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Arabian Nights week 13
Story
- Contrasting fates of Ali Baba and Qasim
- Ali Baba hides from bandits, discovers their hideout
- Takes some gold home
- Qasim's wife discovers that Ali Baba has found gold, she and Qasim become jealous
- Qasim extracts the secret, greedily tries to take too much and forgets the password
- Thieves return, kill Qasim
- Ali Baba returns the body (and takes some more gold), offers to marry Qasim's wife
- Marjana conceals manner of Qasim's death
- Thieves discover their lair has been discovered.
- A thief discovers Qasim's house, but Marjana conceals it; the chieftain kills the thief
- Thieves conceal themselves in oil jars
- Marjana discovers the concealed thieves, kills them all with boiling oil
- Chieftain flees for his life
- Ali Baba frees Marjana, they bury the thieves
- Chieftain returns to the city, posing as a merchant
- Marjana recognises him, kills him.
- Eventually, Ali Baba takes the rest of the gold
Notes
- Differing sources of temptation: food (from Syria) and weath (from France)
- How much did you already know of Marjana?
- Sesame: Babylonian reference?
- Ali Baba taking the gold: is this theft? (He makes not attempt to return the gold to original owners, or give to charity)
- Does Qasim's wife have a name?
- The same "mark all doors" trick was used by Charlie Stross in Halting State, where DNA tracing is fooled by spraying a crime scene with dust taken from several public busses.
- Morality of Marjana killing all the thieves?
- Is Marjana the true hero of the story?
- This is longer tale than most of the previous. How does it compare? More or less satisfying?
Comments
I have to admit that I knew nothing about Marjana before reading this! As was indicated in one of the comments, in most Western versions of the tales women are relegated to distraction or decoration rather than being agents of the action. I mean, how many of us know about "Marjana and the Forty Thieves"? But whether or not she's the hero, she's certainly the driving force of most of the plot, and Ali Baba himself fades into a rather nice-but-ineffectual person who just doesn't realise what's going on around him. (In your summary, you didn't mention that Marjana gets rewarded - presupposing it is a reward - by marrying Ali Baba's son, but I suppose that can be seen as legitimising what she did on his behalf).
Thanks for the modern DNA equivalent example - another story I hadn't come across!
What struck me was, perhaps oddly, the opening lines of Robin Williams's main genie song from Aladdin:
"Well Ali Baba had his forty thieves,
Scheherazade had her thousand tales..."
So in the world of Disney's Aladdin, Ali Baba and Scheherazade are equally real as Aladdin himself. But in Shahrazad's world of the Tales themselves, Scheherazade is real and both Ali Baba and Aladdin are fictional, and at the same level" of fictionality in that neither is in a sub-plot of the other's tale. And in our own world, I suppose we reckon that all three are fictional.
Quite apart from musings about reality and fictionality, I very much enjoyed this story, especially as the actual plot kind of subverted my expectations.
Good story, I thought. I most remember this from an LP collection of stories I had as a kid that were narrated/acted out, and of that I remember most the magical Open Sesame words and the magical interior of the cave. I don't recall Ali Baba's brother being quartered, nor Marjana's part, nor how the tale ended. I wish I still had those LPs, but alas do not.
Sesame was certainly a Babylonian staple, though it might not necessarily be a reference to Babylonian culture and I'm sure it was just as much as staple during Arabic times. The Babylonian word for Sesame might be quite close to the Arabic word, but that's true for other words as well (like 'Sun').
Ali Baba's taking of the gold is certainly theft. But can it be seen as a retributive theft, like that of Robin Hood? Since he just kept it for himself, I don't think so. Curious thing about this story is why are all these generations of thieves hiding all this accumulated wealth in a cave to begin with? They obviously don't need the wealth. In the story, the thieves are basically a dragon, like Smaug. They rob people and hoard the treasure they find. When a hapless Bilbo (who is proud to be a thief in this case) enters the cave and takes something, the Dragon enters the city to get revenge, and ends up getting killed.
Note that thieves who takes things by force are not nearly so respected as thieves who takes things by trickery. If you lose something because you weren't clever enough to keep it, then I guess you really didn't deserve it to begin with, and relinquish your right to it.
One may, I suppose, question the morality of Marjana's actions, but in her case it was probably a question of self defense. Had she not killed the thieves, her owner (and possibly herself and the family too) would have been killed. I suppose this makes her actions more heroic than Ali Baba's whose actions were ultimately self-serving, where Marjana's were not. I mean, she could have just left her owner to his fate and been freed that way.
The tale is longer, but also of note it had fewer breaks for Shahrezad to sleep, and the breaks were more logical, I thought, than in previous stories. Perhaps, tis being a late story, is more suited to our modern reading sensibilities?
I like the link with The Hobbit
I'm with Richard, in that I'd not heard of Marjana before this story. I wonder why she has been forgotten in English (European?) literature? It's also another example of cleverness being lauded over strength, as with Dalila the Crafty and many other stories. Indeed, has there been a story where the hero succeeded due to physical prowess?
I had a vague idea that the character names might be significant in terms of the story, but I'm no longer convinced:
Ali Baba = Great Leader
Qasim = Generous / charitable
Majana (from Murjana) = Little Pearl
Ah well. If I'd been choosing the names they would have meant something in the narrative context, but seems not here!
Chakraborty remebered Marjana...