This evening, shortly before heading to dinner, I was chatting with a dear Persian friend of mine about her tendency to bring up important questions about grammar, ask for me to provide more information about them, only to immediately fall asleep and delay the conclusion of the discussion to the following day. I noted, when she got up, that this tendency reminded me of the collection of tales that resolves around the woman we know as Scheherazade, the heroine of the collection of tales we know as the 1001 Arabian Nights. This historically significant collection of tales, which Westerners know from the translations of them from Arabic, include such notable tales as Aladdin, Sinbad the Sailor, and Ali Baba and his gang of 40 thieves, among other stories. I had a sneaking suspicion, though, that my Persian friend knew the stories under a different name.

This suspicion came about because, thanks to Peter Cetera’s song “Scheherazade,” my second favorite song from his “One More Story” album, I knew that the young woman who saved her neck by her habit of starting tales and then falling asleep while they were in the middle to delay her beheading for another day, for the titular 10001 nights, was not a story of the Arabian peninsula at all but rather was set in Samarkand in the areas of Central Asia that have long been inhabited by Turks but has been a part of the Greater Iranian zone of cultural influence, in the nations that we all -stans (Uzbekistan to be more precise), which is the Persian word for a land of a particular people. Knowing that the story is Central Asian, I figured that my friend, as a Persian, would not call it 1001 Arabian Nights, and I found out that it was apparently just called One Thousand And One Nights, which makes sense.

I am not a thinker given to worry overmuch about issues of cultural appropriation, given that as a white American I have long been able to enjoy the cultural contributions of all kinds of people both within my own country as well as in my travels. I am fond of many different aspects of culture, including food, fashion, dance, music, literature, film, and so on, and many aspects of culture come about because of the mixture of different cultural elements from people of different backgrounds. Just because someone is interested and appreciative of cultural elements from other groups does not make that person a culture vulture who is simply interested in appropriation. However, when a set of stories that takes place in a region is ascribed to a place that is far away, so that Central Asian tales told by a Persian heroine (Scheherazade is an adapted form of Shahrzad, a Persian name that is apparently still popular for girls that means town-born, as opposed to country-born, I suppose) are considered to be Arabian tales simply because it was the Arabs who transmitted them to interested European scholars of the Middle East who found Arabia to be far more accessible than remote Central Asia (and who could blame them?). The Arabians who appropriated tales that properly belonged to others without giving them proper credit–1001 Samarkand Nights would have been more accurate by far–deserve considerable blame for trying to claim credit for a cultural work that did not properly belong to them.

What is to be done about this kind of situation? The transmission of tales is not always a straightforward matter. The spread of stories from Central Asia to the rest of the Muslim world probably took some time. The stories themselves show an awareness of a wide world that included long-distance travel and trade as well as a cosmopolitan elite that was capable itself of weaving stories born out of the experiences of a wide variety of people of different backgrounds. Enough information about the original milieu of the stories has been conveyed that we know it to be a Central Asian tale, a product of a time when Central Asia was a major cultural hearth, and not merely a particularly backwards part of the globe as it is viewed in present days. Scheherazade and her peers deserve to hold their heads up with collectors of stories like the scholarly German Brothers Grimm and a wide variety of others who have collected folk stories as a way of preserving them in literature as the folk cultures began to be threatened by the processes of urbanization and forced cultural assimilation to larger national cultures. The way in which folk vernacular culture became first national property and then commercialized and copyrighted material owned by companies like Disney is far too complicated to discuss here, but the stealing of stories and their subsequent ownership by those who had nothing to do with them is something we ought to view with considerable concern and alarm.