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More than a century ago now, Martha Pike Conant, a doctoral student at Columbia University, undertook a study of the oriental tale in which she demarcated the literary form as constituted by “all the oriental and pseudo-oriental fiction—chiefly prose that appeared in English, whether written originally in English or translated from the French.”¹ Oriental, the framing adjective, Conant elaborated, pertained to “those countries, collectively, that begin with Islam on the eastern Mediterranean and stretch through Asia.”² Borrowing verbatim from Antoine Galland, the self-professed discoverer and translator of the Arabian Nights into French, Conant further suggests that “ ‘Oriental,’ then, includes here what it included according to Galland […]: ‘Sous le nom d’Orientaux, je ne comprends pas seulement les Arabes et les Persans, mais encore les Turcs et les Tartares et presque tous les peoples de l’Asie jusqu’à la Chine, mahometans ou païens et idolâtres.’ ”³ We can ask what it means to “begin with Islam,” but for now it should suffice to say that Galland and Conant delineated the orient as a set of Muslim territories that extend east from the Mediterranean, and home to, as Antoine Galland writes, Arabs, Persians, Turks, Tartars, and all the people of Asia until China, “Mohammadans,” pagans, and idolaters included.⁴

What is the oriental tale, then, if the orient is constituted in these apparently ethno-religious and geographic terms? By logical derivation, the oriental tale is the name for fictions in English that claim origin in—or by way of their plot, characters, or location are somehow of the orient—a non-Christian, in fact, Muslim geography that lies to the east of Europe. Conant’s generous definition serves the purpose, in fact, gathers for contemporary readers a large part of the structures that have informed that eighteenth-century literary phenomenon we now know as the oriental tale. Taking on a range of fictions that include the Grub Street translation of Galland’s Mille et Une Nuits (~1707), the instructive stories that appeared in weekly journals such as The Spectator and Rambler for much of the 1710s, as well as later, more complex, Gothic renditions such as William Beckford’s Vathek (1787), Conant describes a multifarious narrative that seemed to defy conventional notions of genre and origin. The critical attribute of the oriental tale, then, is its deliberate affiliation with spaces or people designated as the same. Assuming the orient to be an established space from the very outset, Conant directs her readers away from an interrogation of its members and territories, pointing instead toward the European Republic of Letters, the true home of the form in question.

In recent years, Conant’s small, but comprehensive book on the oriental tale appears as a frequent citation in contemporary works on eighteenth-century fiction forms. While the unrelenting efforts of postcolonial intellectuals have forced us to rethink grouping large swathes of people and traditions under the term “oriental,” what remains unchanged from Conant’s conception of the oriental tale are the limits of its influence. Contemporary scholarship still sees the oriental tale functioning largely within a world defined by its Englishness. It is translated into, or originally composed in English; its inspirations are other English or European narratives about the East; and its circles of influence are largely constrained to further literary developments within England.

Alternatively described by James Beattie, the eighteenth-century Scottish poet and moralist, as the “Oriental fable,” the oriental tale also became affiliated—albeit as a lesser form—with the Aesopian tradition that itself commanded significant influence in Restoration England.⁵ Like the English fable, “an amazingly diverse assortment of literary exercises undertaken in Aesop’s name,” the oriental tale also served a variety of purposes—cultural, domestic, political—mostly through the evocation of an Arab or Persian writer named briefly in the English or French translator’s introduction.⁶ Arriving in a reading metropolis where fairytales, or oral lore such as the stories of Tom Thumb and Robin Hood, had been pushed to the social peripheries, while more informative, moral, or knowledge-oriented genres had gained ascendancy, the oriental tale achieved the vogue that it did, in part at least, because it stood as a bridge between these two otherwise removed categories. That is to say, its English authors and translators believed it to be “less insipid” than animal fables, while containing all the “Beauties without the extravagance of our own tales of the Fairies.”⁷ Despite the fact that some of the most heavily circulated oriental tales in eighteenth-century England were translated from French originals, their popularity and their afterlives attest to their significance in the formation of an English nationhood. If the novel achieved this through dedicated realism, the oriental tale took on this task by proclaiming itself as moral and informative, an allegory for the domestic performed by the exotic and the fantastic.

Much like its nineteenth-century scion, the novel, the oriental tale fast became a frequent member of popular magazines and weekly periodicals and papers such as the Flying Post, The Spectator, and The Gentlemen’s Magazine, a staple script for cheap, nightly theatrical performances in London, and eventually a recurrent event in women’s magazines. This last aspect of the oriental tale, mostly a footnote or passing mention in studies of the form, is a significant one. A work such as Arabian Nights Entertainments, for example, made for convenient fodder for eighteenth-century chapbooks, thus achieving a much wider circulation in English society than either the oral folklore that was commonly associated with a newly literate working class or the higher literary forms—essays, poems—that were preferred by a more aristocratic or socially aspiring order. Early reprints of the Arabian Nights, Paolo Lemos Horta tells us, most often appeared as “cheap bootleg editions, some just one story long, produced with a popular audience in mind and with little concern about the accuracy of the translation.”⁸ In other words, various versions of the same volume could be read across social class and gender in edited, pirated, or abridged forms, unlike many texts from elite or high culture, which normally appeared as “poetry and drama, moral essays and prose satire.”⁹

Recent studies of the oriental tale, including the nuanced and comprehensive projects of eighteenth-century scholars, the late Srinivas Aravamudan and Ros Ballaster, revisit this literary form with the intent of explicating the at times renegade, dissident role it played with relation to mainstream narratives of its time. Aravamudan, in a number of articles and two fine books, illustrates the contradictory posture that the eighteenth-century oriental tale took with respect to the emergent novel.¹⁰ Ballaster’s position, articulated through a full-length study of the oriental tale, asks us to consider this form in terms of the political and social complexities that marked the long eighteenth century. Fiction, for much of this period, is the dominant means for France and England to understand and negotiate national politics and social morality as well as the vast swathes—trading and political allies or rivals—that were collectively referred to as the Orient.¹¹ At the heart of these diverse critical arguments by Conant, Ballaster, and Aravamudan, however, is a single concern: what role did the eighteenth-century oriental tale play in the longer history of an emerging English literariness? That is to say, if Conant’s reading of the oriental tale marks its instrumental role in the rise of English Romanticism, then Aravamudan and Ballaster read this form as carving an uneasy, but ultimately complicit, relationship with the idea of nationhood as well as with England’s imperial aspirations.

Aravamudan’s contributions on the import of the oriental tale in England are an invaluable point of departure for this study. In a redemptive reading of the oriental tale, Aravamudan asks us to consider the oriental tale as a form that, like the novel, also “constitutes nationalism, but differently.”¹² Unlike the novel, it “generate[s] a two-way cultural process of dissemination as well as the consolidation of aesthetic values.”¹³ Aravamudan’s celebration of the oriental tale as a form that brings forward a “different set of questions concerning nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and transculturation,” however, rests on a problematic position that post-colonialists have adopted with respect to Edward Said’s eviscerating critique of the totalizing discipline we know as “Orientalism.”¹⁴ Oriental fictions and tracts from the eighteenth century, Aravamudan argues, instigated a critique of the self, as well as of the hegemonies of nation and state that more insular genres such as the novel, in fact, bolstered. Aravamudan’s project—one in which he certainly was not alone—was based on the premise that Enlightenment Europe’s interest in the orient had utopian aspirations, motivated by self-reflection, thus prompting a “fluid circulation of endocultural and exocultural processes.”¹⁵ To put it simply, texts, fictions, and travel narratives that took the orient as their center but demonstrated a committed critique of the self, or took a stand against slavery, constituted a positive orientalism as well as a positive nationalism.

Aravamudan’s persuasive stance on the oriental tale stands as long as the literary history of English is considered a cocooned event with a singular trajectory. If we consider English “not merely as a language of literary expression, but as a cultural system with global reach,” then the pivot of the oriental tale also shifts.¹⁶ Once decentered from the orbit of a single literature or language, the oriental tale is forced to confront the English version of its origins as well as the journeys it takes from the European Republic of Letters toward colonized “orients.” Thus, Aravamudan’s claim, that “oriental tales, pseudoethnographies, sexual fantasies, and political utopias” that “speculated about a largely imaginary East” were “experimental, prospective, and anti-foundationalist,” also asks us to recall that these productive attributes were available only through exercises in allegorical reading.¹⁷ More important, the political and social concerns addressed in these progressive forms are proper to French and English audiences. For most readers, these stories were literally just tales about a distant orient. The oriental tale is thus a literary form whose cosmopolitanism—to use Aravamudan’s word—masks a nation-centeredness that is usually contained in the allegories and moral precepts of the form. Consumed across literate social classes and integrated with the rise of journalistic impulses that had become an indispensable part of public life, the oriental tale was distinct precisely because, for its metropolitan audiences, it was as fantastic as it was authentic, truthful, and moral. The story that this chapter tells continues not in England, where the oriental tale is slowly superseded by the novel, but in colonial North India (and eventually contemporary Pakistan), where this literary form is introduced and systemically canonized over the course of the nineteenth century.

Our present moment—coincidentally defined by the rise of populist movements across Euro-America and postcolonial states in South Asia—demands a more nuanced and critical reading of the oriental tale as a popular national genre distinguished by its worldly aspirations. To go back to Conant, what does it mean to say the “Orient begins with Islam?” Was the vogue for the oriental tale, a much-used phrase, merely a vogue? Is it enough to try and rehabilitate eighteenth-century English attitudes toward the Muslim East by attempting to cast one literary genre as liberal, even dissident? Is this ostensibly worldly, progressive moment ultimately insular or nation-centric? In the case of the affirmative, we must also interrogate the relationship the oriental tale in English forges with the so-called oriental spaces it claims as its origin. And finally, if the oriental tale exceeds the bounds of the metropolis, what are the terms of this excess? That is to say, is the circulation of the oriental tale an unregulated accident, or does it take place within the systems and institutions of a once-colonized world? To read the oriental tale as a sign of translatio, or intercultural exchange, as Aravamudan does, is to elide its historical presence and enduring influence in both the metropolis and the colony. It is a form that inevitably contributes to the twin projects of British national reification and imperial expansion, which are mediated largely through the performative specter of the then-Islamic East. Despite its worldly, but other times naïve, demeanor, the moment of the oriental tale is a decisive event in the intertwined histories of orientalism and its constitutive literary and cultural forms.

When I say the moment of the oriental tale, I am referring to roughly the first half of the eighteenth century in England, when volumes such as Francois Petis La Croix’s Persian Tales and Turkish Tales (1710), Thomas Guellette’s Mogul Tales (1736), and Frances Sheridan’s History of Nourjahad, all inspired by the raging success of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, flooded the English literary market, the scope of their readership ranging from the working to the aristocratic classes. Though not normally considered significant in studies of orientalism—the discipline or the discourse—the oriental tale is instrumental in the imaginative invention of a particular kind of orient. The critical impulses of the oriental tale are not restricted to England, and therefore, I read the oriental tale against the idea that it is archive only to English and Anglophone literatures. I read it as a moment that must be read into the mainstream archives of modern vernaculars such as Arabic or Urdu, both wrought by colonial pasts.

The oriental tale invents and is organized around what I call the chronotope of the Mahometan/Muslim, the relational unit of time and space that is essential to the form and meaning of this literary genre. The oriental tale is inevitably located in the imaginary space I call the Mahometan Orient and its protagonist is a Mahometan, who in later forms gives way to the category of Muslim. The Mahometan and, by extension, the Muslim are constituted as itinerants, devoid of civilizational, racial, or even linguistic origins, a figure who is unlike other “Orientals,” Hindus, for example, and above all, in contradiction to Enlightenment ideals of nationhood. It is this set of time-space relations that replicates in vernacular oriental tales and the later fiction forms that arise from the dominance of this form in the Indian colony. Though the chronotope of the Mahometan/Muslim does not necessarily dictate the plot or the allegorical lesson that oriental tales often have for English audiences, it informs the arrangement of the oriental tale, the orientation of its characters, and the possibilities of representation in the narrative. It is the particular configuration of this chronotope that distinguishes the oriental tale from earlier English and continental representations of the Muslim East.¹⁸

I use the term “Mahometan,” and not Muslim, Islamic, or Arab, to emphasize the imaginative construction of a historic, lived geography and peoples by the greater orientalist project.¹⁹ As a concept, Mahometanism is a European invention, a title that Said explicates in Orientalism as a crude conflation of Islam as an imitation of Christianity. In the oriental tale, the Mahometan Orient is constituted by the vast territories that ranged from Egypt to China and whose historic associations with Islam allowed for them to be represented through a limited set of conflated signifiers: sultan, caliph, wives and harems, viziers, merchants, belief in Mahomet, empire. Places and cities such as “Baghdad,” “Persia,” “Damascus,” “Cashmire,” and “Egypt” are all part of the homogenous geography of the Mahometan Orient, merchants and sultans constantly moving from one part to another. Particularized for Western consumption, the Mahometan Orient of the oriental tale exists as an extended empire that houses the caliph/sultan figure and serves as a playground for his barbarisms and sexual fantasies, as well as his eventual reformation. At odds with the rational Enlightenment ideals of origin, nation, and modern state, the histories and uncontained geographies of this orient—as compared to other, later orients, the Indic or even Semitic, for example—are fantastical and unreal. The Mahometan Orient, then, was the imaginary spatial formation that lent itself to popular consumption through its seeming disconnect with English society.

Within the vast imagined territories of the Mahometan Orient, the Mahometan appears in the various identities of caliph and sultan, and, at times, merchant and dervish. In many of his guises, including that of caliph, he indulges in the multiple identities made possible by masquerade. Whether despot or dervish, the Mahometan is inevitably an itinerant, a nomad, who imposes himself upon foreign lands through the force of conquest or through the exploitation and wiles of mercantilism and disguise. As a “Mahometan,” he follows Mahomet, a prophet who is cast as a posturing despot in various orientalist works, the most prominent among them Voltaire’s Le fanatisme ou Mahomet, le prophete (1736). The territories within which this figure moves are always empire formations: Ottoman, Safavid, or Persian. That is to say, the Muslim is not native to the lands or territories that he inhabits. He is non-national, unable to lay claim to a single civilization, a native language, or an aboriginal people (this particular contradiction is fleshed out more scientifically in the second half of the eighteenth century). Conspicuously unattached and undomesticated, the Mahometan, even if married, is sexually deviant by English standards, indulging in multiple wives and concubines, marrying at will in different locations, other times deceived and tricked by oriental women in the style of Schahriar’s first unfaithful queen.

Sometimes of humble origins, other times as princesses and queens, female characters in the oriental tale are either wise and virtuous, or sexually deviant and adulterous, their deception often causing a sultan to unleash his brutality upon innocent citizens. While women such as Scheherazade and Nurse Sutlememe from the Persian Tales are speaking figures, their virtue is made apparent only by their story-telling abilities and their success in reforming a barbarous sultan or recalcitrant princess. More common are women such as Schahriar’s first queen, whose infidelity unleashes the anger of the sultan upon all the virgins of the empire; Canzada, the sexual predator in the frame tale of the Turkish Tales; and the multiple enslaved women whose work seems to be to seduce wandering Mahometan men. The female characters of the oriental tale are never outwardly identified as Mahometan, nor do they seem to indulge in religious rituals such as prayer and ablution, as their male counterparts often do. In other words, the female subject of the oriental tale replicates masculine itinerancy through the sexual license of her body by offering herself to black slaves and her stepsons, and through polygamy, which is often inadvertent.

The Mahometan Orient, as it unfolds in the oriental tale, is a space of constant transgression. These various transgressions are incurred through empires that forcibly rule over various peoples, men who are in a constant state of movement, which is largely physical but often supplemented by assumed identities and changed bodies, or women who cross the bounds of home and marriage through adultery and infidelity. The oriental tale, defined by the chronotope of the Mahometan/Muslim, becomes the stage for a variety of metropolitan concerns by way of a foreignness that is constructed as both intimate and exotic, a marked departure from Tudor and Jacobean plays and poems about Islam. The overt heterogeneity of the oriental tale as well as the duality of its protagonists allowed it to exist as a popular genre, entertaining, at times moral, and simultaneously to represent higher aesthetic or philosophical concerns. Despite the absence of domestic attachments or national origin for the protagonists of the oriental tale, the genre becomes significant in the negotiation of English domesticity as evidenced not just in works such as the Persian Tales, but most noticeably by the frequent appearance of oriental tales and anecdotes in women’s magazines. If the romance and “pleasant histories … were singled out as fit for only lower-status readers, including women, servants, and eventually children,” then the oriental tale for much of the eighteenth century achieved an unprecedented status as a “popular” form, permitting readers from across intellectual and social classes to partake in the variety of narrative possibilities it offered.²⁰

Given the literary-historical ambitions of this book, I turn to the work of Edward Said in Orientalism, despite the recent multitude of scholarly critiques decrying Said’s arguments. I do not need to rehearse Aravamudan’s, Ballaster’s, or even Felicity Nussbaum’s arguments, which suggest that Orientalism, possibly inadvertently, led scholars to denounce the oriental tale as a genre, and thus permitted only limited views of the long eighteenth century. Said does not identify the oriental tale as a specific genre; much of the early discussion in Orientalism remains focused on European attitudes toward Islam from as far back as the medieval period. In part, I premise my argument in this chapter and others, in a perhaps elementary manner, on Said’s own admission that Orientalism is “far from a complete history or general account of Orientalism.” “All I have done,” Said clarifies in his introduction, is “merely to suggest the existence of a larger whole, detailed, interesting, dotted with fascinating figures, texts, and events.”²¹ Critics of Said’s formidable volume have pounced on this supposed deficiency but to little effect. The oriental tale and the Mahometan Orient are both categories that emerge as precursors to the period of high imperialism, which is, of course, Said’s main concern. Here, I offer a close account of the early decades of the eighteenth century during which English identity at various levels is negotiated through the oriental tale and the ubiquitous chronotope of the Mahometan/Muslim.

The second premise that informs this chapter pertains to the fact that Said’s Orientalism mostly takes stock of the “Islamic Orient.” Using self-experience as a reason to limit, Said mostly stays close to the territories he deems part of this particular orient—Egypt, Palestine, modern-day Syria, Iraq, the Maghreb. But representation is not the end of orientalism, and neither is the Islamic Orient a stable category. The Mahometan Orient (to use my amended term), as it is constructed in the oriental tale, is a moving empire, extending from Persia to China, or from Cairo to Damascus in any given story. Unfixed, the Mahometan Orient shifts variously in the several hundred tales that were published during the eighteenth century, taking with it its constitutive structures of despotism. It is premised on Mahomet as a figure in the European imagination. Described even in early Christian scholarly exercises such as Humphrey Prideaux’s Life of Mahomet (1697), Mahomet is a wily trader and imposter who is able to invent a new religion almost entirely through pretense and performance.²² It is this imagined Mahometan Orient, and not historic, lived Islamic societies, that can smoothly imitate English society while remaining at a distance from its actual geography and interests.

On its own, perhaps, a Mahometan Orient would have been deemed harmless, but the rise of a competing oriental ideal, that is, the Indic, is a turning point within the longer history of British orientalism and its imperializing bent. For the most part, the Indic Orient gains consequence in the late eighteenth century through the scholarly work of orientalists such as Nathaniel Halhed and William Jones, and through its linguistic revitalization of the Aryan hypothesis. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Ballaster argues, India was described by early travelers as a “kind of physical fairyland, rich in minerals and precious stones,” and in other narratives as “a space of the marvelous, a dreamscape for the Christian pilgrim.”²³ While the Indic Orient indeed entered the English cultural imagination in a decisive fashion only after the success of Jones’s translation of the Sanskrit play, Sakuntala in 1789, its initial interactions with the Mahometan Orient are hardly inert. In the high moment of the oriental tale, the Indic Orient travels to the Mahometan Orient in the form of santons, or mystic devotees; giaours, or monsters; and through knowledge of the dark arts, all of which seem to bring the Mahometan protagonists to grief in some fashion or the other.²⁴ While the oriental tale lacks the scholarly sophistication that later orientalists would bring to the question of India, it offers the Indic Orient as a space that is inhospitable, even destructive to the Mahometan who ventures toward it, codifying Anglo-French perceptions of the Mughal presence in India into its stories. India is referred to variously in the oriental tale, sometimes as “the Indies” or India. In some cases, the “Indies” can also refer to a vague space extending forth from the Ottoman East.

Toward the close of the eighteenth century, as the next chapter shows, the Indic Orient is seen as having “poured forth,” recast as a long-lost civilization, the cradle of ancient cultures that British orientalism had discovered and that could only be revived for modernity through the efforts of a British Empire in India.²⁵ To borrow from Aamir Mufti, the Indic Orient was subsequently generated through the “chronotope of the indigenousness, a temporal structure of deep habitation in ancient time,” by way of which the Hindus, deemed the descendants of an ancient Sanskritic civilization, were crowned as the natives of the territory the English called India.²⁶ It offered a new source to replace biblical lands and languages whose Judaic claims interrupted the emergent ideals of a European Aryan identity. The Mahometan Orient, on the other hand, evolves in the space of the oriental tale as the contradictory medium through which late eighteenth-century England defines certain ideals of nationhood against the face of an empire that shuttles between despotism and barbarism. It is worth noting as well that while the Indic Orient featured in several late eighteenth-century novels, including Phebe Gibbes’s Hartly House, Calcutta (1789), the Mahometan Orient remains proper to the oriental tale.

Given that the oriental tale or fable, to use Beattie’s term, for at least the first half of the eighteenth century, orbits largely within France and England, we may correctly assume that the form was intended for Western consumption. Like the early novels of the eighteenth century—Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders (1722), or Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740)—oriental tales such as the Persian Tales and Turkish Tales were also accompanied by moral lessons that were either announced in the prefatory remarks made by the author masquerading as translator or were part of the fabular narrative that followed. Whether English reading audiences stood to benefit from the “examples of vertue and vice” in the Arabian Nights,²⁷ or the “most exalted notions of virtue” in the Persian Tales, the oriental tale, true to the demands of English society and literary markets was hardly pure entertainment.²⁸ Unlike the novelistic hero, the Mahometan protagonist of the oriental tale was usually a sultan or caliph, or occasionally a queen or princess in the harem. Reformation or domestication, both of which were stated functions of the novel as well, thus functioned with a dual purpose in these works. On the literal level, the frame tales of the Arabian Nights, Persian Tales, and Nourjahad were the stories of despotic or royal figures in need of domestication and moral edification. Allegories that highlighted English fears around despotism, wasteful and bad women, or trade concerns, or alternatively exemplified social virtues, frame tales as well as the sequences within, came together as reformative or cautionary works for an English reading public.

In the sections that follow, I suggest that the chronotope of the Mahometan/Muslim is codified in the frame tales of works such as the Arabian Nights Entertainments, Turkish Tales, and Persian Tales, volumes that were published within a few years of each other and whose widespread popularity gave rise to more sophisticated, complex stories and plays, including Voltaire’s Mahomet and Delariveire Manley’s Almyna (1707). I read major characters such as Sindbad and Haroun al-Raschid, merchant and caliph, as prototypes for the itinerancy and masquerade that become integral parts of the Mahometan protagonist. Sindbad, I argue, performs and justifies early colonial forays to India and East Asia for England. Other Mahometans based on Sindbad, most visibly, Aboulfouaris of the Persian Tales, however, exemplify how the prototype of the merchant evolves into a figure forever unmoored. The chronotope of the Mahometan takes on further complexity in popular stories such as that of Fadlallah and Zemroude, where its geographical limits are defined against a slowly unfolding Indic Orient. Finally, the emergence of the English novel, with its proclivity for the domestic, signals the maturation of the chronotope. A sign, a synecdoche, a meaning-laden reference for the Mahometan Orient, the chronotope of the oriental tale, as it appears in the English novel, is definitive of all that an emergent national consciousness in England seeks to define itself against.