Once upon a time a widow could not bear the pain of losing her husband, she was mourning day and night by his grave. Nearby, a guard responsible for guarding the corpse of a hanged criminal heard her wailing. Upon finding the widow, he was struck by her beauty and offered his hand in marriage. Meanwhile, the criminal’s corpse was stolen by his fellow culprits, and the punishment awaiting the guard was being hanged. The widow offered to dig out her husband and hang him instead of the corpse. Then the guard remembered that the culprit’s corpse was beardless. Upon the woman’s suggestion, they plucked the beard. The guard was saved and he married the widow, yet there was no comfort to his soul. On his deathbed, he made her promise that she would not torment him by plucking his beard upon his death. This story, aiming at warning men about the deceitful character of women, is one of the Ottoman versions of the well-known tale, the Widow of Ephesus. The tale was in circulation from the first century onwards, and the story has been retold by many, including famous figures such as John of Salisbury and La Fontaine. Its origins and circulation in the Christian and Jewish worlds has been studied, yet the Ottoman versions remain unexamined. For the purposes of this paper, I will focus on four different Early Modern Ottoman versions scattered in three different manuscripts and their relation to the existing corpus. An especially apt version for comparison is found in The Book of Delight by the Jewish author Joseph ben Meir Zabara, who lived in Spain in the second half of the twelfth century. What makes the story of literary encounters more exciting is the fact that the earliest known edition of The Book of Delight is found in a volume of works published in Constantinople in 1577. The Ottoman versions and the version in The Book of Delight are remarkable with the emphasis on a motif: plucking the hair/beard of the deceased, hence deceiving and dishonoring him further. This paper concentrates on how the stories and their motives are alike, how they are different, and how they were crafted according to the needs of the narrator and historical context. Accordingly, it aims at contextualizing the Ottoman versions of the Widow of Ephesus in the larger Mediterranean and Islamicate context.

A young prince, educated away from court, is summoned home by the king. Shortly after his return, the king’s favorite concubine fails in seducing him and (falsely) accuses him of attempted rape. Since the prince cannot defend himself, due to his vow of silence for seven days, each day a vizier tells the king a story to delay the prince’s execution. The concubine in turn persuades the king each day anew to punish him by death. After seven days, the prince speaks and the truth is revealed. This frame story, most likely of Pahlavi origin, was widely circulated not only in the Islamic World, but in medieval Europe, too, where it became known, among other titles, as The Seven Sages (of Rome). Although extensive work has been done for the various European versions, its Middle Eastern origin has been rather neglected in scholarly research. This paper focuses on narrative techniques and framing devices in the oldest extant Persian text, the Sindbād-nāma (12th century CE) and discusses changes and adaptations in different linguistic and cultural contexts. Through analysis of the framing and the enactments of the frame story in the embedded tales of the Sindbād-nāma, it becomes clear that the avoidance of haste and the control of one’s emotions is just as important as the warning against the “wiles of women”. Other versions have a different set of embedded tales or show adaptations in the frame story: In the Latin version Dolopathos (12th century CE), the prince becomes a monk, in the Scala Coeli (14th century) and the German version Dyocletianus’ Leben (15th century), we find enforced misogynist tendencies. This is illustrated by a closer look at the tale Canis (the faithful greyhound), a story that is included in most versions of the cycle. From a tale that is narrated to warn against haste and anger in the Sindbād-nāma, it becomes a story of a knight neglecting his family, to man trusting the words of his foolish wife. I will show that the adaptations this collection of tales underwent is not only visible in the framing, but in an individual tale as well. The frame tale and embedded tales combined serve to create a distinct “moral of the story” that varies according to the audience of a specific cultural context.

The story of a young boy and girl who fall in love, are kept apart by their families, and eventually unite (or perish in the attempt) is a long-established archetype in Irano-Mediterranean literatures, with examples going back at least as far as Ovid’s Pyramus & Thisbe, emerging again in Greek and Arabic works like Chaereas & Callirhoe and Layla & Majnun, and immortalized in the English canon by Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet. While the usual conclusion of this archetypal narrative is either comic (marriage) or tragic (death), occasionally both elements come together to produce a tale of death and rebirth, a theme that naturally lends itself to the topoi of religious salvation. Indeed, two examples of this unusual plot twist, one from eleventh-century Iran and the other from thirteenth-century Iberia, end with the pseudo-death of the protagonists and a mass conversion into Islam or Christianity. As H.R. Jauss predicts, the historical conditions that would motivate such an ending are apparent: both stories were composed at times when inter-religious warfare, the establishment of true religion, and the eradication of heresy were part of the legitimating ideology of the ruling elites and a hallmark of their political practice; by infusing the conventional love story with elements of political allegory and sacred history, these literary works utilize their generic tropes in novel and pertinent ways that address the immediate concerns of their audience, explaining why they gained widespread popularity in their respective milieux. More interesting still, both stories can be traced back to a common source that also emerged in an era of holy war and divine conquest: the ‘udhrī romances of the early Umayyad period, of which Layla & Majnun is the most famous representative. Given the suggestive fact that the later stories situate themselves in the early 700s, and that this was a period when Umayyad rule did indeed extend from Iran to Iberia, it seems plausible that this was the moment in which the ‘udhrī tales gained currency across this wide geography, leaving behind an archetype whose legacy would continue to speak to local audiences and their aspirations and anxieties for centuries to come.