Suketu Mehta: Bombay’s laureate on Abu Dhabi’s backstreets

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, Suketu Mehta has gained global acclaim for his book on Mumbai and his writings on migration and community in major world cities, Nick Leech talks to him about Abu Dhabi.

When it comes to thinking about cities, the view from his temporary home at New York University Abu Dhabi provides Suketu Mehta with all the material he needs.

“When I look at a place like this, I wonder what genius of an urban planner thought that it would be a great idea to make a city without sidewalks and decided that the automobile would have primacy over the pedestrian?” the writer wonders, looking across Saadiyat Island’s twisting motorways and flyovers towards the hotels that line its distant coastline.

“I’d love to be able to walk to the beach but I can’t really go for a walk outside this apartment. And, as you can see, I’m literally at the end of my road,” he says, pointing to a patch of waste ground beneath his window where six lanes of motorway simply disappear into the sand.

More than his role as an associate professor of journalism at New York University, his alma mater, it’s Mehta’s thinking and writing about urbanism that have brought him to NYUAD.

Since January, the award-winning author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found has been teaching a course at the university that not only involves looking at fiction, film, non-fiction and poetry, but also includes field trips to places such as Dubai’s Hor Al Anz, a neighbourhood that he considers to be one of the UAE’s more inspiring destinations.

“It’s the Jackson Heights or the Southall of Dubai. We hung out, we walked the streets, had a biryani and I really felt at home,” Mehta enthuses.

“The more time I spend here the more I realise how little I know and how wrong the rest of the world is about this place,” he says. “It’s much more complex.”

It is difficult to consider a contemporary writer who is more committed to cities and city life than Mehta.

Born in Kolkata in 1963, he spent his early years in Mumbai before his family moved to Jackson Heights, a multicultural neighbourhood in Queens, New York, in 1977 and it was 21 years before he returned to the city he still refers to as Bombay.

After years spent working as a journalist and editor for business-to-business computing titles, Mehta returned to India with a determination to write and a seductively simple question: Can you ever go home again?

“I thought I would go to Bombay for a year to write a quick and dirty book about a quick and dirty city,” Mehta told the writer William Dalrymple in a panel discussion at last year’s Zee Jaipur Literary Festival in Boulder, Colorado.

Fortunately, as it turns out, the budding writer was mistaken. Mehta spent two and a half years immersed in the company of gangsters and hitmen, Bollywood moguls and call girls, police chiefs, religious rioters, actors and politicians.

“In Bombay I met people who lived closer to their seductive extremities than anyone I had ever known. Shouted lives,” Mehta writes in the book that resulted from his unexpected sojourn.

“These are not normal people. They live out the fantasies of normal people. And the kind of work they do affects all other spheres of their lives … in this sense they have become artists.”

Published as his first book in 2004, Maximum City earned Mehta a place on the finalist’s list for the Pulitzer Prize in 2005 and catapulted him, then 41, to the forefront of world literature.

Before long, Maximum City came to be considered not just as a great book about a great Indian city, Mumbai’s answer to Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi or Geoffrey Moorhouse’s Calcutta, but it also earned Mehta a place in the pantheon of literary urban investigators alongside Dickens and Orhan Pamuk, Joseph Mitchell and Jan Morris.

Since the publication of Maximum City, Mehta has spent a decade writing articles for publications such as The New Yorker, The Guardian, Time magazine, and Newsweek while working on a new translation of Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography and researching material for his next book, a study of the immigrant experience in New York tentatively titled City of the Second Chance.

At the same time, Mehta, whose accent still ties him to Mumbai and bears no trace of his many years in the United States, has been visiting cities as the only writer to participate in Urban Age, an itinerant city research programme established by Richard Sennett and Ricky Burdett at the London School of Economics.

“I’ve never taken a course in urbanism or architecture, but after Maximum City I was asked to be part of this travelling group of urbanists, planners, architects and mayors,” he says.

“I started getting invited to their conferences in cities all around the world where there were all these debates taking place about the future of cities. I started wondering why they invited me, a complete amateur at all this, and I realised that it’s because the story of the city needs to be told.”

For Mehta, writing about cities and the deliberations of the people who have the power to shape their future is a civic duty and helps to ensure that, rather than talking about buildings, the debate around our urban future focuses on people instead.

“The jargon of urbanism has become like a Latin mass and this is where I think storytelling needs to re-enter the whole conversation,” he says. “There’s a role for journalists and writers to listen to the deliberations of the good and the great and to translate this into stories for the rest of us.

“If you’re a literary theorist or a philosopher you can write in obscure journals, but it will not have much effect on the rest of the public. But the dreams of urban planners can become our nightmares because we have to live with them.”

The outcome of all this travel, research and meetings with urbanism’s great and good is a book-length essay, The Secret Life of Cities, that Mehta describes as an amuse-bouche for his forthcoming book about New York.

Focusing on migration, alienation and community in the world’s cities, the book, which is yet to be published in English, examines just what it is that makes great cities great, a quality, Mehta insists, that is quite different from the liveability indexes produced by organisations such as the Economist Intelligence Unit.

“The world’s most liveable cities always include places like Canberra and Munich, places made for expat bankers that completely bore the s*** out of me,” Mehta says.

“I think there needs to be another list of liveable cities that considers that metropolitan excitement, that sense of chaos and informality and a little bit of unpredictability, even a little frisson of danger. This is what makes for a great city.”

Rather than the sterile lakeside sidewalks of cities such as Geneva, the epitome of the kind of vibrant urban environment that Mehta favours is the Coney Island boardwalk and beach in New York, which serve as a metaphor for a workable urbanism that is open and realistic.

“A great city doesn’t have to include everyone. You could sit at Ruby’s Bar in Coney Island and watch the whole parade of humanity,” he says.

“Bangladeshis in their hijabs next to Russian girls in bikinis, and anarchists from the East Village in leather and Dominicans, and they all walk side by side before going off to their little knots on the beach.

“It’s not that they’re all happy and talking to each other. It’s not that you’ll get invited to every picnic on the beach, but somewhere on the beach there’s a picnic that you too can go to.”

The alternative view, as Mehta sees it, is a socialist notion of equality that he rejects as utopian and unrealistic, preferring instead to focus on openness, tolerance and dignity.

It is an approach that is heavily influenced by Mehta’s upbringing and from his teenage years when he grew up in a building in Jackson Heights in Queens, the easternmost and largest of New York’s five boroughs and a district that is statistically and linguistically the most diverse in the US.

In the building where the Mehta family lived, which was owned by a Turk and managed by a Greek, Indians lived alongside Pakistanis, and Jews lived next to Muslims.

“It’s not that we started loving each other. When we went inside we all said horrible racist things about somebody else. But there was a cessation of hostility and an understanding that we were all making a new future,” Mehta says.

When it comes to the UAE’s future, the real stories, he believes, lie not in the architectural visions that adorn the property developer’s hoardings he sees from his window, but in the backstreets of the neighbourhoods where the vast majority of Abu Dhabi’s population lives.

“This city is made up of layers, but the most visible layer – the one you see in advertisements and on airlines – is only the tip of it,” he says.

“There are all these other layers that are South Asian and Filipino and African and Egyptian, and the most interesting parts of the city are the interstitial spaces where these bubbles mix.

“There’s a great Maximum Abu Dhabi or Maximum Dubai to be written,” Mehta insists. “I’m certainly not the person to write it, but I think somewhere out there there is a young writer – they could be Emirati, they could be Pakistani or they could be English – who is collecting observations and stories and will write the great non-fiction book about this city, because it certainly demands it.”

This article was originally published in The National

Art: Inventing Downtown – artist-run galleries in New York City, 1952-65

Around the mid-point of the last century, three very different birds could be found in New York, each of which was the product of a singular and very modern vision, and each of which attested to the city’s new-found status: it was not only most confident and affluent city in the United States but the world’s most innovative metropolis, a place where the rules of the old world were discarded and new ways of thinking were applied.

The first bird, the jazz saxophonist and composer Charlie “Yardbird” Parker, had been performing in New York since 1939 to such acclaim that a decade later a new club, Birdland – the self-styled “Jazz corner of the world” – was named in his honour when it opened in 1949, in Midtown Manhattan.

Featuring regular performances from the likes of Parker, Ella Fitzgerald and Miles Davis, not only did Birdland help to establish New York’s reputation as the epicentre of a distinctly African-American sense of modernity, but it also helped to define it in the public imagination as a place that was incomparably cool.

The second bird, a phoenix rising from the ashes of another world war, formed the centrepiece of an oil canvas mural painted by the Norwegian artist Per Krohg for the United Nations Security Council chamber at the new UN Headquarters that opened on October 14, 1952. Its location on the banks of the East River confirmed New York’s new-found political pre-eminence.

The third bird, now sun-bleached and weather-beaten, originally served as the sign for the Tanager Gallery, an exhibition space that existed for a decade in Manhattan’s Downtown, but now hangs as an exhibit from the ceiling of the New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) Art Gallery.

Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952-1965 focuses on 14 galleries and their associated spaces, cooperatives and communities that emerged from the warren of old shops, semi-derelict buildings and basements in the area below 14th Street.

The show investigates the emergence of the area that would become an antidote to Manhattan’s commercially-focused Uptown art scene and not only that, but the crucible for a brave new way of thinking about art that helped pave the way for the city’s regeneration and its emergence as a global cultural capital.

With more than 200 museum-grade works by more than 50 artists, Inventing Downtown revisits this overlooked episode in American art history; it also speaks directly to the contemporary moment here in the UAE, and to the various roles that the arts can play in city-building and urban development.

“The story that lives in this exhibition, about artists who find cheap places to make shows that then becomes a scene, and who then become famous, that is the New York fairy tale and the artists are the Cinderellas of the art world,” NYUAD’s Maya Allison suggests. “They go downtown to this place that’s rough and cheap and then they come back as Claes Oldenburg or Dan Flavin.

“That is a fairy tale that feeds gentrification. Now we see the place where they were is one of the most expensive places to be. Everything has been converted and the art community has moved to another location that keeps moving further out,” the NYUAD Art Gallery’s director and chief curator explains. “That’s happened in New York so much now that the artists have been pushed further out. Now they’re in Berlin or Lisbon but I think this is one of the first times that we see that cycle.”

Allison admits that the Downtown example is a very different model of arts-led regeneration from the one that can be seen on Saadiyat or at Dubai’s Alserkal Avenue, where galleries and museums, rather than artists, have been the drivers for urban change. But, she insists, this does not mean that there are not lessons to be learned beyond the immediate art historical ones discussed in the exhibition.

“I think it’s fascinating to think about the differences. I wanted to bring this exhibition here because I wanted to start a conversation about what it means to be a cultural centre, because it’s almost as if we are skipping straight to the issue of creating an arts community,” Allison tells me.

If Inventing Downtown examines how this was achieved in New York from the start of the 1950s, But We Cannot See Them: Tracing a UAE Art Community, 1988-2008, the last exhibition shown at the NYUAD Art Gallery, set out to investigate something similar by focusing on the group that assembled around the pioneering Emirati artist Hassan Sharif.

If the unplanned dialogue between these shows provides Inventing Downtown with an added topicality, the experience of seeing very early, and sometimes slightly awkward, works by artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, as well as powerful works by lesser-known artists such as the African-American abstract expressionist, Norman Lewis, makes visiting Inventing Downtown a pleasure as well as an education.

The exhibition not only includes one of Yayoi Kusama’s early Infinity Net paintings, created by the Japanese artist in her New York studio and exhibited in a solo show at the Brata Gallery in October 1959, but also includes three works by Flavin that illustrate the profound changes and developments he experienced as a younger artist.

Dating from the end of 1959 or early 1960, Apollinaire wounded (to Ward Jackson) consists of a crushed can, oil, pencil on Masonite and plaster on pine; and, although it displays an early interest in light and colour – principally white – it appears to occupy a very different artistic universe from the kind of fluorescent light-based installations Flavin began to exhibit at Green Gallery just four years later.

One of these appears in Inventing Downtown in a photograph from November 1964 alongside the architectural pencil sketch of the gallery space that Flavin produced to plan his installation, setting up a contrast between graphite and fluorescent white light that only serves to emphasise the artist’s powers of imagination and visualisation.

It’s in these moments, in which works are exhibited in close proximity to original photographs from the time, that their daring modernity, and the intimate relationship between art and artist communities and urban fabric that helped to shape them are most clearly defined. Given the wealth of images that are contained in the book that accompanies the show, there could have been much more of this kind of contextualisation but, even as it is, the work provides a vital portrait of an old New York neighbourhood and a community that was inspiring – and thriving – despite the deprivations of the time.

This article originally appeared in The National

Photography: Learning from Gulf Cities at NYUAD

Last week, as the UAE recovered from the opening of the Louvre Abu Dhabi and braced itself for Dubai Design Week’s exhibitions, conferences, workshops, graduate shows, fairs, pop-up boutiques and the selfie-­inducing Prologue, a sculpture that features more than 8,000 topaz-coloured Swarovski crystals, a very different type of exhibition opened in Abu Dhabi.

Little more than a series of photographs accompanied by statistics, infographics and brief texts displayed in the Project Space at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), Learning from Gulf Cities appears modest but its scope and implications could not be more profound.

“See the Gulf, See the World” proclaims a panel while setting out the show’s basic premise: that rather than being exceptional, the cities of the Arabian Gulf are actually extreme architectural laboratories and lenses through which broader international urban trends can be seen.

“Gulf cities are designed and engineered by actors near and far and then, in turn, replicated elsewhere. They are very much part of the global circulation of ideas, investments, designs, technologies, and people”, it continues.

“Rather than celebrate – or simply ridicule and deplore – we look for lessons that are relevant for other cities in the world”, the text concludes, aligning Learning from Gulf Cities with the project that not only provided the show with its inspiration but also with its name.

In 1972, the architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown and Steven Izenour produced one of the most controversial texts of 20th century architectural history, Learning from Las Vegas, an urban study that dared to consider the Las Vegas strip on its own terms and without prejudice, looking for meaning in a place considered monstrous by architects and moralists alike.

“We are a part of the same scholarly tradition,” explains the veteran academic Harvey Molotch, who founded the current project alongside Davide Ponzini, a professor of urban planning at the Politecnico di Milano.

“There was a similarly dualistic reading of Las Vegas – the spectacle of the building and the shows and the suspicion,” he says, drawing parallels between historic and contemporary attitudes to Nevada, Abu Dhabi and Dubai.

“The big thrust is to restrain yourself from the presumption that Gulf cities are the product of some diabolical plot and from the adulation of their spectacle and to pull back and to start to encourage people to look at Gulf cities in a different manner.”

Molotch, a professor of sociology and metropolitan studies at New York University, was inspired to find out more about Gulf cities following a brief teaching stint at NYUAD in 2014.

“Coming in from the outside, I became extremely curious about the mechanisms that hold this place together: politically, economically and culturally. I found the whole place puzzling, so I started trying to learn as much as I could about the region and Davide’s was one of the articles that captured my attention,” Molotch says of the colleague with whom he has since formed an “intellectual marriage”.

“There is a difficulty in interpreting so many things here because they do not match with any urban theory that we have encountered before and we both realised that we needed different intellectual tools,” Ponzini explains.

“We also wanted to reframe the work that so many Gulf scholars have been doing by saying that Gulf cities are extreme, but they are not exceptional and to try to connect what local area specialists know about Gulf cities to a more global understanding of urbanisation at large.”

It wasn’t long before Molotch and Ponzini were joined by the third member of their urban trifecta, Michele Nastasi, an Italian architectural photographer who has not only been researching the region for more than a decade, but who also worked with Ponzini on the publication that alerted the academics to each other in the first place, Starchitecture: Scenes, Actors, and Spectacles in Contemporary Cities (2016).

In its particular combination of Ponzini’s words with Nastasi’s images, not only did Starchitecture help to set a visual and methodological precedent for Learning From Gulf Cities but it also helped to identify many of the locations, companies and individuals who now feature in the NYUAD show, which compares carefully composed images of Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Doha and Riyadh with pictures of London, New York, Barcelona, Baku and Milan.

A hugely experienced architectural photographer, Nastasi is at pains to contrast the kind of images he has made for Learning From Gulf Cities with the more usual photographs that depict architecture in the region.

“The idea of representation is crucial. Most architectural photography is paid for by the architects who have designed the buildings and with the crisis of editorial work in magazines and reviews most websites and blogs don’t have the budget to commission photographers,” the photographer says.

“They just publish whatever the architects send them and that’s a problem because the images are becoming more and more promotional, so this is an effort to separate myself from the market and the system and to develop the eye of a passer-by,” he adds.

In a series of images that contrast panoramas with street views and that record buildings in their social as well as their physical context, Nastasi not only attempts to illustrate the concepts and ideas developed by Ponzini and Molotch, but also develops a thesis about the role images can play in promoting a more critical approach to urban life.

“I wanted to try and see the architecture in its place with all of the contradictions of those places. It’s not so difficult, you just have to widen your view and concentrate on the multiplicity of elements that make up a city and to give you the sense of being there. It’s more than the building, it’s the environment, there are the people, the public space, the streets,” he says.

“We have to take care about what images are doing to us. Trying to deconstruct the rules of images and how they are used and circulated is an act of consciousness about our built environment and society.”

A photograph of Emaar Square in Istanbul is a case in point. Featuring a landmark tower designed by Foster and Partners, the development includes an Emaar Square Mall, the Address Hotel and residences and the kind of standard retail units, fountains and finishes that make it difficult to locate. A large outdoor screen dominates the square and carries an image of Downtown Dubai, which is proclaimed as “The Centre of Now”.

As well as Istanbul, the exhibition also includes other images of what Nastasi describes as a “placeless geography”.

“The idea is that there is a circulation of money, investments, ideas and designs but what I am trying to stress as a photographer, is that there is also a circulation of images and that these images also help to drive the transformation of cities,” the photographer insists.

“Sometimes you will hardly recognise where you are. This is something that is a consequence of only concentrating on images and the surface of things. If you see a skyline from afar, it is a spectacle that gives you the idea of a modern city but that is completely different from the impression you get when you enter the city and pass through the streets.”

Several micro-studies in Learning From Gulf Cities investigate the spread of these increasingly common urban features, an effective denial of unique notions of place that has been described by the architectural historian Nasser Rabbat as “Dubai Syndrome”.

In Similar Forms, Different Landings, the exhibition looks at the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that architectural designs appear and reappear around the world, belying the claims to sensitivity and specificity often made by contemporary architects.

Building on research they conducted for their Starchitect project, Ponzini and Nastasi compare Atelier Jean Nouvel’s 38-storey Torre Agbar in Barcelona, whose location they approve of, with the firm’s 46-storey Burj Doha, proposing that buildings travel, but landmarks cannot.

“Meaningful buildings and places need to be designed and developed and discussed and eventually redesigned for specific places and for the communities that exist in those places. That’s a meaningful way of making cities,” Ponzini insists, ignoring the fact that even when a building is developed, it still has to function as a piece of architecture to be a success.

In January, the Torre Agbar was sold for the second time in three years as it continues to be the focus of disappointed tenants who have complained of “dirty windows, an awkward donut-shaped floor plan and inoperable sun blinds”, just come of the gripes reported the online design publication, Dezeen.

 

Another panel investigates three schemes by the architects Broadway Malyan, whose 2007 design for waterside apartment buildings at Al Bandar in Abu Dhabi, which was completed in 2011, then reappeared at Battersea Reach in London in 2014 at the same time as a similar scheme in Port Baku.

The UK scheme had actually been designed first but had taken 14 years to come to fruition, whereas the project in Azerbaijan, which was more than 10 times as large, took only five years from appointment to completion.

“Gulf cities act as urban ‘test beds’ for architectural, engineering and design experiments,” a panel in the exhibition states. “Encouragement comes from ‘fast-track governance’, ready capital, and low-cost labour; citizen opposition does not stand in the way.”

After two years of research, workshops in Abu Dhabi, New York and Milan and exhibitions at NYU and now NYUAD, the team behind Learning From Gulf Cities is now on the verge of producing a book, published by New York University Press, that will draw on the work of some of the 50 or so academics and professionals who have contributed to the project thus far.

At its best, Learning From Gulf Cities combines research into issues such as the international real estate investment and development patterns of bodies such as the Qatar Investment Authority, Emaar and DP World and illustrates how these have tangible and increasingly international urban effects.

When these are combined with Nastasi’s images, the effect can be as alarming as it is revelatory.

“The exhibition is not here to celebrate Gulf cities and it’s not here to deplore them,” says Ponzini. “We want to suspend judgement in order to come back with more refined ideas.”

Despite all of attempts at objectivity and nuance, however, the exhibition points to a number of incredibly hard and often unpalatable lessons that planners, architects and developers are likely to want us to forget.

This article was originally published in The National

Art: Invisible Threads at NYUAD

On October 4, 1957, a converted ballistic missile was launched from a secret test range 200 kilometres east of the Aral Sea in what was then the Soviet Socialist Republic of Kazakhstan.

The launch took place at 22:28:34 Moscow Standard Time but the engineers who witnessed the event watched the craft, nervously, for a further 98 minutes – the time it took for the rocket’s payload to complete its elliptical orbit around the Earth – before finally informing their political masters of the news.

The team, led by the 50-year-old aeronautical engineer Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, had succeeded in sending a highly-polished metal sphere the size of a beach ball into a near-Earth orbit.

They referred to the device as Elementary Satellite-1 but we now know it as the Sputnik and as the satellite sped through the heavens its simple onboard radio transmitter emitted a signal, described by the Associated Press as the “deep beep-beep”, that even amateur shortwave radio enthusiasts could hear.

Broadcasting on the night of the launch, an NBC radio journalist captured the resonance of the Sputnik’s signal with a simple instruction: “Listen now for the sound that forevermore separates the old from the new.”

Thanks to a combination of ideological antagonism, personal ambition and nationalism, a new chapter in the history of human ingenuity – the Space Age – had finally begun; the Soviet Union had claimed first honours in the race for the heavens; and the Sputnik Crisis, an unprecedented wave of international political tension and paranoia, was unleashed upon the world.

As the historian Daniel J Boorstin later explained in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Americans: The Democratic Experience: “Never before had so small and so harmless an object created such consternation.”

For the majority of people who will visit Invisible Threads: Technology and its Discontents, the new show at the Art Gallery at New York University Abu Dhabi which opens this Thursday, the Cold War will be little more than a matter of historical record; but among those who can remember the threat of mutually assured destruction, the show’s opening sculpture is likely to produce a profound and visceral response.

An exact replica of an object that no longer exists, Michael Joaquin Grey’s sculpture My Sputnik (1990) not only symbolises the dawn of our current Information Age but also epitomises Invisible Threads’ stance on the link between art and science, encapsulating as it does the paranoia-inducing dualities of utopianism and determinism, privacy and surveillance, emancipation and control.

“Launching Sputnik was a great technological feat that created a lot of excitement for one part of the globe and lot of anxiety for the other,” explains Bana Kattan, the show’s co-curator who is also assistant curator at the Art Gallery at NYUAD.

“And that’s really what this exhibition is about, the anxiety that we feel when we interact with technology,”

For the rest of this article, please visit The National

Literature: A Hundred and One Nights – Scheherazade redux

Seven years ago, the Arabist and translator Bruce Fudge set off in hope rather than expectation when he went in search of the collection of wondrous tales known as A Hundred and One Nights.

Fudge was living in Morocco at the time and as he searched the bookshops of Fez and Meknes for the marvellous tales of love and adventure, hidden treasure, djinns and death, his enquiries were met with the same and all too predictable reply.

“They’d never heard of it,” he says. “I went around all the bookshops and without exception they said, ‘Don’t you mean A Thousand and One Nights?’”

Despite featuring familiar characters such as the story-telling Scheherazade, Harun Al Rashid and the famously cuckolded and homicidal kings Shahryar and Shahzaman, the booksellers’ ignorance came as little surprise to Fudge.

The first printed Arabic edition of A Hundred and One Nights was only published in 1979 and even though the seven surviving manuscripts are all written in a Maghribi script that originate in North Africa, the tales were not widely read, even in the countries of the Maghreb. “It’s not that well known in the Arab world, but then again pre-modern literature isn’t particularly well known in any country,” admits the academic, who is now professor of Arabic at the University of Geneva.

Fudge had never seen any of the manuscripts, two of which are held in Tunis, and three of which now belong to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, but he had read part of a French translation that convinced him that the tales were rather more than a condensed version of A Thousand and One Nights.

Translated as Les Cent et Une Nuits, the very first printed edition of A Hundred and One Nights was published in Paris in 1911 and until the appearance of the first Arabic edition, which was edited by the Tunisian scholar Mahmud Tarshunah in 1979, it was the only printed version of the tales in existence.

Apart from sharing certain characters and stories, such as The Ebony Horse and The Prince and the Seven Viziers with its more illustrious literary cousin, Fudge insists that A Hundred and One Nights also contains important narrative differences that raise interesting questions about how themes and motifs throughout the Night’s corpus may have been developed and transmitted.

For the rest of this story, please visit The National