...201 Arabian Nights Universal Themes Images and Techniques Used Arabian Nights, also known as One Thousand and One Nights is a story which revolves around a Persian king who just married a new bride. However, he discovers that his wife was unfaithful and has her executed. As a result, all the women in the kingdom are declared unfaithful. Shahryar (the king) begins to marry a sequence of virgins from the kingdom and has them executed the next morning. In due course, the vizier, who is entitled with the responsibility of providing the virgins, can no longer find any more virgins in the kingdom other than his daughter Scheherazade. She offers herself to be a bride to the king despite objections from her father. On the night of their consummation Scheherazade starts to tell the king a story but does not get to finish it. The king is therefore forced to delay her execution in order to hear the conclusion. On the next night, she tells the king another story and this turns into a series of stories that go on for one thousand and one nights (Haddawy 16). Universal Theme Immortality The Arabian Nights comprises of a sequence of stories which do not have an ending. The passing on of the tales is universally seen as a means of preservation. Scheherazade used the narration of stories as a way to preserve her life she further interwove the endings of the stories with the beginnings of the new stories thus giving them a sense of infinity. She told the stories night after night and thus...
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...the local and global history(Colla, 2013). In regards to these tales in the context of the Arabian Peninsula’s history, I will study the stories themselves. Analysis of these stories will pull from the concept of Archetypes (Campbell, 2008; Jung, De Laszlo, & Hull, 1990), and Philology (Dobie, 2008). The stories in the Arabian Nights have interesting histories in themselves. I will track the evolution of these stories from oral traditions to their eventual translation and distribution across the world. Studying the Nights in a global context will require knowledge about translation (Dobie, 2008) and mass communication...
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...World Mythology March 5th, 2012 Arabian Nights Essay Fantasy our Daily Determination The art of storytelling is the oldest and most captivating art form man has ever produced. Each and every one of us has been lead on a path by a story so unique that each path can only be traveled once with no chance of return or pause along the way. The reason these stories create a one-time offer is due to the mysterious element of fantasy that no man can ever lack or cease to exist. Fantasy is a genre of fiction that commonly uses magic and other supernatural phenomena as a primary element of plot, theme, or setting. Though formal in definition the fantasy defined above is only the tip of the iceberg because fantasy can be created in one’s mind at a moments notice. Kieran Egan an education professor at Simon Fraser University states that, “fantasy is the most valuable attribute of the human mind; it enriches children’s spiritual development, and is the most important tool for orienting ourselves to reality”(3). This quote pinpoints why fantasy stories have been with us since the start of man and why books like “The Arabian Nights” are so popular thousands of years after there first dictations. Each story read from “Arabian Nights” has different fantasy elements in it, these elements captivate us and bring us inside the stories and are exactly what we connect to, not as a form of “escapism” but to help fuel our own determination to fulfilling our own fantasies. Many of these stories...
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...Tales from Arabian Nights The Arabian Nights tales started out from a king’s history. The king distrusted women and thought that all women are unfaithful and bitter, so the king marries a virgin and after one night has the woman executed. However, one of the virgins was bright enough that on the first day she started to tell a story, which will be the tales in the Arabian Nights, to the king. Instead of finishing the story, the virgin left it unfinished therefore the king postponed the execution to hear the ending of the story. The next night, the virgin finished the story, but she then started another one but also left it unfinished again. This lead the king to postpone the execution once again. This pattern went on for one thousand and one nights, and that is how the virgin was able to keep herself alive. The tales from Arabian Nights gives...
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...First, you have to know a few things about the Arabian Nights. They are not that Arabian and they were written for a courtly culture in the Abbasid Empire that was heavily Persianate. The Arabian Nights, called simply The Book of 1001 Nights in Arabic, are comprised of various stories taken from an international culture that developed in the Abbasid Caliphate around Baghdad in the 8th-10th century and the stories come from Indian, Persian, Greek, and Arab sources. One of the largest sources was, in fact, a Persian book called Hazar Afsad. It is not necessarily reflective of the broader culture. It reflects the culture of the court which was a mixture of Persian and Hellenistic influences but at a time when the ruling class who produced this...
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...The Power of Manipulation In Naguib Mahfouz’s Arabian Nights & Days he addresses the dark shadow of one’s self. In the novel, Mahfouz uses the influence of evil genies to show that a man can be manipulated into corruption. He expresses this through multiple characters that all have the same influence and the same outcome. The result is an exploration of the dark side of identity focusing on the corrupt nature of all mankind. This is shown through characters such as Sanaan al- Gamali, Gamasa al- Bulti and Fadil Sanaan. Sanaan al- Gamali’s will is manipulated into corruption by the power of an evil genie names QumQam. The genie told al-Gamali that he must kill Ali al- Salouli, who is the governor of the quarter, or be killed himself. Al-Gamali agrees out of fear not knowing what he is getting himself into. By agreeing to commit such a crime he reveals his dark side in which cannot be handled. “He went deeper and deeper into a state that became difficult to control” (Mahfouz 17). The mind state that he remains in is almost unrecognizable because it is the opposite of what Sanaan’s usual persona is. “His nature deteriorated as though he were being created anew in a form that was at variance with his old deep-rooted gentleness” (Mahfouz 15). Mahfouz uses the work “anew” to express the extent of the change in Sanaan’s life and “his old deep rooted gentleness” to explain his transformation from his normal self. The new Sanaan is portrayed as the dark and evil side and to what...
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...Life presents a lot of challenges. It presents a lot of hardship, but the people that are able to take those hardships are the ones that really do have a lot of success. We have read and analyze stories from the Ancient Arab World, which we made many connections to that deal with hardships. From the Collection of stories in “The Arabian Nights” we read “Story of King Shahryar and his Brother” and “The Tale of the Bull and the Ass.” In these explicit stories we meet two characters, King Shahryar and a Merchant. Within these two characters we distinguish similarities and differences when it comes to dealing with hardships. King Shahryar ruled his own kingdom with equity and fair dealing to his subjects, in extreme solace and enjoyment, that...
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...manufacturing industry within the region. The UAE and other countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) have a strong and unique culture that favors the appreciation of perfumery. Stemming from a tradition and culture dating back thousands of years, both men and women in the Gulf like to apply layer upon layer of fragrances which linger long after the wearer has moved on. Arabic perfumes are made from oud, a rare and hugely prized oil found in agar wood. The tree that produces oud goes back thousands of years in culture and tradition, and grows in some of the world’s most dense forests in India and Southeast Asia. Known not only for its distinctive scent, natural oud is also more expensive, weight for weight, than gold. The director of Swiss Arabian Perfumes in Sharjah, Adam Ali, United Arab Emirates, asserted that the highest-quality oud came from trees older than 100 years, but “that stock is completely gone.”1 Nonetheless, the popularity of oud-based perfumes continues to grow, and today, due to the shortage in...
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...A Comparison of the tale of “Aladdin and the Enchanted Lamp” and the Disney Movie Aladdin: A Cultural Study According to N. J. Dawood, the translator of The Thousand and One Nights, “Aladdin has been retold or presented to so many different generations all over the world that it can perhaps be rightly described as the most renowned story invented by man”. Interestingly enough, “Aladdin and the Enchanted Lamp” was not part of the original collection of stories that composed The Arabian Nights. No one knows exactly when a given story is originated, but it is obvious that some stories circulated orally for centuries before they actually were collected or written down. The story of Aladdin appeared for the first time in Antoine Galland’s (1646-1715) translation of the Thousand and One Nights, the first major European version. Before Galland, there was no known Arabic version of Aladdin and his lamp. The first Arabic version showed up after Galland’s version and very well could have been translations of Galland’s French version. One of the more recent and most popular versions of “Aladdin” was an animated feature produced in 1992 by Walt Disney Pictures. Aladdin made over $217 million in revenue in the United States, and over $504 million worldwide. Even though the American film and the medieval Arabian tale share common elements and are both plotted around a young impoverished boy named Aladdin, the moral lessons they offer differ in ways that can be described through the values...
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...Aladdin is one of the tales in the book One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. There are several moral lessons in the story. The main moral lesson on Aladdin is that its best to be yourself. Greatness and strength comes from within, not from without. Its not whats on the outside that' count; what is important is what's on the inside. The moral of the original Middle-Eastern tale 'Arabian Nights' is that greatness and strength comes from within, not from without. This is demonstrated by Aladdin's bravery and intelligence despite his humble upbringing. In Disney's animated musical version of the story, the writers updated this theme to a single phrase, calling Aladdin a 'diamond in the rough'. There are many differences between the movie and the original tale of Aladdin, because the filmmakers believed that the original had an inappropriate moral message. And I have to agree with this for at least two reasons. First, Aladdin never tells the princess who he really is; he becomes a prince thanks to the jinni, but he never considers telling his wife about who he was before that. The original story doesn’t even mention this. Lying and pretending to be someone else is, indeed, something that should not be promoted in a children’s movie.Then, in the original story I really couldn’t stand the princess, Badr al-Budur. She is naïve, has no personality and no opinion, she does what she is told to, and never asks questions. She is so easily tricked, that she almost gets Aladdin killed...
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...Unit 2 Assignment: Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves George Dekle Kaplan University HU300-10 Professor Laura King January 21, 2014 This is a tale of the archetypical(1) Heroine(2) which has been passed down through the Collective Consciousness(3). Born as a lowly slave her journey is one to surpass her meager beginnings. She is faced with a world in which she finds her worldly superiors mentally inferior to herself. By taking the initiative and doing things without first informing her master she is able to outwit everyone. In doing so she kills forty murderers. Eventually, her status is raised to that of a citizen and she is celebrated beyond normal humans (Janaro & Altshuler, 2012). Cassim and Ali Baba are two brothers. Cassim married a woman and received a large dowery and lived in wealth. Ali Baba was a poor woodcutter as he had to provide for his wife himself. Ali found a cave that thieves were storing gold in. Curiosity(4) got the best of him and he went inside. He was careful to only steal a small bag so that it would go unnoticed. Cassim found out and took a donkey trying to steal as much as possible. Because he was greedy(5) he was caught and murdered by the thieves. The body chopped up and hung as a warning. Ali being of a good nature made sure his brother got a decent burial(6). Morgiana was a slave girl who had belonged to Cassim. Ali knew her to be smart and asked for her help in keeping the details of...
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...Archeology says that humans have lived in the Arabian Peninsula as far back as 15,000 to 20,000 years ago when the land was still lush and full of vegetation and wild animals. As the ice cap melt it left the Arabian Peninsula as a dessert with the rivers dried up and no more wild animals it forced the people to move into the mountains valleys and oases. This is where they developed agriculture. This began in Mesopotamia and the Nile River Valley and spread across the Middle East. This development allowed for more permanent living and allowing for the formation of civilizations. As the Islamic empire expanded as far as Spain and parts of India and China, the Arabic language becomes the international language that allowed for exchange of ideas...
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...Executive Summary TUJAR Lounge & Restaurant is a XX seat fine-dining restaurant with a XX seat lounge. We focus on our American and European menu with a touch of Asian influence. We will be located in the booming, and rapidly expanding business area in the heart of Bahrain.' The outlook for the future of TUJAR is promising. Developers are recreating a multi million first-class business, residential and resort projects. It is estimated that thousands of squire meters will be allocated for commercial space, and many more for residential units with condo and townhouses ranging from 100,000 BD to-500,000 BD; rentals from 1000 BD-2,500 BD a month. The combination of these elements will provide the city with a year-round economy. The area is in need of a warm and friendly place with excellent food. A place where you always know you will get the best of everything. TUJAR Lounge & Restaurant will feature a cozy dining room and an elegant lounge, comfortable furnishings and decor with soothing warm tones. The lounge will have a comfy couches and antique love seats with a softly lit bar. It will be the perfect place to stop in for a bite to eat, for a drink or for a small business meeting. For extra comfort and to please a large group of people we will make up special hors d' oeuvre platters for customers. The menu will be inspired from different countries' specialties and appeal to a diverse clientele. You can go a little bit more International and choose a red curry chicken...
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...Facts and Statistics LOCATION: Saudi Arabia is a monarchy in southwestern Asia, and occupies most of the Arabian Peninsula. Saudi Arabia is bordered on the north by Jordan, Iraq, and Kuwait; on the east by the Persian Gulf and Qatar; on the southeast by the United Arab Emirates and Oman on the south by the Republic of Yemen; and on the west by the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba. The southeast and southern boundaries are not precisely defined. The Middle East, bordering Iraq 814 km, Jordan 744 km, Kuwait 222 km, Oman 676 km, Qatar 60 km, UAE 457 km, Yemen 1,458 km Capital: Riyadh Climate: harsh, dry desert with great temperature extremes Population: 25,795,938 including 5,576,076 non-nationals (July 2004 est.) Ethnic Make-up: Arab 90%, Afro-Asian 10% Religions: Muslim 100% Government: monarchy Language in Saudi Arabia Arabic is the official language of Saudi Arabia, but English is widely spoken. It is used in business and is a compulsory second language in schools. Among the non-Saudi population, many people speak Urdu, the official language of Pakistan, and other Asian languages such as Farsi and Turkish. Arabic is spoken by almost 200 million people in more than 22 countries. It is the language of the Qur'an, the Holy Book of Islam, and of Arab poetry and literature. While spoken Arabic varies from country to country, classical Arabic has remained unchanged for centuries. In Saudi, there are differences between the dialects spoken in urban areas and those spoken...
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...prophet Muhammad; also spelled Koran Sirah - biographies of Muhammad written in the century after his death Hadith - Collection of sayings attributed to Muhammad, along with anecdotes and stories about him. Quraysh - one of the most powerful groups in Arabia. Founder Muhammad is known as rasul Allah, or God's Messenger to the Arabs, and to all of humanity. He was born in Mecca ca. 570 C.E., and died in Medina in 632. Most of what we know about Muhammad comes from the Quran, but we also have biographies written in the century after his death (called the sirah) and the hadith. Some general histories contemporary with the sirah are also useful sources of information about Muhammad's life. The night Muhammad was called to become a prophet of Allah, known as the Night of Power, took place when Muhammad was around forty years old. The strange and terrifying vision shook Muhammad deeply, but Khadija advised him to be steady and trust the vision. Muhammad began preaching to the people of Mecca in 613. Muhammad gathered followers from a variety of segments of Meccan society, from both poor and weak clans, and wealthy ones. All seemed to be seeking something more fulfilling than the materialism offered by Meccan society. Muhammad and his followers critiqued the culture of competition and the high value placed on money and material goods, calling for...
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