Jinn (2014)

Thanks to Paul for passing this along. Jinn is an upcoming horror film to be released in April of 2014. Unlike other Jinn/Jann/Djinn/Genie related fare, this one seems to be adhering to an "authentic" portrayal of these disruptive spirits.

The Jinn are frequent characters in the Nights, though generally lumped together into a sort of mystical genie caricature. They are, however, different types and different personalities.

The film is reviewed here on Fangoria, the popular horror magazine that you all should subscribe to: http://www.fangoria.com/new/have-some-jinn-in-2014/

"The horrific side of Eastern mythological folklore is coming to the U.S., as the supernatural horror film JINN has set a release date.

JINN (no relation to Tobe Hooper’s forthcoming DJINN) will open courtesy of Exxodus Pictures and Freestyle Releasing April 4, 2014. Written and directed by Ajmal Zaheer Ahmad, the film stars Dominic Rains (pictured above), Serinda Swan, Ray Park, Faran Tahir and William Atherton; here’s the pitch: “In the beginning, three were created. Man made of clay. Angels made of light. And a third made of fire. For centuries, stories of angels and men have captured the imagination and been etched into history crossing all boundaries of culture, religion and time. These two races have dominated the landscape of modern mythology, shrouding the evidence that a third was ever created. This third race, born of smokeless fire, was named the jinn. Modern man has all but forgotten this third race ever existed. It is time for him to remember.”

The Sufis - Idries Shah

A mention of the Nights in mystical form in the book The Sufis by Idries Shah (Anchor Books 1971) -

He begins his book with mentions of Sufi poetry as being secretive states of literary mysticism and says:

"In its most advanced form the secret language uses Semitic consonantal roots to conceal and reveal meanings; and Western scholars seem unaware that even the popular Thousand and One Nights is Sufic in content, and that its Arabic title Alf layla wa layla is a code phrase indicating its main content and intention:  'Mother of Records'" (x).

Idries Shah was a popular "mystical" new age writer who penned scores of books throughout the mid to end of the 20th century.  His son Tahir Shah recently published his own book In Arabian Nights.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idries_Shah

Review of The Islamic Context of The Thousand and One Nights

The Journal of Folklore Research has a new book review up on Muhsin J. al-Musawi's 2009 book The Islamic Context of The Thousand and One Nights.

The review is vast and lengthy and is written by Hasan El-Shamy, Professor at Indiana University and author of the 2006 book A Motif Index of The Thousand and One Nights, a specialized academic resource of tale types found in the Nights.

I haven't read the entirety of al-Musawi's book but I have it at home from the library.  It seems to be one of the few lengthy treatments of the topic (Islam & the Nights) though it also suffers, I think, from some of the generalizations of most Nights scholarship (ie does not necessarily treat individual variants of the Nights as idiosyncratic pieces of a much larger and looser literature instead relying on the Nights in a very broad sense).

El-Shamy's review can be read in its entirety here:  http://www.indiana.edu/~jofr/review.php?id=975

Here is an excerpt:

"The chapters are logically arranged to present a sequence of historical and sociocultural developments as depicted in or inferred from the Nights as literature rather than folklore, written or oral. Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 7 address the Islamic Factor: in "Global Times" (25), as "the Unifying [...] Factor" (52), its role in "the Age of Muslim Empire and the Burgeoning of a Text" (106), and in "Scheherazade's Nonverbal Narratives in Religious Contexts" (250), respectively. In this context, "Global Times" signifies fraternity beyond ethnic and similar social distinctions (21). Meanwhile, chapter 5 discusses "Nonreligious Displacements in Popular Tradition," emphasizing the dichotomous patterning between the court and street or the rich and the poor (197), and between the secular and the religious (214, 231, cf. 224 where the fantastic partakes of the religious). Two chapters (4 and 6) are dedicated to the influence the population exerted on the formation of this narrative anthology; they bear the titles "the Role of the Public in The Thousand and One Nights," where the "readers" and their preferences are discussed (145), and "The Public Role in Islamic Narrative Theorizations" (228), respectively. Al-Musawi labels this cultural phenomenon associated with a readership the "urban mind," and points out that it distinguished Baghdad from the eighth to twelfth centuries C.E., and Mamluk Cairo later (6, 8, 22).

It is that "urban mind" and its desire to read 'asmâr (nightly entertainments) and hikâyât (tales) that motivated the movement among some elite to gather and re-write oral traditional folktales that came to be attributed to Sheherazade's oral tale-telling skills. Al-Musawi explains: "The effort to address a reading public is central to the [narrative] art, however, for it manifests both the damage done to the oral tradition... and the desire among some of the literati to dig into the marginalized culture or to refine it through acceptable embeddings and translated framing narratives" (230-231)."

The Arabian Nights in Historical Context

A new academic collection of essays on the Nights has been published by Oxford University Press.

It is quite expensive at about $100 but is also available via libraries. I've ordered a copy through my library's "Inter-library loan" system. If you aren't a student or university affiliated you can usually purchase a decently priced library membership at a local university which will typically allow you to access online academic databases and also let you borrow books through the host library and affiliated libraries.

Here is the link to the publisher's site and some information from the site about the book:


http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/LiteratureEnglish/WorldLiterature/Anthologies/?view=usa&ci=9780199554157

The Arabian Nights in Historical Context
Between East and West

Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum

ISBN13: 9780199554157
ISBN10: 0199554153
hardback, 300 pages Dec 2008, In Stock Price:$99.00 (06)

Description
Alf layla wa layla (known in English as A Thousand and One Nights or The Arabian Nights) changed the world on a scale unrivalled by any other literary text. Inspired by a fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript, the appearance of Antoine Galland's twelve-volume Mille et Une Nuit s in English translation (1704-1717), closely followed by the Grub Street English edition, drew the text into European circulation.

Over the following three hundred years, a widely heterogeneous series of editions, compilations, translations, and variations circled the globe to reveal the absorption of The Arabian Nights into English, Continental, and global literatures, and its transformative return to modern Arabic literature, where it now enjoys a degree of prominence that it had never attained during the classical period.

Beginning with a thorough introduction situating The Arabian Nights in its historical and cultural contexts-and offering a fresh examination of the text's multiple locations in the long history of modern Orientalism--this collection of essays by noted scholars from "East," "West," and in-between reassesses the influence of the Nights in Enlightenment and Romantic literature, as well as the text's vigorous afterlife in the contemporary Arabic novel.

Product Details
300 pages; 2 black-and-white halftones, musical samples;
ISBN13: 978-0-19-955415-7
ISBN10: 0-19-955415-3

Table of Contents
Introduction , Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum

1. Translation in the Contact Zone: Antoine Galland's Mille et une nuits: contes arabes , Madeleine Dobie

2. Cultivating the Garden: Antoine Galland's Arabian Nights in the Traditions of English Literature , Robert L. Mack

3. Playing the Second String: The Role of Dinarzade in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction , Ros Ballaster

4. Galland, Georgian Theater, and the Creation of Popular Orientalism , Bridget Orr

5. Christians in The Arabian Nights , Nabil Matar

6. White Women and Moorish Fancy in Eighteenth-Century Literature , Khalid Bekkaoui

7. William Beckford's Vathek and the Uses of Oriental Reenactment , Donna Landry

8. The peculiar character of the Arabian Tale: William Beckford and The Arabian Nights , James Watt

9. Coleridge and the Oriental Tale , Tim Fulford

10. The Adventure Chronotope and the Oriental Xenotrope: Galland, Sheridan, and Joyce Domesticate The Arabian Nights , Srinivas Aravamudan

11. Under the Spell of Magic: The Oriental Tale in Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade , Nasser Al-Taee

12. The Influence of The Arabian Nights on the Contemporary Arabic Novel , Maher Jarrar

Burton the Muslim

Burton says he is a Muslim here:

"Finally I went to Meccah not as a Christian, but as a Moslem."

In a letter to the editor called "Unexplored Syria." The Academy 2 Jun. 1873: 217.

1001 Nights = True Voice of Islam

A weird review of the new Penguin Nights (A faithful version of Islam! Which stories? The orgy in the garden? The wife who drugs her husband every night so she can go be a sex slave to a poor man in a trash heap? Genies in bottles?) - ???

"The Arabian Nights is that magical mirror that reflects Islam's genius, its vast cultural scale and its incalculable contribution to the arts and sciences. The tales celebrate life and the blessings it offers. Praising love, joy, courage, defiance, compassion, they negate the teachings of such death-worshippers as Khomeini, Al-Qaida, Taliban et al. For those wondering where the true voice of Islam is, be assured it is here in these 1,001 tales."

There are so many problems with the perception of the Nights I don't know where to begin. I suppose you can just slap whatever you believe onto the label "1001 Nights" and then go with it, nobody will prove you different because they can't prove anything about the Nights!

Here's the whole review from the Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2008/nov/27/arabian-nights-islam

The magical mirror of The Arabian Nights

Love, compassion, joy, defiance: the true voice of Islam sings out from Shahrazad's 1,001 tales

Posted by
Moris Farhi Thursday November 27 2008 11.14 GMT

(Is the reviewer Moris Farhi the author? Even stranger!? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moris_Farhi)



A detail from a Victorian illustration of The Arabian Nights. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

A new translation of The Arabian Nights, published this week, offers a definitive version, shorn of the confusing conflations which have dogged it since its transcription from oral tradition in ninth century Abbasid Baghdad.

Born and bred in Turkey, I grew up with these stories. Their tales of people facing adversity, particularly those on the margins of society, laced my mother's milk, elevated to heroes those who never doubted that somewhere, some sage, would discover the magical vessel that would transform life into Seventh Heaven.

Now, eagerly reacquainting myself with these fables, I feel compelled to speed up my journey as a writer. Benign exile can spawn complacency. Old age, with eyes at the back of its head in trepidation for children's future, has no time for philosophical questioning of the meanings of existence. Those meanings, whether rooted in necessity or chance or God, have long been hijacked by the overlords of politics, war, religion and economics. It is their armoured policies that must be defied, even if such defiance perishes in the wilderness.

Although The Arabian Nights became widely known in Europe after the Crusades and inspired countless artists and writers (from Chaucer to Dickens to Rushdie in Britain), Sir Richard Burton's translation in the late-19th century brought it a new level of popularity on these shores, not least because it was purported to expose the vagaries of the Muslim mentality and Arab way of life. Perhaps these injudicious perceptions, callusing over time, even laid the foundations for present-day Islamophobia.

The Arabian Nights is that magical mirror that reflects Islam's genius, its vast cultural scale and its incalculable contribution to the arts and sciences. The tales celebrate life and the blessings it offers. Praising love, joy, courage, defiance, compassion, they negate the teachings of such death-worshippers as Khomeini, Al-Qaida, Taliban et al. For those wondering where the true voice of Islam is, be assured it is here in these 1,001 tales.

But what of the brutality they contain? What about their obsession with death?

True, Death, "the destroyer of delights", is forever on the prowl. Indeed, even before Shahrazad, the teller of these tales, utters a word, it has claimed 3,000 virgins - all deflowered and executed, at the rate of one each day, by Sultan Shahryar, as punishment on womanhood for his wife's infidelity. However, when Shahrazad volunteers to be Shahryar's next victim, her intention is to defy Death, not to surrender to it meekly. And as she secures her daily reprieve with a fresh story, she denounces summary brutality and exalts the sanctity of life. Eluding Death is The Arabian Nights' raison-d'être.

These tales, however, present a disturbing aspect to the modern reader. Women in The Arabian Nights are often conniving and voraciously adulterous. We might wish to imagine Shahrazad's misrepresentation of women as facetious, but it is impossible to escape the fact that the original bards were invariably men.

Convinced that gender defamation conflicts with the tales' ethos, I can only interpret the misogyny as a projection from our patriarchal societies. "There's not a moment in the male mind that's not tumescent with sex", says an Arab adage. The creators of The Arabian Nights assumed that female minds possess the same trait, an assumption shared with the creators and enforcers of those implacable monotheisms Judaism, Christianity and Islam in their struggle to unsex women and commandeer their rights.

Though more than a millennium separates Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon from Abbasid Bagdad, they offer a germane spirit. When the Babylonians started building the Tower of Babel, an edifice designed to reach the Heavens and glorify humankind, God perceived this as a challenge to His authority; consequently, He decided to confuse them by making them speak in different tongues. Seen in the Bible as a calamity, this, in fact, proved a blessing. The different tongues unleashed our diversity - a diversity so strikingly reflected in The Arabian Nights - and delivered us from a monolithic culture which, unable to have intercourse with other cultures, would have otherwise condemned us to onanistic existence. This diversity of society also gave voice and stature to women, the perennial non-persons of our religions, just as The Arabian Nights gives voice to Shahrazad.

Oh, for more Towers of Babel bubbling with unbound women! That will stop the overlords from warring!

another Nights phd

From a beliefnet blog comes this news, sounds like an interesting project:

http://blog.beliefnet.com/textmessages/2008/10/dr-olivers-islam.html

Dr. Oliver's Islam
Saturday October 18, 2008
Categories: Culture

Congratulations to my dear friend and BU colleague Martyn Oliver, who passed his dissertation defense yesterday in Boston. (He's also getting hitched in 3 weeks--not a bad autumn.) I've had the pleasure of reading bits of his dissertation, which is about the literary construction of Islam. Martyn Dr. Oliver tells the story of how the story collection "1001 Nights"--an Arabic text, mind you, not an Islamic one--shaped Western conceptions of the religion of Islam. See: "Aladdin"--the most popular stories we tell about a culture, in some ways, are that culture.


This is, of course, true for Christian culture as well. I'm not sure there is a case quite like "1001 Nights" and its radical displacement of Islam from outside Islam, but certainly there are many texts, extra-biblical texts, which have shaped the cultural imagination about what Christianity is. Dante's Inferno. Milton's Paradise Lost. Cecil B. DeMille's "The Ten Commandments." (Seriously. And no, it has almost nothing to do with Judaism, despite its source.) Any others? Which extra-biblical stories do you think have had a shaping effect on what people believe about Christianity?

Just finished reading The Matter of Araby in Medieval England by Dorothee Metlizki. In it she ties together several medieval stories written in Latin or English by Englishmen to several tales found in the 1001 Nights.

The book, (wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Matter_of_Araby_in_Medieval_England), does a good job at tackling some of the issues of story transmission but is also somewhat delinquent because the "truth" of the history of these stories is far too complex to figure out just by saying both of them have flying horses or something.