Exploring ‘One Thousand and One Nights’

Paul Cobb’s course on “One Thousand and One Nights” isn’t just a standard literary or historical exploration of a classic volume, but one that goes far beyond the printed page.

“It’s not a book between two covers,” says Cobb, the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures. “It is a complex collection of stories with lives of their own.”

The course was born from the idea of taking a “deep dive” into a single book or author, such as “The Odyssey” or Dante, ideally one with a body of scholarship and an English translation that was accessible to undergraduates, Cobb says.

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“‘One Thousand and One Nights’ jumped out as a text full of that. It checked all those boxes and more,” says Cobb, who is the director of the Middle East Center. “It is an excellent entry way into the study of the Middle East—not just the text itself, but of what its afterlives tell us about the study of the region.”

“One Thousand and One Nights,” also known as “The Arabian Nights,” is a collection of stories assembled over years from different cultures, Cobb says. The tales are framed by a storyteller, Scheherazade, who explores the stories from night to night to delay the “murderous impulses” of her husband, the king.

While it’s often misunderstood as a collection of 1,001 stories, that’s not accurate, Cobb says. Depending on the collection, there are about 400 stories, often spread over multiple nights and ending on cliffhangers, “so we’re eager to get to the continuation of the story,” he says.

Some stories also are nests for other stories: “Scheherazade will tell a story about a merchant, who tells a story about a barber, who tells a story about his cousin,” Cobb says. “These are stories about storytelling, and the telling of them goes on and on and on. It’s somewhat disorienting—and wonderfully so. Just keeping track of which story we’re in is part of the fun of the work.”

Projects within the course allowed students to apply personal interests to the creative tales and themes of the manuscript and its forms. One week had students visiting the Lea Library to view, read, and touch some of the different forms that the book has taken, drawn from Penn’s collections. Another element, new this year, involved creating a podcast featuring students reading and interpreting the stories, accompanied by interviews with scholars from around the world.

Haley Mahoe, a third-year political science major from Wailuku, Hawaii, was intrigued by how the stories were adapted in East Asian cultures, such as through K-pop and Korean dramas. “How do Asian adaptations of the Arabian Nights navigate and reshape this sort of ‘Oriental’ imagery to both local and global audiences?” she asks.

Omar Sweidan, a fourth-year political science major from Philadelphia, planned to examine one of the actual historical figures that appears in the text, looking at how they were presented in the histories and between different translations of the Nights. The visit to the rare book room was useful, he says, “getting to get hands on the actual books and seeing the collection.”

Cobb has taught the course, a Benjamin Franklin Seminar, twice since 2022, and every time it reveals something new through his students’ perspectives. “Each time they have a different set of eyes, of expectations, and of interests,” he says.