Abstract
The One Thousand and One Nights, Alf layla wa-layla, or the Arabian Nights, is an Arabic collection of folktales, a composite text without any individual authors. However, the frame establishes the character of Shahrazad as the main narrator, and she has become synonymous with women’s storytelling. The One Thousand and One Nights has a complex textual history and has been subjected to systematic Western colonialist appropriation. Western translations have distorted their sources and are misogynist and often obscene. More recently, women writers, especially but not exclusively from the Arab world, have reimagined this material in positive terms, and a new translation by Yasmin Seale aims to eliminate the modern overlay of racism and sexism.