Luis Dias
The influence of Hollywood and Walt Disney studios is inescapable, I guess even more so when you are parent to a child. Whether reruns of the controversial 1992 animated musical feature film (controversial for its Orientalist and Islamophobic casting of the characters and storyline) or its more recent (even more controversial for the above reasons and for its choice of leading roles) 2019 live-action remake, or images from those films on schoolbags, lunch boxes, they assail you at every turn.
To be fair, the films do have catchy tunes, and I got swept away by them too when the 1992 film was released. My cousin’s bride sang ‘A Whole New World’ at their wedding shortly after it was released.
But what surprised me, and I can’t have been the only one, was the depiction of Aladdin as Middle Eastern, whereas the storybooks of my childhood told me he was Chinese. Do any of you remember that?
Then you will also remember the catchphrase ‘New lamps for old!’ the line used by the ‘bad guy’ in the fable (a sorcerer, not a Vizier or Wazir as in the Disney version) to trick Aladdin’s unsuspecting wife to part with the magic lamp at some point in the story. I waited in vain to hear the line in the film.
‘New lamps for old’ was such a pervasive catchphrase from the fable that it entered popular culture. Indian poet-philosopher Aurobindo Ghosh (1872–1950) had used it as the title for one of his publications in 1893, his critique of the Indian National Congress of his time. An editorial remark even clarified: “It is not used in the sense of the Aladdin story, but was intended to imply the offering of new lights to replace the old and faint reformist lights of the Congress.”
A Punch cartoon in the British press (April 15, 1876) adapted the Aladdin catchphrase, depicting prime minister Benjamin Disraeli in ‘Oriental’ attire as a travelling salesman, offering Queen Victoria the imperial crown of India, “in a spoof cartoon on an Arabian Nights tale (Aladdin’s new lamps for old)” with the caption ‘New crowns for old ones!’
‘New lamps for old’ was representative of the Aladdin fable. So its omission in both the Aladdin films was quite
conspicuous.
I found the storybook from my childhood during this lockdown and the image accompanying this column is
from there.
The opening song in the 1992 film is called ‘Arabian Nights’, an obvious reference to ‘One Thousand and One Nights’, a collection of Middle Eastern folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age, between the eight and 14th centuries. But one learns something new every day: the story of ‘Aladdin’, and even the story of ‘Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves’ are actually ‘orphan tales’ and not actually part of the collection. Aladdin has no authentic Arabic textual source, and was inserted into the French translation of the collection (‘Les mille et un nuits’, published in 12 volumes between 1704 and 1717) by French orientalist and archaeologist Antoine Galland after an encounter with a Maronite storyteller from Aleppo, Antun Yusuf Hanna Diyab. Galland inserted the fable into his book without acknowledging Diyab, who may well have been the source of more such ‘orphan tales’, certainly of the Ali Baba fable.
So in the Diyab story, and the one in my childhood storybook, Aladdin is an impoverished boy ‘somewhere In China’. His father has died, but his mother and he struggle to make ends meet. An evil sorcerer woos Aladdin, claiming to be his late father’s long-lost brother. Unlike the Disney films, there isn’t any magic carpet; that’s such a typical Middle Eastern cliché. There’s a magic ring instead, and a magic lamp, and two jinnis (genies), one each from the ring and lamp, although the genie of the lamp is the more powerful.
There’s no Jasmine; instead it’s Badroulbadour, ‘full moon, a metaphor for female beauty, which is common in Arabic literature and throughout the Arabian Nights. She’s the daughter of ‘the Sultan’. In my storybook version, she’s just ‘the princess’, daughter of the ‘Chinese Emperor.’
But why was a Syrian storyteller’s setting in faraway China? It would most likely have been used in the abstract sense to depict an exotic faraway land.
And why an Islamic name (Western mispronunciations and misspellings obscure the fact that it is a form of a large class of names ending with ad-Din, therefore Ala’ud-Din, Allah-ud-Din, Ala’ al-Din and similar transliterations, all meaning “nobility of faith” or “nobility of creed/religion”) in China?
It could be artistic license of course, using a familiar name to the audience for whom it was intended. But then again, one shouldn’t forget that there have been Muslim communities for some 1300 years, virtually soon after the birth of Islam itself, a fact that Chinese government today wishes to obscure and erase, part of a disturbing global worsening Islamophobia. Islamic communities have been known to exist in the Silk Route region of China since the Tang Dynasty.
Perhaps Aladdin in the tale was Uighur? I remember studying in geography class in school about the Uighur community of central Asia. However, the persecution of the Uighurs in China has progressively worsened, with at least 120,000 detained in mass detention camps. Police surveillance has even invaded their private homes, and innocuous things such as owning books about Uighurs, growing a beard, having a prayer rug, or quitting smoking or drinking can be viewed as signs of “religious extremism”.
Aladdin could also have been from the Hui people, another Islamic community in China also with a troubled relationship with the Chinese authorities on account of their faith.
The setting of the Aladdin fable could also have been Turkestan (encompassing Central Asia and the Chinese province of Xinjiang in Western China).
The fable, like many good fables, has several variants, but the bare bones are similar: a poor down-at-heel boy or soldier finds a magical object (ring, lamp, tinderbox) that grants wishes. The magical item is stolen but gets retrieved with the help of another magical object.
Unfortunately both Walt Disney versions of the Aladdin fable tend to ‘Americanise’ it far too much. This is a failing of most American film adaptations of stories from other parts of the world. One can understand the need to pander to a very large North American audience, but it still seems like overkill.
So in both versions Aladdin and the genie of the lamp have the gumption, chutzpah and street-smart lingo better suited to Brooklyn than fictitious Agrabah, while the rest of the characters are cardboard cut-out Orientalist stereotypes of a Western gaze that has changed very little over at least two centuries now. Princess Jasmine is (gasp!) a free-thinking women in a land stifled by veils and sabres.
With lyrics in the very opening of the 1992 film: “Oh, I come from a land- from a faraway place- Where the caravan camels roam. Where it’s flat and immense and the heat is intense. It’s barbaric, but hey, its home”, the scene is set for further Islamophobic typecasting of the Arab world. Disney had two opportunities to build a bridge between cultures, but seems to have further widened the chasm.
