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The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night; Volume 3 of 4
This great classic of world literature is familiar to most readers through the tales of the Arabian Nights--Scheherazade, Sinbad, Harun al-Rashid, Aladdin, Ali Babba and the Forty Thieves. This translation, the only complete and accurate one in English, presents an unexpurgated version of these famous stories. Wonderfully readable, they tells of a world of magical beauty, of the East and its enchantments, and of an art of living which was the product of one of the world's great civilizations.
576 pages, Paperback
Published September 4, 1986
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* They are officially published under that name
* They are traditional stories not attributed to a specific author
* They are religious texts not generally attributed to a specific author
Books whose authorship is merely uncertain should be attributed to Unknown.
See also: Anonymous
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
November 5, 2017
Onto the third volume of The Thousand Nights and One Night. As ever the stories are a mixture of romance, fantasy, eroticism and ribaldry. Humans are helped or threatened by Jinnis, magic carpets are flown, an extraordinary number of people turn yellow, and ugly husbands spend their wedding nights with their heads stuffed down a privy.
The morals outlined in The Thousand Nights and One Night are somewhat unclear. It is not that the tales are lacking in morality. Plenty of the stories express moral opinions, and wrong-doers are punished, sometimes in barbarous ways where the punishment seems worse than the crime.
However the morality is inconsistent, reflecting the fact that the stories are the work of a number of writers. There are stories here in which murder is trivialised, theft and petty crimes are glorified, and marital infidelity is celebrated.
The latter point is surprising. There are considerably more comic tales about wives cheating on their husbands in this volume than there were in previous ones. Lest we forget, the stories are being related by Shahrazad to distract her husband, King Shahryar, who executed all his previous wives on their wedding night to prevent them from being unfaithful, as his first wife was.
It therefore seems tactless to harp on about other wives’ infidelities to this tyrant. Yet Shahryar is strangely silent during these tales. Only once does he complain about the number of cheating wives who go unpunished, and this does not prevent Shahrazad from telling more stories of the same nature.
In The Thousand Nights and One Night, marital betrayal is sometimes portrayed as a terrible thing, but it appears to be acceptable and amusing if the husband is old, ugly or too complacent about his wife.
The morals of the characters in the stories are underpinned by the Qu’ran, but even this is an uncertain guide. Characters are forever evoking Allah, no matter how absurd or immoral their justification. A husband and wife make a wager on the Qu’ran – so much for the prohibition on gambling. In one of the more preposterous passages, a Christian woman converts to Islam because her Muslim lover is so good in bed.
For those who believe that Islam is a religion of peace and that only extremists think otherwise, then I’m afraid this volume will offer you no relief. The language used to describe other religions is bigoted and violent throughout. Jews are condemned for not covering their wives when they have guests. Hindu icons of worship should be smashed. Understandably the worst ire is saved for Christians. They are described as perverts, and one of the stories is laced with constant curses against them, and invocations to war with them.
The other point of interest in this volume is that it contains the story of Aladdin. Aladdin gains access to a lamp and also a ring, both of which contain Jinnis, and he uses these to become rich and overcome his wicked ‘uncle’ The story is free for the main part of the usual gratuitous sexual scenes, which may explain why it has more easily found its way into juvenile fiction.
The stories in Volume 3 are often repetitive, and we have seen strands of them in the earlier volumes. However they are amusing and entertaining, and allow the reader to be transported into a pleasing world of fantasy for a few hours.
The morals outlined in The Thousand Nights and One Night are somewhat unclear. It is not that the tales are lacking in morality. Plenty of the stories express moral opinions, and wrong-doers are punished, sometimes in barbarous ways where the punishment seems worse than the crime.
However the morality is inconsistent, reflecting the fact that the stories are the work of a number of writers. There are stories here in which murder is trivialised, theft and petty crimes are glorified, and marital infidelity is celebrated.
The latter point is surprising. There are considerably more comic tales about wives cheating on their husbands in this volume than there were in previous ones. Lest we forget, the stories are being related by Shahrazad to distract her husband, King Shahryar, who executed all his previous wives on their wedding night to prevent them from being unfaithful, as his first wife was.
It therefore seems tactless to harp on about other wives’ infidelities to this tyrant. Yet Shahryar is strangely silent during these tales. Only once does he complain about the number of cheating wives who go unpunished, and this does not prevent Shahrazad from telling more stories of the same nature.
In The Thousand Nights and One Night, marital betrayal is sometimes portrayed as a terrible thing, but it appears to be acceptable and amusing if the husband is old, ugly or too complacent about his wife.
The morals of the characters in the stories are underpinned by the Qu’ran, but even this is an uncertain guide. Characters are forever evoking Allah, no matter how absurd or immoral their justification. A husband and wife make a wager on the Qu’ran – so much for the prohibition on gambling. In one of the more preposterous passages, a Christian woman converts to Islam because her Muslim lover is so good in bed.
For those who believe that Islam is a religion of peace and that only extremists think otherwise, then I’m afraid this volume will offer you no relief. The language used to describe other religions is bigoted and violent throughout. Jews are condemned for not covering their wives when they have guests. Hindu icons of worship should be smashed. Understandably the worst ire is saved for Christians. They are described as perverts, and one of the stories is laced with constant curses against them, and invocations to war with them.
The other point of interest in this volume is that it contains the story of Aladdin. Aladdin gains access to a lamp and also a ring, both of which contain Jinnis, and he uses these to become rich and overcome his wicked ‘uncle’ The story is free for the main part of the usual gratuitous sexual scenes, which may explain why it has more easily found its way into juvenile fiction.
The stories in Volume 3 are often repetitive, and we have seen strands of them in the earlier volumes. However they are amusing and entertaining, and allow the reader to be transported into a pleasing world of fantasy for a few hours.
June 28, 2020
Reading Vol 3 was my task for June and I finished it today. (I'll be doing Vol 4 in August).
To be honest I'm getting a bit bored of it now, the stories are getting repetitive - fabulous jewels, sumptuous banquets, multiple ways of doing sexual relations, extremely poor people being raised up and vice versa, etc, bridegrooms having their heads shoved down the privy while the brides' lovers do the duties.
The Aladdin and the Lamp story is in this volume (but without Widow Twanky or 'Wishee Washee').
The last 100 pages (570 in the book) did include some short and funny stories so they were ok.
If I were the king, I think I'd be about ready to chop off Shahrazad's head by now!
Just a reminder: these are absolutely not suitable for kids. Definitely NOT the very santitized stories you read as a child.
To be honest I'm getting a bit bored of it now, the stories are getting repetitive - fabulous jewels, sumptuous banquets, multiple ways of doing sexual relations, extremely poor people being raised up and vice versa, etc, bridegrooms having their heads shoved down the privy while the brides' lovers do the duties.
The Aladdin and the Lamp story is in this volume (but without Widow Twanky or 'Wishee Washee').
The last 100 pages (570 in the book) did include some short and funny stories so they were ok.
If I were the king, I think I'd be about ready to chop off Shahrazad's head by now!
Just a reminder: these are absolutely not suitable for kids. Definitely NOT the very santitized stories you read as a child.
September 8, 2026
Are fishermen rude?
There are a lot of stories featuring rude fishermen in this third volume of The Thousand Nights and One Night.
We have Abdullah, the fisherman who catches a merman (also called Abdullah), rather like the fisherman who caught a genie in the first volume. Abdullah is the politest of the fishermen and maintains a good relationship with the merman, and a good relationship with those around him. His local baker, another Abdullah, trusts him so much that he lets the fisherman have bread on credit - though I have noticed that bakers in these stories are far kinder than millers in European tales. Abdullah eventually goes into the underwater world for a little explore. These people with fish tails find him extraordinary because “never in their lives had they seen a bottom, or anything that looked like a bottom’. He ends up feeling extremely self-conscious and breaks off ties with the merman.
Another fisherman, Khalifah, is extraordinarily rude to everyone. He pushes people out the way, frequently threatens to bugger them and is generally brusque and rough. He’s even rude to Haroun Al-Rashid, and Al-Rashid isn’t even in his usual merchant disguise, he’s fully dressed in his royal finery but Khalifah gets him doing chores and threatens him when he’s too slow. In some stories this may mean beheading or a spike up the arse, but Al-Rashid finds it hilarious and blesses the rude fisherman with riches.
There’s another fisherman in ‘The Diwan of Easy Jests’, an interlocked set of silly tales. This fisherman is a pot-head with a keen sense of the absurd. He tells a number of stories, many of them involving the religious arbitrators, the kadi, and donkeys. He is then given the job of wazir, where he enacts skewed pot-head justice through the kingdom.
This volume has two mer-people tales, as the one following Abdullah is a story of a king marrying a mermaid and his son sparking a full on mer-war. You know that Samandal is an evil mer-king because he laughs evily till he farts and has ‘prodigious’ testicles that hang to his knees. His daughter has a bottom splendid enough to merit a whole paragraph.
‘The Tale of Hasan of Basrah’ has an impressive build-up, with a whole frame story dedicated to a quest to find the last and greatest story never heard, and Hasan’s being the result. He’s tricked out of his house by an evil Persian sorcerer and taken by a winged horse to the top of a mountain. He immediately pushes the sorcerer off the mountain, job’s a good ‘un. Naturally he finds a golden palace full of beautiful spirits. He finds a secret door that leads to another palace with even more beautiful women who are birds when they wear feathered cloaks. Rather like a typical selkie myth, he hides the cloak. Also inevitably, she gets it back, so he goes on a desperate quest to win her back. The element I most enjoyed in this story was the woman who loved him but helped him win the selkie-woman because of her love for him. It’s a trope in one of the earlier stories and it’s one I appreciate. What’s most interesting about this story is that it is written differently to many of the other tales, with more addresses to the reader and self consciously luscious writing.
A number of the stories in this volume were more self-consciously muslim. While most of the stories call on Allah and assert Muhammad as his prophet, a number of these tales were more emphatically didactic. ‘The Tale of Young Nur and the Warrior Girl’ was the most bloodily emphatic. The warrior girl was a princess of Constantinople and so a heathen Christian but she converts to Islam because of the quality of Nur’s kindness and love-making. When she is captured and taken back to Christendom, she is baptised in the blood in one hundred muslim men. Of course Nur follows her and they meet in a church where he is hiding as a monk. They have sex in the church, described as “the holiest act in that dark place” and the reader is exhorted to “be ever preserved from chastity, that impure thing.” From the perspective of the tale, a monk’s devotion to chastity is one of his most irredeemable qualities.
Sex appears in many of the tales, but is most interestingly described in ‘The Tale of Kamar and Halimah, the Expert’, where she teaches him the grammar, verbs and nouns of sex and they perform “the battle of legs and thighs” where his “pilgrim’s stick tapped many times down the road that night”. There have been numerous times across the volumes where characters have been proud of the proverb that no muslim woman will die a virgin. In some ways this is expressed as a proud enjoyment of Allah’s gifts but it does lead to a lot of 13 year old ‘women’ being described as ‘ripe’ and that remains queasy no matter how many times it pops up. (Another proverb that popped up was “A camel boy never achieves pilgrimage until he has buggered his camel” - no idea what that one is supposed to mean.)
“The Tale of the Sleeper Wakened” has Haroun Al-Rashid in his habitual disguise and meeting a man who will only have people round for dinner and acknowledge them once because they disappoint him on further meetings. He decides to have fun with the man, drugs him, takes him to the palace and gets everyone to act like he’s the ruler. Then he drugs him and takes him back. Understandably, this makes the man go insane for a while and Al-Rashid feels bad about it and sets him up for life.
Finally, this is the volume with Aladdin in it, or Ali Al-Din. He actually has two genies in this story, one in a ring and one on the lamp. This is very handy for when one of his genies is out of commission. He also has all the wishes he requires and no magic carpet - that’s actually in a separate tale. This story was actually a little hacked up in my copy, with some of the story missing and some of it printed twice - it was actually handy that this tale is one I already knew.
After over 1,700 pages of tales, (not counting the other books of tales I’ve read this year), I’m not getting tale-fatigue but I am getting tale-overload. I’m having to rely on my notes more to extract individual tales as they have become a thick, steaming, aromatic soup of stories in my head. I have another 500-odd pages to go, so I expect the soup to become even thicker.
There are a lot of stories featuring rude fishermen in this third volume of The Thousand Nights and One Night.
We have Abdullah, the fisherman who catches a merman (also called Abdullah), rather like the fisherman who caught a genie in the first volume. Abdullah is the politest of the fishermen and maintains a good relationship with the merman, and a good relationship with those around him. His local baker, another Abdullah, trusts him so much that he lets the fisherman have bread on credit - though I have noticed that bakers in these stories are far kinder than millers in European tales. Abdullah eventually goes into the underwater world for a little explore. These people with fish tails find him extraordinary because “never in their lives had they seen a bottom, or anything that looked like a bottom’. He ends up feeling extremely self-conscious and breaks off ties with the merman.
Another fisherman, Khalifah, is extraordinarily rude to everyone. He pushes people out the way, frequently threatens to bugger them and is generally brusque and rough. He’s even rude to Haroun Al-Rashid, and Al-Rashid isn’t even in his usual merchant disguise, he’s fully dressed in his royal finery but Khalifah gets him doing chores and threatens him when he’s too slow. In some stories this may mean beheading or a spike up the arse, but Al-Rashid finds it hilarious and blesses the rude fisherman with riches.
There’s another fisherman in ‘The Diwan of Easy Jests’, an interlocked set of silly tales. This fisherman is a pot-head with a keen sense of the absurd. He tells a number of stories, many of them involving the religious arbitrators, the kadi, and donkeys. He is then given the job of wazir, where he enacts skewed pot-head justice through the kingdom.
This volume has two mer-people tales, as the one following Abdullah is a story of a king marrying a mermaid and his son sparking a full on mer-war. You know that Samandal is an evil mer-king because he laughs evily till he farts and has ‘prodigious’ testicles that hang to his knees. His daughter has a bottom splendid enough to merit a whole paragraph.
‘The Tale of Hasan of Basrah’ has an impressive build-up, with a whole frame story dedicated to a quest to find the last and greatest story never heard, and Hasan’s being the result. He’s tricked out of his house by an evil Persian sorcerer and taken by a winged horse to the top of a mountain. He immediately pushes the sorcerer off the mountain, job’s a good ‘un. Naturally he finds a golden palace full of beautiful spirits. He finds a secret door that leads to another palace with even more beautiful women who are birds when they wear feathered cloaks. Rather like a typical selkie myth, he hides the cloak. Also inevitably, she gets it back, so he goes on a desperate quest to win her back. The element I most enjoyed in this story was the woman who loved him but helped him win the selkie-woman because of her love for him. It’s a trope in one of the earlier stories and it’s one I appreciate. What’s most interesting about this story is that it is written differently to many of the other tales, with more addresses to the reader and self consciously luscious writing.
A number of the stories in this volume were more self-consciously muslim. While most of the stories call on Allah and assert Muhammad as his prophet, a number of these tales were more emphatically didactic. ‘The Tale of Young Nur and the Warrior Girl’ was the most bloodily emphatic. The warrior girl was a princess of Constantinople and so a heathen Christian but she converts to Islam because of the quality of Nur’s kindness and love-making. When she is captured and taken back to Christendom, she is baptised in the blood in one hundred muslim men. Of course Nur follows her and they meet in a church where he is hiding as a monk. They have sex in the church, described as “the holiest act in that dark place” and the reader is exhorted to “be ever preserved from chastity, that impure thing.” From the perspective of the tale, a monk’s devotion to chastity is one of his most irredeemable qualities.
Sex appears in many of the tales, but is most interestingly described in ‘The Tale of Kamar and Halimah, the Expert’, where she teaches him the grammar, verbs and nouns of sex and they perform “the battle of legs and thighs” where his “pilgrim’s stick tapped many times down the road that night”. There have been numerous times across the volumes where characters have been proud of the proverb that no muslim woman will die a virgin. In some ways this is expressed as a proud enjoyment of Allah’s gifts but it does lead to a lot of 13 year old ‘women’ being described as ‘ripe’ and that remains queasy no matter how many times it pops up. (Another proverb that popped up was “A camel boy never achieves pilgrimage until he has buggered his camel” - no idea what that one is supposed to mean.)
“The Tale of the Sleeper Wakened” has Haroun Al-Rashid in his habitual disguise and meeting a man who will only have people round for dinner and acknowledge them once because they disappoint him on further meetings. He decides to have fun with the man, drugs him, takes him to the palace and gets everyone to act like he’s the ruler. Then he drugs him and takes him back. Understandably, this makes the man go insane for a while and Al-Rashid feels bad about it and sets him up for life.
Finally, this is the volume with Aladdin in it, or Ali Al-Din. He actually has two genies in this story, one in a ring and one on the lamp. This is very handy for when one of his genies is out of commission. He also has all the wishes he requires and no magic carpet - that’s actually in a separate tale. This story was actually a little hacked up in my copy, with some of the story missing and some of it printed twice - it was actually handy that this tale is one I already knew.
After over 1,700 pages of tales, (not counting the other books of tales I’ve read this year), I’m not getting tale-fatigue but I am getting tale-overload. I’m having to rely on my notes more to extract individual tales as they have become a thick, steaming, aromatic soup of stories in my head. I have another 500-odd pages to go, so I expect the soup to become even thicker.
March 24, 2025
This is the third volume in Mardrus and Mathers' translation of "The Book of the Thousand and One Nights". I liked it more than the two previous entries, as it contains some of the most famous stories – in particular, "Ala al-Din and the Wonderful Lamp" appears in this book, and what a great tale it is!
Other classic stories collected in this volume include "Land Abdallah and Sea Abdallah", "The Sleeper Wakened", and a few less-known but equally good ones like "Farizad of the Rose's Smile", "The Adventures of Hasan of Basrah" and "The Keys of Destiny".
In a different category, there's also a bunch of hilarious stories including "Khalifah the Fisherman", and several "Anecdotes", "Diwans", "Recitals" and "Parables" which are short tales that provide a much welcome comedy relief.
The same issues with the previous books still apply: lots of racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Christian and anti-Semitic material, it's definitely a hard read in modern times. And also lots of typos and formatting issues, in one case two pages appeared switched in the wrong order.
All problems aside, this book is a superb read for admirers of fantasy, and the exotic flavor of the stories adds a lot to the enjoyment. I'm looking forward for the final volume in this edition, only 187 nights remain.
Other classic stories collected in this volume include "Land Abdallah and Sea Abdallah", "The Sleeper Wakened", and a few less-known but equally good ones like "Farizad of the Rose's Smile", "The Adventures of Hasan of Basrah" and "The Keys of Destiny".
In a different category, there's also a bunch of hilarious stories including "Khalifah the Fisherman", and several "Anecdotes", "Diwans", "Recitals" and "Parables" which are short tales that provide a much welcome comedy relief.
The same issues with the previous books still apply: lots of racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Christian and anti-Semitic material, it's definitely a hard read in modern times. And also lots of typos and formatting issues, in one case two pages appeared switched in the wrong order.
All problems aside, this book is a superb read for admirers of fantasy, and the exotic flavor of the stories adds a lot to the enjoyment. I'm looking forward for the final volume in this edition, only 187 nights remain.
August 19, 2022
It took me a while to get through this volume as I was reading a lot of other books at the same time.
Of course one of the perks of this huge narrative is that there are lots of places to pause, either at the end of one of the stories or when Scheherezade (Shahrazad) takes a break at the end of each night.
Among the many tales in this volume is the well-known "Aladdin", entitled here as "The Tale Of Ala Al-Din and The Wonderful Lamp". Which differs quite a bit from the watered-down, Disneyfied version that most of us are familiar with.
Great stuff, though I may take a short break before I start the final book.
Of course one of the perks of this huge narrative is that there are lots of places to pause, either at the end of one of the stories or when Scheherezade (Shahrazad) takes a break at the end of each night.
Among the many tales in this volume is the well-known "Aladdin", entitled here as "The Tale Of Ala Al-Din and The Wonderful Lamp". Which differs quite a bit from the watered-down, Disneyfied version that most of us are familiar with.
Great stuff, though I may take a short break before I start the final book.
March 5, 2013
It's been taking me a ridiculous amount of time to get through all four volumes of the Book..., so it's going to be difficult to compare this to the last one (which I read more than a decade ago). In fact, I'm not even going to try.
This volume contains the usual range from intolerable to magical, with a liberal dose of tales (effectively) set in Egypt, as well as the famous story of Ala al-Din (a.k.a Aladdin) and the magic lamp (set in China...in as much as any of these stories are 'set' where they say they are). My personal least-favourite is 'The Loves of Zain al-Mawasif,' solely for its overuse of verse and song. 'The Strange Tale of the Mirror of Virgins,' on the other end of the spectrum, is practically a perfect example of the stories throughout the Thousand Nights; it has magic, secret rooms, humour and just enough sex to keep adults interested.
In as much as I don't really remember the first two volumes, this is as good a place as any to start reading them: a good, solid collection of (mostly) thoroughly enjoyable stories.
This volume contains the usual range from intolerable to magical, with a liberal dose of tales (effectively) set in Egypt, as well as the famous story of Ala al-Din (a.k.a Aladdin) and the magic lamp (set in China...in as much as any of these stories are 'set' where they say they are). My personal least-favourite is 'The Loves of Zain al-Mawasif,' solely for its overuse of verse and song. 'The Strange Tale of the Mirror of Virgins,' on the other end of the spectrum, is practically a perfect example of the stories throughout the Thousand Nights; it has magic, secret rooms, humour and just enough sex to keep adults interested.
In as much as I don't really remember the first two volumes, this is as good a place as any to start reading them: a good, solid collection of (mostly) thoroughly enjoyable stories.
May 17, 2012
Definitely a thousand stories in one book. Some parts I caught myself reading but not paying attention. I think I'm just not that much of a classics girl.
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