The Influence of One Thousand and One Nights on Children’s Arabic Literature

Abstract

One Thousand and One Nights, also known as Arabian Nights, is a literary source that evokes supernatural, magical worlds that transcend place and time and stimulate the reader’s audio-visual imagination. Kamil Kelani, the renowned Egyptian writer, as well as other writers who followed his style, derived tales from One Thousand and One Nights and simplified them for children in forms that still maintained the original marvel. The study argues that these tales from One Thousand and One Nights have saved children’s Arabic literature from stagnation and the domination of a preaching didactic tone that overwhelmed it since its inception at the end of the nineteenth century.

The study confirms that the simplified tales of One Thousand and One Nights meet the various needs of Arab children today, including fantasy, imagination, and reading for pleasure. For instance, characters such as giants, mermaids, and unicorns, subjected to unusual time-place conditions, have entered the space of children’s Arabic literature through the simplified tales of One Thousand and One Nights and enriched it with imagination, oddity, wonder, fantasy, and amusement. These tales also do not neglect reflections on life and death, achievement and failure, and love and hatred, being some of the key issues facing children in their foundational years. To show this, the study employed an analytical approach through which specific motifs and elements from the simplified tales of One Thousand and One Nights are analyzed for their impact on Arabic children’s literature, how they were assimilated into this literature, and their influence on its content, narrative structures, character formation, and symbols. This approach aims to comprehend the interaction between the tales of One Thousand and One Nights and Arabic children’s literature since the end of the 19^th century.