The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia (review)

The tricentenary of Antoine Galland's 1704 translation of the Arabian Nights compilation into French has been widely celebrated in the Western Hemisphere through readings, symposia, exhibitions, and the media. Much more than one of such memorials, the Encyclopedia under review is a useful research tool of long-lasting significance. The encyclopedic genre has its roots in early-eighteenth-century Europe, where it was meant as an instrument to survey, summarize, and popularize knowledge of vast and ever-growing volumes whereby encyclopedic forms for storing and preserving knowledge had also been developed in the Arabian literature before. Both editors are leading scholars: Ulrich Marzolph is a professor of Islamic studies at the University of Göttingen, Germany, and one of the senior editors of the Enzyklopädie des Märchens; Richard van Leeuwen is an Arabist and assistant professor from the University of Amsterdam who previously issued the Dutch encyclopedia De wereld van Sjahrazad ("Shahrazâd's World," Amsterdam: Bulaaq, 1999) and translated the Nights into Dutch. Their new Encyclopedia is the outcome of a three-year project sponsored by the German Research Society, which has done well to invest in another long-term production such as this multidisciplinary reference book.

The Encyclopedia is arranged in two volumes. Volume 1 contains an introduction by Marzolph and fourteen introductory essays (1–61), each written by an internationally renowned specialist. Forming part 1 of the volume, this section treats issues such as the literary style of the Nights (Daniel Beaumont); the situation, motivation, and action of the stories (Aboubakr Chraïbi), their oral connections (Hasan El-Shamy); the combination of the prose narratives with poetry (Geert Jan van Gelder); the manuscript tradition (Heinz Grotzfeld); film adaptations (Robert Irwin), Orientalism (Rana Kabbani); the illustrations, which Kazue Kobayashi classifies into three categories; intertextual relations to the Arabic popular epics (Remke Kruk); gender issues of homosociality and heterosexuality (Fedwa Malti-Douglas); selected images of masculinity (Reinhard Schulze); the stereotyped roles of Jews within the stories (Joseph Sadan); social life and popular culture as expressed in the tales (Boaz Shoshan); and the relationship of the Nights to modern Arabic literature (Wiebke Walther). Each of these three- to six-page surveys contains references and useful suggestions for further reading. As for the issue of orality, El-Shamy discusses textual evidence from the tales and a number of references to folkloristic tale type classification. One would also have liked to know whether and how tales of the Nights are still orally performed in the coffeehouses and marketplaces and at recent international festivals. For instance, there is no reference to Marrakech's Djemâa el-Fna —performers who have become part of UNESCO's "Intangible Cultural Heritage" program and toured France, Belgium, and Germany starting in 2003. Considering such contemporary uses should not simply be left to journalists but should also be put on scholarly agendas. A most appealing element in the Encyclopedia are forty-nine—for the most part nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European—illustrations that appear interspersed within the two volumes. On their own, they deserve a historical analysis that could be made in terms of thematic iconography and Orientalist discourse. Intertextuality is referred to in regard to Arabic poems and epics, but one would also have liked to know more about connections to the larger corpus of Arabic folktales, admittedly a vast field to explore and one we get glimpses of from the classification work done by El-Shamy.

The bulk of volume 1 is made up of part 2, "The Phenomenon of the Arabian Nights" (63–464). Despite its modest title, this is a powerful section, as it provides surveys of 551 tales contained in various printed editions, manuscripts (Wortley-Montague, Reinhardt), and European editions, with Burton as the main reference and Mahdi and Mardrus as additional sources. Each of these tale entries, which are alphabetically arranged according to title...