Story of Scheherazade Then and Now

MARGUERITE THEOPHIL
One Thousand Nights and a Night, or The Arabian Nights, brought the unforgettable woman of spirit and strength, Scheherazade, into our lives. The frame story has King Shahriar, so shocked by his wife's infidelity that he has her killed. Deeming all women unfaithful, every night he acquires a new wife who is executed at dawn. This continues until the wazir's daughter Scheherazade comes up with an ingenious plan, volunteering to become Shahriar's next wife.
Each night, Scheherazade spends many hours "beguiling the night" with a story that always breaks off before dawn at a key point, ensuring that the king keeps her around a bit longer to hear a bit more. By the time 1,001 nights are up, Scheherazade has given birth to three sons, and the king, impacted by both her faithfulness and her brilliance, makes her queen, revoking his monstrous decree.
The story shows up in the many adaptations and imaginative sequels produced even today. In Penelope Lively's The Five Thousand and One Nights, Scheherazade, around today with new stories reminiscent of Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters, bores poor Shahriar who longs for the 'old style' stories she once enchanted him with. John Barth, in his reworked stories, presents the Arabian Nights from the perspective of Dunyazade, Scheherazade's younger sister.
In Githa Hariharan's When Dreams Travel, the saga is recalled by Dunyazade; as the bereaved sultan prepares a white marble monument to his late wife, Dunyazade puzzles over the mystery of her death and the perennial jockeying of the sexes for love and power.
In a translation by Husain Haddawy from a 14th-century Syrian manuscript, we are told she is a woman who "...had read the books of literature, philosophy and medicine. She knew poetry by heart, and studied historical reports, and was acquainted with the sayings of men and the maxims of sages and kings". Intelligent, knowledgeable, wise and refined, she offers insight into a woman's life before male-centred customs and interpretations consigned women to second-class citizenship.
Fatima Mernissi, whose earlier work, The Harem Within, pointed out how differently those in the East and the West regar-ded Scheherazade, later wrote Scheherazade Goes West, a tongue-in-cheek portrayal of the western female trapped in an invisible socio-cultural harem.
Scheherazade's stories enthral as they provide a timeless example of a seemingly 'weaker' protagonist outwitting authority and conventional power in the most unexpected of ways. Marilyn Jurich's Scheherazade's Sisters reminds us of fables, myths and stories of clever, self-sufficient women with courage and initiative. She considers them female 'tricksters', naming them trick stars, through whose actions that expose hypocrisies and stupidities of society, the "system" is circumvented or foiled and usually changed for the better.
Azar Nafisi, as university professor in Tehran, saw in this wise storyteller, "who made her world as she talked about it", a woman who used her courage, erudition and wit to overcome the threat of likely death and who, in the process, transformed a kingdom and a king.
For Scheherazade the choice was between cruel injustice or awakened imagination, between unjust death or life-giving telling. Her stories saved not only her life, but also the life of her people, and the life of the embittered king too; for without her and the stories he would go on being a monster. The writer is a Mumbai-based organisational consultant, personal growth coach and workshop leader.