Justification of Morality, Behaviour, and Late/Chance in the Arabian Nights
Many people of a certain culture believe that their beliefs are followed globally. For example, the Aztecs believed that sacrificing humans to the sun was “right” but Muslims think human sacrifice is wrong. Still, if we are talking about the Arabian nights, no matter what one believes in, luck and chance are more important than morals within a character when determining a person’s fate. Many characters, regardless whether they are good or bad, are rewarded at random.
What determines in which column — ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ – things fall into is one’s culture. This means, right and wrong are the state of mind in which you believe them to be. In the “Arabian Nights” or “1001 Nights” the conveying rights and wrongs are situational because of the cultural differences between the Medieval European society versus the medieval Islamic religion and society. In the Arabian nights women and children were treated differently regardless of their actions, in Islamic traditions, women and children have different “codes” that limit them unlike men, so that also, limits the women and children on their Rights and Wrong that they can commit. If they are limited to only specific actions, the wrong of women are not the same as those of men. According to the Quran, a religious text held by the Muslim tradition, men and women hold the same spirituality but, in the Arabian Nights it is conveying to one that women are less prominent in the stories. So, a man can commit a crime and be punished but, a woman can do the same “action” and not be punished (or vice versa). Right and wrong differences go a long way in the stories of the Arabian nights, most of the stories have a “Good” intensions but a “Bad” outcomes. Basically, some of the characters within the stories are rewarded with “Bad” outcomes because of another’s view or perspective of the action that the characters carried out. Most of the “Bad” outcomes are conquered, but, that is because of the chance and luck that they character has, (depending upon whether the character is female or male) most of the time the characters in the end are not rewarded materialistically.
Since the text of the Arabian Nights is “translated” and “appropriated” by Antoine Galland, a white European male, and he translated them from his point of view, from the point of view of his culture, bias perspectives on rights and wrongs were drawn.
Behaviour is a topic that has an inconsistent relation with luck, because the actions performed by the character(s) do not correspond with the result of the situation. Most of the character(s) in the Arabian Nights are not compensated by the behaviour of the character, but, by the luck that the character has. Unlike most American novels where the “good” character are rewarded with riches and etc., the Arabian Nights focuses on the main character and regardless of the actions, the character is compensated with something it could range from revenge to riches. Behaviour of characters “clash” in the Arabian Nights because of the culture differences mentioned before, the behaviour of the characters pulls the belief on the whether something is rights or wrong. The individual’s behaviour has a small impact on the fate that they are going to end up becoming but, their behaviour also has an impact on themselves as a whole, because once they realize the ‘wrong’ they are doing, they become a whole another person.