Hi! Arab from a Muslim country here. Aladdin’s name can only exist in the Islamic era because it’s a compound name of two parts Alaa, which means Glory and Din which means The Religion and that sort of name only existed during the Islamic era. Lit translation is Religion’s Glory
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Replying to @CrimsonMaher
The source complicate it since Aladdin story was added pretty late to the One Thousand and one night. So is story that supposedly a french guy got from christian but the sources are sketchy. So for all we know he just made it up. Which is to say reality is stranger than fiction.
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Replying to @N0M2D3 @CrimsonMaher
I should clarify I am not doubting your take. Your take is good just bringing this up as fun fact. Not to attempt to undermine your point in anyway.
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Replying to @N0M2D3 @CrimsonMaher
The most recent consensus is that Hanna Diyab, the Syrian Christian source of the Ali Baba and Aladdin stories, was a real person (thanks to the translation and republication of his heretofore obscure autobiography) and Antoine Galland deliberately suppressed knowledge of him
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It still seems very likely that Diyab made up these stories from whole cloth rather than them being based on preexisting folklore, and he may have done so while living in France for a French audience Still, it makes them more "authentic" than if Galland made them up himself
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Replying to @mssilverstein @arthur_affect and
Although the details are typical of a Golden Age Islamic civilization, the story notionally occurs in "one of the great cities of China," much like Elizabethan actors who wore doublets and hose while playing Julius Caesar (not to say there aren't Islamic cities in China thought!)
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Replying to @napguerreiro @mssilverstein and
I find it entertaining to posit that Aladdin was a Uighur who lived in Urumqi
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Replying to @arthur_affect @napguerreiro and
It’s possible that he was Uighur who lived in Baghdad. It was very common during the Islamic golden age for scholars to flock to Baghdad from all over the Islamic world to learn as it was the academic and cultural capital
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Replying to @CrimsonMaher @napguerreiro and
Well sure, but the original story specifically says he lived in China, somewhere "in the uttermost East" that Scheherazade knows little about
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That's kind of the point, the author of the story clearly doesn't know much about China but puts Aladdin in China because that's the eastern end of the "known world" for him, and has the sorcerer come from the Maghreb because that's the western end of the world
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Replying to @arthur_affect @CrimsonMaher and
So the sorcerer has literally "crossed the entire world" in his search for the lamp and finds it at the very end of his journey
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Replying to @arthur_affect @napguerreiro and
True. The thing is all of it was technically under the Islamic influence. Many characters in the 1001 Arabian nights come from across the old world. Sinbad is from India, Ali Baba can be traced back to Sudan, Shehrazad and Shehriar are clearly Persian names.
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