One Thousand and One Nights
One Thousand and One Nights is the most representative work of Arab literature. The story is written during the Islamic-Arab Empire, the most prosperous Abbasid dynasty. This period was a prosperous and confident period for the Arabs. Political stability, economic prosperity, developed trade, active commerce, social tranquility, people's happiness, a large number of newly affluent businessmen have risen. They are adventurous, curious about exotic places, and desperate for money and women.
"One Thousand and One Nights" adopts a framework story structure model, through the way the prime minister's daughter Shanruzod tells the story to the king, 264 stories of large and small sizes are integrated into the framework of the big story, and the big and small stories are set up with small stories, so that the large and small stories are intertwined, forming a huge scale and system, with clear layers, miscellaneous and continuous, and meticulous.
In this collection of stories, the most representative stories are "The Story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves", "The Story of Aladdin and the Divine Lamp", and "The Story of Sinbad the Navigator".
The Hunchback Story
In fact, "The Story of the Hunchback" has a total of 11 stories, divided into 3 levels: there are 4 medium stories under the big story, and the fourth middle story contains 6 small stories. The story is roughly as follows:
A seamstress couple at home invited a hunchback to dinner, which the emperor had raised. The hunchback was accidentally hooked by a fish thorn in the throat tube, resulting in suffocation and death. In order to avoid this inexplicable responsibility, the tailors carried the hunchback corpse to the staircase of a Jewish doctor's house and blamed the doctor.
The doctor accidentally stepped on the hunchback when he went out, and the hunchback rolled down the stairs, and when he touched the other party, he was already dead, thinking that he had killed the hunchback by mistake, so he tried to get him to the chief housekeeper.
The general manager mistakenly regarded the hunchback as a thief, hit it a few times to see that he was out of breath, and hurriedly moved the body to stand upright in front of a shop on the street, just when a drunken merchant passed by, thinking that he had encountered a thief, he punched the hunchback. Patrol officers caught the businessman and wanted to execute him.
However, in the end, the chief manager, the doctor, and the tailor came out one after another to bear the responsibility, so that the chief criminal officer did not know who to kill for a while. In order to avoid death, the four people told the emperor four strange stories one after another. The Story of the Christian Merchant, The Story of the General Manager, The Story of the Jewish Doctor, The Story of the Tailor, and the barber, the protagonist of the tailor's story, tells the story of his six brothers, and the result is that the emperor summons the barber, and the barber saves the hunchback, and everyone is rewarded.
The Story of Sinboda's Voyage
The protagonist of the story is Sinboda, who was born in Baghdad to a wealthy merchant family, his father died at an early age, leaving him with countless huge inheritances, so he has lived a luxurious life of "spending money like dirt and wasting too much" since he was a child, he "made wine and meat friends, and he was a clumsy child", and soon squandered the family business and made himself desperate.
In order to revitalize the family business and restore the luxury of the past, Sinboda auctioned off all the remaining family property, determined to venture far and wide. He made a total of seven voyages. Every time there are adventures, encounter dangers, every time the murder is auspicious, and the death is escaped.
On the first voyage, the ship sank to the bottom of the sea, and the people on board drowned, only Sinboda grabbed the barrel and drifted at sea for a day before he struggled to get ashore and escape.
The second time, he wandered alone on an isolated island, and with his wit tied his body to the legs of the roc bird, letting the bird take himself out of danger.
The third time, he blinded the giant's eyes with an iron rod and escaped.
The fourth time, he was buried in the grave and cleverly escaped.
The fifth time, when he encounters the man-eating monster Sea Old Man, Sinboda drunk him with wine and smashed him to death, escaping from the clutches of the devil.
The sixth time, everyone was killed, they all starved to death, and only he escaped from hunger.
The seventh time, he was almost killed by an elephant and escaped from danger.
The Story of King Harid and Prince Wald Khan
After the crown prince Wald Khan succeeded to the throne, he was swayed by his favored concubines, indulged in wine all day, ignored the government, alienated his subjects, did not ask about the sufferings of the people, and lived an absurd and hedonistic life.
The courtiers repeatedly asked for advice to the king to abandon his pleasures and take on the responsibility of governing the people, but they were all hindered by the king's favorite concubines. The favored concubine did her best to stir up dissension between the monarch and the vassal in front of the king, causing the state affairs to be abandoned, the fortunes of the country to decline day by day, and the people to live in ruins.
The king's fall finally aroused the indignation of the people, and the courtiers and the people carried weapons and prepared to besiege the palace, determined to kill the king and make someone else king. In the face of the wrath of the people, the favored concubine also used a trick to instruct the king to temporarily calm the people's hearts and stabilize the situation. Then, after the autumn, the civil and military courtiers, scholars, gentlemen, and officials of all sizes headed by the prime minister in the palace were all beheaded, and none of them were spared.
Eventually, the king suddenly woke up, reformed the evil, reorganized the society, and severely punished the spoiled and deceitful concubines. The king expressed his repentance to the ministers present after re-administering the government.
Story backdrop
In 750 AD, 5 years later, the Tang Dynasty had the Anshi Rebellion, and the Abbasid Dynasty was established. This point in time is quite interesting, the Anshi Rebellion is the Tang Dynasty, and even the turning point of ancient China from prosperity to decline. That is to say, when China turned from prosperity to decline, the Islamic-Arab Empire ushered in its heyday.
In the first hundred years of the Abbasid dynasty, the empire's external expansion has reached the extreme, the domestic political stability, social tranquility, agricultural and commercial development, cultural prosperity, and prestige are far and wide, which is the "golden age" of the empire's great power. Among them, Caliph Rashid and Caliph Maimun were the most prosperous during their reign.
During Rashid's reign, in less than half a century, Baghdad grew from a deserted village to a center of astonishing wealth and a metropolis of international significance. The development of Baghdad is in fact a microcosm of the development of the Islamic-Arab Empire.
With the end of the conquest, the social stability, the comfortable living environment, the development of the commodity economy, resulting in the rapid accumulation of wealth, overseas business and trade has promoted the development of urban industry and commerce, but also caused the intensification of the gap between the rich and the poor in society. The noble, extravagant and lascivious; the poor, the poor. The princes and nobles squandered and enjoyed, living a luxurious life of paper drunkenness and gold fans; the rich merchants and tycoons were rich and rich, and the money was like dirt; the commoners at the bottom had a difficult life and often worried about their livelihood.
The Islamic outlook on life requires people to approach this life with a progressive and positive attitude, so that people will not be satisfied with their current situation and wealth, and large-scale commercial activities have become a major way for people to chase more wealth, even at the expense of risk.
Most of the merchants in One Thousand and One Nights go out to do business, often with a strong impulse, showing an adventurous nature that relies on intuition to act. Precisely in pursuit of this kind of adventure, the story is not interested in the wealth obtained through normal, unremarkable means, but is reveling in the accidental and accidental loss of everything, and the accidental and accidental acquisition of more wealth than lost. Such windfalls may not be common in reality, but they clearly demonstrate the Arabs' desire for money, the source of happiness in this world, for the twilight.
"One Thousand and One Nights" almost does not describe the accumulation of small and gradual accumulation of small business, careful and careful calculation, and the reduction of food and clothing for the sake of income. The most admired are those who have become upstarts by risk, chance and chance.