Underworlds and Otherworlds in The Thousand and One Nights

While concepts of utopia and dystopia are foreign to the world of The Thousand and One Nights, there are nonetheless several tales that portray a world or universe fashioned in a manner that shares some similarities with utopian ideals; that is, an all-encompassing vision of perfect coherence and order. The story of ‘[Hdot]āsib Karīm al-dīn and the Queen of the Serpents,’ along with its enframed stories of ‘Bulūqiyā’ and ‘Jānshāh,’ and the story of ‘The City of Brass’ contain Islamized versions of a widely-diffused literary topos: the descent to the underworld. These ‘underworlds’ or otherworldly realms represent visions of the universe shaped by a renunciant, ascetic view of the individualʹs relation to God. The stories present a theological vision and a geographical space that embodies that vision. Like other literary descents or quests, then, these Islamic versions also result in an awareness of the protagonistʹs (and by extension, the readerʹs) own mortality. The nature of these particularly Islamic variations on the initiatory journey is the topic of this paper. Some of the features of the pre-modern narratives are highlighted by way of contrast with a modern version of the ‘City of Brass’ by Najīb Ma[hdot]fūż.