Thousand and One Nights
"The Arabian Nights"
Obscene Pornography or a Great Work of Culture?
There are always voices in the Arab world that want to censor, "purify" or even ban The Arabian Nights. The latest call comes from a group of conservative lawyers in Egypt who have gone to court over the matter. They want to take a new edition off the market and replace it with an edition from which all "obscene" words have been removed. Samir Grees explains the background to the case
There are always voices in the Arab world that want to censor, "purify" or even ban The Arabian Nights. The latest call comes from a group of conservative lawyers in Egypt who have gone to court over the matter. They want to take a new edition off the market and replace it with an edition from which all "obscene" words have been removed. Samir Grees explains the background to the case
| Ilustration by Olga Dugina |
There can be few works that have fascinated their readers around the world as much as The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1,001 Nights. For some people, the tales – taken from Indian, Persian and Arabic sources and told by Scheherazade – are almost as popular as the Bible and Shakespeare. Many writers, among them Voltaire, Goethe and Borges, have said how much they admire the stories and admit how indebted they are to them.