Anthony Sattin

A treasure-trove of grisly Arab tales may appeal more to an Isis fighter than your average British reader

In a review of the medieval Arab Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange, one of the greatest marvels is that the manuscript survived at all

The marvellous tales of the title are not just confined to the contents of this book, for the travels and travails of the lone manuscript in which they were inscribed are also something of a wonder, and deserve to be told.

The original collection appears to have been composed in the 10th century, and it is easy to imagine some of these stories doing the rounds of Cairo, Baghdad and Damascus while the crusaders were making trouble in the neighbourhood. This particular version of the stories was written down in the 14th century, probably in Cairo, for that is where the manuscript can be traced. In 1517 when the Renaissance was in full flood, the Ottoman Sultan Selim — ‘the Grim’ — watched the crucifixion of the last of the Mamluk rulers of Egypt at one of Cairo’s great gates. Among the treasures that Selim took home to Istanbul was the only manuscript of this cycle of stories. The manuscript was housed in the library of Hagia Sophia, and was then forgotten.

In 1933 a German scholar, Hellmut Ritter, came across the tales and translated them into German, and an Arabic edition appeared in 1956. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that the British Arabist Robert Irwin heard about the stories and recognised their immense significance; for these tales, which pre-date The Thousand and One Nights, are the earliest known stories in Arabic literature. Irwin has likened this to discovering a lost Shakespeare play or more Canterbury Tales. At his suggestion, they have finally been translated into English and the tales they tell are even more fabulous and unlikely than that of the story of the lost manuscript.

The Thousand and One Nights is a cycle of individual stories held together by a framing narrative.

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