One Thousand and One Nights - Aladdin is Chinese

Just before the new live adaptation of Aladdin by Disney, a polemic rose about the choice of Naomi Scott, an English actress of Indian origin for the role of Princess Jasmine. Many regretted this choice which rules out the possibility of putting forward an actress of Arab origin.

The reasons given by the studio are understandable (difficulties finding young actors who know how to play, dance and sing well) and their good faith seems sincere because Disney Studios have almost always employed dubbers from the countries presented in their animated films. In addition, from the Hollywood point of view, highlighting an Indian main actress is as rare as an actress of Arab origin, so they really took an additional risk in making this choice which can frustrate (quite understandably) the Arab population.

But another question arises under these conditions: must the studio absolutely continue to faithfully remake its old animated films?

One Thousand and One Nights (popularly known as Arabian Nights in English) is one of the most popular ambassadors of Islam in the World. Yet many tend to forget that Islam is not only linked to the Arab world and that many parts of Asia and Africa have also been converted for centuries. It is therefore not so surprising that one of its greatest representatives presents Chinese or Indian characters in his adventures.

Originally, One Thousand and One Nights is an anonymous set of Persian and Indian tales and poems transposed to writing in Arabic around the 10th century. However, a fragment of a work dating from the 9th century was also found.

Transcribing the history of this book is complex because it was widely distributed in the Middle East for centuries and many different versions exist with many variations and additions over time.

Moreover, it was long considered a popular work and not as part of the "adab", the concept that defines both the culture of the cultivated noble and the accompanying prose literature. Its derivative versions were therefore largely facilitated because of its lack of official supervision by scholars.

-Today, it would be as if we were trying to write an official version of a popular tale like the story of Santa Claus: there would be a version which borrows a maximum of logically overlapping ideas but there would necessarily coexist other versions impossible to integrate who would continue to survive in parallel. In the end, the final version of One Thousand and One Nights gathers 1,205 stories since the Boulaq version of 1835.

Even the story line has been adapted to give more or less public versions. You probably know it, but to sum up, a powerful sultan cheated by his wife decides to execute the woman he married the morning before so he will not to be betrayed again. The grand vizier’s daughter, Sheherazade, offers to marry the sultan herself, but before sleeping, she will tell him the beginning of a story which he will not know the end until the next day if he does not execute her.

Most of the stories and poems revolve around thirty big episodes in which they are integrated, this stratagem allows Scheherazade to save time to gain the confidence of her husband until he trusts her enough and gives up her execution.

Let's go back to Aladdin. This is not one of the original stories but a late addition made by a very important French in the history of One Thousand and One Nights: Antoine Galland.

Published between 1704 and 1717, the first French translation is actually a free adaptation of this man. Member of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres with a very broad general culture, Antoine Galland was both the king's antiquarian and a professor of Arabic language at the Collège de France.

As great lover of oriental cultures, he wanted to popularize them in France and knew that a simple translation of the stories he had only incomplete editions would not be enough. So he decided to completely revise these books. He condensed a maximum of stories from different geographical origins and added his own creations inspired by Persian tales to reach the one thousand nights: Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, The Adventures of Sinbad the Sailor and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves .

But his main change to popularize the work was the rewriting of the texts. Galland was an excellent translator of the different original languages and yet, his texts are radically different. He had understood that the very "dry" and descriptive original style did not suit his own culture. One Thousand and One Nights was above all a popular tale and to reach more than a limited number of scholars who the style would not have disturbed, he energized the narration, removed details that he considered unnecessary and softened some words and violent passages.

In his preface to the 1806 edition where he published the literal translation alongside that of Antoine Galland, M. Caussin de Perceval writes:

"M. Galland knew Arabic very well; but he did not believe for that reason that everything that was literally translated from Arabic could please French readers. He wanted to make a pleasant work in his mother tongue, and he succeeded; but to achieve this, it was necessary to conform to the taste of the nation. M. Galland was therefore obliged, not only to entrench, to soften, to explain, but even to add; for the oriental authors, who often fall into repetitions, or who dwell on useless details, sometimes leave to guess many things; and their lively narration like their imagination, is often too fast, and even obscure for us. "

This adaptation was saving for One Thousand and One Nights because the bet was successful and the book was very quickly a popular success. As said above, these stories do not fit into the criteria of Arabic literature (distinct and identified author, noble writing style and maintained all the way... far away from the different dialects originally present) and today, many agree that, without this adaptation, this story would have ended up being forgotten and would have disappeared.

Now let's focus more on the original story of Aladdin in particular.

In his story, Antoine Galland specifies from the start that Aladdin lives in a capital of China and is a burden for his widowed mother because of his idleness.

An African mage, pretending to be his uncle, will ask him to access a sealed cellar accessible only to his bloodline and will give him a protective ring so that he can bring him a lamp. As Aladdin refuses to give it quickly, the mage gets angry and closes the cellar over the young man. He then discovers that the ring and the lamp each contained a hideous genie that fulfilled all the wishes of their owner. After going out and getting rich thanks to the genies, he wants to marry the princess Badroulboudour but as she is already engaged, he orders the genie to remove her and lock her up every night to prevent her from consuming her wedding. Disgusted, her husband ends up canceling the marriage and the sultan allows Aladdin to marry his daughter.

But much later, the African mage deceives Badroulboudour during an absence of Aladdin by posing as a merchant who replaces the old lamps with new ones. Ignoring the powers of her husband's lamp, she willingly gives it to him, allowing the mage to summon the genie to remove Aladdin's palace and wife.

Calling on the genie of the ring, Aladdin will find again his palace and ask Badroulboudour to poison the mage during his dinner with her so that everything goes back to normal.

Fans of the Disney animated film will have a hard time recognizing the mischievous thief and the courageous Princess Jasmine because apart from the name and the concept of the lamp housing a genie, the two artworks have very little in common. Here, Aladdin is manipulative, greedy and does not hesitate to frighten the princess when he kidnap her every night during her first marriage until he gets his way. Bradoulboudour has no real interest in the story, she have no other function than to be beautiful and to sell the wonderful lamp out of ignorance to the African mage before poisoning him on Aladdin's orders. The two genies with unlimited wishes also remove any notion of obstacle to be crossed. Without personal elevation and without the slightest difficulty to overcome, one wonders in the end what moral emerges from the story.

But this does not mean that this one is bad. It is simply a story that plays on its exotic arguments, drawing inspiration from tales containing djinns. That said, even when placing the story in its historical context, the personalities of the characters are not really exciting.

-Exoticism is also the only reason I find to explain why the story takes place in China.

Indeed, if a minor Muslim community has been present in China since 651 and some people have Arabic names (especially pilgrims who travel to Mecca and earn the honorary prefix "Hajji"), their culture is quite unimportant except in the province of Xinjiang from the 10th century. But in the 18th century France, talking about China added an even more exotic notion than the Middle East and evoked a mystical country where magic was common in the collective imagination.

Trade between France and China has been very sporadic throughout history and the popular understanding of the Orient was still so meager less than a century ago that Hergé will openly mock it in Tintin's album Le Lotus Bleu (The Blue Lotus) in 1934 when he describe the stereotypes of his time to the young Tchang.

-Many clichés and a priori have faded away today but it is still sad to note that a large number of them are still present and that the argument of exoticism remains very powerful if we evoke the Asian countries to sell an esoteric product without scientific basis.

But if China was not really interesting in Aladdin, one of the other emblematic stories of One Thousand and One Nights has a much more interesting and direct link that we will see in the second and last part devoted to these tales.

In the meantime, I count on you to continue to enrich your imagination and see you soon!