One Thousand and One Nights by Hanan Al-Shaykh

The more I read, the more I came to admire the flat, simple style I had so criticised in the past. I came to see that her weapon was art at its best, her endless invention of all of those magnificent stories. I read page after page, marvelling at Shahrazad's perseverance in remaining the king's prisoner in order to reveal to him the truth of her mind. I decided I must discover why, while most Arabs considered the framing story of Shahrazad to be a mere cliché, academics regarded it as work of genius and a cornerstone of Arabic literature. I wanted desperately to escape the world it evoked. Of course I didn't know then, and neither did my friend, that the reason her father didn't want any of the women of the house to read Alf Layla wa-Layla was because of its explicit sexuality.Īs the years passed, my obsession with Alf Layla wa-Layla faded.

I asked my friend if I might touch one, but she said that her father always locked the cabinet and kept the key in his pocket, because he said he feared that if anyone finished the stories they would drop dead. The volumes were leather-bound, their title engraved in gold.

I heard that a girl in my class had Alf Layla wa-Layla, and I hurried with her to peer at a few volumes in a glass cabinet, next to a carved elephant tusk. I don't recall exactly whether I was eight or 10 years old when I first heard the words Alf Layla wa-Layla, One Thousand and One Nights, but I do remember listening to a radio dramatisation and being utterly smitten: the clamour, hustle and bustle of the bazaars and souks, the horses' hooves, the creaking of a dungeon door, how the radio seemed to vibrate and shake at the footsteps of a demon, and the famous crow of the lonely rooster at the start of each episode, which would be answered by all the roosters in our neighbourhood.

One Thousand and One Nights by Hanan Al-Shaykh