Though hardly any child could have missed hearing about the exploits of Aladdin and his magical lamp or the fantastic voyages of Sindbad the sailor, there appears to be a deep distrust, or even a disdain, for these stories. While they have never been out of circulation as part of popular culture, you will search in vain if you want to obtain a decent collection of these stories in Urdu. I still recall with fondness the handsome one volume edition of Alf Laila retold for children. It was the work of Iliyas Mujeebi who also rendered the Urdu classics Fasana-i-Ajaib and Bagh-o-Bahar into versions for children. Mujeebi’s Alf Laila was published from Karachi and I wonder what has made it go out of circulation, why it has not been reprinted time and again. But it is not only children who are being deprived of this extraordinary feat of storytelling; it is being kept away from adults as well as is apparent from the versions of The Arabian Nights available in the market today.

Under the leadership of Maulvi Abdul Haq, the Anjuman Tarraqi-i-Urdu, one of the most respectable learned institutions related to Urdu, published a version of the Alf Laila, retold and translated by Mansoor Ahmed, a few years before Independence. Some years ago, the same learned body reprinted this very book but with some portions cut out. So from the days of Baba-i-Urdu to the present day, more and more prudery has set in. What was perfectly acceptable in his time is censored today, and that too, not by the government but by the very organisation which had published the original version.

Tales from The Arabian Nights have been despised because of fantasy and magic and the high levels of entertainment they provide, the very elements which contribute to their popular appeal. In the book Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights, scholar Marina Warner makes the poignant remark that the book was regarded as khurafat by the Arabs, hence “enjoyable but not worth serious attention.” The same word carried over into Urdu too and anything could be dismissed as khurafat. According to Warner, “The Nights continued to be considered popular trash, written in an impure Arabic beneath the attention of serious literati; and as pulp fiction, the cycles of stories were excluded from the classical Arabic cannon.” The Arabs were notorious for being purists to a painful degree in literary matters but their bias carried over into the more hybrid versions which were introduced into Urdu.

An exception to the general lack of non-availability is Hazar Dastaan, the version by Ratan Nath Sarshar, the author of Fasana-i-Azad and a great prose stylist himself. This version is not only very readable but closer in spirit to the 19th century Urdu novel rather than a proper dastaan. Sarshar has excelled in the depiction of the hustle bustle of life in a burgeoning metropolis, drawing Baghdad from what he had seen of Lucknow. The cutting and trimming is not dissimilar to what Sarshar made out of Don Quixote in his Khudai Faujdaar and Askari has placed Sarshar’s achievement in the larger context of translations into Urdu, with the comment that a writer will see as much of a timeless classic as his society and times will allow him to see. Two different versions of Sarshar’s Alf Laila are available currently. The first is the one volume abridgment published by Sang-e-Meel from Lahore and the other is the multi-volume edition published by Oxford University Press. The Lahore edition is served well by the inclusion of the highly original and perceptive introduction by Intizar Husain, which in a wonderfully readable style looks at the tales as a great cultural achievement.

It is in this context that I place the recent publication of selected tales from The Arabian Nights brought out by another Lahore-based publisher, Ilqa Publications. The perennial favourites, Aladdin, Ali Baba and Sindbad have been published as attractive, illustrated books aimed at younger readers. The writer is Muhammad Salimur Rahman, who is known for his poems and stories as well as translations, including a prose version of The Odyssey, and is also the author of several books for children, such as Sulaimani Khazana, an adaptation of Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines. I cannot determine which of the many versions of The Arabian Nights he has used as his source, but it is interesting to note that Aladdin’s tale is 100 pages, twice the length of the Ali Baba’s tale, and hence it is the richly detailed Aladdin which appeals more to me. In any case, these slim volumes retain the interest of the reader and do not distance themselves from the spirit of the original.

Along with a narrative gusto, these tales are remarkable for language. Muhammad Salimur Rahman is a wonderful prose stylist with a varied and precise vocabulary. Here he has used a style appropriate for children and younger readers. The text is enriched with clear and well-delineated drawings by Amna Mehmood. These volumes would make delightful reading for children in schools as well as in addition to the classroom. I do hope that further volumes follow in this series so that the set of The Arabian Nights is complete once again.

Asif Farrukhi is a fiction writer and critic