Mongolia | 1001 Arabian Nights and Dolts

I have been inundated by a blizzard of email taking exception to the characterization of my readers as “dolts” in a Previous Post. I would have thought that anyone who read this would assume that everyone but themselves were dolts and get a certain satisfaction from this, but now it appears that some people actually believed that the word applied to themselves. Rest assured that it is in fact all the other readers who are dolts and not yourself.

So what, you may wonder, led me to use the word “dolt” in my post? I’ll tell you. Just recently I finished reading Husain Haddawy’s relatively new ((latest edition: May 12, 2008) translation of the 1001 Arabian Nights.


This translation, by the way, has only 271 of the Nights included. If you want the entire 1001 Nights just about your only option is the 16-volume translation by Richard Burton. The dead tree version of this 16-volume set is a collector’s item and will set you back some big bucks, even if you are lucky enough to find a set for sale. Amazingly, the Entire 16-Volume Set is now available in Kindle format from amazon.com for a trifling $4.79. Of course I have added a copy to my Digital Scriptorium.


This work may well represent the high water mark of the Victorian mania for footnoting. Burton simply cannot resist adding as footnotes lengthy exegeses on the most arcane subjects which come up in the text, with special emphasis on his bizarre sexual obsessions, an area in which the 1001 Nights offers plentiful inspiration. Burton had, of course, spent a good part of his life in India and the Middle East researching this topic, so he came well equipped with plentiful anecdotal information.

Actually there is even a newer edition of the 1001 Nights, this one a three-volume collector set, available only in England. It is not clear how many of the Nights are covered. I have not read any reviews or added it to the Scriptorium, so I will not comment further.

Anyhow, after reading Haddawy’s translation and a good chunk of Burton’s version, I naturally got curious about the background of the 1001 Nights. Who wrote it?—an author is never listed—when and where was it written? etc. Everyone has heard of the 1001 Nights, but admit it, how much do you really know about the book? To satisfy my curiosity and fill in these lacunae in my knowledge I added to the Scriptorium a book by Robert Irwin entitled The Arabian Nights: A Companion.

This book belongs to one of my favorite genres: books about books. It gives a detailed account of the milieu out of which the the 1001 Nights probably developed, who may have written it—no one person, no doubt—an exhaustive history of the various translations down through the ages, and much, much more. There is one chapter, “The Storyteller’s Craft,” which gives a history of professional storytellers from 12th century Cairo and Baghdad to seventeenth century Damascus. It was probably these guys who over the centuries put together the opus became known as the 1001 Nights. In the early days they plied their trade in streets or squares near mosques and markets, places with a lot of foot traffic, but starting in about the sixteenth-century, with the rise of the Ottoman Empire, coffee houses became popular in these lands and the storytellers moved inside. It is interesting to note that at first some strict interpreters of the Quran considered coffee an intoxicant and thus illicit under Islamic law. Coffee houses therefore tended to attract a louche clientele. I cannot help but noticing that even in Ulaan Baatar today habitual coffee drinkers tend to hover on the brink of moral turpitude, especially compared with those who prefer to drink tea, a more spiritually uplifting beverage. Anyhow, the patrons of Louch Coffee Houses provided a ready audience for the kind of tales which make up the 1001 Nights. I myself prefer to drink oolong tea, preferably Bao Zhong from Taiwan, while reading the book, and try to avoid coffee houses, louche or otherwise, whenever possible.

Bao Zhong is a lightly oxidized oolong tea with the qualities of both oolong and green tea. Because it is partially oxidized, Bao Zhong is classified as an oolong tea, but its oxidation period is less than typical high mountain oolongs of Taiwan. For this reason Baozhong is sometimes referred to as a green tea. True green teas, however, are completely un-oxidized. In any case, a perfect complement to 1001 Nights.

Irwin also relates that Richard Burton, translator of the 1001 Nights, encountered various storytellers in Tangiers in the 1880s. At this time and place we once again find them performing in the street. They could be recognized by the tom-tom drum and stout walking stick they carried, and they often appeared to be “disreputable-looking figures.” One witnessed by Burton “speaks slowly and with emphasis, varying the diction with breaks of animation, abundant action and the most comical grimaces; he advances, retires and wheels about, illustrating every point with pantomime; and his features, voice and gestures are so expressive that even Europeans who cannot understand a word of Arabic divine the meaning of his tale.”

A similar storyteller pops up in The Teachers of Gurdieff, by Rafael Lefort (almost certainly a pen name for Idries Shah who went on to make a name for himself as one of the most visible proponents of Sufism in the West).

The book, published in 1968, purports to be a search for Sufi teachers who claimed to have taught the great twentieth century magus George Gurdjieff. While in Istanbul Lefort met with the Sufi Pir Daud, who advised him, ““Go to Tabriz and find there Daggash Rustam, Master of the Drum. He may see you or he may not. If he does, you can hope to continue on in your search. If he does not—’ he spread his palms expressively.”

Lefort proceeded to Tabriz, in Iran, and finally tracked down the storyteller Daggash Rustam, who like Burton’s storyteller carried a drum and a staff:

Ten days I spent in searching until one day, as I sat in a chai khana, my attention was drawn to a tall figure, heavily bearded, dressed in a ragged patched robe, crossing the street. On reaching a small open place he produced a drum and started to beat it crying, ‘Harken ye all to Rustam,’
I jumped, split my tea and rushed over.
The dervish was seated on a stone and round him a crowd had gathered. He held up his stick for silence.
‘I will tell you a tale, though why I waste my time on dolts like you I don’t know,’ he began. An appreciative murmur showed that this was a known gambit.

So that is where I got the expression, “why I waste my time on dolts like you I don’t know,” which I used in the earlier post. Strangely enough, however, I have not heard any “appreciative murmurs.” Of course we live in a different time and place.

In any case, the book 1001 Arabian Nights has also inspired the 1001 Arabian Nights Restaurant in Beijing, for which I am eternally grateful, having spend many enjoyable nights there.