We stop the storytelling here for one chapter. Nobody new appears in it. Twenty-nine chapters get pulled into one line, and then one question follows.
The question is this. What if the two stories you know best are not in this book’s manuscript. Aladdin and Ali Baba.
The Road So Far
In Part One Shahrazad broke off every night. A merchant’s life hung on one date stone, and three old men paid it for him. A fisherman stayed alive in front of what came out of a bottle by telling one story. Those six chapters set the rules of this book.
Part Two goes out to sea. Sindbad went out seven times and came back seven times. What he took for an island was a back, and the old man on his shoulder did not get down. In the last of them he chooses, for the first time, to stop.
Part Three is the alleys of Baghdad. People who broke a promise not to ask each had to put up a story that night. One apple gets a woman killed and four men come forward to say each did it. A trial the adults had closed was reopened by a child at play.
Part Four is chapters where one object changes where a person stands. Aladdin gained a lamp, lost it and got it back. Ali Baba opened a rock with one phrase, and the house was saved by Marjana. Maruf started from a lie, and Baba Abdalla wanted one thing more and lost his eyes.
The Twelve Volumes Galland Published
Europe first read this book in 1704. A Frenchman called Antoine Galland put an Arabic manuscript into French and published it. Twelve volumes came out by 1717. Once that book appeared, one country after another began reading these stories.
The manuscript Galland worked from had come out of Syria. It is among the older Arabic manuscripts still surviving. But that manuscript breaks off partway through the two hundred and eighty-second night. He did not own a manuscript that ran to the thousandth night.
The Four That Are Not in It
Aladdin is not in that manuscript. Neither is Ali Baba. Baba Abdalla from chapter 28 is not, and the two sisters from chapter 29 are not. They are in Galland’s book and not in the manuscript he worked from.
Scholars who study this call them orphan tales. It means we cannot locate the place they came from. And these four are among the most widely read stories in the book.
The Man from Aleppo
Galland kept a diary. It records that he met somebody in Paris in 1709. A man called Hanna Diyab, who had come from Aleppo. Aladdin and Ali Baba are on the list of stories he told.
Galland noted down summaries of what he heard. Then he wrote them out in his own words and put them in the later volumes. For a long time after that the cover of the book carried only Galland’s name. Diyab left an account of his own travels too, and it only became known much later.
An Arabic manuscript of Aladdin did surface at one point. For a while it was taken to be the original Arabic story. It turned out to be the French version put back into Arabic.
Nights That Differ by Edition
There is not one Arabic edition either. One came out of Egypt in 1835 and another began appearing in India in 1839. The two do not agree on which stories are in them or on the order. The same tale is the hundredth night in one of them and some other night in the other.
That is why this series gives no original chapter numbers. In Journey to the West we noted which chapters of the original each one covered. Doing the same here would mean picking one edition as the standard. There is no single one to pick. That is the position this book is in.
Today, the Word Fake
Is the most famous story fake because it is not in the original. To call it fake you need a real original to hold it against. This book does not have one. It is stories out of India and Persia and the Arab world and Egypt, gathered over centuries.
Inside the frame Shahrazad is in the same position. She is not somebody telling stories she invented. She is somebody retelling what she heard somewhere, shaped for that night. This book was built out of carried stories from the beginning.
So not in the manuscript does not mean fake. It is closer to meaning we know when and where it came in. That Aladdin has been read for over three hundred years stands on its own.
One thing does stay, though. Writing down who brought it. The name of the man who brought in two of the most read stories on earth was blank for a long time. The question from chapter 26 and chapter 29 comes round here for the third time.
This Is Not the End
Part Four closes here, but the nights are not over.
Next is Part Five, eight chapters of love and fate. A bridegroom is carried to another city in one night, and two jinn make a wager over a person.
Then in Part Six the story returns to the first chapter. On the thousandth night Shahrazad stops, and we ask what changed in the king.