{"id":14,"date":"2007-06-27T22:27:06","date_gmt":"2007-06-28T04:27:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/islammedlit\/2007\/06\/27\/intertwined\/"},"modified":"2007-06-27T22:35:51","modified_gmt":"2007-06-28T04:35:51","slug":"intertwined","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/islammedlit\/2007\/06\/27\/intertwined\/","title":{"rendered":"Shahrazad’s Magic"},"content":{"rendered":"

You have to hand it to Shahrazad.\u00c2\u00a0 She tells one very compelling story.\u00c2\u00a0 And she does this by telling a story within a story within a story.\u00c2\u00a0 Think about it.\u00c2\u00a0 The main story of The Arabian Nights,<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0is her own.\u00c2\u00a0 She reminds us of this with some small word or phrase found within the text.\u00c2\u00a0 She then goes on to tell stories to King Shahryar. And in her stories, she had her characters tell stories to each other.\u00c2\u00a0 And so the stories and storytellers come full circle.<\/p>\n

The stories themselves deal with magic and things that would be outside the experiance of the average Muslim of the time period.\u00c2\u00a0 Now they most likely believed<\/strong> <\/strong>in things like magic and jinnis.\u00c2\u00a0 This was so that they would have something or someone to blame when the unexpected happened.<\/span><\/p>\n

One of my favorite stories so far is “The Tale of the Ensorcelled Prince.”\u00c2\u00a0 Which is told to the king from “The Fisherman and the Jinni.”\u00c2\u00a0 In this story, the prince marries his cousin (lots of intermarrying going on\u00c2\u00a0amoung cousins and siblings it seems) and he is as happy as a lark with his wife and he thinks that she feels the same way about him.\u00c2\u00a0 When he overhears two servants talking about how his wife drugs him every night so that she can be with her lover, he gets angry and decides to kill him.\u00c2\u00a0 (Also the lovers are almost always black slaves, wonder why that is.)\u00c2\u00a0 Instead he only\u00c2\u00a0managed in maiming the slave and cause the slave to loose his voice.\u00c2\u00a0 Now the wife goes into mourning and has her lover put inside a shire of some kind so she can take care of him.\u00c2\u00a0 After three years of this, the prince gets pissed about all her moaning and wailing and tells her to shut up already and get over it.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

When the wife realizes that her husband is the one who hurt her lover she casts a spell on him that turns the bottom part of his body to stone and all the people within his kingdom to fish.<\/p>\n

Enter the king from the Fisherman’s story. The king finds the prince and listens to the entire sorid affair and then decides to help this prince.\u00c2\u00a0 He goes and kills the wife’s black slave lover and takes his place within the shire.\u00c2\u00a0 When the wife comes back she does not seem to notice that her lover is now a white man and is able to speak now.\u00c2\u00a0 The king tricks the wife into freeing the prince and his people and is then killed by the king.<\/p>\n

As in a lot of Shahrazad’s stories, the women are all beautiful (and only 5′ tall) and the men, and the majority of the men are either royal or in positions of power. (Which only make sense, as Shahrazad is telling the stories to a king and he would want to here about other kings and princes.)\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 She uses magic to explain the unexplainable and to further the idea that such things do happen and that there is a reason for most magic and that magic has a logic all its own.<\/p>\n

Shahrazad manages to keep King Shahryar enthralled by her stories for three years and in that time she gives birth to two sons, thus continuing both her bloodline as well as the kings.\u00c2\u00a0 And she gets to keep her head at the end of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You have to hand it to Shahrazad.\u00c2\u00a0 She tells one very compelling story.\u00c2\u00a0 And she does this by telling a story within a story within a story.\u00c2\u00a0 Think about it.\u00c2\u00a0 The main story of The Arabian Nights,\u00c2\u00a0is her own.\u00c2\u00a0 She … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":69,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[261,259],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-magic","category-storytelling"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/islammedlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/islammedlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/islammedlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/islammedlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/69"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/islammedlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/islammedlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/islammedlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/islammedlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/islammedlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}