And given the striking imbalance of male and female power that prevailed in that place and time, Shahrazad's calm wisdom is all the more impressive. In almost any culture, it is a man's ultimate humiliation to discover that his wife has been cheating on him, but the Muslim world of the Middle East was (and is) even more male-dominated than most societies thus the king's humiliation at discovering his first wife's unfaithfulness was all the worse. She kept this up over the course of more than three years, during which time she produced three male heirs, and at the end of 1,001 nights, the king gave up on his original plan and let her live.ДЇrom the standpoint of personal and individual life, the frame story is interesting for what it reveals about men and women. The king was intrigued, and therefore he kept her alive until the next night-when she would do the same thing again. On her first night with him, she began telling a tale, but when dawn came she was not finished. But one wife, Shahrazad (SHAR-uh-zahd) or Sheherazade (shuh-HAIR-uhzahd), outsmarted him. He therefore resolved to sleep with a different wife every night, then have her beheaded in the morning. It seems that a certain king came to distrust all women after he discovered that his wife had been unfaithful to him.

There is hardly a person alive who has not been enthralled by one of its tales, particularly the three most famous: 'Ala-ed-Din and the Wonderful Lamp,' 'Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,' and ' Sinbad the Sailor.' Out of the hundreds of other tales that form the book, perhaps the most well known is the 'frame story'-that is, the story that provided a larger context or meaning for all the tales. T he Thousand and One Nights, better known in the West as The Arabian Nights, almost needs no introduction. 'The King, hearing these words, and being restless, was pleased with the idea of listening to the story and thus, on the first night of the thousand and one, Shahrazad commenced her recitations.' Published in Stories from the Thousand and One Nights: The Arabian Night's Entertainments, 1937

The palace of a thousand and one nights