Arabian Lore

At the root of Arabian lore lies the desert belief of the pre-Islamic peninsula: the invisible jinn share the world with humankind, holding the ruins, dry wells and wastelands, dictating verses to poets, while travellers on night roads watch for the shapeshifting, man-eating ghul. With the rise of Islam this hidden race was written into scripture — the Quran declares the jinn created from smokeless fire, rational beings alongside angels and humans, and devotes a chapter to their conversion. The prophet-king Solomon pressed them into service, building sanctuaries and diving for pearls, and sealed the rebels into brass bottles sunk in the sea, stocking the later stories with inexhaustible props.

These scattered beliefs pooled at last in the Thousand and One Nights. Its frame descends from the Persian Hazar Afsan, 'A Thousand Tales', noted by al-Mas'udi and Ibn al-Nadim in the tenth century, then thickened over centuries of retelling in Baghdad and Cairo, until Scheherazade's nightly stories, each suspended at daybreak, grew into a labyrinth wide enough for fishermen, porters, merchants and jinn. From 1704 Antoine Galland's French translation swept Europe; the most famous pieces of all — Aladdin, Ali Baba — are 'orphan tales' with no Arabic source text, told to Galland in Paris by the Syrian traveller Hanna Diyab.

The temper of the tradition is mercantile. Its leading hero is Sinbad, a merchant of Baghdad, and even its wonders carry price tags — a flying carpet bought for forty purses of gold, diamonds fished from their valley with slabs of thrown meat. Yet its cosmos is vast: beyond the emerald ring of Mount Qaf lie the kingdoms of the jinn, and the earth rides on the backs of an angel, a bull and the cosmic fish Bahamut.