The Arabian Nights (Historical Context)

Historical Context

Translation Of the Arabian Nights

Sir Richard Burton's The Arabian Nights was an immediate hit upon its publication in 1885. Based on the 1881 translation by John Payne, Burton's work not only fed the growing demand of English readers for tales and images from the Oriental reaches of their empire, but its comparatively frank sexual references, its bawdiness, and its wild adventures also spoke to, as much as it shocked, the repressed prurient interests of its Victorian readership.

While Burton's translation of the actual tales was nothing more than a slightly revised version of Payne's, his ten-volume collection included copious notes on the histories of the stories, etymologies of Arabic phrases, and explanations of various Arabic customs and conventions. Of particular interest to his readers were his extensive notes on sexual allusions and references, a subject in which Burton had acquired a great deal of interest and expertise from his years of travel and study in the region.

Sexual practices had long been a part of Burton's cultural and anthropological studies. While he was on military commission in India for the East India Company before his career as an explorer or writer began, he undertook a study, on the request of his superior Sir Charles Napier, of the homosexual brothels in Karachi. Burton's clinical and graphic work fell into unsympathetic hands after Napier's retirement, and as a result Burton's military career was permanently damaged. Nevertheless, the experience set the tone for nearly all of Burton's future expeditions and writings. Sexual practices continued to be the focal point of much of his career, so much so that upon his death, his wife burned several of his translation manuscripts because of their explicit erotic content.

Burton was well aware of the impact the sexual content of his work would have, and out of fear of prosecution under British obscenity laws, he published The Arabian Nights anonymously under his private imprint, the Kama Shastra Society, which he founded with F. F. Arbuthnot in order to produce joint, but anonymous, translations of several Indian sexual manuals, including the famous Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana.

In his preface to that work, Burton wrote, in anticipation of the furor that would arise surrounding the sexual explicitness, that his mission was to publish a "full, complete, unvarnished, uncastrated copy of the great original." The success of Burton's endeavors only proved the hypocrisy of Victorian society. While the society exuded an air of prudish indifference, nineteenth-century readers had in truth a keen interest in the subject, a point certainly proven by the first printing's immediately selling out and making Burton his first profit as a writer.

The popularity of Burton's tales can also be attributed to Britain's growing interest in Islamic and Middle Eastern culture. At the time of Burton's publication, Great Britain ruled the entire Indian subcontinent, including Afghanistan, and held sovereignty over Egypt and much of northern Africa — all areas containing large Muslim populations.

The Arabian Nights, like many of Burton's travelogues, effectively became a window to the Islamic and Arabic culture, providing understanding of which the British, as an imperial presence, were otherwise seriously lacking. Burton stressed the need for British education in the Oriental culture in his introduction: "England is at present the greatest Mohammedan empire in the world. her crass ignorance concerning the Oriental people which should most interest her, exposes her to the contempt of Europe as well as of the Eastern world." His concern, however, with teaching the English the ways of the Orient was strictly for the success of British imperialism. He continues: "He who would deal with [Muslims] successfully must be favourably inclined to their manners and customs if not to their law and religion." This statement reveals that Burton, although committed to the examination of other cultures, was at heart, like most of his countrymen, an imperialist, believing that, although there was worth in other cultures, British rule and conquest was completely justified by British cultural and racial superiority.

However, while modern scholarship criticized the many inaccuracies and cultural and racial prejudices in Burton's studies and beliefs, it must be remembered that his work was groundbreaking for its time, both for its treatment of sexual content and for its anthropological and linguistic notations. While his Arabian Nights was not the first European or even the first English translation of the tales, it was without a doubt the translation that put the collection on the literary map in the west and opened European doors to the vast influences of Arabic culture.

Arabic History

Most of the tales of The Arabian Nights are obviously fictional; however, several historical figures appear throughout, which may indicate a historical basis for some of the tales. For example, the name Abbaside khalif Haroun er Reshid, also known as "Aaron the Orthodox," appears frequently in the text, leading some scholars to believe that the tales may have originated in his courts.

Arabic Social Classes

The characters of the Arabian Nights are defined by their social classes and include slaves, prostitutes, mendicants, merchants, the upper class, Princes, Kings. The clear definition and delineation of the characters' classes is indicative of the social structure of the medieval Arabic society in which the tales originated.

Compare & Contrast

• Middle Ages: As portrayed in The Arabian Nights, women are regarded largely as property: a woman who is unfaithful to her husband can lawfully be executed. Single women who exercise sexual freedom are designated to a separate, lower class from married women.

  Today: In many parts of the world, the inequality and mistreatment of women is still a major problem. However, due to women's rights movements working from the late nineteenth century onward, in Western society in the early 2000s women have the same legal rights as men and can exercise both economic and sexual freedom and independence.

• Late Nineteenth Century: Burton's translation of The Arabian Nights includes copious anthropological notes that, in many cases, reveal an attitude of cultural and racial superiority, reflecting an institutionalized racism that is an inherent part of the British Empire.

  Today: Prejudice between races is still a problem; however, by and large the governments of Western society have removed institutionalized racism from their laws and have created domestic policies such as affirmative action in an attempt to reverse the damages of racist policy.

• Late Nineteenth Century: Victorian society is scandalized by the frank sexual content of Burton's translation and annotations of The Arabian Nights.

  Today: Looser sexual mores allow for frank discussion of sexuality to figure as a significant theme of twenty-first-century modes of entertainment, including television shows, movies, popular music, and books.

• Late Nineteenth Century: Although Oriental studies programs have become a part of most major European universities, there is widespread general ignorance of Arabic literature and culture. Aside from the few major works, most Arabic writing is untranslated and therefore not known to the Western world, and little is known about other Arabic art forms.

  Today: Although cultural ignorance of the Arabic world is still a problem in the West, many major Arabic works are translated, and many contemporary Arabic writers are also translated and published in the West. Additionally, Middle Eastern films are distributed widely and help spread Arabic culture into the west.