Underworlds and Otherworlds in The Thousand and One Nights

Abstract

While concepts of utopia and dystopia are foreign to the world of The Thousand and One Nights, there are nonetheless several tales that portray a world or universe fashioned in a manner that shares some similarities with utopian ideals; that is, an all-encompassing vision of perfect coherence and order. The story of ‘[Hdot]āsib Karīm al-dīn and the Queen of the Serpents,’ along with its enframed stories of ‘Bulūqiyā’ and ‘Jānshāh,’ and the story of ‘The City of Brass’ contain Islamized versions of a widely-diffused literary topos: the descent to the underworld. These ‘underworlds’ or otherworldly realms represent visions of the universe shaped by a renunciant, ascetic view of the individual's relation to God. The stories present a theological vision and a geographical space that embodies that vision. Like other literary descents or quests, then, these Islamic versions also result in an awareness of the protagonist's (and by extension, the reader's) own mortality. The nature of these particularly Islamic variations on the initiatory journey is the topic of this paper. Some of the features of the pre-modern narratives are highlighted by way of contrast with a modern version of the ‘City of Brass’ by Najīb Ma[hdot]fūż.

Notes

¹W. H. MacNaughten, ed., Kitab Alf layla wa-layla, 4 vols(Calcutta: W. Thacker & Co. 1839), II, 582–699 (‘[Hdot]āsib Karīm al-dīn’) and III, 83–115 (‘City of Brass’).

²Robert Irwin, ‘Political Thought in the Thousand and One Nights’ in The Arabian Nights in Transnational Context, ed. Ulrich Marzolph (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007), 110 and 111.

³Pierre Versins, Encyclopédie de l'Utopie, des Voyages extraordinaires et de la Science-Fiction (Lausanne: L'Age de l'Homme, 1972), 57 (s.v. Arabe [culture]).

⁴Rachel Falconer, Hell in Contemporary Literature: Western Descent Narratives since 1945 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 1.

⁵See the useful section on ‘Generic features of katabatic narrative’ in Falconer, Hell in Contemporary Literature, 42–7, as well as the survey in Anna-Leena Siikala and Francisco De Velasco, ‘Descent into the Underworld,’ in Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Lindsay Jones, 2nd ed. (Detroit, MI: MacMillan Reference USA, 2005), s.v.

⁶Aboubakr Chraïbi classifies the ‘City of Brass,’ ‘Bulūqiyā’ and ‘[Hdot]āsib Karīm al-dīn’ under ‘Mythologies et voyages initatiques,’ of which they are the only entries. Aboubakr Chraïbi, Les Mille et une nuits: Histoire du texte et classification des contes (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2008), 128–30. The story of ‘Jānshāh’ he treats separately, under ‘A la recherché de la princesse,’ of which there are seven other examples (123–4).

⁷On the possible antecedents for the City of Brass, see Charles Genequand, ‘Autour de la ville de bronze: D'Alexandre à Salomon,’ Arabica 39 (1992): 328–45; David Pinault, Story-telling Techniques in the Arabian Nights (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 141–239; and Maurice Gaudefroy-Demombynes, trans., Les cent et une nuits, (Paris: Sindbad, 1982), 234–70 and 306–17. On the [Hdot]āsib cycle, see Jamel Eddine Bencheikh, Les Mille et une Nuits, ou la parole prisonnière (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 147–230. Abdelfattah Kilito draws on Bencheikh for his own discussion of ‘[Hdot]āsib’ tale. Abdelfattah Kilito, L'oeil et l'aiguille: essai sur Les mille et une nuits (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 1992), 51–61. For Bulūqiyā, see Daniel Bodi, ‘Les Milles et une nuits et l'Epopée de Gilgamesh: éléments de comparaison’ in Les Mille et une nuits en partage, ed. Aboubakr Chraïbi (Paris: Actes Sud, 2004), 394–411; Stephanie Dalley, ‘Gilgamesh in the Arabian Nights,’ Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society ser. 3 I (1991): 1–17; and Stephanie Dalley, ‘The Tale of Bulūqiyā and the Alexander Romance in Jewish and Sufi Mystical Circles,’ in Tracing the Threads: Studies in the Vitality of Jewish Pseudepigrapha, ed. John C. Reeves (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994), 239–69. Dalley's proposals and conclusions are criticized with some severity in A. R. George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction. Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 65–8. George argues that the actual narrative structure of the two stories is very different and their similarities reside merely in certain motifs (e.g. ‘the plant of rejuvenation, the death of the companion in danger, the magic realm of an immortal king beyond a cosmic mountain’) that are shared with many literatures, and that in any case the temporal distance between the composition of the Arabic ‘Bulūqiyā’ and the cuneiform epic is so vast as to preclude any direct connection. Other useful comments on potential connections with the ancient Near East are mentioned in Stanislav Segert, ‘Ancient Near Eastern Traditions in The Thousand and One Nights,’ in The Thousand and One Nights in Arabic Literature and Society, ed. Richard C. Hovannisian and Georges Sabagh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 106–13.

⁸I should add that there are two very well-known Arabic stories of descent into an underworld or afterlife: the Risālat al-ghufrān of Abū l-A‘lā al-Ma‘arrī (d. 449/1058) and the Risālat al-tawābi‘ wal-zawābi‘ of Ibn Shuhayd (d. 426/1035). Both are close to conception of Hell commonly associated with Homer, Dante, and so forth, in that their primary interest is communication with the dead or with spirits who informed great authors of the past. These versions of Hell are not visions of space, nor are they informed by the same religious vision. They are, of course, in their own way katabatic narratives, but of a different cast, where the inhabitants of the underworld are recognizable in their connection to living beings and the knowledge acquired is related to fellow humans past and present. The stories of [Hdot]āsib and the City of Brass are of an altogether different scale.

⁹The English ‘afterlife’ or ‘hereafter’, with its temporal emphasis, is less useful for our purposes here than the more spatially-oriented au-delà or das Jenseits.

¹⁰See Victor Chauvin, Bibliographie des ouvrages arabes ou relatifs aux Arabes publié dans l'Europe chrétienne de 1810 à 1885, 12 vols (Liége: H. Vaillant-Carmanne, 1892–1919), V 255–7 ([Hdot]āsib, listed here as ‘Djamasp’ # 152), VII 39–44 (‘Jānshāh’ # 153) and 54–9 (‘Bulūqiyā’ # 77). There is also an excellent summary in Bencheikh (Les Mille et une Nuits, 149–55), and similar individual descriptions may be found under ‘Queen of the Serpents,’ ‘Bulûqiyâ’ and ‘Jânshâh’ in volume I of Ulrich Marzolph and Richard van Leeuwen, The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC Clio, 2004), s.vv.

¹¹Bencheikh, Les Mille et une Nuits, 156. Bodi, too, remarks on the intentional juxtaposition (‘Les Milles et une nuits, 406). In the Qi⋅ās al-anbiyā’ of al-Tha‘labī (d. 427/1036) there is a similar but condensed version of ‘Bulūqiyā.’ Instead of meeting Jānshāh, however, he meets ‘a white beardless lad’ whose name is [Sdot]āli[hdot] and who is seated by the tombs of his pious parents, awaiting death, but this [Sdot]āli[hdot] does not relate any narrative of his own. See al-Tha‘labī, ‘Arā’is al-majālis fī Qi⋅a⋅ al-anbiyā’ or ‘Lives of the Prophets’ as recounted by Abū Ish⋅āq A[hdot]mad Ibn Mu[hdot]ammad Ibn Ibrāhīm al-Tha‘labī, trans. and annot. William M. Brinner (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 593–608. Interestingly, this tale is not included in the Arabic edition of al-Tha‘labī's Qi⋅a⋅ available to me. al-Tha‘labī, Qi⋅a⋅ al-anbiyā’ al-musammā bil-majālis (Cairo: Maktabat al-jumhūriyya al-‘arabiyya, n.d.).

¹²Bencheikh, Les Mille et une Nuits, 155 and passim. Chraïbi also classed ‘[Hdot]āsib’ and ‘Bulūqiyā’ as initiatory journeys (Chraïbi, Les Mille et une nuits, 128–30).

¹³See the formulation of this definition in Roy P. Mottahedeh, ‘‘Ajā’ib in the Thousand and One Nights,’ in The Thousand and One Nights in Arabic Literature and Society, ed. Richard C. Hovannisian and Georges Sabagh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 29–39.

¹⁴Hasan El-Shamy notes that many of the individual cosmological motifs in the [Hdot]āsib tale are not known from other Islamic sources, and moreover ‘these themes portray a world view incongruent with recurrent folk beliefs encountered in daily life.’ He thus labels them as ‘mythological’ rather than ‘religious.’ He does admits that ‘as components of a literary belief system, these themes reveal affective (psychological) dimensions espoused by the social groups to whom they belong.’ See Hasan El-Shamy, ‘Mythological Constituents of Alf Laylah wa Laylah,’ in The Arabian Nights and Orientalism: Perspectives from East and West, ed. Yuriko Yamanaka and Tetsuo Nishio (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 25–46, esp. 28–34 (citations from 33–4).

¹⁵The scene may recall the quest of Gilgamesh and the death of Enkidu, but the order of events is there reversed—the death of the companion prompts the quest of Gilgamesh, while for Bulūqiyā it effectively ends the explicit search for immortal powers.

¹⁶Chraïbi, Les Mille et une nuits, 130.

¹⁷The classic work on the centrality of knowledge in Islam is, of course, Franz Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant: The Concept of Knowledge in Medieval Islam (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1970). This is usefully juxtaposed with the importance of continuity and connection, which seems to predominate in medieval and modern Islamic practice. See William A. Graham, ‘Traditionalism in Islam: An Essay in Interpretation,’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23, no. 3 (1993): 495–522.

¹⁸The beginning of Gilgamesh's epic invites the reader to open the box holding the written account of his experiences (Bodi, ‘Les Milles et une nuits, 409–10). In the translation of A. R. George (The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic, I 539):

[Find] the tablet-box of cedar,

[release] its clasp of bronze!

[Open] the lid of its secret,

[lift] up the tablet of lapis lazuli and read out

all the misfortunes, all that Gilgameš went through!

However, the similarity seems to end with the shared motif of writings in a chest. In the Islamic examples it is the transfer of knowledge that takes priority.

¹⁹[Hdot]āsib achieves this after consuming the broth from the cooked flesh of the serpent queen. Chraïbi (Les Mille et une nuits, 130) draws our attention to Philostratus' Life of Apolonius of Tyana (3rd c. CE), which mentions that the Arabs used to acquire extraordinary knowledge by consuming the flesh of reptiles. Although not mentioned in the text, this may be related to an idea that it was the reptiles that had deprived humans of their immortality. Philostratus refers to Arabs learning the tongues of animals, and that it was common for them ‘to listen to birds prophesying like any oracles, but they acquire this faculty of understanding them by feeding themselves, so they say, either on the heart or the liver of serpents.’ Philostratus. The Life of Apollonnius of Tyana, trans. F. C. Conybeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1912), I, 57 (Book I, Ch. XX).

²⁰Briefly and partially, these include: the river or valley of sand that ceases to flow for a portion of the week, across which one find the Israelites/Brahmins, in an echo of Alexander's encounter with the gymnosophists; Alexander is told of a island of women that is unattainable, told that he must be content with looking at the wall since no man can look inside and live; the expeditions of both Mūsā and Alexander travel through a realm of darkness before reaching either the brilliant Water of Life or the shining brass city; the bright marble within the city recalls both the Solomon and Queen of Sheba episode and a similar account in the Alexander Romance; the figure of al-Khi[ddot]r is linked to Alexander's cook, who discovered immortality. See Genequand, ‘Autour de la ville de bronze’ (and note 6 above).

²¹Kilito, L'œil et l'aiguille, 98–100.

²²See Bruce Fudge, ‘Signs of Scripture in the ‘City of Brass,’’ Journal of Qur'ānic Studies 8, no. 1 (2006): 88–119.

²³Genequand, ‘Autour de la ville de bronze’, 337.

²⁴This could of course represent some kind of mystical initiation, and it seems likely that these tales, especially the ‘City of Brass’ and ‘Bulūqiyā,’ could have been read as mystical journeys, although the paraenetic element seems more likely to have a popular appeal than the mystical reading that would be required in each case. See the interpretation of Andras Hamori, On the Art of Medieval Arabic Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 145–63; and his subsequent moderation of that view, in Hamori A. “Madīnat al-nu[hdot]ās,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. Brill Online, 2012. Reference. OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES. 26 September 2012 <http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-2/madinat-al-nuhas-SIM_8800>.

²⁵Najīb Ma[hdot]fūż, ‘al-Shay ⃛ān ya‘iż’ in al-Shay ⃛ān ya‘iż (Cairo: Maktabat Mi⋅r, n.d.), 333–67, citation from 367.

²⁶Michael Cook, Muhammad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 88–9.

²⁷Hamori, On the Art of Medieval Arabic Literature, 163.