One symptom of the neglect in Anglo-Zionist historiography of Arabic literature and culture—despite its role as the main heir to axial-age Mediterranean and Persian cultures and, as the western representative of the Afro-Asiatic merchant capitalist world system, key progenitor of “the West”—would be the neglect which the 1,001 Nights has suffered in literary scholarship. Everything I can find in English or Japanese is only interested in the impressions it left in the industrial-era European mind as a long-gone Other, but the fact is that we (finally) have a modern edition (by Muhsin Mahdi) and English translation (by Husain Haddawy) of the surviving (15th-c.) Arabic manuscript lineage which attests to the Nights as they were circulating before the rise of Europe—which modern economic history has shown to have occurred only after 1800. Nevertheless, I with my admittedly limited skills as a West-Asianist can find nary a comparative study of this text of the Nights in their prime with later developments and their European adaptations and distortions: only “post-colonial” (really covertly neo-colonial) navel-gazing exercises that reinscribe and eternalize the European gaze rather than casting it aside for the strange, two-hundred-year dream that it was, to look squarely at the genius of Arabic narrative and subjectivity in story that we see in the real roots and first rumblings of bourgeois revolution in West Eurasia.
","author_name":"Fergal Schmudlach"}