EXPLORE LOOKING FORWARD TO AN AWESOME BOOK?
Move Over Scheherazade
An invitation to move on from the stereotypical heroine of One Thousand and One Nights with these four writers.
Imagine narrating a new tale, every night, for 1,001 nights!
No mean feat, indeed.
That is what Scheherazade did in One Thousand and One Nights.
The fantastical collection of tales and its fictional narrator, Sultana Scheherazade, has inspired many.
That is, many men.
It was brought into the limelight in the 18th century. An Orientalist scholar, Antoine Galland, took a Syrian manuscript and published the first Western edition.
It enraptured the French.
Since then, it has made its way to many other countries, capturing the imagination of English-speaking audiences around the world.
Various characters have become cultural icons. I refer to the likes of Aladdin, Sinbad, and Ali Baba and his thieves.
In The Beginning…
Supposedly, the newlywed Scheherazade told these stories to her husband the sultan Shahryār, a “Sasanian king”. But it was neither sex nor romance that inspired the nightly narrations.
To understand the beginning, we must explore the backstory.
It goes something like this.
Shahryār was shocked to learn that his first wife was a flagrant adulterous. He had her killed and decided that all women must be the same.
He learnt that it was not only her. Many women treated their husbands this way. This included his brother’s betrothed, who was also killed for her betrayal, and even the beautiful wife of a powerful Ifrit.
The Ifrit’s wife’s tale is narrated by her as follows:
“Know that this Ifrit carried me off on the night of my marriage, prisoned me in a coffer and placed the coffer in a box and fastened about the box seven chains, yes, and then laid me at the bottom of the moaning sea that wars and dashes with its wave. But he did not know that whenever any of us women desires a thing, nothing can prevent her from it.”
She went on to warn them in verse, partially reproduced below:
“Friend, trust not at all in women, smile at their promising,
For they lower or they love at the caprice of their parts.”
Thus began the king’s femicidal streak.
As recompense for his wife’s betrayal, Shahryār successively married virgins, only to have each of them executed the next day.
That is, before she had a chance to sleep with another man. This went on for three years and horrified his subjects.
Eventually, as the stock of virgins wore thin, he married Scheherazade, the vizier’s daughter.
Unlike the other, now dead virgins, she offered herself up as “ransom for the daughters of the Mussalmans and the cause of their deliverance out of the hands of the king.”
On their wedding night, Scheherazade began a tale, but did not end it. Curious as a cat, the king postponed her execution in order to hear the conclusion.
The next night, and for 999 nights after that, Scheherazade narrated tales of history, philosophy, love and erotica, tragedies, comedies, poems, and so forth.
Writers Dream of Arabia
Over the centuries, One Thousand and One Nights has inspired world-renowned writers including the likes of Goethe, WB Yeats, and Jorge Luis Borges, who remixed many stories from it.
The collection of folktales has also been the muse for Sufi mystic Idries Shah, who said in his book, The Sufis:
“Western scholars seem unaware that even the popular Thousand and One Nights is Sufic in content, land that its Arabic title Alf layla wa layla is a code phrase indicating its main content and intention: “Mother of Records.””
Contemporary references include the award-winning Japanese writer Haruki Murakami who named the short story Scheherazade in his collection — Men without Women.
It also found its way to Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro’s famous novel Never Let Me Go.
(Check out this list of books for more on Japanese literature)
The more common name, ‘Arabian Nights’ has also been the title of two Hollywood movies, from 1942 and 1974 respectively.
It is also the namesake of British author-journalist Tahir Shah’s 2007 travelogue In Arabian Nights: A Caravan of Moroccan Dreams, and the 2021 retelling of The Arabian Nights Adventures. It inspired his most recent work, the upcoming ‘Daydreams of an Octopus & Other Stories.
The dreamlike narrative not only motivated writers, and the plots of many stories, but the structure also added to the literary canon.
The allegorical stories served as both ruminations and historical records. The stories within stories format was new to readers outside the Islamic world and adapted by many writers.
A Few Centuries Later
As a woman from the 21st century, one cannot help but question the valorization of the sacrificial Scheherazade, who was essentially a sex-slave for all those nights.
Sure, she knew how to spin many a wondrous yarn. She may have even saved other women.
But should she be considered an inspiration, or any kind of role model, for women today?
There are plenty of real Muslim women who have more inspiring stories to tell, and I would rather introduce them to my daughters, than Scheherazade.
Here are four such women from the 20th and 21st century, who, in my humble opinion, deserve more attention than One Thousand and One Nights continues to receive.
1. Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880-1932)
This is Ladyland, free from sin and harm.”
- Sultana’s Dream
Sultana’s Dream is a Bengali feminist utopian story in English. It was first published in 1905 in the Madras-based English periodical The Indian Ladies Magazine.
I recommend this beautiful publication by Tara Books that captures the tale through Indian artistry by Durga Bai, a woman artist from the Gond tribe of central India.
(To explore another beautiful publication from Tara Books check out my list of recommended nature books)
It narrates the story of a shy, pardanashin woman who was not accustomed to being without a veil (purdah).
One day (or night) she walks out to find that all the men have been shut indoors, much like the common Islamic practice of keeping women inside a zenana.
In this wondrous realm, it is believed that no one is safe so long as there are men on the streets. Like how it is not safe when a wild animal enters a marketplace.
No one dies in their youth except by accident. An alternate feminist scientific temperament prevails.
Technological advancements include solar cooking and heating as well as eco-friendly flying air-cars. Girls are compulsorily educated, and they are not married off at an early age.
The women practice a new religion of love and truth.
One wonders, how did this vision come about for women so early in the 20th century?
All thanks to the brilliance of the author.
Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, commonly known as Begum Rokeya, was a prominent Bengali thinker, writer, educator, and political activist who lived in British India, now Bangladesh. She is a renowned pioneer of feminism and women’s liberation in South Asia.
Her other works may be found in the collections Freedom Fables: Satire and Politics in Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Writings and The Essential Rokeya: Selected Works of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880–1932).
2. Ismat Chugtai (1915-1991)
“Ismat Chugtai wore no purdah. And her pen worked as an instrument to shear the purdah behind which the whole world of middle-class Muslim women vibrated in gossip and scandal, desires and urges, jealousies and tensions, rituals and traditions, regressions and little rebellions.”
- Introducing Ismat by Sukriti Paul Kumar, from Ismat: Her Life, Her Times
Ismat Chughtai was a non-traditional Indian Urdu novelist, short story writer, liberal humanist, and filmmaker. Ahead of her time, she was both notorious and famous.
Her iconoclastic inspiration, rebelliousness, and uniqueness are best captured in the anthology Ismat: Her Life, Her Times.
A worthy introduction to a fierce woman, the book is a collection of essays on her extraordinary life and literary career. Among other things, it includes her shorter works including letters, and essays on how she impacted many other writers.
It captures the nuances of her unconventional personality and life experiences that inspired her fiction.
For instance, beginning in the 1930s, she wrote extensively on themes like female sexuality and femininity.
Her famous short story from 1942 called Lihaaf (The Quilt) is about the experiences of a young girl and a Muslim woman married to a much older homosexual man. Her sexuality is explored through subtleties and suggestions.
In spite of this, the fictional account became the subject of an obscenity trial in 1944, where she was asked to apologize for writing about sex. She refused and subsequently won the case.
An English translation can be found in the collection The Quilt & Other Stories.
Her characters often try to deal with societal evils, but her fiction is suffused with beauty, happiness, and peace. Her leftist perspective is portrayed through realistic explorations of their internal social and emotional exploitation.
Associated with the Progressive Writer’s Movement of India, Ismat Chughtai is considered by many to be the fourth pillar of modern Urdu fiction.
A significant voice from the 20th century, she was awarded by the Indian Government for her services to the field of literature.
Many of her books, including Ismat, Her Life, Her Times, have been made available as free e-book by Rekhta Foundation, through an online repository of Urdu literature.
3. Benazir Bhutto (1953–2007)
“Clearly it’s not easy for women in modern society, no matter where they live. We still have to go the extra mile to prove that we are equal to men. We have to work longer hours and make more sacrifices. And we must emotionally protect ourselves from unfair, often vicious attacks made on us via the male members of our family.”
- Benazir Bhutto
Benazir Bhutto was the first woman to head a democratic government in a Muslim majority country.
Bhutto was the daughter of the politician Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who led Pakistan from 1971 to 1977. Being born into an affluent and influential family, she was educated at Harvard University and the University of Oxford.
However, being from a political background came with its own problems. Her father was deposed and executed by the dictator General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq.
After she became the titular head of her the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), she suffered from house arrest throughout the early 1980s, and lived in exile from 1984 to 1986.
She returned to Pakistan after General Zia’s sudden death to become the country’s first female prime minister. She served in that position from 1988 to 1990, and from 1993 to 1996.
Her political career was marred by accusations of corruption and nepotism, which led to several court cases. She was assassinated in 2007.
Nonetheless, she was considered a global icon for women’s rights and admired for her progressive modern views.
Benazir Bhutto has inspired many women, especially in the Muslim world, including Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai. She also received many awards, including the French Legion of Honour.
Her fascinating life and thought process are best understood through her own words as found in her memoir Daughter of Destiny: An Autobiography (1989).
Her last book, Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West (2008), was published posthumously. It captures her last few months, and serves as a vindication of Islam against those who synonymize it with terrorism.
4. Marjane Satrapi (1969-)
"We’d see pieces about Iran on television, but they didn’t represent my experience at all. I had to keep saying, “No, it’s not like that there.” I’ve been justifying why it isn’t negative to be Iranian for almost twenty years. How strange when it isn’t something I did or chose to be?"
- On Writing Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, as told to Pantheon staff.
Marjane Satrapi, the French-Iranian graphic novelist and film director, created Persepolis as a way of telling the truth about Iran, as experienced by her.
The autobiographical graphic novels, Persepolis 1 and Persepolis 2, were first published as French comics, and published together as Persepolis in 2003, in English.
The title is a reference to the ancient capital of the Persian Empire.
The 1st volume tells the story of Marji, a ten-year-old growing up in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
It captures the author’s childhood experiences of participating in demonstrations against the Shah’s regime. She experiences religious extremism and suppression of women’s rights. Being required to wear a veil, she begins to question her religion and society.
She also suffered through political executions including of a family member and was bombed during the war with Iraq.
The second volume captures her experiences in Vienna, Austria, after escaping Iran.
Her other work includes Embroideries (Broderies), and the award-winning graphic novel Chicken with Plums. She has also directed films based on her written work.
A New Beginning
While many feminists have derided Scheherazade and her legend, many others seek to vindicate her.
For sure, she is controversial and her role in the story remains questionable.
For instance, should we presuppose that the King would not have been defeated in his misogynistic quest?
Maybe he would have found salvation by other means, when the stock of virgins dried up, if Scheherazade had not readily offered herself up.
Once we consider the role of women in a feudal society from centuries past, it is possible to empathize with Scheherazade. Stuck in a system which allowed such horrific abuse to occur without restraint or remedy, she found the best path available to her.
In the end, maybe she even freed herself, and many women besides her.
However, it may be time to leave a past age behind. Perhaps it is more useful to remember her as an icon from a bygone era, a heroine from the annals of history.
Then we can finally move on to realize the truth about Muslim women and look toward more realistic Muslim writers to understand the role of women in society.
Hi! Thanks for reading.
Please clap if you liked this article.
Also check out this one about telescopes and time travel, and this one about captive elephants.
You can find my short stories if you scroll down on this page.
Check my Journo portfolio to see the stuff I’ve published and been paid for.
If you want to read stuff like this, feel free to hit the “follow” button, so it shows up on your feed. It encourages me to keep writing!
Happy browsing.
