Wendy Doniger's The Magic Of The Arabian Nights

The magic of the Arabian Nights by Wendy Doniger

The original, authentic, real Ur-text of the Arabian Nights (aka Alf Layla wa-Layla, or the Tales of a Thousand and One Nights, or just the Nights) is a mythical beast. There are far more than a thousand and one nights, for the thirty-four-and-a-half stories in the fourteenth or fifteenth century “core” body of the Nights were soon supplemented by other tales in Arabic and Persian, from the culture of medieval Baghdad and Cairo, and then in Hindi and Urdu and Turkish, tales carried by pilgrims and crusaders, merchants and raiders, back and forth by land and sea. And then came the narratives added by European translators, as well as the adaptations (in paintings and films) and retellings by
Warner’s argument about the importance of magical thinking in modernity is not particularly surprising, but she documents it in highly original ways. Her analysis of the exoticization of magic through the use of Oriental material, since the eighteenth century, enhances her discussion of the way that early films of stories from the Nights superimpose Arabic magic on the magic of filmmaking, so that the magic flying horse becomes an objective correlative of the projector, with the peg between the ears of the magic steed, and the brake on the tail, echoing the mechanism that controls the passage of the film through the projector. There is also the magic of speech acts, not just, “With this ring I thee wed” but “Hoc est corpus meum”, which inspired the phrase “hocus pocus” in mockery of the “trick of transubstantiation”. Warner discusses the magic of things (such as rings and carpets) as fetishes, and cites Lorraine Daston’s insight (in Things That Talk, 2004) into idols (from the Greek eidolon), illusions that are misleading and fraudulent. Daston contrasts idols with evidence, but notes that the two often blend together; forensic exhibits may be fabricated or, on the other hand, become powerful fetishes and take on the idol’s ability to haunt. Warner compares these “objects with uncanny life” to Winnicott’s transitional objects and to the quasi-magical functioning of her BlackBerry, Satnav, and
Many of the early European historians of religions, in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, were trying, within their Orientalist limits, to make the civilization of the Orient comprehensible, and hence acceptable, to people in the West who would otherwise regard all Orientals as ignorant savages. The founding mantra of the science of comparative religion was the hope that if you know peoples’ stories you are less likely to slaughter them, the lesson that Shahrazad taught to the Sultan. This is the comparatist’s version, avant la lettre, of Emmanuel Levinas’s famous dictum that the face of the other says, “Don’t kill me”. The guiding impulse of Stranger Magic turns out to be that noble, if perhaps naive, Orientalists’