Thousand & One Nights: 40th Night: Tale of the Second Dervish

Those who were present in the house of three beautiful girls marvelled at the story of First Dervish. The Caliph said to Ja'far "In all my life I have never heard a stranger tale."

The second dervish began to tell his tale.

By God, my lady, I was not born one eyed. My father was a king [1] and he taught me how to read and write. I studied jurisprudence in a book by al-shatibi, [2] and commented on it in the presence of other scholars. Then I turned to the study of classical Arabic and its grammar until I reached the height of eloquence, and I perfected the art of calligraphy until I surpassed all my contemporaries and all leading calligraphers of the day, so that the fame of my eloquence and calligraphic art spread to every province and town and reached all the kings of the age. One day the king of India [3] send my father gifts and rarities worthy of a king and asked him to send me to him. My father fitted me with six riding horses and send me along with the posted couriers. I bade him good-bye and we set out on our journey. We rode for a full month until one day I came upon a great cloud of dust, and when a little later the wind blew the dust away, and cleared the air, we saw fifty horsemen, who looking like glowering iron in steel armour.

The Dawn.

1.  The so called king was only a chief of a tribe. For teaching, there was no specialised people. Women had enough job cooking food, carrying water, gathering wood for fire. In short it was a primitive society.

2. al-shatibi: Abu Ishaq Ibrahim ibn Musa al-shatibi, who lived between CE 1320 to 1388 was a leading jurist of his period.  Here the narrative is a fusion of two historic periods and two cultures. Such a technique is called anachronism or temporal fusion. We can consider the latest period as the original period of the story, a period when professional story telling teams flourished in various cultures. This kind of artistic fusion is visible in The Travels of Marco Polo. Sutas of India, Ashiks of Middle East and Griots of West Africa were professional story tellers.

3. The India referred to here encompass regions beyond modern day India's boarders including parts of modern day Pakistan, Afghanistan and Southeast Asia reflecting the cultural and trade exchange network of the time. The name originated from ancient Greeks, who used Indos to refer to the regions and its inhabitants. The name was later adopted by Romans and other cultures, becoming an exonym that referred to the regions and its  inhabitants. And with the arrival of English East India Company the term India took a unified and concrete shape.

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