In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Reading for Fun in Eighteenth-Century AleppoThe Hanna Dyâb Tales of Galland's Mille et une nuits1
  • Ruth B. Bottigheimer (bio)

Introduction

The Arabian Nights entered European consciousness in the opening years of the eighteenth century, when Antoine Galland (1646–1715) translated, edited, and greatly expanded the stories from a fifteenth-century Arabic-language manuscript titled Alf Layla wa Layla ("Thousand Nights and One Nights").2 Into this story collection Galland inserted non-Nights material, such as stories from Sindbad the Sailor, which had also long been popular in the Levant, as well as novellistic material about whose history and use we still know very little. His last insertions were based on several stories told to him in 1709 by a young Syrian named Hanna Dyâb (c1689–after 1764).3 The expanded collection was published in twelve volumes as Mille et une nuits: Contes arabes ("Thousand and One Nights: Arab Tales," 1704–1717). The Dyâb tales constituted nearly a third of the entire collection and contributed what would become the collection's best-known tales.

For centuries before Galland, stories from Alf Layla wa Layla had entertained readers and listeners in the Near East. The collection could be bought, borrowed, or rented, and extant copies show penned-in readership marks from Muslim, Christian and Jewish readers, as was also the case for collections such as Sindbad the Sailor. I will make the case here that the Dyâb tales reflect a familiarity with tale collections such as Sindbad the Sailor, Mi'at Layla wa Layla ("Hundred and One Nights"), Alf Layla wa Layla ("Thousand and One Nights"), and Hikayat ("Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange").

Arabists have long understood that the written antecedents of Galland's Aleppo manuscript were rich, varied, and urban:4 Hameed Hawwas has demonstrated that the Nights tales, including those in the Aleppo manuscript used by Galland, actively valorize a written tradition, which Aboubakr [End Page 133] Chraïbi has further specified as mirroring merchant tastes.5 That reasoning leads to the conclusion that eighteenth-century Aleppan city dwellers like Hanna Dyâb who were familiar with Nights tales had either gained this knowledge directly from a written source (by having read the tales) or indirectly (from having heard them read aloud).6 Muhsin Mahdi, producer of the critical edition of Alf Layla wa Layla, repeatedly rejects the notion that its tales circulated in oral form,7 a mistaken assumption that underlies persistent claims that "Aladdin," "Ali Baba" and several other tales that Hanna Dyâb added to Galland's Mille et une nuits have oral folkloric origins.

However, Dyâb did pass these tales on to Galland primarily in oral form. Hanna Dyâb told Galland a few stories on March 25, 1709, but Galland did not record these.8 Nor did Galland record Hanna's telling of "Ala Eddin," which took two days to tell and which Dyâb later wrote down in Arabic. Galland did, however, record the next fifteen Dyâb tales, most of them at the time of their telling.9 Because these stories were absent from earlier Arabic storytelling, Mia Gerhardt designated them "orphan tales," as they have been called ever since.10 The remaining Dyâb stories—"The Enchanted Horse," stories about small-scale merchants, and the night-wandering Harun al-Rashid—are the subject of this article, whose thesis is that these Dyâb tales reflect and refract his readings of tale collections and chronicles available in eighteenth-century Aleppo.

Aural Story Acquisition in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Levant

The written word was valorized in Thousand and One Nights itself, and in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries public and private storyreaders in the Levant commonly read its stories aloud from (generally manuscript) books.11 Listeners thus acquired those same stories aurally. It is worth considering, if only in passing, what kinds of venues Hanna Dyâb might have been exposed to, even though this takes us into speculative territory.

Storytelling in Aleppo, as described by Alexander Russell for the first half of the eighteenth century, was an "entertainment" for "the vulgar."12 Stories13 were available along...

pdf

Share