As a child Richard E Grant loved the fabulous stories of the Arabian Nights. Now he travels East,  to discover the world that created these stories and to ask why they still have such a hold on our imagination.

The 1001 Arabian Nights is one of the most engaging and fascinating collection of fables, morality tales and adventure epics ever told. Scherazade, Sinbad, Ali Baba and Aladdin have become children’s classics, endlessly retold in different forms for each new generation. Paul O’Grady, who has appeared in several Aladdin pantos,  explains how, as a boy, he was entranced by a pop-up cardboard theatre version of the story.

The Nights first arrived in the West more than 300 years ago,  after they were discovered by the French Arabist Antoine Galland. Richard visits the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris to see the original Arabic manuscript Galland translated. Here he learns how the stories became an immediate best-seller in 18^th century France, spreading quickly to Britain and across the whole of Europe.

To understand the world that first created the Arabian Nights, Richard travels to Cairo, one of the three great cities in which many of the stories are set.

He quickly finds that the book brilliantly depicts street-life in the bustling, narrow medieval streets of Old Cairo. “It’s pulp fiction, it’s the equivalent of graphic novels…and that’s still the case today. And that’s partly because it’s written in what is rough Arabic,” explains writer Marina Warner, interviewed in the film. “At times it’s filthy, it’s got smutty jokes in it, it’s highly romanticized.”

Some conservative Moslems are offended by its sexually-explicit content, and because stories often play fast and loose with conventional morality; good behaviour is not always rewarded, and villains get away with murder and worse. Richard meets the Egyptian writer and publisher Gamal al Ghitani, who received death threats recently when he published a new edition of the book. Gamal sees the book as one of the great treasures of Arab culture, and he rejects the calls to censor or ban it.

Richard also travels into the deserts of North Africa to understand how these arid landscapes may have influenced the Arabic story-tellers, or hakawati, who told and retold the stories as they travelled along the great trade routes. Hundreds of miles south of Cairo, he finds himself awestruck in a range of vast dunes, before running down the precipitous edge of a sand mountain. “Now it’s one thing to read these stories when you’re at home in the comfort of your little bed. When you get here in the landscape of the desert which is so vast,  with nothing between yourself and Timbuktu, its absolutely awe inspiring and your sense of being a grain of sand is absolutely obvious. So that as the light is all gone and the temperatures go, you can imagine sand storms conjuring up genies or phantoms.”

Many of the tales are thought to have originated as oral stories, from China, India, Persia and even China, before they were eventually written down and bundled together in the book we know as the Arabian Nights.

Richard finds that the ribald and riotous stories in the Nights offer a fascinating, multi-layered view of Islam. He wonders whether the Nights can still enrich and change the West’s distorted image of the Arab world?

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