In the Great Khan’s Tent

In The Great Khan’s Tent is now a year old!

We would like to firstly thank all of our listeners for helping us with our journey so far and hope you are pleased by our offerings so far and plan to stick around as we reach new and better heights while bringing you the same quality of educational, informative, and entertaining content that we are known for!

I would also like to thank all those supporters and well wishers who have led us this far in the life of this podcast. Without you, this would not be possible. Thank you!

In the first of our One Year Special, we examine the question of Obscenity and Censorship in the One Thousand and One Nights. This was a part of a question that a listener had asked of us, concerning the translators and why we use their translations for this podcast. In this talk, I discuss how the question of obscenity, censorship, and the translators themselves transformed the corpus of literature that we know today as the One Thousand and One Nights. The history of the translators themselves, their translations, and their publication history will be examined in detail at a later time.

If you’d like to know more than the basic structure I provide, there is a reading list provided on the website and I would recommend reading Edward Said’s book on Orientalism to get a better grip of the environment and the ideologies that these translators used to produced their works.

We hope that you have found the offerings of In The Great Khan’s Tent to be to your liking and hope you continue to listen to us! Thank you!

In this Episode, we conclude the story “The Story told by the Jewish Physician” continuing with Night XXVIII and begin the story “The Story told by the Tailor” in Night XXIX and Night XXX. I will have to say at the outset that the story told by the Tailor and the character of the Barber which features in this cycle of stories is one of my favorite characters in the One Thousand and One Nights.

What becomes evident, though told in a humorous manner, is that the level of education and prominence of the multiple fields of study one would have undertake to be considered as being on the same “educated” level of the Barber. The fields of knowledge which the barber lists, such as morphology, rhetoric, knowledge of the religious texts and of the Qu’ran all in there way speak to the educational environment available for the populace if they had time and the money, although there was free education as well, to employ the best teachers in all these fields.

The main character who is telling this story, is once again to no ones surprise, a son of a merchant, who much like the protagonist in the Jewish Physician’s story, suffers from some sort of event which causes him to become lame. As we continue on with this story, we may find out, in a hilarious manner, of why the protagonist suffered from the Barber and became lame.

On a different note, as we reach the one year anniversary of In The Great Khan’s Tent in September, there will be a plethora of episodes to celebrate this momentous occasion including Part III of our Special Episode series focusing on the history of the One Thousand and One Nights and other special episodes released for this occasion. Be sure to check us out!

In this Episode, we conclude the story “The Story told by the Sultan’s Steward” with Night XXVIII and beginning the story “The Story told by the Jewish Physician”.

Once again, in a similar vein to the stories told in this cycle, the main character for the story told by the Jewish Physician is a merchant, this time from Mosul, who travels to cities of Aleppo and Damascus and by the time we reach the end of this episode, he has run away to Cario. There is a clear indication that these stories all seem to focus around the travel either to or from Cario and it seems that this city was the city to go to for every merchant, at least in the stories we have encountered so far.

Another common theme that seems to be in this cycle of stories is the harm brought out by falling in love, whether it be the death of a loved one, the harm brought to the protagonist through his love for a woman, and in this story the murder of a luckless damsel by another while he was sleeping. This may be a reflection of the costs of falling in love too quickly.

An important historical figure, that of the lady Zubeydah the wife of the Khalifa Harun al-Rashid, also features in the story told by the Steward. It is interesting to note that there is no recorded reaction to this story by Harun al-Rashid, who is listening to this cycle of stories from his vizier Jaf’ar al-Barmaki, to his wife making an appearance, playing a large role in how the protagonist from the Steward’s story ends up with his eventual wife, and how he was living in his private quarters for a considerable period of time. I would make the assumption that he would not have been very pleased by this revelation.

In this Episode, we conclude the story “The Story told by the by the Christian Broker” with Night XXVI and in Night XXVII we begin the story “The Story told by the Sultan’s Steward”.

The story told by the Christian broker was in essence a sad one. Although he does gain his wealth back and more by the end, what he has lost is more immense than can be recovered by mere wealth alone. This fact is clearly indicated by the merchant, who at the end of his story, travels back to his home city of Basra with the Broker, but leaves to return to Cario perhaps to be closer to his loved one.

Although there can be many interpretations of what motivated the merchant, in the end it is followed on by the Sultan hearing another story, this time from the steward. Why did the Sultan not like this story when compared to the story of the Humpback? Probably because this was more of a romantic tale, while the humpback’s one was more comedic.

This new story, much like the story of the Christian Broker, is again based on the experiences of a merchant, this time a store owner, who has debts to discharge incurred by his father and how he meets a female customer who he falls in love with.

These stories seem to revolve around the characters of merchants and their love lives in a more common setting perhaps indicating who this tale, at least from the onset, was meant for when the storyteller plied his trade.

In This Episode we have concluded the story of “The Story of Nur-ud-din Ali and his Son and of Shams-ud-din Mohammad and his Daughter” with Night XXIV and beginning a new story, “The Case of the Tailor, The Hunchback or Humpback, the Jew, the Inspector, and the Christian” or known as “The story of the Humpback” with Night XXV.

This new story is, much like some of the earlier ones, a story within a story and in this episode, we are introduced to the Christian’s story, “The Story told by the Christian Broker”. This is one of the stories where there is a clear appeal to the merchant crowd being made with references to trading, weights and measures, trading methods being employed which the merchants would be aware of, and the naming of locations in Cario where merchants may have themselves stopped.

Although the story itself is set in the Iraqi city of Basra, Cario was still an important trading city. Much of the architecture and areas mentioned were build during the Fatamid period, in the 10^th and 11^th centuries well after the reign of Harun al-Rashid which may give an indication that these stories where written down or created sometime after the heyday of the Abbasid Caliphate.

We here at In the Great Khan’s Tent would like to take this opportunity to thank Sandman Stories Presents for featuring us on his podcast! We really appreciate it!

In this Episode we are reaching the conclusion of the story of “The Story of Nur-ud-din Ali and his Son and of Shams-ud-din Mohammad and his Daughter” continuing with Night XXIII and going into Night XXIV.

In this night we see that Shams-ud-din Mohammad, his daughter Sitt al-Husn, and his grandson Ajib, are all in Damascus and then going to Basrah to pick up Hasan Badr-ud-din’s mother and returning to Damascus where they finally find Hasan Badr-ud-din and take him in a unique method back to Cairo.

It should be noted that unlike the previous episode, where we could adequately identify the camping grounds that Shams-ud-din stayed in, this time the camping grounds are identifiable to some degree, but their history is not really known and my research as proven inconclusive. The area of Raidaniya (or al-Raydaniyeh according to Edward William Lane) is only identifiable with the battle between the Mamluk forces of Egypt and the Ottoman empire in 1517 C.E.

It is also unclear why Shams-ud-din went to the Viceroy to gain his permission to take Hasan Badr-ud-din, when he had already taken him and what this act was meant to accomplish.

I would love to hear your thoughts about it.

Welcome back to In The Great Khan’s Tent and our continuing series on the One Thousand and One Nights also known as the Arabian Nights.

To recap, we had begun the story of “The Story of Nur-ud-din Ali and his Son and of Shams-ud-din Mohammad and his Daughter” where Hasan Badr-ud-din, whose father Nur-ud-din had died after leaving Egypt for Basra, found himself being taken away as he slept to Egypt and winding up in the wedding of his cousin Sitt al-Husn and the humpback groom.

We continue this story with Night XXIII with the events that soon followed after showing the last two dresses of Sitt al-Husn, and the events afterwards where the humpback groom was confronted by the Ifrit. It is interesting to note here that this tale is the first time that Allah and his angels take a direct role with the punishment of the Ifrit, the reasons of which are not clear about nor why such a drastic action would have been taken.

We also encounter the son of Hasan Badr-ud-din and Sitt al-Husn who is described in a mystical way as he grows up. This tale is also the first time where Damascus, the city in Syria, is encountered as much of the tales so far were either in a mystical place or were situated in either Iraq or Egypt. This may be an indication of where this story originated and at what time.

In this episode of In The Great Khan’s Tent Presents: The Later Mughals we continue with the struggle of the three sons of Aurangzeb, this time focusing on the two strongest candidates, Bahadur Shah and Azim Shah and the beginning of the culmination of this conflict with the start of the battle of Jajau on the 20^th of June 1707 C.E. Azam Shah’s struggles with the loyalty of some of his prominent supporters and their own competing interests began to be more clearer in this episode with the culmination of the actions taken by two prominent supporters, Zulfikar Khan and Raja Jai Singh Kachhwaha, and how it effected the struggle at Jajau. As in the last episode, Azam Shah’s own personality faults can be attributed to result from Aurangzeb’s own suspicious nature also plays a role in how he reacted to ongoing developments.