A Story to Pass the Waking Hours of the Night

Abstract

The Satanic Verses affair was, in its formal structure, like a ‘nested’ story in The 1001 Nights where the teller of the tale encounters a character who tells a tale in which another character tells a tale and so on and so on. Circles within circles, encounter upon encounter; so, in fact, the story of this affair does not begin with the stone Khomeini cast against Salman Rushdie’s fourth novel.

Night 1, ‘The Merchant and the jinni’, The 1001 Nights