Contents
Introduction by Alastair Reid
The Divine Comedy
Nightmares
The Thousand and One Nights
Buddhism
Poetry
The Kabbalah            
Blindness

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CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

To Read or Not to Read:

The Thousand and One Nights

I read my first tales from the Thousand and One Nights when I was seven. I had just finished my first year of primary school, and my brother and I had gone to spend the summer in Geneva, Switzerland, where my parents had moved after my father took a job there. Among the books my aunt had given us on leaving Istanbul, to help us improve our reading over the summer, was a selection of stories from the Thousand and One Nights. It was a beautifully bound volume, printed on high- quality paper, and I remember reading it four or five times over the course of the summer. When it was very hot, I would go to my room for a rest after lunch; stretching out on my bed, I would read the same stories over and over. Our apartment was one street away from the shores of Lake Geneva, and as a light breeze wafted in through the open window and the strains of the beggar's accordion drifted up from the empty lot behind our house, I would drift off to lose myself in the land of Aladdin's Lamp and Ali Baba's Forty Thieves.
    What was the name of the country I visited? My first explorations told me it was alien and faraway, more primitive than our world but part of an enchanted realm. You could walk down any street in Istanbul and meet people with the same names as the heroes, and perhaps that made me feel a little closer to them, but I saw nothing of my world in their stories; perhaps life was like this in the most remote villages of Anatolia but not in modem Istanbul. So the first time I read the Thousand and One Nights, I read it as a Western child would, amazed at the marvels of the East. 1 was not to know that its stories had long ago filtered into our culture from India, Arabia, and Iran; or that Istanbul, the city of my birth, was in many ways a living testament to the tradition« from which these magnificent stories arose; or that their conventions – the lies, tricks, and deceptions, the lovers and betrayers, the disguises, twists, and surprises-were deeply woven into my native city's tangled and mysterious soul. It was only later that I discovered-from other books-that the first stories I read from the Thousand and One Nights had not been culled from the ancient manuscripts that Antoine Galland, the French transla- tor, and the tales' first anthologizer, claimed to have acquired in Syria. Galland did not take Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves or Aladdin's Magic Lamp from a book, he heard them from a Christian Arab named Hanna Diyab and only wrote them down much later, when he was putting together his anthology.
    This brings us to the real subject: The Thousand and One Nights is a marvel of Eastern literature. But because we live in a culture that has severed its links with its own cultural heritage and forgotten what it owes to India and Iran, surrendering instead to the jolts of Western literature, it came back to us via Europe. Though it was published in many Western languages-sometimes translated by the finest minds of the age and sometimes by the strangest, most deranged, and most pedantic-it is Antoine Galland's work that was the most celebrated. At the same time, the anthology that Galland began to publish in 1704 is the most influential, most widely read, and most enduring. One could go so far as to say it was the first time this endless chain of tales had appeared as a finite entity, and the edition was itself responsible for the worldwide fame these stories achieved. The anthology exerted a rich and powerful influence on European writing for the better part of a century. The winds of the Thousand and One Nights rustle through the pages of Stendhal, Coleridge, De Quincey, and Poe. But if we read the anthology from cover to cover, we can also see how that influence is bounded. It is preoccupied mostly with what we might call the "mystical East"-the stories are replete with miracles, strange and supernatural occurrences, and scenes of terror-but there is more to the Thousand and One Nights than that.
    I could see this more clearly when I returned to the Thousand and One Nights in my twenties. The translation I read then was by Raif Karadag, who reintroduced the book to the Turkish public in the 1950s. Of course-like most readers-I didn't read it from cover to cover, preferring to wander from story to story as my curiosity took me. On second reading, the book troubled and provoked me. Even as I raced from page to page, gripped by suspense I resented and sometimes truly hated what I was reading. That said, I never felt I was reading out of a sense of duty, as we sometimes do when reading classics; I read with great interest, while hating the fact that I was interested.
    Thirty years later, I think I know what it is that was bothering me so much: In most of the stories, men and women are engaged in a perpetual war of deception. I was unnerved by their never-ending round of games, tricks, betrayals, and provocations. In the world of the Thousand and One Nights, no woman can ever be trusted. You can't believe a thing women say; they do nothing but trick men with their little games and ruses. It begins on the first page, as Sheherazade keeps a loveless man from killing her by entrancing him with stories. If this pattern is repeated through the book, it can only reflect how deeply and fundamentally men feared women in the culture that produced it. This is quite consistent with the fact that the weapon women use most successfully is their sexual charm. In this sense, the Thousand and One Nights is a powerful expression of the most potent fear gripping men of its era: that women might abandon them, cuckold them, and condemn them to solitude. The story that provokes this fear most intensely-and affords the most masochistic pleasure-is the story of the sultan who watches his entire harem cuckold him with their black slaves. It confirms all the worst male fears and prejudices about the female sex, and so it is no accident that popular Turkish novelists of the modem period, and even politically committed "social realists" like Kemal Tahir, chose to milk this tale for all they could. But when I was in my twenties, and awash in typically male fears about never-to-be-trusted women, I found such tales suffocating, excessively "Oriental," and even somewhat coarse. In those days, the Thousand and One Nights seemed to pander too much to the tastes and preferences of the back streets. The crude, the two-faced, the evil (if they weren't ugly all along, they dramatized their moral depravity by becoming ugly) were unremittingly repugnant, acting out their worst attributes over and over, just to keep the story going.
    It could be that my distaste upon reading the Thousand and One Nights for the second time arose from the puritanical streak that sometimes afflicts Westernizing countries. In those days, young Turks like me who considered themselves modern viewed the classics of Eastern literature as one might a dark and impenetrable forest. Now I think that what we lacked was a key-a way into this literature that preserved the modern outlook but still allowed us to appreciate the arabesques, pleasantries, and random beauties.
    II was only when I read the Thousand and One Nights for the third time that I was able to warm to it. But this time I want to understand what it was that had so fascinated Western writers through the ages – what had made the book into a classic. I saw it now as a great sea of stories-a sea with no end-and what astounded me was its ambition, its secret internal geometry. As before, I jumped from story to story, abandoning one midway if it started to bore me and moving to another. Though I had decided it wasn't a story's content that interested me so much as its shape, its proportions, its passions, in the end it was the stories' back-street flavor that most appealed to me-those same evil details I had once deplored. Perhaps with time I grew to accept that I had lived long enough to know that life is made of treachery and malice. So on my third reading, I was finally able to appreciate the Thousand and One Nights as a work of art, to enjoy its timeless games of logic, of disguises, of hide-and-seek, and its many tales of imposture. In my novel The Black Book, I drew upon the magnificent story of Harun al Rashid, who goes out in disguise one night to watch his double, the false Harun al Rashid, impersonate him; I changed the story only to give it the feel of one of those black-and-white films of I940s Istanbul. With the help of commentaries and annotated editions in English, I was able, by the time I was in my mid-thirties, to read the Thousand and One Nights for its secret logic, its inside jokes, its richness, its beauties tame and strange, its ugly interludes, its impudences, and its vulgarities-it was, in short, a treasure chest. My earlier love-hate relationship with the book no longer mattered: The child who could not recognize his world in it was a child who had not yet accepted life as it was, and the same could be said of the angry adolescent who dismissed it as vulgar. For I have slowly come to see that unless we accept the Thousand and One Nights as it is, it will continue to be-like life, when we refuse to accept it as it is-a source of great unhappiness. Readers should approach the book without hope or prejudice and read it as they please, following their own whims, their own logic. Though perhaps I am already going too far-for it would be wrong to send a reader into this book with any preconceived ideas at all.
    I would still like to use this book to say something about reading and death. There are two things people always say about the Thousand and One Nights. One is that no one has ever managed to read the book from start to finish. The second is that anyone who does read it from start to finish is sure to die. Certainly an alert reader who has seen how these two warnings fit together will wish to proceed with caution. But there's no reason for fear. Because we're all going to die one day, whether we read the Thousand and One Nights or not. 

A thousand and one nights ...