Tales From the Thousand and One Nights Essay

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Thousand and One Nights is a book about feminine power by means of wit, resilience, and love of justice, creativity, grace and passion. The volumes comprising this book are meant to produce reactions. Considering the fact that parents in the western world are reluctant to place the books with the Tales on the front rows of their library shelves mainly because of their sexual explicit content, continuing with views on male female relationship types that would clash with conservative views in the Arab world, or the confronting of authority, One Thousand and One Nights keeps the reader focused and keen to turn the page. Beside their narrative aspect, the tales give way for consideration, they have the power to make one think, judge, criticize, analyze, reconsider, thus leaving an indelible impression on those who read them. The main feminine character, Shahrazad, is a symbol of feminine power, for people form all hemispheres.

The westerner who picks up the book will soon find out it is anything but a collection of fairytales full of cliches about the culture the storytellers came from. This would be the equivalent of denying Balzac's novels, for example, their valuable insights into the nineteenth century France. The richness of details and the vast areas the stories were gathered from adds to the qualities of the volumes in question.

Precisely the fact that the stories in One Thousand and One Nights used to be gathered from different storytellers in different corners of the Asian world, over centuries, makes them even more valuable and interesting since it brings different views and cultures into the light. Not only do these stories gather the spin one or another storyteller intended to give a particular one, according to one's personal philosophies and the moral of the times one lived in, but it also offers the readers slices of private and public life from different epochs that could help one better understand the evolution of their characters in the historic, socio-political context.

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They talk of the high and mighty, too, but they are essentially dedicated to those who make the largest part of society: the weak and the oppressed. Historically speaking, one of the weak and the oppressed groups was that of women. Western or Eastern societies have dealt and, to different degrees, are still dealing, with women's oppression in one form or another. Regardless of the fundamental differences between the western and the eastern world, they have at least one thing in common: women's rights. It is a thing of the very recent past that women had gained equal rights in the western world along with some other advanced societies around the globe, that is why the male-female relationship continues to be under scrutiny for those who are striving to understand the mechanisms of human society generally speaking and look for better ways to restore the balance of rights when it comes to the role women play in building and shaping their respective societies.

Historically, in the Arab world, women's roles were constrained at the private corners of their homes. They were offered few chances to go public and thus influence their society in any visible way. The stories in the folk tales place Shahrazad, a woman, in the highlighted spot a hero deserves. The king brothers are cuckolded. One of them in one of the cruelest ways possible: not only by his wife, but also by his concubines. He is faced with the worst fear a king can face: not only his bloodline at the throne is endangered, but also his shame is on the verge of becoming public. His revenge is as merciless as the wrong committed against him: he is resolved to kill every virgin in his kingdom, thus jeopardizing not only his successors, but also his entire kingdom. Facing his thirst for revenge against the entire female population, his subjects seem powerless: "soon, many girls had….....

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