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Why Read Folk-tales from Arabia
Because they are rattling good stories. Folk tales from Arabia are plot driven, contain little padding, and are peopled by interesting characters that are utterly believable, even when they happen to be supernatural beings or animals. I first heard some Arabic folk tales when I went to work in Kuwait in the late 1980s and was invited to visit diwaniyahs. A diwaniyah is the parlour found in every Kuwaiti home where the men of the house entertain their friends. There we used to sit around, playing cards, chatting and joking, snacking and drinking. Late at night, if we were lucky, story-telling would begin. Fabulous stories they were too and the more so because of the style of the telling. Even though there was always a TV in the corner, it was turned off as soon as some-one, sitting cross-legged on a pile of cushions, began telling a tale. My Arabic was very poor in those days (and isn't much better today) but there was always a kind soul around who would whisper a translation. I followed the stories as best I could, watching the rapt faces staring at the speaker and his gestures as his voice rose and fell. Traditional story telling is still alive and well in the Arabian Gulf. I used to write these stories down, when I could remember them, in the morning. Later, as the founding editor of Kuwait this month, I polished them up and published them and they went down very well with English readers in the Gulf. I found out later that various versions of these stories had been written down hundreds of years ago but most of them, with a few exceptions, were virtually unknown in the West or have been forgotten about. The stories I heard were really good tales. By that I mean they had great plots. The seed of a crisis was always sown early on and there were seldom any long windy descriptions. The crisis would grow, seem to resolve, only to get worse, several times over. Finally there was usually a very satisfactory ending. Though the stories were plot-driven, the characters were always plausible. With just a few deft words, the story-teller would sketch a fully-rounded personality you could easily believe in, even if they were jinn, ifreet, or other super-natural beings. When reading one of my favourite tales, The Ox and the Donkey, I find the talking animals entirely realistic, perhaps because their thoughts and actions mirror the wiliness of humans. Though Arabic folk tales reflect local culture and especially the Bedouin mind-set, their themes are universal -- the fight for justice, that might does not make right, that the bad man always gets his just deserts, the struggles of the under-dog, and so on. They nearly always have morally satisfying outcomes with which we can all identify. If you are, like me, the sort of person who enjoys a good story for its own sake, you should delve into the rich store of folk tales that have been told for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, in Arabia, and are still being told today. |
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