The Merchant and The Genie, The Enchanted Horse, The Little Hunchbacked, Sindbad The Sailor, etc., are few of the selected stories which will act as catalyst and set off the young beginners on the quest for knowledge. This collection of ancient tales from Arabia, India, Persia, etc., is called Arabian Night. Here is a very good collection of ancient tales called Arabian Nights Stories. So that by the middle of the century most English children would have been fairly familiar with these particular tales. Plots from these stories also became stock elements in English Pantomime. The Egyptian collection, on the other hand, absorbed many further stories in an apparent quest to actually arrive at the 1001 nights of the title.īecause of the various inputs to the final collection, it is important to recognize that there is no ONE version of this tales with universal acceptance. The Syrian collection remained close to the original. The stories were circulated in manuscript for centuries until they were written down in a definite form during the late 13th century, somewhere in Syria or Egypt.Īll later manuscript versions originate in this now-lost document and they fall into two main bunches - one developed in Syria and the other in Egypt.
The first documented evidence for the collection is a 12th century Cairene notebook : the oldest manuscripts date from the 15th century and consist of about 270 nights. The Arabian Nights has often been banned by Arab governments even as recently as 1989 Imagination and fantasy were more commonly expressed in poetry which had a tradition in Arabic life pre-dating Islam and was not constrained by religious concerns. Most traditional Arabic narrative wasĭidactic or religious - history, useful knowledge moral instruction.
This rejection reflects the Koran's condemnation of fictional narratives as lying. Ironically, the work was not widely accepted as serious literature by the intellectual and literary elite of the Islamic world. The collection of Arabian Nights Stories is the most famous literary product of a classical Islamic Civilization that was formed through a merging of Arabic culture (especially religion) and the great imperial traditions of the eastern Mediterranean and the Persian empire of the Sassanians.