West and Central Asia

Abstract

Literary creativity found its outlets much less in the adab tradition of elite language and literature than in folk dialectal and semi-dialectal literature. The Ottoman Arab writers seemed too busy with exhibiting their skills in manipulating the linguistic means to care about the substance which those means were supposed to serve. The Arabic manuscripts prior to Galland's version had to add these stories to their printed versions. The very title and structure of The Nights goes back to the most ancient Arabic storytelling tradition: the style and structure of the musamara , or night conversation, whose random pattern infiltrated most if not all important adab works. Persian prose literature of the sixteenth to eighteenth century thus bears strong evidence of the influence that a vigorous ideological and religious reorientation of a centralized state can have on literary culture.