copy of Alf layla wa layla.
Badrı̄, the lover, is about to undergo his rite of passage while his two
comrades (embodying the Sindbad of the land and the Sindbad of the sea
respectively),55 are expected to watch over him. The threshold of the journey
constitutes a focal point around which the narrative evolves.56 The trans-
position of the theme of the Sindbad tales evoked at this juncture of the
novel is further enriched through the overall structure of the novel experi-
menting with the various narrative potentialities of the Nights.

Adaptations of The Nights’ Frame Story

Two other novels appropriate the Nights’ frame story to construct transtextual
strategies. The first is Tustufı̄l Myrel Streep [I care less about Meryl Streep / Too bad

53 ‘Abd al-Rahmān Munı̄f, al-Kātib wa ’l-manfā, ed. Muhammad Dakrūb (Beirut: al-Mu’assasa
al-‘Arabiyya lil Dirāsat wal-Nashr, 1994), 50–1, 79–84. On the experimentation with language by
modern Arab novelists, cf. Sasson Somekh, The Changing Rhythm: A Study of Najib Mahfuz’s Novels
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1973), 98–100; P. M. Kurpershoek, The Short Stories of Yūsuf Idrı̄s: A Modern Egyptian
Author (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1981), 11–15, 114–24; For the case of Munı̄f, See Muhammad Dakrūb in
‘Abd al-Rahmān Munı̄f, ’al-Kātib wa ’l-manfā, 10–16.
54 ‘Abd al-Rahmān Munı̄f, Ard al-sawād, 1–3 (Beirut: al-Mu’assasa al-‘Arabiyya lil-Dirāsāt wa ’l-
Nashr & al-Markaz al-Thaqāf ı̄ al-‘Arabı̄, 1999), i. 457–77.
55 The motif of Sindbad in the early Arabic novel and in modern Arabic short story and
poetry has been proficiently studied by Muhammad Shaheen, The Modern Arabic Short Story: Sharazad
Returns, 2nd edn. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 51; cf. as well Roger Allen, ‘Sindbad the
Sailor and the Early Arabic Novel’, in Kamal Abdel-Malek and Wael Hallaq, Tradition, Modernity,
and Postmodernity in Arabic Literature (Leiden, Boston, and Cologne: Brill, 2000), 78–85.
56 Maher Jarrar, ‘Abd al-Rahmān Munı̄f wa ’l-‘Irāq: Sı̄ra wa dhikrayāt (Beirut: al-Markaz al-Thaqāf ı̄
al-‘Arabı̄, 2005), 173, 180–3.
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for Meryl Streep] by the Lebanese novelist Rashı̄d al-Da‘ı̄f and the second is the
Egyptian novelist Edward al-Kharrāt’s Rama and the Dragon.

Rashı̄d al-Da‘ı̄f’s Tustuf ı̄l Myrel Streep

The Lebanese Rashı̄d al-Da‘ı̄f invokes the frame story of the Nights, alluding
to Shahrayār’s aggressive ‘visual desire’ in order to amplify the protagonist’s
(Rashshūd’s) obsession with sex.57 The story line is simple, and it ends with
Rashshūd’s divorce from his wife who gets pregnant and whom he accuses of
being involved in an affair with a French student. This melodramatic theme
is typical of al-Da‘ı̄f’s last three novels, where melodrama functions as a
means of revising notions of value and behaviour. His strategy in this novella
is mostly built on voyeurism, the manly gaze, secrecy and hypocrisy.58 In fact,
Rashshūd (incidentally the diminutive form of Rashid, the author’s own
name) is obsessed with two things: owning a TV set, and sex—goals that
would make possible acts of male power and surveillance against women’s
bodies. Al-Da‘ı̄f’s reference to the Nights’ frame story is fragmentary; that is,
he only draws on a single aspect of the latter in the form of a collage and
leaves it free-floating without further examination, in a one-dimensional
attempt to enforce the notions of jealousy and cheating and to stress the
narrator’s strikingly conservative, macho attitude towards women.

Edward al-Kharrāt’s Rama and the Dragon

The second example involves a novel by the Egyptian writer Edward al-Kharrāt,
Rama and the Dragon (1978), which was considered by critics to mark a break-
through in the Arabic nouveau roman. As previously indicated, Andreas Pflitsch has
already explored the cyclical nature of two of al-Kharrāt’s novels, finding them
particularly reliant on the notion of arabesque. In fact, al-Kharrāt is a great
example of an aesthetician in language, who also cares about bringing out the
ontological concerns of the individual human being.
In al-Kharrāt’s novel, both Rama and Mikhail—the implied narrator—
reciprocally undertake the task of narrating for one another. Hence, Mikhail

57 Rashı̄d al-Da‘ı̄f, Tustuf¯l

ı Myrel Streep (Beirut: Riad El-Rayyes, 2001), 64, 119–22.
58 Maher Jarrar, ‘Sexuality, Fantasy and Violence in Lebanon’s Post-War Novel’, in Samir
Khalaf and John Gagnon, eds., Sexuality in the Arab World (London, San Francisco, Beirut: Saqi
Boohs, 2006), 281–8.
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often perceives Rama as the healing Shahrazād, while in other instances he
alludes to himself as Shahrazād. In this novel, the complexity of human
relations is both narrated and counter-narrated, to form a web-like design
that encompasses the narrator, the narrative itself, and the unstable, shifting
figure of Shahrazād. We can refer in this context to Malti-Douglas’s study
‘Narration and Desire: Shahrazād’, where the narrative embodies all three
elements—death, desire, and the body—and where in the process of narra-
tion, ‘body has been transmuted into word and back into body’.59 In this
fashion, al-Kharrāt enriches the heterosexual couple but he suddenly turns
back—at the end of the novel60—to what seems to be a homosocial alter-
native. The irony here lies in the fact that we are left with great doubt as to
the healing power of narration or the binary opposition that Malti-Douglas is
posing in her feminist approach.61 Or perhaps one can read it as a poetical
closure to a ‘political allegory’—catching on a trend among some scholars?

Badr al-Dı̄b’s ‘Re-Writing’ of Hāsib Karı̄m al-Dı̄n

As a final illustration, I would like to consider a remarkable endeavour, a
textual transformation, alluding to the cycle of Hāsib Karı̄m al-Dı̄n wa malikat
al-hayyāt as a hypotext.62 Badr al-Dı̄b’s (1926–2005) ‘re-narrating’ Hāsib Karı̄m
al-Dı̄n63 amounts to a diegtic transposition of the cycle.64 Al-Dı̄b’s narrator retains
the name and character of the original Hāsib Karı̄m al-Dı̄n in order to
rewrite his own memoirs that had previously appeared in the Nights. Towards
the end of his two-page prologue, a concluding prose poem comes to

59 Fedwa Malti-Douglas, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Word: Gender and Discourse in Arabo-Islamic Writing
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 28.
60 Edwar al-Kharrat, Rama and the Dragon, trans. Ferial Ghazoul and John Verlenden (Cairo and
New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2002), 324–7.
61 Cf. as well, Fedwa Malti-Douglas, ‘Homosexuality, Hetrosexuality, and Shahrazād’, in The
Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, i. 38–42.
62 ‘Abdallāh Ibrāhı̄m, al-Sardiyya al-‘Arabiyya: Bahth f ı̄ ’l-bunya al-sardiyya lil- mawrūth al-hikā’ı¯
al-‘Arabı̄ (Beirut: Al-Markaz al-Thaqāf ı̄ al-‘Arabı̄, 1992), 102–8; Ranā A. Kishlı̄, Hāsib Karı̄m
al-Dı̄n: Tı̄qniyyaāt al-sard wa ’l-namadhij al-bad’iyya f ı̄ dawra hikā’iyya min Alf Layla wa Layla (MA Thesis)
(American University of Beirut, 2000).
63 Badr al-Dı̄b, I‘ādat hikāyat Hāsib Karı̄m al-Dı̄n wa malikat al-hayyāt: Warā’ al-kaynūna.
Cairo: Asdiqā’ al-Kitāb, 1990.
64 Cf. Genette, Palimpseste, 403–15.
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question being, creation, and the word. Hence, the reader realizes that s/he
will be faced with an ontological text, grappling with the whimsical nature of
existence. Badr al-Dı̄b keeps the cycle of Hāsib Karı̄m al-Dı̄n’s text nearly
intact, summing up long descriptions or undertaking various abridgements
and adding commentary sentences at crucial junctures. This ‘minimal’
reworking of the text alters the overall meaning and transforms it into a
spiritual journey bearing insights into the meaning of life, destiny, free will,
narration, and the act of writing itself. Hence, al-Dı̄b’s rewriting, approach-
ing Hāsib Karı̄m al-Dı̄n’s voyage as a Sufi hagiography, an esoteric rite of
passage leading towards a spiritual union with the prototype of the Perfect
Man (the Islamic, Neoplatonic idea of haqı̄qa Muhammadiyya). This diegtic trans-
position of the hypotext amounts to a new configurative meaning which opens
up a new ‘horizon of expectation’ to the reader. Despite this short display of
the book’s general idea, al-Dı̄b’s attempt can only be deemed unique and
innovative in Arabic literature.

Conclusion
Harold Bloom argues that ‘Shakespeare belongs to the giant age before the
flood, before the anxiety of influence became central to poetic conscious-
ness’.65 The Arabian Nights, although it is a ‘book without authors’ encompass-
ing ‘oceans of stories’,66 could also be regarded as belonging to the giant age
before the flood; to an age in which ‘the marvels recounted by Schehrazade
really happened in the daily life of her time, and stopped happening because
of the incredulity and realistic cowardice of subsequent generations’, as
Garcı́a Márquez puts it.67 Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’68 has bridged the
way to theories of intertexuality, writing as the intersection of textual surfaces,
the death of the author, and other postmodern theories. On the other hand,
Scheherazade has produced a progeny that is scattered across geographical
locations and different genres of writing, keeping in mind that genres
themselves have become hybridized.

65 The Anxiety of Influence. A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 9.
66 Titles of chapters in Robert Irwin’s book, The Arabian Nights: A Companion.
67 Gabriel Garcı́a Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale, 219.
68 For a revision of Bloom’s theory, see Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1980), 318–45.
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This chapter has attempted to delineate a working schema with regard to
the Nights and its impact on the Arabic nouveau roman. It could only ever have
been a sketch, dealing with a few works, albeit important ones. But much
more scholarly work needs to be done in order for us to fully appreciate the
extent to which the Nights effectively bridge together so many of the world’s
most vibrant literary cultures and ages.
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