Aladdin

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For other uses, see Aladdin (disambiguation).

Image:Aladdin in the Magic Garden - Project Gutenberg eText 14221.jpg Aladdin (a corruption of the Arabic name Alauddin/ʿAlāʾu d-Dīn, Arabic: علاء الدين, Chinese: 阿拉丁) is one of the tales with a Syrian origin in the collection 1001 Nights and one of the most famous in Western culture.

The story concerns an impoverished young man named Aladdin living in China, who is recruited by a sorcerer to retrieve a wonderful oil lamp from a booby-trapped magic cave. After the sorcerer attempts to double-cross him, Aladdin keeps the lamp for himself, and discovers that it summons a surly djinn that is bound to do the bidding of the person holding the lamp. With the aid of the djinn, Aladdin becomes rich and powerful and marries princess Badroulbadour.

The sorcerer returns and is able to get his hands on the lamp by tricking Aladdin's wife, who is unaware of the lamp's importance. Aladdin discovers a lesser, polite djinn is summoned by a ring loaned to him by the sorcerer but forgotten during the double-cross. Assisted by the lesser djinn, Aladdin recovers his wife and the lamp.

The theme of the wily trickster of lowly birth who outfoxes the trickster himself is a widespread motif in fables.

The story of Aladdin is a classic example of one of the seven basic plots in story-telling i.e. an example of the "rags-to-riches" story. This type of story presents in three parts: from lowly beginnings, a protagonist achieves an initial success in life, traverses a major crisis in which all seems lost, and finally triumphs over adversity to achieve more stable and enduring success. This final success is only possible because the hero has learned a degree of inner maturity by going through the crisis. Aladdin's first success came too easily and was not based on his own efforts, but the genies who helped him; his despair at losing the princess and the palace to the evil sorcerer takes him to a spiritual place at which he needs to arrive before he can develop true strength and wholeness by making his own efforts to succeed. The wholeness he finally achieves is symbolised by the re-establishment of the relationship with the princess. One of the reasons for the enduring interest of the Aladdin story lies in our often unconscious recognition of the importance of its underlying meaning. We recognize our own struggles to grow and develop in Aladdin's journey.

The original full text includes a grossly antisemitic episode, usually omitted in the bowdlerized versions, in which the naive Aladdin is cheated and exploited by a treacherous Jewish merchant, and is saved by the Jew's honest and upright Muslim competitor. The late Dr. Yoel Yosef Rivlin who translated the book into Hebrew admitted that although he had a feeling of distaste and felt apprehension that his full translation might ruin an otherwise delightful tale for Israeli readers, he still felt duty-bound to provide Hebrew readers with a full and unexpurgated translation.

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Sources

No medieval Arabic source has been traced for the tale, which was incorporated into The Book of One Thousand and One Nights by its French translator, Antoine Galland, who heard it from a Syrian Christian storyteller from Aleppo. Galland's diary (March 25, 1709) records that he met the Maronite scholar, by name Youhenna Diab ("Hanna"), who had been brought from Aleppo to Paris, France by Paul Lucas, a celebrated French traveller. Galland's diary also tells that his translation of "Aladdin" was made in the winter of 1709–10. It was included in his volumes ix and x of the Nights, published in 1710.

John Payne, Aladdin and the Enchanted Lamp and Other Stories, (London 1901) gives details of Galland's encounter with the man he referred to as "Hanna" and the discovery in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris of two Arabic manuscripts containing Aladdin (with two more of the "interpolated" tales). One is a jumbled late 18th century Syrian version. The more interesting one, in a manuscript that belonged to the scholar M. Caussin de Perceval, is a copy of a manuscript made in Baghdad in 1703. It was purchased by the Bibliothèque Nationale at the end of the 19th century.

In the United Kingdom, the story of Aladdin is a popular subject for pantomimes. The traditional Aladdin pantomime (which is set in China, unlike many adaptations of the story) is the source of the well-known pantomime character Widow Twankey.

Note that although it is listed as an Arabic tale either because of its source, or because it was included in The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, the characters in the story are neither Arabs nor Persians, but rather are from China and Africa. However, the narrator seems to have had little knowlege of the actual China. The China of the story is an Islamic country, where most people are Muslims (there is a Jewish community, regarded by others with a prejudice completely unknown in the real China, but there is no mention whatever of Buddhists or Confucians). Everybody in this China bears an Arabic name and its King seems much more like an Arab ruler than like an actual Chinese emperor.

For a narrator unaware of the existence of America, Aladdin's China would represent "the Utter East" while the sorcerer's homeland of Morocco represented "the Utter West" (the name "Morocco" is itself a corruption of the Arabic for "West", and the story introduces the sorcerer as "a westerner").

In the beginning of the tale, the sorcerer's taking the effort to make such a long journey, the longest conceivable in the narrator's (and his listeners') perception of the world, underlines the sorcerer's determination to gain the lamp and hence the lamp's great value. In the later episodes, the instantaneous transition from China to Morocco and back, performed effotlessly by Djins, make their power all the more marvelous. This feature would argue that, even though no earlier manuscripts were found, the tale is derived from the period before the discovery of America, or at least before its existence sunk into the consciousness of Arabs and Muslims.

This tale has been adapted to film a number of times, including Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp, the 1939 Popeye the Sailor cartoon, and Aladdin, the 1992 animated feature by Walt Disney Feature Animation. There is also a hotel and casino in Las Vegas named Aladdin.

In the 1960's India's Bollywood produced "Aladdin and Sinbad", very loosley based on the original, in which the two named heroes get to meet and share in each other's adventures; in this version, the lamp's djin is female and Aladdin marries her rather than the princess (she becomes a mortal woman for his sake).

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