Ferdowsi Review.Vol.1. No. 4.

Fall 2011 ©Ferdowsi University of Mashhad

The Orientalist Readings of The Arabian Nights

Hossein Sabouri, (kassbouri@yahoo.com)

Assistant Professor, University of Tabriz

Abdollah Karimzadeh, (abdollah.karimzadeh@gmail.com)

MA in Translation Studies, University of Allameh Tabataba’i

ABSTRAC: Review of the related literature shows that Orientalism is a

centuries-long project which aims to create a dichotomy between the Occident
and the Orient for the purpose of consolidating the supremacy of the former
over the latter. This project contributed in shaping an image of the Orient that
provided the western powers with the academic justification on which to base
their hegemony. The present paper is an attempt to show how translation and
literature can ideologically produce a system of representations in favor of a
specific culture. On this basis, we have analyzed Richard Burrton's English
translation of The Arabian Nights (1885) to show its cultivation of stereotypes
about the Eastern culture and about Islam in particular. Our analysis shows that
it is indeed a part of the Orientalist as well as the postcolonial project that
instead of bridging differences, serves to consolidate ideologically-motivated
stereotypes about the East, widen differences and further alienate the Other.

Keywords: Orientalism, Misrepresentation, Oriental other

1. Introduction
According to Edward Said (1978), the Oriental Other is a concept shaped
during the Crusades (1095-1270) and developed since then into a sizable
body of knowledge most of which persistently strove to degrade and
dehumanize the Orient for the purpose of dominating it. This body of
knowledge about the Orient has been termed as Orientalism. It is defined by
Said as follows:
"By Orientalism I mean several things, all of them in my opinion, interdependent.
The most readily accepted designation for Orientalism is an academic one and
indeed the label still serves in a number of academic institutions. Anyone who
teaches writes or researches about the Orient and this applies whether the person is
an anthropologist, sociologist, historian or philologist and what he or she does is
Orientalism " (Said, 1978, p. 2).

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Richard Burton was the translator of an Eastern literary work. He also

worked on the history, culture and languages of the East. Consequently, he
falls under Said's definition. Said further expands its definition:
"It is a project whose dimensions take in such realms as the imagination itself......a
complex array of oriental ideas (Oriental despotism, cruelty, and sensuality), many
Eastern sects, and philosophies domesticated for local European use" (Said, 1978,
p. 4).
The first encounter between the West and the East that generated an
ever-growing interest in the cultures, religions and languages of the east
goes as far back as the 7th century when Islam emerged as a serious threat
to Christianity (wheatcroft, 2003, p.47). Islam was seen by the church as the
quintessence of evil (wheatcroft, 2003, p.55). Moslems were seen as an evil
that needed to be eradicated. This confrontational relationship manifested
not only in the battlefields, but also in an immense body of knowledge that
sought to depict Islam in negative terms as a threat against Christianity
during the crusades. The ideologically-motivated translation of the Quran
was instrumentalized by the church to portray Islam as a barbaric and
backward religion. In addition to translation, the negative Christian image
of Islam intensified in the Renaissance through poetry and popular
superstitions to the extent that it became apparent to European thinkers that
"something would have to be done about Islam" (Said, 1978, p. 61).
To this end, they focused on the oriental tales and the mythology of the
East. However, the general tendency toward the East was Eurocentric,
representing the East as a backward place, populated by irrational and
passive people practicing a violence-driven religion. For Said, such
misrepresentations of the Orient were the counter-image of the West. In his
critique of Orientalism, Said introduces a format for colonialism and its
motives by colonial powers. He demonstrates how Orientalist studies
created a political vision in favor of promoting a discourse based on the
"Self" and "Other" dichotomy for the sole purpose of western domination
and supremacy.
The following statements made by the British diplomat, Lord Cromer
(1847) sum up the West's biased perceptions of the Oriental people:
"The Europe is a close reasoner; his statements of fact are free from any ambiguity.
He is a natural logician, albeit he may not have studied logic. He is by nature
skeptical and requires proof before he can accept the truth of any proposition. The
mind of the Oriental on the other hand, like his picturesque streets, is wanting in
symmetry. He is deficient in the logical faculty. He is incapable of drawing the
most obvious conclusions from any simple premises" (Said, 1978, p. 38).

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Indeed, Lord Cromer by underscoring the Oriental's natural deficiency

and incapability is going to justify the West's right to govern the East. As
we will see, Burton also in his Arabian Nights assumes the Easterner's
acceptance of the Western governance. Cromer's statements about the East
and the West show that the Orientalist discourse, whether it takes the form
of a translation, a political statement, a traveler's account, developed
historically into a power knowledge. In the following sections, we will
analyze Burrton's translation of The Arabian Nights (1885) to see how they
relate to the dominant discourses about the Orient.
Drawing on Said's definition of Orientalism, we have selected Burton
for our study to show how the discourse of Orientalism manifests itself in
literature and translation. The rationale behind selecting Burton for our
study is that he belonged to England, a country with a long history of
colonialism and Orientalist scholarship. Furthermore, he had a close contact
with the Orient on account of his long stays in the Middle East as Britain's
intelligence service agent. The method adopted in this study is corpus-
based. Burton's English translation of The Arabian Nights (1885) constitutes
the corpus for this study. Instead of the texts, we have focused on meta-
texts, i.e., the annotations and the notes that accompany the texts and have
related them to Orientalist inter-texts.

2. The narrative of The Arabian Nights

The story of "Shahryar" and "Shah Zaman", the two brothers who rule over
China and Samarkand respectively forms the introductory frame to the
remaining tales. One day, Shah Zaman leaves Samarkand for China to meet
his brother. In the middle of the way, he is backing home to fetch
something. All of the sudden, he catches his wife, red-handed, in a situation
of adultery with a black slave. He kills his wife on the spot and resumes his
journey to visit Shahryar.
In his brother's palace, Shah Zaman is still depressed as a result of his
wife's infidelity. His brother tries to relieve him and bring him some
comfort, but to no avail. One day, when Shahryar is out hunting, Shah
Zaman discovers his brother's wife committing adultery with a slave.
He then realizes that he shouldn't feel any envy towards his brother as both
are now victims of the same fate. As soon as Shahryar returns, Shah Zaman
informs him of the sad incident. Pretending to go on another hunting
expedition, Shahryar surprises his wife in the same amorous situation.
As his brother did before, Shahryar executes his wife, her lover and all the
slaves involved in the betrayal. He decides, thereupon, to marry a woman
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every single night and have her killed the next day. Shahryar carries out this
revengeful plan for three years until the day when all the women of the
kingdom start to shun the fate that Shahryar has reserved for them.
Shahryar orders his minister to find a woman for him to marry.
"Shahrzad", the minister's own daughter, a woman of knowledge and
intelligence, volunteers to marry the king in order to save the women in the
kingdom.
To succeed in her suicidal endeavor, Shahrzad has to use her talent of
story-telling to escape a certain death. She starts to narrate a story in
Shahryar's presence, but makes sure not to end it before the break of a new
day. This careful plan allows Shahrzad to delay her execution.
Curiously enough, the dénouement is postponed via an extraordinary
textual intertwining and the existence of different levels of narration. The
narrator for example, tells the story of the tailor who, in turn, tells the story
of the barber who tells the story of each one of his brothers. Such a
juxtaposition of the tales in the form of Story-inside-a story technique to
which Shahrzad resorts not only allows her to stay alive, but also to prove
her faithfulness to Shahryar and to safeguard the women of the kingdom
from a certain death.

3. Systemic analysis of The Arabian Nights

According to Itamar Even-Zohar's polysystem theory (1970), literary works
belong to a system of systems (examples are canonized literature, children
literature, banal literature, etc.). Translated literature also is considered as a
system. These systems all are competing to occupy a central position
(position of canonicity) in the polysystem and to avoid marginalization.
Compared to the dominant literary discourses in the Islamic world, the
tales of The Arabian Nights were viewed as a marginalized and second-class
literature (in the periphery of the poly-system), not worthy of criticism in
the literary circles. The reason for this is that in the Islamic world, the tales
proliferated at a time when poetry was the most excellent literary genre,
assuming centrality in the literary polysystem and dictating the standards of
literary excellence.
Unlike in the East, it was one of the most translated and widely- read
works of literature in the West, whereas the major figures and classics of the
Eastern literature were unknown. The Arabian Nights thanks to translation
was elevated to the status of a universal literature and assumed canonicity
and cultural authority in the Western academies, such that nowadays, it is
one of the most referenced works in the Oriental studies by the western
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Orientalists. Contrary to the Western world, these tales in the Eastern world
were not welcomed warmly by erudite audience, but were just received by
readers whose conception of literature was that of entertainment.
Our aim is not to search for the reasons why these tales were
disregarded in the Eastern world; we aim to understand the reasons for the
great interest triggered by the tales in the literary salons of London and
Paris. These reasons will be discussed in the following sections of the paper.

4. Cultural analysis of The Arabian Nights

We would like to start our analysis by raising a question: was the search for
the Orient and of which translation was one of the principle channels, a real
attempt to understand a different and exotic culture or did this research also
serve to consolidate pre-existing prejudices and to strengthen stereotypes
regarding the Orient? In other words, did the translation of The Arabian
Nights fulfill the primary objective of literary translation, i.e., the
representation of an exotic work of literature for the purpose of
familiarizing the readers with a new culture?
A close analysis of Richard Burton's translation will help us to
determine if and how he has contributed to the Orientalist discourse. Since
our analysis focuses on Burton's translation, it is necessary to shed some
light on his ideological framework, but due to the limitation of space in this
paper, it is not possible to delve into his biography. Suffice it here to say
that he was a secret agent in the British intelligence service, serving in the
East Indian Company besides British Navy. He had a good command of
Oriental languages including Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Indian, and Urdu. To
carry out our cultural analysis, we will look into the meta-texts of Burton's
translation, i.e., the notes accompanying the texts in the bottom of the pages.
In the preface to his translation, Burton writes:
«holding that the translator's glory is to add something to his native tongue,
while avoiding bald literalism, I have carefully Englished the novel expressions of
the original in all their outlandishness…These are mere barbarisms…»
(Burton,2001,P.24).
Here two terms emerge: first, translation as a contribution to one's native
language, secondly, Englishizing whatever is considered by Burton
barbaric, although Burton, unfortunately does not tell the readers exactly
what he means by barbarism. His translation is full of notes. They are a rich
reservoir of knowledge about Eastern culture. He does not leave anything
related to Orient without a comment. These notes and comments show
Burton's full acquaintance with the culture he studies. Yet, on many
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occasions, he cannot resist the temptation of misrepresenting the Eastern

culture for the purpose of escaping from the reality of the Eastern life and
culture.
If these misrepresentations had been made by a person not familiar with
the East, we could have attributed them to sheer ignorance or a difficulty to
understand an alien culture. Since these views come from Burton's deep
knowledge of the Eastern culture and his long stay in the East, they
certainly carry a new value which is related to the dominant Orientalist
discourse of his time.
To shed some light on the relationship between Burton's views of the
Orient as expressed in his notes and Orientalist discourse, we have selected
here a number of notes that revolve around the notion of slavery, sexuality,
ideology and Islam:

4.1. An uncivilized Orient

Here is what we read in the original text when king Shahzaman catches his
wife, red-handed, in amorous love-making with one of his slaves:
«At midnight, he (king Shahzaman) remembered something he forgot in his
palace. He went back, entered his palace and found his wife lying in his own bed
embracing a black slave »(Burton, 2001, P. 9).
Burton's translation faithfully reflects the incident, but portrays the slave as
following:
«But when the night was half spent, he bethought him that he had forgotten in
his palace somewhat which he should have brought with him, so he returned
privily and entered his apartments, where he found the queen, his wife, asleep on
his own carpet-bad, embracing with both arms a black cook of loathsome aspect
and foul with kitchen grease and grime » (P.5).
Burton documents all practices of sexual perversion supposedly
prevalent in the Orient. His comments on Eastern sexuality, however, are a
kind of pornography. The following short passage from his translation of
the tale «king Shahryar and His Brother »illustrates this point:
«[….] And then sprang with a drop-leap from one of the trees a big slobbering
black moor with rolling eyes which showed the whites, truly hideous sight »
(P.7).
Commenting on this «truly hideous sight», Burton offers the readers a
profuse description of black anatomy that is essentialist, unfounded and
cannot be accepted uncritically. The note goes as follows:
«Debauched women prefer Negroes on account of the size of their parts. I
measured one man in Somali-land who, quite quiescent, numbered nearly six
inches. This is a characteristic of the Negro race and of African animals, e.g. the
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horse, whereas the pure Arab man and beast, is below the average of Europe, one
of the best proofs that the Egyptian is not an Asiatic, but a Negro partially white-
washed. Moreover, the imposing parts do not increase during erection;
consequently, the «deed of kind» takes a much longer time and adds greatly to the
woman's enjoyment. In my time, no honest Hindi Muslim would take his women-
folk to Zanzibar on account of the huge attractions and enormous temptations there
and thereby offered to them.
Upon the subject of Imsak (retention of semen and prolongation of pleasure), I
shall find it necessary to say more » (P.732).
In addition to radical prejudice that Burton nourishes towards the
black race (see the Frequency of the derogatory word «Negro»), he
implicitly attempts by using the expression «his women-folk» and through
the note in general to impart the idea that polygamy and Eastern women's
weakness in face of sexual temptation is a general feature of Muslim
society. It is easy to detect some exaggerations by Burton about some
aspects of Easterner's relationships with each other. The following passage
from the «Tale of the Ensorcelled Prince» and the note that comments on it
illustrate this aspect. Burton translates this passage in this manner:
«in my wrath, I cried-o thou foulest of harlots and filthiest of whores ever
fluttered by Negro slaves who are hired to have at thee » (P.41).
In addition to his customary degradation to anything related to black,
Burton adds the following meta-text:
«the words are very lowest and coarsest, but the scene is true to Arab life»(P.740).
Burton astonishes the readers by the ambiguity of his assumption. How
can we interpret Burton's claim that the scene is true to Arab life? Is it the
scene of adultery itself, in which case Burton epitomizes Arabs, or Arab
wives as the champions of adultery? Or is it insulting words by the prince to
his deceitful wife true to Arab life. Burton implicitly expects his readers to
hold his views as general truths about the Orient. So, the overall picture of
the Orient that seems to emerge from Burton's comment is that of a society
incapable of evolution and left to its own animal instincts.

4.2. A violent and barbaric Orient

Burton allocates some of his notes to Islamic faith and practices. His
comments denote his familiarity with Islam. But his inclination towards
generalization and the distortion of reality discredit his claim to truth. His
notes are oriented and subjective. His treatment of corporal punishment
illustrates this point. The following passage from the translation of the«
Tale of the Portress » and the note accompanying it illustrates this point:

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«Then , he bade slaves drag me along the ground and lay me out at full length,
after stripping me of all my clothes, and when the slaves had so sat upon me that I
could not move, he fetched in a rod of quince-tree and came down with it upon my
body, and continued beating me on the back and sides till I lost consciousness from
excess of pain, and I despaired of life » (P.120).
Inspired by this passage, Burton tries to provide information on corporal
punishment and comes up with the following note:
«when a woman is bastinadoed in the east, they leave her some portion of dress
and pour over her buckets of water for a delicate consideration. When the hands
are beaten, they are passed through holes in the curtain, separating the sufferer
from mankind. And made fast a falakah or pole» (P.758).
By this note, Burton hopes to present Eastern cruelty towards women. He
projects a static image of a violent and barbaric Orient.

4.3. A colonized Orient

Some of Burton’s views on the Orient echo an ideological discourse that
was very much in harmony with the spirit of 19th century imperialism.
Burton was writing and translating in a time when Great Britain had
emerged as the most industrialized economy and the mightiest naval power
in the world with many colonies scattered over the continents. The
following passage from Burton's translation and his comment on it shows
how inter-textually is employed by Burton for the benefit of his intended
interpretation and reading of the Oriental texts. Burton’s interpretation acts
within the ideological framework of master-subject. The passage is from the
« Tale of the Three Apples » .
«The caliph looked at the old man and the young man and asked, which of you
killed the girl? The young man replied, «no one killed save I» and the old man
answered,« I did not kill her but myself». Then said the caliph to Ja'far, «take the
twain and hang them both», but Ja'far told him, since one of them was the
murderer, to hang the other were injustice » (P.127).
Here is Burton's comment on the notion of «zulm» or injustice. By
quoting a saying of Prophet Mohammad, he writes:
«zulm» is a capital sin for a ruler. One of the sayings of Mohammad is
«kingdom endureth with kufr (infidelity), but endures not with zulm (injustice).
Hence, the good Muslim will not complain of the rule of unbelievers like the
English (my emphasis), so long as they rule him righteously and according to his
own law » (P.759).
For a western reader unaware of Islamic traditions (hadith), the backing
of imperial power is justified by a saying attributed to Prophet Mohammad.
Here, Burton advocates the British right to rule over other people, especially
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when this rule is supposedly approved by the prophet of God. Burton by this
comment is going to legitimize the imperial power.

5. Conclusion
A very sizeable amount of knowledge about the Orient has unfortunately
been instrumentalized in order to consolidate the hegemony of imperial
power over the East. This knowledge of the the Orient included a variety of
disciplines and cultural practices, translation being one of them.
In this paper, we showed that the translation of The Arabian Nights by
Burton is not merely the transfer of some stories belonging to the Orient,
but it is the expression of a discourse (or an ideology) that forms an
authoritative knowledge about the Orient. We demonstrated that Burton by
using the technique of annotations as a meta-text intended to promote an
ideological discourse that turned a piece of fiction into history, while at the
same time distorting the real history of the East.
Our analysis shows that Burton's translation of The Arabian Nights is
indeed a part of the Orientalist scholarship, which as Edward Said has
demonstrated, contributed in shaping an image of the Orient that provided
Western powers with an academic justification on which to base their
hegemony.
Findings of this study lead us to the conclusion that today's biased
images of the Orient are but the outcome of a centuries- long scholarship of
which translation is an essential part. Indeed, translated literature as a
literary system by nature was employed by the Orientalists to consolidate
their Orientalist readings of the fictions belonging to the East, just for the
purpose of passing a piece of fiction for a historical document and distorting
the realities of the East. In other words, literature whether translated or
original has been abused by some power seekers to dominate a specific
political discourse. On this basis, the researchers are on the belief that many
of today's political discourses raised by the Western politicians have their
roots in the Oriental fictions, The Arabian Nights being one of them.

Works Cited:
Burton, R. (2001) [1885]. The Arabian nights: Tales from a thousand
and one nights. New York: Modern Library.
Said, E. (1979). Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.
Toury, G. (1995). Descriptive translation studies and beyond.
Amsterdam: Benjamins.

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Wheatcroft, A. (2003). Infidels: The conflict between Christendom and

Islam. London: Penguin Books.

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