Mixed Media: The Arabian Nights (2013)

The Mixed Media Column from the April 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mary Zimmerman’s 1992 play, Arabian Nights, was recently produced at the Tricycle Theatre in London. Zimmerman was motivated by the 1991 Gulf War to dramatise The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night to portray the poetic richness of Islamic and Arabic culture. The stories are Middle Eastern and South Asian folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age (c750-1258 AD) of the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad when the Arab world was the intellectual  centre of science, philosophy, poetry, commerce and agriculture. The Caliph Harun Al Rashid (Denton Chikura) is even a character in the Arabian Nights.

The magical key line of Zimmerman’s Arabian Nights is ‘in our heads, my lord, we do contain all the images of the universe’: the play is a celebration of the imagination, the power of storytelling, and conjures up the earthy spirit of the souk and harem without recourse to the djinns and magic carpets of Aladdin or Ali Baba. The play is an ensemble piece with many accents beginning with the frame story of Persian King Shahayer and the Vizier’s daughter Scheherezade (Adura Onishile).  This then opens out into stories within stories like a set of Chinese boxes which look at love, lust, shame, comedy, dreams and intellectuality.

Stories dramatised include The Jester’s Wife and Her Three Lovers, a farce of marital infidelity in which the wife hides a pastry cook, greengrocer and butcher in the lavatory. Edward Gibbon saw Islam as ‘more liberal than the laws of Moses.’ The stories of Madman and Perfect Love and The Ruined Man who Became Rich Again Through a Dream have a merchant as the central character. The Arab world was a pre-industrial merchant (bazarri) capitalist society with a market economy and monetary system. In fact Muhammad was the Prophet of the Arab merchant, and Engels identified that ‘Islam is a religion adapted to townsmen engaged in trade and industry.’

The tale of Sympathy the Learned is about a female slave who outwits the greatest intellectuals of Islamic study and can be seen as feminist in its portrayal of women. The Qur’an assumes the existence of slavery and implicitly accepts it although the Islamic world did not operate a slave system of production as in classical antiquity.

Zimmerman’s Arabian Nights evoke AL Fisher’s ‘the Arabs were poets, dreamers, fighters, traders’ and the Prophet Muhammad’s affirmation that ‘the ink of a scholar is more holy than the blood of a martyr.’

Steve Clayton