Arabian Nights and Days: A Novel

"Mahfouz is one of the great writers, he’s just brilliant. The Cairo Trilogy is one of my favourite novels. I was actually lucky enough to meet him once in Egypt. I was in touch with his biographer, who told me about a hotel where he met up with literary friends. He was still a target for Islamists because of one of his novels, and he’d been stabbed in the neck a few years earlier. So you couldn’t tell anybody where you were going, the location had to be kept secret and I wasn’t allowed to go with anybody else. But it was lovely, meeting him. He was very old; it was only a year or two before he died. He didn’t have the energy that he no doubt would have had before. Also, my Arabic was dreadful. But one thing I did ask him about was his interest in oral culture—the storytelling traditions of Egypt and the hakawatis, who were the traditional storytellers. He talked about how when he was younger, he used to love listening to them in the cafes. They’d tell these wonderful, old, magical, mythical stories. He said he was a little sad that that had mostly died out because of radio and television. So, many years later, when I came to read this book, Arabian Nights and Da ys, I was reminded of that meeting, because the book is very much a celebration of oral culture. It comes back to what I was saying earlier about the orality of fairytales, which is very much there in the Tales of 1,001 Nights , which this is based on. It’s a sequel. Scheherazade has told all these stories and the king, Shahryar, who used to kill a wife every night, has said his troubled mind is finally at peace. He’s “magnanimously” granted her freedom and she no longer has to keep telling stories. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Arabian Nights and Da ys goes out into the streets outside. It’s a sort of multiverse of 1001 Nights where you have various characters from the stories who happen to be living around the place where the stories are being narrated. You have Sinbad telling the stories of his sea journeys. You have Kamar al-Zaman, who’s a very beautiful figure in one of the stories. One story that Naguib Mahfouz tells is about two djinnis who have a debate about who’s the most beautiful person in the world. There’s a boy and a girl and they can’t decide. So they bring them together to find out who’s more desperate to love the other, as a way of judging their beauty. Various stories are retold from The 1001 Nights , often the more mischievous ones. There’s a story of a woman who is harassed by four men in powerful positions. She invites them back to her house when her husband is away and gets them to strip off their clothes. Then she suddenly says, ‘My husband is coming, you’d better hide in the cupboard.’ So she has four of them in a cupboard, and she’s going to sell them in a marketplace and expose them all. They’re wonderful stories. They’re also gritty. Mahfouz brings his sense of social injustice and of community to the book. So you have a man who is told by a djinn that he must assassinate the local governor. He does this but, on the way, he also kills a young girl and goes completely mad. When he’s killed the governor, he asks the djinn to rescue him before the guards come. Then there’s a debate between him and the djinn about what communal responsibility means, and that he must make a sacrifice for the sake of the community. That’s very Mahfouz: he was really interested in how communities are made and how lives intersect around a neighbourhood. People have their different occupations—they might be the barber or the water carrier or the perfume seller. You see how they all join up and their lives are entangled with each others’. That comes out in this book. It’s full of talk of government spies, policemen and various apparatchiks. Mahfouz is very slightly referencing the troubles of modern Egypt and contemporary problems, as he always does, and brings those, very subtly, into the story. But it’s also very surreal and very magical. Towards the end, Shahryar, the king, finds himself in what is his ultimate nightmare: a city populated entirely by women. He ends up being very befuddled and confused and being thrown by a giant out into the desert. It’s a very enigmatic ending, where he has a discussion with another outcast about what the meaning of truth is, whether you can ever find truth, or when you think you’ve found it, that’s the very moment when you lose it. That’s very Mahfouz as well, that sense of the enigma of everything and the difficulty of pinning things down. Nicholas Jubber is the author of The Fairy Tellers: A Journey into the Secret History of Fairy Tales , published on 20 January 2022 by John Murray Press, priced at £20 and available online and from all good bookshops."