A Motif Index of The Thousand and One Nights (review)

All scholars studying The Thousand and One Nights are at a certain point confronted with the question of how to define and demarcate their research material and how to accommodate their objectives to the chosen corpus. In the course of time, the material representing The Thousand and One Nights has become so vast and diffuse that it can hardly be approached as a coherent whole. Although philological research has been advancing, the philological status of several texts and the interrelationships among certain texts have not yet been clarified. Western interventions not only have contaminated the original corpus with apocryphal additions but also have transformed the tradition of The Thousand and One Nights by adding new layers of texts, translations, reworkings, and so forth. The Thousand and One Nights has turned from a literary work into a cultural phenomenon, whose manifestations tend to obscure its origins and to problematize the relationship of the components with the tradition as a whole. For some, The Thousand and One Nights is mostly a mystification; for others, it is the mystifications that make the work especially attractive as an object of research.

Another problem connected with research on The Thousand and One Nights is the ever-increasing quantity of the material. Both the Arabic tradition and the European tradition of Nights are contained in a large number of texts, some in manuscript form, others only remotely related to the "original" core. For researchers who are not focusing on The Thousand and One Nights tradition as a whole but instead on the influence of Nights on other texts, or on narratological aspects of specific texts or stories, it is almost impossible to find their way through the vast amount of texts to search for parallels and divergences. It is especially for this reason that we should praise the efforts of Professor Hasan El-Shamy to make the narrative material of The Thousand and One Nights accessible to a wide audience of scholars, most recently through A Motif Index of The Thousand and One Nights, published by Indiana University Press. The book is a continuation of El-Shamy's previous studies in the field of Arabic folklore, especially Types of the Folktale in the Arab World: A Demographically Oriented Tale-type Index (Indiana University Press, 2004) and Folk Traditions of the Arab World: A Guide to Motif Classification (Indiana University Press, 1995).

After the introductory section, El-Shamy's motif index offers an elaborate inventory of folklore motifs subdivided into thematic chapters, such as "Animals," "Tabu," "Marvels," "The Wise and the Foolish," based on the system developed in the earlier works supplementing the systems of Aarne and Thompson. References are made to Western texts such as the Burton translation, the survey of Chauvin, and the Arabian Nights Encyclopedia. The book further contains a table of titles of tales according to the Burton translation, an alphabetical index of motifs, a register of tale types, and a general index. This system assures the user of a very sophisticated access to the material of Nights, through a great number of motifs and entries in the various indexes.

Although El-Shamy's diligent and conscientious work should be praised in itself, some remarks can be made regarding his approach and, more particularly, regarding the definition of his source text. In his introduction, the author rightly argues that a motif index of The Thousand and One Nights should not be based on an English translation but on an Arabic text, since the vision of a translator and his choice of words may affect the categorization of specific motifs. He also discusses the problems involved in typifying the stories of The Thousand and One Nights as "folklore." There are several characteristics of the work that contradict this classification, such as—according to El-Shamy—the use of rhymed prose, the absence of "women-bound tales," and the "blatant eroticism" of some...