‘I am your servant and for a thousand and one nights I have been telling you stories of past generations and moral tales of our predecessors. May I hope to ask you to grant me a request?’
‘King of the age, these are your children and my wish is that as an act of generosity towards them you free me from sentence of death, for if you kill me, these babies will have no mother and you will find no other woman to bring them up so well.’
‘Even before the arrival of these children, I had intended to pardon you, as I have seen that you are a chaste and pure woman, freeborn and God-fearing. May God bless you, your father and mother, and your whole family, root and branch. I call God to witness that I have decided that no harm is to come to you.'
The king presents a splendid and magnificent robe of honour to his vizier, Shahrazad’s father. ‘May God shelter you,’ he said, ‘because you gave me your noble daughter as a wife, and it is thanks to her that I have turned in repentance from killing the daughters of my subjects. I have found her noble, pure, chaste and without sin; God has provided me with three sons by her and I give thanks to Him for this great good fortune.’
Next up, The Story of Aladdin or The Magic Lamp, and I have yet to work out how to divide that into daily digestible segments, but the 1,001 tales of Shahrazad's framing story in Robert Irwin, Malcom Lyons, and Ursula Lyons,, Ursula. 'The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1,001 Nights' are complete. I don't know exactly what date I started but the first reference to it on these pages is dated January 11, 2021. No small feat.
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