Las noches de las mil y una noche

Salam aleikum, worthy friends. That is just how the story began of the new Disney movie to hit the big screen. It's about Aladdin, a story that forms part of the memorable medieval Arab stories of a thousand and one nights but it is not about the thousand and one nights that I want to talk to you about I want to recommend to you this novel The nights of a thousand and one, or as it's called in Arabic, "Layala alf layla wa layla." Its author is Naguib Mahfuz, an Egyptian author, internationally famous winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988. This book was recommended to me by my professor of Arabic language and literature in college and now I want to recommend it to you. This story begins just where the thousand and one nights leaves off. After morning prayers, while obscure clouds met a burst of energetic light the vizier Dandán was summoned to present himself before the sultan Shahriyar. His composure dissipated and in his chest his heart beat loudly. While he got dressed, he stammered, "Now destiny, your destiny, will be complete, Sherezade." After three long years in which the princess Sherezade has been narrating one after another all the stories that comprise the thousand and one nights, the ruthless sultan Shahriyar decides to marry her and finally end a cruel bloody era in which every night he murdered a virgin of his kingdom. From here on, we find imaginary, fantastic and fabulous stories that could take place anywhere in time and in any modern Arab Islamic country as it could be Egypt, Iraq, and including old Persia happening throughout India or China. Definitively, this author could have made a social critique of the modern Arab countries that are experiencing a grave situation of corruption on the part of their politicians and governments. It could be an Arab spring.