Fall 2024 Course
1001 Nights: Beyond the Fairy Tale
Course is now full. For our other current offerings, please visit our Programs page.
Course Description
Murderous sultans, magic lamps, genies and flying carpets. Fairy tales for children, right? Think again.
The 1001 Nights is one of those works that we think we all know, but on inspection, it turns out to be far stranger and more mysterious than we ever imagined. With a history that goes from ancient India to Sassanian Persia to Abbasid Baghdad to Medieval Cairo and finally 18th-century France, the 1001 Nights is a work that is both a quintessential icon of Middle Eastern culture and yet also one of the world’s first truly global stories.
In this course, we will unravel all the separate threads that go into this most intricate of tales: history and myth, the sordid underworld and the dazzling supernatural. We will look at issues of cultural borrowing and cultural appropriation, and see some of the surprising things the Nights have to say about gender, race and slavery. We will look at the history of the text’s reception in the West, and evaluate the various attempts made to translate the work into English.
And yes, we will read “Aladdin.”
Details
- Cost: $49 (English only) / $99 (English + Arabic)
- Class meets Sundays, 12 pm – 1 pm EST
- Class meets once a week for 5 sessions
- Class begins September 22nd and ends on October 20th
- Recording available for students who miss a session
- Course materials will be provided by instructor
- Arabic section will be scheduled in coordination with interested students.
Prerequisites
None.
Some familiarity with Middle Eastern history and Arabic literature is helpful, but not required.
For the Arabic section, two years of Modern Standard Arabic and/or knowledge of a modern Arabic dialect will be sufficient.
Instructor
Brian Powell is a translator and scholar of Classical Arabic and Persian literature. He is the author of the proverb collection 1,001 Arabic Proverbs with English Translation and a food guide based on his time in Egypt titled Eat Like a Local: Cairo. In over 12 years as an Arabic translator, he has translated a number of works into English, including Mysteries of the Sufi Path, The Hawza and the State and al-Maturidi’s Kitab al-Tawhid.
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