One Thousand Nights: The Islamic Golden Age

It was during the Islamic Golden Age that the Arabian nights or, One Thousand and one nights was created. It consists of arrangements of anonymous stories in Arabic. Old and medieval Arabic, Indian, Egyptian, Persian and Mesopotamian legends and writings are the characteristics of the work that was gathered over a centuries by different researchers, writers, creators and interpreters all the way from the Central, West, South Asia to North Africa. The original part of stories comes from Persia and India in the eighth century. Later, in ninth or tenth century, more Arab stories were included Iraq and afterwards in thirteenth century, extra Syrian or Egyptian stories were included, and as time passed, more stories were included by creators and

The historical backdrop of the Nights is greatly mind boggling and the present day researchers have made numerous endeavors to unwind the story of how the accumulation as it presently exists came about. Robert Irwin condenses their discoveries: "In the 1880s and 1890s a lot of work was done on the Nights by [the scholar] Zotenberg and others, in the course of which a consensus view of the history of the text emerged. Most scholars agreed that the Nights was a composite work and that the earliest tales in it came from India and Persia. At some time, probably in the early 8th century, these tales were translated into Arabic under the title Alf Layla, or 'The Thousand Nights'. This collection then formed the basis of The Thousand and One Nights. The original core of stories was quite small. Then, in Iraq in the 9th or 10th century, this original core had Arab stories added to it – among them some tales about the Caliph Harun al-Rashid. Also, perhaps from the 10th century onwards, previously independent sagas and story cycles were added to the compilation. Then, from the 13th century onwards, a further layer of stories was added in Syria and Egypt, many of these showing a preoccupation with sex, magic or low life. In the early modern period yet more stories were added to the Egyptian collections so as to swell the bulk of the text sufficiently to bring its length up to the full 1,001 nights of storytelling promised by

This is the most punctual known surviving part of the Arabian Nights. The first reference to the Arabic form under its entire title "The One Thousand and One Nights” shows up in Cairo in the twelfth century. Professor Dwight Reynolds depicts the ensuing changes of the Arabic adaptation: Some of the earlier Persian tales may have survived within the Arabic tradition altered such that Arabic Muslim names and new locations were substituted for pre-Islamic Persian ones, but it is also clear that whole cycles of Arabic tales were eventually added to the collection and apparently replaced most of the Persian materials. One such cycle of Arabic tales centres around a small group of historical figures from 9th-century Baghdad, including the caliph Harun al-Rashid (died 809), his vizier Jafar al-Barmaki (d.803) and the licentious poet Abu Nuwas (d. c. 813). Another cluster is a body of stories from late medieval Cairo in which are mentioned persons and places that date to as late as the thirteenth and fourteenth