Scheherazade And Shahryar

The outer tale that changes the rest

The story of Scheherazade and Shahryar is the frame of the Thousand And One Nights. Having been betrayed by his wife, Persian king Shahryar has taken to marrying and then killing women each day so he can never be betrayed again. To stop the killing Scheherazade, daughter of the king’s vizier, volunteers to spend the night with the king with the plan of telling him stories, but stopping before the end so he has to keep her alive if he wants to hear the climax. After 1,001 nights Scheherazade runs out of tales, but the king has fallen in love with her and makes her his queen.

“Within the story of The Three Apples this young woman doesn’t get any justice, but there’s this other young woman who we’re rooting for, which is Scheherazade, and the message we want for her is not kill the person even if you think you’ve been betrayed,” explains Horta. It’s true that when you consider Scheherazade’s plight and her attempt to convince the king that killing women for perceived slights is wrong, telling tales of forgiveness and mercy seems much more reasonable than telling tales of righteous justice.

“It’s almost like the writer is telling you that power, even when it’s trying to be just, you see something arbitrary about it or you see injustice,” suggests Horta. “A lot of the stories have this sort of weird tension between a frame where a Harun-like figure is supposed to represent the centre of Baghdad, at the central palace, goes out into the city in disguise, rights the wrongs Batman-style, but the individual stories that are imbedded within these frames are often stories of transgression, of social upheaval, of sexual transgression. There’s a contradiction.”

It’s a contradiction that begins to make more sense when seen through the prism of Scheherazade attempting to teach Shahryar about forgiveness and temperance, but it takes on yet another meaning when you examine why that framing might be useful to disguise other messages in the text. “These stories are often about merchants and in a way they are rubbing against mores or societal structures that don’t really give them much political power and yet they are the engine that drives the economy. In a way it makes sense that there is a tension between the sultan or the Shahryar figure or the king and the kinds of characters that we root for.” In this respect the Arabian Nights is quite anti-establishment and antiauthoritarian. Its stories frequently mock the rich and powerful and elevate the lowest in society to new heights, whether through good fortune or hard work.

Even the later tales added by Hanna Diab and Antoine Galland take on new colours when considered with the framing of Scheherazade. “Once you recontextualise these stories as told by Scheherazade, that changes those stories,” Horta agrees. “So, in a way the original themes will end up winning out if you are printing these stories and editing them in such a way that they are told by Scheherazade.”

It actually reveals just how deft Diab and Galland were in how they brought their additions to the collection. As the more modern entries, it’s no surprise they resonate with contemporary audiences, but there’s something else there too. “Maybe there’s something to the fact that Ali Baba and Aladdin were basically co-created by a Syrian and a Frenchman, and it was a Syrian who had travelled to Paris and a Frenchman who had travelled to Istanbul. Maybe that’s a part of their universality,” concludes Horta. “Those stories are not entirely Western or Middle Eastern. There’s a kind of synchronism or mixture that helps different kinds of people see themselves in these stories.”