Wherever the travellers go, from the silk market to the jewellers' emporia to the innermost chambers of the palace, they find such macabre scenes. The merchants are dressed for business, the princess lounges on her dais, but all are skeletons, decaying simulacra of the living in a city closed forever to the world. On the most obvious level, this is a parable of transience. (As the cynical pasha puts it in Ivo Andric's novel Bosnian Chronicle, "We're all dead but some of us are buried later than others.") But is it not also a symbol of what happens when a once vibrant culture becomes intoxicated by its own most poisonous fantasies?
Readers who come for the first time to The Thousand and One Nights ( in Arabic Alf Layla wa'Layla) may be startled to discover an Islamic culture almost unrecognisably at variance with any we know today. Though rigidly hierarchical, dominated by Koranic precept and prophetic example, as well as by meticulous social protocols and rituals of courtesy, the Baghdad or the Cairo we encounter in these pages pulse with a sense of freedom and expansive possibility. The high and mighty rub shoulders (as well as other parts) with the lowest of the low. A slaughterhouse worker (one of the "vile professions" in traditional Islamic culture) finds himself suddenly in bed with a high-born married woman, and at her invitation. These are cities of abrupt reversals: a prince is reduced to tattered beggary, a slave-girl ends up on a throne, a wolf vows to become a Sufi. This may be a "patriarchal" society but its women, whether simpering courtesans or toothless hags, are hardly "oppressed". They dominate and hector their men. Far from being languorous odalisques, they are bold in their desires; they make impetuous assignations, it is their lovers who hang back.
In this world, men and women fall in love at a glance, and before you know it, they're snogging between scented sheets, often under the noses of oblivious spouses. Nor is either sex abstemious. They gorge on delicacies washed down with gargantuan draughts of wine. At the same time, they are unabashedly devout. The sharper and the whore are as fervent in belief as the cadi (Islamic judge), indeed, often more so, and this is not seen as hypocrisy - that is the exclusive province of the smugly sanctimonious, who are often satirised. The piety of rogues and backsliders represents one of those recurrent collisions of extremes by which the anonymous story-tellers of the Nights sought to portray human life at its most joyous pitch.
