The fake Arab nights

Antoine Galland translated the tales of One Thousand and One Nights into French in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, and this translation played a major role in the spread of the book in European literature and the world. A copy of the book was published in French before any other language, including Arabic. Galland's translation included tales that do not have known ancient Arabic origins, and Galland revealed in his diaries that a Maronite man from Aleppo named Hanna supplied him with tales, numbering fifteen in total, ten of which appeared in his book, and he mentioned summaries of these tales in his diaries. Hanna told Antoine Galland tales and wrote others for him, but manuscripts of the tales written by Hanna have not been found. Galland's tales remained a subject of research and debate regarding their origins, especially the stories of Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. These two stories are widely famous, and interestingly, they are not present in the Arabic versions of One Thousand and One Nights, and the only source mentioned about them in Galland's diaries is Hanna Diab. However, manuscripts about these two stories appeared in the nineteenth century, casting doubt on their authenticity. Among them is a manuscript of Aladdin, which Mohsen Mahdi believes to be a translation from French made by the Lebanese Mikhail al-Subh, who fabricated a fictional Baghdad version of the book of One Thousand and One Nights and sold it for profit. This book contains articles about al-Subh and the manuscripts of Galland's story versions, two articles by Borges about the book of One Thousand and One Nights and its translators, the Arabic text of the stories of Aladdin and Ali Baba, and articles about the manuscripts of these two tales.