Marjana, Marjana, Quite the Honour!

A typical night in the glory of an Arabian province. A wealthy turban-ed man comes home from a long day of work managing his local oil rig, producing millions upon millions of dollars each week. "Salem, Abdul!", cautiously says one of this seven wives. Yes, this man's name is indeed Abdul Muhammed Nassar. "Prepare me my falafel, woman!" he yells back sternly, and quite honestly, forgetting whether it was Fatima or Alia whom he addressed. At no more than this, the unknown wife runs back into her familiar place in the kitchen, fearing for her life, considering the fate of her predecessors. After all, Abdul has had a long day at work, his personal belly-dancer was ill today, and his cousin, Hakeem Muhammed Sarkis, had died in a local bombing (one which he himself initiated, of course), and at any point, her husband could act homicidally.

What must this do with Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves? In this apparently simple story, the under lying theme does its best to reject and discredit the many stereotypes the West has developed about the arab culture, most prominently, those regarding Arab women.

Marjana is the lowest of low. She is a slave. And not only is she a slave, be that bad enough, she is a female slave. She serves her master, Qasim, until he is murdered. She then helps dispose of the body by faking a post-mortem death. Be that not clever enough, she saves the life of her more heroic master, Ali Baba, on multiple accounts and continues to murder thirty-eight thieves. Her keen intellect and sharp wits are demonstrated throughout our story, emphasising the fact that this woman is only good befriended, or married to, as Ali Baba took to. 

The cleverness of Marjana in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves annihilates all and any remaining stereotypes about either slaves or women that were perpetuated by the readings of such misogynous stories such as the The Tale of Scheherazade. In that story, the only role women played was to destroy the lives of men, extracting the only meaningful moral which was to control your wives through any means, especially if it means physical beatings or execution. In contrast, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves demonstrates women in a way that strongly benefits the house of Ali Baba Instead of chaos breaking when the woman deals in secrecy, Ali Baba life is spared multiple times, noting that women are much more beneficial in deception than in tight grips, another common stereotype of arab culture. 

The Book without Authors Summary

Translation is tricky in any scenario, whether it be translating to or from a foreign language, or translating in the same language but two entirely different cultures or times. When transcribing a manuscript accurately, one must take into account both the obvious linguistic differences as well as the subtle connotational and cultural understanding of the text. Further complexities arise when the language is not in a romanticised alphabet nor the language of the text exists as it did when the document was written. And finally, there are the possibilities of a text going through multiple translators, "co-authors", and others who interacted with the text, and the uncertainty of the original, clouds the original intended meaning of the base text. 
This is tornado of linguistic struggles the text The One Thousand and One Nights went through in order to arrive at the modern American editions and translations we hold in our library. The text is assumed to be a Persian prototype, sourcing back to the height of the Persian Empire in Arabia. As the region fluctuated away from Persian and into [a version] of Arabic, the story was translated and continued to spread through the Mediterranean world, at some point being translated into Egyptian and Syriac. It was then that Greeks were able to translate it, and from there it was quite accessible by the western world. However, orientalists of the west (namely from France and the United Kingdom), revisited the, what they believe to be, original text, translating directly from the Persian and/or Arabic. By doing this, the orientalists tried to achieve the most accurate translation of the original document by going directly to it, rather than indirectly through multiple generations, languages, and cultures.