Every Rising Sun by Jamila Ahmed review a feminist take on One Thousand and One Nights

Shaherazade is a rebel with an ever-evolving cause in this novelisation of the classic tales

Every creative artist knows what it is to work under a deadline, and the harshest deadline of all is presented by one’s own mortality. The quick-witted storyteller of Arabian Nights – or One Thousand and One Nights, which is preferred because several stories originated from beyond the Arab world – responded with creative ingenuity to just that predicament. It has probably inspired more translations, retellings and adaptations across cultures, generations and genres than any other text. It has influenced the works of Leo Tolstoy and Jorge Luis Borges, Marcel Proust and Salman Rushdie, Angela Carter and AS Byatt, and many more beyond the western canon.

Each new version seeks to do something different for its readership in terms of outright entertainment, literary craft, aesthetic pleasure and historical revisionism. Some succeed on some of those levels, but it is rare to find a rendition that, quite breathtakingly, comes close to doing it all. The last such work was a translation by Yasmin Seale – the only female translator of this text – who finally gave us a version without the orientalism, racism and sexism. Every Rising Sun, a novelised adaptation by Jamila Ahmed, continues what Seale began. A scholar of medieval Islamic history, Ahmed also adds historical context to her debut work.

The last of the Seljuk dynasty of Kirman, a medieval province in Iran, was a ruler who abandoned his kingdom when he could no longer handle the constant attacks of the Oghuz Turks. Ahmed transforms him into the wife-murdering Shahryar of the Nights’ frame story. In the original, the vizier’s wise daughter, Scheherazade, reforms Shahryar by marrying him and staying her own execution with stories. In Ahmed’s version, the storytelling wife takes centre stage, and the frame story becomes the main story.

Her Shaherazade (a slightly different spelling) is a rebel with an ever-evolving cause. As her world expands beyond Kirman and she ventures into the biggest conflict of the time, the Crusades, her own quest widens beyond saving young women from Shahryar’s executions to a larger rescue-and-restore mission. From working alongside Muslim rulers against the western Crusaders to strategising to save her homeland from being taken by the Oghuz, she has more agency and power than we’ve seen so far in the many adaptations of this centuries-old classic. And she does it all, of course, by weaving fantastic tales. As she tells us early on: “There are words, and then there are words. Words that can bind hearts, break a marriage, rupture an empire.”

That radicalism is also reflected in the stories she tells. Ahmed ensures that her Shaherazade’s tales maintain the traditional folklore forms of the Nights: fairytales, fables, romances, comedies, tragedies and historical anecdotes. There are all the usual supernatural elements of magical birds and animals, demons and djinns, talismans and treasures, and other worlds blended skillfully with everyday cultures and customs of the time. Yet these are not the same stories spun for centuries. Don’t go looking for the now-Disneyfied Aladdin, Ali Baba or Sindbad here; Ahmed foregrounds girls and women as heroes instead.

Revisionist retellings of literary classics typically have sociological aims. Sometimes, they are intended to help us appreciate a culture differently. Sometimes, they seek to give voice to those who were never allowed voices. And, sometimes, they hope to fill the gaps and omissions in history. Ahmed’s lyrically imaginative evaluation of a much-storied, still-contested historical and literary past aims to do all of the above. By foregrounding Shaherazade’s life and allowing her an entirely different ending, Ahmed makes the tales more resonant with meaning and emotion than ever.

In keeping with a popular numerical trope of folklore, here are this novel’s three notable literary feats. The first is in how Ahmed’s Shaherazade circumvents the inflexible binary codes of her time. Her worlds of wish fulfilment enable more acts of transformation for the girls and women as they adventure beyond their restricted milieus and overcome obstacles. It is just as enthralling to read how these stories of bold young women captivate her listeners – who are mostly powerful men – and influence their course, altering decisions and actions. As Shaherazade reminds them: “think of the other women, khatuns and queens and sultanas and wives, who have endless patience to rightly guide their men, to save them from themselves, and who do it unseen”.

For Shaherazade, stories are tools and weapons, means of bartering and bargaining, and emblems of hope and redemption. As her journey takes her further into uncharted territories and becomes more conflicted, the girls and women in her stories also take on more outlandish challenges. She realises that “no matter how I die – a husband’s sword, a Frankish mace, an Oghuz arrow, or illness and old age with no renown – I will live in the annals of history, a woman … who dared enter the world of men.” This interlocking, layered architecture in which Shaherazade’s art imitates her life, and vice versa, is Ahmed’s second literary feat.

The original Nights is actually an array of texts from various sources – Indian, Persian, Arabic – authored and translated many times since the 10th century. The definitive Arabic version from which most English translations have emerged is filled with different registers that range from colloquial speech to ornate poetry: there are riddles, songs and verses interspersed throughout. Ahmed’s novel is not a translation, so it is in a mostly contemporary register. Despite that, it retains the poetic textures and cadences of the original, and this is its third literary feat. We see this in idioms such as “but we cannot be idle; we must tie our camel”, phrases such as “O my liver!” (where some translators, like Husain Haddawy, opted for “O my heart!” instead), and sensual descriptions of food, landscapes and clothing.

In doing all this, the book does not merely produce effects comparable to those derived from the original text. Ahmed defamiliarises and dismantles what we think we know of Nights, so that our understanding and interaction with it evolve, too. And she proves that a classic remains an endless trove of profound truths and pleasures that writers and readers can discover with each new version.

Every Rising Sun by Jamila Ahmed is published by John Murray (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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