Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange, the first English translation of a set of mediaeval Arab stories similar to those found in the Thousand and One Nights, shares many of the features of the latter collection, including the marvellous happenings and strange events signaled in the book's title. Like the stories in the Nights, those in the newly translated collection open a window for modern readers onto mediaeval Arab culture, with its emirs and caliphs, merchants and seafarers, shopkeepers, servants, slaves and shape-changing jinn. The collection has been translated into sturdy modern English prose by Malcolm C. Lyons, formerly professor of Arabic at Cambridge University and also the translator of the complete Thousand and One Nights. It is introduced by the writer and critic Robert Irwin, himself the author of an indispensable Companion to the Arabian Nights, and though it does not contain a frame story, unlike the Nights where the stories are told by a female narrator, Scheherazade, to a sleepless and tyrannical sultan, the collection uses similar motifs and devices, even introducing some of the same characters. The Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid, ruler of Baghdad during its mediaeval golden age and an occasional character in the Nights, also figures in the stories in Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange, for example, as does his vizier Ja'far al-Barmaki. These are not the only historical characters to find their way into the stories, since their anonymous mediaeval authors filled them with individuals who would have been known to their original Cairo or Baghdad audiences. Harun al-Rashid and Ja'far play cameo roles, as do other famous figures like Amr ibn al-As, the Arab conqueror of Syria and Egypt, the Abbasid caliph Al-Ma'moun, son of Harun al-Rashid and described in the Nights as having tried to pull down the Pyramids, and the fabulously wealthy Abbasid prince Mohammed ibn Sulaiman al-Hashimi, a cousin of Harun al-Rashid and governor of the port city of Basra. Some of the stories in Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange appear in different form in the Nights, as Irwin explains in his introduction, while others employ similar motifs. The story of “Talha, the Son of the Qadi of Fustat,” for example, the second in the collection, describes a feckless spendthrift rescued by a resourceful slave girl and is similar to the story of “Ali Shah and Zumurrud” in the Nights, taken by the Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini as the frame story for his famous film version. The stories, Irwin says, are “the oldest of all the Arab story collections that have been discovered thus far,” and though he does not say so perhaps this accounts for some of their more peculiar features. One of these is the prominence of the Umayyad caliphs in the tales, with story 14, “Said son of Hatim al-Bahili and the Marvels he encountered at Sea,” opening with the Umayyad caliph Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik, sleepless in his palace in Damascus, waiting for a storyteller to help while away the evening hours, for example. Christians, too, are given unusual prominence in the tales. In the same story, the narrator begins by giving the caliph a history lesson before recounting what he has heard from a monk encountered on a sea-voyage from India to China. “I was a young man in the caliphate of Uthman,” the narrator says. “He had brought a number of Muslims to the province of Basra under the command of Amr ibn al-As, ordering him to put to sea and conduct a holy war against anyone who opposed Islam.” After spending some time in India, the narrator sets out for China and meets a monk “who leaned out towards us from his hermitage and asked us who we were and from whence we had come. We said we were followers of Muhammad, may God bless him and his family and give them peace.” This exchange may be a memory of the monks encountered in Egypt and Syria during the earlier Arab conquests. “The fact that protagonists in the tales frequently invoke the name of Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, as well as the fact that Ali is given a heroic role in two of the stories, might suggest that the compiler had Shia sympathies,” Irwin also suggests. But “there is no sign of any particular hostility towards the Umayyad caliphs.” While some of the stories are apparently set in Baghdad, their geographical scope is striking. News of the strange is culled from destinations as far apart as Damascus and China, and the stories also include references to Alexander the Great and the pre-Islamic Persian kings. Christians, Jews and pagans are all familiar figures to their narrators. Among the motifs Irwin lists in his introduction are the coincidences that bring separated characters together and the prevailing emphasis on the pain and pleasure to be found in love and sexual desire. The narrators of the stories conjure up visions of lives lived amid almost unimaginable opulence and, for some, vast monetary rewards. Princesses languish in tents sipping cool drinks while princes are accompanied by hundreds of followers dressed in clothes woven with silver and gold. The authors of the stories can also go to extremes perhaps rarely seen even in the Nights. Women, for example, are frequently portrayed as scheming and deceitful, with the seventh story in the collection, “Arus al-Ara'is and her Deceit, as well as the Wonders of the Seas and Islands,” being almost a case study in misogyny. “The storyteller or storytellers show a particular hostility to scheming and deceitful old women,” Irwin comments, tracing this motif through several stories, including the third, “the Six Men,” in which men are lured to their destruction by various evil-intentioned women, and the last, “Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle,” which contains a wicked sorceress and evil queen of the jinn. Earlier, readers are introduced to an “evil-omened old woman with a face like a vulture,” Irwin says, and despite ambiguities in the presentation of women in the tales it seems that this new collection will stoke the debate on the place they are assigned in mediaeval Arab storytelling. In the meantime, “Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle” and perhaps other stories imply an Egyptian author or readership. The story takes several barely comprehensible detours, suggesting that its original readers valued local texture over narrative line, it being entirely possible, as incident is piled up on incident, to forget the initial situation the storyteller had offered to explain. However, the story begins with the Arab conqueror Amr ibn al-As entering Egypt, the narrator adding that “when he had got as far as Ain al-Shams he saw a huge old building, bigger than any he had ever seen, surrounded by remarkable remains.” Like in the story of “Said son of Hatim al-Bahili and the Marvels he encountered at Sea,” he then comes across an aged Christian hermit, a monk named Matrun, who offers to explain the local customs. “I shall tell the emir – God help him – what I have heard about [the building] and the stories that have reached me. I shall tell him about the huge old castle to which it was attached and why it was that its foundations were destroyed. I shall give the name of the queen and set out its story, so that he may have a clear view of it, if this is what God wills,” Matrun promises. By the end of the tale, Amr ibn al-As is suitably impressed by what he has heard, perhaps, as Irwin suggests of the tales as a whole, precisely because it answers to a mediaeval Arab taste for the marvellous and the strange. “Extraordinary things were signs of God's creative power,” Irwin writes. “To marvel at God's creation was thus a pious act.” “Amr approved the story told him by Matrun the monk and rewarded him generously,” the narrator comments. “Praise be to the One God, and blessings and peace rest on Muhammad, his family and his companions.” Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange, translated by Malcolm C. Lyons, London: Penguin, 2014, pp447
