Juḥā is a pseudo-historical character whom oral and literary tradition have, over the centuries, turned into the most popular protagonist of jocular tales, jokes, and pranks in the Arab world. First documented in third/ninth-century Arabic literature, the character became especi…
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Arabic literature of the pre-Mongol period contains many thousands of jokes . From the fourth/tenth century onwards, jokes were compiled into joke books , a genre that remained popular in the post-Mongol and modern periods. A similar, although chronologically somewhat later, dev…
A fable is a short and often humorous tale in which non-human characters (often animals, but also plants or supernatural creatures; rarely human beings) act and speak as human beings in order to exemplify a simple common truth in a metaphorical manner. 1. Introduction In interna…
Abū Wuhayb Buhlūl b. ʿAmr al-Majnūn al-Kūfī (d. c.190/805) is the prototype of a loosely defined group of people called “wise fools” (ʿuqalāʾ al-majānīn) in the early ʿAbbāsid period. Buhlūl apparently lived during the time of the caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd (r. 170-93/786-809), who …
The Nuzhat al-udabāʾ , bearing the full title Nuzhat al-udabāʾ wa-salwat al-ghurabāʾ (“Entertainment of the educated and consolation of those who are far from home”), is an Arabic collection of jokes and anecdotes and is representative of the jocular compilations of the Ottoman …
The Romance of Ḥamza is the most widely read popular epic of the Muslim world (Marzolph, Ḥamza-Nāme). No one author can be identified as having invented or written the romance, even though various Persian sources attribute its compilation to a certain Abū l-Maʿālī Nīshāpūrī, a p…
Arabian Nights , the work known in Arabic as Alf layla wa-layla , “A thousand nights and one night,” is an oriental collection of stories that is constituted by a frame-tale focused on the narrator, Shahrazād, telling stories for a thousand nights. Derived from a pre-Islamic Ira…
"The Thousand and One Days, a companion collection to The Thousand and One Nights, was published in 1710-1712 by French Orientalist scholar François Pétis de la Croix who advertised it as the faithful, albeit selective translation of a Persian work. Subsequent research has found…
"The Thousand and One Days, a companion collection to The Thousand and One Nights, was published in 1710-1712 by French Orientalist scholar François Pétis de la Croix who advertised it as the faithful, albeit selective translation of a Persian work. Subsequent research has found…
"The Thousand and One Days, a companion collection to The Thousand and One Nights, was published in 1710-1712 by French Orientalist scholar Franc¸ois Pe´tis de la Croix who advertised it as the faithful, albeit selective translation of a Persian work. Subsequent research has fou…