In The Great Khan’s Tent Episode 27: The Arabian Nights Part 25

In the Great Khan’s Tent

In this episode, we continue “The Story of Nur-ud-din and Anis al-Jalis” with Night 36.

Once again, this is another sort of morality tale warning about the wasteful spending with unreliable people or hangers on who are just there for spending a persons wealth, as in the case of Nur-ud-din, but once the wealth has run dry and the person needs help, they disperse and claim to not to know you. As Nur-ud-din finds out, these sorts of “friends” do not help and will only hinder a person in the long run.

We get a small glimpse of the slave markets that were present in Basra during the Abbasid Caliphate with a number of ethnicities present in this tale. There is a marked difference between this sort of slave trade and the transatlantic slave trade which most readers are familiar with. This difference will be explored in an upcoming special episode later this year.

As we go further in the tale, once again we encounter the Khalifa Harun al-Rashid in passing, referencing the garden that Nur-ud-din and Anis al-Jalis find themselves in after they had run to protect themselves from al-Mo’in ibn Sawi. The presence of Harun al-Rashid in this tale further strengthens the concept that this is one of the core stories of the One Thousand and One Nights, as the earlier tales prior to this one featured Khalifas that were successors of Harun al-Rashid.