Eastern Dreams (5 page)

More than simple reciters, many
rawi
were akin to theatrical performers, employing props or costumes to assist their recitations or accompanying themselves on musical instruments to create a mood and maintain their audience's attention. Alexander Russell, a British physician working in Ottoman Syria during the mid-eighteenth century, gives a vivid description of the working methods of these entertainers:

It is not merely a simple narrative; the story is animated by the manner, and action of the speaker. A variety of … story books … furnish material for the story teller, who by combining the incidents of different tales … gives them an air of novelty…. He recites walking to and fro, in the middle of the coffee room, stopping only now and then when the expression requires some emphatic attitude.

Frequently, Russell tells us, the storyteller will act like Scheherazade herself, when “
in the midst of some interesting adventure, when the expectation of the audience is raised to the highest pitch, he breaks abruptly, and makes his escape from the room,” leaving the tale unfinished and forcing listeners to return the next day to hear the conclusion or next instalment.

Operating first in marketplaces, where they competed for audience attention with conjurors, jugglers, acrobats and shadow-players, most
rawi
eventually moved into the new coffee houses that began appearing in the Muslim world during the sixteenth century. On special occasions such as festivals or family celebrations, storytellers might also be invited inside palaces or
private homes to ply their trade. But whatever the venue, for a few coins and the odd word of praise, the
rawi
enthralled listeners with all manner of stories, some taking many hours to relate. Although of low social status, over the centuries they nevertheless performed an invaluable service for the eastern community by providing not only entertainment but also moral lessons, social instruction and tutelage in Islamic beliefs for a mostly illiterate population.

As vital components of Muslim society, the
rawi
maintained their profession unchanged up to the twentieth century, and can still be found in a few select places, such as the famous Djemmaa al-Fna Square of Marrakech, Morocco, or parts of Iran. Today the linear progression from storyteller to modern Arab literati is direct and unbreakable, symbolized by an alliance of Arab-American writers that has assumed the title RAWI (for Radius of Arab American Writers Inc.). Contemporary eastern writers continue to employ concepts of storytelling in their work. In Naguib Mahfouz's
Arabian Nights and Days
, Scheherazade's stories are reconfigured into a narrative involving the havoc wrought on a town where
Arabian Nights
characters live and interact. In Tahar Ben Jelloun's
This Blinding Absence of Light
, political prisoners languishing in a Moroccan jail maintain their sanity by repeating film scripts or tales from the
Nights
to one another. In Salman Rushdie's children's classic
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
, the novel's crisis is prompted by the silencing of the protagonist's storytelling father, Rashid Khalifa, and a threat to the actual ocean of tales from which storytellers draw their inspiration.

By the ceaseless oral process, proto–
Arabian Nights
stories that proved interesting enough to be transmitted from place to place were subsequently picked up by the
rawi
, floating perpetually on a sea of tongues until sometime before the tenth century
CE
, when they began to be put down on paper and compiled.

Not all the tales found within the
Arabian Nights
arose from the oral tradition, and it is a mistake to believe that classical Muslim story collections are the direct result of listening to the
rawi
and more or less transcribing what was heard. Some narrative elements derive from older tales found in ancient Egypt or other pre-existing written compilations, or may have been taken from jokes or anecdotes uttered by witty courtiers and the companions of sultans and caliphs. These literary antecedents were then added or adapted to the early
Nights
as desired, while other tales, such as Sindbad's voyages, came much later, though they appeared in written form long before they were added to the body of the
Nights
.

It is also a mistake to think that
The Thousand and One Nights
formed a large share of the storyteller's repertoire.
Alf Laila wa Laila
tales were only part of the
rawi
's storehouse, and were by no means the most favoured. In places like Cairo, popular romantic and heroic epics—often a mixture of prose and poetry—were more commonly heard than stories from
Alf Laila wa Laila
. The
Nights
were known and loved, of course, but remained only a fragment of the endless streams of stories circulating among professional and amateur storytellers and their listeners in the classical Muslim world.

Even those tales set down directly from oral storytelling were often given a literary form by the scribes committing them to paper, with the conversion of recitation to the written word involving changes in both their shape and intent. For all these reasons, it seems best to describe the Arabic
Nights
as a hybrid book, blending oral stories with literary ones—both ancient and more recent—to form a complex, interlinked series of written tales. But such is the timeless appeal of the storyteller that even now, the spectre of the
rawi
hovers over the
Nights
like a protective sentinel, given symbolic form by the declaiming figure of Scheherazade.

No one knows the name of the first compiler of
Alf Laila wa Laila
tales, although some sources mistakenly identify him as the early tenth-century Abbasid bureaucrat and historian Muhammad al-Jahshiyari. It appears that al-Jahshiyari did begin to compile a work he envisioned as containing a full thousand stories assembled from various sources, and was able to collect 480 Nights before his death ended the project and the work was eventually lost. His Nights, however, look to have been separate, disconnected tales with no frame story to link them together—really, an anthology—and so the work cannot be considered a true
Alf Laila
compilation.

But it is known that by the latter part of the ninth century, a written prototype of the
Nights
was in circulation in the Middle East. Shortly after the Second World War, the University of Chicago scholar Nabia Abbott acquired from Egypt a fragment of handwritten paper consisting of two joined folios preserved by the desert's dry air. Written on both sides, this scrap, known as the “
Alf Laila
(
A Thousand Nights
) Fragment,” indicates how old written forms of the
Nights
truly are. Besides being the oldest surviving example of an
Arabian Nights
book in existence (it resides today in the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute Museum), this small piece—not quite the size of a foolscap sheet—is also, according to Abbott's research, the oldest surviving evidence of a paper book found outside China. Thanks to some marginal material written by an owner named Ahmed ibn Mahfuz (who probably used it as scrap paper), it is possible to date this fragment to October 879 CE, about the same time as the Arabs were conquering Sicily.

One page of the folio contains the title
A book of tales from a Thousand Nights / There is neither strength nor power except in God the Highest, the Mightiest
. There follows the traditional
bismillah
, or invocation of God's name (“In the name of Allah the Merciful, the Compassionate”) followed by the word for “Night,” then succeeded by a request from Dinarzade that Scheherazade tell her
a story, giving “
examples of the excellencies and shortcomings, the cunning and stupidity, the generosity and avarice, and the courage and cowardice that are in man.” Scheherazade obliges, beginning “
and Scheherazade related to her a tale of elegant beauty….” Five discontinuous lines follow before the leaf abruptly ends.

That's it: the sum total of the
Alf Laila
Fragment. No stories, no frame tale involving Scheherazade and the sultan—nothing beyond the title, invocation, Dinarzade's request and the beginning of Scheherazade's recitation. It is impossible to say how things proceed, what story or stories are told, how large the full manuscript was or what differences exist between this manuscript and later versions. Still, the precise dating of this artifact is of tremendous importance in establishing that a prototype of the
Arabian Nights
was in circulation as early as the late 800s, just two centuries after the establishment of the Muslim empire. It was probably in circulation even earlier, since we do not know how old the
Kitab Hadith Alf Laila
(“A Book of Tales from a Thousand Nights”) book was when it came to be used as scrap. By that time, it seems that versions of the earliest
Nights
' tales, as well as some semblance of Scheherazade's frame story, had become sufficiently popular to be thought worthy to be set down on paper.

Paper itself had only made its appearance in Islam a little more than a century earlier. As it is known today, paper is a Chinese invention dating from the time of the Han Dynasty. Fashioned by compressing wood and bamboo fibres together into thin flat sheets, Chinese paper was infinitely easier and cheaper to make in bulk than the expensive papyrus and parchment used in Persia, Egypt and Europe. Zealously guarded by the Chinese, papermaking techniques nevertheless began spreading throughout Asia between the third and sixth centuries, but it was not until the eighth-century Tang-era war with the Abbasids over control of Central Asia that paper made its way west.

Tradition holds that during this conflict, a Chinese caravan carrying several skilled papermakers was captured by Muslim warriors. Recognizing their importance, the soldiers immediately whisked these craftsmen away to Samarkand, where the caliphate compelled them to work at their art as well as impart the secrets of making paper. By 793, Haroun al-Rashid had established a state-run paper factory in Baghdad, where the Muslims substituted linen fibres for the coarse wood of the Chinese to create finer and more durable sheets. From Baghdad, paper production spread to Damascus, Cairo and Morocco before reaching Europe through Moorish Spain in the twelfth century.

Within a hundred years of learning its technology, the Abbasids followed their Chinese predecessors by turning the output of paper into an early mass-production enterprise. Because of paper's easy availability, a new class of “white collar” worker, more bureaucrat than scholar, began appearing in the caliphate. With the material now available to make copies of the
Koran
and to record everything from cargo manifests to government decrees, ever-more-voluminous writings appeared in the Abbasid dominion, writings that could be copied and made accessible to the farthest reaches of the empire and beyond.

At a time when the grand medieval libraries of Europe might boast a few dozen texts, their Muslim counterparts, particularly in the great municipal centres of Baghdad, Cairo and Spanish Cordoba, stored many thousands of volumes. So essential was the paper industry that around the time when the first
Nights
tales were recorded, an entire street in Baghdad was devoted to the sale of paper and books. It is no accident of history that when stories from
The Thousand and One Nights
first appeared in manuscript form, it was during the Abbasid caliphate, and probably in its paper-rich capital of Baghdad.

Part of the magical aura surrounding the
Arabian Nights
lies in its seemingly spontaneous appearance as a book. With no indication of the precise time its tales were first set down, the existence of the
Alf Laila
fragment is the sole tantalizing glimpse into the earliest history of the
Nights
in manuscript form. No reference to the work exists prior to this artifact, and we have little information concerning its progress to later versions. From the time of the ninth-century fragment until the early fifteenth century—some six hundred years—there are only four brief mentions of
The Thousand and One Nights
in extant writings.