Secrets Of The Arabian Nights

April21

21st April, 2011

The Arabian Nights first arrived in the West 300 years ago, and ever since then its stories have entranced generations of children and seduced adults with a vision of an exotic, magical Middle East. Actor and director Richard E Grant has been a fan of the stories in 1001 Arabian Nights since he was a child. He wants to know why the book he loved as a child still has such a hold on our imagination.

Now he’s revisiting the book and discovering that it has always been a controversial text (there are some who would like to ban it today), that Scheherazade’s stories originated from far and wide along ancient trade routes, and that its tales of princes, genies and robbers helped shape the west’s view of the Middle East. In this documentary, Richard travels to Paris to discover how the stories of Sinbad, Ali Baba and Aladdin were first brought to the West by the pioneering Arabist Antoine Galland in the early 18th century. The Nights quickly became an overnight literary sensation and were quickly translated into all the major European languages. Richard then travels to Cairo to explore the medieval Islamic world which first created them.

He quickly finds that some of the stories can still be deeply controversial, because of their sexually-explicit content. Richard meets the Egyptian writer and publisher Gamal al Ghitani, who received death threats when he published a new edition of the book.

He also finds that the ribald and riotous stories in the Nights represent a very different view of Islam than fundamentalism. Can the Nights still enrich and change the West’s distorted image of the Arab world?

Given its status as a children’s classic, it starts with a grisly premise: Scheherazade’s husband, the king, takes a different virgin for his bride each night and has her executed in the morning.