Conference: The Syrian-French Connection: Antoine Galland’s and Hanna Diyab’s Arabian Nights Sources

Here's a call for papers for this upcoming conference in Copenhagen, if you are interested in attending contact the organizers below, I'm sure they will try and fit you in even though the deadline has passed. Unfortunately my funds as a grad student are limited otherwise I'd be very excited to try to present something.

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Call for Papers / Appel à communication


Copenhagen 2012: May 31 – June 2

International Conference
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Organization : University of Copenhagen, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies
Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA, Paris)
Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO, Paris)
Agence Nationale de la Recherche, MSFIMA project
Centre de Recherche Moyen-Orient et Méditerranée (CERMOM, EA 4091– INALCO)
with the support of The Danish Research Council for the Humanities (FKK)

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The Syrian-French Connection: Antoine Galland’s and Hanna Diyab’s Arabian Nights
Sources, Transmissions and Influences of the First Occidental Corpus of the
Nights


What are the Arabian Nights today? There are several possible answers to this
question. There is no doubt that this piece of literature is the outcome of
medieval Islamic civilization, the richest and most influential in the literary
sphere, in cinema and the arts. It is also in the field of the imaginary a
symbol at an international level. It is perhaps first of all a fruitful
cooperation between several languages, several cultures and several geographic
areas encompassing the Occident as well as the Orient…
The idea of this colloquium is to take as a point of departure the creation that
involved several cultures and to follow how the result was transformed and in
various ways had its impact in several fields of the arts. In the 8th century,
when the book was adapted from middle Persian into Arabic, the result was a new
work that involved both cultures, Persian and Arabic. The focus of the
colloquium is another transformation, when, many centuries later, Arabic and
European cultures interacted in a highly significant manner, i.e. at the
beginning of the 18th century, when a manuscript of the Arabian Nights was
brought from Aleppo to Paris, and a dozen new tales were told by a learned
Syrian, Hanna Diyab, to a French oriental scholar, Antoine Galland, who chose
eight of them and added them to his translation of the Nights. The manuscript
from Aleppo is one of the oldest and most important of the Nights. It was edited
in 1984 (Mahdi, Leiden). The eight new tales have been called the ‘orphan tales’
(Gerhardt, 1963), since they were not included in any of the manuscript versions
of the Nights - a somewhat curious denomination, since there were actually two
fathers, Hanna Diyab, who knew the stories by heart and in his own manner told
them to Galland, who then created his own French adaptations. The volumes
published by Galland thus include tales from the Nights as well as new tales.
These volumes turned out to be a major cultural and literary event that would
have a profound impact on European literature at the time and lasting effects
all the way into contemporary culture. Some of the eight new tales have had a
particularly remarkable fate, Ali Baba has, e.g., after several dozens of
cinematic adaptations (25 versions in Urdu between 1930 and 1980, just to quote
one example), also recently been turned into a movie (Pierre Aknine, 2007). A
similar success does obviously raise a number of questions. Yet Ali Baba is not
the only French-Syrian tale that has been remarkably successful. Aladdin has
similarly sparked a number of adaptations, of particular importance is the
Danish case, where Oehlenschlaeger’s drama-version, Aladdin and the Magic Lamp
(1805), not only is a major classic, the Aladdin-character has moreover been a
point of reference all the way through the 19th century for numerous literary
texts as well as important cultural controversies. Another example: one of the
outstanding works of silent cinema, The Thief of Bagdad (1926), is also based on
one of the Diyab-Galland-tales, i.e. Prince Ahmed, but also on the story about
Aladdin. All of this invites us to ask two essential questions:
1) What was the role of the Syrian community in Paris at the beginning of the
18th century in the transfer of culture from the Orient to the Occident? What
did the orally transferred tales and the manuscripts of the Nights that were
brought from Aleppo to Paris (in particular the so called Galland-manuscript -
number 3609-3611 at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France) represent?
2) What are the characteristic features of the new tales that were brought to
Antoine Galland by Hanna Diyab? What is their ‘history’, their narrative
organization, their function? What was the cultural influence of the ‘mixed’ or
’hybrid’ tales, like Aladdin or Ali Baba? What is in general the afterlife of
this new material in literature, cinema, and the arts? How can we grasp the
reasons for the immense success of these tales?


This colloquium will also contribute to the preparation of the exhibition on the
Arabian Nights that will take place at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris in
November 2012, some of the contributions will be published in the exhibition
catalogue.



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Participation : Those who wish to participate are kindly requested to send an
abstract of no more than 500 words or one A4 page (double-spaced) to Peter
Madsen (pmadsen@hum.ku.dk ) and Aboubakr Chraïbi (aboubakr.chraibi@inalco.fr )
before 2011 December 15.




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Appel à communication


Copenhague 31 mai – 2 juin 2012

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Organisation : University of Copenhagen, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies
Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA, Paris)
Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO, Paris)
Agence Nationale de la Recherche, projet MSFIMA
Centre de Recherche Moyen-Orient et Méditerranée (CERMOM, EA 4091– INALCO)
avec le soutien du Danish Research Council for the Humanities (FKK)

Colloque international

La composante franco-syrienne : Les Mille et une nuits d’Antoine Galland et de
Hanna Diyab.
Sources, transmissions et influences du premier corpus occidental des Nuits


Qu’est-ce que les Mille et une nuits aujourd’hui ? Plusieurs réponses sont
possibles. C’est sans doute l’ouvrage de l’islam médiéval, comme civilisation,
le plus riche et le plus influent sur la littérature, le cinéma et les arts.
C’est aussi un symbole, dans l’imaginaire, à l’échelle internationale. C’est
peut-être surtout l’histoire d’une coopération réussie entre plusieurs langues,
plusieurs cultures et plusieurs espaces géographiques, qui englobent Orient et
Occident …

L’objectif de ce colloque est précisément de prendre comme point de départ la
perspective d’une création commune, et de continuer ensuite vers les
transformations successives de l’ouvrage, jusqu’aux modalités de sa diffusion et
de son influence sur les différents arts. Au VIIIe siècle, lorsque le livre a
été adapté du moyen persan en arabe, il en a résulté une création nouvelle,
partagée par les deux cultures, arabe et persane. Pour nous, il s’agit de nous
situer au moment d’un autre passage, lorsque, bien plus tard, les cultures arabe
et européenne vont jouer ensemble un rôle significatif, c’est-à-dire au début du
XVIIIe siècle, avec le transfert d’un manuscrit des Mille et une nuits d’Alep à
Paris, et la transmission d’une douzaine de contes nouveaux par un lettré
syrien, Hanna Diyab, à un orientaliste français, Antoine Galland, qui en
choisira huit et les ajoutera à sa traduction des Mille et une nuits. Le
manuscrit importé d’Alep est l’un des plus anciens et des plus importants des
Nuits. Il a été édité en 1984 (Mahdi, Leyde). Et ces huit contes nouveaux ont
souvent été appelés orphan stories (Gerhardt, 1963), car ils ne se trouvaient
naturellement dans aucune version manuscrite des Nuits, ce qui est en soi assez
plaisant, lorsqu’on sait qu’ils avaient en réalité non pas un mais deux pères :
Hanna Diyab qui les connaissait par cœur et les a racontés à sa manière à
Galland, et celui-ci qui les a adaptés en français. Au total, la traduction de
Galland, qui mêle donc contes des Nuits et contes nouveaux, représente un
événement majeur qui va affecter profondément la littérature européenne de
l’époque et dont les effets se poursuivront jusqu’à aujourd’hui. Parmi les huit
contes ajoutés, certains ont eu en effet un destin particulièrement remarquable.
Par exemple, Ali Baba, après avoir été adapté au cinéma des dizaines de fois (25
versions différentes tournées par exemple en ourdou entre 1930 et 1980), a
encore fait l’objet récemment d’un nouveau film (Pierre Aknine, 2007). Un tel
succès suscite bien entendu de nombreuses questions. Mais Ali Baba n’est pas le
seul conte franco-syrien à être devenu aussi célèbre, Aladdin est une création
du même genre, en particulier au Danemark où la pièce d’Oehlenschlaeger Aladdin
ou la lampe merveilleuse (1805) est un grand classique et où ce personnage a été
tout au long du 19e s. une référence récurrente dans de nombreux textes
littéraires et de nombreux débats savants. L'une des œuvres majeures du cinéma
muet, Le voleur de Bagdad (1926), est basée sur Le prince Ahmed et la Fée Péri
Banou (autre conte de Galland-Diyab), mais aussi sur Aladdin. En somme, ces
observations induisent deux questions essentielles :

1 – Quel était le rôle de la communauté syrienne présente à Paris au début du
XVIIIe siècle dans le passage du savoir d’Orient en Occident ? Que
représentaient alors les contes oraux et les manuscrits des Mille et une nuits
transférés d’Alep à Paris (en particulier le manuscrit de la BnF n° 3609-3611
dit de Galland) ?
2 – Comment peut-on identifier ces contes nouveaux rapportés par Hanna Diyab à
Antoine Galland ? Quelle est leur « histoire », leur composition, leur
fonction ? Comment ces contes « mixtes » ou « hybrides », comme Aladdin et Ali
Baba, ont-ils influencé d’autres ouvrages ? Qu’elle est plus généralement la
postérité dans la littérature, le cinéma et les arts de cette matière nouvelle ?
Comment doit-on comprendre son immense succès ?

Ce colloque servira notamment à préparer l'exposition Mille et une nuits qui
aura lieu à l'Institut du Monde Arabe en novembre 2012 à Paris et certaines
communications seront intégrées au catalogue de l'exposition.

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Participation : Les personnes désireuses de participer sont priées d'envoyer le
titre de leur communication, accompagné d'un abstract (maximum 500 mots ou une
feuille A 4, interligne double), à Aboubakr Chraïbi (aboubakr.chraibi@inalco.fr
) et à Peter Madsen (pmadsen@hum.ku.dk ) avant le 15 décembre 2011.

1001 Nights in Granada

I posted awhile back about the Nights conference that was (then) going to be held in Granada Spain.  I hear it was a great success.  Many thanks to Nathalie for passing along this video picture montage with some great music:


Congreso de Bagdad a Granada by 3alyiah

You can also see it at her blog:  http://deunaorillaaotra.blogspot.com/

De Bagdad à Grenade, Miroirs des Mille et Une Nuits - 13-16 avril 2011 - Grenade, Espagne

De Bagdad à Grenade, Miroirs des Mille et Une Nuits - 13-16 avril 2011 - Grenade, Espagne

This is an upcoming conference in Granada, Spain with lots of interesting sounding panels and papers.  It is organized by Aboubakr Chraïbi, INALCO, Paris and Nathalie Bléser, U. de Grenade.

What a nice place for a Nights conference!

Most of the papers are in French, though a few are in English and Arabic.

You can find the whole program (mostly in French) here:  http://www.inalco.fr/ina_gabarit_article.php3?id_rubrique=2640&id_article=4879&id_secteur=1

I've also uploaded it to scribd here:

Programme Colloque GRENADE

 

Call for Papers - MLA 2012

Call for Papers at the 2012 MLA Convention in Seattle

Manuscripts & Sources of The 1001 Nights

Unconfirmed special session proposal on the sources or manuscripts of The 1001 Nights. Papers examining, in detail, one specific version of the Nights will be especially considered.

Abstracts by 11 March 2011; Michael Lundell (lundell@gmail.com).

Please pass along to anyone who might be interested!

Great World Texts in Wisconsin - The Arabian Nights

I posted a bit before about this great yearlong teaching program that the Center for the Humanites at the University of Wisconsin is having on the Nights.

They are conducting a "1 book" teaching program throughout the state in both high schools and colleges focusing on the Nights that culminates with a final conference in which the participants share their experiences teaching the Nights.

They have recently updated their website with all kinds of great things like teaching ideas, an extensive sample curriculum and several Internet resources (including, and it's an honor, this humble blog!).

Check it out!:  http://humanities.wisc.edu/programs/great-texts/arabian-nights/About.html

The Arabian Nights in Wisconsin

There is this literary project I recently became aware of called "Great World Texts in Wisconsin" and next (academic - 2010-11) year's work is our own Arabian Nights.

It sounds like a really promising literary project which is based out of the Center for the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Each year they pick a text and offer stipends to Wisconsin high school teachers who all agree to teach and focus on that text statewide in their classes at the same time during the school year.

Here is their website: http://www.humanities.wisc.edu/programs/great-texts/about.html

From the website: "The mission of the Great World Texts in Wisconsin program is to encourage more high school and university students to read the classic world texts of the humanities and to connect and engage UW faculty and high-school teachers across the state in this project. High school and college classes will participate in these projects throughout the year. Each program culminates in a student conference in the spring."

and also: "The Arabian Nights in Wisconsin: The Center for the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison invites interested schools and teachers from across Wisconsin to join us in our year-long partnership program, The Arabian Nights in Wisconsin. Teachers and teams will be selected to participate in the sixth of our series of successful state-wide projects. The project aims to bring this classic text into high school classrooms throughout Wisconsin. Each team will receive a financial award, teaching support and materials, access to university resources, and opportunities to participate in two teacher colloquia, and a student conference. Program details are listed below, and information is available at www.humanities.wisc.edu."

Sounds like a very interesting project and I'll be eager to know how it turns out and how the final student conference/presentations go.

Upcoming 1001 Nights Panel - MESA 2010 San Diego

picture:  Scheherazade Telling Tales by Kay Nielsen (early 20th century)

The 1001 Nights Panel

MESA (Middle East Studies Association) 2010

The following is information on a panel I put together for the upcoming (November) MESA conference here in San Diego. I’ll be the chair of the panel. The abstracts for the papers being presented are listed below with their presenters.

Anyone interested in attending the conference and the panel needs to register and you do not have to become a member of MESA but the conference is less expensive if you do (http://www.mesa.arizona.edu/).

The panel will be on the first day of the conference, Session I, Thursday, 11/18/10 05:00pm.

Session info: http://mymesa.arizona.edu/meeting_program_session.php?sid=49a29cf88d4ddf3287dd9483cb9d5a28

Papers (abstracts are copyright their respective authors):

Martyn Oliver, “Shifting Identities of Islam and 1001 Nights”

Since its introduction to Europe via Antoine Galland's translation in 1704, the 1001 Nights have been a locus for both the construction of and argument about the identity of Islam. The text's composite and suspect creation is, of course, a crucial element in understanding the codification of Islam as an object of Western interest. However, largely dismissed and unexplored is the role of the Nights as a primary source text for the founders of the contemporary academic study of Islam. While derided by some as simple--and therefore ignorable--folktales, scholars from Duncan Black Macdonald to Muhsin Mahdi have held up the Nights as an exemplar for the manners and customs of Muslims and Islam. But "manners and customs" echoes and mimics the colonizing language used by Galland, Lane, and Burton when advertising their translations. We are left, then, with an unusual agreement about the role of the Nights as a representation of Islamic identity, but one that violates our sense of post-colonial politics. This paper will address the contentious role of the Nights in the evolving dispute over who and what speaks for Islam.

Enass Khansa – “Articulations of Communal Identity in The 1001 Nights (Alf Layla W Layla) And Prophetic Hadith”

This short paper wishes to place the sacred text of Prophetic Hadith as used by famous authorities in Islamic jurisprudence and popular piety next to stories from Alf Layla wa Layla, to study areas of intersection between the two bodies of literature. Through specific focus on the textual identity in both, the paper re-contextualizes Alf Layla within the larger projects sketched by Islamic traditions. This will come as an attempt to denaturalize and bring under scrutiny the process through which the scripture and its interpretation acquire 'timelessness,' and instead will be studied as a discursive practice whose politics are formed through complex intersections with the communities, their beliefs and common practices- all processes articulated in Alf Layla. Both Hadith and Alf Layla will be studied within an understanding that they have constantly shared, exchanged and negotiated themes, techniques, communal beliefs and practices prevalent within the culture that produced both.


Elizabeth Holt – “Staging Narrative Genealogy: Reading Season of Migration to the North through 1001 Nights”

Tayib Salih's Season of Migration to the North [Mawsim al-hijra ila al-shamal] stands as a staple of the comparative and world literature canon today, taught frequently in a recent translated edition and the subject of commentary by countless critics. It perhaps rivals A Thousand and One Nights in recent decades as the representative Arabic narrative in today's 'world republic of letters,' to borrow Pascale Casanova's formulation. My paper uncovers how Season of Migration to the North comments on its own incorporation into international syllabi and scholarly discourses by reading the embedded narrative frames of Salih's novel against and through similar narrative precursors in A Thousand and One Nights. As the story of Mustafa Sa'eed dead ends in an empty tome, as closed doors reveal dark chambers full of untold secrets, as wives die or are killed, as stories emerge from stories until we are left without closure and perhaps drowning in the waters of the Nile, my paper situates the story of the story of Mustafa Sa'eed as a narrative contest over the rights and implications of appropriation and revenge. Building upon the work of Nights critics such as Rana Kabbani and Muhsin al-Musawi, in the paper I chart the history of the translation and proliferation of A Thousand and One Nights, and place that history alongside Salih's Season of Migration to the North. What emerges is a macabre recasting of A Thousand and One Nights, that infamous collection of nocturnal tales, as it lends Tayeb Salih's seminal novel both the stuff of Orientalist fantasy and its own history of migrations to the North and back.


Elise Franssen – “The ZER Manuscripts of the Arabian Nights”

In the end of the nineteenth century, the French orientalist Herman Zotenberg defined the 'Egyptian Recension' of the text of the "Arabian Nights"; this group of manuscripts is now known as ZER (for 'Zotenberg's Egyptian Recension'). This classification is based on the the tales, their succession, and the chronological and geographical origin of the manuscripts.
This recension of the text is actually the best known version of the "Nights", since most of the printed editions of the "Thousand and One Nights" are based on a manuscript being part of this group. Thus, this text seems to be well known but amazingly its manuscripts are not. No critical edition or deep study of any them exists. Furthermore, some of the ZER manuscripts actually present similar codicological features, such as their distribution in four volumes, or even the page setting and, sometimes, the handwriting.

A precise codicological study of the ZER manuscripts permits determining if this group is as homogeneous as it appears on first sight or if, on the contrary, if it can be divided into other subgroups. It gives information about the birth context of the group; where were the manuscripts copied? And for whom? Do they all derive from a single copy, the model being respected as far as in the physical aspect of the book? These are some of the questions I will try to answer. The collected codicological information will be compared to the conclusions of the narratological and philological study of each manuscript's text.


Gretchen A. Head – “The Reception of "The Nights" in 19th Century America”

The stories of The Thousand and One Nights have had a strong presence in American culture for over two centuries. The first American edition was published in 1794, and in the 19th century, 140 of the 238 different English editions published were printed in the United States; publishing houses in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, and Baltimore issued dozens of different versions for a growing American reading public. Given the wide dissemination of The Nights, two questions should be asked. First, who was reading these stories and how were they interpreted and/or manipulated? And, how have The Nights contributed to the shaping of American perceptions of the Middle East? This paper will address these questions in the context of 19th century America.


- Hope to see a lot of people there!

- Michael

MLA Call for Papers - Influence of the 1001 Nights

I'm looking to fill one or two spots on a panel having to do with the 1001 Nights for the upcoming MLA conference in Los Angeles in January 2011.

You have to be an MLA member by April 7.

Email me abstracts at my email address in my profile here.

I'm looking for papers under the topic "The Influence of the 1001 Nights" (which is a bit broad but specific enough I think for a viable panel topic). The panel is not approved yet and I need to submit everything fairly soon.

Please email me if you'd like to participate, hopefully by a week from today so I can get in the submission. Feel free to spread the word!

Thanks!

ulysses and the 1001 nights

I'm presenting a sort of preliminary paper at the upcoming Joyce Conference at UC Irvine and the topic is the relationship between James Joyce's Ulysses and the 1001 Nights.

I say preliminary because thankfully that is the format of the conference as everyone will be presenting a 5 page argument abbreviated paper instead of a fully developed one and thankfully because my argument isn't as developed as I intend it to be.

What I'm suggesting in this paper is that previous scholarship on both the Nights side and the Joyce side fail to fully develop which specific version of the Nights Joyce used for inclusion in Ulysses. Aida Yared has an article which convincingly argues that Joyce had not read any version in particular before Finnegans Wake and that Joyce uses extensively from Burton's specific version in the Wake.

The primary function of the Nights in Ulysses seems to be as part of the English/Irish pantomime and not of any textual version.

Once you begin looking at the specific version of the Nights Joyce uses you can begin to uncover the ways in which he uses the Nights in Ulysses.

In any case, I think most scholarship on Joyce and the Nights apart from Yared's article just mentions the 1001 Nights in a general sense and that they influenced Joyce but not to what extent nor which specific versions of the Nights and in what ways.

For whatever that's worth it's sort of the direction this paper is heading. It'll be my first conference paper too.

- M

nights conference at nyuad

The Abu Dhabi campus of New York University is currently hosting a conference on the 1001 Nights with several well known Middle Eastern writers and a number of scholars and papers on the topic.

I pasted an article excerpt below from The National, an Abu Dhabi based newspaper - to view the entirety click link - http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091214/ART/712139988/1007.

And here is the conference brochure:

Arabian Nights conference nyuad



Nights to remember

Ed Lake

* Last Updated: December 13. 2009 8:13PM UAE / December 13. 2009 4:13PM GMT

“I feel, personally,” says the scholar and novelist Marina Warner carefully, “that it’s in some sense sort of prophetic. Prophetic beyond just the reach of fiction. It really did envisage some aspects of the modern world.”

The “it” in question is The Thousand and One Nights, the ancient and anonymous story-cycle also known as the Arabian Nights, which introduced the world to Aladdin and Ali Baba (not that either of them were originally part of the sequence – but that’s another story).

Warner, the nearest thing Britain has to a celebrity mythographer, a reputation established over dozens of books and cemented last year with a CBE, is in Abu Dhabi this week for a conference to discuss how these medieval Persian and Arabic fables have shaped the modern world.

And, true to the impish spirit of the tales themselves, she has some provocative ideas.

“I think the present financial crisis is rather interestingly depicted in an enchanted form,” she says dryly, “with money coming out of nowhere and also vanishing into nowhere... The virtuality of contemporary systems certainly seems to me to have found a way of being told in the Arabian Nights.”

That kind of satirical swipe would fit neatly in a world where the tyrannical King Shahryar condemns all women for faithlessness and the story-teller Scheherazade must buy back her life at the cost of one fanciful cliff-hanger a night.

“That’s a kind of allegory of general abuses of power,” says Warner, “so there’s an exemplary side to the book. It is sort of philosophical in that sense.” And as far as that fairy gold goes, perhaps cautionary for us as well. Warner chuckles. “Unconsciously – it doesn’t have to be conscious.”

The strange thing about Nights’ impact, at least as Warner tells it, is just how unconscious we now seem to be of it. “How many European fairy tales have people flying in them?” Warner asks. “They’re all post-Nights... It’s not very common to fly around before that. Cinderella doesn’t fly, she gets into a magic coach.”

Now, of course, characters take to the air throughout western fantasy entertainment. As Warner says: “The cinema just took to that, because you can do it ... It’s an absolute commonplace of films that are targeted for the family entertainment audience.” And the silver screen isn’t the only place the Nights cast their shadow.

The three-day public conference at NYU Abu Dhabi’s new Downtown Campus this week will include papers on the Arabian Nights on stage, in film and in music.

It traces their influence on Voltaire, Samuel Johnson, Laurence Sterne and Walt Disney. Writers including Elias Khoury, Gamal el-Ghitani and Githa Hariharan, the filmmaker Nacer Khemir and the theatre director Tim Supple will be on hand to talk about how the stories are reflected in their work.

The Nights are everywhere, and all the harder to detect because of their ubiquity. “It becomes so natural and so accepted that it’s really almost become invisible,” Warner says.

It is not only in the West that the books have managed to inveigle themselves, either. In the late 19th-century there was an Arabian Nights craze in Japan. “They did a marvelous knight’s move,” says Warner. “They went through Middle Eastern orientalism to create their own Japanese orientalism. Just an anecdote, but apparently every wedding in Japan has to have a picture of a camel in the background, even though the camel is unknown in Japan.”

Goodness, I reply, I’d never heard that before. Warner seems doubtful for a moment. “I don’t know if everybody does,” she says. “It might be beyond the reach of some purses.”

Warner’s own area of expertise is magical tales, and it’s as a repository of magical tropes and atmospheres that she seems to find the book most interesting. What, I ask her, do the Nights give us that can’t be found in European traditions – the legends of King Arthur, say?

“People keep asking me what the differences are,” she says with a sigh. “One of the biggest differences is that the Arthurian romance takes place sort of in the countryside. Forests, lakes – rather obviously that geography doesn’t materialise in the Arabian Nights very much.”

Instead the Arabian Nights, for all its enchanted oases and fables about animals, is fundamentally about the city. “It’s not pastoral at all,” Warner says. “The real flavour of the Nights is an urban one.

“And it’s more modern ... It’s about consumerism, markets, trading, objects, manufactures, souks, vessels. It’s not about swords and knights. It’s sort of bourgeois and mercantile. And that’s a different character.” She laughs. “When an enchanted palace appears in an Arabian Night, it’s sort of full of goods. It’s like an emporium!”

Emporium or not, the book itself is certainly a treasure trove, though what it actually contains is harder to determine than you might think.

The earliest fragment of manuscript was found in Syria and dates from around 800 AD. The largest, and the one which ultimately made its way to Europe, was made 500 years later and contained around 300 stories. That’s the one the French Arabist Antoine Galland found in the early 18th century; he put out his own translation in French, and anonymous Grub Street hacks followed it in 1706 with a much-abridged first English translation. It was an instant hit.

“It had an absolutely amazing effect on writing,” Warner says. “Once you start looking at it, you can’t believe it. So many people suddenly realise there’s a way of writing things they wanted to write ... There was a huge a number of forms and devices found in the Arabian Nights that freed the tongues of people.”

Further important translations followed – a prudish one from Edward Lane that left out all the naughty bits, and a lubricious one from Sir Richard Burton that multiplied them. That kind of editorial meddling seems to have typified the way the Nights were treated, even before they made their way into English.

“The general view I think now is, let’s treat this as a collective work,” says Warner. “It in a sense is a woven tapestry of different voices, different hands, over time.

“[Jorge Luis] Borges wrote a marvelous essay called The Translators of the Nights in which he makes this point, that this is a book that grows, this is like a garden. You don’t want to take the garden back to the day it was planted; it would look like very little then.”

For one thing, it wouldn’t include Aladdin: though apparently of Middle Eastern origin, the tale of his magic lamp, not to mention that of Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves and the seven voyages of Sinbad the Sailor, were all European interpolations, included to bump up the numbers.

Such is the variety of the tales that do belong to the Nights, however, that odd men out like these would be difficult to spot.

Scheherezade’s stories include prototypes of the murder mystery and the sci-fi adventure. There are interplanetary voyages, under-sea worlds and a surprising number of robots. Coincidence reigns and the laws of time and space are put aside.

Indeed it was just this sort of anarchic fancifulness that made the Arabian Nights so appealing to the great 18th-century European satirists. As Warner explains, the likes of Voltaire and Jonathan Swift realised “if they made them fantastic, if they made them preposterous, if they put in this kind of humour, this wit and lightness and romance, and mixed it all together with terror and magic, it freed people to write. And of course it also eluded the censors ...” Well, for a while.

Nevertheless, the likes of Gulliver’s Travels and Candide, were funhouse mirrors held up to European society, their bulges and hollows modelled on the Middle Eastern tales.

“There’s a paradox,” says Warner, “because in a sense there’s a mockery of the forms of the Nights. There’s a mockery in Voltaire of the preposterousness and the coincidences, and the wife who dies several times and keeps recovering and being rediscovered, all these sorts of devices and untoward events. But at the same time they needed it.” The more outrageous Voltaire made his tales, the better he could hide his serious purpose.

And do we need the Arabian Nights today? Its influence rises and falls with the generations. As Warner says: “It’s a pulse, the use of the Nights. At the moment it isn’t a particular influence. But it has been in the past.”

She recalls the most recent peak. “The Sixties and Seventies, my youth, when I of course wore kaftans and so did my boyfriend. But that isn’t so salient now.”

Still, if the Arabian Nights teach anything, it’s that there is always another lease of life to be found in its stories.

The Arabian Nights conference runs at NYU Abu Dhabi’s Downtown Campus from tomorrow until Thursday. RSVP nyuad@nyu.edu.