The Nights, is a collection of tales originating from the Middle East, that has been orally passed down from generation to generation. They have played a large role in Middle Eastern culture and history. There have been countless different interpretations and tellings of these stories for western audiences, such as Aladdin, The Thief of Baghdad, etc… The problem at hand is that each of these retellings have been deemed problematic and orientalist for several different reasons. Whether it be lack of Middle Eastern representation, reinforcing harmful stereotypes, exotisizing the Middle East, combining many very different and distinct countries into one, or all of the above. Anytime these classic tales have been made for Western audiences they have unfortunately succumbed to the orientalist mind set, so the question now becomes is it even possible to create a telling of these stories, for western audiences, in which it does not. Unfortunately, the answer to this complicated question is not until the west can end it’s orientalist stereotypes and mindset.
While there have been many offensive and untruthful stereotypes towards the Middle East. One of the most common is that Middle Eastern women are oppressed and only used for sex. This is an orientalist stereotype that has been perpetuated and enforced in Western media for so long, and it is, sadly, in almost every version of the stories within The Nights that we have today.
In order to make these tales available to western audiences without them enforcing harmful stereotypes, all the negative depictions of women would need to be removed from the story, in an attempt to not further perpetuate these stereotypes. However, this is nearly impossible as many stories within The Nights are based around a negative portrayal of women. Many of the tales include depictions of women cheating on their husbands, such as the framework story itself. The main plot in The Nights is entirely started by not one but two women cheating on their husbands. Women in these stories are often also treated very poorly by the men. For example, in one of the stories a woman is beaten black and blue for questioning her husband and asking him to tell her the truth. This caused him to have an outburst of anger and beat her into submission. These negative images can be found all throughout The Nights, and in order to get rid of all traces of orientalism many of the stories would need to be heavily altered, changing the plot drastically. Altering these oral tales from their original form would show them a great disservice. Also, this would cause them to lose both their history and authenticity.
While there are some stories within The Nights that do not include these terrible views on women, they are fairly rare. While there may be others, the only two that I could think of was the character Scheherazade and the story, “The Fisherman and the Demon.” Scherazade is a character in the framework story, who risks her own life to save all the young women in her village. While this is quite heroic of her, the rest of the framework story is based on women cheating on their husbands and being brutally slaughtered for it. Moreover, while the character Schehrazade is actually a strong feminist character the rest of her story does not help to depict other women in a positive light. The other story that was mentioned above, “The Fisherman and the Demon”, does not have any negative depiction of women, simply because there are no female characters in the story to depict negatively. In this entire book full of different stories there is only one that comes to mind that, if made for western audiences, would not help support the incredibly offensive stereotypes held towards Middle Eastern men and women.Unfortunately, sexism is so deeply rooted into the stories within The Nights, and orientalism is so deeply rooted within western society that it is nearly impossible to separate them from each other. The unpleasant depictions of women cannot be removed from The Nights without losing an important piece of the stories as well, and this unfortunately makes it really hard to show these stories to western audiences without reinforcing their racist, orientalist stereotypes. It does not matter how much time, energy, and research is put into making everything else about the film accurate, if the plot itself is going to be problematic. Unfortunately, the stories within The Nights will never be able to be told to western audiences without succumbing to orientalism, until the west can learn to get over their racist prejudice and stereotypes.
