Not your average bedtime story

The Arabian Nights is a book with no author its tales immerge from the trade routes and centers of the Middle East. A thousand nights and a night refers to one story that is wrapped around others and is an assembly of wonder, tales of magic, mysticism, eroticism and comedy. It’s a book of dark tales and ruthless men in ancient times. Women were not valued only punished if they did wrong to their men. The very beginning of this web of tales starts with King Shahryar sends for his younger brother Shah Zaman and, Scheherazade, King Shahryar’s wife, she tells stories just to stay alive. These tales are about lust and the fear of betrayal, power, love, and are full of angles and cliff hangers. This is not …show more content…

The elderly fisherman casts his net only four times a day. On this one particular day he catches no fish for three times he throws the net. Discouraged he prays and throws the net for the last time and pulls up a jar sealed with a leaden cap stamped with the seal ring of Lord Solomon. Upon opening the jar smoke “spired heavenward” that became a Jinni. The fisherman is told by the Ifrit he will die with his choosing of death. The man asks his crime and thereupon the jinni speaks and since she has been stuck there for many years she has vowed death to the next that frees her. It is only through tricking the jinni back into the bottle does the fisherman get away with his life. Pleading to the fisherman not to toss her back to the water says "Allah upon thee, O Fisherman, don't! Spare me, and pardon my past doings, and as I have been tyrannous, so be thou generous, for it is said among sayings that go current: 'O thou who doest good to him who hath done thee evil, suffice for the ill-doer his ill deeds, and do not deal with me as did Umamah to 'Atikah.'" The fisherman releases the Jinni and she gives him four colored fish to bring to the King. Trickery was also used when the king had released the prince from his wife’s powers while pretending to be the love of the wife; the king hides and kills the woman. The Prince’s people are restored (having before been turned into four different colors of fish) and his