1001 NIGHTS

Question 1. People’s everyday lives are reflected on such websites as twitter, face book, hi5, etc. people share their opinions, experiences and sometimes feelings regarding different issues with others. As I followed some people on twitter, I was able to see certain activities from their lives on a daily basis. Even though we did not spend much time on twitter, it was enough to see these people’s moods. I could learn how they were feeling or what was going on in their lives in that particular moment or what happened that day and why they wanted other users to know about it. As I observed, most of the people write about their activities during a day. They express their feelings about some interesting aspects of a daily life or write about some occurrence that made them feel bad or good. In some cases, twitter works as an information source as people ask each other different questions. For instance, they might ask what the homework for Tuesday English class is. I think all the activities on twitter are referring to teleological time. If there is no purpose in life, then what are we living for? However, sometimes when things go wrong, it’s very hard to see a path, a reason that you living for. But time goes by and heals all the wounds, and we are back to linear time that relates to a purpose of life.
Question 2. 1001 Nights is a series of stories within stories; in other words, the book offers a chain of stories. For example, Herein tells the story of King Shahryar and his younger brother, Shah Zaman, King of Samarcand, who discover their own wives are disloyal and become enraged toward all women. The story begins with King Shahryar sending his Wazir with presents and invitation to his brother Shah Zaman. Shah Zaman accepts the invitation and pays his bother a visit.
King Shahryar concludes that all women are innately unfaithful and, to make sure that he is nobody’s fool, starts killing each wife of his after the wedding night.

This results in shortage of women after some time; the king's Wazir has problems getting new women, and tells about it to his daughter Scheherazade. The latter offers herself as bride for the night. The Wazir responds to Scheherazade’s suggestion with a story about the bull and the ass. Such allegorical tales, dotted into the main story, are characteristic for the Arabic Nights. Such technique of storytelling keeps the reader’s curiosity alive. In spite of the father’s resistance, Scheherazade manages her way to the king’s bed. As the king and Scheherazade’s sister, Dunyazade, who also finds herself in the king’s bedroom, suffer from sleeplessness, Scheherazade tells another story titled The fisherman and the Jinni.

As I have mentioned above, 1001 nights also known as Arabian Nights, consist of stories into the stories; this is an interesting approach to narration. Different stories carry different messages of a didactic nature. The story of King Shahryan and His Brother has a dramatic ending, whereas The Tale of the Bull and the Ass ends happily. In these two stories we are dealing with entropic or chaotic time in which events are completely random.
Question 3. Collections of tales of the One Thousand and One Nights already existed in the tenth century. The tales provide a good source of different aspects of life. One of these aspects is the treatment of women in Arabic countries. However, time did not change the approach of Arabic cultures to the feminine part of humanity. In Islamic countries, women are considered subordinates and are treated badly. Reports about abuses committed against women are published in Islamic press on a daily basis. In Arabic countries, it is thought that women's lives have less significance than those of men's. Although the prophet Muhammad granted women with certain rights that dramatically improved women’s condition compared to that that women had before Islam, after Muhammad’s death the attitude toward women in Arabic countries slowly deteriorated and returned to pre-Islamic norms. I believe the Nights will not cause any controversy in a modern Arab reader as he/she will not find anything drastically “disrespectful” or “harmful” in how women are treated in the book. Unfortunately, the situation has not changed much. http://www.uga.edu/islam/Islamwomen.html)