Book description
Every night for three years the vengeful King Shahriyar sleeps with a
different virgin, executing her next morning. To end this brutal pattern
and to save her own life, the vizier's daughter, Shahrazad, begins to
tell the king tales of adventure, love, riches and wonder - tales of
mystical lands peopled with princes and hunchbacks, the Angel of Death
and magical spirits, tales of the voyages of Sindbad, of Ali Baba's
outwitting a band of forty thieves and of
jinni
s trapped in rings and in lamps. The sequence of stories will last 1,001
nights.
Malcolm Lyons, sometime Sir Thomas Adams's Professor of Arabic
at the University of Cambridge and a life Fellow of Pembroke College,
Cambridge, is a specialist in the field of classical Arabic
literature. His published works include the biography Saladin, the
Politics of the Holy War, The Arabian Epic,
Identification and Identity in Classical Arabic Poetry and
many articles on Arabic literature.
Ursula Lyons, formerly an Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty
of Oriental Studies at Cambridge University and, since 1976, an
Emeritus Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, specialises in
modern Arabic literature.
Robert Irwin is the author of For Lust of Knowing: The
Orientalists and Their Enemies, The Middle East in the Middle Ages,
The Arabian Nights: A Companion and numerous other specialised
studies of Middle Eastern politics, art and mysticism. His novels
include The Limits of Vision, The Arabian Nightmare, The
Mysteries of Algiers and Satan Wants Me.
