SOURCE: Ghazoul, Ferial J. “Narrative Dialectics.” In Nocturnal Poetics: The Arabian Nights in Comparative Context, pp. 17-28. Cairo, Egypt: The American University in Cairo Press, 1996.

[In the following essay, Ghazoul argues that the operational structure of The Arabian Nights consists of four major blocks: the story of Shahrayar as king, Shahrayar as a traveler seeking knowledge, the story of Shaharazad, and the frame story as narrated by the vizier.]

SEGMENTATION

Roman Jakobson defined literature as a message centered on its mode of expression. Every literary text poses two questions to the specialist: how is the text generated and what is its final outcome? The answer to the first question, on how the text flows from its beginning to its end, throws light on the message that the text enunciates. The first step, therefore, is to try to understand the essential course of the text.

The Arabian Nights is a narrative discourse, but the narrative component does not cover the entire discourse. There are certain parts in the story which can be discarded without damaging the narrative line. This is evident enough since we know that there are many ways of telling the same story. Vladimir Propp has shown that the functions in a tale are the crucial points in the unfolding of narrative—these help us to see the story as a series of functional transformations connected in a causal relationship.¹ Tzvetan Todorov went further by demonstrating the hierarchical nature of these functions, and that some of them are more essential to the narrative line than others, thus condensing the narrative to its essential identity.² The analysis of The Arabian Nights in this chapter will follow the operations undertaken by Propp and Todorov, to observe the phenomenal changes in their essential role, and then to retain the principal transformations which will lead to the significance of the fiction.

The overall structure of The Arabian Nights is that of a principal preposition enclosing other prepositions connected by conjunctions, and so on. The fundamental preposition in The Arabian Nights, at the basic level, is the story of a king who, having found himself betrayed by his wife, vows to marry a virgin every night and behead her in the morning. After a succession of such wives, one of them—Shahrazad—manages to postpone her verdict and eventually waive it by narrating stories which captivate the king. This is the indispensable part of the narrative; it covers but a few pages at the beginning and the end. This is called the frame story. The stories related by Shahrazad (as well as one related to her by her father to dissuade her from marrying the king) can be omitted from the discourse without infringing on the narrative thread. On the other hand, if the frame story were omitted, the result would simply be unconnected stories. In the first case, we have a necklace without beads; in the latter, beads without a necklace.

The narrative line can be retold in more abstract terms as that of a rupture leading to a curse and its ultimate undoing. This invariably carries with it overtones of Semitic sacred narratives of Creation where an initial order and equilibrium are lost. In this sense, The Arabian Nights is essentially a demotic version of paradise lost and recovered. The bliss of the original couple was ruptured when they ate the fruits of the forbidden tree, that is, by tasting the fruits of knowledge. Similarly, taboo and knowledge are keys to the unfolding of The Arabian Nights. Sin and death go hand in hand in both. The sacred narrative in Genesis underlines the loss. The Arabian Nights points to recovery and redemption. Shahrazad's story echoes and develops the myth of Origin.

Apart from the power of The Arabian Nights to evoke dormant mythological texts, its structure offers a model of symbolic economy. The essence of narrative is a chronological transformation, a series of changes along a diachronic axis. Succession is as vital to narrative as seriality—that is, paradigmatic repetition—is to poetry. The narrative is the temporal discourse par excellence. There is an element of poetic justice in Shahrazad's struggle against deadline (and it is literally a dead line) armed with narrative: she fights time with time. In the Odyssey, Penelope's struggle to gain time is based on a simple device of doing and undoing; she unravels at night what she weaves in the daytime. Penelope marks time in order to delay temporal events, but Shahrazad's art lies in annulling the very limits of time. Penelope's struggle is against given time, while Shahrazad's is against the notion of time itself. The Arabian Nights deals with one of the most excruciatingly difficult philosophical concepts, that of abstract time.

Technically, The Arabian Nights offers an example of a struggle that has been used frequently in more modern literary works, such as Tristram Shandy and Through the Looking Glass, where the initial binary opposition of thesis and antithesis is not resolved by a mediating synthesis, but by the triumph of parentheses and digressions. The frame story can be broken down into four narrative blocks. In other words, the frame story combines four narratives which could stand independently, one from the other, although in this case they are artfully linked together.³ The four blocks are the story of Shahrayar as a king, the story of Shahrayar as a traveler seeking knowledge, the story of Shahrazad, and the story narrated by her father.

THE STORY OF SHAHRAYAR

The beginning narrative block relates the story of two brothers who are monarchs; the older is called Shahrayar and the younger Shahzaman. After twenty years of happy rule, Shahrayar misses his brother and sends his vizier to fetch him. Shahzaman sets out to visit his brother. At midnight, he remembers something he had forgotten and goes back to his palace. There he finds his wife in bed with a black slave. He kills them both and goes on to visit his brother. Although Shahrayar had ordered a proper welcome for his brother upon his arrival, Shahzaman remains sullen. Sharayar assumes that his brother is homesick and Shahzaman will only refer enigmatically to an internal wound that is bothering him. One day, there is a royal hunting expedition but Shahzaman refuses to join the group and stays home. As Shahzaman is looking into the garden of his brother's palace, twenty slave girls, twenty slave men, and his sister-in-law come strolling along. They all undress and Shahrayar's wife copulates with a black slave, while the other girls do likewise. Shahzaman feels somewhat better after witnessing this orgy as it proves that his calamity is no worse than his brother's, and he soon regains his gaiety. On returning, Shahrayar is surprised by the sudden change in his brother, and he questions him about it. But Shahzaman only explains the reason for his grief by relating how his wife betrayed him, and will not explain how he got over it. Upon the insistence of his brother, Shahzaman gives in and explains how the betrayal of his sister-in-law had lessened his grief. Shahrayar then wants to check the story for himself and he arranges another royal hunting expedition, but secretly comes home and watches his wife's orgy with his own eyes.

The narrative line of this story is interrupted by introducing another narrative block, but it will be continued later.

THE VOYAGE

Shahrayar decides with his brother to travel in order to find out if theirs is a singular case. They walk until they come to a spring next to the sea and they sit down to rest. After a while, a black column appears from the sea, and the two brothers become frightened and climb up a tree. It turns out to be a giant demon carrying a chest on top of his head. He comes and sits underneath their tree. The demon then proceeds to open the chest, from which he removes a beautiful young maiden. He puts his head in her lap and goes to sleep. The girl looks up, sees the two brothers, and asks them to come down. They protest, to no avail, and in the end they have to come down for fear that she will turn the demon against them. She orders them to copulate with her and they obey. When this is over, she takes out a bag with five hundred and seventy rings, which she has gotten from previous lovers who made love to her while the demon slept, and she asks them for a ring each.⁴ They do as she requests. She relates to them how she had been kidnapped on her wedding night by the demon, put into a box, placed in a trunk with seven locks, and then put at the bottom of the sea so as to assure her chastity. The two brothers are amazed at what has befallen such a mighty demon and are somewhat consoled.

Here the line of the first narrative block is resumed. The two brothers go back to Shahrayar's kingdom, and there Shahrayar puts his wife and her slaves to death.

THE STORY OF SHAHRAZAD

For three years, Shahrayar marries a virgin every night and has her killed the next morning. It becomes increasingly difficult to find brides for him. The vizier, having failed to do so, goes home worried. The vizier has two daughters, Shahrazad the elder, who is well read, and Dinazad the younger. When the vizier is questioned by his elder daughter, he tells her all that has happened. Shahrazad offers to marry the king with the hope of delivering her fellow women. Her father warns her that she might have to face what befell the ass and the bull with the farmer. She inquires about that, and her father starts relating the story.

The story line of this narrative block is interrupted here and resumed later.

THE FABLE

There was a farmer who knew the language of animals. He owned an ass and a bull. The bull found out that the ass was much better off and told him how much he envied his leisurely life, as he was only occasionally used for his master's transport. The ass advised the bull to pretend to be sick, to lie down and not to eat, and by so doing avoid hard work. The bull did so accordingly, but since the farmer had overheard the conversation, he gave instructions that the ass be used to replace the bull in drawing the plough. The ass regretted his advice and tried to get out of the new situation by telling the bull that he had better return to work soon, as the owner intended to have him slaughtered if he continued to be sick. The next day, the bull did his best to display appetite when eating and energy at work. The farmer, who had overheard these conversations, roared with laughter. Although he knew the language of animals, he was required not to divulge what he knew, otherwise he would surely die. His wife asked him why he was laughing and he told her that it was a secret which, if revealed, would entail his death. But she insisted on knowing, even at the cost of her husband's life. The husband did not know what to do, since he loved his wife dearly. He called his relatives and neighbors and told them about his predicament. Everyone entreated the wife to abandon the matter, to no avail. So the man resigned himself to her wish and went to perform his last ablutions before telling the secret. He then overheard his dog cursing the cock and accusing him of lightheartedness when his master was about to die. The cock inquired how that had come about and the dog told him the story of their master and his wife. The cock accused his master of stupidity on the grounds that he could not manage even one wife when the cock succeeded in satisfying fifty of them, and wondered why his master did not give his wife a good beating. The farmer, having overheard this, decided to take up the cock's suggestion. He hid some branches in the closet and invited his wife in, pretending he was about to reveal the secret to her. When she came in, she got a beating and consequently asked to be pardoned.

Then the narrative takes up the story of Shahrazad, which eventually fuses with the story of Shahrayar. The vizier says to his daughter Shahrazad that her fate might very well be that of the farmer's wife. But Shahrazad insists on going ahead with her plan. Shahrazad has instructed her sister that she will ask for her on the wedding night, and that Dinazad is to ask for tales to pass the night. The vizier takes Shahrazad to Shahrayar and she requests that her sister be with her. Dinazad comes and sits under the bed. After the deflowering of Shahrazad, Dinazad asks her to relate some stories to pass the time. Shahrazad agrees to do so, if the king will permit it. He does, and is delighted with her discourse. Shahrazad continues to tell her story all night but stops at daybreak. Shahrayar, anxious to hear more, postpones her sentence night after night until one thousand nights have passed. On the thousand and first night, after finishing a story, Shahrazad asks to be granted a wish. She brings her three sons and asks Shahrayar to free her from beheading for the sake of the children. Shaharyar embraces his children and assures her that he has pardoned her. She is delighted and joy overwhelms the people. Then, Shahrayar summons his vizier and thanks him for arranging his marriage with his daughter, who has begotten him three sons. He also orders festivities for thirty days and charitable acts for the people. They live happily ever after until death separates them.

BINARISM

CHARACTERS

These narrative blocks exhibit a rigorous organizational system in terms of major characters. The first block presents the reader with the most striking impulse in The Arabian Nights, that of binarism. The two brothers present to us in full dimension the question of duplication. They are both knights and kings and rule happily. Shahzaman's experience foreshadows Shahrayar's and is almost identical to it. He kills his wife instantly when he finds her in bed with a black slave, while Shahrayar's death order is delayed and undertaken only after his searching voyage. The striking similarity of Shahzaman's and Shahrayar's stories makes them sound like a voice and an echo. Here the text provides us with the first variant of binarism: pairing. This form of male pairing is symmetrically balanced by female pairing, represented in Shahrazad's and Dinazad's relationship in the third narrative block. However, there is a subtle difference in these two pairs. The male pair (Shahrayar and Shahzaman)—as in Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet—is two parties in two performances of the same drama. Each reinforces the other but is completely independent in his actions. With the female pair, there is an explicit complicity between the two sisters. Dinazad is a shadow or a negative of Shahrazad, who accompanies her all along. Shahzaman is more than a negative; he is a double and a copy of Shahrayar.

The names of the dramatis personae also carry with them a phonetic duplication. Shahrazad and Dinazad share an end rhyme, Shahrayar and Shahzaman an initial rhyme. The sonorous repetition in the system of names manifests itself in the characters of the enframed stories, such as Sindbad the Porter and Sindbad the Sailor, Abdallah the Hunter and Abdallah the Mariner, and in the story of the two brothers ‘Ajib and Gharib. It is a common feature of legends and mythological narratives to have two parallel characters with rhyming names, such as the two giants Gog and Magog who were believed to have been imprisoned by a great wall during the reign of Alexander the Great. Another example is that of Harut and Marut, the fallen angels who were hung by their feet in a well in Babylon, yet another is that of Qahtan and ‘Adnan, the mythical ancestors of the Arabs. This phonetic parallelism in The Arabian Nights, a phenomenon that can be observed on the surface of the text, confirms and accentuates parallelism on the semiotic level. The significance of the correspondence between these two levels lies in the reinforcement of the impact on the reader and consequently prepares the reader for a deeper assimilation of the text and its patterns.

The protagonists in The Arabian Nights are Shahrayar and Shahrazad. They are the backbone of the narrative. While Shahzaman and Dinazad can be removed from the narrative, it is impossible to remove Shahrayar or Shahrazad without damaging the story. The relationship between Shahrayar and Shahrazad presents the second variant of binarism: coupling. This is how their attributes contrast:

Shahrayar	Shahrazad
husband	wife
sultan	subject
listener	narrator

This royal couple offers opposed and complementary polarity. The terms “husband,” “sultan,” and “listener” connote antinomically “wife,” “subject,” and “narrator” because they are parts of a split union. A husband cannot be comprehended as a term without its complementary contrast—a wife. Similarly, a king or sultan without subjects is such an incongruity that Antoine de Saint-Exupéry played on its absurdity in Le petit prince. In the same vein, a listener, by definition, conjures up a speaker, a narrator, or at least a voice. Shahrazad's attributes are, thus, mirror reflections of Shahrayar's, and vice versa. The interlocking of these two poles produces a totality and generates a process. They are a model of a structural couple: opposed and complementary like the yin-yang principles in Chinese cosmology. This coupling is realized on the phonetic level as well; Shahrazad and Shahrayar share both an initial and a medial “rhyme.”

There is yet a third variant of binarism—ambivalence—which is presented in the character of Shahrazad on the one hand and Shahrayar on the other. On the surface, Shahrayar is a paradigm of power: an Oriental despot and virile male who consumes a woman every night, while Shahrazad embodies the very principle of female vulnerability. She is at the total mercy of Shahrayar's monstrous appetite. However, she does not try to strike at him as in the wonder tales of giants and monsters, as in “Jack and the Beanstalk” or the Biblical story of David and Goliath. She tries to appease his appetite, to tame him, as it were, and replaces his steady diet of women with tales of women. Shahrazad's genius lies in turning women from objects of sex to objects of sexual fantasy. This entry into the symbolic is the most critical step undertaken by Shahrazad. It is a crucial transformation that parallels the substitution of ritual enactment for the concrete offering of a sacrifice in religion. Once the signifier replaces the signified, language becomes possible—and once language is installed, unlimited discourses become possible.

By obtaining the privilege of narrating, Shahrazad has inverted her relationship with her master. As the narrator, she has the upper hand. Shahrazad has become a “dictator” in the etymological sense of the word—derived from the verb dicere (to say). The listener, by definition, is the passive party in the act of narration. Shahrazad's position is the reversal of the conventional one, where discourse is the prerogative of the sovereign. Shahrazad's narrative gift and gigantic knowledge are stressed in The Arabian Nights:

The former [Shahrazad] had read various books of histories, and the lives of preceding kings, and stories of past generations: it is asserted that she had collected together a thousand books of histories, relating to preceding generations and kings, and works of the poets.⁵

Shahrazad is, therefore, an exceptional person in her own right. She is potentially powerful though technically helpless. Her status is ambivalent and so is her condition. She is—to borrow the paradox of Kierkegaard—put to death but kept alive.⁶ Shahrayar, by being completely entangled in her fictional web, mesmerized by her narration, evokes the image of an enslaved titan. Both hero and heroine dramatize a case of ambivalence and are examples of coincidentia oppositorum.

The relationship between Shahrazad and Shahrayar becomes consequently more complex, or at least more subtle, since their opposition is further complicated by internal contradictions. Neither is a pure type. There is something of the empowerment associated with Shahrayar in Shahrazad, and something of her helplessness in him. Their struggle is not a clear-cut one of forces of light versus forces of darkness. It is by no means a Manichean struggle, but something of an unblocking of dormant potentials in the weak partner and exposing the underlying limits of the strong partner. At bottom, both Shahrayar and Shahrazad are complex and ambiguous types, combining strength with weakness.

Throughout, the text persistently displays binarism and uses the principle of duality in three logically possible ways: duplication, opposition, and ambiguity. It is perhaps worth pointing out that these three variants of binarism correspond faithfully to three orders in semantics: synonymy, antinomy, and heteronomy.

ACTIONS

The binary scale which governs the relationships between the principal characters permeates the thematic contents of the story as well. The major themes of the narrative are the principal actions that occur. In the frame story these are unequivocally those of love and death. The relationship between these fundamental acts in the unfolding of the story falls under three dialectics—repetition, inversion, and fusion—which parallel the relationship of pairing, opposition, and ambivalence. In analyzing these three dialectics within the text, it is often important to note how stylistic craftsmanship superbly coordinates the move from love to death and from death to love.

The first dramatic incident occurs when Shahzaman finds his wife in bed with a black slave. This erotic motif recurs when Shahzaman sees his sister-in-law copulating with a black slave, and it is seen once again by Shahrayar himself. This tripling of the one single incident amplifies it. The accompanying twenty slave girls and twenty slave men copulating in the royal garden further intensify the image. The death motif is equally insistent—participants in the orgy are slain—so the first narrative block presents us with the binarism of Eros and Thanatos.

The second narrative block displays the principle of inversion, where one act changes syntactic position and becomes reversed. The force seems to change direction while maintaining its full thrust. In the voyage undertaken by the two monarchs in the second narrative block, both Shahrayar and Shahzaman have experiences which constitute a drastic change from their earlier ones in the first narrative block. The two kings have sexual intercourse with a young woman kidnapped on her wedding night and kept under many locks. Earlier, their wives had managed to have lovers despite the fenced protection of a royal palace. Shahrayar's love-making with the young woman parallels that of the black slave with his wife. The analogy is evident:

Slave: Shahrayar = Shahrayar: Demon

This neat criss-crossing process also occurs within the story related by the vizier, Shahrazad's father, about the ass and the bull. The ass who has advised the bull to feign sickness in order to have an easy life ends up replacing the bull at hard work, while the bull indulges himself in the pleasures formerly enjoyed by the ass.

The difference between the inverted dialectic of Shahrayar and the bull is that the bull's inversion represents a complete transposition in the two elements given, something akin to the rhetorical figure of antimetabole, while the inversion of Shahrayar is something of a chiasmus. Both inversions—Shahrayar's and the bull's—are crucial in the narrative context. Shahrayar learns a lesson from his experience, acknowledges that this is not a singular case, and goes back to his throne. The ass, too, realizes that he is paying dearly for his advice and sets out to regain his former prestige.

The third dialectic in the narrative text is that of fusion, where two seemingly contradictory motifs are soldered together. Both the powerful notions of blackness and defloration carry with their use in the text what Arab grammarians have called the principle of addad, or the fusion of two opposing meanings in one term.

The episode of Shahzaman's return to his palace shows amply the clever use the text makes of blackness:

[He] set out towards his brother's domains. At midnight, however, he remembered that he had left in his Palace an article which he should have brought with him, and having returned to the palace to fetch it, he there beheld his wife sleeping in his bed, and attended by [in the arms of] a male negro slave. On beholding this scene, the world became black before his eyes, and he said within himself, if this is the case when I have not departed from the city, what will be the conduct of this vile woman while I am sojourning with my brother? He then drew his sword, and slew them both in bed.⁷

The text alone plays to the utmost on the semantic fields and associations of blackness, linking this opening and crucial incident to the stuff of the book—nocturnal narration. The text specifies that Shahzaman remembers the article he forgot in his palace at night, indeed, at the very peak of night. Night evokes darkness and midnight evokes the heart of darkness. Shahzaman, then, finds his wife in bed with a black slave. Blackness seems to crown this darkness. And when Shahzaman sees all this, “the world became black before his eyes.” The final blackening of death completes the somber process. One pigment has been sufficient to describe the timing, the adulterer, and the reaction. The swift movement from one situation to the other is unified by the color scheme.⁸

The concentration on one color is a clear example of textual economy where one term functions as a conceptual transformer of the night, from being read as equivalent to erotic time to a reading of it as murder time. The darkness of the night works as a cover and is associated both with sexual love and illicit actions. In Arabic literature, the night of lovers has been glorified in the most celebrated lines in Arabic poetry (though occasionally lovers were portrayed as meeting at other times of day, such as dawn). Both Imru' al-Qays, the pre-Islamic paragon poet, and ‘Umar ibn abi Rabi‘a, the early Islamic playful poet, set the mode and the model. The love scene set at night builds simply on a literary cliché, but the text moves from presenting the night as a protective veil into the night as absence of vision, where it infuriates Shahzaman to the point where he kills both his wife and her lover instantly. Here, night evokes darkness and blindness. Both opposed semantic poles of the night are used in this short passage.

What turns this discourse into a text is precisely this stylistic compactness. Thematically and logically, the sequence of events in the above passage is banal enough. A man finds his wife in bed with another and commits a crime de passion killing both of them. It sounds rather journalistic and of only passing interest. However, the style enhancing the sequence of events turns the report of such an occurrence into a literary text. In this case, the leitmotif of blackness shows how repetitions of one vehicle can produce highly differentiated and somewhat opposing tenors, to use the terms of I. A. Richards. The fusion here can be called duality in unity.

The text offers, furthermore, a fusion in which different vehicles are united by one overriding tenor, displaying the principle of divergence in convergence. The text specifies the kind of women Shahrayar wanted every night:

and henceforth he made it his regular custom, every time he took a virgin to his bed, to kill her at the expiration of the night. This he continued to do during a period of three years.⁹

It is clear that Shahrayar suffers from a wound and is trying to avenge himself, but what he is after is not women qua women but virginity. His own innocence, i.e., his mental “virginity,” has been wounded and he is making up for it by inflicting wounds. Defloration, a symbol of the erotic act and the procreative drive, is juxtaposed and simultaneously contrasted with beheading. The antithetical nature of the defloration, which is both a synecdoche for life while being literally a bloody rupture, renders the development of the paradox possible. Shahrayar, by the very act of rendering a female procreative and life-producing by inseminating her, is condemning her to death. On the other hand, Shahrayar is doing unto his brides the same act twice over: a metaphoric death followed by a literal death. Eros and Thanatos are fused together. Deflowering and killing, opposite rites, turn out to be facets of one act, namely laceration.

Thus, the binary impulse in The Arabian Nights manifests itself both in characters and themes, in the nouns and in the verbs of this great preposition which constitutes the text. Binarism is used in three distinct ways which I shall call—borrowing terms from medieval Arabic rhetoric—(1) correlation (mumathala) which covers pairing and repetition, (2) confrontation (muqabala), which includes opposition and inversion, and (3) antithetical meaning (addad), which delineates internal contradictions in characters and cleavage in actions. The effect is invariably that of amplification and hyperbole in the first place (mumathala), revolution and upside-down transformations in the second place (muqabala), and paradox and reversibility in the third place (addad).

A dyadic organizational system such as that of The Arabian Nights, which cannot build a third term, is invariably committed to radical changes but not to growth. A paradox may split apart, and a force may change its position in the syntactic order, but the constituent units remain essentially the same.

If we were to think of The Arabian Nights as parole, an enunciation, then the organizational system outlined above would constitute its language (langue). There is something disturbingly inorganic about this langue. It works through sedimentation, mutation, and explosions. The metaphors describing this text should perhaps be drawn from geology rather than biology. The mode of expression, as Jakobson points out, is profoundly linked to the message. The Arabian Nights, in using a binary structure, falls inevitably into repetition rather than growth.

Notes

1. Vladimir Propp, The Morphology of the Folktale, second edition, ed. L. A. Wagner (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1968).

2. Tzvetan Todorov, “The Two Principles of Narrative,” Diacritics I: 1 (Fall 1971): 37-44.

3. A narrative block is a textual unit. It constitutes a segment of the story that can (potentially) make narrative sense autonomously.

4. The number of rings varies in the different manuscripts/editions of The Arabian Nights. In Mahdi's edition, there are ninety-eight. But the exact number of rings in itself and in this specific context is not important. What is significant is the indication of an enormous quantity (be it ninety-eight or five hundred and seventy) of lovers.

5. Lane, The Thousand and One Nights, I:10.

6. Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology, trans. W. Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946), 152.

7. Lane, The Thousand and One Nights, I:4. Emphasis mine.

8. At the end of The Thousand and One Nights, when the happy ending is announced and Shahrayar pardons Shahrazad, the color of the night is said to have been “whiter than the face of the day.” Lane, III:672.

9. Ibid., I:10.

Works Cited

Lane, E. W., trans. The Thousand and One Nights. 3 vols. London: Chatto and Windos, 1912.

Mahdi, Muhsin. “Mazahir al-riwaya wa-l-mushafaha fi usul alf layla wa layla.” In Revue de l'Institut des Manuscrits Arabes 20 (May 1974): 125-44.