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Politics, Religion, and Love

How Leo Strauss Read the Arabian Nights

It is difficult to find any non-Western work of literature that has had more of a lasting effect on Western thought than the One Thousand and One Nights (in English more commonly called the Arabian Nights, hereafter Nights). Since its introduction to Western readers in 1704 by Antoine Galland, this work has captured the imagination of its Western readers unlike any other intellectual product of the Arabic language. The Nights not only has played a key role in shaping the Western image of the East, but has also contributed to the West’s self-understanding.¹ In one of its most popular editions, namely that of the British Arabist Richard Francis Burton, the Nights comprises sixteen volumes and contains more than four hundred stories of various lengths and complexities. Facing such a writing, which even in its least monumental recensions consists of so many intricate and mysterious stories of an uncanny character, coming from a culture and society worlds apart from anything European, Western readers were bound to react in many different ways: from treating it as a source of rather scandalous entertainment, to highly scholarly approaches which read it as a source of all kinds of information, literary, poetical, religious, and political. When Galland first introduced the Nights to French audiences, it was mainly calibrated to the tastes of the eighteenth-century French salons; but this does not mean that Galland saw his translation only as a source of entertainment. He also considered it as having a public function, a sort of popular manual addressed to French readers in which they could find valuable information about the foreign world of Islam. The turn to the Nights as a source of information really began, however, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the increasing turn of Europeans toward the “oriental” countries, the foundation of several institutions for the study of oriental languages, and the development of the field of orientalism. One can clearly observe this considerable change of perspective in the translations of Edward William Lane and Burton. Their translations both contain an enormous number of footnotes, often reflecting questionable orientalist prejudices, which are meant to provide information and insights into different aspects of the Muslim world. The supplementary material added to Lane’s translation was believed to be so important from the scholarly perspective that it was even published as a separate book, titled Arabian Society in the Middle Ages.²

Today, we are far from such Orientalist naiveté, and we no longer look, at least not uncritically, for the real East in the Nights. The stories of the Nights are still considered a valuable source of information, though mainly with regard to specific aspects of medieval Muslim societies which are not represented in traditional sources. Contrary to our contemporary interests, medieval writings are mainly concerned with the lives of the more prominent classes – the political elite and administrators, military figures, religious scholars, famous scientists, philosophers, Sufis, and mystics find a prominent place in these writings. On the contrary, the ordinary and private lives of the lower classes, little merchants, the underworld of petty thieves, criminals, their mentalities, beliefs, prejudices; more broadly speaking the social history of these societies, is not addressed in the literature of the period, and our interest in them can find its material more readily in the Nights.³ There has also been some interest in the more intellectual aspects of the Nights, for instance in its religious as well as political aspects.⁴ What is significant, however, is that even these scholarly writings on the Nights treat it more as a mirror, or reflection of mentalities, historical facts, events, prejudices, and beliefs. In other words, they presuppose that what they find valuable in the Nights is not intentionally put there; their existence is more due to the impact of the context in which these stories were written and read. The contextualist view of texts, ideas, schools of thought, and even whole philosophical systems, is of course neither new nor rare. Major classic writings, philosophical ideas, religious thinkers, and the like, are often considered a reflection of their historical context, born out of the beliefs and practices of their milieu. Plato has been read as being representative of the ideas common among the pro-Spartan, anti-democratic elite of Athens; writings of Muslim philosophers have been considered a reinterpretation of distorted Greek ideas through the lens of the Muslim beliefs, which the Muslim thinkers shared with their nonphilosophic contemporaries; John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government has been interpreted as the reflection of the point of view of the rising English bourgeoisie to which Locke belonged. But this is not the only perspective brought to bear on classic writings and the thought of the thinkers of the past. Plato’s Republic, Ibn Tufayl’s Ḥayy ibn Yaqz.ān, and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government are also read, even mainly, for their theoretical worth, as products of remarkable authors who thought deeply about specific subjects, sometimes disagreeing with, sometimes approving of, the common ideas of their societies, composing their writings with a specific intention in mind. These authors, it is widely supposed, wrote their works to convey a specific teaching to the reader, and they expected the reader to employ his efforts to discover that teaching. One can then legitimately ask: why the Nights is not read in the same way?

The specific, and rather common, approach to the Nights as mainly a reflection of ideas, rather than a writing with a specific intention, is partly born out of a difficulty regarding the authorship of this work. The Nights is often described as a “book without an author.” Galland already refers to this idea in the preface of his translation:

The name of the author of such a great work is unknown; but presumably it is not all by a single hand; for how can we believe that a single man had the imagination fertile enough to suffice for so many fictions?⁵

Lane, for his part, went against Galland’s view and claimed that the Nights, which he translated, was composed by one or perhaps a maximum of two authors in Mamluk Egypt, sometime at the beginning of the sixteenth century or shortly before. He hypothesized that the stories have probably a more ancient origin, but he claimed that one or two authors must have rewritten the stories, added new material, and arranged them according to their purpose.⁶ This view was severely criticized by Burton in his translation, who could not believe “how the distinguished Arabist came to such a conclusion.”⁷ Burton was convinced that the Nights does not have a single author, but rather many authors, presumably holding different views; authors who added new stories and revised the older ones during a long period of time. Burton’s view is now considered the correct one and the idea of a single authorship for the Nights is generally rejected.⁸ The prominence of this view leads us, however, to a very important exception which goes against the consensus: Muhsin Mahdi (1926–2007), a prominent scholar of Islamic thought and one of the most important scholars who dedicated a great part of his intellectual efforts to the Nights. Mahdi’s scholarship was mainly focused on the study of Islamic political thought and the writings of Alfarabi. His interest in the Nights, a work which was for centuries in Arab and European countries considered a “low” kind of literary entertainment suitable primarily for less sophisticated readers, does not fit as a matter of course, and is in need of some explanation.⁹

How Mahdi began working on the Nights can be summarized as follows: before the publication of Mahdi’s critical edition of the Nights in 1984, there were four main Arabic editions of the Nights, called Calcutta I (published 1814 and 1818), Breslau or Habicht (published 1824‒43), Būlāq I (published 1835), and finally Calcutta II or Macnaghten (published 1839‒42). None of these editions were scholarly, and there was much doubt and obscurity regarding their provenance and authenticity. The situation began to change at the end of the nineteenth century, when an orientalist by the name of Hermann Zotenberg published an essay on Galland’s translation of the Nights. Zotenberg’s essay in turn attracted the attention of Theodor Nöldeke, one of the most prominent scholars of Islam. The idea was born that a critical edition of the Nights is a necessity for the advance of scholarship.¹⁰ The project was picked up at the beginning of the twentieth century by Duncan B. Macdonald (1863‒1943), who began working on the manuscripts of the Nights and announced his project to publish a critical edition of Galland’s manuscript, collating it with other surviving manuscripts.¹¹ The project did not bear fruit before Macdonald’s death, and it was Mahdi who began working on it in 1959, with the results being published, after fifteen years of painstaking effort and hard work, only in 1984: the critical edition of the Nights based on the oldest surviving manuscripts.¹²

It is not an exaggeration to say that Mahdi’s edition of the Nights remains one of the most important developments in the study of this classic Arabic writing. Mahdi was, however, more than a simple editor. As remarkable as his philological talents were, Mahdi had a philosophic perspective which remains an exception among the Arabists. Mahdi’s scholarly edition was accompanied by a remarkable theoretical perspective on the text. In order to understand Mahdi’s general view of the Nights, we should mention some technical but nonetheless unavoidable points. The manuscripts of the Nights are divided into two main branches: the “Syrian,” famously used by Galland, and the “Egyptian,” which is the basis of other editions, most importantly of the so-called Calcutta II. The Syrian manuscripts are considerably shorter and contain only about forty stories told in 282 nights. This is while the Egyptian editions go up to 1,001 nights, giving the impression that they are “complete” while the Syrians are often described as “incomplete.” Mahdi challenged this view. He claimed that the original work (the so-called mother source) of the Nights was produced sometime in the thirteenth or perhaps fourteenth century in Syria. In Mahdi’s view, Galland’s “incomplete” manuscript is a copy of that original work, perhaps going through an intermediary stage. Galland’s shorter manuscript, Mahdi claimed, is a rather faithful reproduction of the original work and contains practically all the original stories. In Mahdi’s view, the other Egyptian manuscripts are not faithful to the original work and contain later additions. Mahdi tried to show in his detailed study that, under pressure to provide the complete version of the text as advertised by the title of the work, Arab copyists began adding stories to the collection. This process of adding stories was later continued and accelerated with the rising interest of Europeans in the Nights. Already, Galland himself, because of his obsession with finding the complete version of the Nights, began adding stories to his translation without explaining their provenance: these additional stories did not actually belong to the manuscript of the Nights which Galland had in his possession, but were rather from unrelated writings as well as oral traditions which were transcribed with the assistance of a Maronite Christian called Hanna. This process of addition continued in the next generation by people like Dom Denis Chavis, Michel Sabbāgh, and Mordecai Ibn al-Najjār, who even forged manuscripts, mainly for financial gain, and fabricated stories to provide a “complete” version of the Nights. Mahdi saw Galland and his followers as responsible for creating so much confusion about the textual history of the Nights, whose most faithful version, Mahdi claimed, is Galland’s own manuscript, which Mahdi edited.¹³

On the basis of his research, Mahdi was persuaded that the Nights, as it is found in the authentic sources, is a carefully designed writing with a definite author.¹⁴ In his view, the Syrian version of the Nights is not an unintelligent compilation of disparate stories haphazardly put together by many editors from previous older sources, but a carefully crafted whole designed by an author, “a consummate storyteller” with a specific intention.¹⁵ Mahdi clearly distinguished between the authentic version of the Nights, produced by the original author, and later Egyptian versions, which were produced by copyists “who missed what he was after and thought that the book was like a hole in the ground in which one could dump one story after another regardless of their styles, structures, or contradictory aims.” According to Mahdi, these later scribes “disfigured the book and produced the confusing text” found in later recensions.¹⁶ Mahdi even claimed that the author of the authentic Nights specifically refrained from including more stories in his rather modest collection because that would have created insurmountable difficulties regarding the relationship between King Shahriar and Shahrazad, two antagonists of the frame story.¹⁷ Even the anonymity of the author finds an explanation in Mahdi’s mind: it is due to the specific character of the Nights as a “subversive work meant for adults who had lost their innocence.” The author of the Nights has decided to “veil” his identity in order to not take responsibility for a writing which Mahdi considered truly radical.¹⁸ Mahdi wrote interpretative essays on the Nights born out of his specific approach to this work, in which he tried to explain the teaching contained in the stories.¹⁹

Mahdi’s interpretation of the Nights as a work written by an author with definitive, coherent, and specific intention goes against the most common contemporary approaches as reflected in recent scholarship. When not read as a resource for the study of popular beliefs, practices, and mentalities of the people living in the context in which the stories were written, like other historical texts, the Nights has been investigated and dissected by the instruments of historical criticism and studied from an exclusively literary approach. Considered an expression of creative genius, akin to a collage, the Nights is often treated as a variety of stories with a variety of origins finding their source and prototypes in Persian, ancient Indian, Mesopotamian, and ancient Egyptian cultures. The attention of scholars has therefore been mainly directed toward questions regarding the sources and origins of the stories, as well as the comparative folk-narrative study of the purely formal characteristics of the stories, narrative motifs, and tale-types. In this perspective, the Nights is today studied “not so much as an individual work of literature but rather as a phenomenon comprising various manifestations in different forms of creative expression.”²⁰ From this perspective, it would be difficult to attribute a definite intention to the author or speak about the teaching of the Nights, precisely because it is thought that there is not a single author behind the whole work: there cannot be a coherent message in this book because we are not dealing with a unified whole, but rather a compilation of disparate stories – ones that have been frequently added and transformed by narrators over the centuries.

Leo Strauss and the Arabian Nights

Mahdi’s specific approach to the Nights distinguishes itself from common contemporary scholarship on the Nights. It has, however, a close predecessor that seems to have had a definitive impact on Mahdi’s perspective, although there are important differences between the two. This interpretation is found in a transcript by Leo Strauss entitled “1001 Nights,” found among his surviving papers. Before turning to this interpretation, let us say a few words about the transcript itself. Mahdi mentions that he began working on the project of editing the Nights by the advice of Nabia Abbott and Strauss, “my former teachers.”²¹ It is reported that Mahdi gifted to Strauss the six volume German translation of the Nights while recovering from heart surgery. These volumes, still in existence, are inscribed in Mahdi’s hand, reading: “For Leo Strauss. On his sixtieth birthday. Cynthia and Muhsin Mahdi.” The date mentioned is “Chicago, [19]59.”²² Later, on September 27, 1960, Strauss writes to Seth Benardete that he is “reading … the 1001 Nights” and he describes the work as an equivalent of Aristophanes’s plays “under Islam.”²³ A few months later, Strauss again writes to Karl Löwith that “I plan to read it [Gadamer’s Truth and Method] as soon as I am through with my most pressing work (which includes the 1001 Nights).”²⁴ The relationship between the Nights and Aristophanes’s works seems to have been particularly important for Strauss, as again on January 24, 1961 he writes to Peter H. von Blanckenhagen that “in my free time I am reading 1001 Nights which has much in common with Aristophanes, as you can imagine.”²⁵ Strauss’s interest in the Nights is also reflected in a published essay and three-course transcripts. Most significantly, in his course on Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, Strauss says:

And now if one would think of this beautiful document of despotism which he [Montesquieu] surely knew, I think, and which I have no doubt some of you know, the Arabian Nights, in which there is so much shown of humanity and virtue—and also of vice, I admit. But what is the point in the Arabian Nights, simply stated? I think that the whole story shows the terrible character of despotism. These stories are all told in order to save the life of an innocent human being. She tells the stories in order to keep the sultan curious, and the continuation the next night is the only way she can save herself. So there is no doubt that Montesquieu meant this seriously.²⁶

It seems that sometime between the end of 1959 and the beginning of 1961, Strauss read the German translation of the Nights and composed his notes.²⁷ Mahdi, for his part, went on to edit his edition of the Nights and also wrote several commentaries on the book, one of them just after Strauss’s death. These essays can be considered thoughtful applications of Strauss’s historic-philosophic approach to the critical edition of the Nights. Mahdi’s interpretation is not, however, a simple elaboration of Strauss’s. In fact, there are fundamental differences between Strauss’s and Mahdi’s approach to the Nights. Strauss pays much attention to parts of the book that Mahdi later describes as inauthentic additions to the original work by thoughtless Arab editors, misguided European scholars, and unscrupulous manuscript fabricators. In contrast to Mahdi, who limited his essays to the Syrian version of the Nights, Strauss based his notes on the Calcutta II version, as translated by Enno Littmann. This version contains more stories than any other recension of the Nights and, before Mahdi’s groundbreaking edition, was widely considered to be the original and “complete” version of the book, the claim strongly contested by Mahdi. In fact, Mahdi’s main claim is that whoever studies the larger editions “with care” and “from beginning to end finds no connection between all the stories” included in them. Mahdi argued that such a connection can be found only in the considerably shorter Syrian version.²⁸ Strauss, on the contrary, tried to find such a connection between all the stories of the Calcutta II recension.

Strauss’s interpretation can be described as the synthetic application of three out of four main problematics of his thought to the Nights– the problematics which I have previously called the pillars of his thought. In Strauss’s notes, the Nights is read as a carefully designed and coherent document of the premodern Enlightenment, composed in an esoteric manner by a thinker of high rank with a specific intention and specific teaching, dedicated to the discussion of the theologico-political problem in the multi-religious context of medieval Islamic societies. To begin with, Strauss’s esoteric techniques of reading are perhaps nowhere less controversial than when applied to works like the Nights. Strauss claimed that one of the common techniques of esoteric writing is to state one’s heterodox ideas under the guise of a storyteller, a narrator, or a mere expositor, granting a certain immunity to the author and thereby putting a distance between oneself and the opinions reflected in one’s writing. This is the reason, Strauss claims, for finding “in the greatest literature of the past so many interesting devils, madmen, beggars, sophists, drunkards, epicureans, and buffoons.”²⁹ These characters might have been the way by which persecuted freethinkers transmitted their controversial ideas. Whatever the merits of Strauss’s thesis regarding the interpretation of different philosophical works may be, the Nights is a literary work. It is generally admitted that literary writers often employ rhetorical devices, such as symbolism, to convey unstated meanings. Consequently, it is a common practice among scholars to pay attention to the unstated or indirectly conveyed intentions of literary works. Furthermore, Strauss’s interest in the Nights is closely related to another pillar of his thought, namely the theologico-political problem, reflected in Strauss’s lifelong preoccupation with the relationship between religion and various aspects of human life, especially politics and philosophy. As was mentioned before, the religious aspects of the Nights have not escaped the notice of its readers, as religion is omnipresent in the stories. Religion in the Nights does not always play an uncontroversial role. Many stories depict religious conversion, proselytism, and the struggle between the adherents of different religions in a very prominent fashion, which above all reminds one of another pillar of Strauss’s thought, namely the conflict between Reason and Revelation.³⁰ In Strauss’s interpretation of the Nights, the question of esotericism, the theologico-political problem, and the conflict of Reason and Revelation join together and form the perspective through which he interprets this work. He reads the Nights as a work intended to be read between the lines, containing heterodox ideas incompatible with, and critical of, the reigning beliefs of the time, and depicting the conflict of religious beliefs with the political order. Although this perspective on the Nights is unique and surely susceptible to criticism, it is not without precedent in the study of comparable writings. For instance, the idea that the authors of Kalīlah wa Dimnah and of the stories of the Brethren of Purity (Ikhwān al-S.afā’) voiced heretical ideas and their criticism of sacred beliefs through esoteric techniques such as putting their ideas in the mouths of certain characters, and even animals, is shared by other scholars.³¹

A detailed description of Strauss’s interpretation of the Nights, evidently, can be only provided through an interpretation of Strauss’s notes, which will be the subject of this chapter, in which I will try to show how Strauss went about finding a coherent message in the edition he was reading. However, an explanation is in order: as Strauss comments on a considerable number of the stories contained in the long edition of the Nights, the major themes of Strauss’s interpretation are presented here while focusing on some of the most revealing stories. The points Strauss discovers in the Nights are accessible only by having the text of the recension he has been reading as well as his other writings in view. I have therefore tried to provide an interpretation of these notes by having these two sources constantly in view, in order to present Strauss’s intentions for readers who otherwise would perhaps not be able to derive the full benefits of reading Strauss’s notes. As the objective is to understand Strauss through his own principles, this presentation will proceed in a purely descriptive manner. I will therefore leave the critical evaluation of Strauss’s interpretation, as well as my reservations about his reading of the Nights, aside. Such a critical evaluation must begin by taking Mahdi’s claim about the incoherence of the recension used by Strauss into account. Furthermore, in view of the character of Strauss’s notes, the following interpretation has a tentative character and should be read in the same spirit. These notes are certainly of considerable importance because, as in the case of his notes on Averroes’s commentary on Plato’s Republic, discussed in Chapter 1, they shed light on Strauss’s view of a classic writing on which he did not publish an interpretation. Strauss’s notes are clearly of somewhat playful character and, again, should be read in the same spirit. I believe, however, that regardless of their place in Strauss’s intellectual biography, Strauss’s notes can play an important role as a model of fruitful reading of the Nights as a serious literary work containing essential observations on religion and politics, a reading which has few examples in the contemporary scholarship.³² With these points in mind, let us turn to Strauss’s notes.

Critique of the Reigning Beliefs

Strauss begins his notes with his famous numerological observations (SNAN 1.1). One must first explain a point about this unusual practice present in many of Strauss’s writings: Strauss’s interest in numerology is not related to the view that numbers have occult, divine, or mystical characters. What Strauss is interested in can be described as conventional numerology, that is, the idea that some writers conventionally used numbers for transmitting their message. The importance of such practices in medieval and early modern writings, especially in Islamic thought, is well-known and there is no reason to reject Strauss’s observation in principle.³³ One should also bear in mind, especially when we reach Strauss’s own writings discussed in the next two chapters, that Strauss tried to imitate these numerological practices in his own writings, partly in the spirit of playfulness, partly for pedagogical reasons explained in the Introduction of this book.

In his numerological observations, Strauss claims that the number 1001 in the title of the Nights is perhaps chosen by the author to transmit a message about the content of the work. This number is a multiple of 7, 11, and 13. The theological symbolism of the number 7 is obvious, as in Abrahamic beliefs God created everything in 6 days and took his rest on the 7th day (Genesis 1, Qur’ān 7:54, 2:29, 67:3, 71:15, 78:12). Number 11 is less obvious, but coming after 10, which represents the Law (as in Ten Commandments), it sometime stands for disobedience.³⁴ The number 13, particularly mentioned by Strauss in his reading of Machiavelli, also seems to have an anti-theological significance.³⁵ These three numbers are therefore for Strauss a kind of wink toward the theologico-political problem and the conflict of Reason and Revelation. Strauss also suggests that the book might be considered 1003 Nights – if one adds two stories told before the ones told by Shahrazad. Number 1003 in its turn is a multiple of seventeen and fifty-nine. For Strauss, the number seventeen represents nature (phusis), as the Greek alphabet, the original language of the study of nature, has seventeen consonants: the consonants being mute like nature are put in opposition to tradition which must be audible to be transmitted.³⁶ The significance of number fifty-nine is not entirely clear, but it seems that for Strauss it also represents nature.³⁷ These numerological observations are followed by a general statement about the content of the whole work: “The overall suggestion: refutation of the nomos regarding inferiority of women; and: indictment of tyranny; and: how jealousy of a king is appeased” (SNAN 1.1). How these three subjects, namely a critique of nomos or (religious) law, a critique of tyranny, and a critique of “jealousy” are related will gradually become clear. But what is particularly interesting is that these subjects prove to be, one way or another, connected with religion: tyranny and jealousy are both divine (SNAN 4.12, 14.39) and women represent erotic longing as a kind of “counter-religion” (SNAN 14.39). It is therefore fitting to begin at the beginning before turning to politics and love.

In Strauss’s interpretation, the critical view of the author of the Nights towards the sacred is first reflected in the frame story of the Nights: King Shahriar invites his younger brother Shah Zaman to visit him. On his way to Shahriar, Shah Zaman discovers his wife in an act of infidelity with a kitchen boy. Enraged and jealous, Shah Zaman kills both of them and then proceeds to visit his brother. During his visit, Shah Zaman suffers from a deep depression. He spends his time in the palace while his brother King Shahriar goes out hunting. One day while looking out the window, Shah Zaman sees his brother’s queen in the courtyard betraying her husband with a black slave. Surprisingly, by witnessing the misfortune of his brother, Shah Zaman’s condition improves, and he informs Shahriar about their shared affliction. Dismayed by their misfortune, they both decide to roam the world in hope of finding someone whose misfortune is greater than theirs. On their way, they discover a jealous jinni, a male supernatural being. The demon’s wife betrays him with men every time the demon takes a nap on the shore (AN I 5–7). Just as in the case of Shah Zaman, the misfortune of the demon brings joy to the jealous kings, and they return to rule their realms.

For Strauss, the major leitmotif of many of the stories in the Nights is the jealousy of kings, demons, and caliphs (see SNAN 1.1, 4.12, 5.15, 10.30). The jealous beings encounter unfaithful women and, being slaves of jealousy, their anger leads to violence. King Shahriar takes revenge not only by killing his unfaithful wife after returning to his realm but also takes a wife every day and kills her the next morning – until he marries Shahrazad, who tells him stories to stay alive. For Strauss, the lesson is that it is a dangerous thing to deceive “kings”; their jealousy must be taken into account (SNAN 1.2). But who are “kings” and why is jealousy so important? Jealousy is one of the traits of the biblical God, “for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God” (Exodus 34:14). Exclusiveness is the core of monotheism, therefore jealousy is the characteristic of the god of monotheism. There is a famous hadith that makes the same point:

Saʻd ibn ʻUbada said, “If I were to see a man with my wife, I would have struck him with the sword, and not with the flat part (side) of it.” When Allah’s Messenger heard of that, he said: “Are you surprised at Saʻd’s jealousy? By Allah, I am more jealous than he, and Allah is more jealous than I. Because of His jealousy Allah has prohibited abomination, both open and secret. And no person is more jealous than Allah.”³⁸

Strauss makes this point rather forcefully: “Allah is a jealous God” (SNAN 1.4). However, he also observes that “it is not dangerous to deceive demons,” as one can see how the wife of a demon has betrayed him with 570 men without the demon knowing about it (AN I 6; SNAN 1.2). In other words, the jealousy of a fantastic being does not seem to be as dangerous as that of a real being. But what do such fantastic beings represent in the Nights? To answer this question one must turn to the story of the merchant and the demon (AN I 10–19): in this story, a group of travelers tell stories to appease the anger of a demon. In the first story, an old man tells the demon that because his wife did not bear him any children, he took a concubine. The concubine bore him a son. The wife became jealous and through magic turned the son and the concubine into a calf and a cow, and asked her husband to sacrifice them at Eid al-Adha – a Muslim festival which symbolizes the story of God asking Abraham to sacrifice his son as an act of submission to God’s command (Muslims sacrifice an animal at this ceremony in remembrance of that story). In the man’s story, a young girl who possesses magic skills recognizes human beings under the shape of animals. For revenge she turns the jealous wife into a gazelle and restores the son to his human shape. The story reminds us of and clearly points to the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham, except that here a jealous wife asks her husband to sacrifice his son, thus confirming Strauss’s suspicion that in the Nights divine jealousy is a theme (SNAN 1.4).

The second story is told by a merchant who is accompanied by two greyhounds. He explains to the demon that the dogs are his ungrateful brothers whom he has rescued from bankruptcy several times. The three brothers together went on a journey and during the trip the narrator meets a beautiful young woman on the shore. He takes her with him onto the ship. His two brothers become jealous and throw the couple overboard. But the beautiful woman turns out to be an ‘ifrita, a she-demon who declares her faith in Islam and the Prophet. The she-demon is angry with the merchant’s treacherous brothers and offers to kill them. However, the merchant tries to appease the demon’s anger and asks for a more lenient punishment. The she-demon agrees to turn them into greyhounds instead of killing them (AN I 17). As Strauss observes, the “she-demon wished a greater revenge than the brother of the treacherous brothers” (SNAN 1.4). The merchant is more humane towards his fellow men than the Muslim she-demon.

By underscoring the difference between the humane punishment of the merchant and the inhuman cruelty of his fantastic religious lover, Strauss reminds us of his discussion of the “inhuman cruelty” characteristic of Biblical morality (SNAN 14.39). Strauss argued that one of the major concerns of early modern thinkers such as Machiavelli was that biblical morality legitimized, nay, made inhuman or pious cruelty a duty.³⁹ That what is meant by the cruelty of these supernatural beings is divine cruelty is corroborated by another story that a woman tells before the caliph: Once, she went on a journey and arrived at a city of unbelieving fire-worshippers. All the inhabitants of the city, including children and animals, have been transformed by God into stone because, as she learns later from the only surviving witness, they did not heed a mysterious voice that summoned them to convert to the True Faith of Islam. The only inhabitant of the city who was saved was the son of the king of the city. The prince was clandestinely proselytized by a Muslim woman, a servant of the king who treacherously concealed her religion (AN I 110–11; see also the story of the semi-petrified prince on pp. 105–106 below and SNAN 5.14 and 18.62).⁴⁰

According to Strauss, jealousy and pious cruelty are not the only objects of the Nights’ critique of religion. In this work, Strauss implies, religion in general is seen as a pernicious phenomenon. In the Nights, according to Strauss’s reading, God is depicted as a major impediment to the good life. He observes this in the dialogue of the wise vizier Shimas with the young prince Wird Khan. The dialogue is at first sight a longwinded repetition of the ideas common to the scholars of the time. However, in the middle of the uninteresting back and forth some interesting points are hidden: one is that vizier Shimas mentions that this life and the next “are at variance with one another” and therefore one living in this world will inevitably “injure his soul in the next.” Prince Wird Khan approves this point by describing this world as the kingdom of an unjust king in which, as Strauss explains, “men cannot be just” (SNAN 17.58). He explains the situation of those who live in the belief in an afterlife as someone who has “fallen between two kings” (AN III 462–64). They live in an impossible situation created by the introduction of the belief in an afterlife. This view of the divine is most clearly depicted in the story of the peahen and the duck (AN I 613–21): A peacock and a peahen, looking for a place to be safe from wild animals, go to live on an island. One day a duck arrives and tells them that he is afraid of the “son of Adam.” The duck has been warned of man’s viciousness in a dream. The duck thinks that the son of Adam is the source of all evil and goes around warning all animals about the danger of man. However, in the end the duck is the one who is hunted by man. When the duck perishes, the peahen (a high-flying bird) says that the duck perished because he did not glorify God, and was punished for it. Strauss calls this “a female explanation of the fate of beings” (SNAN 10.30). The duck and the peahen say in fact the same thing. As Strauss explains, the story read literally would hardly make sense, as animals are killed not only by man but also by other animals. The story would make sense, then, only if it is interpreted in human terms: seen from the point of view of animals, man is God. The peahen unknowingly unveils the message of the duck’s symbolic warning: all evil comes from God – this is why we see the duck and other animals take refuge in the protection of a lion. But the peahen also obfuscates the message of the duck by hiding the real culprit, that is, God, in whose absence all animals would live comfortably and in perfect harmony and friendship.

If the peahen was not such a high-flying bird (SNAN 8.30), she could see the real culprit. This seems to be the reason why Strauss also refers to the remarkable story of an old woman who lives in the desert. The old woman feeds on bitter water and snakes. When a traveler asks her why she lives in this earthly hell, she asks the traveler about his own country. The visitor, who is on his way to Mecca on pilgrimage, describes his hometown: in his city, everything exists in abundance and there are “such blessings as are only to be found in the Paradise which Almighty God describes as being reserved for his pious servants.” (AN II 274). The woman tells him that the “earthly” paradise of the visitor is ruled by a tyrant who if “he wants can drive you from your house and uproot you,” thereby reminding us, among other things, of God’s expulsion of man from the original Paradise. Then she compares this tyrant with the old rulers who governed with grace. The author completes this story by narrating the story of al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, the famous Muslim governor. Al-Hajjaj rebuked the demands for a more lenient rule by saying that “Almighty God has appointed me as your ruler.” Strauss compares this story with Book 1, Chapter 26 of Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy (SNAN 14.39). Only in that chapter, which according to Strauss is specifically devoted to the phenomenon of tyranny, does Machiavelli directly quote from the Bible. Machiavelli uses a famous quotation from the New Testament (also a part of the Magnificat that is frequently sung in Church services) to describe the actions of King David – while the Biblical passage is in fact about God. Machiavelli is therefore describing actions similar to David’s as being “very cruel” and the enemy to every way of life. Strauss thinks that this is Machiavelli’s esoteric way of saying that God, like Philip of Macedon (also mentioned in the chapter) is a cruel and inhuman tyrant.⁴¹ In other words, according to Strauss, the author of the Nights and Machiavelli look at the Biblical/Qur’ānic image of God as a violent tyrant ruling over human beings. It is therefore not surprising that Strauss sees a relationship between Aristophanes’s comedies and the Nights. In Aristophanes’s Peace, Tyrgaeus succeeds in bringing peace to Hellas by disinterring the goddess of peace against the explicit command of Zeus: “The just and pleasant life of ease and quiet cannot be brought about except by dethroning the gods.”⁴²

Wisdom, Beliefs, and Political Theology

What should one conclude from the critique of religion in the Nights? Is it the intention of the Nights, according to Strauss, to help men get rid of religion? Does the author think that men should live their life without religion? Strauss often argues that before Pierre Bayle, no philosopher argued for the possibility of an atheistic society; even unbelieving thinkers thought that some kind of religion, even in the form of a salutary myth or more precisely a “political theology,” is necessary for the functioning of a decent political order.⁴³ The same seems to be true of the Nights: its teaching is rather the manipulation of beliefs in the service of a decent human life.

This point is intimated in the story of the fisherman and the ‘ifrit (AN I 19ff.). This story represents the new situation of the wise in the world of revealed religions (SNAN 3.7 end). The story depicts a poor fisherman who goes to cast his net in the river to earn his day’s living. From the beginning, we suspect that he is no ordinary fisherman: he is “musical” and while casting his net sings verses about his own wisdom and his undeserved poverty (AN I 21). The fisherman catches a brass jar in his net – one with a lead seal imprinted with the inscription of Solomon. Unknowingly he opens the jar, and thereby frees a heretical demon who rebelled against Solomon and was imprisoned in the jar. During his captivity, the demon had sworn to kill the person who freed him from the jar and now plans to kill the poor fisherman. But the fisherman is very confident of his own intelligence. He apparently knows many things about religion and its powers. First, he conjures the demon by “the Greatest Name of God” to answer his questions.⁴⁴ The demon is apparently shaken and tamed by the mentioning of the Greatest Name. The fisherman benefits from the perplexity of the demon: he tricks him into returning to the jar and puts back the brass stopper imprinted with the inscription of Solomon. The fisherman seems to be a master of the art of controlling demons by using the revealed religion.

The demon begs for mercy, but the fisherman refrains from releasing him and begins to tell a story to explain to the demon why he cannot trust him. The story told by the fisherman is that of King Yunan and Duban the sage (AN I 25ff). King Yunan, whose name means “Greece,” suffers from leprosy; there comes a sage who has studied the books of the Greeks, the Persians, the Arabs, and the Syrians.⁴⁵ He is the master of all the sciences and manages to cure the king with his medical knowledge and is given the most splendid rewards. The new status of the sage arouses the jealousy of the vizier. The vizier tries to convince the king that the sage is a dangerous individual possessing unknown powers who might kill the king in the same way that he had cured him. The king is at first skeptical of the vizier’s claim, but the vizier tells a story to convince him. In the vizier’s story, a wicked vizier conspires with a female demon to kill the prince, but the demon foolishly advises the prince to pray to God if he wants to save himself. The prince prays, and being saved, goes back to the king explaining how the wicked vizier wanted to kill his son. The king kills the wicked vizier and now King Yunan, listening to the story, is convinced that he should also kill the sage Duban. When the sage is brought for execution he says that he is innocent and killing him after the service he has done for the king would be like “the crocodile’s reward.” The king asks the sage to tell the story of the crocodile, but surprisingly the sage refuses to do so. After unsuccessfully pleading with the king to spare his life, the sage requests some delay for putting his affairs in order. When the sage returns, he offers a magic book to the king and tells him that the book will make his head speak after it has been cut off. All that the king should do, he says, is read some passages from the book. The sage is beheaded, but as the king tries to open the book, he sees that the pages are stuck together. The king licks his fingers to open the pages, but the pages had been poisoned by the sage, and the king dies: the king “Greece” and the sage end up killing each other.

As Strauss mentions, nothing is said about the fate of the wicked jealous vizier, but we can assume that he inherited the kingdom. Strauss thinks that “the wicked vizier is a prophet who denigrates his predecessors,” namely the wicked viziers of the past. He has devised a plan to destroy the foolish king (“the prophet’s master”) and his rival, the sage, in a mutual destruction (SNAN 2.5). The episode reminds Strauss of the conflict of Athens and Socrates (SNAN 3.7–8, 4.12), and how two partners who could have been beneficial to each other followed the path of mutual destruction.⁴⁶ The sage of the story who could not tell a story to save his own life should learn from the musical fisherman, his religious knowledge and poetic powers, or from the prince who learned the power of prayer from a demon. The fisherman is a musical sage who has learned to use the divine art of prayer and religion to imprison the demon.

Strauss observes the same teaching in another story of the Nights, the story of the second dervish. This dervish, who is especially religious, was transformed into a monkey by a descendant of Satan. The dervish-monkey is presented to a king who has an intelligent daughter knowledgeable about the art of magic: a princess who knows 170 charms (10 × 17). She discovers the monkey to be a prince and pledges to release him. A fierce fight between the king’s daughter and the demon who has put the dervish under spell takes place. In the end, the dervish is restored to his human shape but the princess is mortally wounded and dies: the princess and the demon end up killing each other (AN I 74, 86, 88). Strauss imagines the possibility of an alliance between the princess and the heretic demon against the religious dervish and thinks that such an alliance would lead to the ruin of “the wicked vizier” and his master “the ugly negro slave” (SNAN 3–4.12; for “the ugly negro slave” see p. 106 below).

Such a fruitful alliance with a descendant of Satan would be devoid of any fanaticism. The same is true of the alliance between the fisherman and the heretic demon who rebelled against Solomon (SNAN 2.6, 3.9). The fisherman releases the demon, and the demon shows the fishermen a lake containing four kinds of fish in different colors. He tells the fisherman that he can become rich by selling the fish to a king. But when the fish are fried by the king’s cook, the kitchen-wall splits open, and a young woman appears and speaks to the fish, and the fish speak to her. To find the mystery of the fish, the king asks the fisherman to take him to the lake. Near the lake, the king discovers the palace of a young prince, the lower part of whose body had been turned into stone. The prince tells the king the story behind his condition: his wife has been betraying him by committing adultery with a “leprous ugly black slave” who lives in a domed shrine-like hut and sleeps on cane stalks covered with rags and tatters. Although she is mistreated by the black slave, the princess humbles herself to him and praises him like a god. When the prince found out about his wife’s adultery he tried to kill the black man, but only injured him. As revenge, the wife, who knows sorcery, has turned the lower part of the prince’s body into stone and his subjects into the fish found in the lake. The adulterous princess lashes the prince every day and nurses the injured black slave. The king kills the black slave and forces the wife to lift the spell, thereby returning the citizens of the city to their human forms. The king also rewards the fisherman and, contrary to King Yunan and the sage, they end up helping each other.⁴⁷

For Strauss, the alliance of the fisherman and the demon leads to rescuing the population of a city and the salvation of the prince of that city, betrayed by a woman in love with a black slave. Strauss calls the fisherman “the enemy of the fish” (SNAN 3.6). It seems that he has a passage in Alfarabi’s Philosophy of Plato in mind in which the fish symbolize stupidity and men devoid of human intelligence are compared to “a fish with a shape like that of a man.”⁴⁸ The fisherman is a philosopher, the enemy of stupidity, but he does not remain the enemy of the fish. The new fisherman-philosopher helps the fish by transforming them into human beings. The sage is the savior of the many in the age of revelation. Strauss also mentions that the actions of the fisherman were not possible in the time of Socrates, namely, trusting in oaths and imprisoning demons with the Name of God: the revealed religions have given birth to new theologico-political problems as well as new arms (SNAN 3.7). Strauss compares the prince’s adulterous wife, who had preferred to him a most ugly leprous slave, with the wicked vizier in the story told by the fisherman (SNAN 4.12). The wife is a prophet who believes in the beauty of the ugly slave and his attachment to him had transformed the people into fish, the dumbest of all animals.⁴⁹ The new religion marks the rise of the fortunes of the ignoble – the slave who fornicated with the queen of King Shahriar was called Masʿūd, “the fortunate.”⁵⁰

The alliance between the sage and the irreligious demons and kings is possible if the sage learns about the power of religion and puts it in the service of the many.⁵¹ The sage should also learn how to appease the king and the demon, and learn to charm them by his story telling, just like Shahrazad, who not only mastered medicine and philosophy but also the art of storytelling, and thereby managed to save her own life and that of her fellow women. The possibility of an alliance between kings and sages is depicted, not only in the frame story of the whole work in which Shahrazad tames King Shahriar and teaches him many things but also at the end of the story of the just King Anushirvan (AN II 327). At the end of this story, Shahrazad addresses the king for the first time and approves of the opinion of “the wise men and philosophers” who said that “religion depends on the king,” showing the way toward an alliance between kings and sages for the subduction of religion (SNAN 14.40).

However, one must remain prudent about the possibility of such an alliance. Strauss reminds us of the limitations of the power of wisdom in guiding human life. This is intimated in the story of Wird Khan. Before the birth of Wird Khan, his father King Jali’ad had a dream which predicted the injustice of his unborn son. The king tries to prevent the fulfillment of the prophecy by giving his son an exemplary philosophic education and asking the wise Shimas to be the vizier to his son. In the end, as Strauss explains, a twelve-year-old boy and the fear of impending invasion of enemies succeed in doing what philosophy and wise men could not do: they knock some reason into Wird Khan (AN III 503ff., SNAN 17.58). The tale depicts the impuissance of philosophy and wise counsel in controlling the tyrannical tendencies of King Wird Khan.

Love and Liberation

According to Strauss, one of the major aspects of premodern thought is the awareness of the limits of politics.⁵² He also intimates the presence of such an awareness in the Nights: “men cannot be just while living in this life” (SNAN 17.58). This means that the real remedy for the problem brought about by revealed religions should not be sought in the sphere of politics. But where should one discover the real remedy offered by the Nights? The answer seems to be in love and erotic longings. This should not sound surprising, as one can easily describe the Nights as a love story: love is the major theme of the whole work and is the guiding motive of many of its characters. However, Strauss gives a theologico-political twist to this observation and calls “the counter-religion of love” a recurring theme of the work (SNAN 13.39). Eroticism and love are somehow related to the Nights’ view of religion. To explain what is meant here, let us first begin with some preliminary observations about love in the Nights.

Love, eroticism, and the body are depicted as the principal targets of religious thought in the Nights. One can see this in a group of six stories (SNAN 14.39). The first one is about an extremely religious son of the caliph who has chosen to live ascetically. He works as a bricklayer for a trifling wage, although he has a precious ruby in his pocket (AN II 213–17). The following stories prove to be a concealed criticism of the basis of the prince’s mode of life: in the second story, an eminent man has met a remarkable schoolteacher who masters the Qur’ān, grammar, poetry, and philology. The narrator describes him as a man of intelligence, contrary to the common belief that schoolteachers are stupid. After a while the narrator finds the teacher in mourning. He asks him about the cause of his sadness and the teacher responds that his beloved had just died. The narrator questions him about her identity but the teacher tells him that he had never seen her: he had fallen in love only after hearing someone recite a poem about her, and recently he had heard another verse, indicating that the woman of the first poem had died. The narrator calls the teacher a fool, and Strauss describes the story as “falling in love on hearsay” (AN II 217–19, SNAN 14.39). The story reminds us of the princess who believed in the beauty of an ugly slave. In the third story, we meet yet another schoolmaster, who has surprised his guest with his knowledge of jurisprudence, grammar, and philology. At night, the guest hears a loud cry in the house and finds the teacher covered in blood and about to die. Asked what has happened, the teacher answers that his reflection about the works of Almighty God has led him to believe that all the members of the body created by God serve a purpose except the sexual organs. He has therefore cut the useless source of his erotic longings with a razor. The narrator again calls all schoolmasters foolish and Strauss describes the message as “the absurdity of asceticism” (AN II 219, SNAN 14.39). The next story describes a schoolmaster who loiters in a mosque (AN II 219–20). He cannot read or write but pretends that he does and tricks parents into sending their children to him. Although he is illiterate, he pretends that he can read the letter of a husband to his wife and tells her that her husband is dead. The story is followed by the story of a king who desires his subject’s woman. When the husband suspects that the king has his eyes on his wife, he refuses to sleep with her until the king assures him that he has lost interest.⁵³ The next story is the fantastic story of the bird Rukh and all the incredible things told about it, followed by several stories of unhappy lovers. One of the stories is about a man who sees a beautiful woman and falls in love, but has no house to which he can invite her. He therefore goes to the house of his friend, called Muslim. The friend gives him money to buy some food, but when he returns to the house, he finds that Muslim has locked the door and is making love to the woman. When he knocks, Muslim simply grabs the food and closes the door, saying that God at the Day of Judgment will reward and repay him for the favor that he has done for him (AN II 225–27).

In the Nights, religion is the enemy of eros and erotic longings. But man is an erotic being and love is a part of his nature. Religion must therefore mutilate man’s nature. The metaphorical mutilation of human nature by religion is depicted literally in the story of the hunchback: in that story, a Muslim, a Jew, and a Christian tell stories of mutilated Muslim men. Strauss remarks that the most mutilated Muslim is the one in the story told by the Muslim (SNAN 6.17, AN 189–97): the Muslim narrator has attended a gathering for recitation of the Qur’ān where the Muslim jurists were also present. After the recitation, the table is set for a feast, and on the menu, there is an almond dish. A young man among the guests whose thumbs and big toes have been cut off refrains from eating the food unless he washes his hands 120 times, reminding us of the ritual ablutions. The guests ask for the story behind his aversion to the dish. He says that he was once a poor merchant when a beautiful slave-girl of the caliph visited his shop. He fell in love and married her, but before consummating the marriage, he ate the same almond dish and forgot to wash his hands. In the bedroom and about to enjoy the union, the slave-girl smelled the scent of the dish and was repulsed by the merchant’s unwashed hands. Outraged by the merchant’s lack of manners, she cruelly cut the merchant’s thumbs and toes as a punishment for not washing his hands after eating. The young man later took an oath to wash his hands before eating the almond dish again. Remarkably, despite the terrible punishment, the slave-girl has become the merchant’s wife and they continue to live together.

Strauss finds the origin of religion’s anti-erotic vision partly in the bodily dimension of erotic desires. God is noncorporeal and lacks eros. “God is jealous either because He is not, or does not believe himself to be, infinitely attractive, and the reason for that is his hiddenness: He Himself is the ground of His jealousy” (SNAN 5.15). However, the God of the Nights is not and cannot be responsible for the effects of His jealousy. In the story of the crow and the cat we see Him depicted as a mere spectator: sitting under a tree and living in peace, a cat and a crow see a leopard coming towards them. The crow flies to safety, but the cat, unable to save himself, asks for the crow’s help. The crow sees a herdsman and his dogs nearby and attracts the dogs towards the tree. The leopard runs away and is followed by the dogs. The herdsman only observes the whole affair from afar. For Strauss, the story points to the absence of divine providence by depicting “man” as a silent observer who does not do anything, but only observes (AN I 640–41, SNAN 11.30). The effects of God’s jealousy on human life therefore come about through human beings, who believe in divine punishment (SNAN 5.15, 15.50).⁵⁴

The effects of belief in divine punishment are seen most forcefully in the story of a young man who is robbed of the pleasure of love by a loquacious barber. The story is narrated by a tailor who has been to a wedding, where he meets a limping young man. As soon as the young man sees a certain barber also attending the feast, he refuses to sit down, telling the guests that he had sworn never to stay in the same town as this barber. Asked about his story, the young man tells the guests that he was once rich and fell in love with a beautiful young woman and arranged to meet her at her home. But before going to the appointment, he decided to shave his beard, and called the barber to his house. The barber turns out to be a remarkable individual and claims to be a modest man of few words who never meddles with the affairs of others. He guesses that the young man is going to meet his lover and offers his services to smooth things over. Exasperated by the barber’s meddling, the young man gets rid of him and sneaks away to the house of the beautiful woman, but, unbeknownst to him, the barber follows him. While in the woman’s room, to the young man’s dismay, her father unexpectedly returns home and starts punishing one of the maids for some minor infraction. The barber, who is waiting outside, hears the wailings of the maid and thinks that the father has caught the young man. He begins shouting in the street that his master is being killed in this house, thereby causing an uproar and attracting a huge crowd of people outside. The father, hearing the barber’s accusations, asks him to search the house to see for himself that he hasn’t murdered anyone. Meanwhile, the young man has concealed himself in a trunk. The barber finds the trunk and leaves the house running with the trunk on his back. The young man manages to throw himself out of the trunk, but breaks his leg, and that is why he is limping – and why he cannot bear to see the barber (AN I 205–17).

Strauss pays particularly close attention to the personage of the barber: he is a busybody who is of a very low status; Strauss mentions his “camel-driver” friends to show his status (SNAN 6.17). But at the same time, this busybody barber boasts of his expertise in all aspects of occult and religious sciences: he knows the Qur’ān and the reports of the Prophet, and resembles an accomplished religious scholar, if not more. He is described as “the ruler of kings” and is proved to be a “demagogue” who successfully mobilizes common people in a revolt.⁵⁵ The barber tells the story of his six brothers and against all evidence to the contrary he boasts of his own taciturnity and politeness; he is wont to denigrate his brothers, and calls them talkative and impolite. Strauss compares the barber to the wicked vizier (the prophet) who denigrated his predecessors, and surmises that the barber’s brothers were also barbers. This is why the barber is capable of performing “miracles” and brings the dead hunchback to life. In the barber’s story of his six brothers, Strauss underscores the stories of the central brothers (the third and the fourth).⁵⁶ The second brother is invited to an extremely beautiful house to enjoy making love to a beautiful woman. He enters the house but is asked to endure anything at all if he wants to have his desire. He is slapped, his beard is shaved, his mustache is plucked, and his eyebrows are dyed. He is asked to dance around the house while the slave-girls and eunuchs throw objects at him. Constantly encouraged to endure everything for the union, he obeys every command. In the end, he is thrown in the middle of a crowded market stark naked and drunk – without enjoying love. The third brother is a blind beggar. He goes into a house to beg for money but goes away empty-handed. He is followed by the owner of the house. The beggar, not being able to see the owner of the house, joins other blind beggars who eat their food together and share their daily proceeds. They suspect that a stranger is among them and get into a fight with the owner of the house who wanted to steal their money. The fight attracts a crowd and they are all brought to the governor. Before the governor, the owner of the house pretends to be blind and accuses the others to be impostors who pretend to be blind. The governor gives some of the beggars’ money to the owner of the house and keeps the rest for himself while punishing the beggars. Strauss observes that two of the brothers succeed in entering a house but the second brother is robbed of the pleasure of love while the third who is there to earn money is robbed of the money he had. Three brothers clearly belong together (SNAN 6.17).

While eros is the target of religious thought, it is also the way towards liberation. This is owing to the fact that for Strauss there is a link between erotic longings and philosophy: eros is a rebellious, even the most rebellious, desire. It does not obey the law and does not bend to the will of nomos. It is the unruliest human desire and hence the target of religious thought. One can easily see this in Genesis, where the first disobedience leads to consciousness about one’s sexuality. Eros opens the way for philosophy, as the essence of philosophy is also rebellion. In fact, for Strauss, “eros, in its highest form is philosophy.” Eros leads man away from and beyond the city and nomos and encourages men to disregard nomos. This is why there is a connection between women, wisdom, and nomos in the Nights. As Strauss explains, “refutation of the nomos regarding inferiority of women” is one of the major themes of the whole work (SNAN 1.1). Women, representing eros as well as wisdom, are the enemy of nomos. Elsewhere Strauss goes so far as to call “the philosophic eros” the phusis of the philosopher.⁵⁷ Eros and wine are also old allies. In the same way that eros rebels against the law, wine loosens the tongue and mind’s fetters that bound it to the ancestral and the sacred.⁵⁸ This is why according to Strauss, Aristophanes’s myth in Symposium“teaches that by virtue of eros man … will approach a condition in which they become a serious danger to the gods.”⁵⁹

In the Nights too, eros is depicted as incompatible with the sense of shame and fear of God. In a story, Nur al-Din, a young man who knows that wine drinking is “a great sin, forbidden in His Book by Almighty God” (AN III 351) learns from his companions to ignore the prohibition against wine drinking. He finds it bitter at first but is told by a gracious old man (see the Devil, p. 115 below) to try it with sugar. He is next told about its uses: “it emboldens the coward and encourages copulation.” When the young man returns home, he in his drunkenness strikes his father and blinds him; he leaves his parents and falls in love with a Frankish woman who can successfully pretend to be Christian to her Christian parents and abuse Islam. But at the same time, this woman kills her Christian brothers and avoids being brought back to her parents by professing Islam, and threatens the caliph with divine punishment were she, as a Muslim woman, to be separated from her lover and returned to infidels (AN III 423–24). The wine-drinking of the young Nur and his later father-beating recalls Aristophanes’s The Clouds, where Pheidippides beats his father after going through philosophical training at Socrates’s Thinkery. The wine-drinking has prepared Nur to ignore the patriarchal order and has put him on the path of falling in love with a Christian woman. The opposition between eros and religion can also be seen in the story of the wife of a Frankish knight who is in love with a Muslim merchant. The merchant abstains from intercourse with the Christian woman because of her religion, but she forsakes her husband and avoids being sent back to her Christian husband by professing her faith in Islam: an unbeliever converts to Islam to satisfy her desire and Islam is depicted as the handmaiden of love. One can imagine the same thing happening with Christianity in a different context (SNAN 17.55).

The most striking example of the stories that depict the transgression of the divine law in the Nights is that of Judar the fisherman (AN II 610–48). The fisherman is instructed by a magician to go through seven tests in order to unravel all the mysteries (AN II 625). In the first six tests, he must confront several fantastic beings who try to kill him. Each time, Judar is directed by the magician to offer himself willingly and without fear, so as to go to the next level. The magician explains to the fisherman that these fearsome beings are only images and that he should not fear them. The sixth test is to confront a black slave and to open a door by saying “Isa [Jesus], tell Musa [Moses] to open the door.” The most interesting test is the seventh and last: to succeed in this test, Judar must force the phantom of his mother to strip off her clothes and allow him to look at her nakedness. Judar is instructed by the magician to ignore his mother’s pleas, for if he does not he will die (AN II 624). At first Judar is hesitant as his mother tells him: “Have you a heart of stone, my son, that you would shame me by uncovering my private parts? This is unlawful.” But Judar learns to ignore her pleas and succeeds in passing the test. In his comment on this story (SNAN 15.47) Strauss is probably thinking about a similar story in Herodotus’s Histories. He explains the importance of this episode many years before in a letter to Jacob Klein.⁶⁰ In Herodotus, Candaules persuades Gyges to see his wife’s nakedness (I.8.1–2). For Strauss, this represents questioning the basis of the patriarchal law. Shame and fear are the instruments by which the ancestral protects itself, and the one who questions the ancestral must first vanquish his fear and sense of shame at doing so. As Seth Benardete, following Strauss’s lead, explains, “to see [human beings] naked is to see them as they are, stripped of the concealment of clothes. And laws are like clothes: they too conceal from us the way things are. All laws say that certain things cannot be seen; before certain things one must have shame.”⁶¹ The story of Judar is that of a man who learns to do away with his cowardice and sense of shame and learns to look at things as they are. However, there is one major difference between the story of Judar and that of Gyges: while Gyges sees the nakedness of a beautiful woman, Judar sees the ugliness of his mother’s old and frail body. The sacred is thus seen as an ugly old woman, or as Strauss puts it, as “treacherous hags or old witches” (SNAN 5.14). The tradition seduces young men and transforms them into religious zealots, like the old treacherous woman in the story of the lady of the house who has converted the son of a king.

The story of Judar shows transgression in its brutality. However, transgression has its own charms and beauties. In fact, what leads to transgression is often attraction to beauty. We encounter the beauty of transgression in a story in which the Devil himself is depicted as an attractive, handsome old man possessing eloquence and remarkable grace; he is fond of wine, can sing Arabic poems of supreme beauty, and is apparently himself in love (AN II 777–78)! It seems that he also procures women for men (AN II 796, SNAN 15.49). But the most remarkable of the stories which depict the triumph of love over religion and the charms of transgression is the story of Nur al-Din ‘Ali and Anis al-Jalis (AN I 244–78). In that story, we are introduced to a sultan in Basra “who loved the poor, the beggars and all his subjects, distributing his wealth to those who believed in Muhammad” (AN I 244). Nur, a young man, seduces and sleeps with a slave girl intended for that sultan. Together they travel to Baghdad and have a drinking party in the garden of the caliph, and even make the pious old gardener of the caliph join them in transgression (SNAN 7.20). The gardener, who is aptly called Shaikh Ibrahim, is a strict follower of the injunction of the Prophet about wine and has not consumed wine for thirteen years, but he is persuaded by the fine casuistry of Nur to drink with them (AN I 262–63). The caliph sees the burning lights of the banquet in his garden from afar and at first believes that the city has been taken from him – and in a sense it has. The vizier tries to calm the caliph’s anger with an excuse: he tells the caliph that Ibrahim has asked the caliph’s permission to have a party in the garden to celebrate his son’s circumcision. The vizier has forgotten to tell the caliph about it. The caliph thinks that he must join the party as he believes that the pious gardener is entertaining the poor and the dervishes at the gathering. But before joining the gathering, the caliph wants to observe it anonymously, so he climbs a high tree and observes the party from above a tree. When the caliph sees the pious gardener cup in hand, drinking and singing with a young and beautiful couple, he becomes furious over such transgressions being committed in his garden. But listening to the music and observing the graceful young man and woman, the caliph joins the party and excuses the participants (cf. AN III 351). The story perfectly describes Strauss’s point about “the impotence of kings vis-à-vis love” as one of the recurring themes of the work (SNAN 15.50).

As it was previously mentioned, in his remarkable essays on the Nights, Muhsin Mahdi argued that a common theme cannot be found in the whole of the stories included in the large editions of the Nights and thought one must look for a common theme only in portions of the stories, namely the “Syrian branch” version.⁶² It seems that Strauss had been trying to find such a common theme in all the stories included in the Calcutta II edition and that his notes are the result of this effort. This common theme is the theologico-political solution of the medieval enlightenment. Theoretical radicalism and practical moderation are characteristic of this solution. For Strauss, the author’s radical and critical thought is clearly joined with practical moderation: although he leads the reader step by step toward his esoteric radical views, he carefully bows to the common opinions of his time at every turn. Liberation from prejudices and false opinions is reserved for those few who see through the orthodox disguise; they are taught to live like the author, a stranger in his homeland, “praising, speaking, seeing, doing things against [his] intent so as to please the prince.”⁶³ It seems that for Strauss, the author of the Nights is no revolutionary; his political teaching consists of learning to live with the reigning opinions and trying to find some breathing space for the life of the mind. He does not propose the root and branch elimination of the reigning beliefs. His teaching consists only of a tactful handling of the common opinions in the interest of a decent human life. He is a private man who lives “as a member of an imperfect society which he tries to humanize within the limits of the possible.”⁶⁴

¹Robert Irwin, “Preface,” in The Arabian Nights and Orientalism: Perspectives from East and West, eds. Yuriko Yamanaka and Tetsuo Nishio (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), viii.

²Edward William Lane, Arabian Society in the Middle Ages: Studies from the Thousand and One Nights, ed. Stanley Lane-Pool (London: Chatto and Windus, 1883).

³A powerful argument for this view is Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion (London: Allen Lane-The Penguin Press, 1994), 6. See also Irmeli Perho, “The Arabian Nights as a Source for Daily Life in the Mamluk Period,” Studia Orientalia Electronica 85 (2014): 139–62. For a criticism of this view see Mahdi’s third interpretative essay in Muhsin Mahdi, The Thousand and One Nights (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 164–81.

⁴Duncan B. MacDonald, “From the Arabian Nights to Spirit,” The Muslim World 9, no. 4 (October 1, 1919): 336–48; Robert Irwin, “Political Thought in ‘The Thousand and One Nights,’” Marvels and Tales 18, no. 2 (2004): 246–57; Yuriko Yamanaka, “Alexander in the Thousand and One Nights and the Ghazālī Connection,” in The Arabian Nights and Orientalism: Perspectives from East and West, eds. Tetsuo Nishio and Yuriko Yamanaka (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 93–115; Nabil Matar, “Christians in The Arabian Nights,” in The Arabian Nights in Historical Context: Between East and West, eds. Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 131–53; Muhsin J. Al-Musawi, The Islamic Context of The Thousand and One Nights (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Bruce Fudge, “Underworlds and Otherworlds in The Thousand and One Nights,” Middle Eastern Literatures 15, no. 3 (December 1, 2012): 257–72. See also a very useful and regularly updated bibliography on the Nights by Ulrich Marzolph: www.user.gwdg.de/~umarzol/arabiannights.html.

⁵“On ignore le nom de l’auteur d’un si grand ouvrage; mais vraisemblablement il n’est pas tout d’une main; car comment pourra-t-on croire qu’un seul homme ait eu l’imagination assez fertile pour suffire à tant de fictions ?” My translation. Antoine Galland, Les Mille et Une Nuits: Contes Arabes (Paris: Le Normant, 1806), I: xxix.

⁶Edward William Lane, The Thousand and One Nights, Commonly Called, in England, The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (London: Charles Knight and Co., 1839), I: xii–xiv.

⁷Richard F. Burton, The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (London: Burton Club, 1885), X: 92.

⁸Apart from Lane, another notable exception is Marie Lahy-Hollebecque, Le Féminisme de Schéhérazade: La Révélation Des Mille et Une Nuits (Paris: Radot, 1927). She claims that the Nights has a single author, a feminist one no less. Lahy-Hollebecque’s position was, however, more based on her view of the Nights as a feminist writing. As we shall see, the more important opposing view, held by Mahdi, is more scholarly and is based on the study of manuscripts.

⁹In his Kitāb al-Fihrist, Ibn al-Nadīm, the Arab bibliographer, describes the Nights as “truly a coarse book, without warmth in the telling.” Ibn al-Nadīm, The Fihrist: A Tenth Century AD Survey of Islamic Culture, trans. Bayard Dodge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), II: 713–14. For Mahdi’s biography and bibliography see Butterworth, The Political Aspects of Islamic Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Muhsin S. Mahdi, 7–9, 383–401; Mahdi, “Years of Chicago. Forming a Soul”; Charles E. Butterworth, “In Memoriam: Muhsin S. Mahdi,” The Review of Politics 69, no. 4 (2007): 511–12.

¹⁰Hermann Zotenberg, “Notice sur quelques manuscrits des Mille et une nuits et la traduction de Galland,” Notice et extraits des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque nationale et autres bibliothèques 28 (1888): 167–320; Theodor Nöldeke, “Review of ‘Histoire d’’Alâ al-Dîn ou la Lampe merveilleuse’ by Hermann Zotenberg,” Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 2 (1888): 168–73.

¹¹Duncan B. MacDonald, “Lost MSS. of the ‘Arabian Nights’ and a Projected Edition of That of Galland,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (January 1911): 219–21; J. Jermain Bodine, “Magic Carpet to Islam. Duncan Black Macdonald and the Arabian Nights,” The Muslim World 67, no. 1 (January 1, 1977): 1–11.

¹²Muhsin Mahdi, The Thousand and One Nights: From the Earliest Known Sources: Vol. 1. Arabic Text (Leiden: Brill, 1984); Muhsin Mahdi, The Thousand and One Nights: From the Earliest Known Sources: Vol. 2. Critical Apparatus: Description of Manuscripts (Leiden: Brill, 1984).

¹³Mahdi, The Thousand and One Nights, 1–87; Mahdi, The Thousand and One Nights: Vol. 1: Arabic Text, v–ix; Irwin, The Arabian Nights, 54ff.

¹⁴Mahdi, The Thousand and One Nights, 140–42. It should be mentioned that Mahdi’s position on the authorship of the Nights is sometimes ambiguous. He often speaks of the “author” as well as “authors” without explaining how these two ideas should be reconciled. See Mahdi, 142, 163. In this regard, Mahdi’s judgment is a detailed elaboration of Lane’s view on the basis of philological research.

¹⁵Mahdi, The Thousand and One Nights, 7–8.

¹⁶Mahdi, The Thousand and One Nights, 163.

¹⁷Mahdi, The Thousand and One Nights, 49.

¹⁸Mahdi, The Thousand and One Nights, 37.

¹⁹Mahdi, The Thousand and One Nights, 127–81. The first essay is a reprint of Muhsin Mahdi, “Remarks on the 1001 Nights,” Interpretation 3, nos. 2–3 (1973): 157–68.

²⁰Ulrich Marzolph and Richard van Leeuwen, The Arabian Nights: An Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2004), xxiv; Ulrich Marzolph, “The Arabian Nights in Comparative Folk Narrative Research,” in The Arabian Nights and Orientalism: Perspectives from East and West, eds. Tetsuo Nishio and Yuriko Yamanaka (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), 25–46.

²¹Mahdi, The Thousand and One Nights: Vol. 1: Arabic Text, vii.

²²I owe the anecdote to Charles E. Butterworth. Jenny Strauss Clay provided me with essential information about Strauss’s copy. I am grateful to both. The edition used by Strauss is the German translation of the Macnaghten or Calcutta II recension by Enno Littmann. Enno Littmann, Die Erzählungen aus den Tausendundein Nächten. Vollständige Ausgabe in Sechs Bänden. Zum ersten Mal nach dem arabischen Urtext der Calcuttaer Ausgabe vom Jahre 1939 übertragen von Enno Littmann. Einleitung von Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 6 vols. (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1953). It is the same version famously translated by Richard Burton and translated recently by Malcolm and Ursula Lyons. Malcolm C. Lyons, Ursula Lyons, and Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1,001 Nights, 3 vols (London: Penguin Books, 2010). Here the Lyons translation is used; references to the Nights are identified by AN, followed by volume and page numbers.

²³Seth Benardete Papers, SB 04–05, The New School Archives and Special Collections.

²⁴Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften. Band 3, 685 (Letter to Karl Löwith on December 13, 1960).

²⁵Leo Strauss Papers, box 4, folder 2, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

²⁶Leo Strauss, 1966 Spring Course on Montesquieu Offered at the University of Chicago, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: Leo Strauss Center, 2014), 75 (Session 5, January 18, 1966); Strauss, “Jerusalem and Athens,” 148; Leo Strauss, 1967 Course on Nietzsche Offered at the University of Chicago, ed. Richard Velkley (Chicago: Leo Strauss Center, 2015), 7 (Session 1); Leo Strauss, 1971–72 Course on Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil Offered at St. John’s College, ed. Mark Blitz (Chicago: Leo Strauss Center, 2014), 6 (Session 1, October 6, 1971).

²⁷Strauss’s notes are found at Leo Strauss Papers, box 20, folder 2, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. References to Strauss’s transcript are identified by SNAN, followed by the page and paragraph numbers of the transcript. The transcript is provided in this volume as Appendix B. In a letter to Joseph Cropsey on August 15, 1960, Strauss writes: “As soon as feasible I shall dictate to Mr. Gildin my observations regarding the 1001 Nights and let you have a copy.” Hilail Gildin (1928–2015), a student of Strauss in this period, later became a professor of philosophy at Queens College, City University of New York, and the editor-in-chief of Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy.

²⁸Mahdi, The Thousand and One Nights, 140–41.

²⁹Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, 1952, 36.

³⁰Josef Henninger, “Mohammedanische Polemik gegen das Christentum in 1001 Nacht,” Neue Zeitschrift für Missionswissenschaft 2 (1946): 289–305.

³¹Clifford Edmund Bosworth, “The Persian Impact on Arabic Literature,” in The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period, ed. R. B. Serjeant et al., vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 487–88; Jennifer London, “How to Do Things with Fables,” History of Political Thought 29, no. 2 (2008): 189–212; Shatha Almutawa, “‘The Death of the Body Is the Birth of the Soul’: Contradictory Views on the Resurrection in Rasā’il Ikhwān Al-Safā,” Studia Islamica 113 (2018): 56–75.

³²One can clearly see how Strauss benefitted from the Nights for reflection on classic theoretical issues and also for understanding other similar writings. For example, in a letter to Joseph Cropsey on August 12, 1960, Strauss writes the following: “Did you ever think of the possibility that there is a connection between Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac and God’s jealousy? On reflection it seems obvious, but the poor one (to use an Arabism) needed the 1001 Nights.” For Strauss’s discussion of this issue in the Nights see pp. 98–99 below. For another similar example, see the connection established between the Nights and Shakespeare’s Othello by Strauss, see p. 106, footnote 47. I am grateful to Hannes Kerber who drew my attention to this letter.

³³In the case of Islamic thought it suffices to mention Abjad numerals. For a general introduction see Vincent Foster Hopper, Medieval Number Symbolism (Mineola: Dover Publications Inc., 2003). For a good bibliography on the use of numerology in Islam see Annemarie Schimmel, The Mystery of Numbers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 288–90.

³⁴See “Eleven is the sin. Eleven transgresses the Ten Commandments,” in Friedrich Schiller, The Piccolomini, Act II, Scene I.

³⁵Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 52; Strauss, “Niccolò Machiavelli,” 311. See especially the comparison with Spinoza in the latter.

³⁶Nasser Behnegar, “Reading ‘What Is Political Philosophy?,’” in Leo Strauss’s Defense of the Philosophic Life: Reading “What Is Political Philosophy?,” ed. Rafael Major (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 41n5; Leo Strauss, “How To Begin To Study The Guide of the Perplexed,” in Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 158; Strauss, On Tyranny, 275 (Letter to Alexandre Kojève on April 22, 1957). Strauss’s interest in number 17 is not unprecedented and its historical importance for different ancient and medieval authors is documented by other scholars. See Kraus, Jābir ibn Ḥayyān: Contribution à l’histoire des idées scientifiques dans l’Islam. Vol 2. Jabir et la science grecque., 187–303, esp. 216–17, 220–23; Lloyd Ridgeon, Morals and Mysticism in Persian Sufism: A History of Sufi-Futuwwat in Iran (New York: Routledge, 2010), 144.

³⁷Commenting on Plato’s Laws, Strauss writes: “The Athenian suggests then that the future city should consist of 5,040 land holders and defenders of their plots and the same number of plots. This number has the advantage that it can be divided by all numbers up to ten; in fact, it is susceptible of fifty-nine different divisions.” Strauss, The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws, 73, 79. The chapter dedicated to Discourses on Livy in Strauss’s Thoughts on Machiavelli also consists of fifty-nine paragraphs. It should be also mentioned that fiftynine is the seventeenth prime number. I owe these observations to Steven J. Lenzner.

³⁸Imam Muslim, Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim. Vol. IV, trans. Nasiruddin Al-Khattab (Riyadh: Darussalam, 2007), 195 (Hadith 3764). For the relationship between jealousy and women in the Bible cf. Genesis 30:1 with Numbers 5:29. Exclusivity, i.e. not admitting partners, is the core of jealousy. Jealousy of God who doesn’t suffer sharing our love with others, is also a common theme in Islamic mysticism. See Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 39.

³⁹Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 187.

⁴⁰The story seems inspired by the stories of many generations in the Qur’ān who also refused to heed the messengers and were consequently destroyed. See Qu’rān 6:10‒11, 7:59–136.

⁴¹Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 44–49; Harvey C. Mansfield, Machiavelli’s New Modes and Orders: A Study of the Discourses on Livy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 99.

⁴²Strauss, “The Origins of Political Science and the Problem of Socrates,” 147.

⁴³Strauss, Natural Right and History, 198; Strauss, “The Law of Reason in The Kuzari,” 115, 130; Strauss, “Religion and the Commonweal,” 90. For the classical understanding of political theology see Augustine, The City of God IV.27. For a genealogy of the concept and its transformation see Bernd Wacker and Jürgen Manemann, “‘Politische Theologie.’ Eine Skizze zur Geschichte und aktuellen Diskussion des Begriffs,” in Politische Theologie und Politische Philosophie, eds. Marie-Christine Kajewski and Jürgen Manemann, 1st ed. (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 2016), 9–54.

⁴⁴Traditionally the “Greatest Name of Allah” (al-ism al-’a‘z.am) is said to be hidden from ordinary men. According to a hadith, the Greatest Name of Allah is “the one which if He is called by it, He will answer”: Ibn Majah, Sunan. Vol. V, trans. Nasiruddin Al-Khattab (Riyadh: Darussalam, 2007), 114 (Hadith 3857); Amira El-Zein, Islam, Arabs, and Intelligent World of the Jinn (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2009), 81–82.

⁴⁵Cf. the career of Duban with the common background of philosophers in the Islamic world. See for instance the surviving passages from Alfarabi’s autobiography in Fakhry, Al-Farabi, Founder of Islamic Neoplatonism, 158ff.

⁴⁶The spurious story that a king killed Socrates probably finds its origin in a misunderstanding about archon basileus, the Athenian magistracy dealing with the indictment against Socrates for impiety. It is mentioned in Plato, Euthyphro 2a3. The same spurious story is reflected in al-Kindi’s anecdote about Socrates: Al-Kindi, The Philosophical Works of Al-Kindi, trans. Peter Pormann and Peter Adamson (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2012), 263. Another possibility is that the story has reminded Strauss of another Socrates, “the Armenian Socrates” in Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus, who is killed by the jealous Armenian king. See Xenophon, Education of Cyrus III.1.38ff; Strauss, 1963 Winter Course on Xenophon, 370 (Session 15, February 20, 1963).

⁴⁷In a letter to Joseph Cropsey on August 15, 1960, Strauss writes the following: “If you happen to write to [Allan] Bloom whose address is not known to us tell him that the story near the beginning of the 1001 Nights of the fisherman and the demon (which includes the story of the prince transformed into stone) is in substance identical with the Othello as he reads that play.” Bloom’s interpretation of the Othello was published shortly before Strauss’s letter, in March 1960. Bloom’s interpretation deals naturally with the question of jealousy which is obviously essential to Shakespeare’s play. What is however more significant is that Bloom strongly implies that the character of Othello is a metaphor for speaking of god. Bloom claims that Shakespeare has depicted Othello as a physically unattractive man to explain the origin of his jealousy: jealousy is disease of a being who lacks self-assurance; he knows that he is unlovable but nonetheless sees himself as deserving to be loved and therefore punishes those who do not love him like a tyrant. In Strauss’s words, “God is jealous either because He is not, or does not believe himself to be, infinitely attractive” (SNAN 5.15). See also Allan Bloom, “Cosmopolitan Man and the Political Community: An Interpretation of Othello,” American Political Science Review 54, no. 1 (March 1960): esp. 147. I am grateful to Hannes Kerber for sharing Strauss’s letter with me.

⁴⁸Alfarabi, “The Philosophy of Plato,” 64 (Rosenthal and Walzer 18). I owe the reference to Nasser Behnegar. The origin of the idea seems to be Aristotle, History of Animals 505a33–b1 in which fish are described as animals lacking most of the sense-organs.

⁴⁹This is also the message of the fantastic story of Maʻruf the cobbler: in that story it is shown how a poor cobbler who has run away to another city from his ugly and troublesome wife starts believing his own lies that he is in fact a rich merchant and that his caravan will arrive soon with his many fantastic possessions. Only a miraculous ring can make his vain hopes a reality (SNAN 18.63).

⁵⁰Mahdi, The Thousand and One Nights, 128. In a famous tradition, the Prophet states that “I was sent to the red and to the black.” On the basis of this tradition, Averroes argues that Islam is intended for all mankind: Averroes, Faith, and Reason in Islam: Averroes’ Exposition of Religious Arguments, trans. Ibrahim Najjar (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2001), 103–4 (Qasim 220). It is said that Muhammad, upon his triumphal return to Mecca, asked Bilal, a black African slave, to call the people to prayer. Several prominent Meccans were unhappy about this, which occasioned the revelation of 49:13: “We have created you from male and female and made you peoples and tribes that you may know one another. Indeed, the most noble of you in the sight of Allah is the most righteous of you.” See also Qur’ān 30:22 and the Prophet’s Farewell Address: “Indeed, there is no superiority of an Arab over a non-Arab, nor of a non-Arab over an Arab, nor of a white over a black, nor a black over a white, except by taqwa [piety].” Ah.mad ibn H.anbal, Al-Musnad (Beirut: Dar “Ihya” al-Turath al-ʻArabi, 1993), Hadith 22978. Islam is also depicted as a lean and brown slave in the story of the Yemeni and his six slaves (AN II 83–96): in that story, the order of the brown slave girl in the enumeration is changed and she is particularly praised. The same is the case of the thin slave girl. Neither of them quotes the Qur’ān in their speeches, thus separating themselves from the four others, as if they are the Qur’ān and do not need to remind us of their Qur’ānic superiority (SNAN 14.38).

⁵¹See “language of brutes” (SNAN 1.3), “mistake of the sage” (SNAN 2.5), “the king’s daughter who knows 170 [17 × 10] charms” (SNAN 14.12), “address of Schechrazad to her king to the effect that religion depends on government” (SNAN 15.41).

⁵²Strauss, “The Spirit of Sparta or the Taste of Xenophon,” 528; Strauss, The City and Man, 127; Strauss, “On Classical Political Philosophy,” 1959, 94; Strauss, Natural Right and History, 151.

⁵³Cf. the story of Abu ‘Isa and Qurrat Al-‘Ain (AN II 239) in which Isa hides his love for the slave girl Qurrat who is offered to the caliph.

⁵⁴According to Strauss the same theme is discussed from a similar point of view in Aristophanes’s Wasps: Philocleon is a zealous Athenian addicted to law courts and condemning his fellow men. He is tricked by his son into acquitting a defendant but Philocleon is afraid of having committed a sin against the gods. For Strauss, Philocleon’s addiction to law courts and his savagery against his fellow men is the result of his belief in the punitiveness of the gods. Philocleon is also an unerotic man and does not desire wine and other refined pleasures. Strauss, “The Origins of Political Science and the Problem of Socrates,” 147.

⁵⁵Cf. “Socrates does get into trouble through a certain inbetween type of man [i.e., Strepsiades], who is not distinguished by honesty. Here we remind ourselves of the fact that the old juryman of the Wasps … is also socially an inbetween type. Needless to say that the demagogues too belong to the inbetween type.” Strauss, “The Origins of Political Science and the Problem of Socrates,” 152–53 (italics added).

⁵⁶The importance of the central items in an enumeration and the central passages, paragraphs or chapters is one of the common principles of Strauss’s hermeneutics. For the justification of this principle see Cicero, Orator 50, and De Oratore II.313ff; Strauss, “Fârâbî’s Plato,” 371n35; Strauss, Xenophon’s Socrates, 58.

⁵⁷Strauss, “Fârâbî’s Plato,” 361.

⁵⁸The theme of wine drinking and its opposition to the sense of shame, respect for the old laws, and established order is mentioned by Strauss in his commentary on Plato’s Laws. In the Laws, the search for the best laws, which are to replace the old divine laws of Crete and Sparta gets underway when the old men of the dialogue are freed from their restraints by talking about wine drinking, whereupon they engage in a “vicarious enjoyment of wine through a conversation about wine.” See Strauss, The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws, 19–21; Strauss, “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 31.

⁵⁹Strauss, “The Origins of Political Science and the Problem of Socrates,” 150.

⁶⁰Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften. Band 3, 556 (Letter to Jacob Klein on October 15, 1938).

⁶¹Seth Benardete, Herodotean Inquiries (The Hague: St. Augustine’s Press, 1969), 12.

⁶²Mahdi, The Thousand and One Nights, 141. In his notes, Strauss mentions about 144 stories included in the Calcutta II edition. Of these only thirty-four are included in Mahdi’s edition.

⁶³Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 214 (III.2); Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 168.

⁶⁴Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, 1952, 17.