Bruce Fudge on the Differences Between ‘A Hundred and One Nights’ and the ‘1,001’
Bruce Fudge, Professor of Arabic at the University of Geneva and author of Qur’anic Hermeneutics: al-Tabrisi and the Craft of Commentary (2011), wanted to take a break from Qur’an commentary and “read all the things that religious scholars told you not to read.”
So when an opportunity arose to translate a text for the Library of Arabic Literature, Fudge suggested a collection of stories not unlike the 1,001 Nights. For while much of scholarship about classical Arabic literature is focused on high literature, he said, 1,001 Nights is just the tip of the iceberg of semi-popular stories. Fudge says that, when he first went around Moroccan bookshops asking about A Hundred and One Nights, booksellers told him that surely he meant the 1001. But, he says, he found that they were better-known than he’d expected.
In the first part of an interview about this edition and translation of A Hundred and One Nights, Fudge talked about where the stories might’ve come from and how they traveled, who might have produced and read the Nights, and what the use of Middle Arabic tells us about their composers, scribes, and audience.