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This article was downloaded by: [Ulrich Marzolph] On: 09 August 2014, At: 04:17

This article was downloaded by: [Ulrich Marzolph] On: 09 August 2014, At: 04:17 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Middle Eastern Literatures Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/came20 In the Studio of the Nights Ulrich Marzolph Published online: 04 Aug 2014. To cite this article: Ulrich Marzolph (2014) In the Studio of the Nights, Middle Eastern Literatures, 17:1, 43-57, DOI: 10.1080/1475262X.2014.903048 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1475262X.2014.903048 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. 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Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms- and-conditions In the Studio of the Nights ULRICH MARZOLPH Abstract Most of the ‘complete’ manuscripts of the Thousand and One Nights in Arabic preserved today were compiled in the 18th and 19th centuries. Since the original manuscripts the compilers of the new manuscripts had at hand were fragmentary, they exploited a wide range of sources to come up with complete manuscripts. The sources the compilers used for their compilations were most probably works from the Mamluk and Ottoman periods that were more readily available than copies of the works dating from the classical period of Arabic literature. The particular work studied in the present essay is the chronicle Kitāb laṭāʾif akhbār al-uwal (‘Subtle Stories from the Forefathers’), compiled by Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Muʿṭı̄ al-Isḥāqı̄ (died 1623). A detailed analysis of the corresponding tales between this work and the Nights reveals the fact that the compilers of the Nights copied a limited numbers of tales directly from Isḥāqı̄’s chronicle, thus supplying a glimpse into the ‘studio’ of the compilers of the Nights. The growth of the Thousand and One Nights into the fully-fledged compilation we know today is characterized by a whole series of peculiar events. Right from the start, Galland’s (1646–1715) liberty in adapting to his translation tales that had never been part of the original collection in Arabic before that date, and the subsequent production of Arabic versions for the tales of Aladdin and Ali Baba, were wilful acts of mystification. More- over, since ‘complete’ manuscripts of the Nights appear to have been rarely available even before Galland’s time, Arabic scribes contributed in their own right to shaping the Nights as a work of many different faces. Considered together, the history of the Nights adds up to depicting a work that, even though it has a relatively stable core corpus of tales,1 was to a large extent created by the enthusiastic western reception of Galland’s adaptation and the ensuing search for the work’s ‘complete’ manuscripts in the 18th and 19th centuries. Besides the 15th-century manuscript that served as the basis for Galland’s adaptation, we today know less than a dozen manuscripts that have most probably been compiled before the end of the 17th century; that is, before Galland’s work and the impact that resulted from its reception.2 None of these early manuscripts is complete, and even the totality of fragments does not allow a clear and unambiguous reconstruction of a standard set of narratives that might have been included in the © 2014 Taylor & Francis Ulrich Marzolph, Enzyklopädie des Märchens, Kulturwissenschaftliches Zentrum, Heinrich-Düker-Weg 14, Göttingen 37073, Germany. Email: umarzol@gwdg.de Middle Eastern Literatures, 2014 Vol. 17, No. 1, 43–57, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1475262X.2014.903048 Downloaded by [Ulrich Marzolph] at 04:17 09 August 2014 ‘complete’ Arabic manuscripts before the beginning of the 18th century. Already these introductory remarks indicate an important aspect that has ruled the content of the Nights before and after Galland: beyond the fixed core corpus, the Nights is a work with a changing repertoire of tales, a true ‘shape-shifter’. Instead of containing a fixed set of narratives, it essentially offers a clearly defined narrative frame, in which Shahrazad tells the tales to King Shahriyar, that is able to integrate narratives of the most diverse origins. Consequently, over the centuries the work has integrated a large variety of nar- ratives including just about each and every genre, such as epics, tales of magic, religious legends, animal tales, and jokes and anecdotes. Most of the complete manuscripts of the Nights known today—manuscripts that actu- ally, as the original name suggests, fill a thousand and one nights of storytelling—were produced to satisfy the European demand in the 18th and 19th centuries.3 It is well known that the compilers of the manuscripts of the Nights even before that date exploited a wide range of sources to complete the fragmentary manuscripts they had at hand. Within the range of works with which previous research has dealt, we find early works such as the ‘mirror for princes’ al-Tibr al-masbūk fı̄ naṣı̄ḥat al-mulūk (‘Smelted Ore: On the Counsel of Kings’) compiled by the famous al-Ghazzālı̄ (died 505/1111),4 as well as later works such as 17th-century author al-Itlı̄dı̄’s Iʿlām al-nās fı̄mā waqaʿa li l- Barāmika maʿa Banı̄ ʿAbbās (‘Information of the People Concerning what Happened to the Barmakids with the Abbasids’).5 In practical terms, the compilers must have taken their material from works that were physically accessible to them. Considering the characteristics of manuscript tradition, according to which old manuscripts would fall out of use while new manuscripts would take their place, the compilers most probably had less direct access to the works of the classical era of Arabic literature than to contem- porary compilations. Besides quotations from older works, these contemporary works also contained new material that is not known from earlier sources, or is at least not pre- served today. Meanwhile, it is equally likely that in ideological terms the compilers felt that culture had moved on. They might have thought that going back to the old works would risk implying a disregard of cultural progress. After all, the more recent works available to the compilers had on the one hand grown out of the older ones, while on the other consciously adapting the traditional material for contemporary society.6 It is a particularly interesting work of 17th-century Arabic literature that I would like to discuss in the present essay, a work that, although long known, has never been studied in detail. This is the chronicle Kitāb laṭāʾif akhbār al-uwal (‘Subtle Stories from the Fore- fathers’) compiled by a certain Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Muʿṭı̄ al-Isḥāqı̄ (died 1623).7 The first western scholar to notice a corresponding tale between the Nights and Isḥāqı̄’s historical work was apparently Edward William Lane (1801–1876). Lane lived in Egypt when new ‘complete’ versions of the Nights were still being compiled. In his detailed footnote to The Story of Abu l-Hasan the Wag, or The Sleeper Awakened, published in 1839 in the second volume of his Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, Lane says that he ‘found the chief portion of this tale related as a historical anecdote’ in the work of Isḥāqı̄.8 This ‘chief portion’ tells the tale of a man who is made to believe that he actually is the caliph, and in the course of action the tale offers numerous opportunities for comic turns of event. The story of ‘The Sleeper Awakened’ is not contained in the Arabic stan- dard versions of the Nights, a fact that Lane was well aware of. Besides Galland’s adapted translation, Lane knew and translated the tale from Habicht’s Breslau edition (1824– 1843), in fact the only printed Arabic version of the Nights containing the tale. But because ‘it exists in one copy, and is one of the best tales in Galland’s version’, Lane 44 U. Marzolph Downloaded by [Ulrich Marzolph] at 04:17 09 August 2014 has ‘gladly given it a place in [his] collection’. In a recent discussion of the tale’s sources and analogues, I have come to the conclusion that Galland’s version is actually indebted to a 17th-century manuscript of the Nights compiled in Ottoman Turkish that already in his days was preserved in the Royal Library in Paris.9 But that is a different story to which I will refer later on. Relying on Lane and Habicht, both John Payne (1842–1917) and Richard Burton (1821–1890) also included uploads/Litterature/ marzolph-studioasd.pdf