Secrets of the Arabian Nights

So Scheherazade said, "Can I tell you a story to while away the night?

"I heard that in a distant part of China lived a poor widow with her feckless son Aladdin.

"One day a wandering magician approached Aladdin in the market place..."

As a boy I loved the Arabian Nights, a riotous collection of adventures

and tales of love, magic and revenge.

I want to find out where these stories come from,

and what they can still tell us about the Arab world today,

1,000 years after they were first recorded.

Even for us in the Middle East this is the fantasy version

of the Middle East.

Not all the good characters will end up alive or fine

and not all the stories will end well but justice will be done.

On my travels I will discover that my childhood favourite is not actually a children's book at all.

In the Middle East it is still deeply controversial.

There is too much drinking. There is too much sex. Too much frivolity.

You are not being rewarded for being good. You are being rewarded for being lucky.

So the book is considered an immoral book.

I'll also discover how they first arrived in Britain, and how they shaped our view of the Arab world.

It's a story of how a best-seller launched a craze for an exoticised and erotic Middle East.

Many of us discover the Nights through one of our best-loved pantos.

New lamps for old!

New lamps for old!

The story of Aladdin, who finds a magic lamp and, with the help of its genie, gains love and riches,

has been a staple of British theatre for two centuries.

'It's a magical panto, Aladdin.'

It's extraordinary that these stories which have been

-done in this theatre in Drury Lane for 200 years...

-Yeah.

-Did you ever read the original stories?

-I did, yeah.

I remember getting a book with the most beautiful illustrations and they were glorious.

I'll never forget the image of the genie.

You know, the wisp of smoke and there is half a body.

And they always stand like this for some unknown reason.

Why Aladdin? What is it that attracts people to it?

I think Aladdin is all about wishes.

It's about the underdog getting one over on everybody.

Aladdin is this street kid and he's got all these fantastic dreams, wishes and ambitions.

And he lives with his mother and she runs a laundrette

and life's rotten and it is never going to happen for him.

But it does, with the help of a little magic.

Sinbad The Sailor is another great favourite to spring from the pages of the Arabian Nights.

Having lost all his money, Sinbad must sail out on many perilous adventures to regain his fortune.

The Seventh Voyage Of Sinbad...

See the attack of the giant two-headed bird!

See the dance of the Cobra woman and feel her deadly slithering embrace!

See the spectacular battle between the one-eyed cyclops and the fire-breathing dragon.

Sinbad and Aladdin are two of the 1,001 tales linked by Scheherazade's frame story.

She marries King Shahryar to break his cycle of revenge.

Betrayed by his first wife, he is executing each

of his virgin brides the morning after their wedding night.

Scheherazade herself is faced with a tremendous problem - genocide.

The Sultan is killing all the women in the kingdom,

and alone, she stands up and fights it.

She's a great feminist heroine, in her own way.

She's telling stories to save her life.

Each ends on a cliff-hanger,

so that the King lets her live to hear the next instalment.

"If I am still alive tomorrow night, I shall tell you something stranger

"and more amazing than this."

It's pulp fiction. It's the equivalent

of graphic novels or something.

At times it's filthy.

It's got smutty jokes in it.

It's highly romanticised.

The canonical Arabic literature scholars thought of this as trash.

These 1,001 stories, that have so powerfully inspired Western artists, writers and filmmakers,

had their roots 1,000 years ago in the oral traditions of the East.

I'm travelling back in time to the Sahara to experience the world that created them.

We've been driving for a few hundred miles south of Cairo

and these are the first proper sand dunes we have seen.

Star Wars land.

God!

Thank god he stopped!

It's straight down.

Oh, wow...

What's extraordinary is that that old expression -

the shifting sands of time - when you're actually in it

and you see this sand moving so swiftly like this and recovering everybody's tracks.

It feels completely nomadic.

Your sense of who you are in the universe,

how important you might be as a human, counts for absolutely squit.

It's one thing to read these stories when you're at home in the comfort of your bed.

When you're here in the landscape of the desert,

which is so vast with nothing between yourself and Timbuktu,

it's awe-inspiring and your sense of being a grain of sand

is all too obvious.

So that as the light is all gone and the temperatures go, you can imagine

sand storms conjuring up genies or phantoms and it is these stories that provided

a human narrative thread through this landscape which is completely inhuman and has no life whatsoever.

So Scheherazade began -

I heard that the second dervish told how the king's daughter drew talismanic shapes in the sand,

whispered magic charms, and in a short time, the world turned dark,

until he could see nothing but a genie rushing out of the sky.

This atmosphere of enchantment, this atmosphere of wonder,

that is very specific to the book.

There is a sense of a kind of endlessly emancipated imagination.

You don't feel that you need to observe

any of the co-ordinates of ordinary life.

They're simply asking you to let your imagination fly.

The seeds of the Arabian Nights lie scattered across the whole of Asia and the Middle East.

They include folk tales from India, and mystical stories from Persia.

As these stories were carried by travellers

on the great trade routes, they developed and took shape.

Long before the diesel engine,

there was only one way of travelling through these wildernesses.

Camel trains could cross continents,

carrying everything from silks and silver, to fabulous tales.

It keeps you going all day?

-Very good.

-Very good.

It's very sweet. My teeth will fall out.

Even as far back as the ninth century,

the story of Scheherazade was being told and retold by the hakawati,

traditional Arabic storytellers, in places just like this.

If you look at the trade routes of how goods travelled

from the East...

Look at something like tea or coffee - and coffee figures

greatly in the Arabian Nights - the trade routes of coffee are the trade routes of the stories.

There are cobblers, beggars, kings and tyrants, wise men, fools and so forth.

There's a huge range and panoply of human character and diversity

and class and a lot of emphasis on merchants and on trade.

And so I think that, in a sense, gives support to this idea that

the stories are part of this transport system

that is crossing the globe.

Hold on here...and how do I steer?

Good. Thank you.

This is real time travel because there is no difference between now and 1,000 years ago, I imagine.

The landscape looked the same. The animals would be the same.

It's extraordinary that this is the way the stories and the people

travelled across these vast expanses.

What a privilege.

Yallah!

Caravans flooded into the great cities of Baghdad,

Damascus and Cairo which became vibrant hubs of exchange.

Gossip and travellers tales were traded as freely as silks and spices.

Plunging into these narrow alleys, I feel I am back in the medieval world of the Nights.

Everywhere I look I am reminded of familiar stories.

I used to love the rags to riches story

of Ali Baba And The 40 Thieves.

He's poor as dirt until he finds treasure hidden

in the robbers' cave.

But then they come after him and hide in enormous pots

in his courtyard, planning to wreak revenge.

It's a sensory overload here. Incredible.

'Gamal El-Ghitani is editor of Egypt's leading literary magazine and one of its greatest writers.

'He's been passionate about the 1,001 Arabian Nights for 60 years.'

Did you grow up in an area like this?

Gamal, just hearing you talk, what I'm so struck by is that you've got,

literally, solid, touchable historic buildings here.

You're the walking, talking oral history and it's like layers

upon layers of paint, wood, plaster, behind the plaster, more bricks.

And, behind here, more secret life.

It seems to me that that is almost like what the story is like.

They fold in on each other one after another. Do you think that's true?

Yes, exactly.

Do you remember the first story out of 1,001 Nights that you read when you were a boy?

She's hiding?

Can you imagine?

But that happens in all the stories.

Somebody hiding in a tree, in a building, listening to what somebody else is doing.

So Scheherazade said to King Shahryar, "Can I tell you a story to while away the night?"

And Scheherazade began.

I heard that the king walked to the centre of the palace.

And looking around saw no-one...

This is a salon in one of the great medieval merchant's houses

where they would have all been seated on cushions over here

and then watching travelling players performing street theatre versions

of the 1,001 Nights.

The palace was furnished with silk carpets, leather mats and woven cushions.

But beyond the inner courtyard, he heard bitter weeping

and moving towards the source of the wailing, lifted a curtain beyond

a door and found a beautiful young man sitting on a throne.

"Why do you cry?" he asked and the young man lifted his robe.

From his navel to his head he was human flesh but from the waist down

he was black stone.

Scheherazade is one of the most enduring characters in world literature.

Why do you think that is?

She saved herself through the power of the word.

She knew history, she knew magical stories.

She was a great entertainer

but it is through the power of the word that she saves herself

and cures her husband, her Shahryar,

from a misogynist throughout the stories,

so that midway he becomes intrigued by her.

She had figuratively and literally sat him on a couch

and psyched him out.

And she actually says in the introduction to the collected stories,

she says, "I am doing this to save myself and my sisters."

So the feminists caught on to that and they said,

"Aha, there she is. She is doing something not just for herself

"and the women of her time, but for women throughout."

Actually she was very clever because the early stories reinforced

the king in his views of woman as being fickle

and not to be trusted.

And then, little by little, they change in tone.

Again and again, there are stories told,

warning against sudden decisions,

arbitrary tyranny, and recommending more mercy, more tolerance.

The psychology of the book deepens and deepens as you go along

into more complexity, more understanding, more sympathy,

and, above all, less paranoia about women's sexuality.

Scheherazade's stories show the Medieval Arab cities as prosperous, mercantile places.

Although essentially Islamic, they had a rich mix of other faiths.

The storytellers, or hakawati, peddled a repertoire

of irreverent tales which satirised everyone equally.

There are many stories which show multi-cultural cities

that are highly recognisable in terms of contemporary reality,

and the Hunchback, to some extent, is one of them.

This is coarse, bawdy humour, an example of the street humour,

stand-up comedian humour, of certain stories in the Nights.

A tailor and his wife met a drunk but very entertaining hunchback

and invited him round for dinner.

Midway through a riotous evening, the hunchback, who happened to be

a close friend of the Caliph of Basra, choked on a large piece

of fish and dropped down dead.

The tailor lugged the body up the stairs, dumped it outside the door

of the Jewish doctor, knocked and then ran off.

The doctor opened the doors, tripped over the body in the dark

and set it tumbling down the stairs.

Now the doctor is terrified he'll be accused of killing a patient

so he carries the body onto the roof and dumps it into the courtyard

of his Muslim neighbour.

Hearing a thud the neighbour rushes out, thinking it's a burglar,

beats him up and mistakenly believes

he's killed a man and has to haul the body off.

The Muslim neighbour dumped the body in a darkened alleyway.

Then a drunken Christian trader came along,

fell over the body, thought he was about to be robbed and beat it up.

This alerted a night-watchman who hauled the drunk Christian trader

off to the police where he was accused of murder.

Just as the Christian trader is about to be executed,

the Muslim neighbour rushes forward.

"It was me, not him, who killed the hunchback".

The executioner grabbed him and put his head on the block.

Just then the Jewish doctor confessed to the crime.

And then the tailor too said, "No, it was me who killed him!"

At this moment, the hunchback sat bolt upright, choked and coughed up the fishbone.

I love this story for its sense of slapstick, comedy and farce.

The behaviour of the Muslim, the Jew and the Christian are all as bad as each other.

And the stereotypes, caricatures are recognisable across the centuries.

Oral stories like this were collected and written down

in the great cities of Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo.

In the tenth century, an Arab historian records that they were

called Alf Layla - 1,000 Nights.

This kaleidoscope of stories might never have reached the West

but for the chance discovery of a French traveller to the Arab world.

I've come to Paris to discover how a dusty Syrian manuscript became an overnight literary sensation.

It was translated by Antoine Galland,

a brilliant linguist and a great favourite of Louis XIV.

Antoine Galland was a prodigy from a poor background

who spoke Persian, Arabic, Turkish and Hebrew.

He went to look for manuscripts for Christian theology,

and he came back deeply admiring of the Middle East.

He translated the Koran.

He became the first great French Arabist and, in a way,

opened up the possibility of mutual respect.

The European West simply did not know that much about

western Asia, what we now refer to as the Middle East, at all.

And it was still an age of discovery on the part of Europe

when it came to both East and West.

Galland was about to revolutionise the West's view of the Arab World.

He started with a story about the amazing voyages

of a character called Sinbad and went on to translate dozens more.

I'm about to see the original manuscripts Galland translated,

now treasured in France's National Library.

Annie Vernay-Nouri is their curator.

-Annie, can we have a look at the books?

-Yes.

This is the three volumes of Galland.

This manuscript is from the 14th century.

So this paper is 14th Century?

Yes, because it is oriental paper and when we see this writing,

we can say that is an old writing of the 14th century.

So, the Arabic that's written here, is that the equivalent of Shakespeare in English?

No, it's not exactly the same.

-So you can read this?

-Yes, I can read this.

I think it's easier than Shakespeare,

because it's not a very good literature. It's an oral tradition.

-It's the language of the street?

-Yes, exactly.

Annie, can you tell me what the red writing is compared to the black?

We have a sort of title.

-So it's like a chapter heading?

-Yes. Just like the beginning of a chapter.

In the Nights, at the beginning of each Night,

you have always the same sentence which begins the tale, or story.

So is it the equivalent of fairy stories where it always begins, "Once upon a time..." ?

Yes, it's the same.

Galland's translations were a sensation with the ladies at court.

They gathered in salons - the book groups of their day - to relish and read aloud whatever was new.

One of the reasons they become popular so quickly is that they fit

very neatly with the already fashionable trend for reading fairy tales.

We mustn't forget that it is only in 1698, 1697 that French writers

like Perrault and Madame d'Aulnoy are publishing their fairy tales and it becomes fashionable

for women in Parisian salons to talk about fairy tales.

So in some ways Galland is extraordinarily fortunate in his timing.

Galland comes across and says, "Hey, I've got a whole new bunch of stories for you."

Not only that, as he says in his preface quite explicitly,

"These are better than anything that we've got."

They were a runaway success, quickly filtering down from court to ordinary readers.

Fans would congregate under Galland's window demanding more.

But how did he feed this appetite for the stories?

I am hoping writer Margaret Sironval has the answer.

He wasn't merely a translator, but a storyteller in his own right.

Having listened to the stories, Galland created his own embellished versions.

Among these were Aladdin and Ali Baba, some of our best-known tales in the West.

Was he the Dan Brown, Da Vinci Code of his age?

The Arabian Nights really was a literary epic, numbering 12 volumes

in as many years. Once the genie was out of the bottle

it couldn't be put back inside.

It's some irony that the most famous stories in the Nights

were either added or possibly invented by Galland himself.

An anonymous translation of Galland's book appeared in Britain in 1706,

two years after taking Paris by storm.

Called The Arabian Nights Entertainments, it amazed and astonished English readers.

What's really striking, I think, for a modern reader

and a modern audience is that this was affected by word of mouth.

It was simply people telling one another about it.

Readers were instantly captivated by an exotic new form of magic,

quite unlike anything they'd encountered before.

The magic in the Arabian Nights is rather different from the magic

in Western myths and fairy tales.

Cinderella doesn't fly.

Sleeping Beauty doesn't fly.

Red Riding Hood doesn't fly.

But all the heroes and heroines fly in the Nights.

All the delirious freedoms of transformation of illusion,

all the spectacular effects, you could find them in the Nights.

The book offered a rich portrait of an exotic East,

whose colours, clothes and perfumes fascinated British readers.

The fashion for the Nights as a text, as a narrative,

certainly whet the appetite and cultivated the fashion

for oriental, or what was perceived to be oriental, furniture and design.

It becomes popular to have your portrait painted in Oriental, or pseudo-Oriental, garb.

People turned Turk, donning turbans, wearing exotic clothes, draping themselves over divans and ottomans

and drinking mind-blowing amounts of caffeinated coffee.

They used Oriental fashions, Oriental ways of being, in order to have their pleasures,

from the dressing gowns that the aristocrats wore, to their slippers and their turbans.

It is, if you like, the phenomenon of the fancy dress ball.

You can have much more fun in fancy dress than you can in your own clothes.

But for some, it proved too much.

In 1711, the Earl of Shaftesbury denounced the Nights for causing

what he called, "the Desdemona tendency" among its female readers.

"The Nights excite in them a passion for a mysterious race

"of black enchanters, such as of old used to creep into houses,

"and lead captive silly women."

But the Earl could not stem the tide.

Dozens of cheap new versions of the Nights were appearing

and the individual stories of Sinbad, Ali Baba and Aladdin were readily available.

We feel we're going through a kind of information technology revolution right now

and being overloaded with information.

Very much the same kind of thing was happening in the 18th century -

a genuine revolution in printing technology and letters.

These chapbooks would have been available for sale not only in bookstores, but also

by traditional chapbook sellers, who would have their stalls on street corners.

Things were passed from hand to hand so often, and a single copy might

have been read by 40, 50 readers. We don't know how many.

AUDIENCE APPLAUSE

The Arabian Nights Entertainments was a great source of material for 18th-Century dramatists,

who mined them not only for their stories, but for their exoticism and their magic.

The first-ever recorded performance of Aladdin took place here in Drury Lane, in Covent Garden, in 1788,

the year before the French Revolution.

AUDIENCE "OOHS "AND "AAHS"

CHILDREN CHEER

The Theatre Royal launched Aladdin, where it quickly became one of Britain's best-loved pantos.

The core story, of a penniless young lawbreaker,

who wins a fortune and falls in love with a beautiful princess,

became the framework for some of the cheesiest gags and greatest stage characters ever devised.

Queen of them all? Widow Twankey.

-Grab hold of this washing for me. I'm going to hang it out.

-OK.

DRUM ROLL

LAUGHTER

That's what I call a spin dry.

You're playing Widow Twankey this Christmas?

Yes, this Christmas.

I'm basing mine on Elsie Tanner and her relationship with Dennis.

Remember her son?

She's all hands on hips and "Eh, Elsie, you're son's setting fast."

She's always skint, so she's the ideal role model for Twankey, Elsie Tanner.

"I've got this terrible life of destitution, all I do is wash and wash." All this nonsense.

"Our Aladdin, he's tagged,"

because our Aladdin's got a tag on and he's tweeting on his mobile.

So she's a modern mum, my Twankey.

See, you can mix all these elements together and get away with them.

Do you think that is how the stories have survived? As they've gone through the centuries,

-people have just localised them every time?

-Yeah, and panto's very contemporary, as well.

It has to be.

-Given the framework of the story and then you can just say anything?

-Then you hang things on it.

You've got this lovely skeleton and then you can go in

and embroider it yourself, to your heart's content.

What's your connection with Aladdin?

I first discovered Aladdin when I was about seven and somebody bought me, I think it was an auntie,

she bought me one of those Pollock's toy theatres, cut it all out, all the characters.

Well, I didn't cut it out, me dad did, because I wasn't trusted with a Stanley knife.

And they were all on little sticks. I remember the cave had a rock that rolled over the hole.

There was a script that came with it, that I learnt religiously, line for line for line.

Nobody around to watch this thing, just me.

I can still remember it, to this day.

I can still remember the villain's curse, when he put Aladdin in the cave,

which was, "Listen, Aladdin, this is your end, you are my foe and you are not my friend.

"May your life be full of strife, the princess will never be your wife.

"May all the fruit you eat turn sour, may you get hiccups every hour.

"May you find wet paint upon each seat, may you get corns upon your feet.

"Now my patience you've sorely tried, the cave is sealed with you inside."

Ayesha Dharker grew up with stories like this in India.

She recently played Scheherazade with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

The Nights introduces this idea of cunning, of living by your wits,

that you may not be the smartest and the prettiest and the brightest,

but that there are certain tools that you can use to survive, you can use stories to survive.

You don't have to be born beautiful, rich and powerful, all the things that...?

Well, the stories have rich, powerful, unbelievable things in them, too,

and also the fact that something is ordinary must never be taken for granted.

Very often, the most ordinary object, like the most ordinary lamp,

the ugliest, most dented, small, useless lamp,

will turn into a fortune that houses a genie that has been waiting for

thousands of years and is very angry at being stuck in this tiny thing.

Originally he would have granted you wishes, but now, because you've taken 100 years extra long,

he wants to kill you and has complete right to do so.

So, you know, the ordinary is a very dangerous term.

EVIL LAUGHTER

The magical reversals of fortune in the Nights captivated

the imagination of Charles Dickens and hugely influenced his writing.

Dickens encountered the stories when he was very young, about six, and characters, references

to the Nights, to individual stories, feature in almost every single novel that he wrote.

They're particularly prominent in the Christmas stories.

'Suddenly a man in foreign garments, wonderfully real and distinct to look at,

'stood outside the window, with an axe stuck in his belt and, leading by the bridle,

'an ass laden with wood. "Why, it's Ali Baba!"

'Scrooge exclaimed in ecstasy.

' "It's dear old honest Ali Baba." '

That's how magical the texts are for him,

that sense of dazzling possibility and excitement,

and he never lets it go, he's constantly fascinated by them.

The Victorians read the Arabian Nights avidly,

but its sexual content both seduced and scandalised them.

Arabist Edward Lane drastically censored his translation for the Victorian family.

Lane was the son of a clergyman.

He was a scholar, he spent time in Egypt, he knew his Arabic,

and he knew what he was doing, but, apparently, he didn't read

all that much in English, apart from the Bible, so when it comes to

translating the Nights, if you look at Lane's version now, it's very archaic. He's a bit prurient,

so he cuts them, he omits anything of an explicitly sexual nature

or anything that would be in any way possibly indecent, indecorous.

He's a bit of a prude.

Many children's versions were published around this time.

They drew heavily on Lane's sanitised translation of the Arabian Nights.

It's very paradoxical the book was adapted for children, because it's probably one of the greatest studies

of sexual desire that has been written, certainly written at that stage.

That is one of the reasons why the book appealed to 18th-century readers in the first place

and was then cleaned up by the Victorians, because they didn't like that side of it.

After all that the stories have gone through in the West, I want to know

if they are still causing trouble where they came from.

I'm taking a magic carpet ride back to Cairo to find out.

As one of the characters in the Nights declares,

"Whoever has not seen Cairo, has not seen the world.

"Its soil is gold, its river is a wonder, its women are houris,

"its houses are palaces, its climate is mild and its scent is sweeter than frankincense."

Today, Cairo is a sprawling megacity of around 20 million people,

almost suffocating under the weight of its own traffic.

'These traders are the descendants of the merchants in the Nights.

'I'm wondering what these stories can mean to them now.'

-Hi.

-Hello, welcome.

You made everything that's in here?

-Everything is handmade.

-Can I see?

I would like you to see this masterpiece and the new design also.

All handmade. I have more bigger than that one.

-Can I see that?

-Yeah, please.

'Tariq Fattoh is at least the fifth generation to work in his family textile business.

'He's currently creating his own version of the Arabian Nights stories.'

This is new building, but the same idea from the souk.

How old were you when you started making tapestries?

-Six years.

-Six years old?

So you didn't want to be a doctor?

-I am lawyer.

-A lawyer?

So you're a lawyer and a tapestry maker?

I like you see that one. This is a special purchase.

But I have one more better than that one, but all handmade.

-So this is your interpretation of the 1,001 Arabian Nights?

-Yeah.

So where is Scheherazade on the picture?

Scheherazade... Here. But not finished, but I have the....

-Oh, she's here.

-Yeah.

I have the design here.

So, I'm intrigued.

Are you allowed to have her shown without any clothes on?

Yeah, you see exactly from the television, from the book, from everything, exactly like that.

Wow.

So the whole of the Arabian Nights stories, all the myths and legends,

are encompassed in this one picture here.

You start off with the genie monster up here.

And open the box,

makes the dream come true.

And then, you move down. Is it Ali Baba?

And here's the magic flying horse, the prince on it.

And over here, the king, inside his castle.

And this is the slave, having sex with the princess.

So you could say that the beginning and the end of the story of the Arabian Nights is all to do with sex

and adultery and I certainly didn't think this when I read these stories when I was ten years old. Did you?

Scheherazade's frame story is about adultery and betrayal.

But there's also a lighter, funnier side to sex in the Nights,

which has been cut out from our favourite children's versions.

There are stories for a sophisticated audience, who relished sensuality.

In the story of the porter and the three ladies, there's a list of all the luxuries and pleasures available

to the very rich, which include "quinces, Amani peaches,

"jasmine and water lilies from Syria, autumn cucumbers, lemons, Sultani oranges,

"scented myrtle, privet flowers, camomile blossoms,

"violets, red anemones, pomegranate blooms and eglantine."

And that's just for starters.

'So Scheherazade began.

'I heard a porter was accosted by a veiled beauty in the market one day.

"Take your basket and follow me," she said.'

The porter had to stop at all the stalls.

Now, Arab readers would have realised that this was a woman of enormous wealth and exquisite taste

and that she was preparing a banquet to pamper all the senses

and inviting the porter and us the readers along with it into her intoxicating world.

'Laden with spices, fruits, sweetmeats and perfumes, he followed her to her door.

'Once inside, he was delighted to meet her two beautiful sisters

'and was soon intoxicated by the carousing and feasting that followed.

'As all four plunged into the pool, kissing and biting,

'cuffing and slapping, he feels he is seated amongst the houris of paradise.

'When there was a sudden knock at the door, how could he have known what dark magic would be revealed?'

The Porter and the Ladies of Baghdad has a wonderfully comic scene,

a marvellous scene of erotical display,

in which, they name with a very beautiful series of words, each other's private parts.

That's one of the reasons why the Arabian Nights was condemned and criticised -

there's too much drinking, there's too much sex,

there's too much frivolity, there's too much immoral reward.

You're not being rewarded for being good, you're being rewarded for being lucky

and that's, you know, really against all religious thinking and teaching.

So the book is considered an immoral book.

ISLAMIC CALL TO PRAYER

Until recently it's been hard to get hold of a complete version of the Arabian Nights in Egypt.

When the book was reprinted in paperback earlier this year, one religious group

called for it to be banned as an immoral and un-Islamic text.

Gamal al Ghitani has received death threats from extremists for publishing a new edition.

Why did they want to ban it?

Soon after I arrived in Cairo, the Egyptian Attorney General rejected the call for a ban on the book.

He ruled that the 1,001 Nights is one of humanity's greatest treasures.

We have prayers starting.

That's wonderful, because that's precisely when Scheherazade

stopped telling her story.

That was the pretext

to stop - at dawn.

Samia, what specifically did the clerics object to in the books?

They piled up many objections,

but I think that,

among them the fact that

some of the stories are sexually explicit,

but also they went so far as to accuse the text,

as whole, of being in contempt of religion.

So do you feel that the Nights have been hijacked, to fulfil

a religious edict, rather than what they are actually dealing with?

It's not even a religious edict. It's more political, in the sense that it's a game between the state

and these conservatives and they have always used culture, which is the soft spot

to embarrass the state into that position of immorality.

So the Nights have become part of a wider struggle

between conservative and progressive forces in the Arab world.

As editor of a fashion magazine, Yasmine Shihata has experienced this struggle first hand.

You began the first women's magazine ten years ago

and you now have 120 issues or stories, which are the stories of contemporary Egyptian women.

Do you see a parallel that you are fighting the same battle

against prejudice to be accepted, like Scheherazade was?

Um, yes, I think, in many ways,

I do relate to her, because these very. kind of,

black and white attitudes about things, they still exist.

You know, how the king has this experience and suddenly all women are not to be trusted.

You do see this attitude still in the Middle East, a lot of lumping of stereotypes about women, about what

is correct or what should be done and what shouldn't be done,

what society expects. These are big things that hang over everybody here.

Do you think that the image created by the 1,001 nights has given

a false impression to the West of what the Middle East is really like?

For a lot of people in the world, even for us in the Middle East, this is the fantasy version

of the Middle East. The real day-to-day life is tough.

That is why people are very religious, very conservative. A lot of it is tradition.

If you look at a lot of the way young veiled women dress now,

you can tell they want to be fashionable, they want to stand out,

so they wear very colourful clothing - yes, they are covered - but they are wearing tight...

-We saw that in the park yesterday.

-They wear a lot of accessories, a lot of jewellery and make-up,

so the whole idea of being veiled to blend in and to not stand out

and to not attract male attention, which is really the origin of it,

is completely irrelevant, because in some cases, by being veiled now they attract more attention.

For centuries, the Nights was the West's main window

onto the Arab world, shaping and even distorting our views of the people who live here.

I'm sure that's not what Galland intended when he first translated these fabulous stories.

The view that people have in the West,

that the 1,001 Nights have exoticised or orientalised

Arab life, do you think that has been positive

or negative...or fantastical?

I think fantastical. I mean, you're here in Cairo now and you can well see

that the Nights and its vision of what Oriental people are like

has very little to do with what you actually see on the streets, besides the architecture, I mean.

But the great themes in the book, of seven deadly sins, lust and debauchery and faithfulness

and fidelity and treason, and all of these things that do go on in life for evermore,

as soon as you have got human beings anywhere, they are all encapsulated in these stories.

And, therefore, they're universal stories.

And they say not necessarily much about us as...

-Any more than Hans Christian Andersen or..

-Right, exactly...

-..or the Grimm's fairy tales tells us about Europe?

-Precisely.

They're fables.

Yep, but very wise ones,

in the sense that they tell us about

ourselves as human beings everywhere, all the time, no matter when.

I've discovered the 1,001 Nights are still relevant in the modern Arab world.

But can they help connect the East to us now in the West?

'I'm visiting an inspiring project in inner-city Paris, set up by Nafissa Lamotte.'

Do you think these stories are still relevant for children to understand?

-Do they still respond to them?

-Oui.

That's very interesting, because it began as an oral tradition and now

the oral tradition is keeping their culture alive again, via the spoken word.

-When you were a little girl?

-Yes.

-Moi aussi.

I know the Arabian Nights are part of popular culture in the West, but I never expected to find such

passion for them here in a tiny room in a Parisian suburb where, they are clearly alive well and kicking.

'So Scheherazade said,

'I heard that a poor merchant called Sinbad, who'd lost all his money,

'set out to sail the seven seas and regain his fortune.'

I feel rather like Sinbad, voyaging through this shared ocean of stories

and discovering richer worlds than I ever could have imagined.

For centuries in the East and the West,

the stories have fed our hunger for entertainment, magic and hope.

And it's because they continue to speak to us that I'm sure they'll never be suppressed.

They are as irrepressible as the human imagination itself.

'And leaving the island for the last time,

'Sinbad boarded his boat and sailed on...'

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