awnser:
the thousand and one nights – or, as i prefer to call them in the following forpurely practical reasons: the arabian nights – as we perceive them three hundredyears after antoine galland’s epochal french adaptation bear a distinct arabicimprint. meanwhile, the commonly accepted model for their textual historyacknowledges various stages in the conceptualization and effective formation ofboth the collection’s characteristic frame story and the embedded repertoire. thevast majority of tales in the preserved manuscripts of the nights has beenintegrated into the collection during two periods of arabic influence, the so-calledbaghdad and cairo periods (gerhardt 1963: 115–374). these “arabic” stages arepreceded by an iranian version, probably dating to pre-islamic times, which in itsturn profits from both structural devices and narrative contents originating fromindian tradition. considering the eminent position that iran and iranian culturehold in the early stages of the textual history of the arabian nights, surprisinglyfew details are known concerning the collection’s relation to and its actualposition within the iranian cultural context. in the following, i will discuss linksbetween the arabian nights and iranian culture on several levels. in surveyingthese links, i will treat five major areas: (1) the iranian prototype of the nights; (2) tales of alleged persian origin; (3) persian characters within the tales; (4)persian translations of the arabian nights; and (5) the position of the arabiannights in modern iran
