Encyclopedia of Islam

Further reading: Terry Allen, Five Essays on Islamic 

Art (Sebastopol, Calif.: Solipsist Press, 1988); Oleg 

Grabar,  The Mediation of Ornament (Princeton, N.J.: 

Princeton University Press, 1992); Ernst Kühnel, Die 

Arabesque (Wiesbaden, 1949); Richard Ettinghausen, 

The Arabesque: Meaning and Transformation of an Orna-

ment (Graz, Austria: Verlag für Sammler, 1976); Gülru 

Necipoglu, The Topkapi Scroll—Geometry and Ornament 

in Islamic Architecture (Santa Monica, Calif.: The Getty 

Center, 1995); Yasser Tabbaa, The Transformation of 

Islamic Art during the Sunni Revival (Seattle: University 

of Washington Press, 2001).

Arabian Nights

The  Arabian Nights is one of the most famous 

works of Arabic literature. It consists of several 

hundred adventure stories, fairy tales, love stories, 

and 

animal

 fables that storytellers recounted for 

centuries to audiences living in the Middle East 

and Asia. Between the 14th and 18th centuries, 

these stories were written down in Arabic and 

collected in the book Thousand and One Nights

(or  Alf layla wa-layla). It first became known 

to English readers as Arabian Nights in the 18th 

century. The tales are nested within the overall 

frame of a story about the fictional king Shahrayar 

of i

ndia

 who murdered his first wife because she 

betrayed him and then, continuing his revenge, 

had each new virgin bride he took thereafter 

killed. To end the king’s killing spree, Shahrazad, 

the well-educated daughter of the king’s minister, 

offered to marry him, and she was then able to 

save her own life and bring his killing spree to 

a halt by entertaining him with a different tale 

night after night, year after year. With its fanciful 

and often risqué stories, the Arabian Nights is not 

an example of Islamic religious literature, but it 

does contain elements—such as references to the