At least, that’s how Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten opens this review of (an abridged version) of One Thousand And One Nights:
One of many different covers of various editions of this book, but almost certainly not the edition reviewed here.
One Thousand And One Nights is a book about love, wonder, magic, and morality. About genies, ape-people, and rhinoceroses who run around with elephants impaled on their horns. About how to use indexical uncertainty to hack the simulation running the universe to return the outcome you want. But most of all, it’s a book about how your wife is cheating on you with a black man.
Nights stretches from Morocco to China, across at least four centuries — and throughout that whole panoply of times and places, your wife is always cheating on you with a black man (if you’re black, don’t worry; she is cheating on you with a different black man). It’s a weird constant. Maybe it’s the author’s fetish. I realize that Nights includes folktales written over centuries by dozens of different people — from legends passed along in caravanserais, to stories getting collected and written down, to manuscripts brought to Europe, to Richard Burton writing the classic English translation, to the abridged and updated version of Burton I read. But somewhere in that process, probably multiple places, someone had a fetish about their wife cheating on them with a black man, and boy did they insert it into the story.
Our tale begins in Samarkand. One day the king, Shah Zaman, comes home unexpectedly and sees his wife cheating on him with a black man. He kills her in a rage, then falls sick with grief, and is taken to the palace of his brother, King Shahryar of Persia. While there, he sees King Shahryar’s wife cheat on him with a black man. He tells King Shahryar, who kills his wife in a rage too, then also falls sick with grief. The two grief-stricken kings decide to wander the world, expecting that maybe this will help in some way.
They come across a mighty king of the genies, and the brothers hide lest he see them and kill them. The genie falls asleep, and the genie’s wife finds them and demands they have sex with her or she’ll kill them. They have sex, and all the while, the genie’s wife is boasting about how even the king of the genies can’t prevent his wife from cheating. The two kings find this experience salutary — apparently the problem isn’t specific to them, it’s just an issue with the female sex in general. So they go back to the palace and everyone lives happily ever … no, actually, King Shahryar vows that he will bed a new woman every night, then kill her the following morning, thus ensuring nobody can ever cheat on him again.
So for however many years, King Shahryar beds a new woman every night, then kills her in the morning. After a while the kingdom begins to run dangerously low on women. The vizier frets over this, and his daughter Scheherazade hears him fretting. She develops a plan, and volunteers to be the king’s victim that night. After having sex, she tells the king a story. At the end, she says it’s too bad she’s going to die the next morning, because she knows other stories which are even better. Perhaps if the king spared her life for one night she could tell some of those too.
(I’d always heard that she leaves him at a cliff-hanger and makes him spare her to find out how it ends, which I think makes a better story, but this isn’t how the real Arabian Nights works).
Scheherazade’s stories are set in an idealized Middle East. The sultans are always wise and just, the princes are always strong and handsome, and almost a full half of viziers are non-evil. Named characters are always so beautiful and skilled and virtuous that it sometimes gets used it as a plot device — a character is separated from his family member or lover, so he wanders into a caravanserai and asks for news of someone who is excessively beautiful and skilled and virtuous. “Oh yes,” says one of the merchants, “I talked to a traveler from Cairo who said he encountered the most beautiful and skilled and virtuous person he’d ever seen in a garden there, he couldn’t shut up about them for days” — and now you know your long-lost brother must be in Cairo. In one case, a woman went searching for her long-lost son, tasted some pomegranate jam in Damascus, and immediately (and correctly!) concluded that only her son could make pomegranate jam that good. She demanded to know where the merchant had gotten the jam, and the trail led to a happy reunion.
The most common jobs in Idealized Middle East are sultan, merchant, poor-but-pious tailor, fisherman, merchant, evil vizier, sorcerer, merchant, thief, person who gets hired to assist a sorcerer because they have the exact right astrological chart to perform some otherwise-impossible ritual, and merchant. Of these, merchant is number one. Whatever else you’re doing — sailing, stealing, using your perfect astrological chart to enter a giant glowing door in the desert mysteriously invisible to everyone else — you’re probably also dealing goods on the side. The only exceptions are Moroccans (who are all sorcerers), Zoroastrians (who are all demonic cannibals), and Jews (who are all super-double merchants scamming everyone else). Also maybe the 5 – 10% of the Middle Eastern population who witches have turned into animals at any given time.
