Risible Rhymes

Letter from the General Editor -- Foreword by Robert Irwin -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- A Note on the Text -- Notes to the Introduction -- A Hundred and One Nights -- The Story of a Hundred and One Nights -- The Story of the Young Merchant -- The Story of Najm al-Ḍiyāʼ ibn Mudīr al-Mulk -- The Story of Camphor Island -- The Story of Ẓāfir ibn Lāḥiq -- The Story of the Vizier and his Son -- The Story of King Sulaymān ibn ʻAbd al-Malik -- The Story of Maslamah ibn ʻAbd al-Malik ibn Marwān (God Show Them Mercy) -- The Story of Gharībat al-Ḥusn and the Young Egyptian.;The Story of the Young Egyptian and his Wife -- The Story of the King and his Three Sons -- The Story of the Young Man and the Necklaces -- The Story of the Four Companions -- The Story of the Prince and the Seven Viziers -- The Story of the King and the Serpen -- The Tale of the Ebony Horse -- The Story of the King and the Gazelle -- The Story of the Vizier Ibn Abī l-Qamar and ʻAbd al-Malik ibn Marwān -- Notes -- Appendix -- Glossary -- Bibliography -- Further Reading -- Indices -- About the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute -- About this E-book -- Titles Published by the Library of Arabic Literature. A luminous translation of Arabic tales of enchantment and wonder Known to us only through North African manuscripts, and translated into English for the first time, A Hundred and One Nights is a marvelous example of the rich tradition of popular Arabic storytelling. Like its more famous sibling, the Thousand and One Nights , this collection opens with the frame story of Shahrazad, the gifted vizier's daughter who recounts imaginative tales night after night in an effort to distract the murderous king from taking her life. A Hundred and One Nights features an almost entirely different set of stories, however, each one more thrilling, amusing, and disturbing than the last. In them, we encounter tales of epic warriors, buried treasures, disappearing brides, cannibal demon women, fatal shipwrecks, and clever ruses, where human strength and ingenuity play out against a backdrop of inexorable, inscrutable fate. Although these tales draw on motifs and story elements that circulated across cultures, A Hundred and One Nights is distinctly rooted in Arabic literary culture and the Islamic tradition. It is also likely much older than Thousand and One Nights , drawing on Indian and Chinese antecedents. This careful edition and vibrant translation of A Hundred and One Nights promises to transport readers, new and veteran alike, into its fantastical realms of magic and wonder. A bilingual Arabic-English edition. Written in mid-17th century Egypt, Risible Rhymes is a short, comic disquisition on “rural” verse, mocking the pretensions and absurdities of uneducated poets from Egypt’s countryside. Like al-Shirbini’s Brains Confounded, written some forty years later, it combines a biting satire on Egyptian rural society with a hilarious parody of the verse-and-commentary genre so beloved by scholars of the day. The two texts also share six overlapping short poems, which suggests that they emanate from a common corpus of pseudo-rural verse that circulated in Ottoman Egypt.