One Thousand And One Nights is a book about love, wonder, magic, and morality. About history, legend, religion, and government. About how to use index

Book Review: Arabian Nights

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2021-05-24 19:30:05

One Thousand And One Nights is a book about love, wonder, magic, and morality. About history, legend, religion, and government. About how to use indexical uncertainty to hack the simulation running the universe to return the outcome you want. About genies, ape-people, and rhinoceroses who run around with elephants impaled on their horns. But most of all, it's a book about how your wife is cheating on you with a black man.

The 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 the 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.

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