The Arabian Nights - A Cultural Journey Across Continents and Centuries: New Departures

Location: SOAS College Building, room G3

Keynote: 2:30-3:00 pm

Manuscripts of The Thousand and One Nights and Arabic Middle Literature 

(مخطوطات ألف ليلة وليلة والأدب العربي الوسط)

• Speaker: Aboubakr Chraibi, INALCO, Paris

Panel Discussion: 3:00-5:00 pm

Presentations: 3:00–4:20 pm

Lyrical Delights of the Arabian Nights

• Speaker: Orhan Elmaz (University of St Andrews)

The language of The 1001 Nights is a fascinating blend of Classical and colloquial Arabic, reflecting its origins in the oral storytelling traditions of the Middle East and its development over centuries through revisions and additions in different cultural and geographic contexts. Its combination of high literary style with everyday language has been a key element in its enduring popularity.

I will look specifically at the function of rhymed prose (sajʿ) in the collection within the framework of the digital humanities, especially corpus linguistics. We will show examples where rhyme functions as a mnemonic device, helping both storytellers and listeners remember the story more easily, aiding in the transmission of tales across generations. Rhyme is also used to highlight key points, emotions, or moral lessons, drawing attention to important parts of the narrative.

The focus of the talk will be the rhythmic and melodic quality of the collection in Arabic. It will be argued that this feature captivates listeners and makes the story more engaging, while enhancing the beauty and artistry of the storytelling. If you have enjoyed reading the Nights in translation, prepare to be utterly enchanted anew.

Looking Inward: Modern Arab(ic-language) Perspectives on The Thousand and One Nights

• Speaker: Sara Forcella (University of Edinburgh)

Considered ‘as much a part of Western literary and cultural traditions as it is of the Eastern ones’ (Malti-Douglas 1991, 41), The Thousand and One Nights owes its worldwide circulation to the interest that arose after the publication of Galland’s French translation at the beginning of the 1700s. Given this long-standing “Western”, and mostly Anglocentric, commitment to the Nights, largely ignored is the fact that in the Arab world a tradition of modern and contemporary critical reception has also developed, mainly – but in no way exclusively – in the form of periodical criticism.

By offering examples of contemporary Arabic critical writings targeting the opening narrative of Nights, this presentation highlights some of the “cultural logics” (Mufti 2016, 19) and dynamics operating in the domestic reception of this work. Dealing with the complex issue of the positioning of the text within its own literary tradition from a variety of points of view, the examples here provided show how Arab critical voices make sense of and negotiate the distance/proximity of the collection from/to Arabic literary heritage. In keeping with the spirit of decentering the globalized, and predominantly anglophone, debate on the Nights, this presentation furthers research into Arab(ic-language) criticism, inviting to reconsider the role of Arabic within the modern-day discussions around the collection.

The Double Life of Alf Layla wa Layla

• Speaker: Feras Alkabbani (University of Sussex)

First translated into French by Antoine Galland (1704-1711), The Arabian Nights underwent a series of renditions in its various European editions over the next two centuries, culminating in Sir Richard Burton’s ‘Plain and Literal’ translation (1885-6). Burton’s version severed the much-loved Oriental classic from its long-held prized position as the ‘delight of the nursery’ and tossed it into the ‘sewers’, now labelled as an ‘Oriental muck heap.’

Burton’s translation was the first to include every single tale with a special emphasis on sexuality, detailed in a parallel subtext of rich annotations and a ‘Terminal Essay’ in which he developed his own theory on ‘Pederasty’. Burton used the medieval text as a pretext to curate a libertine vision of its Arab context, which he presented authoritatively to his late-Victorian readers as a space of ‘Other’ sexual possibilities. 

While Burton’s translation became the longest (10-volume), most complete edition of The Nights in Europe, the book was paradoxically shrinking in the original Arabic, dwindling down to a compact 3-volume edition in Khalil Sarkis’s contemporaneous version of Alf Layla wa Layla (1883), in which the Lebanese Nahdawi scholar cleansed the Oriental classic from vulgarities and sexual profanities, producing the Arab world’s first expurgated edition of the text. Sarkis’s edition was the culmination of nearly a century of Nahdawi discourse, which had been reconfiguring sexual morality in Arabic literature and culture vis-à-vis Orientalist depictions. 

By juxtaposing these two versions of the Oriental classic, Feras Alkabani highlights the ways in which the text acts as a wider metaphor of the changing discourse of sexuality and homoerotic desire in English and Arabic literatures at the fin de siècle.   

Sea Girls: the call of the Arabian Nights and the almost human cries of (women from) the sea

• Speaker: Professor Ros Ballaster (University of Oxford)

Sinbad may be the best-known seafarer of the Arabian Nights. I turn though from the mariner to the mermaid to consider the resonances of the ‘call’ of the sea for readers in the story traditions that have crossed oceans, speaking to us anew in the context of contemporary ecopoetics and ecopolitics. In English-language writing, from the translation of the story of ‘Gulnare’ in the early eighteenth-century Arabian Nights Entertainments to Monique Roffey’s Aycayia (The Mermaid of Black Conch, 2020), the sea girl has served as a figure of ecological and political intercultural dependency.  The cry of the salty sea (manifest in the sea-girls' tears and song) is a ‘not human’  sound we are called upon to strain to hear: that ‘strange poetry of the uncanny return of the … object’  as Patricia Yaeger terms it in her essay ‘The ocean as quasi-object’, that promotes much-needed what Mona Narain calls  ‘immersive ontologies’  The non-human cry of the ocean (the seagirl, the siren, the seagull)  reminds us of our  ‘intimate entanglement’ (Narain)  (think of those nets and hooks that pull the mermaid onto the deck )  which refuses while it reminds us of  the strategic concept of a ‘European ‘human … ‘freed’ by liberal forms while other subjects, practices, and geographies are placed at a distance from the ‘the human’ . The ocean connects and separates land masses and bodies (human and nonhuman). And sea-girls, mermaids and gulls, are the liminal figures who bring the sea to shore or mark the shore. Stories of sea-girls are inevitably stories of what happens when the ’deep’ is brought inland, their sounds and cries reviving ancient memories

Q & A:  4:20-4:45 pm

Concluding Remarks and Closing

• Wen-chin Ouyang, SOAS, University of London (Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature)

Location: SOAS Gallery (formerly Brunei Gallery), room BG02

Location: SOAS Gallery (formerly Brunei Gallery), room BG01

Speakers, Storyteller and Musician

Aboubakr Chraïbi is Professor at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales in Paris. He works on pre-modern Arabic literature, and in particular, through manuscript sources, on Arabic Middle literature and the Thousand and One Nights. He has published extensively on the subject, including editing the collective work Arabic Manuscripts of the Thousand and One Nights (Paris, 2016). His most recent publication, with Samira Mezeghrane, is ‘Natation et perfection: un marqueur de la civilisation arabo-islamique’ (QSA 19: 1-30, 2024).

Dr. Orhan Elmaz teaches Digital Humanities and classical and modern Arabic language, literature, and culture at the University of St Andrews. His research area lies at the intersection of linguistics, intellectual history, and transcultural studies. He has published on the Qur’an (and its use and abuse), computational and corpus linguistics, and One Thousand and One Nights. Currently, he is working on the emergence and development of feminist ideas, specifically around female education, contrasting different Muslim-majority and Muslim-minority communities of the Middle East, Europe, and Central Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Dr Sara Forcella received her PhD from Sapienza - University of Rome in 2021, with a thesis entitled Otherness and the Other Sex Within the Frame Story of The Thousand and One Nights: Texts and Criticism. During her doctorate, she spent 15 months at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter as a visiting doctoral researcher. She recently completed her Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (University of Edinburgh), working on the project Looking Inward: A Decolonial Perspective on the Arab Criticism of The Thousand and One Nights. 

Feras Alkabbani is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Sussex, where he co-directs the Middle East and North Africa Centre at Sussex (MENACS). He is a Trustee of the British Society of Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES) and a member of the Editorial Board of the Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle East and North African Migration Studies (North Carolina State University). Feras Alkabani is author of Richard Burton, T.E. Lawrence and the Culture of Homoerotic Desire: Orientalist Depictions of Arab Sexuality, published by Bloomsbury on 17 October 2024. 

Ros Ballaster is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies in the Faculty of English, Oxford University and Professorial Fellow of English at Mansfield College, Oxford. She has published widely in the field of eighteenth-century literature in English and has particular research interests in women’s writing, women’s studies, feminist theory, and oriental fiction. She is the author of Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662-1785 (2005) and editor of companion anthology Fable of the East: Selected Tales 1662-1785 (2005), both from Oxford University Press.

Hanan al-Shaykh is an award-winning journalist, novelist, and playwright. She is the author of the short-story collections I Sweep the Sun Off Rooftops and One Thousand and One Nights; the novels The Story of Zahra, Women of Sand and Myrrh, Beirut Blues, and Only in London; and a memoir about her mother, The Locust and the Bird. She was raised in Beirut, educated in Cairo, and lives in London.

Ahmed Mukhtar was born in Baghdad, Mukhtar has been playing the oud and Arabic percussions since 1979. He has worked with many folk music groups and musicians in the city. In 1983, he began studying both the oud and percussion at the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad with the Masters Ghanim Haddad and Jameel Jerjis. In 1985, Mukhtar began working with Arabic orchestras and performing on Iraqi TV with a variety of Iraqi groups. A few years later, in 1990 he attended the High Institute of Music in Damascus where he continued his studies of the oud and Western percussions. In 1999, Mukhtar earned an MA from the London College of Music, and in 2003, he received a Masters Degree in Performance with a focus on Middle-Eastern and Arabic music from SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies), London. He is currently teaching oud, percussion and Arabic music theory in many institutes around London including SOAS, the University of London, and the Taqasim Music School. This is in addition to working as the Musical Programs Director for Al-Fayha, an Iraqi television channel.