Magic Tales in the Muslim Middle Ages

Abstract

In contrast to the two previous chapters, only two medieval manuscript texts inform the greater part of this chapter.¹ One, Tales of the Marvellous (Al-hikayat al-’ajiba) contains 18 stories of its original 42; the other, Alf Layla wa-Layla (Thousand and One Nights), consists of the frametale, five narrative cycles, three novellas and the opening pages of a fourth from the earliest substantially surviving manuscript of the Thousand and One Nights, or Arabian Nights, as it is popularly known. It might be objected that the narratives in these two collections are not “tales” per se. That objection is valid for Tales of the Marvellous, some of whose stories are longer than the half hour or so that I accord a “tale’s” telling, but in Alf Layla wa-Layla, Dinarzad routinely denotes each of Shahrazad’s partial tellings of a lengthy narrative as “what has been said,” the Arabic phrase rendered in English as “story” or “tale.” (See “terminology” in Chapter 1, p. 4.) In this light, it is justifiable to redefine a lengthy narrative like “The Two Viziers” as a composite that consists of a series of brief tellings that cumulatively comprise the narrative as a whole.