Endless imagination

Scheherazade wanted narration to serve two functions simultaneously; the first was to keep Shahryar interested in her storytelling so that she wouldn't allow him to think of killing her. Thus, narration became a defensive function. Every story Scheherazade tells Shahryar equals life itself. Therefore, the more Scheherazade told stories, the greater her chances of survival. Narration is life itself. The second function was to rid Shahryar of his narcissistic complex. He would marry a slave girl one day and kill her the next, until there were no women left in the city. From this, Scheherazade saw narration serving the second function, which was to rid the happy king of the psychological distress that had made him aggressive and obsessed with killing innocent women. It is a book that managed to use imagination to transcend reality and to herald an alternative mythical reality for creating heroes and characters. However, it could not at all focus on satisfying the intellectual elite by interacting with the standard language used by the high commissioner, which led to a clash between the two projects. Perhaps the most important aspect of "One Thousand and One Nights" lies in the book's ability to create a flexible imagination that can claim the completeness of experience and the openness of insight. For "One Thousand and One Nights" is, in the end, a collective narrative dream, which must dwell in the collective memory, even if it is individual memory that renews it, because it is a dream that aspires to the completeness of experience and the openness of insight.

• Category: Arabic Novels

• Number of pages: 336 pages